"These Emotions of the Body": intercorporeal narrative in 'To the Lighthouse.' - book by Virginia Woolf

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1994 by Laura Doyle

Woolf's narration of a politically situated intercorporeality unfolds at both the thematic and structural levels of To the Lighthouse. At the thematic level she depicts a phenomenal world which serves as a common reference point for her characters and the site of their struggles, especially that of mother with father. At the structural level her narrator occupies the object-filled ground of the character's struggles, maneuvering that phenomenal ground not only to generate narrative sequence but also to situate the cultural dialogue on temporality, embodiment, and death within the dramas of motherhood and patriarchy.

The first section subtitle of this novel, "The Window," immediately signals the "in-between" space or surface that is the nexus of the characters' interrelations as well as the locale of the narrative voice in the text. Many details, such as Mrs. Ramsay's hobby-horse about all doors being kept shut and all windows being left open, hint that the window is a crucial passageway between indoor and outdoor, house and sea--realms understood by Victorian sexual ideology as female and male. Sitting at that window, Mrs. Ramsay engages in a disagreement with her husband about the future of the outdoor world--about tomorrow's weather. In making a claim on this outdoor world Mrs. Ramsay, like the Fisherman's Wife in the tale, trespasses on male territory, even as her position near the window signals her encroachment on the outdoors physically. "The window" is thus the frame of Mrs. and Mr. Ramsay's dialogue about the external world and so this section opens with Mrs. Ramsay's words, "Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow." Before Mr. Ramsay counters with, "It won't be fine," the narrator filters the meaning of Mrs. Ramsay's words through the feelings of James, who sits in his mother's lap, watching his father pace the terrace.

To James these words convey "an extraordinary joy," especially since he is still a member of "that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that" (9). Further, James is still, in spirit, immersed in that language of "the emotions of the body," the grammar of which Lily searches for and the narrator continually employs. He has a "secret language" which connects for him "the wheelbarrow, the lawnmower, the sound of poplar trees, leaves whitening before rain, rooks cawing, brooms knocking, dresses rustling" (9-10). It connects, in other words, the outdoor object world of wheelbarrows with the indoor object world of dresses and does so through the living object world of trees and rooks--those same rooks (Joseph and Mary) that Mrs. Ramsay frequently watches rise and fall outside her bedroom window.

But within this world in which intercorporeality is so patriarchally coded (even those rooks are the archetypal Christian married couple), James will soon be forced to abandon this language in favor of his father's discourse which, beneath its restless movement from P to Q, rests on "that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things" (301). Already in this first section of the novel, even as he covets his "secret language," his mother imagines him "all red and ermine on the Bench, . . . the image of stark and uncompromising severity" (4), the agent of a language of laws and exclusions. And already James's thoughts give evidence of those laws, even while they express his resistance to his father. As he watches his father approach, James