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

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

hated him for interrupting them; he hated him for the exaltation and sublimity of his gestures; for the magnificence of his head; for his exactingness and egotism (for there he stood, commanding them to attend to him); but most of all he hated the twang and twitter of his father's emotion which, vibrating round them, disturbed the perfect simplicity and good sense of his relations with his mother. (58)

Through James the narrator not only offers the body as language (the sublimity of his gestures, the magnificence of his father's head send James a message) but ironically incorporates that same magnificence or "uncompromising severity" of lawful thought into the rhythm of the prose conveying James's thought, with the mounting clauses "he hated . . . he hated . . . for the . . . for his . . . but most of all." The sentence gathers evidence piece by piece, building up to its final pronouncement of guilt. And yet what most bothers James is the insult to "good sense" issued by the feminine "twang and twitter" of his father's emotion. But this confused Oedipal struggling on James's part might not be so fiercely ambivalent if Mr. Ramsay were someone in whose lap James might as affectionately sit. Since it is not so, James's language moves in what Helene Cixous calls "sequences of struggle and expulsion" (254) because of the opposing postures or conflicting "body languages" of his parents.

For, in response to Mrs. Ramsay's suggestion that "it may be fine," Mr. Ramsay enlists the evidence of the barometer. She answers, in turn, that "the wind often changed," and he is outraged by the "folly of women's minds." Mrs. Ramsay "without replying" "bent her head as if to let the pelt of jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked. There was nothing to be said." The rain and hail in Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay's relationship foreshadow the failure of fine weather and further relationships in the outside world on the following day, and at the same time Mrs. Ramsay's bodily expressed response to the "pelt of jagged hail" itself replaces spoken dialogue between them. Clearly then, the seeable, physical world is both ground of contention and expressive weapon in Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay's marriage, and James sits amid that world, in his mother's lap, cutting out representations of domestic objects such as refrigerators.