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"These Emotions of the Body": intercorporeal narrative in 'To the Lighthouse.' - book by Virginia Woolf
Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1994 by Laura Doyle
The differences between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay's relations to the physical world are emphasized throughout the first section, with Mrs. Ramsay's sense of "kinship" being extensively explored. Mrs. Ramsay's powerful connection to the world of objects, as with her and the fisherman's wife's empowering affinity with the sea, stands at odds with the division of inner and outer worlds in Mr. Ramsay's mind and in her relations to him. Whereas for Mr. Ramsay the red geraniums along the garden path "decorate the processes of thought" and "the arts are merely a decoration imposed on the top of human life; they do not express it" (67), for Mrs. Ramsay the living world is the observable trace of a physical past, with which one has a relationship that constitutes oneself and the future. Mrs. Ramsay loves the "inanimate" world and knows herself through it: "It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one" (97-98). In the absence of others she faces not the void but another intimacy; she feels "tenderness" rather than Sartrean nausea. Her intercorporeal kinship with the world of things buoys her being and deeply informs her ideal of social relations, which, as we will now see, is at the same time informed by her heterosexual orientation in the world.
In depicting Mrs. Ramsay's response to the rhythm of the lighthouse searchlight the narrator explicitly sexualizes her relation to this physical world. The lighthouse light may be understood as the ray of the "unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love" that Cixous understands to be the impulse most passed on in the mother's nurturing relation to others, especially the daughter (251). According to Cixous, it is the mother's milk that feeds the "white ink" of the radical woman writer's text. To some extent, Woolf's text bears out Cixous' celebrations; but at the same time To the Lighthouse suggests that the "milk" connecting mother and daughter or self and world is never pure, never flowing completely free of fatherly intervention.
For Mrs. Ramsay meets the third stroke of the light as she meets a lover. "There rose, and she looked and looked with her needles suspended, there curled up off the floor of the mind, rose from the lake of one's being, a mist, a bride to meet her lover" (98). Just as earlier in the text Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay's "two notes struck together" (62) but left a lingering dissonance, her response to this light rushes to a sexual climax in a flow not wholly without snags and threats.
With some irony in her interrogation, for when one woke at all, one's relations changed, she looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call (she woke in the night and saw it bent across their bed, stroking the floor), but for all that she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and the waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough! (100)
