Reinventing grief work: Virginia Woolf's feminist representations of mourning in 'Mrs. Dalloway' and 'To the Lighthouse.'

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1995 by Susan Bennett Smith

The Ramsays are also engaged in a work of mourning. The trip to the lighthouse fulfills the aborted journey discussed in "The Window," and in doing so honors both Mrs. Ramsay's beauty and her social work. James has the work of steering the boat and remembering his mother, in the same scene that Lily remembers, but the focus for James is on his father's interruption of his shared moment with his mother (252). James's resentment of his father is overcome when Mr. Ramsay praises his skillful handling of the boat. As the leader of the expedition, Mr. Ramsay recapitulates the work of his earlier philosophical journey: his attempted intellectual journey from "Q" to "R" is "a desolate expedition across the icy solitudes of the Polar region," and Mr. Ramsay himself is "the leader, the guide, the counselor" on whose bravery and strength it all depends (54). His mourning abates when he recognizes the deaths of sailors as an ordinary, workaday event: "Naturally men are drowned in a storm, but it is a perfectly straightforward affair, and the depths of the sea (he sprinkled the crumbs from his sandwich paper over them) are only water after all" (306). As with Lily's painting, work enables the acceptance of death for both James and Mr. Ramsay.

The action in To the Lighthouse takes place in a single symbolic day: it begins in the afternoon and ends at noon after a long, dark night that spans ten years and many deaths. The work of mourning takes place, appropriately, in the morning. That the novel ends in the full light of day enhances the optimistic consummations of Lily's and Mr. Ramsay's projects. Woolf aimed at the effect of simultaneity, which suggests that their projects are fundamentally the same (Diary 3:106). The works of mourning are complete.

My reading of the novel as a symbolic day suggests that it is ahistorical, that the night might be arbitrarily long, that the mourning will dispel the darkness into noon. There is a sense in which this is the case: the community of the vacation house, composed of friends, relations, and servants, enacts what Philippe Aries terms the "pre-Romantic" mourning of the whole community for its dead: "It is this model that might, because of its extreme age and stability, be compared to a state of nature" rather than the model of Victorian mourning ritual (581-82). The roles of Lily Briscoe and Mrs. McNab as mourners follow this much older tradition; the Victorian conventions did not recognize the deaths of any but relatives. In To the Lighthouse Woolf employs this quality of pre-Romantic mourning in defining a new mode of mourning. She rejects the gendered role-playing of conventional sympathy, as well as the psychoanalytic concept of grief work which demands complete detachment from the dead. Instead she advocates meaningful work, as appropriate to both the bereaved and the dead. Women are no longer to be merely the objects of art, or the servants of men; Woolf's feminist consciousness shapes her conception of the work of mourning. Lily Briscoe and Mr. Ramsay take separate journeys, not because of gender difference, but because of their differing talents and interests. Both a work of art and artful work allow grief to be expressed and worked through.