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

Mrs. McNab, a member of the working class, makes it clear that the apparent gender division between beautiful sympathy and work represented by the Ramsays is class-specific.(17) The unlovely Mrs. McNab must work, even as an old woman. Her work opposes the forces of "loveliness and stillness" that have descended on the unoccupied house (195). But her work is not without a spiritual dimension: she does the work of mourning. In her efforts to put the deserted house to rights she envisions the ghostly presence of Mrs. Ramsay: "She could see her now, stooping over her flowers; and faint and flickering, like a yellow beam or the circle at the end of a telescope, a lady in a grey cloak, stooping over her flowers, went wandering over the bedroom wall, up the dressing-table, across the wash-stand, as Mrs. McNab hobbled and ambled, dusting, straightening" (205). While Mrs. McNab's vision of Mrs. Ramsay is not an artist's epiphany, hers is a kind of grief work which evokes the dead as a welcome presence by means of tasks related to them.(18) She is "something not highly conscious . . . something not inspired to go about its work with dignified ritual or solemn chanting" (209). Her work is unadulterated by conventions or ritual; like Lily's painting, it is the thing itself. In the figure of Mrs. McNab, Woolf represents an unmediated and unconscious ideal of grief work which salvages the past in the interests of the present. The slow and painful work of Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast allows the others to do theirs.

Lily takes over the work of mourning from Mrs. McNab; unlike the weary, witless "care-taking woman" (196), she is "Awake" (214). But Lily does not at first know what to do with her morning; she is in a quandary, "wondering whether, since she had been left alone, it behooved her to go to the kitchen to fetch another cup of coffee or wait here. . . . For really, what did she feel, come back after all these years and Mrs. Ramsay dead? Nothing, nothing - nothing that she could express at all" (217). Sitting at the table reminds Lily of the "moment of revelation" she had had ten years previously about her painting: "she would paint that picture now" (220). A desire to escape Mr. Ramsay's emotional demands triggers her memory: "She must escape somewhere, be alone somewhere. Suddenly she remembered" (220). She thinks of her work as a haven from sympathy, but it becomes clear that the two are necessary to each other.

Even with her easel set up and brush in hand, Lily is still vulnerable to the nakedness of Mr. Ramsay's needs (223): "An enormous need urged him, without being conscious what it was, to approach any woman, to force them, he did not care how, his need was so great, to give him what he wanted: sympathy" (225). Woolf's terms here suggest rape, a suggestion which condemns the traditional sexism that makes women answerable for men's emotions: "A man, any man, would staunch this effusion, would stop these lamentations. A woman, she had provoked this horror; a woman, she should have known how to deal with it. It was immensely to her discredit, sexually, to stand there dumb" (228). Woolf critiques the tradition of placing the burden of mourning on women: "She could not sustain this enormous weight of sorrow, support these heavy draperies of grief (he had assumed a pose of extreme decrepitude; he even tottered a little as he stood there) a moment longer" (227). Mr. Ramsay, of course, bears a strong likeness to Leslie Stephen, and his demands correspond to those Leslie made of his daughter Stella (Moments 94). Mr. Ramsay's behavior strikes Lily as insincere: "(He was acting, she felt, this great man was dramatising himself)" (227). His bereavement is very much a Victorian one; Lily's reactions belong to Woolf's generation.