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 somewhat comic solution to this gendered and generational impasse is to discuss a work of beauty:

"What beautiful boots!" she exclaimed. She was ashamed of herself. To praise his boots when he asked her to solace his soul . . . deserved, she knew, and she looked up expecting to get it, in one of his sudden roars of ill-temper, complete annihilation.

Instead, Mr. Ramsay smiled. His pall, his draperies, his infirmities fell from him. Ah, yes, he said, holding his foot up for her to look at, they were first-rate boots. (229)

The boots are associated with Mr. Ramsay's own egotism rather than with Mrs. Ramsay; they offer a diversion.(19) That Lily and Mr. Ramsay land on "the blessed island of good boots," becomes less trivial, less puzzling, and less ironic when seen in light of workmanship, beauty, and the sympathy that binds the two together.(20) Mr. Ramsay has invested his own work in these beautiful boots: first in finding the only man capable of making them, and second in devising an original and superior method for tying the laces. Mr. Ramsay expands to his professional self as teacher to instruct Lily how to tie a knot. In the contemplation of his boots, Mr. Ramsay forgets the excesses of his grief; his ability to attend to the material reality of the boots indicates that his grief has eased a bit. Woolf uses boots as a symbol of death at the end of Jacob's Room. Here, because the owner of the boots still lives, they maintain their usefulness; they are a part of life.

Lily, having ministered to Mr. Ramsay, is free to paint. Her unconscious takes over, just as it did for Woolf in the quick, bubbling composition of the novel itself (Moments 81): "As she lost consciousness of outer things . . . her mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space, while she modeled it with greens and blues" (Lighthouse 238). The work of memory is inseparable from her art: "And as she dipped into the blue paint, she dipped too into the past there. Now Mrs. Ramsay got up, she remembered" (256). Lily's memory finally summons Mrs. Ramsay's ghost as manifested by "an odd-shaped triangular shadow over the step" where she had been sitting years before for Lily to paint her (299). Lily envisions Mrs. Ramsay knitting in her chair, at work on charity socks. The woman artist invokes not her beauty but her work. Lily's vision is simultaneously the extremity of her grief and its abatement. The fact of Mrs. Ramsay's death is now "part of ordinary experience"; the work of mourning is done (300). All that is left is to put the final stroke on the painting in concert with the arrival of the Ramsays at the lighthouse. Of course Lily's painting is not a conventional portrait "of" Mrs. Ramsay. Instead she produces a respectful depiction of Mrs. Ramsay as an abstract shape which expresses her grief without clothing it in the hated Victorian conventions. Lily is a modernist in both art and mourning; she wants to express "the thing itself before it has been made anything" (287).