Woolf's Feminine Spaces and the New Woman in to the Lighthouse: the Cases of Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe

Woolf's Feminine Spaces and the New Woman in To the Lighthouse : The Cases of Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe Thais Rutledge South Central Review, Volume 37, Number 1, Spring 2020, pp. 73-101 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/scr.2020.0008 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/752373 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] THE CASES OF MRS. RAMSAY AND LILY BRISCOE / RUTLEDGE 73 Woolf’s Feminine Spaces and the New Woman in To the Lighthouse: The Cases of Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe Thais Rutledge, University of Texas at Austin VIRGINIA WOOLF’S TO THE LIGHTHOUSE is distinguished by the spaces in it, starting with a family summerhouse and culminating in the eponymous lighthouse, a beacon that leads mariners to safety. Yet those spaces are more than settings: each contributes a layer of meaning to the novel’s plot. In mapping those meanings onto the plot, readers can see how the various spaces, particularly in the Ramsays’ vacation home, help dramatize the ways in which gender roles and expectations are formed and reinforced in the characters of Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe. In fact, as I will argue, Woolf constructs a novel that shows in its use of particularly charged spaces more than it explains. Mrs. Ramsay, the Victorian housewife, and Lily, the “New Woman,” are made more complex to the reader when they perform their roles in spaces that are carefully constructed according to Victorian norms of behavior.1 In tracking their performances, readers can recover clear indications of how Woolf was trying to address the necessity for change in women’s roles, but in productive, evolutionary encounters, where the older and newer roles for women known in her day confront each other and, in a dialectical revolution, produce new scripts for a “New Woman” who is more than a bluestocking.2 In order to read the novel this way, I will map the spaces in the Ramsay home as key to how Woolf structures the novel, and then consider them as gendered spaces, using Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe as case studies in order to show how the house also maps their behaviors. Indeed, Lily and Mrs. Ramsay begin the novel by performing according to gender expectations, especially while in the house. Even though both women spend time in the rooms of the house and enact social performances commensurate with those spaces, their thoughts eventually drift toward alternatives, thus showing their preoccupation with their problematic roles. By tracing their behaviors and thoughts, I want to show that Mrs. Ramsay acts as though she is the “Angel in the House”; her thoughts, however, frame her as a potential “New Woman.”3 In contrast, Lily, the aspiring artist, represents the “New Woman,” but actually does not become one until later in the novel, after her relationships to these spaces mature. © South Central Review 37.1 (Spring 2020): 73–101. 74 SOUTH CENTRAL REVIEW These are the roles that the two women enact at the start of the novel and that Woolf carefully balances off as the two evolve, Lily toward being a true New Woman, and Mrs. Ramsay as the Victorian Matriarch, who can vaguely imagine a life as a New Woman, but not become one. Lily, for example, displays signs that she is nothing like Mrs. Ramsay. Unlike Mrs. Ramsay, Lily seems capable of removing herself from the house with no excuse necessary. In contrast, Woolf shows Mrs. Ramsay bowing to her traditional roles when she offers an excuse to leave the house, by asserting a necessity, “[s]he had an errand to run in the town [. .] she would be ten minutes perhaps.”4 I am not necessarily indicating that Mrs. Ramsay needs permission to leave her home. However, I think that Woolf in such passages reflects a fundamental fact for the Victorian woman: she is expected to remain within the spaces of the house, since women remained in the private spaces of the home, and men could roam around both public/private spaces.5 Woolf’s nuanced approach to gender roles is not surprising.6 As some- one who was raised within systems of Victorian values, she understood the limitations imposed on women and experienced their inability to join men in their social spaces. As a young girl, Woolf was not encouraged to leave the house in order to attend a university and earn an education, unlike her brothers and stepbrothers who attended Cambridge Univer- sity. Instead, Woolf was mostly educated at home, where she at least had complete access to her father’s extensive scholarly library.7 Thus, in her works, she fought out of her personal experience for women’s rights, explored sexuality, women’s roles, relationships, marriage, and the correlation between independence and individual control of space. Woolf’s sensitivity to space and to the ideologies of ownership and iden- tity associated with it are familiar from A Room of One’s Own (referred to as Room from here on), which overtly connects the ownership of a space with the definition of what a working author could or should be: “[A] woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”8 Woolf’s argument in Room became “central to the first wave of early and twentieth-century feminism, making [her] one of the most influential early feminist theorists,” according to Gabrielle McIntire.9 Yet Woolf worked with spaces more often in her essayistic works. In Three Guineas, Woolf not only exposes the inequality between men and women throughout her lifetime, but she challenges the ideologies embedded in the social spaces of her own society. When talking about gender, marriage, women’s education, and heterosexuality, for instance, she writes, THE CASES OF MRS. RAMSAY AND LILY BRISCOE / RUTLEDGE 75 It was with a view to marriage that her mind was taught. It was with a view to marriage that she tinkled on the piano, but was not allowed to join an orchestra; sketched innocent domestic scenes, but was not allowed to study from the nude; read this book, but was not allowed to read that, charmed and talked. It was with a view to marriage that her body was educated; a maid was provided for her; that the streets were shut to her; that the fields were shut to her; that solitude was denied to her—all this was enforced upon her in order that she might preserve her body intact for her husband.10 An upper-middle-class class woman had no independent place in that society, because, as Woolf indicates here, she was consigned to domestic spaces. In addition, she was all too easily perceived by her own society, family members included, as an object or tool for men’s pleasure and care. Indeed, as she outlines it, women’s education was limited, and their bodies were to become objects. By understanding women almost solely in relation to the domestic sphere, then, men would actually have much more control over the women’s access to the public, even if the women lived comfortably. Such ideologies were not easily questioned: if a woman married a wealthy man who could provide her with a maid, why would she have anything to complain about?11 My argument, then, will demonstrate how Woolf contests these com- monplaces in To the Lighthouse by the way she stages or places characters in spaces that reinforce Victorian ideas of domesticity and then shows not only what it will mean for them if they do or do not evolve into the New Woman, but how each space affects Lily and Mrs. Ramsay. I will argue this parallel evolution as consciously built into the novel, since Woolf understood that a woman kept in the domestic spaces of the home did not have much of a chance to pursue her own aspirations or desires.12 Even access to Leslie Stephens’ (Woolf’s father), considerable library would not remedy these privations, because Victorian ideologies were often reinforced by the literature of the time. Arguably, the best-known exemplar of Victorianism in literature is Coventry Patmore’s famous poem The Angel in the House (1854).13 The poem was very popular during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.14 Patmore’s poem, which is divided into two parts, illustrates aspects of the Victorian lifestyles that Woolf will contest in her works. In fact, Ana Parejo Vadillo noted that Woolf inherited a signed copy of The Angel in the House from her mother, Julia Stephen: “Julia Jackson with the kind regard of Coventry Patmore.”15 Woolf’s grandmother, Maria Jackson, in fact, was a good friend of Patmore’s, states Vadillo. 76 SOUTH CENTRAL REVIEW One memorable Victorian moment in Patmore’s poem comes from the “Prelude” to canto IX, which reads as follows: Man must be pleased; but him to please Is woman’s pleasure; down the gulf Of his condoled necessities She casts her best, she flings herself. (Patmore 48)16 The Angel in the House was meant, without a doubt, to “please” her husband, and she rarely had a room of her own that did not serve Vic- torian ideals.17 She was to tend to her husband’s needs and, most often, sacrifice her own desires for others. This intertext, I believe, underscores the degree to which Woolf was consciously trying to appeal to contemporaneous female readers in To the Lighthouse, even as she was pointing towards a better future for them.

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