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 someone 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 identity 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. Woolf claims her dispute with Patmore’s work openly in a famous 1942 essay titled “Professions for Women,” where she indicated that, in order to write literature, she had to “kill the Angel in the House.”18 That angel’s “phantom,” indicates Woolf, nonetheless still often appeared when she was reviewing men’s novels and advised her to be “sympathetic” towards them.19 Woolf’s aversion towards this universal image of “the Angel in the House” is clearly perceived in her essay. A woman must get out of the house and join the social world of her own society, and she must also contribute to it. In addition, To the Lighthouse is structured around spaces to give readers a clear sense of how such spaces affected the female characters in her novel. This narrative tactic allowed Woolf to criticize the Victorian values that, often, isolated women and to bring readers into a new place, a new understanding of what “the Angel in the House” meant for them. In the following sections, I will first briefly resituate Woolf’s project of spaces within today’s scholars’ interest in space in order to highlight how she uses spaces ideologically in the novel. After that, I will turn to the individual character’s performances within the novel’s spaces in order to show how the gendered spaces of the house, almost wordlessly, stage conflicts between the characters and the traditional expectations about “the Angel in the House”—conflicts that characterize not only the more traditional Mrs. Ramsay, but also the purported “New Woman,” Lily. Indeed, how both women perform in the spaces of the Ramsay house indicate how deeply they are inculcated with the gender expectations mapped in those rooms. THE CASES OF MRS. RAMSAY AND LILY BRISCOE / RUTLEDGE 77 At first, as we shall see, Mrs. Ramsay acts as “the Angel in the House,” and Lily simply follows the social norms. Their thoughts, however, indicate much concern about the problematic roles to which they adhere.20 In the novel’s resolution, we see how Woolf suggests an evolution of women’s roles that does not require a renunciation of tradition, but instead a re-scripting of it.

The Rooms: The Creation of Space and a Social Map

Space is crucial in understanding a character’s behavior in To the Light- house, but most critically, Woolf’s initial drawing of the novel introduces spaces that are marked by the gendered ideologies of the Victorian era. The first section of the novel, in fact, explicitly introduces the female characters by mapping them onto the spaces of the house. To be sure, addressing Woolf’s work through space is hardly a new practice in the Woolf scholarship. Given the prominence of rooms, houses, streets, cit- ies, and other distinctive places in her writings, it is not surprising that critics interested in literary cartography or spatial literary studies have found Woolf’s work to be so evocative. Following what has been called the “spatial turn” in the humanities, critics have increasingly begun to note how Woolf’s spaces and places often appear through her narratives, as characters walk the streets of London, hang about the spaces of the house, or sit in the privacy of their rooms, to name but a few examples.21 In her novels, Woolf often uses space as a form of imaginative mapping as a way for her characters to navigate the roles that they move within, but also to highlight a character’s experience of space and place as an index for their identities. Spatially oriented critics such as Eric Bulson, Lisbeth Larsson, Anna Snaith, Andrew Thacker, and Suzana Zink, among others, have thus been re-examining Woolf’s oeuvre in more detail as they attempt to explore the spaces and places created by her narratives.22 As Anna Snaith and Michael H. Whitworth observe in the introduction to their edited collection, Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place (2007), “Woolf’s fictional and non-fictional writing is consistently concerned with the politics of spaces: national spaces, civic spaces, private spaces, or the textual spaces of the writer/printer.”23 Even though Locating Woolf does not include an essay devoted to To the Lighthouse specifically, the essays in the collection highlight “the inseparability of real and imagined spaces” present in Woolf’s novels.24 Similarly, in Walking Virginia Woolf’s London: An Investigation in Literary Geography (2017), Lisbeth Larsson 78 SOUTH CENTRAL REVIEW maps many of the spaces created by Woolf’s narratives and investigates how such spaces affect characters such as Mrs. Ramsay, Lily Briscoe, and Mrs. Dalloway, among others. When examining To the Lighthouse and Orlando, for example, Lisbeth Larsson is interested how the house (or place) signifies gender. Larsson argues that the “summer house can be read as a symbol for Mrs. Ramsay, the mother who holds the family together.”25 Yet these examples do not go as far as I believe Woolf does in her essayistic critique of “the Angel in the House” or, as we shall see, in To the Lighthouse.26 These critics’ emphases on the house as a symbol underplays what spaces can mean in a novel because they do not trace how characters repeatedly are confronted by the house and brought to perform and reaffirm their identities in those spaces. Other theories of spatiality recovery such interactions as dynamic—as performances of identity rather than staged representations of it. In The Production of Space (1974, cited here in the 1991 edition), for instance, Henri Lefe- bvre argues that space is a social construction based on an individual’s or society’s values; these values affect the conception and perception of space.27 He says:

(Social) space is a social product [. . .] the space thus produced also serves as a tool of thought and of action; that in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power; yet that, as such, it escapes in part from those who would make use of it.28

Lefebvre insists that every society creates its own space, but also that the spaces have their own lives (as the second section of To the Lighthouse insists, as it visits the house without the Ramsay family, specifically Mrs. Ramsay). Following Lefebvre, we must also admit that anyone who is part of a society, directly or indirectly, not only participates in the creation of their own social spaces, but also in transacting with the power structures refined in them. The result is that occupying a space does not only mean recapitulating the purposes for which the spaces were originally created. Capitalism, Lefebvre continues, creates interrelated levels of space, for instance, each of which functions differently for individuals. Thus, when thinking of To the Lighthouse and the gender roles to which Lily and Mrs. Ramsay adhere, one can conclude that the house, in itself, has the purpose of providing the Ramsay’s with a summer home where they could spend their vacation. What is more, the house then becomes a place that reinforces Ms. Ramsay’s and Lily’s behavior since it is a “social product” created by their society.29 THE CASES OF MRS. RAMSAY AND LILY BRISCOE / RUTLEDGE 79 To the Lighthouse, then, shows us the space of a house that provides a more expansive account of how individuals interact with the ideologies of their era through its structures. As we will see below, the rooms encountered in Woolf’s novel correlate with contemporaneous ideologies, rather than absolutely determining the social practices to which Mrs. Ramsay adheres; she, like Lily, eventually moves beyond them. The house in which Mrs. Ramsay spends most of the time is a socially constructed space which implicates ideological markers of gender and class, but it was never intended to be a passive stage for individuals’ actions. In fact, when Woolf first began to think about how to structure To the Lighthouse, she drew a picture in her diary. The picture, which is quite simple, shows “two blocks joined by a corridor.”30 Woolf’s drawing is the map of a very unconventional house, but a very precise conceptual space that shows how her novel was intended to present that house as sponsoring three very different relationships of characters to that “family house,” in sections that later will be labelled: “The Window,” “Time Passes,” and “To the Lighthouse.” The first section ofTo the Lighthouse presents an exemplary Victorian family house and its inhabitants, as British readers particularly would know them. In this section, Woolf introduces the Ramsay family and pays special attention to Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. From the first, the Ramsays seem to be the archetypes of the Victorian patriarch and matriarch. Mrs. Ramsay is the wife whose sole purpose and duty is to care for her husband, home, and children. Mr. Ramsay, on the other hand, relies on Mrs. Ramsay for everything, including “sympathy” and reassurance about his “genius.”31 Mrs. Ramsay’s character, observes Vadillo, is “frame[d]” by the conservative “Victorian values” of the time.32 In “Time Passes,” the second section, Woolf presents readers with an empty house. The section is only 20 pages long, which is short in comparison to the novel’s other sections. Yet “Time Passes” is the most experimental part of the novel and a crucial link between the first two sections, as it creates a moment where the outside world and class enter the spaces of the house. In this section, the sudden deaths of Mrs. Ram- say, Prue, and Andrew Ramsay are mentioned by Woolf in terse, short, bracketed sentences. While other scholars attempt to read this section “as a bridge between two days in parts one and three,” Pamela Caughie maintains that the brief section is an “interruption in the continuing narrative.”33 When entering the empty house, readers sense Mrs. Ramsay’s “continued presence” as Mrs. McNab and Ms. Bast, the housekeepers, walk around all of the spaces in which she once spent much time and find many of her belongings.34 Indeed, Mrs. MacNab and Mrs. Bast are 80 SOUTH CENTRAL REVIEW the only individuals who enter the house in preparation for the arrival of the remaining members of the Ramsay family. The house, though empty, is an entity in itself as it becomes an abode for living creatures and the space in which memories of Mrs. Ramsay reside. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard says that a house is a place where daydreams reconstitute themselves. What is more, the house, along with the objects inside of it, enables individuals to re-imagine such spaces as they once were. He says, “When we dream of the house we were born in, the utmost depths of revery, we participate in this original warmth, in this well-tempered matter of the material paradise. This is the environment in which the protective being lives.”35 The house stores an individual’s “past memories,” either happy, sad, even “moments of solitude,” according to Bachelard, remain “indelible within us.”36 As Mrs. McNab cleans the rooms, she encounters Mrs. Ramsay’s personal objects; among these are a grey cloak and boots. She also finds Mrs. Ramsay’s dressing table filled with clothes, all of which evoke memories of the lovely woman:

There was the old grey cloak she wore gardening (Mrs. McNab fingered it). She could see her, as she came up the drive with the washing, stooping over her flowers [. . .] [S]he could see her with one of the children in the grey cloak. There were boots and shoes; and a brush and comb left on the dressing-table, for all the world as if she expected to come back tomorrow.37

Mrs. McNab’s memory is affected by the spaces of the house as well as the objects that recall Mrs. Ramsay’s presence. Notice how Mrs. McNab daydreams while in the spaces of the house. She recalls the past, as her imagination causes her to “experience the house in its reality and its virtuality, by means of thoughts and dreams.”38 What is more, when touch- ing Mrs. Ramsay’s grey cloak, almost as though she was caressing Mrs. Ramsay herself, Mrs. McNab is displaced from the present moment and daydreams about the days when Mrs. Ramsay was present in the house. Mrs. McNab, while daydreaming, re-lives moments when she would observe Mrs. Ramsay walk up the drive with the children, stooping over the flowers. Boots, shoes, and other objects in the dressing table trigger Mrs. McNab’s daydreams. In a way, Mrs. McNab’s reveries display her yearning to see Mrs. Ramsay again. Mrs. McNab’s daydream breaks the distance between past and present. Though one may perceive the now-empty house as an abandoned, desolate space, its empty rooms are filled with life. The house becomes THE CASES OF MRS. RAMSAY AND LILY BRISCOE / RUTLEDGE 81 the designated abode for “toads,” “swallows” and their nests, “Tortoise- shell butterflies,” “roses,” “dahlias,” “carnation flowered among the cabbages,” “giant artichoke” grew among all of the flowers, and much more.39 Winds constantly “blow” throughout the house thus indicating “a force working, something not highly conscious; something that leered, something that lurched.”40 The section can be considered as the moment in the novel where space itself is measured and the moment of transition in time. A moment where the era of Mrs. Ramsay and the modern era collide. Finally, the third section, “The Lighthouse,” shows the house in- habited by the remaining members of the Ramsay family and their guests. Before looking at how these spaces are used as performance of Victorian ideologies and identities, it is worthwhile to identify what Patmore and his contemporaries understood as appropriate uses of a proper house’s rooms. An excellent source for this is the legendary Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861, cited here in 1907 edition).41 The book defined for generations what was expected of the Englishwoman who would hope to serve as the Angel in the House. Mrs. Beeton’s was the go-to book of its time for those interested in how to run Victorian households, as it described what is expected of both a woman’s behavior within her house and its rooms. While nominally a set of recommendations about how proper households are organized, Mrs. Beeton’s also tightly delineates how a Victorian woman was to experience her household. Mrs. Beeton’s, in a way, creates scripts that would become rules as to how a woman must experience and behave in her own house; additionally, it reinforces female oppression for those looking for a “room of [their] own,” because it denies that freedom of action.42 As Doreen Massey summarizes in another context: “The attempt to confine women to the domestic sphere was both a specifically spatial control and, through that, a social control on identity.”43 Four rooms figure most prominently inTo the Lighthouse: the drawing room, the dining room, Mr. Ramsay’s reading room, even the children’s bedroom where she performs her duties as a mother. All are laid out and used according to the scripts that Mrs. Beeton’s confirms. A drawing room is the place where guests are to be received and entertained, usu- ally in a more intimate setting than a salon or great room, and also the place to which the ladies withdraw after a formal dinner, leaving men alone to their serious conversation, brandy, and cigars. In consequence, the dining room tended to be gendered as more masculine/public than the drawing room. Yet at the same time, the dining room makes possible a complex social performance: when describing how a proper dinner should be presented by a hostess, for example, Mrs. Beeton insists that, 82 SOUTH CENTRAL REVIEW “In giving a dinner it is far better to have a simple meal, which one knows will be properly cooked and served, than to risk anything elaborate, for it is difficult to appear utterly unconcerned when one is unable herself to enjoy, without anxiety, the dinner she is giving to her friends.”44 One is to appear “unconcerned” when one enjoys the event, but the actual performance will be judged as proper or not, which can create anxiety about one’s social position. Finally, the reading room or library is a space for her husband’s business, and it will reveal, as we see below, a place where she does indeed cross borders. In To the Lighthouse, for the most part, Mrs. Ramsay and Lily spend much time in the same spaces of the house, specifically the drawing room, the dining room, and reading room, and what they do there offers characterizations that set up the novel’s ideological interventions. These spaces characterize the historical positions from which Lily and Mrs. Ramsay begin, not their respective progression from the Victorian values to modern ones. That is, Mrs. Ramsay can only imagine of a life outside the house, while Lily becomes the “New Woman” towards the end of the novel.45 Just as Woolf noted that she had to kill “the Angel in the House” to achieve her writing, the reader is confronted with a truth: even though both women seem as though they behave according to the Victorian values, they spend much time in their inner spaces of their minds, a place where they are free to ponder upon their uncertain fu- tures.46 Moreover, while these two women spend time in the same spaces acting according to the expectations set up by books like Mrs. Beeton’s, their thoughts and preoccupations correlate with Modern values, hence revealing their concerns with their problematic roles. Most importantly, Woolf does kill the Angel in this House: Mrs. Ramsay does not live into the novel’s third section, when a new room is introduced as a central site (the kitchen). As already indicated above, however, the novel starts from the stereotypes “proper” for the Victorian woman. Mrs. Ramsay’s character represents “the Angel in the House” as she is “intensely sympathetic. She [is] intensely charming. She [is] utterly unselfish.”47 While in the drawing room, the dining room, and the reading room, Mrs. Ramsay acts as though she is “the Angel in the House.” She tends to her children; she serves guests; she spends time with Mr. Ramsay even though she wishes to have some time alone. However, when she retreats into her own thoughts, Mrs. Ramsay reaches a threshold where she can question those roles, even if she never crosses it. Lily, too, while in some of those rooms, most often conforms to the era’s gender expectations—or at least the text indicates that she knows them, as I will discuss below. Still, Lily represents the new generation THE CASES OF MRS. RAMSAY AND LILY BRISCOE / RUTLEDGE 83 of women who do not envision themselves as wives or mothers in this sense. Lily’s identity is meant to be different from Mrs. Ramsay’s in many ways, and so is her use of spaces in the Ramsay house. Not only is she young in age, but she aspires to have a career of her own (to say nothing of the fact that she owns two names, first and last, while Mrs. Ramsay has only her husband’s last name and no first name). Some critics agree that Lily Briscoe embodies the characteristics of a New Woman, com- pared to Mrs. Ramsay.48 The term “New Woman” gained its popularity in the end of the nineteenth century as women aimed to achieve their autonomy. When discussing the New Woman, Stevens says, “The New Woman, in her demands for education and the right to pursue a career rather than marriage, her rejection of the patriarchal family and life of domesticity, and her demand for political power, actively questioned the biological determinism and gender assumptions of the Victorian era.”49 Indeed, women wanted to have careers; be independent; and embrace their own individuality. Let us now turn directly to how Mrs. Ramsay and Lily disclose their doubts about their changing social identities.

Performing against the Stage: Re-Scripting Victorian Identities

When navigating the spaces of the house, one quickly observes that Woolf early in the book acknowledges the tradition of the drawing room as a semi-private, feminized space, for example, when she uses this more feminized location to introduce Mrs. Ramsay’s inner life. While she sits by the window in the drawing room, Mrs. Ramsay ponders her duties as a wife. In general, she performs her identity in terms set by the room and the social expectations imposed on women for managing a life in such a place, not necessarily experiencing it as individuals. Yet suddenly:

There might be some simpler way, some less laborious way, she sighed. When she looked in the glass and saw her hair grey, her cheek sunk, at fifty, she thought, possibly she might have man- aged things better—her husband; money; his books. But for her own part she would never for a single second regret her decision, evade difficulties, or slur over duties.50

Woolf’s use of stream of consciousness reveals Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts. Even though Mrs. Ramsay sits in the room knitting a stocking for the lighthouse keeper’s son, stream of consciousness displays a certain 84 SOUTH CENTRAL REVIEW concern permeating her mind. Indeed, the simple act of knitting a pair of stockings for a little boy, who is not her own, displays Mrs. Ramsay’s duty to individuals outside of the spaces of her home. This duty, or act of charity and benevolence, is another idealized performance of the Victorian woman. As Mrs. Beeton’s says, “Charity and benevolence are duties which a mistress owes to herself as to her fellow little creatures [. . .] it is to be always remembered, however, that it is the spirit of charity which imparts to the gift a value far beyond its actual amount, and is by far its better part.”51 Clearly, Mrs. Ramsay performs the idealized codes for women. What is more, if one looks closely at the passage, one sees that Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts, and her mere sigh, indicates her awareness of performing her identity as she ponders on a “simpler, some less laborious way” to lead a life. Mrs. Ramsay, though briefly, indicates of a certain knowledge of a possible life of her own—a life where she chooses what to do and when to do it, a life that does not involve the idealized norms of her society, a life where the need of others and wifely duties would cease to be her responsibility. However, the moment quickly fades as Mrs. Ramsay convinces herself not to “regret her decision, evade difficulties, or slur over duties.”52 To all who may enter and encounter Mrs. Ramsay in the drawing room, she is fulfilling her “duties” as a Victorian wife.53 After all, Mrs. Ramsay is a devoted parent, and charitable woman who knits stockings for those in need. Here, the actions and the inner monologue are not completely in accord. Mrs. Ramsay seems from the outside to be a devoted mother and wife, but if one looks closely at the thoughts drifting through her mind at this particular moment, one sees that she is concerned about her looks and about the costs she has paid for her marriage. As if encountering her own image for the first time upon looking at the glass window as a kind of mirror, Mrs. Ramsay realizes she has aged. Her “grey hair” and “sunk[en]” cheek force her to realize how much time has passed.54 She becomes aware that she has not taken as good care of herself as she has of everyone else. Notice how, after she realizes she has aged, Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts immediately shift to her obligations for her husband’s “books” and “money.”55 Mrs. Ramsay simply avoids the incoming thoughts, modern thoughts that diverge from the Victorian life she leads. Yet then she snaps back into her prescribed role. In an attempt to jus- tify her preoccupations about her wifely duties, Mrs. Ramsay, reminds herself not to “regret her decision, evade difficulties, or slur over duties.”56 Mrs. Ramsay has some significant concern that even sound as if they express a slight regret over her decision. However, while she can notice that the choices she has made have placed her in the position of a THE CASES OF MRS. RAMSAY AND LILY BRISCOE / RUTLEDGE 85 housewife, she refuses to act upon these possible regrets and question her prescribed role. She even defends the male figures when thinking such thoughts by reminding herself that, “she had the whole of the other sex under her protection.”57 The house, as we see, reinforces Mrs. Ramsay’s roles because she occupies it the way a Victorian woman would, meaning that the only space where she is free to think about anything outside her duties is her mind, a space supposedly free from social restrictions as ‘private’ but actually still tightly scripted with reminders about what she should think about her situation, rather than what she does think. Thus, her thoughts often contradict one another: Mrs. Ramsay embraces her roles, but it is also clear that she at least imagines what it would be like to escape these roles. This way of looking at Mrs. Ramsay and the room in which she sits is in fact a part of Woolf’s aesthetics. Woolf has written about the influ- ence of an environment upon an individual’s identity in her personal memoirs. In her essay, “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing, Woolf provides much insight on how “the pressures exerted by the conventions and beliefs dominant in the late Victorian, upper middle class family life” affected her own family.58 Woolf’s memoirs collection help readers understand Mrs. Ramsay and her role as a Victorian wife, while at the same time, realizing how she might have gained her freedom from the boundaries of her spaces.59 When in the drawing room, Mrs. Ramsay sits by the window, and as she knits a stocking, Mrs. Ramsay has a “moment of being,” a moment where she evaluates her own “reality.”60 Indeed, Mrs. Ramsay, at this moment, receives a “shock” that indicates an awareness of something outside the limitations imposed by Victorian values.61 Mrs. Ramsay thinks,

For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of—to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge- shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.62

After she acts the role of the Angel in the House, Mrs. Ramsay returns to her inner spaces of her mind to find a voice of a very different sort. Indeed, only in her mind can Mrs. Ramsay ponder upon “the strangest 86 SOUTH CENTRAL REVIEW adventures” and the “limitless” “experiences” that are available outside of the house.63 Mrs. Ramsay here has a “moment of being [herself].”64 This moment of being is significant as she displays relief at the thought of not having to fulfill duties or “think about anybody”; she realizes the “need” to be alone.65 Mrs. Ramsay, at this moment, has a greater sense of her true identity, the identity that is not tainted by her spaces, an identity that is only visible to her. To those around her, Mrs. Ramsay seem mysterious, stoic. However, she is incapable of being herself while performing the role of the Angel in the House. This particular moment is one of many where Mrs. Ramsay has the chance to think about her present and imagine an alternative life. Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts reveal themselves as even pointing to the what-if questions about an identity other than the one she performs. Notice, too, how the moment above displays the conflicting thoughts pervading her mind, explicitly pointing at conflicts and hopes for which she has few words. Shannon Forbes, in her study of the novel, investigates Mrs. Ramsay’s character in these moments. She notes,

Mrs. Ramsay’s sense and perception of her identity, in other words, invisible to others and allowed to surface only when she is alone and therefore free to be herself, is not the identity of an Angel in the house [. . .] her sense and perception of her identity, this wedge-shaped core of darkness, is comprised of competing, conflicting desires-wanting to gain acceptance but wanting also to be a modern woman.66

I would add that this “wedge-shaped core of darkness” is very small at the beginning of the book, and that Mrs. Ramsay is still far from wanting to be modern because she mentions alternatives only vaguely, only “the strangest adventures” and being not-here, nothing from the bustle of life.67 Indeed, Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts span two different generations’ experiences and social performances. On one hand, she lives a life led by Victorian values, for which she has words. On the other, she understands that there are other possibilities outside the house, something probably triggered by Lily’s presence but still largely undefined and unarticulated, even if present as the ghosts of other lives. Regardless, Mrs. Ramsay’s intuition indicates that she is aware of something more than only caring for one’s family. As the novel progresses, Woolf complicates her characters’ situations, thus unveiling the novel’s many layers and complexities. During the famous dinner scene, we see Mrs. Ramsay performing the role of THE CASES OF MRS. RAMSAY AND LILY BRISCOE / RUTLEDGE 87 the perfect hostess, but here again, she experiences another “moment of being.”68 At dinner, she ensures that her guests, like her family, have everything they need. When sitting down to eat, Mrs. Ramsay places herself among her guests, assigns their seats, and serves them. But here again, a first-person narration hints at Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts leading her astray from that role, yet without achieving the kind of awareness that would be full-blown inner monologue: “But what have I done with my life? Thought Mrs. Ramsay, taking her place at the head of the table, and looking at all the plates making white circles on it. ‘William, sit by me,’ she said. ‘Lily,’ she said, wearily, ‘over there.’”69 Here, again, the Victorian dining room provides the script, and Mrs. Ramsay continues to hide her discomfort. Just as Mrs. Beeton’s suggests, a woman must not “appear utterly unconcerned” when tending to her guests, a script to which Mrs. Ramsay precisely adheres.70 Far from being unconcerned, Mrs. Ramsay ensures that everyone sits in their assigned seats and “lad[les] out soup” to all in the table.71 While she serves everyone, she questions her own achieve- ments, as Woolf’s use of stream of consciousness indicates, “But what have I done with my life?” This is another moment where Mrs. Ramsay, while acting the role of the Angel in the House, questions her own happiness and role in life, but the questions lead nowhere.72 Here, Woolf’s art is evident: by only having Mrs. Ramsay ask herself the questions rather than answering them, she allows female readers to identify with her position—be those readers feminist or not. She does not move right away into the aspirations of the New Woman, because she is, and has always been, “framed” by the Victorian values.73 Indeed, she could never remove herself from her current, suffocating identity, which is framed symbolically by the rooms in her home. Like the window looking out on a world, only Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts move beyond the house, not her life. When following Mrs. Ramsay to the reading room, we again witness her experience of a moment of being, but also another signal that she is not ready to be that New Woman, even while the reader sees her as capable of doing more. Mrs. Ramsay does not read there. Rather, she attempts to nap, to take a swift break, or have another moment “to be herself.”74 In that gesture, Woolf has written into the novel a parallel between Mrs. Ramsay’s identity and Victorian ideology, signaled in the character’s performance in a social space. A reading room, presumably less formal than a library in a city or great house, would function also as a kind of office, where the family would both read and write. The Ramsays’ reading room is frequented by both Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, and even though they seldom talk to one another while in the room, Mr. Ramsay’s need 88 SOUTH CENTRAL REVIEW for attention interrupts Mrs. Ramsay’s moment of rest. As the narrator describes the scene and Mrs. Ramsay’s (Woolf’s heroine) state of being: “Mrs. Ramsay raised her head and like a person in a light sleep seemed to say that if he wanted her to wake she would [. . .] but otherwise, might she go on sleeping, just a little longer, just a little longer?”75 A contemporary reader, however, must be careful not to understand her choice as a symptom of her dullness. Woolf again shows her awareness of the costs of her position. For example, Mrs. Ramsay knows her husband’s wishes, and she is willing to provide him with the attention he often needs to get his work done. Indeed, Mrs. Ramsay, in addition to caring for her children and running the house, is the one who “manages” Mr. Ramsay’s “books.”76 Mrs. Ramsay knows and is prepared to act as the Angel in the House; she will sacrifice her time to fulfill Mr. Ramsay’s need even after a long day tending to all in the house because he is the head of household and the breadwinner. That is, she has to do what is essentially a job, because at first glance, she does not seem to have a place of her own. However, it becomes clear that she has to help him do his job, as well, for the good of the family. When discussing space and gender, Massey points out,

One way of approaching [unequal class relations] is through the conceptualization of the spatial structuring of the organization of the relations of production. Some spatial structures of the relations of production involve the geographical separation, within one firm, of headquarters and branch plant. Although the precise form will vary (branch plants can, for instance, have varying degrees of autonomy), what is at issue here is the stretching out over space of the relations of economic ownership and of posses- sion (the functions of control over investment, of administration and co-ordination, and of the hierarchy of supervisory control over labour).77

Massey’s work addresses the structures of power in a work place in order to examine the inequality between genders. If one applies Massey’s con- cept of gender inequality within a workplace to the Victorian home, one sees the unequal power relations within the spaces of the home. While the Ramsays do not belong to different social classes, their “shared” spaces reflect different gender classes in the framework of production. Mrs. Ramsay, then, has to perform her duties while in such spaces and conform to social scripts where she is seen as doing the real work. She is incapable of expressing her own wishes and desires, and often ponders on her duties, “They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all THE CASES OF MRS. RAMSAY AND LILY BRISCOE / RUTLEDGE 89 day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.”78 Even in her children’s bedroom, Mrs. Ram- say performs her duties as a mother and is not surprised to see that her children remain awake. In addition, she seems a bit bothered at Mildred for not removing “that horrid skull” from the wall, as she had previously asked.79 Mrs. Ramsay’s gentility while in the room echoes Mrs. Beeton’s instructions of a good housewife, whose “[g]entleness, not partial and temporary, but universal and regular, should pervade her conduct . . . . [as] it delights her children, but makes her domestics attentive and respectful.”80 While the bedroom scene displays Mrs. Ramsay performing her duties, stream of consciousness indicates her slight disappointment and lack of surprise at Mildred’s inability to follow simple instructions. She thinks, “She had told Mildred to move it, but Mildred of course, had forgotten.”81 Nonetheless, even in the inner spaces of her mind, Mrs. Ramsay harbors doubts about her role in the house. She is incapable of expressing her feelings to her family about her current domestic role and her desire to change that role, but she can live vicariously through Lily when that evolving modern woman enters her homely spaces. Lily is much younger than Mrs. Ramsay and experiences the house and its rooms in different ways than her elder friend does. Lily is unmarried and does not see herself leading a life akin to Mrs. Ramsay’s—she is not as well-versed in Mrs. Beeton’s approved Victorian scripts, but she shows some knowledge about how a woman must behave while in the company of men. Despite her reluctance to play those roles, Lily spends much time in the drawing and dining rooms with the Ramsays and their guests. Still, while the rooms force her to behave according to the appropriate gender roles of her class, her thoughts do not respond to these roles, as she is an aspiring “[n]ew [w]oman.”82 While resting her head on Mrs. Ramsay’s lap like a child, for example, Lily thinks very adult thoughts:

she would urge her own exemption from the universal law; plead for it; she liked to be alone; she liked to be herself; she was not made for that; and so have to meet a serious stare from eyes of unparalleled depth, and confront Mrs. Ramsay’s simple certainty (and she was childlike now) that her dear Lily, her little Brisk, was a fool. Then she remembered, she had laid her head on Mrs. Ramsay’s lap and laughed and laughed and laughed, laughed almost hysterically at the thought of Mrs. Ramsay presiding with immutable calm over destinies which she completely failed to understand.83 90 SOUTH CENTRAL REVIEW Woolf’s narrative provides readers with both Lily and Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts in order to highlight how both women think about each another. What is more, the passage clearly shows the clash between the Victorian values which Mrs. Ramsay’s identity reflects and the modern values that begin to shape Lily’s identity (and which will emerge more clearly at the end of the novel). Both women criticize one another as they observe each other, again showing that they are aware of their gender roles. Indeed, as she looks at Lily, Mrs. Ramsay assumes that Lily sees her as a “fool,” “childlike.”84 Lily, on the other hand, laughs at Mrs. Ramsay for “presiding with immutable calm over destinies which she completely failed to understand.” Lily, in a way, rebukes Mrs. Ramsay for not “exempt[ing] [herself] from the universal law.”85 Even though Lily is 34 years old at this time in the novel, her behavior, at times, does not correspond to her age in terms of manners. In addition, Lily refuses to comprehend the implications of Mrs. Ramsay’s life choices and her role in the standard Victorian household. The power of the spaces and social control, however, still inform Lily’s behavior in the house. While in the designated rooms, Lily’s body language and behavior correlates with the gender roles they require. She knows enough about how she must behave in these rooms, but she cannot fully experience them in the ways the Victorian ideals would demand. Thus, her thoughts drift to new scripts, to the modern ideals that apply to the newer generation of women of which she sees herself being part. Consequently, Lily is produced/framed by the room in ways that reveal her experiences as corresponding to upcoming, modern social spaces of her time and reveal how her values and ideas differ dramatically from Mrs. Ramsay—yet without any confrontation. For instance, Lily simply “laugh[s] hysterically” at the thought of Mrs. Ramsay playing the role of matchmaker, as no married woman with eight children can or should assume that every unmarried woman wishes to have a family.86 Lily knows and feels that she is not made for marriage or “that.”87 Yet, in Mrs. Ramsay’s terms, Woolf also clearly marks the younger Lily as a child: she is behaving in an un-lady-like fashion (laughing hysterically), and she is lying in Mrs. Ramsay’s lap. Woolf thus manages to bring both perspectives into the woman’s room in a Victorian house while she keeps them utterly apart, so no open conflicts occur, only a mutual assessment revealing their inner distance from each other. Woolf’s passage also shows that, even though both women ridicule one another via thoughts, they actually have much in common. Like Mrs. Ramsay, Lily “like[s] to be herself.”88 THE CASES OF MRS. RAMSAY AND LILY BRISCOE / RUTLEDGE 91 Lily is much younger than Mrs. Ramsay, but Woolf places both women in the same room on purpose in order to challenge overtly or overturn the Victorian values that often oppressed women. Instead of writing overt conflicts into the novel’s plot, Woolf instead complicates these situations through inner monologue to show that women have desires of their own, desires that may not correspond with Victorian ideologies. When looking at Mrs. Ramsay in the same passage, it becomes clear that she is conflicted about the values to which she chose to adhere as opposed to the ones Lily seems to follow. Forbes writes that, “Mrs. Ramsay perceives of her identity as composed of conflicting desires, but she nevertheless finds herself encouraging the patriarchal world because she has chosen to enact the role of an Angel in the House.”89 Mrs. Ramsay’s habit of playing matchmaker is her way of encouraging the patriarchal world. Indeed, even earlier in the novel Mrs. Ramsay, as she poses for Lily’s picture, thinks that “one could not take [Lily’s] painting very seriously; she was an independent little creature.”90 Yet Mrs. Ramsay envies and admires Lily for having the privilege to choose between art and marriage, as she sees the option. How Woolf ends the novel, however, suggests that Lily may reconcile both after Mrs. Ramsay’s death.91 When following Lily around the house, one can also find her in the dining room, performing other Victorian roles. While she eats, however, Lily again displays resistance to Victorian values, as Woolf’s use of stream of consciousness again shows. For example, Lily contemplates talking with Charles Tansley, especially after he tells her “women can’t paint, women can’t write.”92 “The phrase becomes one of the many re- frains in the novel, echoing Lily’s mind like a haunting version of the taunt that Woolf—and women all over the world—had heard through her life,” says McIntire.93 Lily chooses not to engage in conversation with Tansley, but at the same time, she thinks of her duty to entertain a guest, attesting to the fact that she is not a child and quite clearly knows how she should be behaving:

Lily Briscoe knew all that. Sitting opposite him, could she not see, as in an X-ray photograph, the ribs, and thigh bones of the young man’s desire to impress himself, lying in the mist of flesh—that thin mist which convention had laid over his burning desire to break into conversation? [. . .] why should I help him to relieve himself? There is a code of behaviour, she knew, whose seventh article (it may be) says that on occasions of this sort it behooves the woman, whatever her own occupation may be, to go to the help of the young man opposite so that he may expose and relieve the thigh bones, the ribs, of his vanity, of his urgent desire to assert himself; as indeed it is their duty, she reflected.94 92 SOUTH CENTRAL REVIEW Even though Lily’s body language and behavior may partially adhere to gender roles, then, her thoughts defy them. She does not go to the help of the young man opposite her. If Mrs. Ramsay had been the one sitting next to Tansley, she would have immediately entertained him and completely ignored his impolite, condescending remarks about women. Lily, on the other hand, openly identifies Tansley’s desire to impress himself, and she, purposely, ignores him. Lily’s thoughts thus indicate her full knowledge about a “code of behaviour” that a woman should follow during dinner, but also her unwillingness to follow that code when it disturbs her own identity beyond the Victorian scripts.95 The “code of behaviour” Lily thinks of here is precisely what Mrs. Beeton’s instructs: that, during dinner, “the company follow in couples, as specified by the master and mistress of the house, arranging party according to their rank and other circumstances which may be known to the host and hostess.”96 Without a doubt, then, such scenes attest to Woolf’s ability to critique and expose the problems created for women by Mrs. Beeton’s rules of etiquette during a dinner party, where a woman’s “vocation” is to “take charge of [her] guests’ happiness,”97 or within women’s domestic spaces. In contrast, Lily’s behavior enacts revenge against Tansley for the way he treats her and signals her refusal to live by values that keep women in the confined spaces of the house and force them to behave according to Victorian scripts. But Lily’s rejection of those values have been delivered in ways that make them readable for both feminist readers and more tradition novel readers because Woolf’s scenes leave to the reader the question of who is right—there is no confrontation, no balance for and against her acts, but simply the questions asked by both women and answered only by Lily.

“To the Lighthouse’’: Recovering Lily

The novel’s final section presents readers with the house ten years after Mrs. Ramsay’s death, the time when Lily comes into her maturity as a New Woman (significantly, and at an age when she is presumably beyond child-bearing years). Finally, the remaining members of the Ramsay family return to the house, along with Lily and Mr. Carmichael. Upon entering the house, Lily feels a certain estrangement towards the now old, desolate space. She thinks,

The house, the place, the morning, all seemed strangers to her. She had no attachment here, she felt no relations with it, anything might happen, a step outside, a voice calling. [. . .] How aimless it was, how chaotic, how unreal it was, she thought, looking at THE CASES OF MRS. RAMSAY AND LILY BRISCOE / RUTLEDGE 93 her coffee cup. Mrs. Ramsay dead; Andrew killed; Prue dead too—repeat it as she might, it roused no feeling in her.98

Lily is now a 44-year-old woman who does not feel any attachment to the house from the Ramsay family’s past—she has lost her friend and any urgency about acting properly in such a house. In the novel’s passages set ten years earlier, we would often encounter Lily in the house telling herself that “she [was] in love with the [Ramsays], in love with this world.”99 While Lily does, and always will, love Mrs. Ramsay, she does not follow the Victorian scripts while in the house at this point in the novel, even as she appreciates its amenities in memory. “Time” has, indeed, “[p]assed” and Lily has matured, even more since the first time we saw her in “The Window” section.100 Everything seems unreal and chaotic to Lily, as she “look[s] at her coffee mug” as if to seek the meaning of life, especially the chaotic events that have taken place.101 However, Woolf has again proved her ability to stage space in a sly way to make a point clearly but without confrontation. Notice that, on this visit, Lily is not shown for any length of time in any of the rooms in which she often spent much time. Now, she is in the kitchen instead. Neither of the Ramsays had earlier been shown in this room with any significant expectations or actions, and so it is unscripted for women of her class in Woolf’s world, as it would have been in Mrs. Beeton’s, given that it would have been the domain of the cook and other servants, not the hostess-mistress of the house. However, in this era’s incarnation of the house experience, those roles are gone. Still, Lily’s behavior around the house is subtly drawn in this regard. The few times she encounters Mr. Ramsay and the ways in which she be- haves around him frame her now as a New Woman, but one with manners and respect rather than childish self-abnegation and avoidance. The two significant moments in this new performance of identity—New Woman meeting Victorian man—occur in heretofore unoccupied spaces: when they see each other in the kitchen and outside the house. Mr. Ramsay’s need for attention is nothing new in the novel, but Lily’s reaction indicates she will not cater to his needs as Mrs. Ramsay often did. When sitting in the kitchen and having some time alone, Lily sees Mr. Ramsay, who is now a much older, feeble man. He passes her a couple of times, something he often did when Mrs. Ramsay was alive—an indicator of his need for sympathy. While in the kitchen, Lily quickly notices Mr. Ramsay’s attempt to get her attention, but “for the first time, for ever; [. . .] she pretended to drink out of her empty coffee cup so as to escape him—to escape his demand on her.”102 Lily’s performance is 94 SOUTH CENTRAL REVIEW quite subtle here, as she does not entirely ignore him. She simply chooses not to engage in conversation with Mr. Ramsay because there is no real need to, as she sees it. Ten years earlier, Lily’s behavior might have been different: with Mrs. Ramsay around, she would probably have had to say something to Mr. Ramsay as per gender expectations. While I see that Lily does, to a degree, acknowledge and conform to more traditional gender roles when pretending not to notice Mr. Ramsay’s need for attention, she is quick to find a way out of the house in order to escape him. Lily’s desires and ability to remove herself from the kitchen signals that other choices are available for her. Unlike Mrs. Ramsay, who remained in the room or spoke to men who often imposed their presence upon her, Lily chooses to go outside to paint—marking it as her time, for her independent identity. She thinks, “She must escape somewhere, be alone somewhere. Suddenly she remembered. When she sat there last ten years ago, there had been a little sprig of leaf pattern on the table-cloth, which she had looked at in a moment of revelation. [. . .] She had never finished that picture. She would paint that picture now.”103 Lily displaces herself from the house, once again, and goes outside to do something she wants to do. Even though the reader will remember that Lily painted “on the edge of the lawn” outside the house at the beginning of the novel, she now deliberately removes herself from the house to avoid Mr. Ramsay.104 Lily’s simple action frames her identity as the New Woman, who no longer has to remain in the house to serve anyone. When he notices Lily’s self-removal from the house, Mr. Ramsay goes after her. When outside, Lily attempts to block or to create a barrier with her canvas to prevent Mr. Ramsay from entering her private space for art outdoors: “She set her clean canvas firmly upon the easel, as a barrier, frail, but she hoped sufficiently substantial to ward off Mr. Ramsay and his exactness. [. . .] he permeated, he prevailed, he imposed himself. He changed everything. [. . .] But he’ll be down on me in a moment, demanding—something she felt she could not give him.”105 Even when outside the house, Lily’s private moment is disrupted by Mr. Ramsay. At this point, not surprisingly, she is “angry at Mrs. Ramsay” for putting up with such a man for so long.106 Yet she also realizes that, as a result of the Victorian scripts in which Mrs. Ramsay was raised, there was actually no escaping Mr. Ramsay. Therefore, Lily simply continues to paint, but eventually feels sorry for him. After all, he lost Mrs. Ramsay, someone whom Lily loved very much. Yet while Lily and Mr. Ramsay talk, something interesting happens: they seem to flirt with one another—a new script enters the picture. Lily compliments Mr. Ramsay’s THE CASES OF MRS. RAMSAY AND LILY BRISCOE / RUTLEDGE 95 boots and eventually “blushes” and feels “ashamed of herself.”107 This is an interesting moment where we see Mr. Ramsay clumsily attempting to engage Lily, as if not wanting to lose an opportunity to be with anyone. His behavior is still coded Victorian, but he has lost his demanding tone. While the text again leaves it to the reader to debate the point, I think that by going outside after Lily, Mr. Ramsay’s performance signals that he realizes on some level, in order to have a chance to be with a woman again, he must modernize himself and views, whether or not he will ever be able to make that necessary transformation in a conscious way. He, too, has moved beyond a simple room with a view into another, more public space, and the sequel to this episode, had it existed, would ask if he would be old and lonely enough to cherish Lily for what she is, and not what she ought to be, in traditional terms.

Conclusion

On a historical level, Lily’s presence in the house signifies the possible arrival of a new age for women, where if men want the sympathy or love they so desire, they must remove themselves from the spaces of the house and join the social spaces of the world along with women. What is most critical, however, is how Woolf stages the narrative to make the bridge between the two disparate periods (Victorian to modernity), as her sketch map for the novel shows. When Woolf maps and remaps the house, we first see the spaces that initially reinforced Mrs. Ramsay’s and Lily’s behavior. Mrs. Ramsay’s decision to act as the Angel in the House displays her complacency with Victorian values, but her thoughts, even certain uses of other spaces in the house, designate her as aware of the goals for a modern woman, even if she has no words for them—why she appreciates Lily, someone who is intrigued by the arrival of a new age. Unfortunately, Woolf, once again, has to kill the Angel in the House in order to show that women need and should be able to choose how they lead their lives. Both Mrs. Ramsay and Lily wanted nothing more than a “room of [their] own.”108 Mrs. Ramsay never had one, except in fleeting moments, and she could not bring herself to be as brave as a Mrs. Dalloway (who has a first name, Clarissa, derived from the Latin clarus, meaning bright or clear, possibly even enlightened, and who claims a room of her own in her house). Yet Mrs. Ramsay is not portrayed as someone who is completely unhappy, but merely as tired—worn to death, as it were, by the patriarchy and eight children, but never with a word of complaint. Lily, considerably 96 SOUTH CENTRAL REVIEW less a remarkable woman at the start of the book, turns into a modern remarkable woman, who can be both an artist and charitable (or at least polite) to the aging Mr. Ramsay. With To the Lighthouse, Woolf is able to put her mother’s “ghost to rest,” as the fictional autobiography looks back at memorable moments in her life.109 The novel clearly reflects on Victorian mothers like Julia Stephen as the prime example of the matriarchy. At the same time, Woolf provides readers with a thorough study of how Victorian values continue to shape one’s identity in the social and personal expectations of everyday life. For Woolf, “an individual’s identity [is] always in flux, every moment changing its shape in response to the forces surrounding it,” indicates Jeanne Schulkind in her introduction to Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing.110 In this novel, Woolf coaxes her readers to reexamine the social structures they have inherited and to question patriarchy and its impact on one’s social spaces. Such spaces, she demonstrates, always reinforce an individual’s behavior when they force their inhabitants to perform/ behave in a way that may not necessarily reflect one’s preferred identity. Mrs. Ramsay’s identity remained that of the housewife or Angel in the House, especially since her home and social milieu framed her as such while giving her no words for alternatives. Her thoughts while in such rooms, however, pointed towards other spaces and places for identity performance. Lily’s presence, then, represents the new age and the incoming of women who will displace themselves out of their home spaces in search of an identity of their own, an identity that they can create and manipulate.111

NOTES 1. Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 27. 2. Most standard readings of To the Lighthouse address the novel’s narrative and style, psychoanalytical relation between the sexes, presence and absence of mothers, Lily Briscoe, aesthetics, Identity struggle, and biographical readings. For a psychoanalytic reading, see Katherine Dalsimer, “Virginia Woolf: Thinking Back through our Mothers.” Psychoanalytic Inquiry 24.5 (Nov. 2004): 713-730. For readings based on narrative style, see Erich Auerbach, “The Brown Stocking,” in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 525-53; Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkley: University of California Press, 1986); Pamela Caughie, “Virginia Woolf Double Discourse,” in Discontented Discourses: Feminism/Textual Intervention/Psychoanalysis, eds. David Bradshaw and Kevin Dettmar (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 41-53; and Caughie, “Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse,” in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, eds. Kevin Bradshaw and Kevin J.H. Dettmar (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), THE CASES OF MRS. RAMSAY AND LILY BRISCOE / RUTLEDGE 97

486-499. See also Shannon Forbes, “When Sometimes She Imagined Herself Like Her Mother’: The Contrasting Responses to the Role of the Angel in the House,’” Studies in the Novel 32.4 (Winter 2000): 464-487; and Gayatri Spivak, “Unmaking and Making in To the Lighthouse,” in Women and Language in Literature and Society, eds. Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman (New York: Praeger, 1980), 310-27. For a biographical approach, see Anne E. Fernald, “To the Lighthouse in the Context of Virginia Woolf’s Diaries and Life,” in The Cambridge Companion to To the Lighthouse, ed. Allison Pease (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 6-18. On aesthetics and space, see Jack Stewart, “A ‘Need of Distance and Blue’: Space, Color, and Creativity in To the Lighthouse,” Twentieth Century Literature 46.1 (2000): 78-99. 3. Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women,” in Virginia Woolf: Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 140-45; Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, 27. 4. Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Harcourt, 1927), 9. 5. As I indicate above, Mrs. Ramsay represents the Victorian wife whose life is solely devoted to her home, family, and children. In Women and Social Action in Victorian and Edwardian England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), Jane Lewis conducts a study of women who were public figures (all of which housewives and philanthropists who attempted to serve outside their private spheres during the Victorian and Edwardian Era). Lewis makes a clear distinction of how each woman’s life “touched and diverged in a manner that promise to open up issues regarding approaches to social questions in late Victorian and Edwardian England; the part played by the female activist, as a social worker, social investigator, [housewife], and social reformer; and the way in which feminism, or perhaps more accurately consciousness of ‘the Woman Question’, touched [women’s] lives in their public and private aspects’” (1). Lewis’s book opens up avenues that help my analysis of both Lily’s and Mrs. Ramsay’s place in To the Lighthouse which echoes the transition from Victorian to Edwardian eras. Both eras have similar cultural expectations of women. However, there is a certain anxiety about a woman’s place with the rise of the suffragist movement in 1903. Indeed, both eras envisioned women in the private spaces of the home, caring for their families. The suffragist movement called for women’s right to vote in public sphere. Women’s voices began to surface in the public domains, as they demanded equality and autonomy. Lily’s character represents all women who, during the Edwardian era, sought equality, autonomy, and the opportunity to be part of the public sphere, mainly thought of as men’s spaces. Mrs. Ramsay, as we see in my argument, is conflicted between the values she has conformed to and those in which Lily’s presence represents. For more information on the cultural conflict and the anxiety regarding a woman’s place between Victorian and Edwardian eras, please see Lewis’s book. I must add that Mrs. Ramsay’s role as a hostess is, in fact, amplified during their time at the beach house. As Isabella Beeton’s Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Manage- ment (Austria, Chancellor Press, 1907) so nicely historicizes a woman’s duty and place during the Victorian era, Mrs. Ramsay displacement from the city to the beach house does indicate a shift in domestic duties. Indeed, she continues to behave as the hostess she needs to be. Lewis, in her book, when talking about marriage and each partner’s duty to one another, says, “The partner’s proper aim was to serve each other and thereby enrich the wider community” (18). Mrs. Ramsay’s role as mother, wife, and hostess remains the same even amidst the transition between Victorian and Edwardian era. 6. Gender roles and the clash between Victorian values and the New Woman are predominant motifs in To the Lighthouse. See Anna Parejo Vadillo, “Generational 98 SOUTH CENTRAL REVIEW

Difference in To the Lighthouse,” and Gabrielle McIntire, “Feminism and Gender in To the Lighthouse,” both in Pease, The Cambridge Companion (122-133 and 80-91, respectively). In addition, see Wendy Perkins, “Virginia Woolf’s Dialogue with the New Woman,” in Family Matters in the British and American Novel, eds. Andrea O’Reilly Herrera, Elizabeth Mahn Nolan, and Sheila Reitzel Foor (Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997), 149-166. Perkins argues that Woolf’s narrative shows Lily’s difficulty and search of her own identity. Perkins indicates that Woolf’s narrative represents the fragmentation and contradictory images of the female identity in a changing world where Victorian values clash with more contemporary ones, where a woman questions the nature of marriage and motherhood. 7. For more information on Woolf’s childhood and upbringing, refer to Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf (New York: Knopf, 1997), 22-49. 8. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Harcourt, Inc., 1957), 2. 9. McIntire, “Feminism and Gender,” 80. 10. Woolf, Three Guineas, ed. Mark Hussey (London, Harcourt Inc., 2005), 48. 11. From the moment the novel begins, Mrs. Ramsay is introduced while performing her duties as a mother. In the first section of the novel, “The Window,” she sits by the window watching her son James and knitting a stocking for the lighthouse keeper’s son. Immediately, readers notice the spatial orientation of the novel, where Mrs. Ramsay spends time in the rooms that reinforce her duties as a Victorian housewife. Later, she performs various duties as wife and hostess in other rooms of the house, something I speak extensively in this article. 12. My argument draws on some of the information present in articles by McIntire, Vadillo, and Forbes, but I must reiterate that my goal in this article is to create a spatial reading of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse while using Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management as a way to show how Mrs. Ramsay’s behavior correlates to much of the rules described by Mrs. Beeton as to how a woman must manage her household, care for her guests, children, husband, and the like. Mrs. Ramsay represents the Victorian matriarch, who must behave accordingly in every space of her house. In this paper, I am mostly interested at how Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe are affected by their spaces, how the spaces of the house cause them to behave according to gender roles. Mrs. Ramsay and Lily are part of a Victorian society; they spend time in the spaces created by such society thus affecting their behavior while in the rooms of the house. That is, they must behave according to the social expectations for women. 13. See Peter Gay’s Pleasure Wars: the Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Vol. V. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998). Gay provides much insight into how the literature written in the Victorian era reinforced the values present in Victorian society, thus reinforcing an individual’s behavior, as well. Gay, in addition, indicates that the vast and fundamental changes in music, art, and literature gave rise to a new era thus causing much anxiety in the transition from Victorian and modern values. 14. This account draws on the fuller explanation by Vadillo in “Generational Dif- ference.” 15. Vadillo, “Generational Difference,” 124. 16. Quote taken from the 1866 London Macmillan edition of the Angel in the House. 17. Ibid, 48. 18. Woolf, “Professions for Women,” 141. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. THE CASES OF MRS. RAMSAY AND LILY BRISCOE / RUTLEDGE 99

21. For more on the spatial turn and literature, please refer to Barney Warf and Santa Arias “An Introduction: The Reinsertion of Space in the Humanities and Social Sciences,” in The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspective, eds. (London: Routledge, 2008) and to Robert T. Tally’s Spatiality (London: Routledge, 2013). 22. Please refer to Eric Bulson, “Mrs. Dalloway Here, There, Everywhere” English Language Notes 52.1 (2014): 133-144; Lisbeth Larsson, Walking Virginia Woolf’s Lon- don: An Investigation in Literary Geography (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Anna Snaith and Michael H. Whitworth, Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Andrew Thacker, Moving through Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); Suzana Zink, Virginia Woolf’s Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). See also Gina Wisker, “Places, People and Time Passing: Virginia Woolf’s Haunted Houses,” Hecate 32.1 (2011): 4-26. 23. Snaith and Whitworth, Locating Woolf, 1. 24. Ibid., 4. 25. Larsson, Walking Virginia Woolf’s London, 140. 26. Woolf, “Professions for Women,” 142. 27. Henry Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Hamp- shire: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 23. 28. Ibid., 26. 29. Ibid. 30. While I found this picture when conducting my research for this paper in Jane Goldman’s “To the Lighthouse’s Use of Language and Form” (in Pease, The Cambridge Companion, 30-46). I decided to include this reference here in order to show readers the distinctive spaces created by Woolf’s drawing, spaces that I discuss in great length in my discussion of the novel. See the actual picture in Woolf, To the Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft, ed. Susan Dick (Toronto University Press, 1982), or online at Woolfonline.com http://woolfonline.com/?node=content/image/gallery&project=1& parent=6&taxa=16. 31. Woolf, To The Lighthouse, 37. 32. Vadillo, “Generational Difference,” 124. 33. See Caughie, “Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse.” 34. Wisker, “Places, People and Time Passing,” 5. 35. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (New York: Penguin Books, 1958), 29. 36. Ibid., 31. 37. Woolf, To The Lighthouse, 136. 38. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 27. 39. Woolf, To The Lighthouse, 137. 40. Ibid., 139. 41. Isabella Beeton, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (Austria: Chan- cellor Press, 1907). 42. Woolf, A Room’s of One’s Own, 2. 43. Doreen B. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Min- nesota Press, 1994), 79. 44. Beeton, Mrs. Beeton’s, 907. 45. Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, 27. 46. Woolf, “Professions for Women,” 141. 47. Ibid. 100 SOUTH CENTRAL REVIEW

48. See for example, Perkins, “Virginia Woolf’s Dialogue.” Perkins argues that Woolf’s narrative shows Lily’s difficulty and search of her own identity. Perkins also indicates that Woolf’s narrative represents the fragmentation and contradictory images of the female identity in a changing world where Victorian values clash with more contemporary ones, where a woman questions the nature of marriage and motherhood. See also Shannon Forbes, “When Sometimes She Imagined.” Forbes also sees Mrs. Ramsay as someone like Lily, who struggles with her own identity as she constantly things of a life other than the one she decides to live. 49. Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, 27. 50. Woolf, To The Lighthouse, 6. 51. Beeton, Mrs. Beeton’s, 5-6. 52. Woolf, To The Lighthouse, 6. 53. Ibid., 3. 54. Ibid., 6. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. In her introduction to Woolf’s’ essay collection, Jeanne Schulkind says that, according to Woolf, an individual’s identity is constantly being shaped and reshaped by the values present in his/her environment. An individual, therefore, is “cut off” from his/ her reality, and at rare moments receives a “shock” or a moment of being that causes them to think beyond the reality created by the values present in their milieu. When alone, Mrs. Ramsay detaches herself from the values of “forces” that have shaped her present identity and is free to imagine an alternative reality, free from the boundaries of her environment. For more detailed information on Woolf’s “moments of being,” please refer to Schulkind, “Introduction,” Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Harcourt Inc., 1985), 16. 59. Mrs. Ramsay’s character in To the Lighthouse is generally acknowledged as representing Woolf’s mother, Julia Stephen. 60. Schulkind, “Introduction,” 16-17. 61. Ibid., 17. 62. Woolf, To The Lighthouse, 62; my emphasis. 63. Ibid. 64. Schulkind, “Introduction,” 17. 65. Woolf, To The Lighthouse, 62. 66. Forbes, “When Sometimes She Imagined,” 469; my emphasis. 67. Woolf, To The Lighthouse, 62. 68. Schulkind, “Introduction,” 16-17. 69. Woolf, To The Lighthouse, 83. 70. Beeton, Mrs. Beeton’s, 907. 71. Woolf, To The Lighthouse, 83. 72. Ibid. 73. Vadillo, “Generational Difference,” 124. 74. Woolf, To The Lighthouse, 62. 75. Ibid., 121. 76. Ibid., 6. 77. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 87. 78. Woolf, To The Lighthouse, 32. THE CASES OF MRS. RAMSAY AND LILY BRISCOE / RUTLEDGE 101

79. Ibid., 114. 80. Beeton, Mrs. Beeton’s, 4. 81. Ibid., 144; my emphasis. 82. Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, 27. 83. Woolf, To The Lighthouse, 50. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid. 89. Forbes, “When Sometimes She Imagined,” 469. I’d like to add that Mrs. Ramsay, even while having thoughts of a life outside the house, often “had the whole of the other sex under her protection” (6). 90. Ibid., 17. 91. Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell was an example of how to manage work as an artist alongside an open marriage to Clive Bell. See Francis Spading’s biography of Bell, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist (London: I.B. Touris & Co, 2016). 92. Woolf, To The Lighthouse, 91. 93. McIntire, “Feminism and Gender,” 81. 94. Woolf, To The Lighthouse, 91. 95. Ibid. 96. Beeton, Mrs. Beeton’s, 13. 97. Ibid., 908. 98. Woolf, To The Lighthouse, 146. 99. Ibid., 22. 100. Ibid., 125. 101. Ibid., 146. 102. Ibid., 147. 103. Ibid. 104. Ibid., 17. 105. Ibid., 149. 106. Ibid. 107. Ibid., 153. 108. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 2. 109. See more about Woolf’s relationship with her mother, Julia Stephen, in Lee, Virginia Woolf, 79-94. 110. Schulkind, “Introduction,” 18. 111. I want to thank Dr. Mia Carter for her help with this article’s first draft. I also thank Dr. Katherine Arens for her help with the various editing stages of this article. Dr. Arens’s constant support and belief in my work and abilities has helped me persevere through the writing process. Finally, I thank Dr. Robert T. Tally Jr. for his help with the spatial aspect of this work and editing process.