Amazing synopsis and analysis of the book so far, Tash! I am in awe of the detail and sensitive level of scrutiny, which helps us all experience and engage in the text all the more intimately. Thank you so much for this. I cannot wait to hear more about how your readers are thinking about this novel. Especially those who haven't read it before and are coming to it for the first time!
p34 '...how life, from being made up if little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash in the beach.'
And
P43 'Only she thought of life abd a little strip of time presented itself to her eyes, her fifty years. There it was before her, life.'
Maybe these reflections stood out as I turn 50 this week myself...
I also loved
P70 'Now the candles were lit...for the night was now shut off by pages of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things wavered and vanished, waterlily.'
This reminded me of a favourite place & memory. The hotel in The Lake District, sitting inside by the log fire, looking out through the vintage glass windows through the depth of the dark across Lake Windermere & the light of the candles inside rippling reflections.
Woolf writes beautifully about time doesn't she. (I secretly love when people share their favourite passages - thank you!) I too love that one about the candles and the rippling outside world. So evocative! And it's a beautiful contrast between order, stability, a human-created refuge inside and chaos and wavering fluidity outside.
The line about life "being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one" caught my attention as well. It reminded me of the character Joana in Clarice Lispector's first novel, "Near to the Wild Heart", who exhorts herself to, "Analyze instant by instant ... Own each moment, connect my awareness to them, like tiny filaments almost imperceptible but strong."
I also liked the moment after dinner, when Mrs. Ramsay is musing that the widower, Mr. Bankes, probably fancies her a little. "He was not 'in love' of course; it was one of those unclassified affections of which there are so many." The idea of there being a type of sliding scale between being 'in love' and 'not in love' with someone appealed to me, and I thought well described how we often come to feel about friends, neighbours, co-workers, and others in our social realm.
I've read three of Lispector's novels--"Near to the Wild Heart" (my favourite so far), "The Chandelier", and "The Apple in the Dark". I'm also slowly chugging my way through her complete short stories. My experience has been that Ms. Lispector is a writer who demands the reader's full attention and capacity to concentrate. She gives your reading muscles a real work-out, but it's well worth the effort.
I find it interesting that Lily is a painter. VW writes about her process, her inner motivations, her desire and confidence and doubts, so fully that I realized quickly that Lily is a stand-in for VW as a writer. But I wonder why Lily is a painter and not a writer? Since so many think the writing is like painting of some style or other. It is probably easier to write a painter than a writer, but VW doesn't run away from writing challenges, does she?
Last night I attended a string quartet recital and was thinking, listening to the 4 voices weaving in and out, similar as stringed instruments but with unique timbres and performance styles from the players, how Woolf's tracings of the inner lives of her characters are similar to what I was listening to. State a theme, pick it up over there, change it over here, back to the theme, introduce a new idea, contrast it with the first, etc.
Regarding the second part of your comment - exactly! It's a perfect metaphor.
Regarding Woolf choosing to depict an artist rather than a writer - I think you're right that it might be easier in some ways to depict a painter - it helpfully places Lily right in the centre of the action with her easel! But I also think it goes further than that. It's not just that Lily (the artist) is an analogue for Woolf (the writer). An artist mindset influences Woolf's actual writing of the novel; she uses it to innovate; she applies painterly and spatial techniques. In the Time Passes sequence, for example, coming up next, we get a (somewhat) still life largely without humans - common in art but very uncommon in fiction. Also, writing about writing can be a bit circular and indulgent, can't it? (This is where you tell me the main character in your forthcoming novel is a writer. Haha.)
No, no novels from me. If I were to write one about a creative person, I think I'd choose a painter or a musician, because it would force me into their consciousness in a way that writing a writer wouldn't. I'd have to be an anthropologist, in a way, trying to see how they see, whereas writing a writer might be too known to me and become, as you say, circular and indulgent. Plus, writing the other art forms have so much potential, as you point out here.
A favorite echo: Bankes puzzled by Lily’s depiction of Mrs. Ramsay as a dark purple triangle; later Mrs. R thinking of herself in very similar terms. This happens a number of times: Lily almost reads Mrs. R’s mind, uses language almost identical to Mrs. R’s reflections about herself.
Lily seems to understand Mrs R very well (indeed all Lily's perceptions seem accurate). Mrs R understands Lily up to a point, the insight that Lily isn't the marrying type like Minta but that at age 40 Lily will be the more worthwhile person.
Yes, but her own obliterating love of the domestic, which is of course part of what’s beautiful about her, prevents her from seeing the richness of Lily’s life.
Absolutely. Nail on the head that 20 word summary of Mrs R. I felt the podcast on the dinner party was perhaps tending to idealise Mrs R, and yes in 21st century sensibility intimacy and togetherness is everything. The dinner is Mrs Ramsay's triumph but it's not unqualified triumph. And overall the individual project of Lily in particular will have its triumph too. As for Woolf herself she'd be in real life more Lily minded.
I’ve also been making painterly metaphors in my mind for the style of this book—it’s so directly suggested, as you mention (even more clearly by the end). For me I think post-Impressionism, Van Gogh in particular, is the closest thing—there is layering of paint strokes and textures and colors, but in an even more stylized way, somewhere between gentle haze of light (which Lily Briscoe, for one, rejects) and bold geometry.
Interesting! - yes, there's a sort of stylised spatial approach to the writing (the two parts joined by 'a corridor,' amongst other things), an interest in mass and form which could be more reminiscent of post-impressionism.
Actually, I stumbled upon this in the intro to the Norton Critical Edition of To the Lighthouse:
'The problem of the mind's relation to the world, posed as the relation between the artist's abstract design and the observable appearances of life, is the central problem explored and debated, both in paint and in words, by the modernist artists and art theorists who surrounded Woolf: her sister Vanessa Bell, her brother-in-law Clive Bell, and their friend Roger Fry. [...] Clive insisted that 'representation' should always be subordinate to 'significant form,' or form for its own sake. Fry's views evolved from an equally firm advocacy for abstract design, as in Post-Impressionist painting--he though that writers should follow the Post-Impressionists and 'fling representation to the winds'--to a more nuanced view that acknowledged the emotional value of references to life.'
There is, of course, much more written there and elsewhere about the painterly quality of VW's writing in TTL and the influence of art and artistic approaches. But I read that little fragment and thought of your astute observation about post impressionist style of VW's approach!
Maybe this is a bit of an obvious thing to go into, but in Mr and Mrs Ramsay VW offers us a study of traditional (Edwardian) gender roles. Mr is more straightforward: the conflict between the two traditional male roles of public intellectual and master of the family. But Mrs Ramsay is a paradigm of the traditional wife-and-mother. Beautiful, even ‘elegant, fragrant and radiant’ (for those who remember the Jeffrey Archer libel case of 1987 – the e f & r Dame Mary Archer is now Chair of the Science Museum by the way). And very good at it: comforting and supporting her family, respectful and loving to her husband, hostess and social facilitator. (Not quite perfect, she misunderstands William Bankes, who would just as soon dine at home; her matchmaking of Minta and Paul is successful but the idea that Lily Briscoe must marry Mr Bankes seems to me a bit misguided.) Lily Briscoe is the opposite: the ‘Room of One’s Own’ woman justified by her work as a painter. But Lily, along with everyone else, acknowledges Mrs Ramsey’s supremacy in the W&M role. The only one who doubts it is Mrs Ramsay herself… But right at the end of this section, after the self-doubt, a moment of joyful self-acceptance. It’s quite tempting to read this part of the novel as a treatise against ‘The Patriarchy’ (especially with Mr Ramsay) but it’s actually much more rounded and ambiguous.
I'm reminded of Woolf's words in a Room of One's Own:
'And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally this is so. [...] And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.'
I see in Woolf's depiction of Mrs Ramsay an interest in dignifying women's experiences, their skills and domains of mastery, in fiction - despite these traditionally being ignored by literature - even while feeling equivocal/critical about the social roles and rules that limit women etc. Notice in the first chapter, Mrs Ramsay's daughters imagine a different life for themselves: they 'sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers; in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other; for there was in all their minds a mute questioning of deference and chivalry...'
It's interesting that those women representing perfect traditional femininity and motherhood (Mrs Ramsay, Prue) must exit the stage as a new post-war world emerges...
I see this as VW imaginatively and sympathetically inhabiting a life role that was her mother’s but very definitely not her own. The ‘wife and mother’ values that she herself will have been very ambivalent about.
This is my second reading of To The Lighthouse. My first was a long time ago when I was at school. We (in my English group) all truly hated it and no-one had a clue what it was about. So I was surprised to find that a quite a few bits had somehow stuck in my brain - sentences like the one about a mere stone Mr Ramsay kicked outlasting Shakespeare came straight back.
Woolf's ability to glide between moments of profound beauty and insight and moments of social comedy/commentary is what I love about her writing. I very much like the advice you gave in your post about letting go of anxiety about whose POV it is at any given moment.
I am touched by how well Woolf captures Mrs Ramsay's experience of motherhood. For me, Mrs Ramsay is most likeable and sympathetic as a character when thinking about or interacting with her children.
Yes, I've really tuned into Mrs Ramsay-as-mother during this read through - I think because I am now a mother. I found ch 18 (in 'The Window') profoundly moving (whereas, I think on previous reads I sort of skimmed over this...)
Mr Bankes (who I consider with Lily as the most 'reliable narrators') describes Mrs R's beauty as put together by the Graces in fields of asphodel. Another flower and the wild Greek asphodel is elegant and graceful (it's a tall slender white flower). BUT the Fields of Asphodel are the realm of the dead in Greek myth. Odd that he sees her that way, not sure what to make of it, though the beating of the sea has also hints of mortality as you point out Tash.
I envy you, Tash, your "fresh, gusty, sunny" day among the vegetables. Here in southeastern Ontario we're enjoying what Environment Canada is calling "a highly impactful weekend winter storm" lasting over two days, with lots of snow and blowing snow, making for what we call white-out conditions on the roads, which we've been asked not to use.
I’ve just finished the Window! These are some things that really stayed with me afterwards;
- the skull as a memento mori that Mrs R then covers up (as if to say ‘no thank you, we will not be mementoing any moris’
- the impact that the enduring nature of the ocean has on various people’s thoughts and moods, and the meaning people endow the ocean with. I haven’t finished the book yet, so I don’t know if Nancy’s brooch turns up, but that feels like a specific instance of us losing something that is supposed to last forever to the tide
- the misunderstanding between Mr & Mrs R when they are alone - that they are both assuming the other doesn’t want to be interrupted. Even that feels like a simplification, because the story also creates a few non-verbal moments of connection and understanding between them, and their internal position in relation to each other is so fluid!
- the social gathering falling apart apart as soon as Mrs R leaves the room. This makes me wonder how the characters will cope without her conscious effort to connect people
- the different experiences of reading that Mr & Mrs R had was gorgeous
- the way each character thought about gender was extremely interesting! It had never occurred to me that a woman might feel protective of all men and grateful to their thought & work. Mrs R seems to think of pacifying men in order to help people connect as a responsibility (at one point she blames Prue ‘not being nice’ for a man’s sooky attitude, probably Mr Tansley) whereas Lily seemed much more contemporary in that she felt no social obligation towards Mr Tansley. To me it felt like she included him in the conversation as a favour to Mrs R!
This turned into a long comment, I have probably way more to say but I’ll leave it there!
What a fabulous comment! I don't know what to add. You've said it all beautifully. I love all these observations! <no thank you, we will not be mementoing any moris> hahaha
I think you're right about Lily feeling no social obligation to Mr Tansley which is perhaps sharpened a bit by her resentment re: 'women can't paint, women can't write'. And when she finally relents - I think you're right - it's a favour to Mrs R (her heart isn't in it) but then she finds a sudden confidence and refuge in her art and this releases any final resentment or restriction in her: 'Then her eye fell on the salt cellar, which she had placed there to remind her, and she remembered that next morning she would move the tree further towards the middle, and her spirits rose so high at the thought of painting tomorrow that she laughed out loud at what Mr Tansley was saying. Let him talk all night if he liked.'
Tash, your title, from the book, for this week's post (It is enough! It is enough!) reminds me of a radio show I heard years ago. Driving across the plains of northern Kansas just before Christmas — cold, windy, at dusk — we listened to Garrison Keillor (his Prairie Home Companion was broadcast live on Saturday evenings for decades) tell a story about his first Christmas away from home in the Northern Plains, come to New York to be a writer. He spent his first holiday there with new neighbors in a coffee shop having a turkey sandwich. As they ate, the early darkness came down and the lights of New York came up and he marveled at where he was, just starting his life. He finished the monologue: It was enough. It was enough (and, directly, Murray Perahia played Claire de Lune as the moon rose over us in Hayes, Kansas). A bit of stardust sprinkled over us as we realized that this show was being broadcast live from Town Hall in New York (long after the event Keillor described) while we, New Yorkers, were driving across the plains.
Birds — so many appearances of birds, and figurative language involving birds, wings, beaks! Have others noticed this? Thoughts about the symbolism? Other motifs I’m interested in: light/lights, furniture, flowers and trees, and mist/fog/clouds.
Actually I hadn't tuned in to the references to birds (though I recall Tom previously mentioning the lovely reference to flamingo clouds in ch 4 and Genevieve mentioned the lark on the first page (which also appears (in a different sense) on the first page of Mrs Dalloway). Which passages caught your attention? There is the beak of brass of course! I am also reminded of that description of Mrs Ramsay's singleness of mind which 'alight[s] exact as a bird, gave her, naturally, this swoop and fall of the spirit upon truth...' (from ch 5).
Regarding flowers, I was thinking quite a lot about the stone urn with the geraniums (that most domestic of flowers) which accompanies Mr Ramsay's thoughts about polar expeditions and ship voyages (and reaching R) in chapter 6. In chapter 8, Mr R sees again 'the urns with the trailing red geraniums which had so often decorated processes of thought...'
I first noticed the motif of birds in Chapter 9, where Lily describes Mrs. R as “like a bird for speed, an arrow for directness.” At dinner she “hovered like a hawk suspended.” And I think there were several others I can’t find now.
Also, this is very trivial but I’m curious about the turn of phrase “Directly we [verb phrase]”—Woolf uses this all the time, where in current American parlance we would say “as soon as we…” or “the moment we…” I just thought of it old fashioned, but then I saw you use it in your post! Are you echoing Woolf or is it still common in British/Australian English?
How funny! I didn't even notice myself doing it, but that is definitely an old-fashioned Woolfish formulation! Definitely not common in Australian English and I'm going to assume very old-fashioned in British English too. I must have spent too long paging through Woolf's various writings lately. Haha
Amazing synopsis and analysis of the book so far, Tash! I am in awe of the detail and sensitive level of scrutiny, which helps us all experience and engage in the text all the more intimately. Thank you so much for this. I cannot wait to hear more about how your readers are thinking about this novel. Especially those who haven't read it before and are coming to it for the first time!
Thank you Nancy! Yes, I always really enjoy reading people's comments - we all tune into different things!
My favourite passages were
p34 '...how life, from being made up if little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash in the beach.'
And
P43 'Only she thought of life abd a little strip of time presented itself to her eyes, her fifty years. There it was before her, life.'
Maybe these reflections stood out as I turn 50 this week myself...
I also loved
P70 'Now the candles were lit...for the night was now shut off by pages of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things wavered and vanished, waterlily.'
This reminded me of a favourite place & memory. The hotel in The Lake District, sitting inside by the log fire, looking out through the vintage glass windows through the depth of the dark across Lake Windermere & the light of the candles inside rippling reflections.
Woolf writes beautifully about time doesn't she. (I secretly love when people share their favourite passages - thank you!) I too love that one about the candles and the rippling outside world. So evocative! And it's a beautiful contrast between order, stability, a human-created refuge inside and chaos and wavering fluidity outside.
Also, happy birthday - that's an important one!
The line about life "being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one" caught my attention as well. It reminded me of the character Joana in Clarice Lispector's first novel, "Near to the Wild Heart", who exhorts herself to, "Analyze instant by instant ... Own each moment, connect my awareness to them, like tiny filaments almost imperceptible but strong."
I also liked the moment after dinner, when Mrs. Ramsay is musing that the widower, Mr. Bankes, probably fancies her a little. "He was not 'in love' of course; it was one of those unclassified affections of which there are so many." The idea of there being a type of sliding scale between being 'in love' and 'not in love' with someone appealed to me, and I thought well described how we often come to feel about friends, neighbours, co-workers, and others in our social realm.
I have Clarice Lispector books on my tbr shelves to read this year, am looking forward to them
I've read three of Lispector's novels--"Near to the Wild Heart" (my favourite so far), "The Chandelier", and "The Apple in the Dark". I'm also slowly chugging my way through her complete short stories. My experience has been that Ms. Lispector is a writer who demands the reader's full attention and capacity to concentrate. She gives your reading muscles a real work-out, but it's well worth the effort.
I marked the p70 section as well. It is so specific in its poetry. So beautiful. Happy Birthday!
I find it interesting that Lily is a painter. VW writes about her process, her inner motivations, her desire and confidence and doubts, so fully that I realized quickly that Lily is a stand-in for VW as a writer. But I wonder why Lily is a painter and not a writer? Since so many think the writing is like painting of some style or other. It is probably easier to write a painter than a writer, but VW doesn't run away from writing challenges, does she?
Last night I attended a string quartet recital and was thinking, listening to the 4 voices weaving in and out, similar as stringed instruments but with unique timbres and performance styles from the players, how Woolf's tracings of the inner lives of her characters are similar to what I was listening to. State a theme, pick it up over there, change it over here, back to the theme, introduce a new idea, contrast it with the first, etc.
Regarding the second part of your comment - exactly! It's a perfect metaphor.
Regarding Woolf choosing to depict an artist rather than a writer - I think you're right that it might be easier in some ways to depict a painter - it helpfully places Lily right in the centre of the action with her easel! But I also think it goes further than that. It's not just that Lily (the artist) is an analogue for Woolf (the writer). An artist mindset influences Woolf's actual writing of the novel; she uses it to innovate; she applies painterly and spatial techniques. In the Time Passes sequence, for example, coming up next, we get a (somewhat) still life largely without humans - common in art but very uncommon in fiction. Also, writing about writing can be a bit circular and indulgent, can't it? (This is where you tell me the main character in your forthcoming novel is a writer. Haha.)
No, no novels from me. If I were to write one about a creative person, I think I'd choose a painter or a musician, because it would force me into their consciousness in a way that writing a writer wouldn't. I'd have to be an anthropologist, in a way, trying to see how they see, whereas writing a writer might be too known to me and become, as you say, circular and indulgent. Plus, writing the other art forms have so much potential, as you point out here.
A favorite echo: Bankes puzzled by Lily’s depiction of Mrs. Ramsay as a dark purple triangle; later Mrs. R thinking of herself in very similar terms. This happens a number of times: Lily almost reads Mrs. R’s mind, uses language almost identical to Mrs. R’s reflections about herself.
Lily seems to understand Mrs R very well (indeed all Lily's perceptions seem accurate). Mrs R understands Lily up to a point, the insight that Lily isn't the marrying type like Minta but that at age 40 Lily will be the more worthwhile person.
Yes, but her own obliterating love of the domestic, which is of course part of what’s beautiful about her, prevents her from seeing the richness of Lily’s life.
Absolutely. Nail on the head that 20 word summary of Mrs R. I felt the podcast on the dinner party was perhaps tending to idealise Mrs R, and yes in 21st century sensibility intimacy and togetherness is everything. The dinner is Mrs Ramsay's triumph but it's not unqualified triumph. And overall the individual project of Lily in particular will have its triumph too. As for Woolf herself she'd be in real life more Lily minded.
I’ve also been making painterly metaphors in my mind for the style of this book—it’s so directly suggested, as you mention (even more clearly by the end). For me I think post-Impressionism, Van Gogh in particular, is the closest thing—there is layering of paint strokes and textures and colors, but in an even more stylized way, somewhere between gentle haze of light (which Lily Briscoe, for one, rejects) and bold geometry.
Interesting! - yes, there's a sort of stylised spatial approach to the writing (the two parts joined by 'a corridor,' amongst other things), an interest in mass and form which could be more reminiscent of post-impressionism.
Actually, I stumbled upon this in the intro to the Norton Critical Edition of To the Lighthouse:
'The problem of the mind's relation to the world, posed as the relation between the artist's abstract design and the observable appearances of life, is the central problem explored and debated, both in paint and in words, by the modernist artists and art theorists who surrounded Woolf: her sister Vanessa Bell, her brother-in-law Clive Bell, and their friend Roger Fry. [...] Clive insisted that 'representation' should always be subordinate to 'significant form,' or form for its own sake. Fry's views evolved from an equally firm advocacy for abstract design, as in Post-Impressionist painting--he though that writers should follow the Post-Impressionists and 'fling representation to the winds'--to a more nuanced view that acknowledged the emotional value of references to life.'
There is, of course, much more written there and elsewhere about the painterly quality of VW's writing in TTL and the influence of art and artistic approaches. But I read that little fragment and thought of your astute observation about post impressionist style of VW's approach!
Maybe this is a bit of an obvious thing to go into, but in Mr and Mrs Ramsay VW offers us a study of traditional (Edwardian) gender roles. Mr is more straightforward: the conflict between the two traditional male roles of public intellectual and master of the family. But Mrs Ramsay is a paradigm of the traditional wife-and-mother. Beautiful, even ‘elegant, fragrant and radiant’ (for those who remember the Jeffrey Archer libel case of 1987 – the e f & r Dame Mary Archer is now Chair of the Science Museum by the way). And very good at it: comforting and supporting her family, respectful and loving to her husband, hostess and social facilitator. (Not quite perfect, she misunderstands William Bankes, who would just as soon dine at home; her matchmaking of Minta and Paul is successful but the idea that Lily Briscoe must marry Mr Bankes seems to me a bit misguided.) Lily Briscoe is the opposite: the ‘Room of One’s Own’ woman justified by her work as a painter. But Lily, along with everyone else, acknowledges Mrs Ramsey’s supremacy in the W&M role. The only one who doubts it is Mrs Ramsay herself… But right at the end of this section, after the self-doubt, a moment of joyful self-acceptance. It’s quite tempting to read this part of the novel as a treatise against ‘The Patriarchy’ (especially with Mr Ramsay) but it’s actually much more rounded and ambiguous.
I'm reminded of Woolf's words in a Room of One's Own:
'And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally this is so. [...] And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.'
I see in Woolf's depiction of Mrs Ramsay an interest in dignifying women's experiences, their skills and domains of mastery, in fiction - despite these traditionally being ignored by literature - even while feeling equivocal/critical about the social roles and rules that limit women etc. Notice in the first chapter, Mrs Ramsay's daughters imagine a different life for themselves: they 'sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers; in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other; for there was in all their minds a mute questioning of deference and chivalry...'
It's interesting that those women representing perfect traditional femininity and motherhood (Mrs Ramsay, Prue) must exit the stage as a new post-war world emerges...
I see this as VW imaginatively and sympathetically inhabiting a life role that was her mother’s but very definitely not her own. The ‘wife and mother’ values that she herself will have been very ambivalent about.
This is my second reading of To The Lighthouse. My first was a long time ago when I was at school. We (in my English group) all truly hated it and no-one had a clue what it was about. So I was surprised to find that a quite a few bits had somehow stuck in my brain - sentences like the one about a mere stone Mr Ramsay kicked outlasting Shakespeare came straight back.
Woolf's ability to glide between moments of profound beauty and insight and moments of social comedy/commentary is what I love about her writing. I very much like the advice you gave in your post about letting go of anxiety about whose POV it is at any given moment.
I am touched by how well Woolf captures Mrs Ramsay's experience of motherhood. For me, Mrs Ramsay is most likeable and sympathetic as a character when thinking about or interacting with her children.
Yes, I've really tuned into Mrs Ramsay-as-mother during this read through - I think because I am now a mother. I found ch 18 (in 'The Window') profoundly moving (whereas, I think on previous reads I sort of skimmed over this...)
Mr Bankes (who I consider with Lily as the most 'reliable narrators') describes Mrs R's beauty as put together by the Graces in fields of asphodel. Another flower and the wild Greek asphodel is elegant and graceful (it's a tall slender white flower). BUT the Fields of Asphodel are the realm of the dead in Greek myth. Odd that he sees her that way, not sure what to make of it, though the beating of the sea has also hints of mortality as you point out Tash.
A bit of foreshadowing?
Oh, I didn't know this.
I envy you, Tash, your "fresh, gusty, sunny" day among the vegetables. Here in southeastern Ontario we're enjoying what Environment Canada is calling "a highly impactful weekend winter storm" lasting over two days, with lots of snow and blowing snow, making for what we call white-out conditions on the roads, which we've been asked not to use.
Blimey! Good weather for staying in with a book then!
I’ve just finished the Window! These are some things that really stayed with me afterwards;
- the skull as a memento mori that Mrs R then covers up (as if to say ‘no thank you, we will not be mementoing any moris’
- the impact that the enduring nature of the ocean has on various people’s thoughts and moods, and the meaning people endow the ocean with. I haven’t finished the book yet, so I don’t know if Nancy’s brooch turns up, but that feels like a specific instance of us losing something that is supposed to last forever to the tide
- the misunderstanding between Mr & Mrs R when they are alone - that they are both assuming the other doesn’t want to be interrupted. Even that feels like a simplification, because the story also creates a few non-verbal moments of connection and understanding between them, and their internal position in relation to each other is so fluid!
- the social gathering falling apart apart as soon as Mrs R leaves the room. This makes me wonder how the characters will cope without her conscious effort to connect people
- the different experiences of reading that Mr & Mrs R had was gorgeous
- the way each character thought about gender was extremely interesting! It had never occurred to me that a woman might feel protective of all men and grateful to their thought & work. Mrs R seems to think of pacifying men in order to help people connect as a responsibility (at one point she blames Prue ‘not being nice’ for a man’s sooky attitude, probably Mr Tansley) whereas Lily seemed much more contemporary in that she felt no social obligation towards Mr Tansley. To me it felt like she included him in the conversation as a favour to Mrs R!
This turned into a long comment, I have probably way more to say but I’ll leave it there!
What a fabulous comment! I don't know what to add. You've said it all beautifully. I love all these observations! <no thank you, we will not be mementoing any moris> hahaha
I think you're right about Lily feeling no social obligation to Mr Tansley which is perhaps sharpened a bit by her resentment re: 'women can't paint, women can't write'. And when she finally relents - I think you're right - it's a favour to Mrs R (her heart isn't in it) but then she finds a sudden confidence and refuge in her art and this releases any final resentment or restriction in her: 'Then her eye fell on the salt cellar, which she had placed there to remind her, and she remembered that next morning she would move the tree further towards the middle, and her spirits rose so high at the thought of painting tomorrow that she laughed out loud at what Mr Tansley was saying. Let him talk all night if he liked.'
I loved the whole thing with the salt cellar so much!! The way it repeated as though she were reminding herself, or maybe reconsidering
Tash, your title, from the book, for this week's post (It is enough! It is enough!) reminds me of a radio show I heard years ago. Driving across the plains of northern Kansas just before Christmas — cold, windy, at dusk — we listened to Garrison Keillor (his Prairie Home Companion was broadcast live on Saturday evenings for decades) tell a story about his first Christmas away from home in the Northern Plains, come to New York to be a writer. He spent his first holiday there with new neighbors in a coffee shop having a turkey sandwich. As they ate, the early darkness came down and the lights of New York came up and he marveled at where he was, just starting his life. He finished the monologue: It was enough. It was enough (and, directly, Murray Perahia played Claire de Lune as the moon rose over us in Hayes, Kansas). A bit of stardust sprinkled over us as we realized that this show was being broadcast live from Town Hall in New York (long after the event Keillor described) while we, New Yorkers, were driving across the plains.
Beautiful Kevin. I just loved this. Thank you for sharing it.
Birds — so many appearances of birds, and figurative language involving birds, wings, beaks! Have others noticed this? Thoughts about the symbolism? Other motifs I’m interested in: light/lights, furniture, flowers and trees, and mist/fog/clouds.
Actually I hadn't tuned in to the references to birds (though I recall Tom previously mentioning the lovely reference to flamingo clouds in ch 4 and Genevieve mentioned the lark on the first page (which also appears (in a different sense) on the first page of Mrs Dalloway). Which passages caught your attention? There is the beak of brass of course! I am also reminded of that description of Mrs Ramsay's singleness of mind which 'alight[s] exact as a bird, gave her, naturally, this swoop and fall of the spirit upon truth...' (from ch 5).
Regarding flowers, I was thinking quite a lot about the stone urn with the geraniums (that most domestic of flowers) which accompanies Mr Ramsay's thoughts about polar expeditions and ship voyages (and reaching R) in chapter 6. In chapter 8, Mr R sees again 'the urns with the trailing red geraniums which had so often decorated processes of thought...'
I first noticed the motif of birds in Chapter 9, where Lily describes Mrs. R as “like a bird for speed, an arrow for directness.” At dinner she “hovered like a hawk suspended.” And I think there were several others I can’t find now.
Also, this is very trivial but I’m curious about the turn of phrase “Directly we [verb phrase]”—Woolf uses this all the time, where in current American parlance we would say “as soon as we…” or “the moment we…” I just thought of it old fashioned, but then I saw you use it in your post! Are you echoing Woolf or is it still common in British/Australian English?
How funny! I didn't even notice myself doing it, but that is definitely an old-fashioned Woolfish formulation! Definitely not common in Australian English and I'm going to assume very old-fashioned in British English too. I must have spent too long paging through Woolf's various writings lately. Haha
Yes, old fashioned in British English. But quite current in the 1920s I think.
That’s funny 😄