As I read “To the Lighthouse”, the character of Mrs. Ramsay came to take on some of the overtones of a mythological fertility figure. For one thing, there’s the fact that she’s given birth to eight healthy children, and presides over the meal where everyone is served in ceremonial fashion with a beef dish that has taken three days to prepare. It’s more than a bit of a stretch, but the three-day timespan makes me think of Easter and the pagan traditions behind the celebration, which often included a fertility goddess (Mrs. Ramsay). And thinking of Easter brings my thoughts back to the beef dinner as a kind of Last Supper, the first and last time we see the novel’s characters all together.
There’s also the regard with which Mrs. Ramsay is held by her children and the other guests staying at the home on the Isle of Skye. Lily Briscoe observes that old Mr. Bankes gazes at Mrs. Ramsay with a look of “rapture” on his face. Even the miserable Charles Tansley, who thinks the other guests are only interested in talking a lot of “rot”, wants to be acknowledged and asked his opinion by Mrs. Ramsay. As for the titular head of the household, Mr. Ramsay, for all his bluster and contrariness, seeks out his wife at various times for approval, forgiveness, and validation.
I was particularly struck by the scene where Mrs. Ramsay uses her shawl to cover up the boar’s head skull mounted on the children’s bedroom wall. It is almost a Solomon-like decision, to cover the skull so that her daughter Cam cannot see it and be frightened by it, yet satisfies her son James who knows the skull is still there. I also think it’s significant that the shawl is green, evoking thoughts of the natural world as well as traditional English folklore tropes such as the Greenwood, the Green Man, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. If I let my imagination run rampant, I’ll recall that the novel opens with James wanting to take an axe to his father and kill him, just as the Green Knight invites Sir Gawain to kill him with an axe at the beginning of the medieval poem. (I can imagine VW rolling her eyes at all this.)
Even after we move to the “Time Passes” section of the novel, where we learn that Mrs. Ramsay has passed away, we are shown her green shawl still partly covering the boar’s skull, as if it were a talisman of her continuing presence and influence in the home and its surroundings. Small wonder that we later read that when Lily Briscoe is outside painting, with Mr. Carmichael lounging nearby, she still feels a strong sense of Mrs. Ramsay’s presence, to the point that she thinks, “[I]f they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return”, just as the festival of Easter and its fertility goddess returns each spring. “’Mrs. Ramsay!’ she said aloud, ‘Mrs. Ramsay!’ The tears ran down her face.”
Tom, such a brilliant take on this novel, and it makes perfect sense to view Mrs. Ramsay through the lens of mythology, to see her as an iteration of a fertility goddess. She is, as you say, a paragon of maternal stability, love, and patience. The ultimate advocate of marriage, of having children, of self-sacrifice, it's a great analogy.
And I don't think that idea of the Last Supper is far fetched at all. It is, in fact, the last dinner the group will share, and the last dinner Mrs. R. will have been in charge of preparing. The last moment she will have to "make moments" and encourage intimacy between her guests and family. And all her children are present, all around her.
The symbolism of the color green is also fascinating--it also makes sense as there are multiple references to the natural surroundings of the house. The hedge Mrs. R. is always staring into, and this image is repeated many times in the novel, is described as twisted with little branches and twigs. I always thought that hedge represented the twists and turns, the confusion, the dense terrain of life. She looks into it in the first section of the book many times, contemplating her life and the lives of those she loves. So green might well represent the natural world and Mrs. R's connection to it. I love the link you drew too, between James's homicidal fantasies in the opening scene to the Green Knight and Sir Gawain, which now I shall have to look up again!
These are wonderful comments from both of you, Nancy and Tom - thank you! - I don't really feel I have much to add! One thing: Tom described the shawl as a 'talisman' and I have to say that I find Woolf often gives objects and phrases a talismanic quality through repetition or by somehow imbuing them with a feeling of symbolic weight. In this category of talismanic objects and phrases, I would put: the lighthouse, Minta's brooch, Mr R's invisible table, the various repeated lines of poetry (someone had blundered!), the hedge, the urns of geraniums, 'doors-shut-windows-open', 'women-can't-paint/write', the compact against tyranny, Lily's painting, and, of course, the shawl and pig's skull.
And that brooch of Minta's -- for me, that was always a powerful metaphor for the losses we bear in life that can never ever be recovered. We dig and dig, we sift and sift, the sand oozing through our fingers, we scour vast surfaces looking and searching, but in the end, what is lost is lost forever, as a precious heirloom. And our job then is to reconcile ourselves to the loss. The brooch, after all these years, is my personal symbol for what can never be found. I just love that metaphor. And I think it meant the same thing to VW, as she bore so many personal losses.
Thanks, Nancy! You're too kind, especially since I was doubtful about leaving my comment, seeing as it sounded more like the result of free association thinking rather than reasoned analysis.
But free association is sometimes the way we find out what to put to reasoned analysis. Sometimes we must have these flights of fancy, following some idea down that proverbial rabbit hole, even if it hasn't been put to the test, to find the gem (the brooch?). Sometimes in my classes, the students who are putting out ideas they haven't thought of before, that they're anxious or embarrassed to voice, end up being the most animated conversations. I just love those moments, when I look back at that student's face, and they're beaming, realizing that it's okay to brainstorm, that their free association led to such a cool exchange of ideas.
About Mr. Carmichael, Tash, you wrote "But Lily also recalls that when Mr Carmichael heard about Andrew Ramsay’s death, he had ‘lost all interest in life." This made me think that we are never in Mr. C's head in this final section. Are we? I have to go back and look for that. But this one line you mention is Lily relaying Mr. C's innermost thoughts (what is more inner than losing all interest in life?). How does she know that? What is interesting to me is that Lily, a painter, is infiltrating the consciousness of a poet (guided, of course, by a novelist).
I'll go back to the final section and see what I can find of who's saying what about Mr. C.
Thank you, Tash, for such beautiful, hard work on this series of posts. I'm in awe of your generosity and insight and enthrallment. And thanks to Nancy Miller and Ronald Turnbull as well.
Thank you for your kind words Kevin - and thank you for participating! I've so enjoyed reading your comments.
Yes, I'm pretty sure we don't ever see directly into Mr Carmichael's mind. I had to go back and find that bit and remind myself! It's in ch 11 in 'The Lighthouse'. It says: 'Yes, he looked the same, but somebody had said, she recalled, that when he had heard of Andrew Ramsay's death (he was killed in a second by a shell; he would have been a great mathematician) Mr Carmichael had 'lost all interest in life.' What did it mean--that? she wondered...'
So I think we can assume she is outside his consciousness having heard about Mr C from others and speculating. Putting 'lost all interest in life' in inverted commas gives those words a feeling of one-of-those-things-people-say but what does it mean actually?
Lily wonders how 'lost all interest in life' manifested in Mr Carmichael's life. But then it says 'She did not know what he had done, when he heard that Andrew was killed, but she felt it in him all the same. They only mumbled at each other on staircases; they looked up at the sky and said it would be fine or it won't be fine. But this was one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the deal [...] She knew him that way. She knew he had changed somehow.'
So I think that actually there is something interesting there about Lily infiltrating the consciousness of the poet. She is understanding in an abstract way - like an artist would... Maybe...
Well, this is in line with her knowing Mr. R's mind as she tried to paint, knowing she couldn't give him what he wanted (without him ever saying what he wanted, or in fact that he even wanted anything).
I wonder if this is VW's portrayal of what might be called women's intuition. Mrs. R certainly had it, and now Lily does as well (and during the dinner, she got herself involved with Tansley's mind).
There's such a difference in the book between Mr. R charging about declaiming, and Tansley being terse and rude (both exhibitions of masculine energy, of physicality, projectiles aimed at whoever's around) and the more feeling and cerebral turning over of what, as you quoted, Lily saw in the outline, her way of knowing people. Lily being an artist, Lily and Mrs R being intuitive women dealing with demanding men.
Yes! And the dinner party is the perfect microcosm really of women intuiting what is needed; facilitating the self-expression (and good humour) of the men (I'm being a bit simplistic but you know what I mean). Lily and Mrs Ramsay both play this facilitating role to some extent - but also Minta Doyle with Mr Ramsay. Mr R gets irritated at one point: 'Then Minta Doyle, whose instinct was fine, said bluffly, absurdly, that she did not believe that any one really enjoyed reading Shakespeare. [...] Mrs Ramsay saw that it would be all right for the moment anyhow; he would laugh at Minta, and she, Mrs Ramsay saw, realising his extreme anxiety about himself, would, in her own way, see that he was taken care of, praise him, somehow or other.'
I'm struck by how it's perhaps easier for Minta to smooth things over with Mr R because of her beauty (there is perhaps a sexual undercurrent to their interaction) which Lily, being plain, finds difficult to affect. While Lily reads the men around her quite astutely (Mr R, Mr Tansley) she finds it difficult to imitate 'the self-surrender she had seen on so many women's faces', 'the rapture of sympathy'. Later when Mr R comes to her wanting sympathy, she thinks that as a woman 'she should have known how to deal with it. It was immensely to her discredit, sexually, to stand there dumb.' But at times, that 'wielding of female sexuality' proves to be a disadvantage as with Mrs R and Mr Carmichael perhaps. Here it is Lily who has the better instincts.
Well, Kevin, what a fascinating question, and you have a good eye, to be sure. Now you've got me wondering about that section as well. I'm out of town at the moment, but will make a point of looking this up and seeing what I can find out.
A lovely conclusion Tash and Nancy, thank you! I've had such a great time revisiting 'To The Lighthouse' and I've taken away much more than I did 20 years ago. So much of this novel plays with distance, and distance, time and age have provided me a greater perspective.
After reading the novel, I listened to the Penguin edition's introduction to it by Hermione Lee and found its references to Woolf's diary notes very interesting. In particular, the way in which Woolf used shapes throughout, whether it be a dome, or a triangle, or a line.
For me, the lighthouse was the line in Lily's painting. As you read, Tash, Woolf said every novel needs a central line to pull it together, and for Woolf, the lighthouse (which is also a line in shape) was that line that threaded through the story from start to finish. It's a constant, stable force amid change, and yet, it's unremarkable. The novel isn't about the lighthouse, (and by Woolf's own admission, the lighthouse wasn't meant to be symbolic of anything in particular), but served as the destination. If we're to evoke the old cliche, 'It's not about the destination, but the journey to get there', we can see that the focus of the novel is on relationships, memory, life and death and everything in between. I feel the painting is the novel, which Woolf described in her diary as being made of two parts with a 'column' down the middle.
Having said that, I loved Nancy's thoughts on the lighthouse being like a mother. And that is the wonderful thing about literature, that one work can tell a million different stories. Our interpretations are as much a part of the creation as the physical words on the page, because it's only in our minds that those words come alive.
Thank you again, Tash, for hosting this reading. It really has been wonderful ❤️
Thank you for this lovely comment Alia - I'm glad it's been a good experience to revisit the novel all these years later - loved that thing about distance in the novel and the benefit of distance, time and age in giving you a new perspective - same here!
Your point about shapes is really interesting - especially the lighthouse being itself like a line down the centre. It reminded me of an excerpt Nancy read out from ch 3 of the third part - 'In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing [...] was struck into stability.' It seems interesting that Woolf refers to 'shape' not 'a shape'. You mentioned the shapes of dome, triangle and line. Some of the shapes I particularly noticed were squares and rectangles - the window frame (and other picture frames that momentarily frame Mrs R's head), the rectangle of Lily's canvas (and perhaps hovering behind that, the rectangular shape of a novel/book), the square cut out of the fish. The use square brackets for that matter!
There is also that phantom kitchen table: Lily thinks of Mr R: 'Naturally, if one's days were passed in this seeing of angular essences, this reducing of lovely evenings, with all their flamingo clouds and blue and silver to a white deal four-legged table (and it was a mark of the finest minds so to do), naturally one could not be judged like an ordinary person.' But in a way, this partly describes Lily too - seeing the 'angular essences' of things - as an artist she sees 'the colour burning on a framework of steel' and 'the light of a butterfly's wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral.' And she sees Mrs R as a purple triangle. Hmmm.
I recall you mentioning cubism at some point in one of the earlier discussions and, when I think of Picasso who had by the time Woolf wrote this novel already shaken the art world with his cubist works, I can see some parallels in what Woolf was trying to do, and perhaps the idea of shape and art, and Lily painting Mrs Ramsay as a purple triangle, is a way of Woolf expressing that she, too, was a revolutionary in her field.
As I read “To the Lighthouse”, the character of Mrs. Ramsay came to take on some of the overtones of a mythological fertility figure. For one thing, there’s the fact that she’s given birth to eight healthy children, and presides over the meal where everyone is served in ceremonial fashion with a beef dish that has taken three days to prepare. It’s more than a bit of a stretch, but the three-day timespan makes me think of Easter and the pagan traditions behind the celebration, which often included a fertility goddess (Mrs. Ramsay). And thinking of Easter brings my thoughts back to the beef dinner as a kind of Last Supper, the first and last time we see the novel’s characters all together.
There’s also the regard with which Mrs. Ramsay is held by her children and the other guests staying at the home on the Isle of Skye. Lily Briscoe observes that old Mr. Bankes gazes at Mrs. Ramsay with a look of “rapture” on his face. Even the miserable Charles Tansley, who thinks the other guests are only interested in talking a lot of “rot”, wants to be acknowledged and asked his opinion by Mrs. Ramsay. As for the titular head of the household, Mr. Ramsay, for all his bluster and contrariness, seeks out his wife at various times for approval, forgiveness, and validation.
I was particularly struck by the scene where Mrs. Ramsay uses her shawl to cover up the boar’s head skull mounted on the children’s bedroom wall. It is almost a Solomon-like decision, to cover the skull so that her daughter Cam cannot see it and be frightened by it, yet satisfies her son James who knows the skull is still there. I also think it’s significant that the shawl is green, evoking thoughts of the natural world as well as traditional English folklore tropes such as the Greenwood, the Green Man, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. If I let my imagination run rampant, I’ll recall that the novel opens with James wanting to take an axe to his father and kill him, just as the Green Knight invites Sir Gawain to kill him with an axe at the beginning of the medieval poem. (I can imagine VW rolling her eyes at all this.)
Even after we move to the “Time Passes” section of the novel, where we learn that Mrs. Ramsay has passed away, we are shown her green shawl still partly covering the boar’s skull, as if it were a talisman of her continuing presence and influence in the home and its surroundings. Small wonder that we later read that when Lily Briscoe is outside painting, with Mr. Carmichael lounging nearby, she still feels a strong sense of Mrs. Ramsay’s presence, to the point that she thinks, “[I]f they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return”, just as the festival of Easter and its fertility goddess returns each spring. “’Mrs. Ramsay!’ she said aloud, ‘Mrs. Ramsay!’ The tears ran down her face.”
Tom, such a brilliant take on this novel, and it makes perfect sense to view Mrs. Ramsay through the lens of mythology, to see her as an iteration of a fertility goddess. She is, as you say, a paragon of maternal stability, love, and patience. The ultimate advocate of marriage, of having children, of self-sacrifice, it's a great analogy.
And I don't think that idea of the Last Supper is far fetched at all. It is, in fact, the last dinner the group will share, and the last dinner Mrs. R. will have been in charge of preparing. The last moment she will have to "make moments" and encourage intimacy between her guests and family. And all her children are present, all around her.
The symbolism of the color green is also fascinating--it also makes sense as there are multiple references to the natural surroundings of the house. The hedge Mrs. R. is always staring into, and this image is repeated many times in the novel, is described as twisted with little branches and twigs. I always thought that hedge represented the twists and turns, the confusion, the dense terrain of life. She looks into it in the first section of the book many times, contemplating her life and the lives of those she loves. So green might well represent the natural world and Mrs. R's connection to it. I love the link you drew too, between James's homicidal fantasies in the opening scene to the Green Knight and Sir Gawain, which now I shall have to look up again!
These are wonderful comments from both of you, Nancy and Tom - thank you! - I don't really feel I have much to add! One thing: Tom described the shawl as a 'talisman' and I have to say that I find Woolf often gives objects and phrases a talismanic quality through repetition or by somehow imbuing them with a feeling of symbolic weight. In this category of talismanic objects and phrases, I would put: the lighthouse, Minta's brooch, Mr R's invisible table, the various repeated lines of poetry (someone had blundered!), the hedge, the urns of geraniums, 'doors-shut-windows-open', 'women-can't-paint/write', the compact against tyranny, Lily's painting, and, of course, the shawl and pig's skull.
And that brooch of Minta's -- for me, that was always a powerful metaphor for the losses we bear in life that can never ever be recovered. We dig and dig, we sift and sift, the sand oozing through our fingers, we scour vast surfaces looking and searching, but in the end, what is lost is lost forever, as a precious heirloom. And our job then is to reconcile ourselves to the loss. The brooch, after all these years, is my personal symbol for what can never be found. I just love that metaphor. And I think it meant the same thing to VW, as she bore so many personal losses.
Thanks, Nancy! You're too kind, especially since I was doubtful about leaving my comment, seeing as it sounded more like the result of free association thinking rather than reasoned analysis.
But free association is sometimes the way we find out what to put to reasoned analysis. Sometimes we must have these flights of fancy, following some idea down that proverbial rabbit hole, even if it hasn't been put to the test, to find the gem (the brooch?). Sometimes in my classes, the students who are putting out ideas they haven't thought of before, that they're anxious or embarrassed to voice, end up being the most animated conversations. I just love those moments, when I look back at that student's face, and they're beaming, realizing that it's okay to brainstorm, that their free association led to such a cool exchange of ideas.
About Mr. Carmichael, Tash, you wrote "But Lily also recalls that when Mr Carmichael heard about Andrew Ramsay’s death, he had ‘lost all interest in life." This made me think that we are never in Mr. C's head in this final section. Are we? I have to go back and look for that. But this one line you mention is Lily relaying Mr. C's innermost thoughts (what is more inner than losing all interest in life?). How does she know that? What is interesting to me is that Lily, a painter, is infiltrating the consciousness of a poet (guided, of course, by a novelist).
I'll go back to the final section and see what I can find of who's saying what about Mr. C.
Thank you, Tash, for such beautiful, hard work on this series of posts. I'm in awe of your generosity and insight and enthrallment. And thanks to Nancy Miller and Ronald Turnbull as well.
Thank you for your kind words Kevin - and thank you for participating! I've so enjoyed reading your comments.
Yes, I'm pretty sure we don't ever see directly into Mr Carmichael's mind. I had to go back and find that bit and remind myself! It's in ch 11 in 'The Lighthouse'. It says: 'Yes, he looked the same, but somebody had said, she recalled, that when he had heard of Andrew Ramsay's death (he was killed in a second by a shell; he would have been a great mathematician) Mr Carmichael had 'lost all interest in life.' What did it mean--that? she wondered...'
So I think we can assume she is outside his consciousness having heard about Mr C from others and speculating. Putting 'lost all interest in life' in inverted commas gives those words a feeling of one-of-those-things-people-say but what does it mean actually?
Lily wonders how 'lost all interest in life' manifested in Mr Carmichael's life. But then it says 'She did not know what he had done, when he heard that Andrew was killed, but she felt it in him all the same. They only mumbled at each other on staircases; they looked up at the sky and said it would be fine or it won't be fine. But this was one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the deal [...] She knew him that way. She knew he had changed somehow.'
So I think that actually there is something interesting there about Lily infiltrating the consciousness of the poet. She is understanding in an abstract way - like an artist would... Maybe...
Interesting!
Well, this is in line with her knowing Mr. R's mind as she tried to paint, knowing she couldn't give him what he wanted (without him ever saying what he wanted, or in fact that he even wanted anything).
I wonder if this is VW's portrayal of what might be called women's intuition. Mrs. R certainly had it, and now Lily does as well (and during the dinner, she got herself involved with Tansley's mind).
There's such a difference in the book between Mr. R charging about declaiming, and Tansley being terse and rude (both exhibitions of masculine energy, of physicality, projectiles aimed at whoever's around) and the more feeling and cerebral turning over of what, as you quoted, Lily saw in the outline, her way of knowing people. Lily being an artist, Lily and Mrs R being intuitive women dealing with demanding men.
Yes! And the dinner party is the perfect microcosm really of women intuiting what is needed; facilitating the self-expression (and good humour) of the men (I'm being a bit simplistic but you know what I mean). Lily and Mrs Ramsay both play this facilitating role to some extent - but also Minta Doyle with Mr Ramsay. Mr R gets irritated at one point: 'Then Minta Doyle, whose instinct was fine, said bluffly, absurdly, that she did not believe that any one really enjoyed reading Shakespeare. [...] Mrs Ramsay saw that it would be all right for the moment anyhow; he would laugh at Minta, and she, Mrs Ramsay saw, realising his extreme anxiety about himself, would, in her own way, see that he was taken care of, praise him, somehow or other.'
I'm struck by how it's perhaps easier for Minta to smooth things over with Mr R because of her beauty (there is perhaps a sexual undercurrent to their interaction) which Lily, being plain, finds difficult to affect. While Lily reads the men around her quite astutely (Mr R, Mr Tansley) she finds it difficult to imitate 'the self-surrender she had seen on so many women's faces', 'the rapture of sympathy'. Later when Mr R comes to her wanting sympathy, she thinks that as a woman 'she should have known how to deal with it. It was immensely to her discredit, sexually, to stand there dumb.' But at times, that 'wielding of female sexuality' proves to be a disadvantage as with Mrs R and Mr Carmichael perhaps. Here it is Lily who has the better instincts.
Well, Kevin, what a fascinating question, and you have a good eye, to be sure. Now you've got me wondering about that section as well. I'm out of town at the moment, but will make a point of looking this up and seeing what I can find out.
A lovely conclusion Tash and Nancy, thank you! I've had such a great time revisiting 'To The Lighthouse' and I've taken away much more than I did 20 years ago. So much of this novel plays with distance, and distance, time and age have provided me a greater perspective.
After reading the novel, I listened to the Penguin edition's introduction to it by Hermione Lee and found its references to Woolf's diary notes very interesting. In particular, the way in which Woolf used shapes throughout, whether it be a dome, or a triangle, or a line.
For me, the lighthouse was the line in Lily's painting. As you read, Tash, Woolf said every novel needs a central line to pull it together, and for Woolf, the lighthouse (which is also a line in shape) was that line that threaded through the story from start to finish. It's a constant, stable force amid change, and yet, it's unremarkable. The novel isn't about the lighthouse, (and by Woolf's own admission, the lighthouse wasn't meant to be symbolic of anything in particular), but served as the destination. If we're to evoke the old cliche, 'It's not about the destination, but the journey to get there', we can see that the focus of the novel is on relationships, memory, life and death and everything in between. I feel the painting is the novel, which Woolf described in her diary as being made of two parts with a 'column' down the middle.
Having said that, I loved Nancy's thoughts on the lighthouse being like a mother. And that is the wonderful thing about literature, that one work can tell a million different stories. Our interpretations are as much a part of the creation as the physical words on the page, because it's only in our minds that those words come alive.
Thank you again, Tash, for hosting this reading. It really has been wonderful ❤️
Thank you for this lovely comment Alia - I'm glad it's been a good experience to revisit the novel all these years later - loved that thing about distance in the novel and the benefit of distance, time and age in giving you a new perspective - same here!
Your point about shapes is really interesting - especially the lighthouse being itself like a line down the centre. It reminded me of an excerpt Nancy read out from ch 3 of the third part - 'In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing [...] was struck into stability.' It seems interesting that Woolf refers to 'shape' not 'a shape'. You mentioned the shapes of dome, triangle and line. Some of the shapes I particularly noticed were squares and rectangles - the window frame (and other picture frames that momentarily frame Mrs R's head), the rectangle of Lily's canvas (and perhaps hovering behind that, the rectangular shape of a novel/book), the square cut out of the fish. The use square brackets for that matter!
There is also that phantom kitchen table: Lily thinks of Mr R: 'Naturally, if one's days were passed in this seeing of angular essences, this reducing of lovely evenings, with all their flamingo clouds and blue and silver to a white deal four-legged table (and it was a mark of the finest minds so to do), naturally one could not be judged like an ordinary person.' But in a way, this partly describes Lily too - seeing the 'angular essences' of things - as an artist she sees 'the colour burning on a framework of steel' and 'the light of a butterfly's wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral.' And she sees Mrs R as a purple triangle. Hmmm.
She really is quite amazing.
I recall you mentioning cubism at some point in one of the earlier discussions and, when I think of Picasso who had by the time Woolf wrote this novel already shaken the art world with his cubist works, I can see some parallels in what Woolf was trying to do, and perhaps the idea of shape and art, and Lily painting Mrs Ramsay as a purple triangle, is a way of Woolf expressing that she, too, was a revolutionary in her field.