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Q17 a

Q19 a

Q17. a)

D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. by David Bradshaw (Oxford

University Press, 1998)

W.S. Graham, New Collected Poems, ed. by Matthew Francis (Faber &

Faber, 2005)
Q19. a)

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford University Press, 2023),

doi:10.1093/owc/9780199536610.001.0001

The female perspective is at once threatened by and essential to the relationship between modern literature

and visual arts. The simile from Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936), encapsulates this sense of duality, made

evident through the juxtaposition between the entrapment of the female body and its identification as a

“ration”.

The personal pronoun “she” shows how the focus of this will be on the female perspective and experience of

this relationship. Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell exemplify both the relationship between modern

literature and visual arts in their interaction, but also this relationship within the context of female artistic

production. The work of Dianne Gillespie is particularly influential within this discussion, as her book, The

Sisters’ Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (1988) presents a re-examination of

modernism, looking at it from the female artists’ perspective. She assesses the relationship between the two

sisters to analyse the relationship between modern literature and visual arts. To the Lighthouse is a model text

for examining this as the character Lily Briscoe within the novel is essential to understanding artistic

endeavour from the female perspective.

The “drawing room”, for example, could be understood as a synecdoche for the domestic house, a space of

entertainment and performance that females were confined to. Meanwhile, the “jungle” is often characterised

as overgrown and tangled, a situation or place of complexity or competitiveness. In this way, it could recall a

sense of the laws of the jungle, referring to the strong behaviour and application of ruthless self-interest
required to be successful within its folds. Rather than the literal place, therefore, it could conjure forth these

characteristics within the field of artistic production, particularly competitiveness for survival.

Her description of the “carnivorous flower” can therefore encapsulate the danger both within the field of artistic

production and domestic setting, hinting at how the female is consumed within it. This is strengthened and

complicated by the connotations of the noun “ration”. Signifying a fixed amount of a certain commodity during

a time of shortage, women then become essential for the survival of these systems. It could also incorporate a

sense of warfare. The Great War, although not explicitly mentioned in To the Lighthouse, pervades the novel

through violent imagery. The second section of the novel, ‘Time Passes’, particularly demonstrates this in its

presentation of the house deteriorating over time. The role of females within its preservation and rejuvenation

shows the vital importance of the female within this context. This essay will then explore the how Plath’s

writing and Bell’s painting can be understood as a representation for the struggles for female creation, and

how this in turn, can comment on the relationship between modern literature and visual arts.

Modern literature and visual arts have a shared goal to present reality. Their ultimate aesthetic goal is arguably

to transport the viewer or reader to another world, into a creation of space beyond the one currently occupied.

Walter Sickert: A Conversation (1934), a culminating piece for Woolf’s engagement with formal art criticism,

discusses this. Within her essay, one of the ideas that she expresses is the inadequacy of words to rise to her

desire to transport the reader in this way. She moves onto to define two kinds of artists to examine how this

might be solved, identifying that whilst “some… bore deeper and deeper into the stuff of their own art; others

are always making raids into the lands of others”. This idea of raiding can be recognised within her own work,

as she taps her experiences of other art forms to strengthen the development of her own. Often inspired by

her own sister’s work, To the Lighthouse consumes the influence of her sister. This can be made evident

through the figure of Lily Briscoe, a Post-Impressionist Painter (like Henri Rousseau), who allows the

processes of creative abstraction to become visible. The parallels that can be made between Lily’s painting

and the voyage to the “Lighthouse” in ‘The Lighthouse’ contributes to this sense of creative process. Woolf’s

redefinition of the novel as “cannibal” then aptly reflects this, whilst also echoing Clive Bell’s own formulation

that “literature is never pure art”. This is because To the Lighthouse demonstrates how the novel can

incorporate other aspects from other art forms.

Not only does Woolf present painting in process within her novel, but she also incorporates characteristics of

it within the writing itself, including textures made visible through narrative focalisation. Whilst this technique is

not new to her work or in literature of the modern period, it is innovative in its removal of clear breaks such as

at the end of chapters or paragraphs in the novel. For the reader, this further complicates the act of following

the fabula as she brings a multiplicity of voices together with little to help distinguish between them. By doing

so, it also has the effect of blurring the boundaries between each character, almost as if she is trying to

remove them and bring the characters into closer communion. This can be seen as a desire to surpass the

boundary between each “human body” and move into another space, but the very act of doing so

simultaneously clarifies that it is impossible to do so entirely. As such, private thoughts of characters are

weighted down with a frustration at the inability to truly communicate or know another truly. Both Woolf’s novel

and Lily’s painting within it can be seen as an attempt to cross these boundaries.

One of the factors obstructing the sisters’ effort to communicate perception in writing and painting are

expectations for the female gender. Coventry Patmore’s ‘The Angel in the House’ (1854), for example,

encapsulates the imposition of traditional female roles upon the woman writer. Both Woolf and Bell, therefore,

demonstrate a struggle to assert their artistic independence through their creativity within the pressures of the

domestic setting, just as Lily must do so against constant concerns with her marriage. Woolf’s essay, A Room

of One’s Own (1929) picks up on the impact that the environment has on the female artist, saying that a

“woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” and create. Her argument

exemplifies how the emancipation of the female artist was central to First Wave Feminism in the early 20 th

Century. Woolf and Bell’s relationship has only recently been examined from an aesthetic and professional

perspective as opposed to a psychological one. The disregard for female artistic creation is demonstrated by

Charles Tansley’s statement that “women can’t paint, women can’t write”. His opposition to the female artist

could also be revealed in his almost knocking over of her easel, which whilst accidental, demonstrates his lack

of concern for it.

Woolf and Bell make a clear distinction between painting and writing early on in their professional relationship.

Gillespie identifies this in 1904, saying that they discuss how painting is a static medium, whilst writing is one
that can embody its creative process. The paradox central to this is that whilst Woolf can enact Bell’s artistic

silence, Woolf ultimately aspires to a parallel one. The final completion of the Lily’s painting with a “line there,

in the centre” in the last section of the novel which both divides and unites her work, evokes this discussion as

it could be seen as reaching of silence. This could reflect her letter to Roger Fry, in which she identifies that

she “meant nothing by the Lighthouse”, saying that one must simply “have a central line down the middle of

the book to hold the design together. This claim to mean “nothing” and its signified silence could be directly

contrasted with the implications of her intention to write an elegy. Whilst it does appeal to Fry’s aesthetics, it

simultaneously speaks volumes within the context of the female voice. One significant implication, for

example, is its replacement of the tree which previously occupied this space in her work. This is because the

“tree” can be understood as a symbol for patronage, therefore, its removal can be seen as her opposition to

patriarchal expectations in the very matter of her work, escaping its influence or finding a way to work beyond

it. The final “line” therefore is more than “nothing” as it can be viewed as a feminist reclamation of the first

person.

The second section, ‘Time Passes’ follows a ten-year interval within the narrative of the story, depicting the

passage of time through natural process of destruction and decay. Contextually, it links the two eras before

and after the great War, and as such, could encapsulate the sense that modernism is motivated by historical

transition and crisis. James M. Haule offers an interesting analysis of the changes made between the

holograph, typescript, and published version of this section, and by doing so, he reveals Woolf’s original

intention for it, exposing how previous versions took direct issue with the masculine interpretations of great

events. One of the most significant changes that Haule identifies is then the movement from an anti-male

aggressor and anti-war focus towards a universal one. An analysis of the character Mrs McNab, for example,

is particularly telling. Whilst in the typescript, her and Mrs Bast are presented as creative, saving forces that

rescue the earth from masculine destruction, in the publicated version, all references to her important

“message” of warning are gone. Instead, they are reduced to “old” and “stiff” presences. The influence of the

war becomes an unidentified “force working”, something that is “not highly conscious; something that leered,

something that lurched”. Woolf’s elimination of the human perspective in ‘Time Passes’, therefore, could be

symptomatic of an attempt to purify her writing. This is encapsulated by her identification that:
 Here is the most difficult piece of abstract writing – I have an empty house, no people’s characters, the

passage of time, all eyeless and featureless with nothing to cling to”.

This expression could be directly compared with the following extract from section itself:

“But the stillness and the brightness of the day were as strange as the chaos and tumult of the night…

looking before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless, and so terrible”.

The idea of being “eyeless” expressed in both demonstrates her lack of human perspective, something that

seems “so terrible”. This sharp contrast with the desire to express a female perspective within the holograph

and typescript demonstrates her prioritisation of a universality beyond this, producing a synchronicity which is

like a painting.

In conclusion, modern literature and visual arts can be understood as related as the sisters Virginia Woolf and

Vanessa Bell. Whilst there are clear individual differences between them, ultimately a family resemblance is

clear. Dianne Gillespie is notable for her study of this, demonstrating how a female perspective on the

relationship between modern literature and visual arts can transform it.