Visual Arts Into The Lighthouse
Visual Arts Into The Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf as writer was uniquely placed to engage with the visual
arts theories of her time, much like the experience of Gertrude Stein and
Pablo Picasso in Paris. Through the intimate circles of friends and family,
her sister Vanessa Bell and the critic Roger Fry, the ambient world of mod-
ernist art practice in London, as publisher, collector, reader, reviewer, Woolf
engaged and positioned her ideas and formal writing practices in the midst
of challenging and thrilling moments in the history of art and literature.
From childhood on, she engaged with her sister Vanessa in a jockeying of
identities, of dual creativity, expanding and railing against their boundar-
ies as women, as creative minds, and as artists.1 To the Lighthouse is an
exploration of the visual and its relation to text, with its focus on a woman
painter, Lily Briscoe, and its evocation of a painting in process. Constituting
a parallel, embedded visual text, the painting loats across the pages as it
transforms, like hypertext. Even at the moment of the completion of her
painting, her “vision” (320), the text allows an open space for revisiting this
delicate point in endless repetition.
Woolf’s nephew Quentin Bell called To the Lighthouse “cubist writing;
it serves to give a new reality and a new complexity even to a very simple
theme.”2 The novel draws attention to the importance of the visual on all
levels, from all angles. Not only is a canvas painted throughout the entire
novel, constituting an embedded parallel visual text, and has an artist as
the principal witness to all major scenes, but the textures of the novel are
deeply visual.3 From the very outset, the novel foregrounds perception shifts
and spontaneous meanings carried on a visual grid. Visual eruptions, image
instability, are in the deepest ilaments of the writing. Perception and mean-
ings interact between things and human sensibility, between things and
things, between words. James is cutting out pictures from a catalogue, a
favorite method of modernist collaging in artwork of the period as well as a
childhood practice. James’s joy “endowed the picture of the refrigerator . . .
with heavenly bliss” (11). “Any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power
136
to crystallize and transix the moment,” claims the text. Things jump off the
page with multiplicities of meaning. There is no end to the potential unpack-
ing of meaning in this text.
From the outset, the visual imaginary of the novel is dramatic, dissolv-
ing all boundaries of physical separation of matter as in James’s rageful
reaction to his father: “An axe . . . would have gashed a hole in his father’s
breast” (12). Extremes of emotion are expressed visually, through objects,
colors, actions, and strange and surreal juxtapositions outside surface reali-
ties. The descriptions of people are vivid and dynamic: Mr. Ramsay is “lean
as a knife, narrow as the blade of one” (12). James has a “secret language;”
“his private code” is fed by this ield of sensation, image, and perception
linkages, even as his mother sits imagining him already a judge or in public
affairs, a stern man (12). Woolf alerts the reader from the outset that the text
encompasses an eruptive, disconnected visual world of emotional response
and perception, breaking through the narrative structure of the novel. The
formal painting by the artist Lily Briscoe, which evolves through the novel,
is but one of the constructed visual pictures that loat through the text.
Objects ly through the air in the dense ield of imagined consequence, so
that there is a proliferation of dynamic imagery, an almost surreal texture
that coexists with Lily Briscoe’s efforts to hold the canvas frame around a
calm composition of Mrs. Ramsay and her son in the window. Perhaps the
best example of these wildly incongruous juxtapositions concerns Lily in
conversation with Andrew, when she asks him to explain his father’s philo-
sophical work. “Subject and object and the nature of reality . . . Think of a
kitchen table, . . . when you’re not there” he replies (40). Instantly the table
takes off through Lily’s associative imagination and lands in the fork of a
pear tree, with “four legs in air.” The scene is written with joyous farcical
and satiric intent, a rich textual image (41), a lash of insight into the pain-
ter’s mind as well as into the mind of Woolf herself.
The role of painterly perception in To the Lighthouse is multidimensional,
fusing so many elements of Virginia Woolf’s experience as creative writer,
sister and friend to painters, and immersed in an intellectual world redein-
ing the power and meaning of art. By 1927 when the novel was inished,
Woolf had been long exposed to ideas of formalism in art. This spanned
the period since before the irst Post-Impressionist exhibition in London
in 1910 to the writings of Clive Bell and Roger Fry and the conversation
circles of Bloomsbury. There is some clear evidence to suggest that she was
already in dispute with some of its tenets and certainly developing her own
independent aesthetic fusions. Pertinent essays by Christopher Reed and
Anthony Uhlmann4 chart the relationship of Virginia Woolf to Bloomsbury
aesthetics, to formalism and to its main proponents Roger Fry and Clive
137
Bell, noting the changes in Woolf’s attitudes over time. Until recently seen as
an overwhelmingly positive inluence, the writings of Roger Fry and Clive
Bell have been characterized as “opening the way for the creation and recep-
tion of modern art in the irst decades of the century.”5 Formalism itself was
never monolithic and had a series of developmental phases. Woolf’s reactions
to these ideas changed over time, in dialogue with Roger Fry, and they are
best characterized as “ambivalent.”6 Clive Bell had claimed, “Literature is
never pure art” in 1914, to which Woolf replied “Artists are an abominable
race. The furious excitement of these people all the winter over their pieces
of canvas coloured green and blue, is odious.”7 This quarrelsome company
was good for all; these debates between the painters and writers and theo-
rists were at the cutting edge of modernist aesthetics and never settled. There
was great respect on all sides. Ideas changed and experiments abounded
into the limits of representation, abstraction, color, form, and design. Roger
Fry himself changed his views, and over time his interest in the avant-garde
waned and he became more interested in new literature.8 In her biography
of Fry, Woolf quotes him: “I no longer think that there is a right way or a
wrong way of painting . . . every way is right when it is expressive through-
out of the idea in the artist’s mind.”9 In a rich, loving friendship with Fry
over many years, Woolf used her encounters with formalist ideas as tools
rather than rules as she experimented with form; any clearly deined lines of
inluence do not hold up. As Reed says of Lily’s painting and Woolf’s inten-
tions, “Making its focus the stable pyramid of a woman and child framed
in the window of a house, her picture fulills Woolf’s belief in a woman’s art
that renders important what has been considered insigniicant. Lily does not
simply replace one subject with another. She simpliies, abstracts, adjusts
her image until it attains independence from its model . . .”10 Woolf took
from formalism and then moved on, according to Reed.11 By the time of the
writing of To the Lighthouse, Woolf had absorbed a lifetime of ambient art-
world frisson, she had seen many paintings, and she had also met Gertrude
Stein and read her work on composition. The mix of ideas and inluences
was truly potent. Her experimentation with aesthetic concepts in the novel
combined all these inluences and her own discoveries.
Critical interpretations of the inluence of Roger Fry and formalist the-
ories upon Woolf have continued to interest scholars. Biographical studies
of Woolf’s sister the painter Vanessa Bell12 have allowed far more insight
into the complexities of their sibling work connections. The most inluential
and groundbreaking of these studies was The Sisters’ Arts by Woolf scholar
Diane Gillespie in 1988. Gillespie moved the debate away from the dom-
inance of the inluence of Fry and placed it into a story about the lifetime
partnership of creative siblings Vanessa and Virginia. This complex study
138
focused far more on their passion for creative work, sisterly rivalries, and
loving support for each other. In Gillespie’s interpretation, To the Lighthouse
plays a central role in this relationship between the sisters. Lily Briscoe holds
within her form both the sisters’ creative practice plus the world of their
family and their times.13 On reading the novel, Vanessa wrote to Virginia:
“So you see as far as portrait painting goes you seem to me to be a supreme
artist . . . I am excited and thrilled and taken into another world as one only
is by a great work of art.”14
As Anne Fernald indicates in Chapter 1, there are many critical interpre-
tations of Lily Briscoe as portrait, elements of Vanessa, of Virginia herself,
and of the generation of young women artists loundering and lourishing in
the modernist moments not only of England and Europe but beyond.15 With
recent research into the reach of international modernism, it is now possible
to chart some of the ways Lily Briscoe as character both captured and also
encouraged the modern woman painter. Her scenes in the novel are almost
ilmic, like picture boards for a movie. As Woolf was also writing about the
cinema during the time of writing To the Lighthouse, the inluence of this
technique has been claimed as having some inluence on the novel.16 Lily
sees and is seen, paints and relects, through a long sequence of appearances
that include painting Mrs. Ramsay and James in the window (32), imbuing
the kitchen table with theory (40), encountering Charles Tansley’s deeply
prejudiced belief that “Women can’t paint, women can’t write” (78), listen-
ing to William tell her about seeing European art (113), solving spatial rela-
tions in the painting while at the dinner, moving the tree to the middle, and
using the salt cellar as a memory lock (144). Importantly, the “Time Passes”
section of the novel is empty of all witnessing by Lily or any one character.
The visual void is powered by another kind of witnessing, a source of see-
ing/sensing outside the human world altogether, and inspired by the idea of
eclipse, war, death. The visualizing of this void is perhaps the most powerful
expression of Woolf’s thinking about seeing and being. Indeed, Woolf herself
wrote about this section: “-here is the most dificult piece of abstract writ-
ing- I have to give an empty house, no people’s characters, the passage of
time, all eyeless and featureless with nothing to cling to” (D3 76).
Just as the world has been changed by passing through this void, Lily
returns in the third section of the novel and takes up her painting again
after a long passage of years, of interruption, of great loss. She has an empty
canvas again, with fresh and wounded sensibility, but this time she is paint-
ing also a memory. Knowing now that “little daily miracles, illuminations,
matches struck unexpectedly in the dark” (249) constitute reality, she begins
again but she begins from a new place: “She had taken the wrong brush in
her agitation . . ., and her easel . . . was at the wrong angle” (243). Having
139
put this right, she raises her brush and renews her project. She cries, remem-
bering Mrs. Ramsay, and relects on time passing. “It was an odd road to be
walking, this of painting. Out and out one went, further and further, until
at last one seemed to be on a narrow plank, perfectly alone, over the sea”
(265). Finally “she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was in-
ished . . . I have had my vision” (320). This moment of completion might be
considered the closest Woolf comes to a self-portrait, noting the wondrous
synchronicity of the inishing of the novel and the painting. The span of the
novel is the span also of the painting as a process, leaving the reader with
the open ending that never ends. Nothing is as it seems in this text, which is
still capable of diverse and changing interpretations over time.
When the novel irst appeared, Roger Fry praised it as Woolf’s best yet,
better than Mrs. Dalloway.17 He had been her sister Vanessa’s lover for a
time, and they were very close friends as well as admirers of each other’s
work. Woolf wrote to him that he had “kept me on the right path, so far
as writing goes, more than anyone” (L3 76). Debate over the meaning of
the lighthouse prompted Woolf to a disclaimer. On the matter of the possi-
ble symbolism of the lighthouse, she said that she meant nothing by it, but
that, echoing Lily, “One has to have a central line down the middle of the
book to hold the design together” (L3 385). Indeed, the great Woolf scholar
Gillian Beer refers to To the Lighthouse as a “post-symbolist novel.”18 There
is a renewed interest among scholars in looking back at some of the earliest
responses to the novel by creating a context for its reception and mapping
the beginnings of what was to become a work of great inluence on writing,
women artists, and international modernism’s spread of ideas and textual
practice. One of the earliest academic interpreters of the role of the paint-
ing and the visual arts in the novel was Ruth Gruber, whose book Virginia
Woolf. The Will to Create as a Woman was republished in 2005 after irst
appearing in 1935.19 Gruber observes:
The external frame of To the Lighthouse is like a static canvas, with immo-
bile chiaroscuro settings. “The Window” is like the descriptive title below a
painted scene. And through the whole chapter this window forms the setting
enclosing; Mrs. Ramsay, a typical Virginia Woolf igure of the Great Mother,
reading a book of fairy-tales to her son James . . . Mrs. Ramsay is the spirit of
the earth . . . She sits . . . looking out at the sea and the distant lighthouse, like a
Renaissance painting of the Mother of God.20
140
Some critics have suggested that Woolf invites the reader to engage in a sym-
bolist reading process, suggesting that the lighthouse is much more than a
mere line down the middle to hold the design together. It is the articulation
of the rhythm of life. “This thing, the last steady stroke, was her stroke.”27
141
Agreeing with Hermione Lee, Frank sees the completion of Lily’s picture is
the only satisfying conclusion to the novel, an aesthetic conclusion.28
John Hawley Roberts, in a brilliant original reading of the painting
in 1946,29 points out that the purple triangle in Lily’s picture is the repetition
of the wedge-shaped core of darkness used to describe Mrs. Ramsay at an
early and essential moment of the novel. The shape is also associated with
Lily sitting on the loor, with her head on Mrs. Ramsay’s knee, the ensemble
forming the shape of a dome: “The feeling lingers on for days. The incident
also adds a stroke of multivalency to the vision: while the picture, as we ind
out, is intended to be of Mrs. Ramsay with James at her feet, it is also of her
with Lily at her feet.”30 This discussion of the dominant recurring shapes in
the novel concludes with the example of Lily trying to explain to Mr. Bankes
what she is actually doing in the painting: “It was of Mrs. Ramsay reading
to James,” she says “But the picture was not of them” (84–85).
The picture was not of them. In this paradox is a clue to the painting and
to the novel. Frank says,
With these two sentences she tells the reader: this is how this novel works. It
is about something and it is about something else . . ., not merely mimetic but
something in its own right. I am writing about my mother, so much so that the
likeness astonishes, startles my sister. “A mother and child can be reduced to
a shadow without irreverence. A light here requires a shadow there,” “I have
had my vision.” This notion of the transformation of reality in art from the
standpoint of aesthetic completion is a cornerstone of Woolf’s aesthetics.31
142
Proctor’s ideas make such a strong connection with the line and the triangle
in Lily Briscoe’s inal resolution of her painting, the line that brings all of the
composition into balance, the triangle or pyramid that forms the structure.
These transmodernist resonances across colonial spaces, time zones, and
geography between women artists in the real and the textual worlds give
extended meaning to the dynamic portrait of Lily Briscoe in Woolf’s novel.
Australian artists like Cossington Smith and Proctor are examples both of
inluence and simultaneity. Speaking in an oral history interview late in her
life, Cossington Smith said, “I wanted to paint from the thing itself . . . My
chief interest has always been colour, but not lat crude colour, it must be
colour within colour, it has to shine; light must be in it . . . Forms in col-
our is the chief thing that I have always wanted to express. I feel I haven’t
accomplished all I want to do, it is a continual try, to go on trying. Thea
Proctor has always been an encouragement to me.”36 In the virtual world of
avatars, we can speculate about the possible futures that might have opened
to Lily Briscoe, since she would have kept painting just as these colonial
women painters also did, unhappy with their canvases and striving for their
visions.
To the Lighthouse can stand as an example of the polyphonic, synesthetic
nature of Woolf’s works, where many different creative forms mingle. The
nature of the textual painting in the novel has a kind of freedom a material
canvas cannot have. Indeed, it could be seen as having an interactive and
luid form that morphs and changes as the novel moves through the eyes and
the eyeless consciousness of its people, its places, its mosaic of meanings. At
the Delaware Conference on Virginia Woolf in 1999, artist Isota Tucker Epes
143
and I engaged in a creative exercise to each paint Lily’s painting, each artist
then writing about the experience. In my version, the painting morphed into
a triptych that tunneled into the novel’s tripartite structure, with a central
abstract panel of the war, death, and an eclipse, framed by the two versions
of Lily’s canvases, showing the shift in her style over the ten years from a
painting style somewhat like her sister Vanessa Bell’s Studland Beach to a
more surrealist explosion of the purple triangle and a transformed window
scene. When I painted my version of the canvas, it morphed into three, and
if I were to revisit the exercise, it would be another vision altogether. This
links with the open-endedness of the novel itself, the vital active partici-
pation necessary from the reader, and the function of time in shifting that
partnership on each revisiting.
NOTES
1 See Diane Gillespie, The Sisters’ Arts. The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf
and Vanessa Bell (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1988); Jane Dunn, A Very
Close Conspiracy. Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf (London: Jonathan Cape,
1990); Jane Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf. Modernism,
Post-Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
2 Quentin Bell, “The Biographer, the Critic, and the Lighthouse,” Ariel 2 (1971),
p. 98.
3 See Suzanne Bellamy, “Painting the Words: A Version of Lily Briscoe’s Paintings
from To the Lighthouse,” in Virginia Woolf: Turning the Centuries, eds.
Anne Ardis and Bonnie Kime Scott (New York: Pace University Press, 2000),
p. 244.
4 See Christopher Reed, “Through Formalism: Feminism and Virginia Woolf’s
Relation to Bloomsbury Aesthetics,” in Twentieth Century Literature 38.
1 (Spring 1992), pp. 20–43; Anthony Uhlmann, “Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury
Aesthetics,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, ed.
Maggie Humm (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 58–73.
5 Reed, “Through Formalism,” p. 20.
6 Ibid., p. 21.
7 Ibid., p. 22.
8 Ibid., p. 24; Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1983), p. 21.
9 Reed, “Through Formalism," p. 33.
10 Ibid., p. 30.
11 Ibid., p. 37.
12 Spalding, Vanessa Bell; Jane Dunn, A Very Close Conspiracy.
13 Gillespie, The Sisters’ Arts; see also Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, ed. Diane Gillespie
(Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1995).
14 Regina Marler, ed. Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell (London: Bloomsbury,
1993).
144
15 Spalding, Vanessa Bell; Dunn, A Very Close Conspiracy; Gillespie, The Sisters’
Arts; Patricia Laurence, Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes. Bloomsbury, Modernism
and China (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003).
16 Leslie Hankins, “‘Across the Screen of My Brain’: Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Cinema’
and Film Forums of the Twenties,” in The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf,
Diane Gillespie ed. (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press,
1993).
17 Mark Hussey, Virginia Woolf A–Z (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995),
p. 311.
18 Gillian Beer, “Hume, Stephen and Elegy in To the Lighthouse,” Essays in
Criticism (Jan 1984), p. 34.
19 Ruth Gruber, Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman (New York: Carroll
and Graff, 2005); original publication based on Gruber’s PhD at the University
of Cologne 1931 (Leipzig: Tauchnitz Press, 1935) published for foreign travel-
lers on the Continent.
20 Ibid., p. 62.
21 Ibid., p. 63.
22 Ibid., p. 63; for other early interpretations of the novel, see David Daiches,
Virginia Woolf (Norfolk: New Directions, 1942); Robin Majumdar and Allen
McLaurin, Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1975);
Jane Goldman, ed., Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse, The Waves (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998).
23 Mark Hussey, The Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s
Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986), p. 72.
24 Ibid., p. 73.
25 Allen McLaurin, Virginia Woolf: The Echoes Enslaved (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1973), p. 184.
26 Hussey, Virginia Woolf A–Z, p. 317.
27 A. O. Frank, The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf: A Philosophical Reading of the
Mature Novels (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 2001), p. 96.
28 Ibid., p. 100.
29 John Hawley Roberts, “‘Vision and Design’ in Virginia Woolf,” PMLA 61.3
(September 1946), 835–847.
30 Frank, The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf, p. 102.
31 Ibid., p. 103.
32 Christopher Heathcote, “Did Grace Cossington Smith Read Virginia Woolf?”
Quadrant 55.11 (Nov 2011), 54–59.
33 Clive Bell, Art (New York: Frederick A Stokes, 1914); see also Roger Fry, Vision
and Design (London: Chatto and Windus, 1920).
34 Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara, and Philip Goad, Modernism and Australia:
Documents on Art, Design and Architecture 1917–1967 (Melbourne: Miegunyah
Press, 2006), p. 160; Thea Proctor’s student lecture on “Design” appears on
pp. 160–162.
35 Ibid., p. 162.
36 Grace Cossington Smith in Ann Stephen et al., Modernism and Australia,
pp. 758–760.
145