Thesis Proposal
Chen, Hsiu-Yu
92122005
Professor Yi, Peng
Traversing the Lighthouse: the Subject and the mOther in To the Lighthouse
1
Being one of the best written novels by Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse1 has
been named “a psychological poem”2 by Leonard Woolf after reading it. It is perhaps
that Woolf has woven a great deal of her personal experiences into the novel, and has
used the novel to discharge the load of intensified psychic energy. She once
mentioned how she released herself from her mother by writing this novel: “I
supposed that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed
some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and
then laid it to rest.”3 However, even when putting aside Woolf’s personal reflections,
readers can still perceive a ongoing story of a psychological journey through the
central artist, Lily Briscoe.
Being created as the central protagonist in the novel, Lily Briscoe is always
trapped within and confined by her relation with Mrs. Ramsay. Even if the story is not
so much about how to depict the mother image, it is no doubt about how our
1
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, eds. Eavan Boland & Maud Ellmann (London: Vintage, 2000)
Abbreviated as Lighthouse.
2
Leonard Woolf ed., A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf (New York:
Harcourt, 1982) 102. Abbreviated as Diary.
3
Diary
1
protagonist ‘thinks through’ the mother image. 4 With Lily Briscoe, the story
somehow depicts a long and winding psychological journey through her searching for
her own subjectivity. In the story, it is clear to see how Lily Briscoe has been
perplexed in her searching for the mother image, how she has gone through the
process of self-analysis by conjuring the deceased Mrs. Ramsay, and how she finally
relocate herself in a proper position in relation to the mother image with what she
called a vision, a revelation. Thus, the thesis will focus on the interrelationship
between Lily Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsay, the maternal image, with a psychoanalytic
point of view; and to understand how the subject should/could react in relation to the
big Other.
2
Start from the first section “The Window”5 the mother is placed in the central
position. As the book title might have implied, the mother image is the metaphorical
lighthouse, which is surrounded by the family and gives light to everyone around.
Along with Mrs. Ramsay, there is a whole semantic cluster devoting to express the
characteristics of her, such as middle, center, sealed, concealed, lockup within, secret,
vise, dome, wedge-shaped, cleavage, circle of life, embraced, and surround. The
cluster focuses mainly on Mrs. Ramsay, and they are the keywords, which Lily has
experienced with, imagined about, or tried to use in describing the maternal image.
These words also provide a perspective to my reading of the story, by implying a
longing for the primal experiences of satisfaction.
Thus I would like to devote the first part of my thesis in discussing the relation
and interaction between Mrs. Ramsay and Lily presented in the story. I will also
4
Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Vintage, 1997) 80. Abbreviated as Lee.
5
Lighthouse
2
include Freud’s elaboration on the concept of identification and its function in one’s
psychological development.
Reading the story from Lily Briscoe’s point of view, the mother image would
thus relate to her subjective development. Placing the emphasis on Lily Briscoe while
reading it, the story is like a journey of seeking after a mother image; or so to speak, a
process of trying to identify with a mother image. On the concept of identification,
Freud has distinguished perceptual identity from thought identity, while both aim at
pursuing and reconstructing the primal experience of satisfaction. Of the two,
according to Freud, the thought identity still in accordance with the perceptual identity,
and is merely a modification of perceptual identity. The thought identity can be
understood as secondary. Thus, in the story, Lily has abandoned to retrace her relation
with the mother through language; she is eagerly looking for a certain kind of unity; a
connection that bridges the mother and herself by means beyond and before language:
What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably
the same, one with the object one adored? Could the body achieve it, or
the mind, subtly mingling in the intricate passages of the brain? or the
heart? Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one?
for it was not knowledge but unity she desired, not inscriptions on the
tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but
intimacy itself…6
As it has been made clear with the passage above, such relation is the unity beyond
the reach of the symbolic function, which can never be wholly and completely
6
Ibid., 47
3
signified with linguistic presentation. When everything is about to be described
through word presentation, its real image dissolved. It is beyond the grasp of language;
Kaja Silverman has pointed out:
The latter [i.e.linguistic signifier] is a remote derivative of a
thing-presentation. I say “remote” because the interarticulation of a
thing-presentation with a linguistic signifier radically diminishes its
perceptual properties, and hence its affective value. What would
otherwise be capable of passing a thing standing before us is reduced to
that vague and generic flash we call a concept.7
3
Trying to obtain the mother-daughter unity with language can only be able to
receive a common conceptual usage which defers or diminishes the emotional
substance. Hence, Lily has to look for other alternative. In this part, I would like to
introduce the idea of maternal metaphor and the Lacanian Other in order to help to
exemplify the mother character and her position in the story.
According to Silverman, when the mother still performs the conventional role;
it is classically through the denial of perceptual form to a libidinal charged memory of
her that the subject enters kinship- through what might be called the “maternal
metaphor”. The subject has to move forward even he cannot help but always looking
back. In such development, once the maternal metaphor has taken place, the mother
represents as impossible an object of desire as das Ding. To put this in another way,
7
Kaja Silverman, World Spectator (California: Stanford UP, 2000) 103. Abbreviated as Silverman.
4
the mother here has turned to be the mOther in the Lacanian theory, indicating the
mother has occupied the position of the Other which functions on the side of the
symbolic order. A symbolic mother, which interests psychoanalytic theory the most, is
the mother in her role as the primordial Other. It is she who introduces the child into
language by interpreting the child’s screams and thereby retroactively determining
their meaning.8 When the submitting to the Other as language in search of meaning,
the subject’s being vanishes. Therefore, when mother also submits to the Other
entering the symbolic order, she shares the non-being as the status quo. It is not only
that the linguistic presentation cannot capture the perceptual form of the maternal
image; so does the mother have taken a new place in the symbolic order which is in
lack of perceptual substance.
4
With such frustration brought on by language, Lily’s pen has given way to her
brush, and her language to images. It is the time to shift the focus onto
thing-presentation, which is related to perceptual identity. The idea will help to see the
subject’s desperate longing for the unity, which might after all be the result of a void
within.
Freud has pointed out that the unconscious is “accessible to the impressions of
life”.9 Therefore, Lily’s vision and her artistic performance through images could be
the clues as to how we understand her painting and its relation with the unconscious,
and with the perceptual identity that exist as the prototype before the intervention of
language. Before the subject’s entry to the symbolic order, it is the thing-presentation
8
Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2001),
119.
9
Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious,” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Trans.
James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1957), vol. 14, p 190.
5
that takes meaning. Chronically and emotionally, visual activity takes place prior to
linguistic activity, and it is from a visual impression that urges the subject to seek a
corresponded linguistic presentation. Silverman has summarized the idea:
The thing-presentation comes first, and subsequently provides the
word-presentation with its signified. It is also by means of the
thing-presentation rather than the word-presentation that the subject
performs its first libidinal speech act. Very early in the subject’s life the
primally repressed thing-presentation begins to function not merely as a
signified to another thing-presentation, but also as a surrogate for
“being”- as the first and most important of the many terms which will
symbolize what has been lost through the entry into language.10
It is because the subject is eager to regain the primal memory that the subject enters
into language in search of meaning and definition, but the lost object and the primal
experience are still surrounded by the thing-presentation.
Thus, painting is what Lily used to capture the perceptual mother image. In the
last section, after the interval of ten years, Lily picks up her brush again, because she
wants to express the vision which has haunted her for ten years. “She had never
finished that picture. It had been knocking about her mind all these years. She would
paint that picture now.”11 For such a long time, the place where Lily wishes to fill to
the full with Mrs. Ramsay is actually a hollow within her: “And she began to lay on a
red, a grey, and she began to model her way into the hollow there. At the same time,
10
Silverman, 117
11
Lighthouse, 141.
6
she seemed to be sitting beside Mrs. Ramsay on the beach.”12 By conjuring up Mrs.
Ramsay when painting her picture, she has the chance to see into the hollowness
within herself and to understand what it is: “To want and not to have, sent all her body
a hardness, a hollowness, a strain.”13 This is the permanent void of the subject in the
Lacanian theory; it is the starting point where Lily set off and returns to. “To want and
not to have” depicts the relation between Lily and Mrs. Ramsay in the novel. When
Lily has longed for the unity, the intimacy, the wish is doomed to fail; in another word,
this kind of unity may be simply a hypothetical one. In the discussion of fantasy, I will
consult both Freud and Lacan, in order to evaluate its value and influence on the
psychical development.
5
In the story, it is through the distance brought by Mrs. Ramsay’s death that Lily
has come to understand that Mrs. Ramsay has faded and gone. Woolf uses the word
“distance” to describe a possible new position of the subject in relation to the Other.
The distance between the subject and the Other is redefined; “so much depend upon
distance, she thought, for her feelings change…”14 It was also because of such
awareness of distance, which Lily start to realize that when she began her journey
with painting, she has taking part in solving the problem actively:
She smiled ironically; for had she not thought, when she began, that she
had solved her problem?
12
Lighthouse, 163.
13
Ibid, 169.
14
Ibid, 182.
7
In such self introspection, Lily has made the whole journey clear for herself. The
realization of the situation may play the role of a traumatic event for Lily in the
beginning of the story, however it unfolds itself as a revelation, a vision to Lily when
the novel comes to the end: “…feeling the old horror coming back- to want and want
and not to have…and then, quietly, as if she refrained, that too became part of
ordinary experience, was on the level with the chair, with the table.”15
6
To conclude my thesis, I would like to argue that the epiphanical moment of
Lily is actually a traversing moment of the subject; in an unconventional way, the
story can also be regarded as a bildungsroman. A fantasy is traversed, because the
unity can never be regained through whatever methods and the hollowness, the split is
what she sacrifice when entering into the symbolic world. Along the journey that
moves forwards, what happens before throw lights on the days to come, and Lily
Briscoe has assumed a new position with respect to the mother. If the mother is the
lighthouse as the title would have tried to suggest, it is not in the tower of the
lighthouse that one can bask in its luminosity but in places around that one gets the
warmth.
15
Ibid, 192.
8
Bibliography
Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London:
Routledge, 2001.
Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1995.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Unconscious,” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works, Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1957, vol. 14.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Vintage, 1997.
Silverman, Kaja. World Spectator. California: Stanford UP, 2000.
Woolf, Leonard, ed. A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf.
New York: Harcourt, 1982.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. London: Vintage, 2000.
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