I reread Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse recently, wanting to revisit the virtuosic mother and household manager Mrs. Ramsay now that I have a child myself (a mere one instead of eight, admittedly—but then, I also lack a staff of nanny, housekeeper, and multiple silly and homesick maids).
I have always loved Woolf for her focus on the rhythms of consciousness, the ebbs and flows of peace and resentment and self-satisfaction that underlie our interactions and our solitudes. This time around I was struck by Woolf’s meticulous attention to what we now call emotional labor—the socially situated executive function that women managing households use to see that all their relations’ and guests’ and acquaintances’ needs are met, and all the men and children remain in reasonably good humor. Mrs. Ramsay plans menus, manages supplies, visits the sick, organizes innumerable schedules, and cajoles, flatters, and coaxes good behavior from her children, her guests, and her temperamental husband. Woolf beautifully captures the skill all this work requires, and the toll it takes on Mrs. Ramsay—how at the end of the day
"it was a relief when [the children] went to bed. For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And what was what now she often felt the need of—to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others."
On rereading, though, I realized that although I recalled the character of Mrs. Ramsay, I had completely forgotten her counterpart, the alternative model of femininity in To the Lighthouse: Lily Briscoe, the painter.
In Mrs. Ramsay’s eyes, of course, Lily is no artist but an old maid, someone who Mrs. Ramsay fears no man will ever choose for marriage, due to her plain looks and (sigh) “Chinese eyes.” Lily is no less perceptive than Mrs. Ramsay; she knows exactly how the older woman sees her, and even whom she envisions as a potential match. But Lily, unbeknownst to her hostess, has no wish to marry, even to the agreeable widower in question with whom she, indeed, forms a close and mutually satisfying friendship. Rather, Lily realizes in a flash of insight at dinner—the same dinner that is Mrs. Ramsay’s triumph as a hostess, when the recalcitrant guests are soothed into good humor, the Boeuf en Daube turns out perfectly, Paul and Minta turn up engaged—at that same meal Lily has her own triumph, realizing that
"she would move the tree to the middle [solving a problem in her painting], and need never marry anybody, and she ... felt an enormous exultation."
Lily, as much as Mrs. Ramsay, keenly perceives and comprehends social situations. But unlike her hostess, who forms the instinctive center around which a group coalesces, Lily stands at a distance, perceiving as an artist, ever at a remove. Even when she is not painting she has this impulse. At dinner, she is seated next to the young and disagreeable Charles Tansley, who has insulted her painting earlier, saying that women cannot be artists. Tansley feels socially awkward and longs for a chance to assert himself. Lily knows perfectly well what he wants, and sees Mrs. Ramsay wordlessly beseeching her to effect it.
"But, she thought, screwing up her Chinese eyes, and remembering how he sneered at women, ‘can’t paint, can’t write,’ why should I help him to relieve himself?
There is a code of behavior, she knew, whose seventh article (it may be) says that on occasions of this sort it behooves the woman, whatever her own occupation may be, to go to the help of the young man opposite her so that he may expose and relieve the thigh bones, the ribs, of his vanity, of his urgent desire to assert himself; as indeed it is their duty, she reflected, in her old maidenly fairness, to help us, suppose the Tube were to burst into flames. Then, she thought, I should certainly expect Mr. Tansley to get me out. But how would it be, she thought, if neither of us did either of these things? So she sat there smiling."
After a few long moments she does relent, under Mrs. Ramsay’s influence, and play foil to the young man. But at the end of the book, it is Lily who triumphs. Hers are the last lines of the book, “I have had my vision.” Mrs. Ramsay is dead, and Lily’s painting is a success.
Here, though, is what I want to know: What if Lily Briscoe had married? What if she had been a mother? What if she had managed somehow, by a nearly impossible feat of will, to become a wife, a mother, without entirely losing her artistic remove, her stubborn resistance? What if, in the face of the insistent demands of her family, she simply sat there smiling, if only for a beat or two? How would the world respond? And what would her children and her husband become?
***
I wrote the bulk of this essay at an indoor playground with my son, where I was, as far as I could tell, the only parent not actively interacting with my child. The other mothers (and a father or two) trailed their children from slide to rocking horse to shopping cart, giving boosts and providing chirpy commentary. Often—or was it only in my imagination?—the other parents looked around quizzically, wondering who he belonged to. For the first few minutes my son came by often to tug at my hand and point out a toy, but soon he settled down into a rhythm, first running circuits from ramp to slide and then pushing toy trains around a track, glancing up periodically to catch my eye but otherwise concentrating intently.
It is difficult as a parent to step aside and give my son space, to let him explore and struggle, and it is especially difficult as a mother to be seen doing so. When the task seems especially daunting I think, what would Lily Briscoe do? And then, if only for a moment, I simply sit there smiling.