Lily Versus Mrs. Ramsay on a Hierarchical Level

Doyle, Laura. "These Emotions of the Body: Intercorporeal Narrative in To the Lighthouse." Twentieth Centure Literature Spring (1994): 42-71. Print.

Doyle expresses her view that the narration in the novel shows many different perspectives of time and of reality. By discussing the three-dimensionality of the world in which the readers live, she shows how this view can make the aspect of time in the novel more understandable. Using many different examples from the novel where the narration illustrates a gap of time, such as how Doyle uses when Lily is reflecting on her picture in the final part of book to show that Lily’s thoughts are complex and appeal to both the temporal and spatial dimensions of the present. To support her view that the narration displays reasoning’s of reality, she uses an example of how Mrs. Ramsay seems to be a mirror for the other characters. “The vision of the world as absolute other, rather than as our connection to each other, makes it a mirror that can only throw us back on ourselves.” (62) Doyle fully expresses that she feels that the narration in To the Lighthouse is complex and has many different insights into the world and the views of the time, such as how Lily is not the female that Mrs. Ramsay is within the patriarchal society. She offers a lot of support in her view and proves her argument to be plausible.

Throughout her article, Doyle shows Lily’s significance in the narrative of the novel; however she does not directly explain how Woolf’s writing style changes while Lily’s consciousness is being written. Doyle tells of how Lily’s epiphanym when she is completing her painting in the final part of the novel, is representative of what Woolf practiced throughout the novel. “The narrator/painter must discover herself as both inhabiter of objects and inhabitant – beside those objects – of an intercorporeal world.” (64) This specific example shows how Lily’s painting is a significant object in the novel because it is key in understand the narration style of Woolf. Doyle shows that it is not necessarily that Lily’s consciousness is narrated differently than the other characters in the novel, but that, in her thoughts, Lily is able to show the artistic aspect of the novel. According to Doyle, having Lily painting creates a connection between Woolf and Lily that shows how Woolf feels about the artistic realm. In her painting, Lily is able to broaden the spectrum of making art a physical sensation, which is seemingly what Woolf is trying to do in her novel.