1176 Woolf, Virginia
against male prejudices about women’s artistic tal-
ent that works for Lily as a powerful motivation. In
this sense, by showing the difficult and contrasting
phases leading a female artist to creation, Woolf
anticipates the theorization on women’s emancipa-
tion that she will present in her famous essay “A
Room of One’s Own” (1929) soon after the publica-
tion of To the Lighthouse. In To the Lighthouse, Lily
needs, in fact, to free herself from “those habitual
currents in which after a certain time experience
forms in the mind,” finding personal means of
expression that contradict male expectations and
predetermined judgments of women. This, as Lily’s
empathy for Mr. Ramsay at the end of the novel
demonstrates, does not imply a repudiation of
feminine qualities; rather, it suggests interpreting
male and female features as less rigid and schematic.
In this sense, the figure of Lily in To the Lighthouse
does not only embody the productive rebellion of
the female subject to society’s impositions but also
presents a recombination of male and female char-
acteristics that open the way to the androgynous
figure of the artist that Woolf will present in her
following novel, Orlando (1928).
Teresa Prudente
memor y in To the Lighthouse
To the Lighthouse originated in Virginia Woolf ’s
own process of recollecting her childhood and
family, and this is mirrored in the novel by the pre-
dominance of the theme of memory. Furthermore,
memory is portrayed in terms that connect this work
to A Sketch of the Past (1937), an autobiographical
text in which Woolf not only narrates meaningful
moments of her childhood but also explains how she
believes the process of memory works.
The very first scene of To the Lighthouse testifies
to both the centrality of the theme of memory in the
novel and the peculiar terms in which Woolf con-
ceives of memory. James, one of the Ramsays’ chil-
dren, hears his mother talking about the boat trip
to the lighthouse planned for the following day, and
the anticipation of this event intensifies his percep-
tion of the present moment. The child is cutting out
pictures from a catalogue, and this simple activity is
transfigured by James’s enthusiasm for the upcom-
ing trip, so that even the smallest details of what
he is doing are destined to remain impressed in his
mind. James is, in fact, described as belonging to that
group of sensitive people to whom “any turn in the
wheel of sensation has the power to crystallize and
transfix the moment upon which its gloom and radi-
ance rests.” In this sense, memory is defined in To
the Lighthouse not as a rational act of recalling but,
rather, as a process involving sensations. In Woolf ’s
conception, the moments that hold a particular sig-
nificance, defined by the writer in a posthumously
published collection of essays as “moments of being,”
stay in memory, since in them the subject has experi-
enced more intense feelings and revelations. In time,
these moments are able to come back to the subject’s
mind, not under the form of distant memories but as
experienced again in the present.
The third part of To the Lighthouse particularly
focuses on the process of memory, which allows the
subject to feel the past as present again. The 10-year
gap of time from the day narrated in section 1 makes
the characters feel distant and separated from their
previous life. In particular, Lily Briscoe experiences,
at the beginning of section 3, a sense of emptiness
that prevents her from remembering the fullness of
life previously felt in the same place. Nevertheless,
she starts working again on the painting that she had
conceived there 10 years earlier, and this obliges her
to face the process of remembering. The painting is,
in fact, based on the impressions left in her memory
by the landscape she intends to portray: “There
was something . . . something she remembered in
the relations of those lines . . . which had stayed in
her mind; which had tied a knot in her mind.” Fur-
thermore, in her painting, Lily wants to convey the
lost atmosphere of the days spent in the house and
the figure of her close friend Mrs. Ramsay, who has
now died. In this sense, the artistic process and the
process of memory overlap in the character of Lily,
since her proceeding with the artistic act coincides
with the reemergence of her memories, and these are
incorporated into the painting. When Lily traces the
first lines on the canvas, she also experiences a state
of trance, which gives impulse to her inspiration and
makes her feel positioned again in the past and close
to her lost friend: “At the same time, she seemed to
be sitting beside Mrs. Ramsay on the beach.”