Embodied Form: Art and Life in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

A focus on art's basis in life hardly represents a new departure in Woolf criticism, particularly so when the semiautobiographical To the Lighthouse is the object of study. Critics reading this novel in light of Woolf's own retrospective commentary in her diaries and memoirs generally acknowledge the novel's therapeutic dimension and its closeness to biographical material. In her introduction to the Penguin edition, Hermione Lee writes that Woolf knew very well what she was doing for herself in writing To the Lighthouse, explaining it on at least two occasions: "I used to think of [my father] & mother daily; but writing The Lighthouse laid them in my mind." ¹ "I suppose 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." ²

The cases of psychobiography apart, critical approaches to the life-art relationship in this novel ³ tend to focus on perceived relations of equivalence between emotional experience and aesthetic (con)figuration, between "life" on the one hand, and shape, trope, structure on the other. Woolf herself pointed to such a relation in the therapeutic process of writing To the Lighthouse: "I . . . got down to my depths & made shapes square up." ⁴ The therapeutic potential, as expounded by critics with a formalist or modernist orientation, resides not in the simple matching or "squaring up," but, significantly, in the transformations and transmutations effected by the alterity of art, the radical conversions of tropological language. From this critical perspective, To the Lighthouse proceeds from biographical material but "transcends" this base through various processes of aesthetic deflection, tropological and narratological. The typical argument of this criticism turns on words like "objectification," "transmutation," "displacement," "abstraction," "impersonalization" (of life or experience). It is a criticism which reads Woolf into a modernist aesthetics of impersonality where the author achieves aesthetic transfiguration, and where bios remains only as material for aesthetic process.

It is commonplace to refer to Roger Fry's ideas on formal analogy, expounded in Vision and Design, in support of such arguments. Woolf's meditations on art's ability to express life, present in Lily's painting (mother and child "reduced" to a purple shadow), but also in other analogies in the novel, are seen as incorporating Fry's theory of an art which does not "seek to imitate form, but to create form; not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life." ⁵ Fry's art, then, and by extension Woolf's, is "transformational rather than representational" (AA 156). Life is not only transformed but effectively disappears in line with the impersonalizing tendency of modernity: "in the process of transformation, the referential factor becomes negligible as the artistic analogy has transcended it" (AA 156). The conceptual framework for these readings, quite evidently, is the ruling construction of early twentieth-century Anglo-American modernism, a framework that brings with it certain assumptions which may be formulated as follows: that the aesthetics of Fry and Woolf (qua modernist) exhibit a typical modernist division between "life" and "experience" on the one hand, and the world of text and trope on the other; that the alterity of modernist art effects a radical conversion (or turn) away from the realm of experience; that the therapeutic or more general aesthetic-cognitive potential of art is realized only through this turn. One of the objectives of this essay is to show that these assumptions need to be modified.

Other approaches to the life-art relationship in Woolf's writing may be understood as conscious correctives to the impersonalizing and "disembodied" tendencies of modernity. Usually with a basis in some variant of feminist/gender studies or phenomenology, such correctives take the form of a "return to the body," aiming to situate the writing and written subjects in their world. In the gender-oriented discussions...