New Literary History

Nussbaum, Martha Craven, 1947-
The Window: Knowledge of Other Minds in Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse
New Literary History - Volume 26, Number 4, Autumn 1995, pp. 731-753

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Martha Craven Nussbaum - The Window: Knowledge of Other Minds in Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse - New Literary History 26:4 New Literary History 26.4 (1995) 731-753 The Window: Knowledge of Other Minds in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse * Martha C. Nussbaum How, then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were?" Sitting close to Mrs. Ramsay, "close as she could get" (78), her arms around Mrs. Ramsay's knees, loving her intensely, Lily Briscoe wonders how to get inside her to see the "sacred inscriptions" in her heart, "which if one could spell them out, would teach one everything, but they would never be offered openly, never made public" (79). She searches for a technique by which these internal tablets might be read: "What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through into those secret chambers?" (79). The art eludes her, and yet she continues to long for it: "How, then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were? Only like a bee, drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch or taste, one haunted the dome-shaped hive, ranged the wastes of the air over the countries of the world alone, and then haunted the hives with their murmurs and their stirrings; the hives, which were people" (79-80). People are sealed hives full of bees that both attract other bees and keep them off. In her complex...