Lily Briscoe's Vision: The Articulation of Silence

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When Lily Briscoe finishes her painting at end of Virginia Woolf's To Lighthouse, not only is she proving Charles Tansley wrong when he told her can't write, women can't paint (75), she is, for first time in Woolf's fiction, directly expressing female subjectivity. Previous characters have made attempt. Rachel Vinrace and Septimus Smith desperately searched for alternatives to gender roles they had been handed, but both were destroyed by effort. Only Lily Briscoe survives passage and reemerges, capable of articulating her vision of being a woman other than prescribed role of Woman.' That female subjectivity can be expressed or even exist has been a subject of much recent debate. Early deconstruction and psychoanalytic theories opposed humanistic concept of authentic, essential self capable of autonomy and unmediated experience, insisting that human consciousness is profoundly affected, if not completely formed, by ideology and language. How can a consciousness formed by a culture something outside that culture? Certainly Lacan's notion of language and human development preempts women from in any authentic, subjective way whatsoever. According to these theories, women are trapped in silence. Contemporary feminist theorists have found a middle ground in this controversy, which has perhaps been best expressed by Therese de Lauretis. She defines individual identity as an ongoing construction, not a fixed point, based on those relations-material, economic, interpersonal-which are in fact social and, in a larger perspective, historical. Meaning and subjectivity are not produced once and for all, but continually created in social practice. De Lauretis names this process experience (Alice 159), thus rescuing old feminist adage the personal is political. A gap, then, exists between cultural construct of Woman, which is fixed, and specific historical and personal of female person, which is site of engendering of female subject. Thus, women are in oscillation between figure Woman and their own daily ongoing experience, and can enunciate female subjectivity by from this gap, which de Lauretis terms speaking from elsewhere (Technologies 25). Elsewhere is not some real place