Lily Briscoe's Vision: The Articulation of Silence

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Lily Briscoe's Vision: The Articulation of Silence Theresa L. Crater Metropolitan State College of Denver When Lily Briscoe finishes her painting at the end of Virginia Woolfs To the Lighthouse, not only is she proving Charles Tansley wrong when he told her "women can't write, women can't paint" (75), she is, for the first time in Woolfs fiction, directly expressing female subjectivity. Previous characters have made the attempt. Rachel Vinrace and Septimus Smith desperately searched for alternatives to the gender roles they had been handed, but both were destroyed by the effort. Only Lily Briscoe survives the passage and reemerges, capable of articulating her vision of being a woman other than the prescribed role ofWoman.1 That female subjectivity can be expressed or even exist has been a subject of much recent debate. Early deconstruction and psychoanalytic theories opposed the humanistic concept of the 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 experience something outside that culture? Certainly Lacan's notion of language and human development preempts women from speaking 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 Thérèse 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 the old feminist adage "the personal is political." A gap, then, exists between the cultural construct of Woman, which is fixed, and the specific historical and personal experience of the female person, which is the site of the engendering of the female subject. Thus, women are in oscillation between the figure Woman and their own daily ongoing experience, and can enunciate female subjectivity by speaking from this gap, which de Lauretis terms "speaking from elsewhere" (Technologies 25). "Elsewhere" is not some "real place" 121 122Rocky Mountain Review beyond or outside of discourse, but "a movement from the space represented by/in a representation, by/in a discourse, by/in a sex-gender system, to the space not represented yet implied (unseen) in them" (Technologies 26). Woolf herself identified the process of escaping the image of Woman and "speaking from elsewhere" in "Professions for Women" when she wrote of killing the Angel in the House. Woolfs Angel admonishes her to please, not to speak harshly, in her writing and to behave in accordance with the Victorian feminine ideal. Woolf notes that her Angel "died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is harder to kill a phantom than a reality." Woolf claims that the woman who has slain the phantom now "had only to be herself." But she immediately runs into another problem: "Ah, but what is 'herself? I mean, what is a woman?" Women have been so restricted by their roles, Woolf claims, they do not know who else they are: "I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill" (60). "Herself" is as yet uncreated. When women "speak from elsewhere," the articulation does not follow the Law-of-the-Father; it is not linear and rational, but shares certain qualities of the imaginai in the mirror stage as described by Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva's notion of the semiotic .2 These communications can almost be thought of as weaving image, rhythm, and sound with the symbolic world of culture and language, as we shall see. Lily Briscoe is the first of Woolfs characters to escape the totalizing image of Woman, represented in the novel as Mrs. Ramsay, and the silencing presence of the Law-of-theFather , appearing as Mr. Ramsay, and to find a way to represent a reality ofwomen's lives which is different from the figure of...