"There She Sat": The Power of the Feminist Imagination in To the Lighthouse

Abstract

Near the end of To the Lighthouse, a moving moment occurs. In the emotional climax of the novel, Ramsay, dead for ten years, reappears: Mrs. Ramsay-it was part of her perfect goodness-sat there quite simply, in the chair, flicked her needles to and fro, knitted her reddish-brown stocking, cast her shadow on the step. There she sat (300). Virginia Woolf does not argue, justify, or explain; Ramsay is simply there, resurrected.' Even on subsequent readings, this moment resonates with extraordinary power, a power that Woolf's moments of or the novel's autobiographical basis cannot fully account for.2 In that powerful moment, Woolf fuses her personal, feminist, and artistic aims to restore her mother, a woman destroyed by the patriarchal myths of Mary and Eve, to her own identity and thus transforms a woman who worked to perpetuate the patriarchal society into the personal, feminist, and artistic heritage she herself needs. For mother, daughter, and reader, it is an audacious moment of liberation.3 Left motherless at 13 and with a mother rarely there even before that (Sketch 83), Woolf mothers herself in To the Lighthouse, creating a mother who, as Bell Gale Chevigny explains, can only sanction the daughter's autonomy after being freed from the patriarchy by the daughter (95-96). Woolf empowers her mother, herself, her characters, and ultimately us; Woolf's feminist power removes the patriarchal myths strangling Ramsay so that there, emanating from the page, is the power of a woman as she is. When Virginia Woolf spoke about professions for women to the