Who is who? A note on self and other in chapters IX and XI of To The Lighthouse ~

 Gilmour 

"For him to gaze as Lily saw him gazing at Mrs. Ramsay was a rapture …" (chapter IX, pg. 47) 

Who is being spoken about in this statement? Why might it matter that it isn’t obvious? Woolfe could have written this statement differently: Mr. Bankes gazed at Ms. Ramsay with rapture; Lily noticed Mr. Bankes gazing at Mrs. Ramsay in a rapture, Mr. Bankes’ enraptured gaze at Ms. Ramsay was seen by Lily etc. But Woolfe's formulation doesn't cut the subjects neatly like these statements do. Like Lily's own paintings, Woolfe blurs the reader's sense of subject, of form, and boundary, and forces a blending. On one level, this sentence intends to communicate that Mr. Bankes gazes at Ms. Ramsay. On another level, it communicates that Lily is watching Mr. Bankes gazing at Ms. Ramsay. Yet, more strikingly, when the reader reads, "For him to Gaze as Lily ...", one cannot help but read Bankes’ gaze as inseparable from hers, or, at least, that both of their gazes are somehow interconnected. This interconnection seems tethered to the experience of rapture. But wasn’t the rapture Mr. Bankes’? At first, we are told that Mr. Bankes’ rapture stopped Lily short in speech–– "... Mr. Bankes made it entirely unnecessary for her to speak by his rapture." However, although the statement at first appears to center Bankes’ gaze, his gaze becomes subsumed by Lily's own; the focus becomes at least equally concerned with her gazing at him gazing, making the antecedent of "rapture" not only belonging to Bankes gaze, but to Lily's as well. That Mr. Bankes’ rapture has extended beyond him, as if penetrating through the porous borders of his soul and into Lily’s, is further reflected in the rest of the sentence–– that Lily felt that the rapture was equivalent to “the loves of a dozens of young men,” as if Mr. Bankes’ rapturous love shouldn’t be thought of as being contained within himself alone, that it is more correctly depicted as being shared among numerous individuals. 

Is rapture ever just our own? Even if it seems to exist as only an intensely personal experience, a private event within the self, is it only ours? Or does it have a way of extending outward, radiating in all directions, lighting upon surfaces before entering into the interiors of other people? Many characters in the novel share their private interiors with others without intention, and often wordlessly. Take the moment at the beginning of Chapter XI, when Mrs. Ramsay finds herself withdrawn from “life,” from the exterior world of other people. Although this state of solitude places her at a distance from Mr. Ramsay (a solitude he he did not want to disturb), when a deep interior ecstasy bursts forth from her in this state, Mr. Ramsay is described  as seeing her as absolutely lovely, “lovelier now than he had ever thought,” as if this seemingly private ecstasy had influenced his aesthetic perception of her–– he sees the beauty she experiences. 

Even the most private experiences, when no one is around, and when one finds oneself alone, are not technically proper to oneself. When Ms. Ramsay begins to enter into her state of solitude away from life (husband, children, other people, the bill for the greenhouse, etc.), when she is finally able to “be herself, by herself,” this self begins to dissolve into something larger. She begins “losing personality,” the personality associated with having to do things in the world with other people, and becomes a “wedge-shaped core of darkness,” a vast, unfathomable” oceanic deep. Who or what has she become then? In turning from the exterior life, and towards “her” interior, the “she” of herself recedes into an undifferentiated mass. That Lily paints Mrs. Ramsay in wedges of color and not in realism suggests that Lily, too, views life from a vantage point within a solitude that is not unlike Mrs. Ramsay’s; that when Lily paints, she is rooted in a state of solitude wherein she creates images that resemble Mrs. Ramsay’s solitude, as if Lily, too, were experiencing that very same solitude with Mrs. Ramsay. 

The dark wedge and unfathomable ocean that Mrs. Ramsay has become doesn’t shut out things from the outside world either. What is “outside” might, in fact, not be as outside as one thinks though. Although she feels she has escaped from others into her solitude, and has, in turn, escaped from the day-to-day Mrs. Ramsay that performs the “apparition” of self for others, a sense of self reappears nonetheless, but in a different light. She is caught between the experience of a vast personal interior that becomes depersonalized, and the vast, exterior “outside” world of “others” that becomes re-personalized, where the self pops up unexpectedly, to replace what one thought was the other. As she sits alone by the window, the reader is told that the repetitious act of “sitting and looking, sitting and looking” often brings her into becoming the thing she is present to. In this case, it is the light from the lighthouse, a light which, “seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as she alone could search into her mind and heart.” Has Mrs. Ramsay transformed into both the ocean and the lighthouse? Or has the ocean and the lighthouse become her? The reader is told that Mrs. Ramsay felt “how if one was alone, one leant to animate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long stead light) as for oneself.” 

    Reading Woolfe is so difficult, in part, because we, as the reader, are asked to shed a language that attempts to keep strict boarders between subjects and objects, a language which aspires to separate and divide cleanly. But what if the world isn't really like that? Access into Woolfe's world of language seems to require that we breakdown our own, and perhaps when we enter her language, we begin to experience a hybridization of self and other.