“Books, she thought, grew of themselves.” They certainly have, and continue to, in every room in my house. And another will appear in my mailbox tomorrow, as this one did last week. And now I can blame it on the books themselves, not on my own tendencies.
Maybe the best description of the death of a friendship I've ever read: "after a time, repetition had taken the place of newness."
Today's section is the subject of Erich Auerbach's "The Brown Stocking"--not to overuse superlatives, but also one of the best close readings I've ever read!
I'm going to read "The Brown Stocking." I love that description of a friendship becoming repetition (with its attendant sadness), paradoxically in a novel that values and USES so much repetition.
OMG-Mona Simpson. I am a fan! Anywhere But Here was just about my favorite book! I read it when it came out. I still think about mom Adele - her clueless but optimistic quest for love. And Ann’s keen observations of her grandmother - (now that I’m her grandmother’s age) finding a list that her grandmother made of her friends. Touching. It’s an honor to read Virginia Woolf with you!!
Entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, and nature's and civilization's resulting contradictions, is a theme I perceive in these passages. Inexorably, everything deteriorates. There are exceptions, for a time. There is much that seems eternal, but it's illusion. Life itself defies entropy, for a time. Humans have children, they build structures and implements, yet death and decay are inevitable.
William Bankes and Lilly Briscoe observe, marvel at nature, at entropy and its contradictions, and the Ramsays in their labor to defy entropy, while the Ramsays themselves are in its employ. The Ramsays, like the pear tree, turn back, hold back entropy, for a time, yet enable its advance.
These contrasts are symbolized in Bankes's imagined moment that his friendship with Mr. Ramsay died: "a hen, straddling her wings out in protection of a covey of little chicks, upon which Ramsay, stopping, pointed his stick and said 'Pretty-pretty,' an odd illumination in to his heart, Bankes had thought it, which showed his simplicity, his sympathy with humble things; but it seemed to him as if their friendship had ceased, there, on that stretch of road. After that, Ramsay had married. After that, what with one thing and another, the pulp had gone out of their friendship."
Entropy and is contradictions in nature and society:
"Standing now, apparently transfixed, by the pear tree, impressions poured in upon her of those two men, and to follow her thought was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one’s pencil, and the voice was her own voice saying without prompting undeniable, everlasting, contradictory things, so that even the fissures and humps on the bark of the pear tree were irrevocably fixed there for eternity."
"in and about the branches of the pear tree, where still hung in effigy the scrubbed kitchen table, symbol of her profound respect for Mr. Ramsay’s mind, until her thought which had spun quicker and quicker exploded of its own intensity"
"but he has what you (she addressed Mr. Bankes) have not; a fiery unworldliness; he knows nothing about trifles; he loves dogs and his children. He has eight. Mr. Bankes has none."
"you have neither wife nor child (without any sexual feeling, she longed to cherish that loneliness), you live for science"
"At a certain moment, she supposed, the house would become so shabby that something must be done."
"for they were gifted, her children, but all in quite different ways. And the result of it was, she sighed, taking in the whole room from floor to ceiling, as she held the stocking against James’s leg, that things got shabbier and got shabbier summer after summer."
The opening of Lily's chapter 4 is filled with vision and sight. She is most often in the moment while Bankes is all thought and remembrance. The pair of them seem like a possible couple except for the fact that she is mostly thinking of Mrs. Ramsay and he of Mr. Ramsay, making them more like two displaced persons who have found mutuality in their common loneliness.
I'm fascinated with how Woolf uses repetition. Here, too, I feel as though repetition helps the reader to stay grounded and also allows Woolf to underline those images or ideas or moments that she wants the reader to pay attention to.
My favorite example in these chapters is Bankes describing the change in his relationship with Ramsay: the hen and the chicks on the road, learning that this moment was when things changed, when "repetition had taken the place of newness." At the end of the next paragraph, this is repeated. We again see the hen and the chicks, and "after which Ramsay had married, and their paths lying different ways, there had been, certainly for no one's fault, some tendency, when they met, to repeat." Repetition underscoring repetition. And what wonderful work those six commas do!
Yes, repetition for emphasis and grounding! And how the hen protecting the chicks pairs so well with the huddle of Mrs Ramsay and James as she repeats to him to stand still. I felt a sort of interiority of the hen reflected off of Mrs. Ramsay, and the other way: an animal attribute to Mrs. Ramsay in this equation. And she catches a glimpse of James and wonders what demon possessed him, echoing for readers his earlier violent thoughts in response to his father's claim the trip to the lighthouse wouldn't happen.
It's interesting that Mr Ramsay keeps quoting "The Charge of the Light Brigade," particularly the line, "Someone had blundered." Why does Woolf keep making him do that? He starts to seem ridiculous. I wonder if it's connected somehow to "Three Guineas," her essay about how ridiculous war seems to women. But she wrote that ten years later. Maybe she was already thinking about the male obsession with war in the 1920s. Not surprising given the disaster that was WWI, in which quite a few someones had blundered. In the context of the novel, it could be foreshadowing of Part II.
I couldn't help thinking about the present war in Ukraine (in connection with the Crimean War in the poem). Someone has blundered.
Back to the novel: maybe Mr Ramsay feels as if he has "blundered." It's not quite clear what he does for work. What kind of job does a "philosopher" have? Apparently he writes books. But Mrs Ramsay worries that maybe she didn't do the right thing about his books, whatever that might be: help him promote them more? And Lily Briscoe thinks his books have something to do with a wooden table. The women seem baffled by the "important" work of the men--"Think of his work!"--but they don't really believe in its importance. Maybe it's all just another blunder. How does he feed eight children on philosophy? Maybe not very well.
Interesting point. I just read A Room Of One's Own but am yet to read Three Guineas.
I thought it was interesting too, that Lily thinks about how Mrs Ramsay thinks so highly of her own husbands work despite not understanding it, and would never think of Lily's work being just as important... something along those lines.
He later allows himself to wonder whether, if he had not had his eight children and his family, whether he might have written better books. But I think he has an inchoate thought that he's blundered. He doesn't see quite where and how.
And photographer Julia Margaret Cameron was the maternal aunt and godmother of Julia Jackson Stephens, mother of both Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. There's a pretty amazing artistic lineage in this family.
And what is the blunder? An interruption? (Is this a novel of interruptions?) Who had blundered? Oh, the outsized drama of men. Mr. Ramsay reminds me of my father. Reading VW at 65, I take her work personally. She understands! The marital impasses that must be suffered/sustained to be a family, to stay in a marriage; how Mrs. R hides her intelligence and depth in plain view to give the men in the book more room because?
Is Mrs. R hiding her intelligence? When they had that hilarious, possibly mostly internal, tiff sparked by Mr. Ramsey having predicted that the weather would be too awful to visit it, it reads as if in her POV, “He said, it won’t rain; and instantly a Heaven of security opened before her. There was nobody she referenced more. She was not good enough to tie his shoe strings, she felt.” I thought this totally self-abnegating. She has bought the mores of her time, that men are superior, rational beings. Thoughts on this? Am I reading this off?
Honestly, on second thought, I think Mrs. R is in remarkable stealthy control of the family, her own lovely doting behavior, of the not yet married characters, of the sumptuous dinner, and of her husband whom she manages with finesse, frustration, sympathy, compassion, but at a distance? Heartbreaking that she can’t tell him she loves him in the scene before she dies. Boots and the shoe strings/laces figure into these next chapters!
Lily is one of my favorite literary characters. I love the way she thinks about her painting: color, shape, meaning, form, the act of creating. Her musing seems to echo Woolf’s writing, the search for how things work together, repeat, vary, echo on the page. I see Lily played by someone like, say, young Rita Tushingham, in her Zhivago era.
I read the chapters... then read the comments ...then reread ‘between the lines’ those same chapters... as I learn to read Woolf in the very way she most illuminates life....seen, heard, felt.
Both Mr. Bankes and Lily are evaluating "Mr. Bankes vs. Mr. Ramsey's" life choices and identities.
Mr. Bankes' rumination, in particular, reminds me of Tim Kreider's essay "The Referendum" (at a certain age, we judge our life choices against our peers or friends' life choices): "he weighed Ramsey's case, commiserated him, envied him, as if he had seen him divest himself of all those glories of isolation and austerity which crowned him in youth to cumber himself definitely with fluttering wings and clucking domesticities [the hen and chickens again!]. They gave him something" (18). Did I make the right choices, Mr. Bankes seems to wonder.
Lily's meditation and judgements are indeed a "ponderous avalanche"--the instantaneous way she measures up both men, directly addressing them: "you are finer than Mr. Ramsey; you are the finest human being that I know" and then "simultaneously" disapproving of how Bankes has a valet, objects to dogs in chairs. It's dizzying!
I'm starting to understand why Woolf is linked so strongly to any discussion of stream-of-consciousness or free indirect discourse.
Love the idea of Mrs. Ramsey as “Prospero” conjuring up beings (8 children and somehow breathing life into other adults around her with her mesmerizing spell), messing around with everyone's relationships, and then abandoning them...
"She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked; it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment's flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her..." Oh, those damn internal editors! Your vision so perfect when imagined while taking a shower or driving in the car.... And then, once you begin--ruined.
In today’s chapters, images and objects resonate with color and meanings. Mr. Ramsey’s work is even described to starstruck Lily as about: “Subject and object and the nature of reality.” Meanwhile, Lily’s struggle with painting seems a study in the same thing and also (perhaps) an expression of VW's own creative struggle of writing one’s “vision" into the shape of a novel:
"It was in that moment’s flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself—struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: “But this is what I see; this is what I see”, and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her."
Finally, Mrs. Ramsey’s meditations on the deteriorating furniture, the house, and its objects meld into the nature of time:
"Mats, camp beds, crazy ghosts of chairs and tables whose London life of service was done—they did well enough here; and a photograph or two, and books.” She has no time to read impossible books, even those inscribed for her, but these titles are given to the reader: "Croom on the Mind and Bates on the Savage Customs of Polynesia (“My dear, stand still,” she said)—neither of those could one send to the Lighthouse.”
Mrs. Ramsey sees time passing in (wishing it too might “stand still?”) in everything that surrounds her as she knits socks for the lighthouse keeper’s son. I’m in awe at how much she gets into so few pages.
Death of a friendship ... Perhaps it's also worth considering that this is Bankes' evaluation of a friendship -- that it his opinion that it must be (all) newness without (any) repetition, perhaps? I'm not sure I agree with Bankes however. Some of the friendships I most value, most of them decades old, while also containing lots of the "new" also include lots of repetition as we remember, recall, compare our memories and perceptions of the past, and thereby refresh and renew what we have.
I agree. It's a limited, sterile view of friendship. Even the Ramsay's marriage has much repetition in it. I notice in the dinner party scene, Mr. Bankes and Mr Ramsay both get impatient in the same way -- they feel the dinner is taking too long! (They would be good meal companions.) But it's moving how Mr. Bankes is able to sustain a friendship with Lily Briscoe.
Yes, I guess repetition can sometimes be energizing and productive -- while other times and in other ways (and often during the more ho-hum dinner parties), repetition can be just plain boring! :)
True... I guess it's their own fault if they don't create new memories together too. I mean, both people in a relationship have to do the effort to make new memories if they don't want to get bored.
That's very funny and apt.
“Books, she thought, grew of themselves.” They certainly have, and continue to, in every room in my house. And another will appear in my mailbox tomorrow, as this one did last week. And now I can blame it on the books themselves, not on my own tendencies.
Maybe the best description of the death of a friendship I've ever read: "after a time, repetition had taken the place of newness."
Today's section is the subject of Erich Auerbach's "The Brown Stocking"--not to overuse superlatives, but also one of the best close readings I've ever read!
I'm going to read "The Brown Stocking." I love that description of a friendship becoming repetition (with its attendant sadness), paradoxically in a novel that values and USES so much repetition.
A great essay… the final one of a great book that begins with The Odyssey and the story of Abraham and Isaac
I've ordered the book. Thank you!
I found the essay - and the book. https://www.themodern.org/sites/default/files/auerbach.pdf
OMG-Mona Simpson. I am a fan! Anywhere But Here was just about my favorite book! I read it when it came out. I still think about mom Adele - her clueless but optimistic quest for love. And Ann’s keen observations of her grandmother - (now that I’m her grandmother’s age) finding a list that her grandmother made of her friends. Touching. It’s an honor to read Virginia Woolf with you!!
I read and loved “Anywhere but Here” when it came out, too! Such a great book. With such memorable characters! Thank you, Mona!
Thank you.
Me too! I've never forgotten it. It made such a huge impression on me!
Thank you.
Entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, and nature's and civilization's resulting contradictions, is a theme I perceive in these passages. Inexorably, everything deteriorates. There are exceptions, for a time. There is much that seems eternal, but it's illusion. Life itself defies entropy, for a time. Humans have children, they build structures and implements, yet death and decay are inevitable.
William Bankes and Lilly Briscoe observe, marvel at nature, at entropy and its contradictions, and the Ramsays in their labor to defy entropy, while the Ramsays themselves are in its employ. The Ramsays, like the pear tree, turn back, hold back entropy, for a time, yet enable its advance.
These contrasts are symbolized in Bankes's imagined moment that his friendship with Mr. Ramsay died: "a hen, straddling her wings out in protection of a covey of little chicks, upon which Ramsay, stopping, pointed his stick and said 'Pretty-pretty,' an odd illumination in to his heart, Bankes had thought it, which showed his simplicity, his sympathy with humble things; but it seemed to him as if their friendship had ceased, there, on that stretch of road. After that, Ramsay had married. After that, what with one thing and another, the pulp had gone out of their friendship."
Entropy and is contradictions in nature and society:
"Standing now, apparently transfixed, by the pear tree, impressions poured in upon her of those two men, and to follow her thought was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one’s pencil, and the voice was her own voice saying without prompting undeniable, everlasting, contradictory things, so that even the fissures and humps on the bark of the pear tree were irrevocably fixed there for eternity."
"in and about the branches of the pear tree, where still hung in effigy the scrubbed kitchen table, symbol of her profound respect for Mr. Ramsay’s mind, until her thought which had spun quicker and quicker exploded of its own intensity"
"but he has what you (she addressed Mr. Bankes) have not; a fiery unworldliness; he knows nothing about trifles; he loves dogs and his children. He has eight. Mr. Bankes has none."
"you have neither wife nor child (without any sexual feeling, she longed to cherish that loneliness), you live for science"
"At a certain moment, she supposed, the house would become so shabby that something must be done."
"for they were gifted, her children, but all in quite different ways. And the result of it was, she sighed, taking in the whole room from floor to ceiling, as she held the stocking against James’s leg, that things got shabbier and got shabbier summer after summer."
Here a compilation of poems quoted in the novel:
https://www.uah.edu/woolf/lighthouse_poems.pdf
here is a nice essay about VW and gardening (I found after googling "jacmanna")
https://lithub.com/penelope-lively-on-virginia-woolf-serious-gardener/
The opening of Lily's chapter 4 is filled with vision and sight. She is most often in the moment while Bankes is all thought and remembrance. The pair of them seem like a possible couple except for the fact that she is mostly thinking of Mrs. Ramsay and he of Mr. Ramsay, making them more like two displaced persons who have found mutuality in their common loneliness.
This is excellent to have all the poems. Thank you
I'm fascinated with how Woolf uses repetition. Here, too, I feel as though repetition helps the reader to stay grounded and also allows Woolf to underline those images or ideas or moments that she wants the reader to pay attention to.
My favorite example in these chapters is Bankes describing the change in his relationship with Ramsay: the hen and the chicks on the road, learning that this moment was when things changed, when "repetition had taken the place of newness." At the end of the next paragraph, this is repeated. We again see the hen and the chicks, and "after which Ramsay had married, and their paths lying different ways, there had been, certainly for no one's fault, some tendency, when they met, to repeat." Repetition underscoring repetition. And what wonderful work those six commas do!
Certain words and phrases become like familiar refrains. So much musicality here.
And the obvious, pleasing aptness of hen and chicks re: the many children Mr. R would have with Mrs. R.
Yes, love that
Yes, repetition for emphasis and grounding! And how the hen protecting the chicks pairs so well with the huddle of Mrs Ramsay and James as she repeats to him to stand still. I felt a sort of interiority of the hen reflected off of Mrs. Ramsay, and the other way: an animal attribute to Mrs. Ramsay in this equation. And she catches a glimpse of James and wonders what demon possessed him, echoing for readers his earlier violent thoughts in response to his father's claim the trip to the lighthouse wouldn't happen.
It's interesting that Mr Ramsay keeps quoting "The Charge of the Light Brigade," particularly the line, "Someone had blundered." Why does Woolf keep making him do that? He starts to seem ridiculous. I wonder if it's connected somehow to "Three Guineas," her essay about how ridiculous war seems to women. But she wrote that ten years later. Maybe she was already thinking about the male obsession with war in the 1920s. Not surprising given the disaster that was WWI, in which quite a few someones had blundered. In the context of the novel, it could be foreshadowing of Part II.
I couldn't help thinking about the present war in Ukraine (in connection with the Crimean War in the poem). Someone has blundered.
Back to the novel: maybe Mr Ramsay feels as if he has "blundered." It's not quite clear what he does for work. What kind of job does a "philosopher" have? Apparently he writes books. But Mrs Ramsay worries that maybe she didn't do the right thing about his books, whatever that might be: help him promote them more? And Lily Briscoe thinks his books have something to do with a wooden table. The women seem baffled by the "important" work of the men--"Think of his work!"--but they don't really believe in its importance. Maybe it's all just another blunder. How does he feed eight children on philosophy? Maybe not very well.
Interesting point. I just read A Room Of One's Own but am yet to read Three Guineas.
I thought it was interesting too, that Lily thinks about how Mrs Ramsay thinks so highly of her own husbands work despite not understanding it, and would never think of Lily's work being just as important... something along those lines.
He later allows himself to wonder whether, if he had not had his eight children and his family, whether he might have written better books. But I think he has an inchoate thought that he's blundered. He doesn't see quite where and how.
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/283098
A photo of "Mrs Ramsay," by Julia Margaret Cameron.
And photographer Julia Margaret Cameron was the maternal aunt and godmother of Julia Jackson Stephens, mother of both Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. There's a pretty amazing artistic lineage in this family.
Thank you for this. I love seeing this. She actually looks quite a bit like her daughter!
Wonderful picture; thank you
Thank you for sharing. So fascinating.
And what is the blunder? An interruption? (Is this a novel of interruptions?) Who had blundered? Oh, the outsized drama of men. Mr. Ramsay reminds me of my father. Reading VW at 65, I take her work personally. She understands! The marital impasses that must be suffered/sustained to be a family, to stay in a marriage; how Mrs. R hides her intelligence and depth in plain view to give the men in the book more room because?
Is Mrs. R hiding her intelligence? When they had that hilarious, possibly mostly internal, tiff sparked by Mr. Ramsey having predicted that the weather would be too awful to visit it, it reads as if in her POV, “He said, it won’t rain; and instantly a Heaven of security opened before her. There was nobody she referenced more. She was not good enough to tie his shoe strings, she felt.” I thought this totally self-abnegating. She has bought the mores of her time, that men are superior, rational beings. Thoughts on this? Am I reading this off?
Honestly, on second thought, I think Mrs. R is in remarkable stealthy control of the family, her own lovely doting behavior, of the not yet married characters, of the sumptuous dinner, and of her husband whom she manages with finesse, frustration, sympathy, compassion, but at a distance? Heartbreaking that she can’t tell him she loves him in the scene before she dies. Boots and the shoe strings/laces figure into these next chapters!
Lily is one of my favorite literary characters. I love the way she thinks about her painting: color, shape, meaning, form, the act of creating. Her musing seems to echo Woolf’s writing, the search for how things work together, repeat, vary, echo on the page. I see Lily played by someone like, say, young Rita Tushingham, in her Zhivago era.
I read the chapters... then read the comments ...then reread ‘between the lines’ those same chapters... as I learn to read Woolf in the very way she most illuminates life....seen, heard, felt.
Both Mr. Bankes and Lily are evaluating "Mr. Bankes vs. Mr. Ramsey's" life choices and identities.
Mr. Bankes' rumination, in particular, reminds me of Tim Kreider's essay "The Referendum" (at a certain age, we judge our life choices against our peers or friends' life choices): "he weighed Ramsey's case, commiserated him, envied him, as if he had seen him divest himself of all those glories of isolation and austerity which crowned him in youth to cumber himself definitely with fluttering wings and clucking domesticities [the hen and chickens again!]. They gave him something" (18). Did I make the right choices, Mr. Bankes seems to wonder.
Lily's meditation and judgements are indeed a "ponderous avalanche"--the instantaneous way she measures up both men, directly addressing them: "you are finer than Mr. Ramsey; you are the finest human being that I know" and then "simultaneously" disapproving of how Bankes has a valet, objects to dogs in chairs. It's dizzying!
I'm starting to understand why Woolf is linked so strongly to any discussion of stream-of-consciousness or free indirect discourse.
Love the idea of Mrs. Ramsey as “Prospero” conjuring up beings (8 children and somehow breathing life into other adults around her with her mesmerizing spell), messing around with everyone's relationships, and then abandoning them...
"She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked; it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment's flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her..." Oh, those damn internal editors! Your vision so perfect when imagined while taking a shower or driving in the car.... And then, once you begin--ruined.
I love that passage, too.
In today’s chapters, images and objects resonate with color and meanings. Mr. Ramsey’s work is even described to starstruck Lily as about: “Subject and object and the nature of reality.” Meanwhile, Lily’s struggle with painting seems a study in the same thing and also (perhaps) an expression of VW's own creative struggle of writing one’s “vision" into the shape of a novel:
"It was in that moment’s flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself—struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: “But this is what I see; this is what I see”, and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her."
Finally, Mrs. Ramsey’s meditations on the deteriorating furniture, the house, and its objects meld into the nature of time:
"Mats, camp beds, crazy ghosts of chairs and tables whose London life of service was done—they did well enough here; and a photograph or two, and books.” She has no time to read impossible books, even those inscribed for her, but these titles are given to the reader: "Croom on the Mind and Bates on the Savage Customs of Polynesia (“My dear, stand still,” she said)—neither of those could one send to the Lighthouse.”
Mrs. Ramsey sees time passing in (wishing it too might “stand still?”) in everything that surrounds her as she knits socks for the lighthouse keeper’s son. I’m in awe at how much she gets into so few pages.
I find myself surprised every time that the brown stocking is just left unfinished...Surprised, saddened and yet pleased. We all die in medias res.
Indeed “in media res,” especially in a life that is at least attempted to live well....
Yes, exactly! On every read I find myself hoping that the stocking will be long enough, even as I know it won’t.
Can you just knit it longer? Like the tube part of the stocking? Have no idea..
Death of a friendship ... Perhaps it's also worth considering that this is Bankes' evaluation of a friendship -- that it his opinion that it must be (all) newness without (any) repetition, perhaps? I'm not sure I agree with Bankes however. Some of the friendships I most value, most of them decades old, while also containing lots of the "new" also include lots of repetition as we remember, recall, compare our memories and perceptions of the past, and thereby refresh and renew what we have.
I agree. It's a limited, sterile view of friendship. Even the Ramsay's marriage has much repetition in it. I notice in the dinner party scene, Mr. Bankes and Mr Ramsay both get impatient in the same way -- they feel the dinner is taking too long! (They would be good meal companions.) But it's moving how Mr. Bankes is able to sustain a friendship with Lily Briscoe.
Yes, I guess repetition can sometimes be energizing and productive -- while other times and in other ways (and often during the more ho-hum dinner parties), repetition can be just plain boring! :)
True... I guess it's their own fault if they don't create new memories together too. I mean, both people in a relationship have to do the effort to make new memories if they don't want to get bored.