FAQ: To the Lighthouse

Significance of Lily and her Painting/Vision


Created June 5, 2002 from material supplied by Srirupa Dhar.

"Lily Briscoe, the painter, is a silhouette of Virginia Woolf, the novelist. Her effort to transform her sense of the world through shape and color lays a bare the aesthetic problems an artist encounters in expressing a private vision. But more than Lily Briscoe is the novel’s unifying persona. Hers is the principal consciousness through which Mrs. Ramsay is kept vivid before the reader in the final section of the book" (Leaska 139).

"Painting her, Lily makes Mrs. Ramsay and James into a purple triangle, an equivalent to Mrs. Ramsay’s own sense of herself ‘when invisible to others’ as a ‘wedge-shaped core of darkness’ " (TTL 95; Lilienfeld 613).

Hussey says that Lily’s painting "embodies her feelings about Mrs. Ramsay" and also quotes Pamela Caaughie, who "not[es] that the structure of the novel ‘is the progression of Lily’s painting,’[and]  sees Woolf as checking two modernist tendencies in Lily’s art in part 3, ‘the withdrawal from the public world of facts in the private world of vision to achieve some form of order’ and ‘the effort to synthesize the two to achieve some kind of harmony.’ " (Caaughie 33-34; Hussey 42-43).

Lily has been a keen observer of the Ramsay family all through the novel. Her art grows and at the end, Lily attains fullness of vision. Life enlightens and enriches her art. What Woolf tries to say is that Lily’s art by itself is not everything. Her painting needs to be enriched by life and draw the raw materials of art from life.—Srirupa Dhar

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