Back to Virginia Woolf Seminar Home PageCreated June 5, 2002 from material supplied by Christie Lamon-Burney.
" ‘Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of beauty, so that all one’s perceptions, half way to truth, were tangled in a golden mesh?’ " (TTL 78; Lilienfeld 616).
"Beauty’s deceptiveness betrays Lily Briscoe. The journey to the truth of ‘it’ is made impossible by an entangling net, a golden mesh which imprisons, and restrains the journeyer" (Lilienfeld 616).
Knitting is an external symbol of Mrs. Ramsay’s attempt to create domestic art. The tangible product of her art, the shawl, reveals open spaces exposing Mrs. Ramsay’s looming image behind her art. The fact that Mrs. Ramsay remains subjective, or the act of keeping herself as an image behind her art, is the flaw or limitation which prevents a unifying vision such as the one Lily is able to achieve.—Christie Lamon-Burney