Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse

As the English novel moved from the romantic period and toward the modern period, there was a discernible shift in the methods of expression of feeling. Emotion for its own sake gave way to emotion or psychology of being expressed with reference to other elements of existence. In Woolf's work, emotional impact may be derived from the simple narrative frame, in the form of fleeting impressions that both convey the intensity (or lack of intensity) of expression and accumulate within the structure of the story so as to provide a sense of artistic whole. The narrative method may be described as impressionistic in To the Lighthouse, to the degree Woolf attaches what may seem to be random "daubs" of incident and feeling on the frame of the story. The accretion of these daubsnow light, now darkresults in a fully realized narrative. This is parallel to the method Woolf describes Lily Briscoe as using as she develops her conception of the painting of the lighthouse environment and the Ramsays, and there is evidence of Woolf's making a

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ral rights with regard to women. But a stick figure is a far cry from a Sarah Schumann painting. The combination of artistic ability with 'feminine'innovativeness is still a rare stroke of luck. Only the progress of feminism can make this happen more often and seem less exceptional, in all areas (Bovenschen 43). The deliberate parallels that Woolf draws between Lily and Woolf herself can be interpreted from several points of view. The cliche injunction to writers of writing what they know is doubtless one aspect of this, and certain superficial similarities between Woolf and Lily may be easily discerned. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf paints a picture of what Martin Luther King Jr. in another context called "the bleakness of nagging despair" (King 90), and it is Lily who comes closest to noticing the depth and content of that despair among the Ramsays. The issue of the connection between character and writer in the case of To the Lighthouse also goes to Woolf's using Lily and the novel as a whole for multiple purposes: as a means of elaborating characters of psychological realism, as a means of discussing aesthetic sensibility in general and Woolf's aesthetic attitude in particular, and
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Approximate Word count = 3204
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)

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