To The Lighthouse...Lily (2)

In his book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer writes: “Though the brain is enclosed in a single skull, it is actually made of two separate lumps (the left and right hemispheres), which are designed to disagree with each other.” We see this process of dichotomy throughout To The Lighthouse as we move through the characters’ interior monologues. It’s probably clearest in Lily. Staying with the Ramsays, Lily realizes that she “was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that’s what you feel, was one; that’s what I feel, was the other, and then they fought together in her mind” (102).

At several points she venerates Mrs. Ramsay, the image she presents and what she stands for: “’I’m in love with this all,’ waving her hand at the hedge, at the house, at the children” (19). “So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing ball….the symbols of marriage, husband and wife” (72). During the dinner scene, looking at Mrs. Ramsay talking to William Banks, Lily thinks, “Why does she pity him? For that was the impression she gave….It was one of those misjudgments of hers that seemed to be instinctive and to arise from some need of her own rather than of other people’s. He is not in the least pitiable…Lily said to herself” (84). She sees Mrs. Ramsay’s qualities and her faults.

It is during the dinner that Lily decides to try an experiment. She knows that Mr. Tansley “wanted somebody to give him a chance of asserting himself….But, she thought…remembering how he sneered at women, ’can’t paint, can’t write,’ why should I help him to relieve himself?” However, she gives in finally and says, “Will you take me [to the lighthouse] Mr. Tansley?” (90-91).

“For, of course, if Mrs. Ramsay said to her, as in effect she did, ‘I am drowning, my dear, in seas of fire. Unless you apply some balm to the anguish of this hour and say something nice to that young man there, life will run upon the rocks--’…when Mrs. Ramsay said all this, as the glance in her eyes said it, of course for the hundred and fiftieth time Lily Briscoe had to renounce the experiment--what happens if one is not nice to that young man there--and be nice” (92).

And what are the consequences of Lily’s insincerity? “She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst…were between men and women. Inevitably these were extremely insincere she thought” (92). Lily knows instinctively that social manners affect something more important than the way a man feels or whether a party succeeds or not. She knows that those rules of etiquette inhibit any real understanding between people. The consequences of the Victorian habit of prizing appearance over reality, is that truth is lost.