To The Lighthouse...Lily (3)

It's interesting to compare the dinner scene experiment that Lily has to give up in "The Window" section with the "boot scene" in the first part of chapter II in "The Lighthouse" section. During the dinner Mrs. Ramsay's look forces Lily to give up her experiment not to play the social game. In the final section of the novel, Mrs. Ramsay has been dead almost a decade.

Lily wants to paint. She has remembered the picture she was working on when she was last at the Ramsay's summer home ten years earlier and has determined to start afresh. She sets up her easel and canvas on the lawn. At the sight of Mr. Ramsay, she knows that he wants sympathy from her. "He permeated, he prevailed, he imposed himself. He changed everything....That man, she thought, her anger rising in her, never gave; that man took" (149).

At this point, Lily dislikes Mr. Ramsay's selfish egotism. He keeps her from painting and forces her to pretend that she is not serious about painting. He makes her waste her time "playing at painting, playing at the one thing one did not play at" (149). Reverting to the Victorian ideology, it must be presumed that, because she is a woman, her painting is merely an "accomplishment" and is not to be considered a serious vocation. Mr. Ramsay makes Lily feel "other" and she loses her "essential self."

"Well, thought Lily in despair...it would be simpler th[e]n to have it over. Surely, she could imitate from recollection the glow, the rhapsody, the self-surrender, she had seen on so many women's faces (on Mrs. Ramsay's, for instance) when on some occasion like this they blazed up--she could remember the look on Mrs. Ramsay's face--into a rapture of sympathy, of delight in the reward they had, which, though the reason of it escaped her, evidently conferred on them the most supreme bliss of which human nature was capable. Here he was, stopped by her side. She would give him what she could" (150).

What she gives him is the exclamation, "'What beautiful boots!'" and immediately feels ashamed of herself. "To praise his boots when he asked her to solace his soul" (153). Mr. Ramsay, however, is completely satisfied. He begins to tease her. "'Now let me see if you can tie a knot,' he said. He poohpoohed her feeble system. He showed her his own invention. Once you tied it, it never came undone. Three times he knotted her shoe; three times he unknotted it" (154).

I'm not sure what this signifies but it reminds me of Mrs. Ramsay's thought that she is not good enough to tie Mr. Ramsay's shoes. I've never been clear on the way Lily has changed if, in fact, she has changed. She seems more serious about her painting which she finishes by the end of the novel. She also seems determined not to become the angel of the house. But why does she feel guilty, ashamed of her remark? "Why, at this completely inappropriate moment, when he was stooping over her shoe, should she be so tormented with sympathy for him that, as she stooped too, the blood rushed to her face, and, thinking of her callousness (she had called him a play-actor) she felt her eyes swell and tingle with tears?" (154). What is Woolf portraying through Lily at this point?