Lily Briscoe's Vision: The Articulation of Silence

Abstract

When Lily Briscoe finishes her painting at the end of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, not only is she proving Charles Tansley wrong when he told her "women can't write, women can't paint" (75), she is, for the first time in Woolf's fiction, directly expressing female subjectivity. Previous characters have made the attempt. Rachel Vinrace and Septimus Smith desperately searched for alternatives to the gender roles they had been handed, but both were destroyed by the effort. Only Lily Briscoe survives the passage and reemerges, capable of articulating her vision of being a woman other than the prescribed role of Woman.' That female subjectivity can be expressed or even exist has been a subject of much recent debate. Early deconstruction and psychoanalytic theories opposed the humanistic concept of the authentic, essential self capable of autonomy and unmediated experience, insisting that human consciousness is profoundly affected, if not completely formed, by ideology and language. How can a consciousness formed by a culture experience something outside that culture? Certainly Lacan's notion of language and human development preempts women from speaking in any authentic, subjective way whatsoever. According to these theories, women are trapped in silence. Contemporary feminist theorists have found a middle ground in this controversy, which has perhaps been best expressed by Therese de Lauretis. She defines individual identity as "an ongoing construction, not a fixed point," based on "those relations-material, economic, interpersonal-which are in fact social and, in a larger perspective, historical." Meaning and subjectivity are not produced once and for all, but continually created in social practice. De Lauretis names this process "experience" (Alice 159), thus rescuing the old feminist adage "the personal is political." A gap, then, exists between the cultural construct of Woman, which is fixed, and the specific historical and personal experience of the female person, which is the site of the engendering of the female subject. Thus, women are in oscillation between the figure Woman and their own daily ongoing experience, and can enunciate female subjectivity by speaking from this gap, which de Lauretis terms "speaking from elsewhere" (Technologies 25). "Elsewhere" is not some "real place"