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Knitting with a Twisted Finger: The Paradox of Domesticity in To the Lighthouse
Drema Drudge
English
Jonathan Watson, mentor
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"What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a crumpled glove in the corner of a sofa, you would
have known it, from its twisted finger, hers indisputably?...She opened bedroom windows. She shut doors. (So she tried to start
the tune of Mrs. Ramsay in her head)" [Italics mine] To the Lighthouse (26).
Twisted: 1. "Of a person: neurotic, emotionally unbalanced; perverted. Crazy." 2. "Intimately associated or
connected; united; combined; also, consisting of two elements united" (OED).
Vanessa BELL Virginia Woolf (knitting) 1911-12
A complex writer of contraries, Virginia Woolf challenges the reader of To the
Lighthouse with a paradox: she makes sacred the domestic through art while revealing madness
by the domestic activities themselves, thus clarifying the "twisted finger" of Mrs. Ramsay. Just
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as Lily in the opening quote tries to start the tune of Mrs. Ramsay in her head, Woolf, with these
words, invites us to listen for the often hidden song of the Ramsays' marriage. The key to
unlocking the paradox is given by their son James: "For nothing was simply one thing" (95).
Thus we are told late in the novel what to notice from the beginning: everything is something
else too. By keeping this in mind patterns emerge which help define artistic relationships
juxtaposed with the domestic.
Since Woolf struggled with mental illness culminating in suicide we can say the finger
writing this story is literally and figuratively twisted by madness as well.
That To the
Lighthouse is widely regarded as Woolf's most autobiographical work complicates our view of
the novel, but it is fiction and should be primarily analyzed as such. Knowing that Woolf knit -"knitting is the saving of life" she wrote while she was institutionalized for mental illness
(Ingram) – and that Woolf and her sister decorated their homes with their knitting and
needlework (Purl), we are inclined to reference Woolf's life as we read Mrs. Ramsay, though
likely Woolf meant Mrs. Ramsay to represent her own mother instead of herself. Dame Edith
Sitwell complained "Virginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she
must have a pattern somewhere" (Braincandy). We should resist the temptation to see that
pattern as being created solely from her life.
Vanessa Bell's painting of her sister Virginia knitting is telling. From the background of
gray which is repeated in the gray of Woolf's dress, echoed in the mere hint of a face, is Bell's
understanding of her sister's mental illness. Bell uses a broader palette of colors on Woolf's
head, as if highlighting the knowledge there, as well as sweeps of color pointing towards her
knitting. Woolf is engrossed in her work, intently thinking, one supposes, the way she exhibits
Mrs. Ramsay doing so in Lighthouse. Perhaps she is writing a story, "twisting" it as she works
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with her hands on the colorful creation. Her posture is somewhat hunched, and her sitting in the
corner of the chair brings to mind Mrs. Ramsay's glove found in the corner of a sofa. One part
revealed, one part hidden.
A stronger argument for a biographical element to her writing would be this quote from
Jane Eyre used in A Room of One's Own:
…it is narrow–minded in their more privileged fellow–creatures to say that they
ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to
playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or
laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced
necessary for their sex. (A Room of One's Own 49)
Woolf notes that Bronte's writing is "deformed and twisted" (49) (calling to mind the twisted
finger of Mrs. Ramsay's glove) from the lack of financial independence, life experience, and
one's own space that Woolf deemed necessary for a woman to be creative and independent, a
deficit her mother might have experienced. In Mrs. Ramsay Woolf begins to play this out,
sketching a woman who not only thinks less of herself than she should, but encourages men to do
the same. Mrs. Ramsay, a revered wife and mother of eight, is portrayed as more socially
intuitive than intellectual. Often she is framed in scenes as if she and her labor are both works of
art, especially her knitting. But during private moments a sort of madness leaks from her, a
sorrow which is never fully explained, as well as opinions contrary to her society's expectations
of women. Though her domestic efforts seem artistic and sincere, at unexpected moments the
twisted finger that the young painter Lily Briscoe sees emerges. While Mrs. Ramsay represents
the domestic arts, high art is represented by Lily Briscoe who is told by a male guest at the
Ramsays' home that women can neither paint nor write. She is trapped between the worlds of
the female and the male, another reason for her fascination with the Ramsays.
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The mission, almost, of Lily, the necessary action which seems the raison d' être of the
novel, is to understand the Ramsays' marriage. Lily, in front of her canvas, sees the Ramsays the
same way everyone else does. They are in awe of Mrs. Ramsay. They worship her with
innocent wonder. They respect Mr. Ramsay's intellect, fear him, or ridicule him as children do.
But away from her canvas Lily sees the twisted finger. Holding a paintbrush she is only able to
see Mrs. Ramsay in the scenes, the tableaux, into which Mrs. Ramsay consciously arranges
herself and others. The brush, rather than clarifying sight for Lily, distorts her perceptions and
makes her see things incorrectly. Away from her painting Lily gives us the truest sense of who
Mrs. Ramsay is; truer, perhaps, than Mrs. Ramsay herself can express. Sadly Mrs. Ramsay does
not see herself the way Lily sees her.
In this half of the paradox others see Mrs. Ramsay as sacred in tableaux or framed to look
as if her beauty and domestic efforts are art. "Woolf uses notional ekphrasis [a description of
imaginary art in another work of art] in her descriptions of Lily's fictional artwork, yet may also
be said to employ ekphrasic writing to describe domestic vignettes in a way reminiscent of still
life paintings (Pedersen 2)." Mrs. Ramsay is idealized and idolized by those who surround her.
Those who gaze at her are enthralled. It takes the perceptive Lily the whole novel to truly see
her. Charles Tansley, a guest at the Ramsays' summer home, sees Mrs. Ramsay after a moment
of charity backed by a portrait of Queen Victoria. William Bankes sees her as a Greek work of
art when she is merely telephoning him to work out details for his visit. She is displayed against
a copy of a Michelangelo. At her dinner party she presides over the tableau which she quickly
calls the past. The second half of the paradox begins unveiling itself to Lily, who also sees Mrs.
Ramsay as a work of art when she paints her, being outside the window and not privy to what is
really going on inside, yet begins to slowly comprehend what is going on within Mrs. Ramsay.
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Frames can honor and display a work of art, but they can also entrap, can limit.
They
underscore. They reveal.
Woolf uses a series of domestic objects to represent the Ramsays, continuing the
domestic tableau effect. Mrs. Ramsay is associated closely with windows, in part in the framing
of her domestic activities, Mr. Ramsay with doors.
She tries to get everyone to open the
windows and shut the doors and can "feel" when even unseen doors are open. Windows bring in
light and air. She is the one who wants to bring in opportunity and sun. While she opens
windows Mr. Ramsay slams doors. Mrs. Ramsay invites guests for the summer, encourages
them in their work. Mr. Ramsay only seems to want them around to make him feel better about
himself, thus becoming a closed door. Yet Mrs. Ramsay is the one who repeatedly asks for
doors to be closed, windows open. In a sense Mr. Ramsay is only giving her what she wants.
Her ambivalence about opportunity – hence the desire for closed doors – is highlighted by her
near claustrophobic command to open the windows. Some things are to be let in, others to be
kept out. There is also a privacy issue. While she opens her home and publicly displays herself
in the window, her true self and marriage are kept behind closed doors.
Both Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay have articles of clothing which represent their domesticity as
well as their madness. The twisted-fingered glove of Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Ramsay's boots are
underscored by the word "indisputably," used by Woolf only twice in the novel:
Remarkable boots they were too, Lily thought, looking down at them: sculptured;
colossal; like everything that Mr. Ramsay wore, from his frayed tie to his halfbuttoned waistcoat, his own indisputably. She could see them walking to his room
of their own accord, expressive in his absence of pathos, surliness, ill-temper,
charm. [Italics mine] (79).
What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a
crumpled glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from its twisted
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finger, hers indisputably?...She opened bedroom windows. She shut doors. (So
she tried to start the tune of Mrs. Ramsay in her head). [Italics mine] (26)
Woolf's use of the word "indisputably" gives weight to these passages. She means for us
to clearly see that these objects are the Ramsays. The positioning of the glove in a corner of an
imaginary sofa begins Lily's attempt to define Mrs. Ramsay outside of painting. A sofa holds
more than one person. While Mrs. Ramsay is willingly sitting in a position that opens her to
company, the crumpled glove shoved in the corner suggests Mrs. Ramsay is hiding something.
It's only one glove, not two, half a pair. There is the public Mrs. Ramsay with the soothing
manners and the private. Mr. Ramsay's boots are plural. He is open. She is half closed. He
expresses affection and feelings freely. She cannot. Her affection for others comes out in the
domestic arena, in the things she does every day in caring for them. Her glove and his boots are
related to their primary activities: the glove with the fingers that knit, and the boots with the laces
he knots. Mrs. Ramsay is the crumpled glove with the twisted finger. A glove is a covering to
protect the hand. We are told Mrs. Ramsay covers her true feelings as she is always covering
something or someone in the house. This crumpled glove which Lily imagines combines Mrs.
Ramsay's roles: she is a mother, thus feminine, yet Lily suggests she is domineering and
controlling. The twisted finger of the glove looks as if it is pointing, almost accusing. Lily says
she is "an arrow," which also gives her a pointing. A covering also performs the function of
hiding. When Mrs. Ramsay comes to Lily's room and insists she must marry, Lily senses there is
more to Mrs. Ramsay, some hidden fount of knowledge. She sees the twisted finger and realizes
it is in part a beneficial finger. The true Mrs. Ramsay conceals who she is. The twisted finger of
Mrs. Ramsay's glove is also more than one thing: it is her complex self, though it may also
represent her husband: "But in her opinion one liked Mr. Ramsay all the better for thinking that
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if his little finger ached the whole world must come to an end," Lily thinks. Mr. Ramsay is what
causes Mrs. Ramsay's world, her finger, to be twisted. "She was not good enough to tie his shoe
strings, she felt" (17). Just as Mr. Ramsay is connected with her glove by his self-pitying
feelings, so she is connected to his boot by her feelings of inferiority, of her feelings of his
superiority. This Biblical reference to shoe strings underscores how god-like she feels her
husband to be. Lily describes Mr. Ramsay through his boots as "ill-tempered" yet charming.
The boots are "colossal," just as he is regarded by the family for his mind and books. The boots
are "sculptured" – purposefully made, carved, the way he has created his tableau of life. Often
he sets the scene for conversations by saying or doing something calculating to receive a desired
response. Lily sees his boots as being expressive enough to walk on their own. Without Mrs.
Ramsay and with his children mostly grown he likely gets his rambles now, but it is as if his
boots go without him. For without his wife nothing means what it used to mean.
Mrs. Ramsay conceals her true feelings in how society views women's roles versus how
she really feels. She hides her own feelings even from herself at times, going about telling
everyone they should marry, match making. She says nothing will ever come of Lily's painting
and she criticizes her own intelligence.
But her actions say differently. While walking with
Charles Tansley she talks passionately about art. Though she says she can't understand her
husband's latest book or books in general, she reads poetry and sits quietly enjoying it in an
enraptured trance. She wishes her children were grown so she could make sure dairies are clean
and see a hospital built on the island.
Besides a window and a door, a glove (whose twisted finger knits) and a boot (which he
knots), Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, united in marriage to the point of not being called by their
Christian names by anyone, are represented by complementary furniture: Mrs. Ramsay is the
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chair in which she knits and Mr. Ramsay is the knotted table by which Lily's imagination
visualizes his work. Whomever sits in a chair presides at table, hosts, as it were, decides what
will take place, what will happen, almost reigns. Significantly Mrs. Ramsay is framed once by a
portrait of Queen Victoria behind her head. In a story she reads to her son the fisherman's wife
wants to be queen, since her husband won't be king.
That Mr. Ramsay is a knotted table is
another sign of his irascibility. Though he appears to control Mrs. Ramsay, the truth is she is the
"chair" of their family, something society, had it understood, would not have condoned. He is
the titular head only.
In To the Lighthouse "twisted" applies to both the negative (mental instability) as well as
the positive in uniting two items. The OED defines twisted as 1. "Of a person: neurotic,
emotionally unbalanced; perverted. Crazy."
2. "Intimately associated or connected; united;
combined; also, consisting of two elements united."
Through their knitting and knotting Mr.
and Mrs. Ramsay display their true natures. Mrs. Ramsay knits coverings such as shawls for the
family. She makes a habit of covering her real feelings. Only her immediate family and those
shrewd enough to closely observe, such as Lily, who Mrs. Ramsay has chosen to reveal herself
to, know of her sadness, her moodiness, her madness. She does not understand why Mr. Ramsay
won't make more of an attempt to hide his feelings. Everyone knows when he is upset. He
makes everyone as uncomfortable as he. Yet he insists on knotting everyone's nerves over his
minor inconveniences like an earwig in his milk. They are intimidated when he flies into a rage.
While Mrs. Ramsay knits their story, her husband knots it, complicates it, with his
demands and pettiness, while simultaneously anchoring the family with his knotting. Perhaps his
churlishness, such as when he storms about quoting Tennyson and becomes furious when
someone dares ask for a second bowl of soup, is the reason for her madness. But he also "knots"
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the family together in tandem with Mrs. Ramsay's knitting. While Mrs. Ramsay knits and Lily
paints, Mr. Ramsay has his own, arguably less constructive habit: he knots, as if he is the tangled
yarn in Mrs. Ramsay's knitting. He is capricious. One moment he is fine, the next he is angry
because someone says something illogical or does something contrary to his wishes. When
Carmichael, the poet, wants more soup he is furious. A bug in Mr. Ramsay's breakfast causes
him to send the dish sailing out the window. One moment he is convinced of his brilliance – the
next he is an unmitigated failure. His emotions seem knotted, and Mrs. Ramsay is the only one
who can undo the knots. After Mrs. Ramsay's death he approaches Lily for sympathy, the same
draining, taxing sympathy Mrs. Ramsay gave. The artistic Lily cannot bring herself to stoop to
tending to the needs of a man rather than to the canvas before her. In the face of her resistance to
helping him, Mr. Ramsay bends to tie a bootlace, which prompts Lily to comment on the
splendor of his boots, the only thing she can bring herself to say. This delights him as he is able
to talk about his boots by the hour. Lily realizes how bleak a comfort she has offered. He asks
her to show him how she knots, then tells her she doesn't know what she's doing (a male once
again telling an artist she doesn’t know what she's doing), and he shows her three times how to
knot. He says this will keep them from coming untied, as if he doesn't realize he has just had to
tie his own boot. Lily sees this as what he does: "He tied knots. He bought boots." His presence
brings back confusion, "ties" her imagination and she has to unknot it having him look over her
shoulder. James, who remains acrimonious towards his father, feels his father has tied him to the
boat as they head towards the lighthouse, and the only way out is for James to take a knife and
cut the mental rope, which is hindering his even thinking of his dead mother.
Mr. Ramsay's life is also knotted: a philosopher, he would like to be free to ramble the
hills and think high thoughts and read great literature. Having eight children, a beautiful wife, as
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well as a group of great minds about who admire him who make him feel virile and immortal, he
compromises his work to feed his family. Mrs. Ramsay knows he's thinking that if he hadn't had
a family, he could have written better. One wonders what she could have done better had she not
had a family. Mr. Ramsay paces, quoting the rich "someone has blundered" from Tennyson's
"The Charge of the Light Brigade," and it rightly irritates Mrs. Ramsay as it occurs to her that he
means something by it. She thinks it is about her and the family that he feels he has blundered.
When she dies, in a sense she takes her ability to turn his knots into knit, from destruction into
creation.
Just as Mrs. Ramsay's knitting covers and creates, so Mr. Ramsay's knotting contributes
to the marriage and family. It unites them, ties them closer together in a way that will not
quickly allow disintegration, even when Mrs. Ramsay dies. Mr. Ramsay somehow manages to
finally get everyone to return to the family vacation home after a decade. Then he coerces his
two youngest children to go with him to the lighthouse, fulfilling a trip promised by their mother
before her death.
Though Mrs. Ramsay's knitting does serve practical ends she takes joy in knitting even
when it takes its toll on her. When Mr. Ramsay considers himself a failure, she knits him a new
outlook: "Flashing her needles, confident, upright, she created drawing-room and kitchen, set
them all aglow; bade him take his ease there, go in and out, enjoy himself. She laughed, she
knitted" (20) [emphasis added]. She not only creates the rooms with her knitting, she lights
them, as if she is the lighthouse. When he repeats that he is a failure, she flashes her needles
again, and this time he believes and is able to return to his evening routine, refreshed. Their son
James is left to sense his mother's ambivalence, her exhaustion and folding in– the illusion of
strength crumbles. Mr. Ramsay has emptied Mrs. Ramsay. She only has the strength left to
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slowly move her finger across the book she is reading to James. With that tired finger once
again she has twisted the story to fit the needs of the family.
Mrs. Ramsay is happy to have
helped her husband: "…there throbbed through her, like a pulse in a spring which has expanded
to its full width and now gently ceases to beat, the rapture of successful creation" (21). She is
aware that her knitting has created something beautiful, hence the rapture, combined with the
exhaustion.
Her knitting serves to create more than physical objects – it clothes the family with her
opinion and influence; it weaves the family's story. She appears to adjust the story, change facts,
with the twist of her knitting. Early in To the Lighthouse James wants to know if they are going
to the lighthouse the next day. Mrs. Ramsay says if it is nice out they will, but Mr. Ramsay
immediately says it will not be nice. Then she "making some little twist of the reddish brown
stocking she was knitting, impatiently," (2) says they may be able to go. James, having seen her
create a new world for his father with her needles, believes her. And he does go, though not until
after his mother's death. The pliable art of knitting allows Mrs. Ramsay to comfort her daughter
and son with separate stories of the same truth. Someone has sent James a boar's skull which is
frightening Cam. Mrs. Ramsay wraps her shawl several times around it, whispering to Cam that
now it's no longer a skull but a bird's nest, a mountain, a beautiful place. Thus death is
transformed. She tells James the skull is still there underneath, and she covers him with her
stories. Feeling for her shawl she realizes it is gone – she has knit herself to the concept of death.
Mrs. Ramsay covers artwork with her knitting to overlay her own viewpoint onto the family.
She uses a green shawl to drape a picture frame that will turn green with mold from the excessive
moisture whether covered or not. Yet she covers and uncovers it repeatedly, almost as if she's
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trying interpret the ever changing story of her family, and her own story, through the "art" of
knitting:
Knitting her reddish-brown hairy stocking, with her head outlined absurdly by the
gilt frame, the green shawl which she had tossed over the edge of the frame, and
the authenticated masterpiece by Michael Angelo, Mrs. Ramsay smoothed out
what had been harsh in her manner a moment before, raised his head, and kissed
her little boy on the forehead. "Let us find another picture to cut out," she said.
(16)
Having been harsh with her son, she simply smoothes it over with a kiss and a promise that they
will find another picture, make another story, one which she helps knit as she has probably knit
the green cashmere shawl with which she has draped the picture. There is life in her domesticity,
there is art, but she is creating under cover, hiding and creating. Her knitting frames her as an
artist, whether she acknowledges it or not.
Mrs. Ramsay has a strain of secret sadness. Lily is aware of the "twisted finger" of Mrs.
Ramsay, for Mrs. Ramsay comes to her room and makes fun of the others with a "malicious
twist," makes fun of the life, of the inner sanctum of men's private lives, this same arena she
encourages Lily to embrace through marriage. But Lily "…had recovered her sense of her now-this was the glove's twisted finger" (26). Mrs. Ramsay appears to have manic highs and lows,
moments of sadness and extremes of happiness, and times when she just wants to be alone:
…it was a relief when they went to bed. For now she need not think about anybody. She
could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of--to think;
well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive,
glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself,
a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued
to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its
attachments was free for the strangest adventures (33).
The Mrs. Ramsay of the twisted finger is not the one who creates elaborate dinner parties and
match-makes. She sees herself as invisible, unimportant, even a "wedge-shaped core of
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darkness" (33). Even in that there is an opportunity for a secret inner life. Lily senses this in
Mrs. Ramsay's late-night visit to her room where Lily tries to regain the sense of who Mrs.
Ramsay is when she's not acting herself. After regaling Lily with imitations of the men and their
serious gripes about the soup Mrs. Ramsay once again advocates marriage as if she is putting the
"Mrs." back onto herself. Mrs. Ramsay seems to Lily to return to her old self, and Lily thinks
there are things inscribed inside Mrs. Ramsay's heart that even Mrs. Ramsay can't begin to
untwist.
Lily continues to seek understanding of the Ramsays. With the residual sympathy she
holds for Mr. Ramsay after Mr. Ramsay's death, Lily is able, with one last bold vertical brush
stroke, to cut the Gordian knot made in her imagination by her inability to understand Mrs.
Ramsay's regard for Mr. Ramsay. Once she sees Mrs. Ramsay in that chair once again, knitting
in that domestic role, and combines it with her sympathy for him, she is finally able to complete
her vision. When she does, she understands their marriage and is able to accept her own decision
not to marry. Her "untwisting" their marriage is imperative for her to complete her painting.
"One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary
experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, it's a miracle, it's
an ecstasy. The problem might be solved after all" (103). Again the Ramsays are associated
with a chair and a table; combined they are a miracle, and she is able to solve the paradox: "So
that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball" (38).
Marriage is as simple and comforting as a couple watching a child play, and it is as limiting as
well. Though some believe the Ramsays have not had a happy marriage, they are devoted to
one another. Mrs. Ramsay is described in Penelope-like terms -- the weaver, Odysseus' wife, a
symbol of marital fidelity. In moments such as after a quarrel when Mr. Ramsay only says Mrs.
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Ramsay's name twice and she comes to him, in how she knows he wants her to say she loves him
and she can't but instead she says he's right about the trip to the lighthouse being off the next day,
which tells him she loves him, and when Mrs. Ramsay dies Mr. Ramsay stretches out his arms
the next morning to find no one to embrace, their love is obvious. They complement one another
in both negative and positive ways. She knits. He knots. Together they create their family, their
social circle, and tie everyone firmly within. This, then, is the twisted finger untwisted and
twisted again, the boot tied, both united.
At the end of the novel as Lily proclaims she has had her vision, Woolf has had hers as
well. When Lily figures out the Ramsays, she is able to join her art with her knowledge and
have her vision. Her vision is, then, not only an understanding of one event, of one marriage.
Her vision also means (in Woolf's writing where nothing is just one thing) she has received her
painting vision, a new kind of sight because she has learned to see what an apple is and what it
cannot be. And, if we are careful readers, we have also had her vision as well as a shift in our
own sight – we understand the paradox of a sacred yet mad domesticity which culminates not in
a twisted perversion but in a combining, a unification of two halves: a window and a door
alternating as sources of fresh air, a glove and a boot covering and warming extremities, and a
chair pulled close to an intimate table.
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Works Cited
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To the Lighthouse." By Ozlem Uzundemir. Virginia Woolf Miscellany 69 (2006): 8, 13.
"From Text to Tableau: Ekphrasic Enchantment in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse."
By Kathryn Stelmach. Studies in the Novel. Fall 2006, Vol. 38 Issue 3, p304-326, 23p.
Ingram, Malcolm. "Virginia Woolf's Psychiatric History." July 2007. Virginia Woolf's Psychiatric History. 12 Dec
2007 <http://www.malcolmingram.com/vwframe.htm>.
Insults about Famous Women. 1990. 13 December 2007 <http://www.corsinet.com/braincandy/ins-fwm.html>.
The Purl Bee. 15 November 2006. 12 December 2007
<<http://www.purlbee.com/display/ShowJournal?moduleId=515416&categoryId=71970>>.
‘What can six apples not be?': Ekphrasis in To the Lighthouse and Spending: a Utopian Divertimento
By Elizabeth Pedersen, Alphaeus online postgraduate journal. Volume 3: November 2005
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. Bath: Chivers Press, 1929.
—. To the Lighthouse. New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich , 1927.