Brittany Davis
Final Paper
Seminar in Modernism
Fall, 1998

“Scenes” From Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse:
Virginia Woolf’s Cinematic Imagery

Virginia Woolf’s ties to the world of the visual arts are obvious through her associations. Her circle the Bloomsbury Group consisted of both painters and writers, and Woolf was continually interested in the issue of visual representation through both her concern with her sister Vanessa Bell’s career as a painter and her friendships with other painters and art critics in the Bloomsbury group. Despite her familiarity with the visual arts, Woolf’s relationship with them was decidedly mixed. She was familiar with painting and photography but had objections to them as adequate vehicles for the type of communication she was attempting through her novels. Living at a time when film was just emerging as an art form and there was little accompanying theory or criticism about film, Woolf recognized film as an important media (yet still not as effective as writing) and applied the techniques of moving pictures to her writing. significant passages in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse demonstrate a film-oriented style of manipulation of image which fulfills Woolf’s twin goals of writing: the avoidance of sentimentality and the creation of a new mode of dramatic expression which previous styles of novel-writing were unable to attain.
It is interesting to look at Virginia Woolf’s writing in terms of its visual qualities. Woolf’s novels are notable for their emotional content, their painstaking depictions of the inner personality and the different stages of thought and feeling. Both Mrs. Dalloway and to the Lighthouse depict very few actions which take place in a short period of time. Mrs. Dalloway is all one day and evening, and, excluding the “Time Passes” episode of To the Lighthouse, all of the novel takes pace on two days years distant from each other but in basically the same setting. The bulk of the novels are the unraveling and intertangling of the thoughts and feeling and realizations of the characters. It is almost paradoxical that the method for depicting these shifts in emotion and intricacies of character come embedded in a style of writing which emphasizes strongly surfaces and textures and qualities of light and various ways of physically seeing things and characters. Woolf’s depiction of thoughts and feeling in her characters is also paradoxically focused on the idea of the shifting surfaced of thoughts. Thoughts seem to take shape, dissolve and reform rather than occur.
...resting, looking from one to the other vaguely, the old question which traversed the sky of the soul perpetually, the vast, the general question which was apt to particularize itself at such moments as these, when she released faculties that had been on the strain, stood over her, paused over her, darkened over her. ... In the midst of chaos there was a shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) and was struck into stability. (To the Lighthouse 161)
Lily Briscoe’s thoughts regarding the positive influence of Mrs. Ramsay on the Ramsay family and their guests are typical of thought processes as Woolf depicts them. There is a wavering of content and frequent visual intrusions that have little to do with the thought process other than the fact that the input of the senses is never absent from the progression of thought.
Woolf’s image-laden and highly visual writing owes much to her association with Modern painters. Her rejection of visual arts initially stems from a post-Victorian reaction to the attempted styles of photographic realism which were the dominant forms of novel writing in the 19th Century. Woolf associated photorealism with a manipulative brand of emotionalism which she wished at all costs to avoid, even to the point of massively rewriting The Voyage Out to eliminate what she considered sentimentality (Broughton 41). Woolf’s theories of visual arts and the presence of sentimentality in writing developed mostly during her ongoing dialogue with Roger Fry regarding the usefulness of the visual arts themselves. Fry was responsible for introducing the Post-Impressionist painters to England, and it was in his discussions with the then Virginia Stevens in 1911 which caused her to question the photorealistic approach of 19th Century novelists (Broughton 39)
Woolf’s early experiments interacting with the visual arts were extremely significant in her stylistic development. Her writing is a direct result of exposure to Impressionist and post-Impressionist techniques. Like Lily’s thoughts on the meaning of life, most of Woolf’s passages are literally the result of layered “impressions” both emotional and visual to create a unified whole. The edges and figures and actions in Woolf’s novels are the result of the imposition of small “strokes” and colors which eventually comprise a rich whole in which each of the small touches which contribute to that whole are still visible within it. Painting is very nearly an appropriate visual and technical counterpart to Woolf;s writing because of the visible and minute parts which make up the whole, but the effect in the end is still essentially static. the finished painting is inherently possessive of the work and the motion required to produce it, but it is essentially static in nature. The very commemorative nature of the static image lends itself to the sentimentality, the valuing of things as they were and not as they are in motion and in progress, which Woolf wished to avoid in her writing.
The sentimental nature of the carefully realistic image was not alleviated in the slightest by the advent of photography and Woolf’s interest in that form of image creation. The most significant use of photography in Woolf’s life and in her writings is to keep a visual memory of people who are no longer living ( ). while Woolf was interested in photography as a hobby and frequently took photographs, she did not consider photography as true a representation as it seemed to be. Her use of photographs in her biography writing was extremely problematic. Photographs were images which were often considered means of “proof”, scientifically produced and exact records of the physical appearance and position of a person or thing at a certain place in time. Woolf was aware, however, that it was not in the nature of those still images to be self-explanatory. they could, quite literally be placed in any situation and described in any way. Woolf illustrated this fact herself with the use of false captions on pictures of real people in her fictional biography Orlando (Wussow).
the introduction of the photograph both to the visual arts and to consideration of Virginia Woolf’s works bring about complications in the purpose and the formation of the image and writing based on largely imagistic concerns. Woolf managed to overcome the inherent sentimentality of the form of the novel by dismantling reader expectations and constructing an aesthetic of time and space which allowed for a reader to focus on the surface of thoughts and yet remain distant from their motion ( ). The photograph would seemingly be an ideal vehicle for conveying a visual effect, but Woolf throughout her career adhered to a loyalty for writing as the most flexible and most capable method to convey events. The photograph is unique in the idea of visual influences on Woolf’s style in that it was the first mechanism of visual representation which appeared to entirely objectify the image. The image on the photographic plate is an exact record of the reflect light which created the scene photographed. With this exact replica also came the commonly accepted (but false) theory that photographs were free of the conceptual warping and stylistic interference caused by the intermediary writer or painter who recorded a scene.
The “photorealistic” painted image and writing which focuses on photographic description could not help but be endowed with a type of sentimentality and obviousness of purpose which Modern painters and writers distrained. Virginia Woolf grouped the photograph with these styles of representation (Gillespie 113). Woolf distrusted biography and commemorative photographs even further than she distrusted painting as an accurate representation of the “truth” of a situation (Wussow). Woolf was skeptical of the objectivity which photographs were supposed to represent. She and her sister often took photographs which were carefully and painstakingly posed (Gillespie 126), so she was well aware of of the ability of the photographer to manipulate what image was actually captured on film. The distance which Woolf desired to maintain between her readers and the emotional content of her novels was not attainable through a concept of photography as a vehicle for objective description. the effect of photography is not the solidification and the objectification of a certain scene which lies in front of the camera, establishing a visual proof for a certain positioning and patterning of light reflected from objects. photography creates a mechanized record of the actual gaze and point of view of the photographer. It is highly personal and highly biased and is so without seeming to be.
Photography had existed in various forms since the mid 1800’s, and at it’s inception, slow shutter speeds and the difficulty of moving the equipment made it the idea medium for portraits and records rather than personal expression. Woolf lived at a time when cameras were small and cheap and widely available (Gillespie 114). The idea of the photograph as a record of people who have passed away was still prevalent in Woolf’s works, and most photographs which appear in her novels are used to create reminders for her characters of people who have died ( ). Woolf’s distrust of photographs and rejection of the idea of photographs as objective records shows that she clearly realized the true nature of them. the comforting, sentimental purpose of photographs is to keep those who have passed away from leaving visual memory, and the idea that if someone were to die, they would still be remembered through a photographic image was central in photography. More important than recording the physical appearance of a person, however, the photograph became the first means by which the certain point of view and specific way of seeing by one single person could be mechanically presented to and imposed upon other people as a record of truth. Essentially, photography is a very specific, very subjective visual record.