These entries are adapted from some journals I wrote for a class on Virginia Woolf. My professor encouraged us to write a journal each week responding to anything we had read, discussed, or wrote relating to Woolf’s writing. I now count Woolf as one of my favorite authors and hope you enjoy diving into her work!
When reading To the Lighthouse, I found myself returning to the idea of something maintaining a shape even after the thing that occupied it is gone. My train of thought started after reading the line on page 129, “What people had shed and left—a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes—those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated…” (Woolf). The image of these nonliving objects being “animated” by “the human shape” made me think of Lily Briscoe in the first section of the novel—Lily was trying to get “the tune” of Mrs. Ramsay and wondered “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?” (p. 49). Even if you haven’t read To the Lighthouse, these lines encourage us to think of this space that occupies an inanimate object when the human has left it. Think about the indent of a couch cushion after someone gets up, or the grease in a pan sizzling after someone has taken away the bacon. We all can have an impact on the nonliving that can remain as a reminder of the living.
I started to remember the concept of negative space in art and painting. With drawing, some artists argue that the negative space is just as an important as the shape itself. When I used to take art classes, my teacher would cover whatever figure I was drawing and color in the negative space. She would ask me: does that space look like that space? Does that space curve here or there? I would look intently at the figure, and it would become a mass of shapes instead of the recognizable image I once thought it to be. She would encourage me to look at it as a moldable blob and not to try and copy the shape itself but the shapes around the shape.
Returning to the novel, when thinking about the inanimate objects, I couldn’t help but relate negative space to this space that Woolf is getting at. How does a human shape their surrounding objects? How do those surrounding objects shape the human? What happens when we look at the negative space and not the figure itself? I think this relates to what Lily was trying to capture. She seemed to be looking for a way to capture “the tune of Mrs. Ramsay” when Mrs. Ramsay was no longer there. (Especially, when reading this as a ghost story, Lily seems to always be looking for a way to capture Mrs. Ramsay long after she is gone).
In my later years of art classes, there was a movement to change the term negative space to unoccupied space in an attempt to take away the “negative” notions around the term. Though the reason for this vernacular change is not relevant, the new term is interesting to think about. What is the significance of space that is no longer occupied—by humans, animals, life? Can that space still hold the memories of those who animated the space? Is one more important than the other? If I attempt to think like Lily Briscoe, I will say yes. Perhaps this is because humans grapple with loss—they want to see the space as it was but now as it is without the life that used to occupy it. Really, I don’t know if we can have occupied space without the unoccupied. The unoccupied shapes the occupied as much as the reverse—it seems that we cannot have one without the other. I think that may be what is so haunting about the house in “Time Passes” section of the novel—we are left with the unoccupied space that shapes the memories of the occupied. We can no longer see the occupied space as it was but now the unoccupied. We want the life, we want Mrs. Ramsay, we want the occupied, but the heartbreaking (or ghostliness) of the story comes from vacancy.
I might take this a bit further to point out that beauty in Woolf’s writing—she is able to convey about a space that is no longer filled with liveliness in a way that the reader can feel that emptiness. That is no easy feat, and I wonder how other authors have conveyed that feeling in their works. A question for another post, I suppose.
Julia DeLuca 