Mrs. Ramsey's Dreamlike Quality in Describing the Scene

One passage that stuck out to me was the dinner scene on page 107.  Mrs. Ramsey has been talking to Mr. Bankes, and right after she finishes serving the food, she kind of goes into this day-dreaming kind of state.

"Here she felt, putting the spoon down, was the still space that lies about the heart of things, where one could move or rest; could wait now (they were all helped) listening; could then like a hawk which lapses suddenly from its high station, flaunt and sink on laughter easily, resting her whole weight upon what at the other end of the table her husband was saying about the square root of one thousand two hundred and fifty-three" (pg 107).

She goes from having this plain, simple conversation about French food versus British food, and then lapses off into this positionality of a hawk, who is floating on laughter as if it was the wind and zeroing in on little snippets of conversation. She continues on vacillating between rational, in the moment thoughts, and these dreamy, blurry, descriptions.  The description in this particular part of the novel makes me think of an impressionist painting, VanGogh's Starry Night for example.  There is no clarity, the lines are blurry.

In many ways, as others have pointed out, Virginia Woolf has a tendency to categorize in a "black and white" fashion things like "love and hate" or "feminine or masculine."  To me this is almost cubist thinking.  She's taking something abstract and giving it boundaries, hard boundaries.  So hard in fact that things can be one or the other and not both. There is no blurring of the lines throughout most of this novel, however, in some places, this being one of them, she seems to be trying her hand at a literary impressionism. 

As I take this approach, of comparing Virginia Woolf to the artistic movements of the period, when I go back and flip through again, I see other examples.  

"Disappearing as stealthily as stags from the dinner-table directly the meal was over, the eight songs and daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay sought their bedrooms, their fastnesses in a house where there was no other privacy to debate anything, everything; flies; people; while the sun poured into those attics, which a plant alone separated from each other so that every footstep could be heard and the Swiss girl sobbing for her father who was dying of cancer in a valley of the Grisons, and lit up bats, flannels, straw hats, ink-pots, paint-pots, bettelse, and the skulls of small birds, while it drew from the long frilled strips of seaweed pinned to the wall a smell of salt and weeds, which was in the towels too, gritty with sand from bathing." (pg 12). 

This sentence is totally made up of little fragments.  When I read that again, I feel like I'm looking at a mirror that has been broken into a thousand little pieces, but still all held together.  Visualizing that makes me think of cubism, not quite in the way of taking something like a face and reducing it down to an oval shape, but more like Picasso's Weeping Woman where yes, parts are reduced down to shapes, but there is a whole picture made up of little fragments. If we looked at each fragment we wouldn't have a clue what we were looking at.  Here in one long fragmented sentence Virginia Woolf is describing the whole house in a way.  You get the sense of all the stuff that comes with having 8 children, as well as the sense of no real privacy.  

There are also a few places where she totally just breaks form.  On page 20 we see an example of this.  Her paragraph starts out:
     "Suddenly a loud cry, as of a sleep-walker, half roused, something about 

Stormed at with shot and shell

sung out with the utmost intensity in her ear, made her turn apprehensively to see if any one heard him" (pg 20).

What she's doing here is separating out what it is that she heard, the little snippet of conversation.  She doesn't give us quotation marks though.  She breaks the traditional literary form (or at least I think that was then the traditional literary form). It's almost as if she is trying to separate it for us visually.

While I am pointing out writing techniques, I can't help but note the repetitious circular manner in which she tells an anecdote here.  For example, on page 29 she brings us back to the point where the story starts; debating whether or not to go to the lighthouse the next day. Within that 29 pages, she comes back to someone saying "there will be no going to the lighthouse tomorrow" several times.  Also there is a repetition to the way we learn about the supposed death of the friendship between Mr. Ramsey and Mr. Bankes.  We are looking into Bankes' thoughts (which is coming from I don't even know who).  On page 24 we see "...William Bankes remembered (and this must refer to some actual incident), by a hen, straddling her wings out in protection of a covey of little chicks, upon which Ramsay, stopping pointed his stick and said 'Pretty--pretty,' and odd illumination in to his heart, Bankes had thought it, which showed his simplicity, his sympathy with humble things; but it seemed to him as if their friendship had ceased, there, on that stretch of road" (pg 24). Then on the next page we see "Begun long years ago, their friendship had petered out on a Westmorland road, where the hen spread her wings before her chicks; after which Ramsay had married, and their paths lying different ways..."(pg 25). There seems to be this circular pattern to the story telling, as if she is going around a mountain and coming back to the same view only from a slightly higher elevation.