“For whatever reason she could not achieve that razor edge of balance between two opposite forces.” ~ Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
“The shadow of her wings fell on my page; […] I took up the inkpot and flung it at her.” ~ Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women”
In the works of Virginia Woolf, the attempted transformation of the fictional female paradigm from angelic heroine to artist has evoked a profusion of psychological interpretations and feminist commentary, particularly in regard to the woman’s own internal struggle with conflicting desires and a seemingly paradoxical destiny. In Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, the archetypal Angel in the House is the central figure, even after death in the latter, while her essence is challenged by consciousness, crisis, and confusion. Although not intended to be an annihilation of Woman, the mere disruption of prescribed gender roles and expectations has significantly disproportionate and chaotic consequences in the novels, as in life, making female metamorphosis in literature a rich and compelling context for the scientific application of theories of chaos and disorder.
The idea that minor or seemingly insignificant events within a dynamical system can have sweeping, long-term effects is referred to metaphorically as the “butterfly effect.” Broadly, it encompasses the concept of hypersensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory, a mode of formalism that seeks to measure and explain disorder and uncertainty. While chaos theory and the premise of the butterfly effect are rooted in the natural and formal sciences such as mathematics, economics, chemistry, and physics, the concepts have also been applied to psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and other social sciences. Once chaos theory found its way into the realm of human dynamical systems and relationships, it became a relevant application for artistic and literary works. The behaviors, interpersonal dynamics, and pathological disorders of literary figures can be linked with chaos theory and analysis to help us recognize and understand certain aspects of the human experience, including psychological confusion and disorder, how an insignificant event can alter destiny, and the notion of unpredictability.
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A common characteristic of Woolf’s heroines is the realization of a paradoxical destiny that both encourages and inhibits their quest to live meaningful, significant lives. “Insofar as women’s priorities must be home, husband, and children, public culture becomes a male domain; and insofar as culture is a male domain, the woman artist or culture-maker becomes a contradiction in terms” (Froula 65). Clarissa Dalloway and Lily Briscoe are keenly aware of the impact and limiting ramifications of their choices and actions, and both struggle to reconcile their desire for autonomy and importance with the mutuality and sacrifice of human systems. “Here all human relation to ideas is motivated by love, certainly including Lily’s art; and all the different forms of love, including the arts and sciences, work to bring things together to support ‘the human gain,’ a sense of what is meaningful and lasting in opposition to the flux of chaos” (Brivic).
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The angelic figure of wife and mother requires selflessness and a grounding of aspirations and movement outside the sphere of marriage and family. “Especially in its role as an agent of social integration, marriage is instrumental in the general wing clipping that must take place […]” (Edwards 551). Like many of Woolf’s female artist-protagonists, both Lily Briscoe and Lily Everit (“The Introduction”) are placed outside “the marriage plot” and endowed with independence and a strong desire to evade culturally prescribed norms. “As Lily paints, one of the things that happens is that she affirms her own choices over how Mrs. Ramsay would have ordered her life […]. As she paints, she realizes she has succeeded in living differently” (Crater 133). Knowing this, she is at odds with her own divergent convictions: “She could have done it differently of course; the colour could have been thinned and faded; the shapes etherealised; that was how Paunceforte would have seen it. But then she did not see it like that. She saw the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral” (Lighthouse 51, emphasis added).
In The Voyage Out, occurrences of a fluttering moth provoke nervousness or pity; the immediate inclination is to destroy it. When Lily Everit corrects Mr. Brinsley’s presumption that she writes poems rather than essays in “The Introduction,” he responds by ripping the wings off a fly in front of her as he turns the conversation to himself. Lily reels at the image, thinking protectively of her own wings and folding them down flat on her back. Now confused with shriveled wings, “she felt like a naked wretch who having sought shelter in some shady garden is turned out and told – no, that there are no sanctuaries, or butterflies, in this world […]” (187-88). These scenes convey the symbolic death of Woolf’s artist heroine “when she finds no language in which to live” (Froula 86). As Woolf explores the feminine transition from angelic self-sacrifice to artistic self-sufficiency and ascent, her heroines die literally or emblematically, with the exception of Lily Briscoe, whose wings incite discomfort but remain intact: “There was in Lily a thread of something; a flare of something; something of her own which Mrs. Ramsay liked very much indeed, but no man would, she feared” (Lighthouse 106). Woolf equipped Lily Briscoe with the ability to suppress “irrelevances that plucked her attention” (161) and remember her work. Each time she is beset with self-doubt, bowing “like corn under a wind” (usually at the hand of Charles Tansley, who insists that women can neither write nor paint), she rights herself by shifting the tree in her painting: “She must make it once more. There’s the sprig on the table-cloth; there’s my painting; I must move the tree to the middle; that matters – nothing else” (88). Although Mr. Tansley tried, “he could not smite that butterfly” (93).
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In both Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Woolf explores the oppositional influences and contradictory desires inherent to the journey to Woman, particularly as the female figure emerges from the domestic sphere to the domain of public culture and authority. In the lives of Clarissa Dalloway and Lily Briscoe, decisions about marriage ultimately determine the classification and span of their wings. Both feel invisible, yet only one is trying to communicate her vision; the other remains adrift and isolated in her streaming consciousness. Clarissa considers the sky and thinks of the plunge, while Lily envisions a butterfly in flight, lovely and strong, lighting on arches of steel: “Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly’s wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron” (Lighthouse 174). In Lily Briscoe, Woolf succeeds at metamorphosing Woman as Angel to woman as artist, a complex, dynamical system, soaring unpredictably and unbounded.
Excerpts from “On the Wings of Angels and Butterflies: The Chaotic Journey to Woman in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse”
by Michelle Arch
English 545: Major Authors: Virginia Woolf
Chapman University
October 2010
Presented at the 2011 Sigma Tau Delta International English Convention, Pittsburgh, PA
and at the 2011 Sigma Tau Delta Regional Conference, Pilgrimage West, Orange, CA
Nice work, Michelle. I like the addition of the “Angels and butterflies” tab.
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