“Robbed of Meaning”: The Work at the Center of To The Lighthouse Emery, Mary Lou. Project Muse: scholarly jounrals online
(This applies to Mr. Ramsay and the presentation of his neurosis in a domestic household) “One way in which Part One reverses hierarchical opposition of masculine/feminine is by removing the masculine “sphere” of activity from the novel” (219)
(This is the premise to Emery’s thesis.)”"Time Passes” breaks the pattern whereby Victorian sex/gender hierarchies are reversed and, in doing so, breaks the ground for Lily’s reconfiguration as the Modern Woman” (220)
(This supports premise) “However, the “airs” and “darkness” that invade the Ramsays’ house in “Time Passes” are personified and militarized forces, “advance guards of destruction.” In the midst of trees like “tattered flags”, the airs ask, ” Were they allies? Were they enemies?” (220)
(Mrs. McNab is the “center” of this article.) “Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast labor distinctly as females, but not as fully human females, rather as forces disassociated from Mrs. Ramsay’s creative, harmonizing maternity… they seem to partake of the female, the inhuman, the natural, and the mechanical simultaneously and indeterminately” (221).
(Evidence of Mrs. McNab’s role in the novel) “But Lily cannot see Mrs. Ramsay with new eyes until Mrs. McNab has entered the house violently and occupied it in two appraently contradictory ways: as a natural and therefore dehumanized yet feminine force and as a militarized and therefore human, dehumanizing, and masculine force. Following Mrs. McNab’s occupation of the house and of these contradictory metaphorical positions, the Modern Woman can have it all (or most of it): androgyny, or the dissolution of masculine/feminine oppositions; female bonding with the domestic, maternal woman; and artistic vision that may grant her public identity” (226).
(Thesis) “The future of Lil’s painting and of Lily as meaning-giver depends on the servant unable to bestow meaning either through her voice or her gaze. Neither Mrs. McNab’s bedroom nor the working-class public sphere where her voice once meant something will hold a meaningful audience for Lily’s creativity. Rather, Lily makes her triumphant line “there, in the centre,” the space analogous to the center of the novel where Mrs. McNab has worked. Thus her “work” of art makrs over and supplants the work performed by Mrs. McNab. Much more than Lily’s painting, Mrs. McNab , her coworker, and their labors have become invisible, while Lily’s “attempt” remains forever, and Lily is the “one” who decides it is so. The servant’s central place in the novel has been reoccupied, and her gaze, as well as her voice, has been robbed of meaning” (231).
(Explanation of Thesis) “The theft from Mrs. McNab that renders her voice and her gaze meaningless is the condition for Lily’s completed painting and for the positioning of the middle-class English woman as arbiter and artistic value and the individual owner of meaningful vision” (231).
(Summary of Mrs. McNab’s dsicredit in the novel) “Mrs. McNab as a stereotype is not a character but a process of subject-positioning. She “works” structurally at the center of the novel to reposition an ideological dichotomy of private and public so that a new female subject may be negotiated in contest but also in compromise with dominant representations of women’s “nature” (233).
The title of this article “Robbed of meaning” refers to Mrs. McNab. As a working-class figure, her character is presented one dimensionally. She is not really a person but a tool used by Woolf to sweep out the old ideals of womanhood and usher in the new idea behind the middle-class woman. Emery maintains that Mrs. McNab embodies both the masculine and feminine roles when she becomes “a force working” to clean the house for the return to the Ramsay’s. Metaphorically, she is cleansing the house of Mrs. Ramsay’s old ideals. However, since her character is deemed “witless” she is not given the credit of actively paving the way for the new womanhood, rather, she is the representation of the discredited class of women, who maintain the old role of women being the cleaners of house. She is, in essence, the forgotten woman of this text, and in so, her class of women of disregarded. Like the masculine elements that surround her in “Time Passes”, Woolf uses her as a mechanical object that carries in the representation of the working woman and sweeps the idea of the woman of luxury. Without Mrs. McNab representing the otherside of the woman sphere, Lily could never find her place in the middle, in the role of the compromising woman.
