Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

68 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
of merging and fl owing and creating rested on her” (TTL 91). Th e danger of this type of
dissolution of the self, mediated by the Angel fi gure, is felt most acutely by Lily Briscoe
and Paul Morel. In contrast to Mrs. Ramsay and Mrs. Morel, Lily and Paul attempt to
foreground the body—“It was one’s body feeling, not one’s mind” (TTL 194)—but both
must fi ght an impulse to merge with the beloved:
What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through
into those secret chambers? What device for becoming, like waters poured into
one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored? Could the body
achieve it, or the mind, subtly mingling in the intricate passages of the brain? Or
the heart? (TTL 57)
Th is imaging of the body as a vessel, prone to intrusion and appropriation, reaches
its apotheosis in the possessive love of Gerald Crich and Gudrun Brangwen in Lawrence’s
Women in Love (1920), but is foreshadowed in Sons and Lovers by Paul’s precarious sense of
self, threatened with a desired dissolution. In the crisis of the fi nal chapter, “Derelict,” Paul
is almost overcome by grief for his dead mother and by the dissolution of self that the Angel
ideal represents: there are repeated references to his body lying abandoned and his desire to
follow his mother into the darkness. Although Paul senses earlier in the novel that his life
is a “toppling balance” (260), he is less successful than Lily in striving to shape and balance
experience. Lily knows that she must fi nd balance in order to complete her painting and she
therefore struggles to reconcile the opposing forces of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, of “male” and
“female:” “For whatever reason she could not achieve that razor edge of balance between two
opposite forces; Mr Ramsay and the picture; which was necessary” (TTL 209).
While Lily ultimately achieves her vision in To the Lighthouse, Sons and Lovers is more
ambivalent and it is Lawrence’s next novel, Th e Rainbow (1915), which begins to envision
a way beyond the problem of desired subjection to the Angel in the House. Lydia
Brangwen represents a more balanced vision of matriarchy: she resists her husband Tom’s
dependence upon her and prompts his realization that physical consummation is the vehicle
to a separate state which allows integral selfhood and imaginary unity with the other:
“when a man’s soul and a woman’s soul unites together—that makes one angel” (129). Associated
by Tom with marriage, this Platonic ideal may also be a spiritual state achieved by
a personal reconciliation of “male” and “female” forces, resulting, for example, in Ursula
Brangwen’s private vision of the rainbow at the end of the novel. Th is alternative “angel”
state is also described in Lawrence’s Study of Th omas Hardy, as something which may be
both physical and purely spiritual:
What we call the Truth is, in actual experience, that momentary state in living
[when] the union between the male and the female is consummated. Th is consummation
may also be physical, between the male body and the female body.
But it may be only spiritual, between the male and female spirit. (72)
Importantly, Lawrence is moving away from the idea of merger as promised/threatened
by the Angel in the House towards an ideal of union, a connection between discrete
identities rather than a blurring of boundaries. Lawrence’s ideal receives its most famous