著者

岩崎 雅之

出版者

日本ヴァージニア・ウルフ協会

雑誌

ヴァージニア・ウルフ研究

巻号頁・発行日

vol.32, pp.1-16, 2015

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Previous studies, such as Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2000) edited by Pamela L. Caughie, and Holly Henry's Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science (2003), argue that Virginia Woolf literalises in her novels new perspectives brought by technological devices such as the X-ray photograph, the gramophone and the telescope. However, these works do not clarify the correlation between scientific perspectives and the sexual desires represented by modern technological devices in To the Lighthouse (1927). In this novel, Mrs Ramsay, a Victorian "Angel in the House," appears in the visions given by the telescope and the telephone, having her sexual enchantment enhanced through which other characters see her in a "modern" way. In addition, Lily Briscoe, an aspiring postimpressionist artist, is said to see things with her X-ray-like vision, which discloses the desires of male characters hidden in their bodies. The discourse of science modifies her perspective as an artist and represents sexual differences in an artistic way. Meanwhile, Lily paints Mrs Ramsay as a "wedge-shaped core of darkness" and a "triangular purple shape," purely geometrical painterly forms. Significantly, these images are visualised through her "Chinese eyes." Urmila Seshagiri indicates how racial differences work to produce the postimpressionist geometrical expressions, defining modernism as an art movement that always pursued the new and discovered racial differences as an aesthetic innovation for the aim. According to Seshagiri, this tendency is found in To the Lighthouse as Lily's "Oriental" eyes. Certainly, Mrs Ramsay's images appear in Lily's vision as the geometrical forms representing a novelty in Western art, but the artist's eyes also work virtually as a technological device. In short, her "Oriental" eyes are also scientific, revealing sexual desires and perceiving human beings in a geometrical pattern. In this study, I suggest that Mrs Ramsay's image appears at the intersection of discourse of science, colonialism and post-impressionism. Geometrical expressions by Lily meet the demand of modernism, succinctly expressed by Ezra Pound's "Make it new," through racial differences and presents a new form of human beings in a post-war society liberated from the conventions of pre-war society. The correlation among the discourse of science, body and geometrical perspective forms an aspect of Woolf's visionary modernism in this novel.