Kinetic Tropes, Comedic Turns: Dancing To The Lighthouse

Summary

It hardly needs saying that To the Lighthouse, perhaps more so than Woolf's other novels, is concerned with ephemerality—both its impact on knowing and being, and how to represent it in writing. In that sense, then, Woolf's novel shares a preoccupation associated with dance. Dance scholars since the sixteenth century have lamented the fact that dance, more so than the performance arts of theater and music, is by its very nature impermanent (Lepecki 125-29). As dance theorist Mark Franco explains: “All dance…is constituted by loss in the form of its own immediate disappearance which then engenders a desire for its reappearance, ultimately for its reconstruction. Reconstruction and choreography— two facets of the science of making dances happen—are distinguishable from dancing as the irretrievable mystery of what happened in those dances” (4). Dance critic Marcia Siegel's comments about dance's comparatively low status vis-a-vis the other arts calls to mind the parallel Woolf draws between Mrs. Ramsay's dinner party and Lily Briscoe's painting that “would be hung in the attics,…would be destroyed” (TTL 211). Siegel writes, “[dance] doesn't stay around long enough to become respectable or respected. Its ephemerality is mistaken for triviality” (xv qtd. in Lepecki 130). In this paper, I have set myself the task of fashioning a reading of To the Lighthouse inspired by dance. In so doing, I wish to open up Woolf's work to a more expansive approach: one that goes beyond visual and auditory registers to consider the kinetic and the kinesthetic.

I am indebted to the scholarship of Evelyn Haller, Rishona Zimring, and Susan Jones, whose research on Woolf's attitudes towards her own experiences dancing socially and watching dance in performance as well as their startling analyses of dancing as influence, motif, and metaphor in several of Woolf's novels has laid the foundation for my reading of To the Lighthouse. For example, in her essay “Her Quill Drawn from the Firebird: Virginia Woolf and the Russian Dancers” and her more recent “Virginia Woolf and Dance,” Evelyn Haller documents the influence that Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes had on narrative themes and allusions in Woolf's fiction as well as structural and thematic parallels between some of Woolf's novels and Japanese Noh theater.