To The Lighthouse: Feminine Mastery Of Inner Dialogue

by Thomas J. Scheff (August 2010)

Can artists point the way toward solutions of the complex problems of human experience? There is a tradition in literature of the study of the stream of consciousness that might provide hints on the sources and structure of consciousness. A crucial problem for social scientists who study consciousness is that most of us, indeed, virtually all of us, are not highly gifted in noticing and remembering a vast array of concrete details. In this respect, we are much like the rest of the human race. The novelist Milan Kundera makes the point tellingly:

Try to reconstruct a dialogue from your own life, the dialogue of a quarrel or a dialogue of love. The most precious, the most important situations are utterly gone. Their abstract sense remains (I took this point of view, he took that one. I was aggressive, he was defensive), perhaps a detail or two, but the acoustico-visual concreteness of the situation in all its continuity is lost.

To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf was a great artist who has provided descriptions of concrete sequences of events in consciousness and perhaps insights into its nature. Of course, we can never be completely sure of the accuracy of her descriptions. But they at least offer instances with which theories of consciousness can be grounded, and inspiration for models of consciousness.

The Incident

The Interior Monologues

This is the text that goes between her first warning and her second (I have numbered and italicized those segments that I will discuss):

The Problem: Identifying the Voices

The classic treatment of the representation of consciousness in fiction is Cohn (1978). However her interest concerns only the artistic problem of representation, not its relation to actual human experience. In this essay, I propose a social psychological solution to the problem of identifying the multipersonal voices. Before doing so, however, I note two other reactions to this and similar problems involving multipersonal representation of consciousness.

Stages of Role-taking

Mead proposed that the child goes through three stages in learning role taking. The first stage he called imitation. In this stage, the child does not grasp the situation from the viewpoint of the other, but merely imitates her outer appearance. The child acts out the appearance and behavior of the farmer or ballerina without seeing the world from their point of view. The child playing the role of Mommy or Daddy does not grasp situations in the way that the real Mommy or Daddy would, but merely acts out their behavior and gestures.

In the game stage, the child learns to take the point of view of the other, but only in settings which are rigidly scripted. In a stage play, for example, the competent actor may learn not only her own part, but also at least aspects of the parts of other characters. In order to play baseball competently, for example, the batter must be able to take the roles of the other players, quickly imagining the reactions of the shortstop and pitcher to the groundball she has hit between them, the reaction of baserunner, and so on. By watching players in the other positions, each player learns to imagine their behavior, from their point of view. But the imagined responses are limited to situations that the child has actually observed.

The third and final stage in the learning of role taking is what Mead called the generalized other. Having learned to take the role of the other in scripted situations, the child grasps this process so well that she is able to take the role of imagined others, seeing self from points of view that do not yet exist, or may never exist. In this way, the capacity for cooperative improvisation arises, since each player can imagine the role of the others in situations that have never arisen before. One can imagine responses such as those of posterity, or by all of humanity. According to Mead, it is this stage which gives rise to the distinctive intelligence, creativity, and flexibility that characterizes human beings at their best.

Suppose that the emotion of grief is an action pattern that is completed by crying or weeping. If one wept completely the instant that one realizes a loss, one would feel little or no grief. But if the bodily response to loss is activated without allowing completion, then one would feel grief. I will apply this idea to a segment of self-talk below.

Mrs. Ramsay knew that Bankes was an admirer of hers, and she also knew his habits quite well. Into the cadenza she has put her knowledge of him (for example, his habit of watching workingmen at a construction cite when gathering his thoughts). She is thinking of the problem of Mrs. Ramsay and her beauty from the point of view of an admirer of hers.

Multipersonal Voices

Why is the second monologue much more multipersonal than the first, more self-referential, and the associations looser and the points of view undefined? One possibility is that two emotional events occurred at the end of the first monologue: Mrs. Ramsay repeated what the Swiss maid said, which was associated with her father dying of cancer, and Mrs. Ramsay spoke sharply to her son James.

In her diary, Woolf seemed to imply that she was consciously attempting to describe inner reality, as much as a scientist as an artist. Here is a note she wrote when working on her first novel, 19 years before writing To the LightHouse. This note refers not only to the objective description of consciousness, but also to the kind of part/whole reasoning I will mention at the end of this article:

Many people of balanced mind and congenial activity scarcely know that they care what others think of them, and will deny, perhaps with indignation, that such care is an important factor in what they are and do. But this is illusion. If failure or disgrace arrives, if one suddenly finds that the faces of men show coldness or contempt instead of the kindliness and deference that he is used to, he will perceive from the shock, the fear, the sense of being outcast and helpless, that he was living in the minds of others without knowing it, just as we daily walk the solid ground without thinking how it bears us up.

Biographical material suggests that Woolf as a child was aware of the small details that constitute the image of a living person, especially both her parents, and as an adult, writing her book, she remembered them. Surely a social science that is bereft of such details will be inadequate in its portrayal of human conduct.

Feminist Interpretations

Given the presence of extensive multipersonal interior monologue in three women writers (Eliot, Woolf, and Lessing), there does seem to be a connection between this type of writing and gender. Perhaps because of the way that the social position of women is subordinate to that of men in most societies, women would be more conscious of the need to take the role of others than men would. To the extent that women are assigned the role to taking care of others (husbands and children) more than men, to that extent they might develop facility in, and awareness of, the process of role taking.

There are indications that in real life, males, more often than women, are in situations in which their role taking is instrumental rather than spontaneous and/or playful. Here is an example from a memoir of an experience in training to be a psychoanalyst (Masson 1990).

Summary

References:

Auerbach, Erich. 1953. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: U. of Texas Press

Bell, Quentin. 1972. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Billig, Michael. 1999 Freudian Repression: Conversation Creating the Unconscious. CambridgeUniversity Press. 1999.

Cohen, Dorrit. 1978. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: PrincetonU. Press.

De Botton, Alain. 1997. How Proust Can Change your Life. London: Picador.

Humphrey, Robert. 1958. The Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel. Berkeley: UC. Press.

Kundera, Milan. 1988. The Art of the Novel. New York: Grove.

1995. Testaments Betrayed. New York: Harcourt.

Lee, Hermione. 1997. Virginia Woolf. New York: Knopf.

Masson, Jeffrey. 1990. Final Analysis. New York: Addison-Westley

Mead, George H. 1932. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press.

Minsky, Marvin. 1985. The Society of Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Morris, Pam. (Editor). 1994. The Bakhtin Reader. London: Edward Arnold.

Scheff, Thomas. 1990. Microsociology: Discourse, Emotion, and Social Structure. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press.

_____________1993. Toward a Social Psychological Theory of Mind and Consciousness. Social Research. 60: 171-195.

____________ 1997. Emotions, the Social Bond, and Human Reality: Part/Whole Analysis. Cambridge: CambridgeU. Press.

Woolf, Virginia. 1927. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt (1989).

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