Freud and Woolf on Art

In Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), Sigmund Freud argues that “[l]ife as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments, and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures” (CD 23). Art is one such “palliative,” one that features prominently in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). Whereas for Freud art is merely one means of substituting pleasure for the pain of reality by escaping reality, in Woolf’s novel art also has a palliative function, but it intersects with and merges with reality to induce pleasure, satisfaction, and intimacy within it.

Freud’s view of misery and happiness informs his view of art as a mechanism to cope with the pain of human life.  Misery comes from humans’ own bodies, the external world, and human relationships.  Relief of misery is another way of speaking of the main human quest in life:  the pleasure principle.  The pleasure principle is a desire for and pursuit of happiness, which may take two forms:  absence of pain and strong feelings of pleasure (CD 25).  Humans seek relief of misery from powerful deflections (planned activities like gardening), substitutive satisfactions (things like art replace or contrast with reality), and intoxicating substances (alterations of body chemistry that desensitize) (CD 23-24). Happiness, or pleasure, can be experienced only by contrast and only episodically, not constantly (CD 25-26).

For Freud, art taps into the life of human imagination, which provides illusions that contrast with reality and its afflictions. Art is a substitutive satisfaction (23-24). Even if art mimics reality, art still distances us from the tangible misery of reality. It is psychically effective at inducing either lack of pain or positive pleasure. Feeling is the root of human perception of suffering, and art redirects feelings. It loosens “the connection with reality” (CD 30). “A satisfaction of this kind,” Freud explains, “such as an artist’s joy in creating, in giving his phantasies body, or a scientist’s in solving problems or discovering truths, has a special quality ... as a source of pleasure and consolation in life” (CD 29, 31). But this “mild narcosis” is merely “transient ... and it is not strong enough to make us forget real misery” (CD 31).

A person may orient her life completely toward pleasure through art and beauty; however, Freud argues that this is helpful but not complete: “This aesthetic attitude to the goal of life offers little protection against the threat of suffering, but it can compensate a great deal” (p. 33). Art is like religion, a “delusional remoulding of reality,” not a dealing with reality (32). In short, art for Freud is only one incomplete means of substituting pleasure for the pain of reality by escaping reality.

The picture of art is somewhat different in To the Lighthouse. Overall, for Woolf’s characters, especially Lily, art seems to be a way to understand the world and to live within it better, not by escaping from it but by gaining an intimacy with it.

Lily’s view of and success in art evolves through the novel as she labors over ten years to complete a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay. Initially, Lily struggles to get the perspective and lines, order and colors in the picture just right: “she could not show [Bankes] what she wished to make of it, could not see it even herself” (TL 59; see 21). She gropes to seize once more the vision for her picture. She speculates about adding a line, for instance, but fears that it may break “the unity of the whole.” This is more than the unity of the portrait but the unity of art and life, art capturing reality in its fullness.

Art for Lily is a means of knowing more about the world, here about the person and world of Mrs. Ramsay. But this is not the cerebral knowledge of Mr. Ramsay’s metaphysical musings but intimacy: “Could loving...make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge” (TL 56). Lily seeks the merging of art and life, fulfilling her personal relationship with and understanding of Mrs. Ramsay in her completed portrait of her.

This role of art as intimacy becomes clearer at the end of the novel when Lily’s not giving Mr. Ramsay the sympathy he desires prevents her from making progress with her painting (TL 193). Moreover, Lily struggles to connect with Mr. Carmichael, who is near her as she tries to finish her painting and to whom she wishes to share her grief over Mrs. Ramsay’s death. Art does not distract her from tense social relations; a tense social relationship diverts her from her art: “For whatever reason she could not achieve the razor edge of balance between two opposite forces; Mr. Ramsay and the picture” (TL 218). Lily, in other words, is hindered in completing her portrait by perceived distance between her and other humans, particularly Mr. Ramsay and Mr. Carmichael.

Lily overcomes this hindrance by beginning to view life as if it were a work of art. She realizes, for instance, that “[i]t was a terribly inefficient machine ... the human apparatus for painting or for feeling” (TL 219). Lily is referring simultaneously to her stance before her easel and to her catching the essential vision of Mrs. Ramsay and feeling connected to her. Lily speaks of art (“painting”) and life (“feeling”) in the same, or exchangeable, terms. Lily becomes more aware of how her vision of Mr. Ramsay parallels her thinking about the lines, shadings, and perspective that inform a painting:

So much depends then, thought Lily Briscoe, looking at the sea which had scarcely a stain on it, which was so soft that the sails and clouds seemed set in its blue, so much depends, she thought, upon distance: whether people are near us for far from us; for her feeling for Mr. Ramsay changed as he sailed further and further across the bay. It seemed elongated, stretched out... (TL 216)

Knowledge of people and paintings is parallel: “But this was one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail, to sit in one’s garden and look at the slopes of a hill running purple down into the distant heather. She knew him [Mr. Carmichael] in that way” (TL 220). Knowledge of humans in reality mirrors the knowledge of a portrait scene in art.

Lily finds a solution to her artist’s block. She completes the portrait -- triumphantly thinking “I have had my vision” (TL 236) -- after she realizes that there is significance in the act of capturing a passing moment of life’s beauty in art. Art and its creation facilitate a kind of permanence amid the world of change: “[The painting] would be hung in attics ... it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself” (TL 236). Lily can finish the portrait of Mrs. Ramsay when she realizes the essence of her beauty: that Mrs. Ramsay was able to bring, even if just in moments, harmony and intimacy to the disorder of life, as she had attempted to do through her actions at the dinner party. Lily sees Mrs. Ramsay in her painting as she understands Mrs. Ramsay in life: the two are mutually informing and in this sense parallel. What is meaningful, what remains, is not necessarily or always the “actual picture ... but what it attempted” (TL 203) -- as in life.

In the end Lily feels sympathetically at peace with Mr. Ramsay and communicatively united to Mr. Carmichael (TL 235). She realizes that perspective matters in human relations as in art. The human apparatus for painting and feeling depends upon recognizing multiple perspectives and angles, the web of relationships. Even “fondness” and “knowing” people is about filling out the gaps of scenes, sometimes from distances with only outlines, impressions. These are imaginatively but truly cast (TL 196). Proper perspective makes a difference in the thing felt, including harmonious relationships.

Harmonious relationships in Woolf’s narrative world resemble the intuitive understanding that one has of art, especially of the artist’s appreciating a work’s perfection, its completeness. At the end of the novel’s first part, Mr. Ramsay desperately wishes for Mrs. Ramsay to tell him verbally that she loves him, but Mrs. Ramsay refuses. She prefers the nonverbal communication of intimacy: “But she could not do it; she could not say it. Then, knowing that he was watching her, instead of saying anything she turned, holding her stocking, and looked at him. And as she looked at him she began to smile, for though she had not said a word, he knew, of course, that she loved him. He could not deny it. ... For she had triumphed again. She had not said it: yet he knew” (TL 137). An important echo of this intimate sort of nonverbal communication occurs at the novel’s conclusion, and it is important because of its connection to Lily’s completion of her portrait of Mrs. Ramsay.

Lily achieves a nonverbal communicative exchange with Mr. Carmichael. This similarity immediately precedes and seems to facilitate her completion of her painting. Mr. Carmichael finally voices what Lily had been thinking about Mr. Ramsay’s arriving at the Lighthouse, but Lily accents the confirmation it provides of their moment of intimately shared thought: “They had not needed to speak. They had been thinking the very same things and he had answered her without her asking him anything” (TL 235). Just after this, Lily experiences intensely for a moment her artistic vision: “There it was -- her picture” (TL 236). Lily finds her intimate artistic connection with Mrs. Ramsay in a silent but significant and undeniable moment. Lily’s nonverbal communicative connection to Mr. Carmichael seems to enable this artistic moment inasmuch as it parallels the pattern of Mrs. Ramsay’s own intimate moment with her husband, a pattern of knowledge Lily the artist now follows.

For Lily -- and for Woolf but contra Freud -- art seems not an illusion functioning solely as a palliative escape from life’s pain, but as a practical means of creating significantly intimate connections with moments of reality and persons within it. For Lily, the perspective that yields successfully intimate art is parallel to the perspective that yields intimate relationships in life.