Memory and Artistic Dissent: An Analogical Reading of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Atwood’s Surfacing

Abstract

This article examines the intersections between memory and artistic vision in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) and Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972), two novels resonating with feminist tensions and gender issues. Investigating two anxious female artists—Lily Briscoe in Woolf’s novel and the unnamed narrator of Atwood’s novel—the researchers argue that memory functions as a source of order and recuperation. Against patriarchal norms, memory allows for psychic healing, liberation and a fresh start. It engenders a space that can correct the wrongs of the past and help the female characters explore their imaginative abilities and enhance their self-esteem. Digging into the past, these artistic figures redeem their lives from the ravages of time, war and patriarchal oppressions. This approach allows for the liberation and the future growth of the artistic visions of the two painters. Each artist, however, reacts differently to the resurfacing of the painful past. For instance, in To the Lighthouse (a modernist text), Lily embraces art as a form of redemption and thus finishes her painting through her positive memory of Mrs Ramsay. However, the unnamed artist in Surfacing (a postmodern manifestation of art) renounces art and destroys her drawings in the process of coming to terms with her past. This article situates both texts within modernist and postmodernist notions on the value and function of art in order to explicate the essential junctions between memory and art and, therefore, demonstrate dissident artistic responses oscillating between (modernist) espousal and (postmodernist) repudiation.