Ah, I felt like I could just fly!

Regarding the Lily Briscoe/Elizabeth Dalloway similarity, I can only take some stabs in the dark.  First off, it should be established that Virginia Woolf periodically got called out for being racist, antisemitic, and a snob... so, in pointing out the Chinese eyes on each of these characters, I think that one of her chief aims was to establish that neither Elizabeth nor Lily was conventionally pretty.  This fact, to an author whose adult relatives and acquaintances while growing up were themselves products of the Victorian era, would likely shape her perception of girls whose looks prevented them from being hot commodities.  It was assumed from the beginning that Lily would never marry; Woolf goes so far as to call her (ironically) "an old maid holding a paintbrush" or something (I looked and couldn't find the exact quote, but it was very powerfully delivered to show how stark and undeserving Lily's external identity was, after we had just gotten to know her thoughts so deeply).  At least in To the Lighthouse, Woolf is composing a detailed meditation on 'beauty,' broadly construed.  Thus, in making Lily less-than beautiful, she is allowing for a level of complexity that could not exist under the name of 'beauty', a complexity that makes emotions less convenient and familiar.  Indeed, much of the novel concerns Lily's battle with her own perceptions and emotions--to understand them and recreate them in art.  Recall when Woolf writes: 

"But beauty was not everything,  Beauty had this penalty--it came too readily, came too completely.  It stilled life--froze it.  One forgot the little agitations; the flush, the pallor, some queer distortion, some light or shadow which made the face unrecognizable for a moment and yet added a quality one saw forever after.  It was simpler to smooth that all out under the cover of beauty."

Another interesting connection between Lily and Elizabeth was their love for older women.  While Lily has a sort of aesthetic and spiritual fixation with Mrs. Ramsay, Elizabeth falls in love, as it were, with Doris Kilman (which Clarissa strongly resented).  I'm actually finding this to be sort of common; in Anna Karenina, Kitty similarly 'falls in love' with Anna when they first meet in Moscow, and Tolstoy says something about how Kitty felt for Anna a type of romance that young girls often feel for older, married women.  Kitty similarly feels this way for Varenka, establishing a relationship that's actually quite similar to that between Elizabeth and Miss Kilman.  Tolstoy was a big influence on Woolf's writing, but I don't quite know what to make of these relationships though.  We should read some Freud... I'm sure that would clear all of this up for us.

As for what Claire was saying, about the novel seeming "hyperreal" in a lot of ways, I think that's a really interesting fact that sort of relates Woolf to yet another realist who was a great influence  on her (and for whom our blog is named).  When you think about this idea of the "roar which lies on the other side of silence" and hearing "the grass grow and the squirrel's heartbeat," that's basically what Woolf is creating for us.  After all, what else did Septimus die from other than this hypersensitivity to every force that surrounded him?   Here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia article on Modernism:

"Modernism, while it was still "progressive" increasingly saw traditional forms and traditional social arrangements as hindering progress, and therefore the artist was recast as a revolutionary, overthrowing rather than enlightening."

Indeed, Woolf isn't 'adding' to our conception of reality like Eliot or Tolstoy tried to do; rather, she's trying to overthrow it completely and show us something new.  Wasn't it Ezra pound who said "Make it new" as a description of modernism?  I think so, but yes, it *is* hyperreal and that's why we love it.

So... what are we reading next?  Claire and I talked about this and did not find resolution.  Also, are we still doing the poetry thing?  I wouldn't mind discussing the Frank O'Hara poem ("The Day Lady Died") with all of you, because I'm not that comfortable with just my own thoughts on it.  I actually looked at a collection of his poems in Barnes & Noble today, and I actually came to find his style really interesting once I read a few more poems.

Other than that, I have said all I can say.  Hope you guys are having a good week...