“Beauty Would Roll Itself up”: From Beauty to the Feminine Sublime in To the Lighthouse

Known for her unconventional approach to shaping feminist aesthetics through writing, Virginia Woolf portrays a woman painter’s quest for autonomy in the novel To the Lighthouse. Critics have probed Woolf’s insightful rewriting of the sublime from different angles, but systemic research into her innovative refashioning of the feminine sublime in her novels remains inadequate. Applying the classic and feminist theories on the sublime and beauty, the article investigates how Woolf reimagines a new sublime mode for Lily Briscoe. The article first focuses on how Virginia Woolf writes her personal life into Lily Briscoe’s quest for the feminine sublime: the archetypal mother’s beauty haunts the woman artist until she works out a new pattern that redefines the position of beauty and sublimity. It then examines Lily’s first step to challenge the traditional aesthetics of beauty by embracing her heterogeneity; namely, by accepting her ambivalent attitudes towards Mrs. Ramsay’s maternity, she empowers the inner self oppressed by the patriarchal society. Furthermore, Lily enriches the feminine sublime by breaking beyond the subject–object binary and succeeding in building intersubjectivity between her and Mrs. Ramsay, and her and Mr. Ramsay. The article concludes that to attain autonomy, Lily Briscoe builds her feminine sublime by cultivating her heterogeneity and subjectifying the Other. It further reveals that through the portrayal of Lily in To the Lighthouse, Woolf conveys her rebellion against the beauty fashioned within patriarchal discourse and promotes the new sublime for women artists like herself.