The “One-Line-Portraitˮ in to the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: Freeing the Counter-Norms

At the Ramsay’s Scottish summer home, where guests are promised an illusory trip to the lighthouse, Lily Briscoe, a post-impressionist painter, indulges into portraying Mrs Ramsay. Throughout the novel, the portrait changes forms, starting as a moving tree in the first section ‘The Window’ and ending, after Mrs Ramsay’s death, as a single line in the very last page of the novel where Lily Briscoe sees it as completed. The “passage into abstraction” satisfies her for she executes the vision she had. The plot follows the same scheme, unfolding through shifting perspectives and oscillating between the figurative and abstract stream of consciousness of each character. It thus reflects Lily’s unstable portrait and paves the way for a deterritorialised writing. This paper will analyse how the “actes graphiques” (the drawn as well as the written items) mutate into an abstract – and therefore non- or a-gendered – line in order to release the un-articulated and un-lived antimainstream love between Lily Briscoe and Mrs Ramsay.