英语论文哪里有？笔者针对人际关系在公共领域的变化，论文主要关注上流社会社交场合中语言对话表层结构与其背后含义的张力。作为通用的交流媒介，语言在公共话语中成了空洞的词句和社交润滑剂，虽然有助于上流社会的运转，却难以承载真情实感。
Chapter One Private Discourse Within Edwardian Domesticity
1.1 Value Gaps Behind Illusion of Resonance
Woolf’s portrayal of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay’s relations cannot be taken at face value in that the narrator’s voice tends to undermine characters’ self-judgement. Despite the “resonance” that Mrs. Ramsay claims to feel with her husband as “two different notes, one high, one low” (44), Woolf does not represent that kind of reciprocity on a positive front. Her narrative draws attention to elements of discord on both sides, demonstrating Mr. Ramsay’s self-imposed isolation in his intellectual pursuit and questioning Mrs. Ramsay’s self-deceptive illusion of harmony. Their relationship seems to operate in a reciprocal way in which the husband asks his share of sympathy for the “protection” that he gives his family through intellectual pursuit (38). The wife, in exchange, relieves him of mundane worries (such as the greenhouse bills hovering in her mind), furnishing him with “this delicious fecundity” of life whenever his mind drains itself to “sterility” (42). What seems genuine mutual understanding, however, belies their fundamentally divergent values and modes of perception, which contribute to the ensuing communication failure.
Chapter Two Public Discourse at Social Gatherings
2.1 Mannered Communication
Woolf deals with the distancing interpersonal relations through dramatizing the tension between social language and psychological language. Social language is meant here as the words spoken by the dinner participants, the public discourse which facilitate the flow of conversation yet inevitably compromise their real sensation and communicative urge. This tension is quite similar to the Ramsays’ relation, in which the spoken words do not always match the interior worlds. Yet unlike the Ramsays who secretly agree upon the jarring reality of uncommunication and psychological detachment from each other, the social world, mingled with different personal histories and temperaments, is more exasperatingly troubled by dyadic encounters. The difficulty of their communication resides not only in the inability or reluctance to express what one means, but also in the tendency to misread others. Such distrust in interpersonal connection has to do with the medium of communication, namely how language tends to bear different layers of meanings during verbal transactions. Just as Nussbaum argues, despite being “a general medium of exchange,” language of daily life is “too crude to express what is most personal, what is deepest in the individual consciousness” (734). Nussbaum’s argument indicates that there are different layers of language, including the common “language of daily social interchange” and “language of thought” peculiar to individuals (735). There may be commonly agreed-upon meanings when they communicate in social language, yet behind it is something deeply personal about “each person’s history and character and taste” (Nussbaum 735), which cannot make it to verbal expression.
Chapter Three Transcending Private-Public Dichotomy: Lily’s Pictorial Representation
3.1 Aesthetic and Interpersonal Vision in Lily’s Painting
Lily Briscoe’s painting is an aesthetic project that weaves through the novel from “The Window” to “The Lighthouse. It is only at the end of the novel that she has her vision: “With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre” (238). The line suggests that she has somehow resolved the issue of empty space in the painting that has been haunting her for years. The realization of aesthetic vision, this section argues, is closely linked with her understanding of human relations and expression of her long-pent communicative urge. Just as Joanne Winning describes, Lily’s painting is about her “affective investment in her own modernist object” (115). Trying to project what she feels about communication, relations, and the world onto the canvas, Lily has spent years on this project, undergoing countless moments of struggles and self-doubt. Her idea of painting is that it is the residue of her thirty-three years, the deposit of each day’s living, mixed with something more secret than she had ever spoken or shown in the course of all those days. (TL, 59)
For Lily, her painting expresses her interior world, which is why she fears so much “the awful trial of someone looking at her picture” (59). Yet meanwhile, she experiences a sense of intimacy when Mr. Bankes looks at her picture without disparagement, feeling that “This man had shared with her something profoundly intimate” (61). Despite Mrs. Ramsay’s making matches between the two, Lily’s view of intimacy is not involved with marriage or love between men and women. It is more related to an understanding of the heart. Her vision of interpersonal connection is certainly poetic and evades language, trying to enclose this shared moment with Bankes in her paint-box: “she nicked the catch of her paint-box to, more firmly than was necessary, and the nick seemed to surround in a circle for ever the paint-box, the lawn, Mr. Bankes, and that wild villain, Cam, dashing past” (61). The gesture of “more firmly than was necessary” suggests Lily’s determination to metaphorically store this moment in her mind, as a memory of profound connections.
3.2 Reconciliation with Limited Mundanity
While painting is a mode of representation that seeks to transcend the limits of verbal medium in daily communication, it is not an easy aesthetic project. As she muses while struggling with the painting: “It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment” (220). The analogy between painting and feeling suggests that her painting is not merely a purely aesthetic project, but also a visual medium through which she communicates her feelings that used to fail words at the dinner-party. The difficulty is also obvious: even though she takes recourse to visual medium to avoid the limitation of verbal language in communication, the struggle remains. It is only after she gets reconciled with the limitation of interpersonal understanding and accepts her epistemological insufficiency that she finishes her painting. The space that she fills is not the absolute penetration into Mrs. Ramsay’s interior space. It is completed through an acceptance of the fundamental unknowability of others and the mundane communication Mrs. Ramsay enables. On the one hand, Lily reconfigures her understanding of intimacy, recognizing “Mrs. Ramsay’s irreducibility” (Högberg 136) and her own perceptive limitation. On the other hand, she incorporates the mundane wordly communication into her painterly vision.
Conclusion
This thesis examines Virginia Woolf’s exploration of interpersonal relations in To the Lighthouse through three communication modes: the private discourse of the Ramsay couple, the mannered public discourse, and the transcendent mode embodied in Lily Briscoe’s pictorial representation. Through these modes, Woolf interrogates the crisis of human connection in the Edwardian era while tentatively offering alternative form of communication that may bypass linguistic limitations and help build genuine connection. As shown by the three chapters above, interpersonal relations are inevitably difficult in Woolf’s fictional world, involving not only the tendency to misread others due to different understandings of language, but also the inability to articulate what one feels or thinks. Such two-way obstacle to communication renders Woolf’s characters almost isolated from each other, longing for authentic connection yet unable to break the barrier of language or to completely lay open one’s interiority. Even the domestic realm, a place of physical and emotional intimacy, is not immune to such communication connundrum. The Ramsays are known by others for their marriage and emotional reciprocity, yet this is merely a façade of their relationship. The narrator keeps mimicrying Mr. or Mrs. Ramsay in their free indirect discourse, undermining their self-judgement and illusion of resonance. Woolf’s narrative draws attention to elements of discord on both sides, demonstrating Mr. Ramsay’s self-imposed isolation in his intellectual pursuit and questioning Mrs. Ramsay’s self-deceptive illusion of harmony. What seems genuine mutual understanding, however, belies their fundamentally divergent values, contributing to the ensuing communication failure.
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