Intimate Distance: The Boundary of Life and Art in 'To the Lighthouse'

To the Lighthouse deals with the central problem of the dissolution of the symbiotic union of the early mother-child relationship, and the child's resultant quest for a lost primal unity and yet antithetical drive for independent identity. The problem of psychological wholeness also merges with the novel's constant meditations on completion of aesthetic form, and determines the very structure of the narrative and Woolf's style in general. The drives for union and separation, intimacy and distance also become sexually categorized as respectively masculine and feminine, and are perceived as both potentially creative and destructive.

Woolf's concern with boundary ambiguity reflects the concern with interruption and violation of unities, an 'oral-narcissistic dilemma', and her confused sexuality. It also determines her aesthetic vision and the fragmentation of her prose, her obsession with visual perspective and the eye in the novel. The prose style, which makes painting a central metaphor for knowledge, has important parallels with Cubism, and the Cubist reaction against the artificial mathematical illusions of Renaissance perspective. Woolf's style is especially similar to that of the Cubists in its use of juxtaposed perspectives and its attempt to capture psychological consciousness prior to abstraction. Like the Cubists, she opposes a logic that sets up an illusory reality, and attempts to create alternative models. Her style is a result of a kind of feminine dislocation, a dissolution of the secure centres of a male-dominated culture, and a new definition of the real.