Virginia Woolf 's To the Lighthouse: Toward an Integrated Jurisprudence

logic, but through empathic or connected knowing. Connected knowing involves not just thinking in contextual particularity but feeling. It "entails 'generous thinking' and 'receptive rationality.'" 1 4 It requires "the deliberate, imaginative extension of one's understanding into positions that initially feel wrong or remote."115 Connected knowers use images not of invading another mind but of opening themselves up to receive another's experience into their own minds." 6 Mrs. Ramsay thought of herself as "a sponge sopped full of human emotions." 1 7 At her dinner party Her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging, trembling.1 Mrs. Ramsay's subjective knowledge is not external but internal. Her instinctive truth is personal, private, and subjectively known or intuited. "Truth, for subjective knowers, is an intuitive reaction-something experienced, not thought out, something felt rather than actively pursued or 112. Id. 113. To THE LIGHTHOUSE, supra note 5, at 9. 114. BELENKY ElT AL., supra note 24, at 121 (quoting NoDDINGS, supra note 33) (citation omitted). 115. BELENKY Er AL., supra note 24, at 121. One woman explains, "'I receive the other into myself, and I see and feel with the other.'" Id. at 122. 116. Id. 117. To THE LIGHTHOUSE, supra note 5, at 32. 118. Id. at 106. 19941 Yale Journal of Law and Feminism constructed."" 9 This theory holds that women see themselves as "conduits through which truth emerges," 2' and identify truth "as feelings that come from within" in contrast to "ideas that come from without."12 Truth is a feeling; Lily Briscoe believes that Mrs. Ramsay experiences a "simple certainty."" "Subjectivist women distrust logic, analysis, abstraction and even language itself" in turning inward for answers. 23 Mrs. Ramsay could not follow "ugly academic jargon."124 "Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified. Her singleness of mind made her drop plumb like a stone, alight exact as a bird, gave her, naturally, this swoop and fall of the spirit upon truth . ".. 125 Intuition is symbolized by the Lighthouse beam: Mrs. Ramsay "[]ooked at the steady light . . . which was so much her, yet so little her . . . as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight ... "126 In contrast to Mr. Ramsay's linear, logical thought process, Mrs. Ramsay's intuitive process is more like an organic sound and light improvisation: Words . . .began washing from side to side of her mind rhythmically, and as they washed, words, like little shaded lights, one red, one blue, one yellow, lit up in the dark of her mind, and seemed leaving their perches up there to fly across and across, or to cry out and to be