Cashmere Shawl as Metaphor and Matterfold

While Mrs. Ramsay's cashmere shawl has been commonly recognized as an organizing trope in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse , this essay calls attention to the “materialities” of the shawl by drawing on a thing‐centered metonymic reading and discourses of new materialism. The first metonymic reading – or what I call a “molar‐form” reading – delves into the historical archive of the cashmere shawl to disclose its role as a material nexus of imperial modernity. But if the shawl is encoded within the molar structure of British Empire in this material archaeology, the second new materialist, “molecular‐force” reading transforms the shawl from a tangible object into an affective body, from a metaphor of imperialism into a “matterfold” of affectivity, to foreground its entangled, vibrant materiality in a dynamic field of forces. Shifting the emphasis from molar aggregates to molecular affects, this essay argues that Lily's “vision” at the end invokes a new aesthetics that replaces the substantialist distinction of subject and object with an affective differentiation of bodies.