To Want and Not to Have
In classic Western novels, women have two choices: you can get married, or you can die. You are either Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, riding off in a carriage with the love of your life, or you are Anna Karenina, tossing yourself into an oncoming train. If you are a woman in a Dickens novel, you must be perfectly angelic, get married, and then die. The underlying message is clear: find a man to marry, or else.
There are a few rare exceptions across literary history: Jo March, in the first volume of Little Women, Janie after her third husband dies in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Lily Briscoe, a protagonist of Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, is perhaps the most fully developed character of classic literature who neither marries nor dies. Lily is a painter who spends her summers socializing with the Ramsays, a genteel family who vacations on a Hebridean island. Despite Mrs. Ramsay’s attempts to match-make Lily with the widower William Bankes, Lily never gets married, knowing she prefers to be alone.
Lily’s only romantic interest is Mrs. Ramsay herself. Lily spends the novel painting a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay, trying to achieve an intimacy with the married woman through art that she can’t express in her life. When Mrs. Ramsay, like all good literary women, dies, so does Lily’s only potential source of romantic love. Instead of love, Lily chooses art, both due to the limitations of her homophobic society and her preference for solitude.
In many ways, Lily is the answer to a feminist reader’s frustrations over centuries of dead or married women—she forges another path. When I read the novel for the first time at thirty, I was intrigued by Lily’s choices. I’d been single for several years, unsure if I would ever get married, and contemplating what a single future would look like. Was this the literary narrative that offered a map for my own life? Would a life of solitary contentment be enough, or would I always feel a pull towards romantic love?
*
“What if I never fall in love again?” I ask, only half-joking.
I slurp a bowl of pho at a noodle house off Highway 1, waiting for my friend Larisa to reassure me, or challenge me, or give sage advice as a single woman nine years older than me.
“I don’t know, dude,” Larisa replies. “I’d like to feel that again too. Ideally before my one egg rolling around in there gives up.”
I laugh and sip my boba tea. My last relationship had ended two years prior, after I’d realized I couldn’t stay with someone who kept texting the woman he’d cheated on me with. I’d dated here and there, but nothing had stuck. At twenty-six, I was starting to worry I would never feel the kind of love I’d felt for my college ex again.
I met Larisa when I joined the faculty of an all-girls boarding school in Monterey, California. I’d left an English PhD in Palo Alto, seeking a more social means to share my love of literature than the indefinite library quarantine of a dissertation. Living on campus in the dorms made my life much less private than in my Bay Area studio apartments. I was also suddenly on my own, at least a two-hour drive from my friends and more isolated than I’d been since the awkward transition between college and graduate school.
Once a month, I had to stay in the dorms for the weekend to mind the girls and wake them up for Sunday mass. I consoled them when they were down and cheered them on when they were up, baked them banana bread, talked about Charlotte Brontë with my nerdiest students before shooing them to bed.
When I wasn’t on duty, I would make the trip back to the Bay Area to see friends and break outside the all-consuming bubble of the school. I made ramen at Anita’s apartment in the Sunset, drank cocktails with Emily in the Financial District, or joined Mary in Noe Valley while she minded a professor’s cat, the two of us gossiping over glasses of wine poached from the professor’s collection.
I didn’t have a guy, but I had the company of women. Spending time with the girls in the dorm and my friends provided a buffer against loneliness, a form of intimacy that sustained me.
But of course, there were days when I didn’t go to San Francisco and I wasn’t on duty. Faced with an empty weekend, I’d panic on Friday night, wondering what I would do with all that time on my own. What did I used to do?, I wondered, as if my past self would have more answers. But then, I’d start doing laundry, pickling cucumbers from the farmer’s market, catching up on the New York Times, giggling at Jane the Virgin, hiking along the cliffs of Big Sur—until I found the next week had begun.
I’d gone from living and studying with a community of people my age to teaching at a school where I had to carve out a personal life separate from my work life. I had to figure out what my personal life even was without the built-in community I was used to, a part of the process of becoming an adult—the disappearance of our childhood coterie of friends, siblings, and parents that, in the absence of a partner and family to replace it, leaves us on our own.
So I started doing things I’d never done alone before. Earlier in my twenties, embarrassed by the idea of doing anything by myself in public and with friends available nearby, I’d find someone to join me whenever I went out into the world. Now, I spent Friday nights eating take-out Indian food and rewatching Gilmore Girls, any sense of lameness overridden by the exhaustion of a first-year teacher. I strolled through the farmer’s market solo, enjoying the anonymity that came with walking alone in a place I’d just moved to. I eyed the cute banjo player next to the farm stands but only picked up strawberries to munch on the way home.
I escaped from campus most evenings for a walk on the beach. I’d take off my shoes and sink my feet into the cool, grainy sand. I stared out at Monterey Bay as I traced the edge of the water, scanning for the furry bump of a sea otter or the sleek head of a seal. I took in the pale pinks, blues, oranges, and grays of the changing sky. Prior to my move, even going for a walk was something I’d felt too self-conscious to do by myself, worried everyone would be looking at me and wondering why I was alone. But in Monterey, after spending the day surrounded by students, I craved these moments of privacy and quiet pleasure.
*
As much as I was learning to enjoy spending time by myself, I still had moments of loneliness, of nostalgia for intimacy, of wanting to be wanted. So on my jaunts to San Francisco, I would tack on a date with any guy who mentioned books in his Hinge profile, a rarity in the Bay Area. They were harmless, but not a match—a journalist who didn’t know why he’d gotten into journalism, a software engineer who went on for too long about the absurdity of rent prices, a handsome project manager who just didn’t hold my interest, each one wearing the same chambray button-down shirt.
Men in Woolf’s fiction disappoint at best, threaten at worst. In To the Lighthouse, Mr. Ramsay fails to understand his wife or live up to her ideals, leaving her to lament “the inadequacy of human relationships.” Even Bankes, who also loves Mrs. Ramsay, drifts in and out of his appreciation for her, distancing himself from her at a climactic dinner party to ponder his botanical work instead.
Even the mild-mannered Charles Tansley, Mr. Ramsay’s academic protegé, poses a threat to Lily as an artist. A nagging voice in Lily’s head tells her, “Women can’t paint, can’t write,” discouraging her from completing her work. Having internalized this mantra, she remembers only late in the novel that Tansley was the one to first say it to her.
At the dinner party, Tansley demands Lily’s attention, talking at her while she thinks about her painting. Though she initially resists him, she eventually “for the hundred and fiftieth time…had to renounce her experiment—what happens if one is not nice to that young man there—and be nice.” She listens to him tell a story about a time he’d been trapped in a lighthouse during a storm, asking questions at all the right moments.
I went on a date in San Francisco with a Charles Tansley. We got dinner at a trendy restaurant, the kind of place serving crudo and crispy brussels sprouts. I’d enjoyed our first date, when we’d argued over the best Pride and Prejudiceadaptation. But this time, he ran through the typical second-date checklist of topics: what he did for work, his family. Bored but trying to be polite, I glanced at my watch, calculating when I could catch the train.
Even though I had no desire to extend the date, I felt obligated to be “nice.” So when the server brought the check after an hour, I felt like I couldn’t just end the date and leave. That seemed, well, rude. I thanked him for dinner and said, “There’s a Caltrain I could catch soon, or…”
“Or?” he asked.
“Or” turned into heading to a nearby bar. A couple missed Caltrains later, I was stuck on a couch with a second glass of Pinot Grigio, leaning away while he edged closer to me. The conversation moved from unremarkable to irritating. After I’d dared to use a few multisyllabic words, he informed me “my Stanford was showing.” Despite my annoyance, I’d continued to be “nice,” smiling and nodding while squirming to avoid any physical contact.
When I finally left, alone on the train, I berated myself for not putting my foot down and wondered why I hadn’t left sooner. I hadn’t been assertive enough, feminist enough—never mind that the ritual of dating was set up over a century ago to disempower women and let the man run the show. Like after so many other dates, I felt lonelier than I had before, feeling no connection to the other person and, even worse, losing my connection to myself, to what I wanted.
*
By my second year in Monterey, I’d had enough of lengthy treks into the city for dates that only further hardened my cynicism. So I stopped dating and spent more time reading, cooking, walking on my own and eating, laughing, talking with my friends.
Not actively dating wasn’t a perfect solution. It gave me more time and better company, but there was still longing, frustration, and expectation. I wanted to feel someone interlacing their fingers with mine, wrapping their arms around me, breathing next to me. I wanted to do the crossword with someone, read a book while stretching my legs over theirs. I wanted to be loved by someone I loved.
At my lowest, I’d lament how years of my youth had gone to waste now as I approached the age of thirty, like a seventeenth-century poet telling an innocent beauty to seize the day before her flower fades. I knew these were ridiculous thoughts even then. I knew that, logically, I was still young, there was plenty of time ahead of me, and I should punch that inner seventeenth-century poet in the face. But it was still hard to reject that voice that had gotten inside of me, the voice that many women hear calling at some point in their lives, dripping poison into our ears in our loneliest moments.
Lily remains unmarried and finishes her painting in her forties at the end of the novel. She still aches with desire and grief over Mrs. Ramsay’s death: “For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there?...To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have—to want and want—how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!” Partly out of preference and partly out of necessity, Lily continues to live alone. Her solitude allows her to realize her artistic potential, unburdened by the needs of a man or the overwhelming emotions she might feel for a woman. But there’s still a current of longing in Lily that goes unsatisfied.
To some extent, Woolf avoids this craving for romantic love by having Lily fall for a straight, married woman who dies halfway through the novel. A literary heroine might spend the rest of her life lamenting a lost, impossible love while stroking her masterpiece into being—but that seemed less viable in reality, not exactly the aesthetic model I sought to emulate.
*
During my two years in Monterey, more and more of my friends from grad school moved away once they finished their PhDs. The long drives on 101 to see the friends still around wore on me. It started to feel like there wasn’t much reason left for me to stay. So I applied for teaching jobs where I didn’t have to live down the hall from delightful but needy teenagers. I got an offer from one in New England, closer to where I’d grown up.
When I knew I’d be moving, I lingered over every last meal, late night, and lazy morning with my friends. I baked a banana cake topped with coconut cream frosting for Anita’s birthday that we devoured while lounging on her couch. Larisa drove me to SFO for my flight east, teasing about the pile of luggage my five-foot-frame would have to carry, and I wondered whether I’d have anyone like her to joke with at my next job. Mary and I had a final brunch at a diner in Palo Alto, swapping notes on the novels we’d been reading. It hit me how much I would miss all of them when she cried as we hugged goodbye.
Having sold my IKEA furniture and shipped the rest of my belongings to my parents’ house, I set out on a trip to Europe, a final hurrah before I moved to Boston and started looking for a new apartment. I visited London and Dublin with Emily before she returned to California and went on to Provence for a final solo leg of the trip.
It was my first time traveling somewhere by myself, with no one else to consider. For two weeks in Aix-en-Provence, I was alone and free to do whatever I wanted. I felt nervous at first whenever I stepped outside my Airbnb, double-checking where I was going on my phone and rehearsing my high school French vocabulary in my head. But the more I did, the more comfortable I felt. I munched on a pain au chocolat at the farmer’s market as I picked out what I wanted for lunch: cheese, cherries, a baguette. I walked up a cobble-stoned hill, sweating in the late afternoon sun, to enjoy Cézanne’s view of Mont Saint-Victoire with no one else around me.
Eating out at a “table pour une” was another matter, something I wasn’t sure I was ready for. I cooked most nights, making simple pasta dishes with whatever vegetables I’d found at the market. But after the first week, I couldn’t deny myself the salmon tartares and glasses of rosé I saw people indulging in as I walked by. After testing the waters at a couple small cafés, I made a reservation at a highly rated restaurant to have one special meal to myself.
*
The ending of To the Lighthouse feels triumphant. Lily achieves her vision as an artist. And at the same time, she still grieves over Mrs. Ramsay, the woman she loved. Both feelings can be true at once—accomplishment and loss, peace and longing, contentment and hunger. I try to let these emotions run together in my own mind. I can be single, I can feel comfortable alone, I can be self-sufficient—and at the same time, I can feel desire, I can feel loneliness, I can feel want. The two are not mutually exclusive, nor does one cancel the other out.
“Bon soir, mademoiselle,” my waitress greets me, leading me to my table outdoors. Twinkle lights are strung along the perimeter of the restaurant’s area of the square, and the temperature has cooled down from the afternoon heat. She switches from French to English whenever I can’t quite follow what she asks—and, even more kindly, back to French when I keep trying.
A little unsure of what to do by myself, I scroll through my phone while waiting for the first course. I sip on the glass of viognier my waitress recommended. I glance around at the clientele sitting nearby. Couples, families, myself the only solo diner.
But to my surprise, as more time passes, it doesn’t matter to me that I’m on my own. I felt self-conscious when I first arrived, but whether it’s the warm welcome, the wine, or the pleasant atmosphere, I don’t feel out of place—I’m just looking forward to what I will eat.
My first course arrives: a sea bass carpaccio decorated with pickled onion, thinly sliced beets, sprigs of dill, and edible flowers. The second course, braised duck strewn with snow peas and carrots. And to finish, a tiny cheesecake for one, orbited by berries sitting atop dots of coulis. I savor every bite. It was exactly what I wanted.
-Akemi Ueda
Akemi Ueda is a writer and high school English teacher living in the Boston area. She completed the year-long Essay Incubator course at Grub Street in Boston in 2024 and has a Master’s in English Literature from Stanford University. Her work has been published in Mochi Magazine and Open Secrets, and she has an essay forthcoming in Peatsmoke Journal.