Virginia Woolf and To the Lighthouse Background

Virginia Woolf was born on January 25, 1882, a descendant of one of Victorian England’s most
prestigious literary families. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was the editor of the Dictionary of
National Biography and was married to the daughter of the writer William Thackeray. Woolf
grew up among the most important and influential British intellectuals of her time, and received
free rein to explore her father’s library. Her personal connections and abundant talent soon
opened doors for her. Woolf wrote that she found herself in “a position where it was easier on
the whole to be eminent than obscure.” Almost from the beginning, her life was a precarious
balance of extraordinary success and mental instability.

As a young woman, Woolf wrote for the prestigious Times Literary Supplement, and as an adult
she quickly found herself at the center of England’s most important literary community. Known
as the “Bloomsbury Group” after the section of London in which its members lived, this group of
writers, artists, and philosophers emphasized nonconformity, aesthetic pleasure, and intellectual
freedom, and included such luminaries as the painter Lytton Strachey, the novelist E. M. Forster,
the composer Benjamin Britten, and the economist John Maynard Keynes. Working among such
an inspirational group of peers and possessing an incredible talent in her own right, Woolf
published her most famous novels by the mid-1920s, including The Voyage Out, Mrs.
Dalloway,Orlando, and To the Lighthouse. With these works she reached the pinnacle of her
profession.

Woolf’s life was equally dominated by mental illness. Her parents died when she was young—
her mother in 1895 and her father in 1904—and she was prone to intense, terrible headaches and
emotional breakdowns. After her father’s death, she attempted suicide, throwing herself out a
window. Though she married Leonard Woolf in 1912 and loved him deeply, she was not entirely
satisfied romantically or sexually. For years she sustained an intimate relationship with the
novelist Vita Sackville-West. Late in life, Woolf became terrified by the idea that another
nervous breakdown was close at hand, one from which she would not recover. On March 28,
1941, she wrote her husband a note stating that she did not wish to spoil his life by going mad.
She then drowned herself in the River Ouse.

Woolf’s writing bears the mark of her literary pedigree as well as her struggle to find meaning in
her own unsteady existence. Written in a poised, understated, and elegant style, her work
examines the structures of human life, from the nature of relationships to the experience of time.
Yet her writing also addresses issues relevant to her era and literary circle. Throughout her work
she celebrates and analyzes the Bloomsbury values of aestheticism, feminism, and independence.
Moreover, her stream-of-consciousness style was influenced by, and responded to, the work of
the French thinker Henri Bergson and the novelists Marcel Proust and James Joyce.

This style allows the subjective mental processes of Woolf’s characters to determine the
objective content of her narrative. In To the Lighthouse (1927), one of her most experimental
works, the passage of time, for example, is modulated by the consciousness of the characters
rather than by the clock. The events of a single afternoon constitute over half the book, while the
events of the following ten years are compressed into a few dozen pages. Many readers of To the
Lighthouse, especially those who are not versed in the traditions of modernist fiction, find the
novel strange and difficult. Its language is dense and the structure amorphous. Compared with
the plot-driven Victorian novels that came before it, To the Lighthouse seems to have little in the
way of action. Indeed, almost all of the events take place in the characters’ minds.

Although To the Lighthouse is a radical departure from the nineteenth-century novel, it is, like its
more traditional counterparts, intimately interested in developing characters and advancing both
plot and themes. Woolf’s experimentation has much to do with the time in which she lived: the
turn of the century was marked by bold scientific developments. Charles Darwin’s theory of
evolution undermined an unquestioned faith in God that was, until that point, nearly universal,
while the rise of psychoanalysis, a movement led by Sigmund Freud, introduced the idea of an
unconscious mind. Such innovation in ways of scientific thinking had great influence on the
styles and concerns of contemporary artists and writers like those in the Bloomsbury Group. To
the Lighthouse exemplifies Woolf’s style and many of her concerns as a novelist. With its
characters based on her own parents and siblings, it is certainly her most autobiographical
fictional statement, and in the characters of Mr. Ramsay, Mrs. Ramsay, and Lily Briscoe, Woolf
offers some of her most penetrating explorations of the workings of the human consciousness as
it perceives and analyzes, feels and interacts.

Symbols
The Lighthouse

Lying across the bay and meaning something different and intimately personal to each character,
the lighthouse is at once inaccessible, illuminating, and infinitely interpretable. As the
destination from which the novel takes its title, the lighthouse suggests that the destinations that
seem surest are most unobtainable. Just as Mr. Ramsay is certain of his wife’s love for him and
aims to hear her speak words to that end in “The Window,” Mrs. Ramsay finds these words
impossible to say. These failed attempts to arrive at some sort of solid ground, like Lily’s first try
at painting Mrs. Ramsay or Mrs. Ramsay’s attempt to see Paul and Minta married, result only in
more attempts, further excursions rather than rest. The lighthouse stands as a potent symbol of
this lack of attainability. James arrives only to realize that it is not at all the mist-shrouded
destination of his childhood. Instead, he is made to reconcile two competing and contradictory
images of the tower—how it appeared to him when he was a boy and how it appears to him now
that he is a man. He decides that both of these images contribute to the essence of the lighthouse
—that nothing is ever only one thing—a sentiment that echoes the novel’s determination to
arrive at truth through varied and contradictory vantage points.

The Lighthouse symbolizes human desire, a force that pulsates over the indifferent sea of the
natural world and guides people’s passage across it. Yet even as the Lighthouse stands constant
night and day, season after season, it remains curiously unattainable. James’ frustrated desire to
visit the Lighthouse begins the novel, and Mrs. Ramsay looks at the Lighthouse as she denies
Mr. Ramsay the profession of love he wants so badly at the end of Chapter 1. James, finally
reaching the Lighthouse in Chapter 3 a decade after he’d first wanted to go, sees that, up close,
the Lighthouse looks nothing like it does from across the bay. That misty image he’d desired
from a distance remains unattainable even when he can sail right up to the structure it’s
supposedly attached to. The novel’s title can be understood as a description for experience itself:
one moves through life propelled by desire towards the things one wants, and yet seems rarely to
reach them. One’s life, then, is the process of moving towards, of reaching, of desiring. It is “to”
the Lighthouse, not “at” it.

Lily’s Painting

Lily’s painting represents a struggle against gender convention, represented by Charles Tansley’s
statement that women can’t paint or write. Lily’s desire to express Mrs. Ramsay’s essence as a
wife and mother in the painting mimics the impulse among modern women to know and
understand intimately the gendered experiences of the women who came before them. Lily’s
composition attempts to discover and comprehend Mrs. Ramsay’s beauty just as Woolf’s
construction of Mrs. Ramsay’s character reflects her attempts to access and portray her own
mother.

The painting also represents dedication to a feminine artistic vision, expressed through Lily’s
anxiety over showing it to William Bankes. In deciding that completing the painting regardless
of what happens to it is the most important thing, Lily makes the choice to establish her own
artistic voice. In the end, she decides that her vision depends on balance and synthesis: how to
bring together disparate things in harmony. In this respect, her project mirrors Woolf’s writing,
which synthesizes the perceptions of her many characters to come to a balanced and truthful
portrait of the world.

The Ramsays’ House

The Ramsays’ house is a stage where Woolf and her characters explain their beliefs and
observations. During her dinner party, Mrs. Ramsay sees her house display her own inner
notions of shabbiness and her inability to preserve beauty. In the “Time Passes” section, the
ravages of war and destruction and the passage of time are reflected in the condition of the house
rather than in the emotional development or observable aging of the characters. The house stands
in for the collective consciousness of those who stay in it. At times the characters long to escape
it, while at other times it serves as refuge. From the dinner party to the journey to the lighthouse,
Woolf shows the house from every angle, and its structure and contents mirror the interior of the
characters who inhabit it.

The Sea

References to the sea appear throughout the novel. Broadly, the ever-changing, ever-moving
waves parallel the constant forward movement of time and the changes it brings. Woolf
describes the sea lovingly and beautifully, but her most evocative depictions of it point to its
violence. As a force that brings destruction, has the power to decimate islands, and, as Mr.
Ramsay reflects, “eats away the ground we stand on,” the sea is a powerful reminder of the
impermanence and delicacy of human life and accomplishments.

The sea symbolizes the natural world and its utter apathy towards human life. The natural world
– which encompasses time and mortality – proceeds as usual regardless of whether humans are
happy or grieving, in peace or at war. Like the incontrovertible fact of death gradually claiming
human youth and beauty, the sea slowly eats away at the land, dissolving it minute by minute.
Like the relentless progression of a clock’s hand, the waves beat ceaselessly on the beach and
slow for no one. The sea itself is unchangeable, and the many different descriptions of the sea
throughout the novel in fact describe shifting human opinions. As if it were a mirror, people see
in the sea a reflection of their own state of mind. Thus, when Mrs. Ramsay feels safe and secure,
the waves sound soothing, but when she feels disoriented, the sound of the waves seems violent
and ominous. Thus, during World War I, the ocean appears senseless and brutal, but in
peacetime it appears orderly and beautiful.

The Boar’s Skull

After her dinner party, Mrs. Ramsay retires upstairs to find the children wide-awake, bothered by
the boar’s skull that hangs on the nursery wall. The presence of the skull acts as a disturbing
reminder that death is always at hand, even (or perhaps especially) during life’s most blissful
moments.

The Fruit Basket

Rose arranges a fruit basket for her mother’s dinner party that serves to draw the partygoers out
of their private suffering and unite them. Although Augustus Carmichael and Mrs. Ramsay
appreciate the arrangement differently—he rips a bloom from it; she refuses to disturb it—the
pair is brought harmoniously, if briefly, together. The basket testifies both to the “frozen” quality
of beauty that Lily describes and to beauty’s seductive and soothing quality.

Themes
The Transience of Life and Work

Mr. Ramsay and Mrs. Ramsay take completely different approaches to life: he relies on his
intellect, while she depends on her emotions. But they share the knowledge that the world around
them is transient—that nothing lasts forever. Mr. Ramsay reflects that even the most enduring of
reputations, such as Shakespeare’s, are doomed to eventual oblivion. This realization accounts
for the bitter aspect of his character. Frustrated by the inevitable demise of his own body of work
and envious of the few geniuses who will outlast him, he plots to found a school of philosophy
that argues that the world is designed for the average, unadorned man, for the “liftman in the
Tube” rather than for the rare immortal writer.

Mrs. Ramsay is as keenly aware as her husband of the passage of time and of mortality. She
recoils, for instance, at the notion of James growing into an adult, registers the world’s many
dangers, and knows that no one, not even her husband, can protect her from them. Her reaction
to this knowledge is markedly different from her husband’s. Whereas Mr. Ramsay is bowed by
the weight of his own demise, Mrs. Ramsay is fueled with the need to make precious and
memorable whatever time she has on earth. Such crafted moments, she reflects, offer the only
hope of something that endures.
Art as a Means of Preservation

In the face of an existence that is inherently without order or meaning, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay
employ different strategies for making their lives significant. Mr. Ramsay devotes himself to his
progression through the course of human thought, while Mrs. Ramsay cultivates memorable
experiences from social interactions. Neither of these strategies, however, proves an adequate
means of preserving one’s experience. After all, Mr. Ramsay fails to obtain the philosophical
understanding he so desperately desires, and Mrs. -Ramsay’s life, though filled with moments
that have the shine and resilience of rubies, ends. Only Lily Briscoe finds a way to preserve her
experience, and that way is through her art. As Lily begins her portrait of Mrs. Ramsay at the
beginning of the novel, Woolf notes the scope of the project: Lily means to order and connect
elements that have no necessary relation in the world—“hedges and houses and mothers and
children.” By the end of the novel, ten years later, Lily finishes the painting she started, which
stands as a moment of clarity wrested from confusion. Art is, perhaps, the only hope of surety in
a world destined and determined to change: for, while mourning Mrs. Ramsay’s death and
painting on the lawn, Lily reflects that “nothing stays, all changes; but not words, not paint.”

The Subjective Nature of Reality

Toward the end of the novel, Lily reflects that in order to see Mrs. Ramsay clearly—to
understand her character completely—she would need at least fifty pairs of eyes; only then
would she be privy to every possible angle and nuance. The truth, according to this assertion,
rests in the accumulation of different, even opposing vantage points. Woolf’s technique in
structuring the story mirrors Lily’s assertion. She is committed to creating a sense of the world
that not only depends upon the private perceptions of her characters but is also nothing more
than the accumulation of those perceptions. To try to reimagine the story as told from a single
character’s perspective or—in the tradition of the Victorian novelists—from the author’s
perspective is to realize the radical scope and difficulty of Woolf’s project.

The Restorative Effects of Beauty

At the beginning of the novel, both Mr. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe are drawn out of moments of
irritation by an image of extreme beauty. The image, in both cases, is a vision of Mrs. Ramsay,
who, as she sits reading with James, is a sight powerful enough to incite “rapture” in William
Bankes. Beauty retains this soothing effect throughout the novel: something as trifling as a large
but very beautiful arrangement of fruit can, for a moment, assuage the discomfort of the guests at
Mrs. Ramsay’s dinner party.

Lily later complicates the notion of beauty as restorative by suggesting that beauty has the
unfortunate consequence of simplifying the truth. Her impression of Mrs. Ramsay, she believes,
is compromised by a determination to view her as beautiful and to smooth over her complexities
and faults. Nevertheless, Lily continues on her quest to “still” or “freeze” a moment from life and
make it beautiful. Although the vision of an isolated moment is necessarily incomplete, it is
lasting and, as such, endlessly seductive to her.
Time

To the Lighthouse explores time at every scale, tracking the intricate thoughts and impressions
within a single lived second while also meditating on the infinity of geologic time stretching
back into the past and forward into the future beyond the span of human knowledge. Between
these two extremes, the novel presents the different measures of time out of which individual
experience is composed. Part 1, The Window, and Part 2, The Lighthouse, occur almost in “real
time,” as the action described takes place within a period more or less equivalent to the period of
time it takes to read the section. Within these sections, each character’s perspective picks up on
an immense range of detail and the observant Mrs. Ramsay and Lily are especially conscious of
the unique specificity of each moment. The novel also explores the vacation time of the Ramsays
and their guests, for whom the scenes of the novel are lived within a “break” from their normal
lives in London, and the circular, ritual time of communal activity and habit, as the characters
repeat the daily routines of walks and dinners, react to one another in predictable ways, and
repeatedly profess long-held opinions. Zooming out from daily life, To the Lighthouse reflects
on time’s larger frameworks as Mrs. Ramsay considers the irretrievable time of childhood and
she, along with Mr. Ramsay and Lily, confront human tininess in the course of the Earth’s
existence. Yet Mrs. Ramsay and Lily (and, though he has his doubts, Mr. Ramsay) believe that it
is possible to make “something permanent” out of the moment, and thus Lily paints to partake of
eternity as Mrs. Ramsay orchestrates lived experience until it becomes as transcendent as art. In
Part 2, Time Passing, the “real time” of The Window accelerates to breakneck speed and the
section spans a whole decade in just a few pages. Without much attention to detail, this view on
time lacks the particularity and complexity of time in The Window and is characterized only by a
barebones framework of events. Thus, the enormity of Mrs. Ramsay’s, Prue’s, and Andrew’s
deaths, and of World War I, are reduced to one sentence parentheticals.

As committed as it is to capturing an experience of lived time, To the Lighthouse is just as

interested in the relics that linger after experience, and the novel holds up many different forms
of memory. There is the history book memory of impartially and sparely recounted event as
demonstrated in the bullet-like plot points of Part 2, Time Passing. There is the circular memory
Mrs. Ramsay has thinking back on her youth, recognizing in her children’s youth their own
future memories, and feeling life to be a cycle of marriage and childbearing passed on from
generation to generation. There is the living memory of Mrs. McNab and Lily as their recollected
images of Mrs. Ramsay appear visible on the surface of the present world.

To the Lighthouse ultimately demonstrates the inadequacy of clock time to measure human
experience: life is not felt, Woolf shows, second by orderly second. Instead, one minute seems to
drag on an eternity while the next two decades speed by. One is one second aware of a human
lifespan as a long, luxurious stretch and the next second perceives it to be an infinitesimal
fraction of Earth’s much more enduring existence. Memories return in the present and live on,
sometimes seeming never to have passed.

The Meaning of Life

Characters throughout To the Lighthouse question life’s ultimate meaning and supply different
answers based on their own perspectives and on the circumstances that surround their
questioning. Mrs. Ramsay understands the meaning of life to be family and domestic happiness,
while Mr. Bankes and Mr. Tansley understand it to be work and professional success. Mr.
Ramsay vacillates between these answers, finding ultimate meaning sometimes in family,
sometimes in philosophy. Lily thinks life’s greatest meaning lies in making art.

Yet even as each character’s thoughts and behavior seem to present a loose argument for each
“meaning,” no character ever feels personally confident or satisfied with one answer. Their
moments of conviction are always shadowed by doubt. Thus, Mrs. Ramsay despairs at the start
of dinner in The Window, feeling her marriage, her family, and her life are hollow and worthless.
Thus, Mr. Ramsay continually doubts himself, one moment disparaging his family life, the next
moment his professional life, and forever relying on Mrs. Ramsay for sympathy and praise to
soothe his spirits. Thus, Mr. Tansley experiences bitter anguish and hurt at the dinner table,
proving how much weight he actually gives to the very world of human relations he calls
meaningless. Thus, Lily repeatedly turns on herself, belittling her life choices and criticizing her
painting.

No matter where the characters of To the Lighthouse find meaning in their lives, those meanings
are integrally related to the theme of Time. A character’s perspective on life is always affected
by that character’s relationship to time. When characters feel that human action transcends
mortality to endure the ages or when they are able to luxuriate in the present moment and feel the
breadth of a human lifespan, then they are able to feel life is meaningful, worthwhile. Thus,
reading Sir Walter Scott, Ramsay feels that the ongoing torch of human accomplishment passed
from person to person is much more meaningful than the identity of each individual torch carrier.
Thinking this way, he no longer worries about his own achievements and feels happy knowing
that his work in philosophy will be carried on by other thinkers in the future. On the other hand,
Mr. Bankes, on tasting Mrs. Ramsay’s beef dish at dinner, is finally grounded in the pleasure of
the present moment and can thereby see the merit in domestic rituals he’d previously considered
meaningless.

There is, ultimately, no one meaning of life and, instead of reaching for one, the novel shows that
meaning is subjective, contingent upon circumstance and perspective. Each life, then, contains
many “meanings,” which shift and change from year to year, from moment to moment.

The Nature of Interior Life

Written as a stream of consciousness, To the Lighthouse constantly investigates the contours and
patterns of human thought through its form and style. While writing within the perspective of a
single character, Woolf’s sentences leap back and forth between various impressions, memories,
and emotions, formally illustrating the associative nature of an individual mind. Lofty thoughts
stand on par with everyday ones. Mrs. Ramsay’s mind alone leaps between thoughts on the
nature of compassion, the relationship between men and women, household budgeting, her
children’s futures, the state of her society, and the state of the beef dish she’ll be serving at
dinner. Emotions, too, flash quickly in and out so that Mrs. Ramsay’s indignation at Mr.
Ramsay’s exclamation “damn you” is restored to admiration just a few seconds later when he
offers to double-check on the weather he has so adamantly insisted will be poor. While capable
of such quicksilver change, the mind is also capable of extended preservation, so that Mr.
Tansley’s insult floats in Lily’s mind ten years later even after she’s forgotten who said it.

Over the course of the novel, Woolf is also constantly leaping back and forth between the minds
of different characters. Though everyone’s mind shares an associative, eclectic tendency,
individual minds are also distinguishable enough from one another that Woolf sometimes doesn’t
even have to indicate that she’s leapt from one person’s perspective to another’s, as when the
text jumps from Lily’s to Mrs. Ramsey’s mind at the end of dinner in The Window. Likewise,
Mr. Ramsay’s stream of consciousness is immediately distinguishable from Mrs. Ramsay’s in its
lack of particular, material detail (the flowers, stars, and other such quotidian beauties that Mrs.
Ramsay laments his inability to notice). As it slides in and out of different characters’ minds, the
novel’s figuration further suggests that the divide between internal and external life might not be
so rigid after all. Repeating metaphors of the mind as a pool of water and as a beehive transform
abstract, private thought into a concrete, shared element of the natural world.

Every aspect of the novel speaks to the diversity of interior life: the diversity of disparate
thoughts within an individual stream of consciousness as well as the diversity of different
thoughts and thought patterns that characterize different individuals’ streams of consciousness.
Lily’s reflection towards novel’s end that in order to see Mrs. Ramsey clearly a person would
need “fifty pairs of eyes” (since each of those pairs would have such different insights into her
character) can be read as a description of the novel itself: written through many separate pairs of
eyes to achieve the most complete possible vision.

Art and Beauty

As it examines the nature of interior life, so To the Lighthouse examines the nature of art and
beauty, giving credence to commonly accepted understandings even as it puts forth alternative
definitions. Weaving in pieces of a Sir Walter Scott novel and the lines from a Shakespeare
sonnet, To the Lighthouse showcases the beauty of canonical art masterpieces, and in the person
of Mrs. Ramsay, the novel presents a traditional ideal of human beauty. Indeed, Mr. Bankes
imagines her “classical” beauty on the other end of the telephone.

The power of such beauty—in both art and humans—can work for good. The literature the
characters read gives joy and consolation, as Mrs. Ramsey delights in the loveliness of the
sonnet’s words and Scott’s prose frees Mr. Ramsey from anxiety about his public image. Further,
such artworks can inspire faith in an all-encompassing human project. After reading Scott, Mr.
Ramsey no longer cares whether it is he or someone else who “reaches Z” – someone will, he
knows, and that’s enough. Mrs. Ramsay’s human beauty likewise consoles and inspires: those
around her admire her and feel strengthened by her spirit. Mr. Tansley is filled with happiness
just by sharing Mrs. Ramsay’s presence and attempts to be kinder and more generous for her
sake. Paul attributes his courage to propose to Minta to Mrs. Ramsay’s effect upon him. Still,
beauty can also exert less positive influences. Lily observes that beauty can reduce and obscure,
concealing the complexity of life beneath it. Admiring Mrs. Ramsay’s beauty, Lily tries to see
past it to “the living thing” that so animates her.
As it considers the nature of beauty, the novel also considers beauty’s makers. The characters of
Mr. Carmichael and Lily afford a view on art in the process of being created by as-yet
unestablished artists. In each case, beauty springs unexpected from unlovely circumstances. Out
of the opium-addicted, shuffling Mr. Carmichael of The Window springs the incongruous
sublimity of his poems, which meet with such apparent success subsequently. Through Lily’s
meager existence, self-doubts, and despair arrives the painting she completes in the novel’s last
section. Yet the novel does not limit the making of beauty to the production of fine art objects. It
understands human conduct and daily life as a form of art also. Thus Mrs. Ramsey’s
orchestration of herself, her family, and her guests is repeatedly described in terms ordinarily
applied to artistic composition and Lily recognizes Mrs. Ramsay’s person as an aesthetic force, a
masterpiece.

In broadening our understanding of art and beauty, the novel shifts the emphasis from finished
product to process – rather than limiting “art” to concrete, enduring, delimited artifacts, the novel
shows that art can also be a spirit, a frame of mind, a form of vision. Thus, Lily ends the novel
satisfied even though she knows that her painting itself will not be immortalized, will almost
certainly be forgotten. She feels content knowing that she has participated in art and beauty just
by making the painting, just by having “her vision.”

Gender

Though the novel’s stream of consciousness jumps from perspective to perspective, the theme of
gender remains in focus as each character considers gender roles and relations from his or her
own standpoint. Mrs. Ramsey delights in her womanhood, successfully fulfilling the traditional
female roles of caregiver, homemaker, beauty, comforter of men. Lily, on the other hand, resents
those same traditional roles, resisting the pressure to fill them and then, when she succeeds in
such resistance, feeling her defiant pride undercut by anxiety and self-doubt. Having successfully
refused to give Mr. Ramsay the female sympathy he craves in The Lighthouse, for example, Lily
thinks she must be a failure as a woman and, wracked by regret, spends the rest of the morning
trying to make it up to him. Among the male characters, Mr. Tansley and Mr. Ramsay aspire to
strength, chivalry, and intellectualism, trying to inhabit the traditional male role of female
protector and evincing an enduring prejudice against female “irrationality” and “simplicity.”
Still, even as the men look down on women, they depend on them. Mr. Tansley and Mr. Ramsay
are both utterly reliant on Mrs. Ramsay and other female characters for praise and crave female
sympathy to keep their egos afloat. Even when Mr. Ramsay recognizes this need as a weakness
in himself, he remains unable to overcome it and thus demands of Lily in The Lighthouse the
same sort of support he’d demanded from his wife ten years earlier in The Window.

Aside from considering men and women’s individual gender roles, the novel also considers the
gender relations within a marriage and presents two models of domestic union. Mr. and Mrs.
Ramsay represent the conventional ideal (indeed, Lily thinks they have suddenly transcended
themselves and become a symbol as they stand on the lawn). Though the marriage of course
possesses its gender-bending quirks—Mr. Ramsay is emotionally needier, Mrs. Ramsay, more
emotionally restrained—it generally operates as a conventional heterosexual romantic
partnership: Mr. Ramsey is the “rational” breadwinner, Mrs. Ramsey the “comforting”
homemaker. They love one another deeply and act as a team. Within this model, both are happy.
Mrs. Ramsay especially praises the virtues of marriage and her eager matchmaking attempts to
set up all single characters in a marriage like hers.

Though not seen first-hand, Minta and Paul’s marriage as imagined by Lily in The Lighthouse
presents a point of contrast with the Ramsay marriage. It’s hinted in The Window that Minta is
not entirely happy about being betrothed to Paul, and the subsequent marriage is rife with
struggle and argument. Yet, over the years, relations between Paul and Minta are repaired by
something that would traditionally be considered a marriage disaster: Paul takes a mistress and,
thereafter, he and Minta are a team again. Remembering Mrs. Ramsay in The Lighthouse, Lily
imagines holding up the example of Minta and Paul as well as of her own contented, unmarried
life as evidence that Mrs. Ramsay was wrong to advocate so single-mindedly for conventional
marriages. Indeed, the novel presents marriage and gender alike as complex, continued
negotiations between the sexes, each facing a set of expectations that seldom fit but are
nevertheless worked around, worked through, and reinvented.

Character of Mrs. Ramsay

Mrs. Ramsay emerges from the novel’s opening pages not only as a woman of great kindness
and tolerance but also as a protector. Indeed, her primary goal is to preserve her youngest son
James’s sense of hope and wonder surrounding the lighthouse. Though she realizes (as James
himself does) that Mr. Ramsay is correct in declaring that foul weather will ruin the next day’s
voyage, she persists in assuring James that the trip is a possibility. She does so not to raise
expectations that will inevitably be dashed, but rather because she realizes that the beauties and
pleasures of this world are ephemeral and should be preserved, protected, and cultivated as much
as possible. So deep is this commitment that she behaves similarly to each of her guests, even
those who do not deserve or appreciate her kindness. Before heading into town, for example, she
insists on asking Augustus Carmichael, whom she senses does not like her, if she can bring him
anything to make his stay more comfortable. Similarly, she tolerates the insufferable behavior of
Charles Tansley, whose bitter attitude and awkward manners threaten to undo the delicate work
she has done toward making a pleasant and inviting home.

As Lily Briscoe notes in the novel’s final section, Mrs. Ramsay feels the need to play this role
primarily in the company of men. Indeed, Mrs. Ramsay feels obliged to protect the entire
opposite sex. According to her, men shoulder the burden of ruling countries and managing
economies. Their important work, she believes, leaves them vulnerable and in need of constant
reassurance, a service that women can and should provide. Although this dynamic fits squarely
into traditional gender boundaries, it is important to note the strength that Mrs. Ramsay feels. At
several points, she is aware of her own power, and her posture is far from that of a submissive
woman. At the same time, interjections of domesticated anxiety, such as her refrain of “the bill
for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds,” undercut this power.

Ultimately, as is evident from her meeting with Mr. Ramsay at the close of “The Window,” Mrs.
Ramsay never compromises herself. Here, she is able—masterfully—to satisfy her husband’s
desire for her to tell him she loves him without saying the words she finds so difficult to say.
This scene displays Mrs. Ramsay’s ability to bring together disparate things into a whole. In a
world marked by the ravages of time and war, in which everything must and will fall apart, there
is perhaps no greater gift than a sense of unity, even if it is only temporary. Lily and other
characters find themselves grasping for this unity after Mrs. Ramsay’s death.

Beautiful, charming, and nurturing, Mrs. Ramsey holds the Ramsay family together as she holds
together every social context she enters by her charisma and instinct for putting people at ease.
Mrs. Ramsay also holds To the Lighthouse together, for the novel’s shape is structured around
her: her perspective dominates Chapter 1 and, even after she dies in Chapter 2, Mrs. Ramsay
remains central in Chapter 3 as the surviving Ramsays manage their grief and Lily revisits her
memories of Mrs. Ramsay and makes peace with her ghost. For her own part, Mrs. Ramsay
exalts in the beauty of the world and, though she insists she is no thinker, frequently reflects on
the nature of time and human experience. An eager matchmaker, Mrs. Ramsay is also, as Lily
sees, an artist who can make out of the fleeting moment “something permanent”

Lily Briscoe

Observant, philosophical, and independent, Lily is a painter pitied by Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay in
Chapter 1 for her homeliness and unattractiveness to men. Still, though Mrs. Ramsay thinks
nothing of her painting and wants her to marry, she admires Lily’s independence. In Chapter 3,
Lily struggles (and eventually succeeds) in painting the picture she had first attempted in Chapter
1, all the while revisiting memories of Mrs. Ramsay and contemplating the great mysteries of
life, death, art, and human experience.

Lily is a passionate artist, and, like Mr. Ramsay, she worries over the fate of her work, fearing
that her paintings will be hung in attics or tossed absentmindedly under a couch. Conventional
femininity, represented by Mrs. Ramsay in the form of marriage and family, confounds Lily, and
she rejects it. The recurring memory of Charles Tansley insisting that women can neither paint
nor write deepens her anxiety. It is with these self-doubts that she begins her portrait of Mrs.
Ramsay at the beginning of the novel, a portrait riddled with problems that she is unable to solve.
But Lily undergoes a drastic transformation over the course of the novel, evolving from a woman
who cannot make sense of the shapes and colors that she tries to reproduce into an artist who
achieves her vision and, more important, overcomes the anxieties that have kept her from it. By
the end of the novel, Lily, a serious and diligent worker, puts into practice all that she has learned
from Mrs. Ramsay. Much like the woman she so greatly admires, she is able to craft something
beautiful and lasting from the ephemeral materials around her—the changing light, the view of
the bay. Her artistic achievement suggests a larger sense of completeness in that she finally feels
united with Mr. Ramsay and the rational, intellectual sphere that he represents.

Mr. Ramsay

As brilliant and passionate as he is petty, bossy, and demanding, Mr. Ramsay is a victim of his
own mercurial moods and is always shifting in the opinion of those around him. Characters
loathe his imperiousness and neediness, then admire his courage and dignity. In Chapter 1, Mr.
Ramsay adores Mrs. Ramsay and his children but struggles with angry outbursts and self-doubt
about his career. In Chapter 3, Mr. Ramsay remains just as needy of female sympathy (especially
since Mrs. Ramsay is no longer around to dispense it) but wishes, looking back, that he had not
been so quick to anger.

Mr. Ramsay stands, in many respects, as Mrs. Ramsay’s opposite. Whereas she acts patiently,
kindly, and diplomatically toward others, he tends to be short-tempered, selfish, and rude. Woolf
fittingly describes him as “lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one,” which conjures both his
physical presence and suggests the sharpness (and violence) of his personality. An accomplished
metaphysician who made an invaluable contribution to his field as a young man, Mr. Ramsay
bears out his wife’s philosophy regarding gender: men, burdened by the importance of their own
work, need to seek out the comforts and assurances of women. Throughout the novel, Mr.
Ramsay implores his wife and even his guests for sympathy. Mr. Ramsay is uncertain about the
fate of his work and its legacy, and his insecurity manifests itself either as a weapon or a
weakness. His keen awareness of death’s inevitability motivates him to dash the hopes of young
James and to bully Mrs. Ramsay into declaring her love for him. This hyperawareness also
forces him to confront his own mortality and face the possibility that he, like the forgotten books
and plates that litter the second part of the novel, might sink into oblivion.

James Ramsay

One of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay’s children, James is as bitter and resentful of his father as a six-
year-old in Chapter 1 as he is as a sixteen-year-old in Chapter 3. Yet, by Chapter 3, James has
learned to distinguish between his father’s person and his father’s imperious moods and can
identify some of his own similarities to Mr. Ramsay.

A sensitive child, James is gripped by a love for his mother that is as overpowering and complete
as his hatred for his father. He feels a murderous rage against Mr. Ramsay, who, he believes,
delights in delivering the news that there will be no trip to the lighthouse. But James grows into a
young man who shares many of his father’s characteristics, the same ones that incited such anger
in him as a child. When he eventually sails to the lighthouse with his father, James, like Mr.
Ramsay, is withdrawn, moody, and easily offended. His need to be praised, as noted by his sister
Cam, mirrors his father’s incessant need for sympathy, reassurance, and love. Indeed, as they
approach the lighthouse, James considers his father’s profile and recognizes the profound
loneliness that stamps both of their personalities. By the time the boat lands, James’s attitude
toward his father has changed considerably. As he softens toward Mr. Ramsay and comes to
accept him as he is, James, like Lily, who finishes her painting on shore at that very moment,
achieves a rare, fleeting moment in which the world seems blissfully whole and complete.