To the Lighthouse Theme of Time

Time is not experienced conventionally in To the Lighthouse (but seriously, what is?).
Instead, time is anchored in certain select moments, which completely distorts it from the
way a clock experiences time. Time is measured as it is experienced by certain people,
which infuses select moments with incredible importance and duration. In other parts of the
novel, ten years is covered in about a dozen pages. Time is therefore both elongated and
compressed.

To the Lighthouse Theme of Love

Love takes several different forms in the text: lasting love thats still flawed, love that casts a
glow on everyone else, love that doesnt last, friendly love, familial love, admiring love, love
as an intellectual topic, etc., but the main point is that love is not the sort of all-consuming
force you see in Anna Karenina. Love in To the Lighthouse is pretty tame and usually turns
out to be love for Mrs. Ramsay.

To the Lighthouse Theme of Gender

Well, its a Woolf novel. Gender figures in all the chauvinistic remarks that the men make,
and the protective tone towards men that Mrs. Ramsay takes. Also, Mrs. Ramsay is held up
as an ideal of womanhood. Lily Briscoe deviates from this ideal because she is not
interested in marriage or comforting and sympathizing with every male character in the
novel.

To the Lighthouse Theme of Marriage

Mrs. Ramsay really wants everyone to get married particularly women. She herself is in a
marriage that at least one character holds up as an ideal. Interestingly enough, her
marriage to Mr. Ramsay is actually the only real marriage we see in the novel. We do,
however, "hear about" (via Lilys memory) how the Rayley marriage, which Mrs. Ramsay
had encouraged so much, worked out it was unsuccessful.

To the Lighthouse Theme of Manipulation

Mrs. Ramsay can get people to marry because she has excellent powers of manipulation.
She can make any man feel like the strongest, most manly man ever. Aside from
manipulation, Mrs. Ramsay is very well attuned to peoples desires and needs, which
comes in handy because her husband can be rather demanding when it comes to ego
stroking.

To the Lighthouse Theme of Admiration

Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are both well-admired in their respective fields. Mr. Ramsay tends to
be followed around by young philosophy students who admire his work, and although Mrs.
Ramsay shuns admiration, most people admire her beauty and grace.
To the Lighthouse Theme of Identity

Mrs. Ramsay, in particular, is very conscious of her identity, constantly interrogating herself
and her character. She adopts a very subordinate position when in her interactions with
other people, which means that her own true self is frequently stifled. But good news
when there are no people around to pander to, her own private self has room to explore.
Lily also contemplates her identity often.

To the Lighthouse Theme of Victory

Victory in To the Lighthouse most frequently occurs over life, but occasionally victory is
scored over other people as well. The main point, however, is that victory occurs beneath
the surface in To the Lighthouse and often in social interactions. Mrs. Ramsay scores a
victory by not saying "I love you," yet Mr. Ramsay has never asked her to say it. On the
surface they have a perfectly civilized conversation. Victory and defeat occur in the
nuances of interaction, not in the overt way that, say, a world war encompasses victory and
def

To the Lighthouse Theme of Friendship

Friendship plays a secondary role to love in the novel, but for Lily Briscoe, friendship is the
most she has ever truly wanted from a man. The other friendship we see (retrospectively) is
between Mr. Ramsay and Mr. Bankes. It failed.

To the Lighthouse Theme of Laws and Order

Mrs. Ramsay is extremely attuned to harmony and discord, and she also takes on the task
of creating as much harmony as possible. This is a double-edged sword because she
frequently sacrifices truth in order to preserve harmony. She adheres to a certain ideal of
the world in which everyone is united and everything is at peace.

The Hen in Mr. Bankes's Memory

Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory

Remember? In their youth, Mr. Bankes and Mr. Ramsay are walking down the road when a
hen comes flying up to protect her chicks, and Mr. Ramsay goes, "Pretty pretty." According
to Mr. Bankes, thats when their friendship stopped. The two of them were down
metaphorically different roads. So whats with the hen? Why not a tree stump or a horse?
Well, a hen protecting her chicks is pretty domestic. Mr. Bankes is trying to say and he
does say it later that Mr. Ramsays turn to the domestic life is what killed their friendship.
And thats expressed symbolically by the hen in the road and Mr. Ramsay saying, "Pretty
pretty."

The Window
Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
Mrs. Ramsay spends her afternoon sitting at a window, reading to James. Lily Briscoe is
attempting to paint them. The window encapsulates Mrs. Ramsay in a very static position,
while everyone else is caught up in dynamic movement: Mr. Ramsay is walking, Lily is
painting, the children are playing cricket. The window furthermore frames Mrs. Ramsay as
the centerpiece of the whole tableau. Mr. Bankes gazes adoringly at her, Lily looks at her
critically in order to properly paint her, and Mr. Ramsay runs over for sympathy. The window
is therefore the physical manifestation of the more abstract idea that Mrs. Ramsay is the
center of the household, in addition to the idea that she is separate and apart from
everyone else (literally separated by a pane of glass).

Waves
Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory

So waves do a couple things in To the Lighthouse. First, and most importantly, they are the
drumbeat of Time for Mrs. Ramsay. They are usually a soothing force, but they take on a
more ominous tone when they become synonymous with destruction. For Mr. Ramsay,
waves are a destructive power because they are part of the vast sea of human ignorance
that eats away at a little spit of land symbolizing human knowledge. We threw out the idea
that waves are a negative force, but our trash guy picked it up and threw it back at us.
Smart man. How can you attach a value to the rhythm of life itself? The waves represent
flux you know, ups and downs, as well as forcibly reminding Mrs. Ramsay of transience.
Life, as well as waves, always goes on, but theyre never the same. So, if you didnt pick up
on it by now, the impermanent waves are a counterpoint to the permanent light from the
Lighthouse.

The Lighthouse

Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory

Before launching into what Virginia Woolf might be talking about with this here Lighthouse,
let's take a second to consider what a lighthouse is. (Here's a photo.) The American
Heritage Dictionary tells us that it's a "tall structure topped by a powerful light used as a
beacon or signal to aid maritime navigation." So, metaphorically speaking, a lighthouse is a
beacon. It's something people who are lost can look towards for guidance. And it's a "tall
structure" a big, solid, unmoving structure. But that powerful light? It does move. When
the night falls, it flashes on, and when the sun rises, it shuts off. So a lighthouse works as
both a symbol of stability (as a beacon) and of change (as its lights go on and off with the
turning of the day).

Now, about this specific Lighthouse. We know that it's visible from the Ramsays' summer
home but separated from it by a stretch of sea, because Mr. Ramsay loves to look at it (see
1.1.22). And we know that, at least at first, James Ramsay really wants to get there so
much that when Mr. Ramsay says they won't be able to sail to the Lighthouse the next day,
James Ramsay contemplates murder: "Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any
weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father's breast and killed him, there and then,
James would have seized it" (1.1.4).
The Lighthouse as a Symbol for Traditional Family Structure
So, why do James and Mr. Ramsay have so much invested in the Lighthouse either in
getting to it in the first place or in preventing others from going? Well, one important thing
they share in common is that they're both guys. Another important thing? They're both
really into Mrs. Ramsay. Sure, one's her husband and the other's her son, but they feel they
have to compete with each other for her attention remember: "most of all [James] hated
the twang and twitter of his fathers emotion which, vibrating round them, disturbed the
perfect simplicity and good sense of his relations with his mother" (1.7.1). So we don't
exactly think it's far-fetched that this whole conflict over whether they'll go to the
Lighthouse might be connected to the way James and Mr. Ramsay seem to be wrangling
over Mrs. Ramsay.

What we're getting at, in a roundabout way, is that the Lighthouse is potentially a symbol for
family structure, and especially for the authority of the father in the traditional family. Not to
be crude or anything, but the lighthouse is kind of a phallic symbol, and phallic symbols in
literature often mean that there are daddy issues coming down the pike.

James and Mr. Ramsay are squabbling over who gets power over the family: Mr. Ramsay
is the authority figure, so he gets to say "No! the weather will be bad!" And James is a rebel
who's all "Why do you have to ruin everything? Just as I'm getting along so well with Mom!"
But in the end, James concedes that his dad always seems to wind up being right (1.1.4)
which just makes everything worse for him. James won't get to the Lighthouse in this
section of the novel, and the family power remains largely in Mr. Ramsay's hands. Their
relations become more complicated in Section Three but for more on that, see James
Ramsay's "Character Analysis."

Other evidence for this reading? We've got lots. Consider Charles Tansley, that unpleasant
guy who's always hanging around in the first section. He looks up to Mr. Ramsay (he wants
to be him, basically). He's embarrassed by his own inability to insert himself successfully
into social situations. And he's oppressive when it comes to the relationship between
women and artistry he basically tells Lily Briscoe that women can't paint or write
(1.17.22).

Charles is obviously concerned with maintaining the patriarchal status quo. So he takes it
upon himself to tell James Ramsay that James won't be able to go to the Lighthouse the
next day (1.2.1). See, he's joining Mr. Ramsay in keeping the power of the Lighthouse
away from the other members of the Ramsay family because if Charles Tansley can't
have patriarchal authority, no one (except, you know, Mr. Ramsay) can.

The Lighthouse, the Traditional Mother's Role, and Mrs. Ramsay

And how about Mrs. Ramsay? Here's where this gets really interesting, because Woolf
loves to explore ways of thinking about family and lineage outside the traditional father-son
trajectory. So motherhood is a big deal in a lot of her work.

One thing that's interesting about Mrs. Ramsay is that she knows that James won't be able
to get to the Lighthouse, but she doesn't want to tell him. She hides the unpleasant truth
from him, just as she wraps that boar skull in her shawl so that Cam can go to sleep in Part
One, Chapter Eighteen. Mrs. Ramsay makes Mr. Ramsay's domineering, oppressive ways
manageable for the Ramsay kids who have to live with his bullying. She genuinely loves
Mr. Ramsay and she genuinely loves her kids and she's also what stands between Mr.
Ramsay and his family to make sure that all of them can live together.

Mrs. Ramsay finds Mr. Ramsay's place at the head of their traditional family necessary,
natural, and inevitable, but she knows that it's hard for her children to accept. So she does
her best to make everything run smoothly: that's her great talent. The Ramsays' traditional
family would be impossible without her soothing influence.

The book underlines Mrs. Ramsay's own investment in the Lighthouse (and in the
importance and authority of fatherhood) by emphasizing that she makes charitable
donations to the Lighthouse keeper (who, apparently, has a son with a "tuberculous hip"
[1.1.5]). She's not only looking after her own children she's such a Supermom that she
can also look after other people's kids.

In a larger sense, Mrs. Ramsay's charitable work is linked to the Lighthouse because it's
part of her role as a traditional mother to take care of people. If the Lighthouse symbolizes
the power the dad has in the traditional family, the charity is like the mother's place in that
power structure. The dad is a beacon; he's what people are imitating, while the mom takes
care of everybody. Mrs. Ramsay's support for this division of labor is pretty apparent when
she gets all reproving with her daughters in that internal monologue in the first section of
the novel:

For how would you like to be shut up for a whole month at a time, and possibly more in
stormy weather, upon a rock the size of a tennis lawn? she would ask; and to have no
letters or newspapers, and to see nobody [...] How would you like that? she asked,
addressing herself particularly to her daughters. So she added, rather differently, one must
take them whatever comforts one can. (1.1.5)

In other words, sure, it stinks always to be in a subordinate position in a family, but at least
women don't get stuck with the lonely, difficult work of being model dads. Mrs. Ramsay gets
that the patriarchy isn't great for her but it's not great for Mr. Ramsay or the Lighthouse
keeper either. She sees it as her natural job to make things better for those poor guys.
Besides, Mrs. Ramsay might say, everyone has to get married anyway, right?

The Lighthouse and Lily Briscoe

The answer to that question belongs to Lily Briscoe: Lily doesn't have to get married
because she has her work. She can see the Lighthouse, but instead of trying to get there,
instead of trying to fit herself into a traditional womanly or maternal role, she paints the
scene in front of her. She uses her art to represent the essence of the Lighthouse without
actually having to be part of everything it represents. Lily basically marries her art, so
there's no cause for her to try to sail to the Lighthouse in Part Three: the Lighthouse doesn't
offer her anything besides an attractive view and some perspective on what drives Mr.
Ramsay.

A Final Word
We've talked about the Lighthouse as a symbol for family authority and how control over
getting to the Lighthouse has a lot to do with family power. But what about the whole
eternal-yet-shifting thing we brought up way back in the first paragraph of this discussion?
Like the Lighthouse tower itself, the family as an institution is (or at least, seems) solid and
unchanging. But individual families come and go as rapidly as a lighthouse beacon goes on
and off time changes the shape of all families (remember the loss of Mrs. Ramsay in Part
Three?). As is the case in many Woolf novels, the progress of time is a major theme of To
the Lighthouse. No matter how solid Family may seem as a concept, every family has its
own private shape and trajectory, a tension between the ideal and lived reality that the
Ramsay family certainly dramatizes.

To the Lighthouse Setting

Where It All Goes Down

A summer house at the Isle of Skye in the Hebrides,

1920s

Well, there are brief jaunts elsewhere: walks to town, walks around the lawn, and the all-
important lighthouse journey, but the house is where its at. Such a specific locale creates a
particular enclosure around the Ramsay family and their assorted friends and colleagues,
allowing Woolf to run in and out of their minds at will and create a true sense of background
for each of them, as well as a sense of unity during the dinner party scene.

Most of the novels action lets make that "action" takes place before and after World
War I, which places the characters in a pretty specific time frame, the main repercussion
being that gender is a big deal. Unmarried woman who likes to paint? Dime a dozen these
days, but not so much back then.

To the Lighthouse Narrator:

Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we
trust her or him?

Third Person (Omniscient)

There are brief forays into third person narrative, most notably during Part Two, but for the
most part Woolf runs in and out of everyones brains at will. Her narrative style is intensely
free-flowing, which was pretty ground-breaking back in the day. More on this everywhere.

To the Lighthouse Genre

Modernism

When youre reading a novel and every so often you sit up and go, "whaaaaaat?" it
probably fits into the genre of modernism. Modernist literature likes to break from
established structures (like, plots) in favor of deeper aesthetic exploration in this case, a
deeper exploration into the human mind. Were sure you couldnt help but notice that not
much really happens in this book as far as actual events go. The kind of action we get is
Lily picking up a paintbrush, or Mrs. Ramsay knitting. But the real action is going on in the
characters heads, exploring their thoughts about themselves, their lives, and each other.
The plot isnt the most important aspect of this book, its the thoughts of the individuals that
make this book interesting and unique.

To the Lighthouse Tone

Take a story's temperature by studying its tone. Is it hopeful? Cynical? Snarky?

Playful?

Deliberate. Deliberately confusing.

Every single moment in To the Lighthouse is milked for all its worth. Lets take a look at the
passage, which occurs as Mr. Bankes admires a view of sandhills: "He was anxious for the
sake of this friendship and perhaps too in order to clear himself in his own mind from the
imputation of having dried and shrunk for Ramsay lived in a welter of children, whereas
Bankes was childless and a widower he was anxious that Lily Briscoe should not
disparage Ramsay (a great man in his own way) yet should understand how things stood
between them. Begun long years ago, their friendship had petered out on a Westmorland
road, where the hen spread her wings before her chicks; after which Ramsay had married,
and their paths lying different ways, there had been, certainly for no ones fault, some
tendency, when they met, to repeat."Think about how the above passage encompasses the
past (how Mr. Bankess friendship with Mr. Ramsay died out), the present (Mr. Bankes is a
childless widower and Mr. Ramsay is married with kids), and the future (anxiety that Lily not
say anything bad about Mr. Ramsay), all in one "moment" of the novel, as Mr. Bankes
admires the view. This is both deliberate (one moment is stretched out) and deliberately
confusing (shoving that much information into one momenttsk tsk).

To the Lighthouse Writing Style

A Dreamy Stream

To the Lighthouse is a Modernist novel, which means (among other things) that it's All.
About. Style. In fact, many argue that the actualstory of the novel itself takes get put on the
backburner in favor the form with which it's told. That's one of the hallmarks of Modernist
literature: the typical meat-and-potatoes of plot and character sit in the back seat, while
previously overlooked aspects like style and structure get to sit up front and drive (if you
can even picture that).

So if this book is super-style-conscious, then what kind of style, exactly, does it go for?
Well, you don't have to read far to realize that this ain't your typical "Once upon a time"
story. It is told from a variety of perspectives, often in a way that be darn confusing for first-
time readers. That's because Virginia Woolf was looking to capture what a story looked
from inside her character's minds, rather than from an objective narrator's point of view.

As a result, the book has long stretches that record the haphazard workings of human
thought. This technique is known as stream-of-consciousness. Why a stream? Well, there's
a certain flow to the way thoughts emerge on the page, as one thought suggests another.
Like a stream, too, these thoughts don't move in a straight line. They twist and turn, even
doubling back on themselves. Check out this example:
Going to the Lighthouse. But what does one send to the Lighthouse? Perished. Alone. The
grey-green light on the wall opposite. The empty places. Such were some of the parts, but
how bring them together? she asked. As if any interruption would break the frail shape she
was building on the table she turned her back to the window lest Mr Ramsay should see
her. She must escape somewhere, be alone somewhere. Suddenly she remembered.
When she had sat there last ten years ago there had been a little sprig or leaf pattern on
the table-cloth, which she had looked at in a moment of revelation. There had been a
problem about a foreground of a picture. Move the tree to the middle, she had said. She
had never finished that picture. She would paint that picture now. It had been knocking
about in her mind all these years. Where were her paints, she wondered? Her paints, yes.
She had left them in the hall last night. She would start at once. She got up quickly, before
Mr Ramsay turned. (3.7)

If you are just wandering into this passage, your reaction might be to run for the hills. Here,
Lily's thoughts bounce around from the lighthouse to Mr. Ramsay to escape, then back ten
years, to a picture, to wondering where her paints got to. That's a lot to take in, but it is, we
think, an impressive rendering of how our minds work. Let's face it: we don't think "A) Wake
up. B) Brush teeth. C) Eat breakfast." Instead, like Lily's passage shows, our minds bounce
around. To read that in a novel, though, can seem like stumbling into a dream where we
have no clear point of reference.

Our advice? Dive right in. When she wrote this book, Woolf was being boldly experimental
with this choice of style, and it's something to savor. Who wants to eat meat and potatoes
at every meal anyway?

Whats Up With the Title?

Well, obviously, the first and third sections of To the Lighthouse are literally about going to a
lighthouse. Are the Ramsays going to visit it? How resentful will James Ramsay be if they
cant? Why does Mr. Ramsay insist that they must go in the third section, after he digs his
heels in against going in the first? All of this fuss about the Lighthouse definitely makes us
wonder what exactly the Lighthouse is representing.

For us (and we also get into this a lot more in Symbols, Imagery, Allegory), the Lighthouse
represents family (and especially paternal) authority. Thats why James Ramsay wants to
go so badly, as hes rebelling against his father and clinging to his mother. (Oedipus
complex, much? And a lighthouse can be seen as phallic its not toomuch of a stretch to
think of it as a giant symbol of the power of the patriarch.) James wants to stake out the
Lighthouse as his own in other words, to take over his dads authority.

This symbol of power could also be why Mr. Ramsay winds up bullying his children to go to
the Lighthouse in the third section, as hes trying to cement his place as head of the family
even as his children are growing older and his wife has passed away. However, we have to
admit that Mr. Ramsays relationship with James in this scene also complicates this
interpretation of Mr. Ramsays motives. (For more on that, check out James Ramsays
"Character Analysis.")

So, thats at least some explanation for the Lighthouse part of the title. But the To the bit is
important, too. After all, this book is all about individual characters as they strive for a place
in a broken, repressive family structure. In a sense, all of the Ramsay children, and even
Charles Tansley and Lily Briscoe, want to get to the Lighthouse: they all want to find ways
of dealing with Mr. Ramsay and the authority that he represents.

And maybe for Woolf personally, theres a similar kind of striving going on. According to
scholar Mark Masseys study of her diaries, Woolf claimed that writing To the
Lighthouse allowed her finally to lay her own dead parents to rest. Perhaps she, too,
wanted to get to that symbolic lighthouse so that she could make a place for herself outside
of the shadow of parental disapproval. (Source: Mark Massey, Introduction, To the
Lighthouse. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Books, 2005, xlviii.)

Whats Up With the Ending?

To the Lighthouse ends with Lily Briscoe having a revelation about her own work. She has
seen from a distance that Mr. Ramsay has arrived at the Lighthouse, his children James
and Cam in tow (for more on the significance of this story line, check out both our "Classic
Plot Analysis" and our look at James Ramsay's "Character Analysis"). This sums up not
only the achievement of Lily Briscoe's artistic project, but also of the project of To the
Lighthouse as a whole.

The third part of To the Lighthouse shows Lily Briscoe picking up a painting that she had
worked on throughout the beginning of the novel, which she never finished. Under the
slightly discouraging influence of Mrs. Ramsay (who wants Lily to marry) and the actively
oppressive influence of Charles Tansley, Lily never manages to find a way to capture what
she's trying to say about life in her art.

The project of her second effort to paint is to reconcile "Mr. Ramsay," who, at this point, is a
kind of shorthand for the pressures of masculine society, and her painting, which is
experimental and private for Lily. And the way she reconciles these two opposites is to work
through her memories of Mrs. Ramsay, who managed to live with Mr. Ramsay for years
while raising children and doing good. Sure, Mrs. Ramsay may not have been perfect, and
in many ways Lily has to overcome her moderating influence, but her pleasure in the
everyday gives Lily the tools she needs to find a new way of painting outside of the
influence of Mr. Ramsay and his like.

So, to the final section: as Lily paints, she manages to use her artwork to gain perspective
on Mr. Ramsay and everything he stands for. She contains him and sees him for what he's
worth. And in the moment that Mr. Ramsay reaches the Lighthouse (thus, as we the
readers know, reconciling with his son), Lily sees that Mr. Ramsay truly has no power over
her modes of artistic production. She can paint whatever she likes, however she likes,
because she no longer feels the weight of the social and gender hierarchies that Mr.
Ramsay once represented to her.

Indeed, this power that Mr. Ramsay once represented isn't only something Lily has stopped
acknowledging. It's also something that Mr. Ramsay himself has let go. Lily sees that "He
must have reached it" (3.13.1), that Mr. Ramsay has finally made his own peace with all of
the intellectual burdens he's been fighting all of his life. And in that moment when Mr.
Ramsay stops fighting the world, the Lighthouse itself seems almost to disappear: "For the
Lighthouse had become almost invisible, had melted away into a blue blaze" (3.13.1).

Lily, with fellow artist Mr. Carmichael as a witness, has finally found an answer to her
artistic problem of how she can paint, as a woman, without competing with the intellectual
enterprises of tyrants like Mr. Ramsay. And her triumph is two-fold: not only does she find
her own artistic confidence, but she also has come to terms with her past and present with
the Ramsay family, a past dominated by Mrs. Ramsay and a present in competition with Mr.
Ramsay. As Mr. Ramsay surrenders some of his own authority to his son, he becomes less
of a direct threat to Lily and her artistic development. At last, Lily has been allowed to "have
her vision."

To the Lighthouse Plot Analysis

Most good stories start with a fundamental list of ingredients: the initial
situation, conflict, complication, climax, suspense, denouement, and conclusion.
Great writers sometimes shake up the recipe and add some spice.

Admittedly, it's kind of tough to talk about To the Lighthouse in terms of plot trajectory
because, while time does certainly move in the novel, "plot" would seem to suggest that
there's some sort of definite goal to the narrative. And yet, really, the book seems like it
might be more of a three-part portrait than a real beginning-middle-end kind of story. Still,
there are two characters who do have something approaching plot: Lily Briscoe and James
Ramsay. Both are actively striving for something, so we're going to organize our plot
analysis to see what they actually get.

Initial Situation

Both James Ramsay and Lily Briscoe are trying to find places for
themselves within the society of the Ramsay family.
At the start of Part One ("The Window"), James Ramsay is six, Lily Briscoe, thirty-four.
James is the baby of the Ramsay family and much-beloved by his mother, but he feels
fiercely competitive with his father, who occupies a place in Mrs. Ramsay's life that James
cannot hope to occupy. Lily Briscoe, on the other hand, is an impoverished friend of the
Ramsay family whose uncertain social place is due to the fact that she's thirty-four,
unmarried, and not very conventionally attractive. Not a good situation for a woman in the
1920s to be in. But she has a strong, mutually affectionate relationship with Mrs. Ramsay
that sustains her throughout her stay with the Ramsay family on the Isle of Skye.

Conflict

James wants to go to the Lighthouse, though his father says that

the weather won't be good enough to go. Lily Briscoe wants to
paint, though Charles Tansley has told her to her face that women
can't write or paint.
James's desire to go to the Lighthouse and his father's (and Charles Tansley's) insistence
on refusing is the main conflict through which James's difficult relationship with his
oppressive father gets represented. Mr. Ramsay wants all of his children to behave on his
terms and to strive according to his orders. James's rebelliousness shows that the main
conflict of James's life is going to be with his father and his father's power over James's life.

Lily Briscoe, like James, is sadly squelched by a man with more status than she has
Charles Tansley. She wants to paint, but to do so seems to be a threat to the masculine
system of intellectual hierarchy that both Mr. Ramsay and Charles Tansley rely upon. Lily's
trying to find a way, as a woman, to pursue her own artistic development freely, but she's
meeting lots of obstacles along the way because of her gender and relatively low social
status.

Complication

Both James and Lily rely on Mrs. Ramsay as a kind of alternative

model of power to Mr. Ramsay's bullying tyranny. But Mrs. Ramsay
throws them each a curveball by not really supporting either
James's trip to the lighthouse or Lily Briscoe's painting.
The beautiful, charming, perhaps secretly frustrated Mrs. Ramsay seems at first like one
possible alternative to the oppressive Mr. Ramsay. But 1) Mr. Ramsay turns out not to be all
that bad, with his massive secret insecurity, and 2) Mrs. Ramsay turns out not to be all that
great. We mean, she's still lovely and sympathetic, but she knows that James isn't going to
get to the Lighthouse. And she regrets the fact that she disguised the truth from him ("She
felt angry with Charles Tansley, with her husband, and with herself, for she had raised his
hopes" [1.18.8]), but she still lied to him in the name of preserving his feelings.

In the end, while she's angry at Mr. Ramsay for oppressing James, Mrs. Ramsay does
nothing to change his behavior. In fact, Mrs. Ramsay actively wishes that James would stay
a child forever (1.10.10) because she loves him as a child. This works directly against
James's desire to grow and replace his father. Similarly, Lily Briscoe is fully aware that Mrs.
Ramsay is willing to care for Lily but only on her own terms. She's not willing to go out on
a limb for Lily's painting ("one could not take [Lily's] painting seriously" (1.3.7), thinks Mrs.
Ramsay). And she still believes that Lily must marry William Bankes. Lily feels Mrs.
Ramsay's pressure on her to be married and resents it, despite her affection for Mrs.
Ramsay as a person.

Climax

World War I strikes and the Ramsay family suffers a series of losses
that change the shape of both the house on the Isle of Skye and of
the family itself.
In the midst of James Ramsay's efforts to get to the Lighthouse and Lily Briscoe's efforts to
get recognition for her artwork, To the Lighthouse draws its focus away from the people of
the novel. The second part of the novel experiments with the passage of time through
focusing on the shifting, decaying form of the semi-abandoned house on the Isle of Skye,
with limited interruptions for the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay, Prue Ramsay (she falls ill in
childbirth), and Andrew Ramsay (he is killed in France by a mine during World War I).

These deaths must leave the structure of the Ramsay family forever changed (as, not to
get too melodramatic, the intrusion of World War I left England forever changed see how
Virginia Woolf gets at massive movements of history through the lens of the everyday?
Good stuff!). So this section of the novel provides a kind of climax for James and Lily:
they're left in suspension (as are we, the readers), waiting to see what's going to happen to
them now that Mr. Ramsay has lost the soothing, socializing influence of his wife. They
were trying to find places for themselves in the Ramsay family as it was in the first section;
now, they must work out what space there is for them in the Ramsay family as it will bein
the last section.

Suspense

It's the beginning of Part Three, and ten years have passed. What
are James and Lily going to do now that Mrs. Ramsay, who gave
both of them a place in the Ramsay family, has died? What are they
now going to work towards?
The third part begins with Lily Briscoe asking, "What does it mean then, what can it all
mean?" (3.1.1), and boy, we're right along with her. What does all of this mean? That's
where the suspense comes in: we're waiting to see if there's going to be any purpose or
conclusion given to the James Ramsay and Lily Briscoe story lines now that Mrs. Ramsay
has died.

And we find out almost immediately that there is going to be some kind of continuation with
the plot lines of Part One. James is finally getting his expedition to the Lighthouse, but this
time, it's on his father's terms and he's being forced to go with his sister Cam. As for Lily
Briscoe, she still feels the oppressive force of Mr. Ramsay that interfered with her painting
so many years ago. And she, like James, is picking up where she left off:

She must escape somewhere, be alone somewhere. Suddenly [Lily] remembered [...]
There had been a problem about a foreground of a picture. Move the tree to the middle,
she had said. She had never finished that picture. She would paint that picture now. It had
been knocking about in her mind all these years [...] She had borne it in her mind all these
years. It seemed as if the solution had come to her: she knew now what she wanted to
do. (3.1.7-8)

In other words, both James and Lily are picking up their quests again, but they're starting
from different places. They must begin in other ways because the James and Lily and
indeed, the Ramsay family of ten years ago have disappeared. As we read, we wonder if
this new James will reach his Lighthouse and this new Lily will finish her picture, as neither
succeeded in doing in Part One.

The suspense portion of the plot for both of these characters certainly covers most of Part
Three. Both James himself and his sister Cam observe James's growing resentment of his
father, as he chats anxiously with Macalister and continues to criticize and bully his
children. This trip seems almost like an intensification of the strain between the two men,
and between Cam, her father, and her brother that we saw in Part One. On Cam's part, she
finds herself feeling drowned in the competition between James and Mr. Ramsay, seeking
comfort in the dreams the steady rock of the boat inspires: "It was a hanging garden; it was
a valley, full of birds, and flowers, and antelopes" (3.12.3). This echoes the lullaby that Mrs.
Ramsay spoke to her when she was afraid of the boar's skull in Part One, the skull that
Mrs. Ramsay wrapped in her shawl to cover it from view. Cam is capable of being soothed,
of ignoring the ugly truths under things. As her father and James lock in silent struggle,
Cam sits to the side, quietly stifling.

James becomes wearily resentful of Cam's unwillingness to take his side (much as his
mother failed really to take his side over the Lighthouse thing in Part One?). So, between
his father's bullying and James's resentment of a female family member, it's almost like old
times. Meanwhile, Lily Briscoe is watching Mr. Ramsay's boat tacking towards the
lighthouse, and as she paints, she considers her relationship to the Ramsay family. Once
again, her painting is like a magnifying glass for her to use small subjects a tree moved
towards the middle of the canvas as a jumping off point for larger explorations of past,
present, art, and reality.

Denouement

The denouement is the point in the plot when everything becomes

clear. Both James Ramsay and Lily Briscoe do get their
denouements by the end of To the Lighthouse.
In Part Three, Chapter Twelve, Mr. Ramsay praises James Ramsay for his steering skills.
At last, he acknowledges that James has talents in his own right, that he need not control
every aspect of James's life.

James Ramsay and Mr. Ramsey share a moment of mutual understanding at the
Lighthouse, witnessed by Cam: "[James] was so pleased that he was not going to let
anyone share a grain of his pleasure. His father had praised him. They must think [James]
was perfectly indifferent. But you've got it now, Cam thought" (3.12.15). Mr. Ramsay has at
last given some of his power to the next generation. He will always be a domineering father,
but he's brought up James to follow in his footsteps, and he is willing at last to let James
take his place at the Lighthouse. We finally learn what James's quest to get to the
Lighthouse really means: he is taking up the social and intellectual authority of the Man.
(See "The Lighthouse" in "Symbols, Imagery, Allegory" for more.)

Lily Briscoe, for her part, is attempting to create a different heritage for herself. She's trying
to make peace with the memory of Mrs. Ramsay, both her quiet bullying (why should Lily
have married Mr. Bankes?) and her all-encompassing love (Lily learned a great deal about
the importance of the little things in life from Mrs. Ramsay). Lily's peacemaking with the
memory of Mrs. Briscoe gives her a way to solve her aesthetic problem of how she should
be painting:

One wanted, [Lily] thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary
experience, to feel simply thats a chair, thats a table, and yet at the same time, Its a
miracle, its an ecstasy. The problem might be solved after all. Ah, but what had happened?
Some wave of white went over the window pane. The air must have stirred some flounce in
the room. Her heart leapt at her and seized her and tortured her. (3.11.21).

Lily gets the everyday from Mrs. Ramsay, but the "miracle," the "ecstasy" that's all her
own artistic aspiration. "The problem" that she's looking for, how to capture that miracle, is
something that Mr. Ramsay is also, in a sense, seeking. He's got his theorem in Part One
that he never finishes, but Lily's focus on the everyday gives her enough to work with that
"the problem might be solved after all."

It's in this moment of realization that Lily understands that Mr. Ramsay has no authority
over her. She is effectively outside the traditional family structure of the Ramsays. He has
firmly established his heirs, James and Cam, who sail with him to the Lighthouse. Lily is
free to do something different, to carve out an artistic legacy for herself.

Lily has come to realize that Mr. Ramsay doesn't have to bother her any more. She has
solved with art what he attempts to solve with philosophy. Her willingness to look outside
the ordered rationality of social and philosophical structures has given her true inspiration.
She has broken free of the bonds of traditional class and gender roles to capture something
more essential: a true moment of aesthetic revelation.

Conclusion

Both James and Lily have gotten what they've been wanting, so all
that's left for the conclusion is that final "line there, in the centre"
to emphasize Lily's recognition of her own freedom from the
Lighthouse and all it represents.
Following the denouement, we get a final chapter in Part Three. Lily Briscoe sees that Mr.
Ramsay's boat must have arrived at the Lighthouse. It's at this moment, when she
observes from afar Mr. Ramsay's greatest moment of family bonding, that Lily really gets
the degree of perspective on the Ramsay family that she's been searching for all of these
years. Lily and Mr. Carmichael (a successful poet) have both achieved an aesthetic
resolution. They may not share the Ramsay family's social status, but their abilities to
capture the essence of such scenes gives them intellectual and artistic security outside the
conventions of marriage and family life. Lily has come to understand that all of the minor
pressures of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay on her fate have fallen away which is perhaps why the
Lighthouse (and all the social and family pressures that it represents) "had become almost
invisible, had melted away into a blue haze" (3.13.1). Lily has solved the problem of the
Lighthouse and how she can operate independently of it as a single woman artist: she has,
at last, completed her painting.

To the Lighthouse as Bookers Seven Basic Plots Analysis: Quest Plot

Christopher Booker is a scholar who wrote that every story falls into one of
seven basic plot structures: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, the Quest,
Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, and Rebirth. Shmoop explores which of
these structures fits this story like Cinderellas slipper.

Plot Type :

The Call

The set-up for the quest is that life has become "oppressive and intolerable," and the hero
"can only rectify matters by making a long, difficult journey." So Christopher Booker tells us.
And frankly, we think James Ramsay would mostly agree with this assessment: life in his
father's household has gotten oppressive. And if only he could get to the Lighthouse,
reasons six-year old James, life would be much better. Maybe he'd even be able to make
time with his mom.

However, this initial call is thwarted right from the start: James is still subject to the dictates
of his father, who won't let him go. So this call for a journey won't be answered until after
his mother has died and his father has begun to think of passing on his power over the
Ramsay family at the beginning Part Three.

As for Lily Briscoe, she's laboring under a lot of social judgment: she's getting older, she's
not very attractive, and she has the unusual aspiration (for a woman in the late Victorian
era) of becoming a painter. So the only way that she perceives that she can defend herself
from Mrs. Ramsay's well-meaning interference to get her married and Mr. Ramsay's less-
well-meaning dismissal of her painting is to find an artistic identity for herself that would be
separate from her identity as a woman in Victorian England.

Just like James Ramsay, though, Lily feels this call throughout the first section of the book,
but cannot truly act on it until Part Three, when she has had some time and distance away
to reflect on the bewitching, influential figure of Mrs. Ramsay.

The Journey

Both James and Lily embark on their journeys at the beginning of Part Three (aptly named
"The Lighthouse"). James encounters "monsters" (apparently necessary in any quest
narrative) in the form of his father and Macalister (the boat captain), both of whom seem to
be speaking the same kind of traditional male-bonding language without paying too much
heed to James who's also wants to be recognized as a man. The ordeal that James is
undergoing here is the increasing tyranny and anxiety of his dad, who's getting more and
more difficult for James to deal with the closer they get to the Lighthouse.

Lily, for her part, is having to do battle with the monsters of the past: as she paints the
scene before her, she recalls the strain and hostility she sometimes felt with her beloved
Mrs. Ramsay. She remembers the subtle, quiet ways that Mrs. Ramsay attempted to
compel Lily to act against Lily's own wishes (Mrs. Ramsay's matchmaking attempts with Mr.
Bankes spring to mind as an example). Lily struggles to capture something of Mrs.
Ramsay's beauty and poise without being personally overcome by Mrs. Ramsay's love for
tradition.

Arrival and Frustration

Booker informs us that, once the hero arrives within sight of his goal, he realizes that
there's more left to his road than he thought. And James definitely feels the frustration that
Booker describes. James is instructed to steer this wretched boat that's going to the
Lighthouse, so you'd think that his hard work would be acknowledged by his dad. Even old
Macalister says that James has manned the tiller like a real sailor. So why can't his dad just
once acknowledge that James is doing a good job?

Lily, meanwhile, is caught up in her memories of Mrs. Ramsay. She remembers that Mrs.
Ramsay, like Lily herself, attempted to capture moments in the flow of time. These
moments, for Mrs. Ramsay, were social or familial; Lily, of course, paints her still moments
on canvas. But the solution for the problem that she has presented to herself, the opposing
forces she has set up between Mr. Ramsay and the painting, remains unsolved: "it evaded
her now when she thought of her picture. Phrases came. Visions came" (3.11.6) but
never precisely the right visions.

The Final Ordeals

We have to say, we feel that the frustration James and Lily experience on their respective
quests is their final ordeal. So, this additional stage doesn't apply.

The Goal

Both James and Lily get to where they want to go in the end. James makes some kind of
peace with his father, and James decides to take his place at the Lighthouse as a Man.
Tickled by his father's praises, James takes up his father's mannerisms and ways of
thinking. Mr. Ramsay and James have formed a direct intellectual line from father to son.

Lily has also succeeded in creating, from her memories of Mrs. Ramsay, a new, feminine
artistic trajectory, in which she uses the everyday as a lens to capture larger truths (or
"visions") about human life.

Three-Act Plot Analysis

For a three-act plot analysis, put on your screenwriters hat. Moviemakers know
the formula well: at the end of Act One, the main character is drawn in
completely to a conflict. During Act Two, she is farthest away from her goals. At
the end of Act Three, the story is resolved.

Act I

Act I ends when the protagonist(s) have reached a point of no return, which we feel comes
when Mrs. Ramsay passes away in Part Two. Until then, all of the struggles of the novel
(between Charles Tansley and everyone, between James and Mr. Ramsay, between Lily
and all of the Ramsays) have taken place under the condition that Mrs. Ramsay was there
to make everyone feel better. Mrs. Ramsay complemented Mr. Ramsay's rough edges, and
her social ease drew everyone together in a way that could never be matched in the
subsequent chapters. So the point of no return is the moment when Mrs. Ramsay is
removed from the scene, and we are left wondering how is James going to get along with
Mr. Ramsay now that his beloved mother is gone? And how is Lily going to form her artistic
identity against the discouragement of men like Mr. Ramsay and Charles Tansley without
Mrs. Ramsay's (sort of grudging) support?

Act II

Act II should take us from that point of no return to the place in the narrative where the
characters are furthest from their goals. Insofar as the characters have goals, then, we'd
have to say that Act II starts with Mrs. Ramsay's death and ends with the beginning of Part
Three, when James and Lily both pick up their struggles with Mr. Ramsay again. We don't
know how James is going to resolve is problems with his dad, nor do we know how Lily's
going to manage to finish her painting after ten years of waiting. But once Lily picks up her
brush and James sets sail for the Lighthouse with Cam and Mr. Ramsay, we know they've
laid the foundations of their final plot developments, which carries us into Act III.

Act III

This is the part of the story where everything is solved: James reconciles with his father,
who has decided to share some of his power with James (symbolized by their shared
arrival at the Lighthouse under James's steering). And Lily recognizes the contribution that
the Ramsay family has made to her life without feeling like she owes them any shame over
her unmarried status. Lily has solved her aesthetic problem of how to be a painter separate
from Mr. Ramsay's philosophies on the subject. The End.

To the Lighthouse Steaminess Rating

Exactly how steamy is this story?

PG

The Ramsays are obviously having it (seriously, eight kids?), but we regret to inform you
that throughout the course of the book no one has sex. Theyre all too concerned with
bigger things, like fruit arrangements, Shakespeare, and the meaning of life. Oh wait
there is one potentially juicy tidbit we forgot to mention. In Part Three, we discover that Paul
Rayley has "taken up" with another woman, but even this seems to be more about shared
opinions about "the taxation of land values and a capital levy" than any sexual attraction.

To the Lighthouse Allusions & Cultural References

When authors refer to other great works, people, and events, its usually not
accidental. Put on your super-sleuth hat and figure out why.

Literature, Philosophy, and Mythology

Alfred, Lord Tennyson: "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1.3.8, 1.4.1 and onwards)
The Brothers Grimm: "The Fisherman and his Wife" (throughout chapters 7 to 10 of Part
One)
Shakespeare (Throughout part 1 of the novel)
Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina (1.17.63)
Percy Bysshe Shelley: "The Invitation" "The best and brightest, come away []" (1.12.10)
Charles Elton: "Luriana Lurilee" (Part One, Chapter 17)
William Brown: "Sirens Song" (1.19.5)
William Shakespeare: Sonnet 98 (Part One, Chapter 19)
William Cowper: "The Castaway" (throughout Part Three)

To the Lighthouse Summary

How It All Goes Down
Part One spans approximately seven hours and takes up more than half the book. Its set
at the Ramsays summer home, where the Ramsays and their eight children are
entertaining a number of friends and colleagues. The novel begins with James Ramsay,
age six, wanting to go to the Lighthouse thats across the bay from the Ramsays summer
home. His mother, Mrs. Ramsay, holds out hope that the weather will be good tomorrow so
they can go to the Lighthouse, but Mr. Ramsay is adamant that the weather will be awful.
Charles Tansley, one of Mr. Ramsays visiting students, chimes in and supports Mr.
Ramsays view that the weather will be rotten. Hes a very socially awkward young man
who is obsessed with his dissertation.

Numerous small bits of action occur. For example, after lunch, Mrs. Ramsay takes pity on
Mr. Tansley and asks him to accompany her into town. By the end of the trip, Mr. Tansley is
in love with the much older, but still beautiful, Mrs. Ramsay (by the way, she is 50). Later,
as she sits in a window and reads a fairy tale to James, Mrs. Ramsay remembers that she
must keep her head down for Lily Briscoes painting. (If youre wondering who Lily is, we
are in the same boat. Although, we gather shes a family friend.) Mrs. Ramsay has the
fleeting thought that Lily will have a hard time getting married, but she likes Lily anyway and
decides that Lily should marry William Bankes, an old friend of Mr. Ramsays.

William Bankes, who is also visiting the Ramsays, comes up to Lily and the two of them go
for a walk. They talk about Mr. Ramsay. Meanwhile, Mr. Ramsay walks along the lawn and
worries about mortality and his legacy to humankind, and then pesters Mrs. Ramsay to
soothe his ego. Mrs. Ramsay does calm her husband, and then starts worrying about Paul
(the Ramsays guest), Minta (another guest), Nancy Ramsay (daughter), and Andrew (son),
who are not yet back from the beach. She hopes that Paul has proposed to Minta.

At dinner, Mrs. Ramsay triumphs. The food is delicious; she is beautiful; Mr. Bankes has
stayed for dinner; and Pauls proposal to Minta has been accepted. She wishes she could
freeze the moment but knows it is already part of the past. She tucks her youngest two
children into bed and then sits with her husband as he reads. They make small talk and she
knows he wants her to say, "I love you," though she refuses. She gets out of it by smiling at
him and telling him that he was right the weather will be bad tomorrow and they will not
be able to visit the Lighthouse.

Part Two compresses ten years into about twenty pages. All the traditionally important
information in a story (read: what happened to the characters) is briefly imparted in
brackets. We learn that Mrs. Ramsay, Prue Ramsay (daughter), and Andrew Ramsay (son)
have died. Mrs. Ramsay died at night; Prue died in childbirth (after first getting married);
and Andrew died when a shell exploded in France. Oh, right. There also happens to be a
war going on World War I which gets glossed over in favor of extended descriptions of
the weather and the summer house by the sea.

Part Three takes place at the summer house and begins with Mr. Ramsay and two of his
children, Cam and James, finally going to the Lighthouse, and Lily working on the painting
of Mrs. Ramsay that she never finished. Via Lilys thoughts, we hear that she never
married, but remained good friends with William Bankes. Paul and Mintas marriage fell
apart. Mr. Ramsay, Cam, and James actually make it to the Lighthouse. Lily finishes her
painting. Throughout this last part of the novel, its clear that Mrs. Ramsay is sorely missed.
Mrs. Ramsay

Character Analysis

Mrs. Ramsay is about as close as Virginia Woolf ever got to Angelina Jolie: Mrs. Ramsay's
beautiful, beloved, charitable, and the mother of many children. (Although, Mr. Ramsay is
no Brad Pitt.) But thats about as far as the similarities go. Mrs. Ramsay isn't a U.N.
ambassador, and we very much doubt that she gave birth to, say, James Ramsay in
Namibia, as Jolie did with Shiloh. But the point remains: Mrs. Ramsay is the lovely star at
the center of the Ramsay family, and at the heart of the novel. Her unexpected death
leaves the Ramsay family (and especially Mr. Ramsay) without its anchor.

Mrs. Ramsay is a complex character: she is invested in the importance of marriage

between a man and a woman (and all men and all women should definitely be married,
according to her), but she clearly sees the flaws in her own marriage. It becomes Mrs.
Ramsay's duty to soften her husband's bullying and to support him in public. Even so,
she'sembarrassed by his constant quoting of poetry in a loud voice, and by his need for
praise from the people around him.

In the midst of all of Mr. Ramsay's posturing and performing, he's actually insecure. And it
falls to Mrs. Ramsay to soothe those insecurities, because that's what she perceives to be
the job of the wife. (We get into this in more detail in the "Lighthouse" section of "Symbols,
Imagery, Allegory.")

At the end of Part One, we see a clear division of labor between Mrs. Ramsay and Mr.
Ramsay: "He found talking much easier than she did," but "she felt herself very beautiful"
(1.19.17). He's the one who talks he's the intellectual one. But she's the one who attracts
people and who makes social interactions possible, at least in part because she's beautiful.
These are the roles they're each relatively comfortable playing: Mr. Ramsay gets to be the
brains if Mrs. Ramsay gets to be the beauty.

The weird thing is, though, that neither of them are completely successful in their gender
roles. Mrs. Ramsay loves the flattery of being checked out by the men around her, but she
uses this admiration to influence Paul Rayley to marry Minta a marriage that, Lily Briscoe
reveals in the third chapter, is a disaster. Mrs. Ramsay's investment in her traditional
gender role as a mother and matchmaker actually damages the people around her.

And Mr. Ramsay spends much of the first chapter secretly wondering why he can't
complete the line of logical reasoning that would prove that he's really a genius. Those
around him William Bankes, Charles Tansley, and even Mrs. Ramsay think to
themselves that his last book was perhaps not his best book. The effort of trying to be the
intellectual head of both his family (with the rebellious James) and of his social circle (with
the ever-striving Charles Tansley) eats away at him inside.

The thing that's interesting about Mrs. Ramsay and her partnership with Mr. Ramsay is that
Mr. Ramsay is obviously the oppressive patriarch. But Mrs. Ramsay's pretty darn
oppressive, too, in a much subtler way. She's got this total love/hate thing going with Lily
Briscoe, who adores Mrs. Ramsay but who also feels that, by being beautiful and
completely stubborn, Mrs. Ramsay makes people do things that they wouldn't otherwise do
(witness the terrible marriage between Paul and Minta):

But beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty it came too readily, came too
completely. It stilled life froze it. One forgot the little agitations; the flush, the pallor, some
queer distortion, some light or shadow, which made the face unrecognisable for a moment
and yet added a quality one saw for ever after. It was simpler to smooth that all out under
the cover of beauty. (3.5.19)

The criticism that Lily's offering here of Mrs. Ramsay is this: she was great at pulling
together her family. But by doing so, she smoothed over all of the complexities and
individual interests of her children and her friends in favor of a greater whole. Mr. Ramsay
is an overt bully, but Mrs. Ramsay quietly influences people to take the shape
that she wants them to take, in the name of a greater ideal ("beauty") that Mrs. Ramsay is
pursuing. (For more on Lily's love/hate thing, check out the "Character Roles" section under
"Foils.")

Mrs. Ramsay and Men: Specifically, Mr. Ramsay

Mrs. Ramsay thrives on male companionship, because she sets herself up as a kind of
Superwoman: she gives great dinner parties and she raises eight children, yet she still has
the energy to be effortlessly beautiful. And what better way is there to show off her
womanhood than to be surrounded by men?

The thing is, though, when we talk about the symbol of "The Lighthouse" in "Symbols,
Imagery, Allegory," we mention that one of the themes of this book is the gap between the
ideal and the real. And there's definitely a gap here: Mrs. Ramsay works so hard to be a
perfect wife that it freaks her out when Mr. Ramsay can't quite fill the role of perfect
husband and father:

She did not like, even for a second, to feel finer than her husband; and further, could not
bear not being entirely sure, when she spoke to him, of the truth of what she said (that Mr.
Ramsay is not a failure). Universities and people wanting him, lectures and books and their
being of the highest importanceall that she did not doubt for a moment; but it was their
relation, and his coming to her like that, openly, so that any one could see, that
discomposed her; for then people said he depended on her, when they must know that of
the two he was infinitely the more important, and what she gave the world, in comparison
with what he gave, negligible. (1.7.7)

There are two things about Mr. Ramsay that are worrying Mrs. Ramsay in this passage: the
first is that he comes to her directly and announces that he's a failure. So he's exposing his
weakness to her in the showiest, most ostentatious way possible. For Mrs. Ramsay, it's as
though he's suddenly strolled into the drawing room completely naked.

The whole point, for her, of manhood, is that it's all about hiding its weakness. She likes
men "for their chivalry and valour, for the fact that they negotiated treaties, ruled India,
controlled finance" (1.1.7). In her heart of hearts, she doubts that a real man would come
up to his wife and say, "Lady, I'm not brave and I've never managed to negotiate a treaty,
rule India, or control finance." Yet, Mr. Ramsay is insecure enough to have done exactly
that.
And what's all of her effort to become Superwoman worth if it's not going to be lavished on
a Superman? Mr. Ramsay makes Mrs. Ramsay doubt what she's doing. And that's the
second thing that's bothering Mrs. Ramsay in this passage. It's not just that she feels
embarrassed by Mr. Ramsay's lack of emotional control in public, it's also that she hates to
acknowledge that both she and Mr. Ramsay suspect that she (Mrs. Ramsay) is
worth more than Mr. Ramsay. And that doesn't fit into the traditional model of motherhood
that Mrs. Ramsay is so clearly invested in.

The Tao of Mrs. Ramsay

We definitely don't want to give the impression that Mrs. Ramsay is just some kind of
monster, though. She's not just using her influence to make people do what they don't want
to do ("having brought it all about, [she] somehow laughed, led her victims [...] to the altar"
(1.17.48), as Lily Briscoe says). The Way of Mrs. Ramsay is actually relatively positive. For
one thing, she seems to be the only character in the novel that cares at all about the
differences between rich and poor:

It seemed to her such nonsense inventing differences, when people, heaven knows,
were different enough without that. The real differences, she thought, standing by the
drawing-room window, are enough, quite enough. She had in mind at the moment, rich and
poor, high and low. (1.1.14)

The Ramsay kids get pretty snooty at Charles Tansley because he's awkward and can't
play cricket. But Mrs. Ramsay (who also isn't that fond of Charles Tansley) isn't having it. In
fact, it's precisely those social questions of correct dress and decent public behavior that
Mrs. Ramsay smoothes over. She's all about facilitating social situations and making
people comfortable (even if they're being jerks; check out the dinner party scene in Part
One, Chapter Seventeen).

What Mrs. Ramsay dedicates herself to is charitable work. She's so compassionate that
she has energy to spare from raising eight children to think of the Lighthouse keeper and
his sickly son. But maybe this isn't as great as it appears. We get into this in "The
Lighthouse" as a symbol, but we'll just say here that the problem with considering gender
discrimination and class discrimination separately is that they're actually part of the same
larger system. Mrs. Ramsay is good to the poor, but by supporting the status quo of the
traditional family, she's actually maintaining the social structures of domination that keep
some people poor and some people rich.

Still, Woolf finds value in Mrs. Ramsay's charitable efforts and daily family work. Maybe
she's not some giant revolutionary trying to overthrow the Man, but her work shouldn't be
devalued because of that.

Mrs. Ramsay Timeline

Mr. Ramsay

Character Analysis
When we are first introduced to Mr. Ramsay, he comes off as a bit of a jerk. To paraphrase,
he says stuff like: "No Lighthouse for you tomorrow, James!" "Life is hard!" and "Suck it up!"
But, once we get inside his brain, we realize that Mr. Ramsay simply suffers from an acute
sense of his own mortality and insignificance. See, Mr. Ramsay is kind of a big deal at
least among the metaphysical philosophers crowd. Because hes such a big deal, hes
constantly thinking about his achievements: how long are they going to last? How long will
his work be valued? He reflects dismally that the stone he kicks with his boot will outlast
Shakespeare. And seriously, how can he compete with Shakespeare? No wonder the
mans so crabby.

In Part Three, it becomes clear just how much Mr. Ramsay depended on Mrs. Ramsay. Not
only did she give him infinite amounts of sympathy, she also watched over him like a hawk
to smooth out any emotional complications in his life. Think of the scene in Part Three
where Mr. Ramsay silently begs Lily to give him sympathy. That situation never would have
happened if Mrs. Ramsay was alive. Mr. Ramsay gets into these grumpy moods where hes
mean, domineering, and tyrannical, but Mrs. Ramsay acted as a mediating force, almost
always ready to give him what he wanted.

The last interesting tidbit of Mr. Ramsays character that we wanted to point out is the
struggle between intellectual achievements vs. domesticity. Mr. Bankes is the first to point
us in this direction, when he muses:

"While he walked up the drive [] he weighed Ramsays case, commiserated him, envied
him, as if he had seen him divest himself of all those glories of isolation and austerity which
crowned him in youth to cumber himself definitely with fluttering wings and clucking
domesticities. They gave him something William Bankes acknowledged that []."

All those beautifully lines boil down to the idea that eight kids and a wife are great and all,
but they come at a price. Whats this price, you ask? It becomes pretty clear later when we
find out that Mr. Ramsay would have written better books if he hadnt gotten married (he
was clearly doing other things with Mrs. Ramsay if you get our drift) and when he
holds off on the deep thinking to admire his beautiful wife and kid in the window. So when
lesser entities tell you that Mr. Ramsay embodies the rational mind or something else like
that, take it with a grain of salt, and remember all these passages where Mr. Ramsay is
obviously drawn to the not-so-rational.

Mr. Ramsay Timeline

Lily Briscoe

Character Analysis

Have you ever heard the term "Mary Sue"? It's an internet slang expression for a character
in a story who seems like total wish fulfillment for the author someone the author either 1)
really identifies with, or 2) really wants to sleep with. A common marker of the Mary Sue is
that she's really pretty. If she's physically flawed at all, it's a flaw that makes her even more
appealing like a single streak of silver hair in an otherwise flaming mane of beautiful red
curls. Another sign that a character might be a self-insertion is that she's really good at
everything: she'll be the most caring, most talented character of the lot. So if you run across
a character in a fantasy novel who's too beautiful to be real, with almond-shaped violet
eyes and a perfect, voluptuous-without-being-too-curvy figure, who turns out to be a half-
elven daughter of Gandalf with magic beyond imagining and wisdom beyond her age
chances are, that's a Mary Sue.

And, in the best possible way, without all of those magic powers of the Faerie, Lily Briscoe
is kind of Virginia Woolf's Mary Sue. She's the person who most closely mirrors Woolf's
own preoccupations with gender and art (and she's also intriguing looking for an analysis
of the significance of Lily's "Chinese eyes," check out Patricia Laurence's book Lily
Briscoe's Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism, and China).

Lily Briscoe is a woman artist, and while she captures what she sees around her in paints
rather than in words, her project in the novel is, in many ways, similar to Virginia Woolf's
project for To the Lighthouse.

Consider the middle section of the book, in which Woolf uses words to sketch the essence
of ten years of time's passage for the Ramsay family by focusing on the slow decline of
their house in the Isle of Skye. Woolf works obliquely (in other words, indirectly and in a
wandering manner) to depict the decay of the Ramsay family without ever actually coming
out and showing how the family has interacted over those ten years. And this is really
similar to the painting strategy that Lily uses inTo the Lighthouse:

It was Mrs Ramsay reading to James, [Lily] said. She knew [William Bankes]'s objection
that no one could tell it for a human shape. But she had made no attempt at likeness, she
said. For what reason had she introduced them then? he asked. Why indeed?except that
if there, in that corner, it was bright, here, in this, she felt the need of darkness. Simple,
obvious, commonplace, as it was, Mr Bankes was interested. Mother and child then
objects of universal veneration, and in this case the mother was famous for her beauty
might be reduced, he pondered, to a purple shadow without irreverence. (1.9.13)

Lily's painting of James and Mrs. Ramsay suggests Mrs. Ramsay's character with a few
lines and a bit of purple shadowing: "she had made no attempt at likeness." Lily attempts to
capture something truthful in her portrait without being too picky about making the painting
actually look like Mrs. Ramsay. And in painting the essence of Mrs. Ramsay rather than her
physical form, she's not trying to get only Mrs. Ramsay; she's also trying to represent
something ineffable or inexpressible about "mother and child [...] objects of universal
veneration" (by the way, veneration means admiration and respect).

This sounds a lot like Woolf's work to get the essence of the Ramsay family (and of her
own family, and of family structures more generally; for more on this, see "In a Nutshell") by
jotting down moments from two days separated by ten years. Woolf isn't going the realist
route with this novel. Like Lily, Woolf uses the "simple, obvious, commonplace" to get at
really profound issues between mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters.
Lily and Men: Specifically, Charles Tansley and William
Bankes

Mrs. Ramsay can't stand for a woman of her acquaintance to stay unmarried. She's a total
matchmaker, and Lily isn't immune. The guy Mrs. Ramsay thinks Lily should marry is
William Bankes, an older widower of Mr. Ramsay's acquaintance who becomes one of the
greatest friends of Lily Briscoe's life. What's really interesting about Lily's relationship with
Mr. Bankes is the way that it models a totally non-sexual and mutually supportive
relationship between a man and a woman something that, as a woman artist in the
1920s, Lily seems cynical about.

This relationship stands in contrast to Mr. Ramsay's incredibly domineering, oppressive

influence on Lily's painting (for more on this relationship, by the way, check out "What's Up
With the Ending?"). Mr. Ramsay makes it impossible for Lily to paint as she chooses: "Let
[Mr. Ramsay] be fifty feet away, let him not even speak to you, let him not even see you, he
permeated, he prevailed, he imposed himself. He changed everything" (3.1.10). Mr.
Ramsay's intellectual and social authority as the Head of the Ramsay Family gives him an
arrogance that squeezes the life out of his social subordinates: his children, his wife, and
even Lily Briscoe (check out our analysis of "The Lighthouse" in the "Symbols, Imagery,
Allegory" for more on this).

But where Mr. Ramsay stifles Lily's creativity, Mr. Bankes respects it even if he doesn't
entirely get what she's going for. Mr. Bankes's contrast with Mr. Ramsay underlined by his
own internal monologue in Part One:

He was anxious for the sake of this friendship [with Lily Briscoe] and perhaps too in order
to clear himself in his own mind from the imputation of having dried and shrunk for
Ramsay lived in a welter of children, whereas Bankes was childless and a widower he
was anxious that Lily Briscoe should not disparage Ramsay (a great man in his own way)
yet should understand how things stood between them. (1.4.9)

What Mr. Bankes wants from Lily is the recognition that yes, he belongs to Mr. Ramsay's
generation (they knew each other as boys), but they have each developed along different
tracks. Mr. Ramsay has become a family man as well as a philosopher, but Mr. Bankes,
who does not occupy the kind of traditional family structure Mr. Ramsay prizes (he's
"childless and a widower"), can talk to Lily about her painting without becoming hostile,
competitive, or patronizing. And this degree of free-thinking reassures Lily that her painting
can be meaningful across gender lines:

She remembered how William Bankes had been shocked by her neglect (in her painting) of
the significance of mother and son. Did she not admire their beauty? he said. But William,
she remembered, had listened to her with his wise child's eyes when she explained how it
was not irreverence [...] Thanks to his scientific mind he understood a proof of
disinterested intelligence which had pleased her and comforted her enormously. One could
talk of painting then seriously to a man. (3.5.17)

Bankes cares about the "significance" of mother and son (both as real people, such as
James and Mrs. Ramsay, but also as social categories). Still, he is capable of overcoming
his own prejudices to admire Lily's work according to her own reasoning. They can have a
conversation about painting that would be impossible between Lily and Mr. Ramsay, with
the latter's real caveman views on women.

As far as cavemen go, though, Charles Tansley is pretty far up there. He's the one who
comes right out and says, repeatedly, that women can't paint and can't write. The thing
about Charles is that he's jockeying for position in a social world that he feels should be
controlled by men and specifically, by intellectual, philosophical men like Mr. Ramsay
(and himself). He doesn't feel that he should be forced to compete with Lily Briscoe in
conversation, and he gets all frustrated during the dinner party when she doesn't play along
with him at first.

The thing that prevents Lily from being oppressed by Tansley is that she has her work to fall
back on:

She had done the usual trick been nice. [Lily] would never know [Charles Tansley]. He
would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst (if it
had not been for Mr. Bankes) were between men and women [...] And she remembered
that next morning she would move the tree further towards the middle, and her spirits rose
so high at the thought of painting tomorrow that she laughed out loud at what Mr. Tansley
was saying. Let him talk all night if he liked it. (1.17.28)

Lily is feeling embarrassed because she's "done the usual trick": Tansley's being a total jerk
at this party, but even so, Lily falls back onto her social training as a woman of the 1920s
and smoothes everything over. She submits to him socially so that he'll stop hating life,
even though he's been a creep to Lily and everyone else around him. But then Lily recalls
that she has something of her own to fall back on that painting with a tree that she'll be
moving further towards the middle. And even though she still has to deal with social
hierarchy on a daily basis, it's a huge relief to Lily that she also has this private, emotionally
meaningful place to speak her own mind.

So Lily doesn't care what Tansley is nattering on about at the dinner table: he has no power
over her. Lily's work and Mr. Bankes are the two things that convince her that social
relations between men and women aren't hopeless: there are decent men out there, and
even when Lily happens not to be seated next to one of them at the dinner table, she's
carved out an intellectual identity for herself that can protect her.

First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage...?

We've talked a little bit about Lily's difficult relationships with men, so it should come as no
surprise that she doesn't want to get married. She seems to view marriage and personal
creativity as incompatible. And she gives us plenty of evidence for this:

For at any rate, [Lily] said to herself [...] she need not marry, thank Heaven: she need not
undergo that degradation. She was saved from that dilution. She would move the tree
rather more to the middle. (1.17.52)

Here's where Lily comes up against the character of Mrs. Ramsay, who has her own form
of creativity. Mrs. Ramsay is a social artist: she puts together dinner parties and holds
together her family. She adopts strays like Lily Briscoe and William Bankes, bringing them
in to the sunny circle of the Ramsay family. But Mrs. Ramsay is limited by her inability to
imagine an identity outside of traditional society (for more on this, check out the "Foils"
section of "Character Roles"). Lily Briscoe doesn't have that restriction. She makes a place
for herself to express her own private understanding of what's going on around her. This
space is her canvas.

What's interesting about Lily's painting (besides the fact that it's nonrepresentational and
abstract, kind of like To the Lighthouse) is that Lily knows that perhaps no one will ever see
it. Her work gave her something to talk about with Mr. Bankes, but otherwise, it has no
communicative function. Lily's basically resigned herself to the fact that her painting is
going to wind up in someone's attic (3.13.3). But isn't art supposed to help you express
yourself? How can it be meaningful if it's not public?

What Woolf is fighting against here is the notion that the only way that art is meaningful is if
its creator is famous (read our Shmoop guide to Orlando to see how she handles this in
another, more fantastical novel). During the time in which this novel is set, fame favors
men. (If you want to get more on this theme of masculine-lineage-for-art, see Woolf's book-
length essay A Room of One's Own.) After all, Mr. Ramsay is famous, and he uses his
established reputation as an intellectual as another way of oppressing the people around
him (think of all that out-of-context poetry he spouts, to the embarrassment of Mrs.
Ramsay).

Lily, on the other hand, can muse on the same questions that face Mr. Ramsay the
meaning of life, etc. without pushing anybody else down. What's more, painting helps her
gain perspective. Lily's thoughts about life and the universe aren't in the abstract, logical
terms that Mr. Ramsay uses. Lily paints the Ramsays and the Lighthouse in an attempt to
make sense of her own lived experience. Lily finds significance in fleeting scenes of daily
life around her, a project that certainly resembles, say, Woolf's own Mrs. Dalloway.
Painting, for Lily, is a means for personal revelation.

Lily Briscoe Timeline

ames Ramsay

Character Analysis

James Ramsay is the youngest of the Ramsay family's eight children. He starts out the
novel as a six-year-old and ends it as a melancholy, sullen sixteen-year-old. James's entire
character revolves around his desire to go to the Lighthouse: in Part One, he desperately
wants to go but will not be allowed, and in the Part Three, his father makes him to sail there
almost against his will. James's obsession makes it obvious that this Lighthouse isn't just a
lighthouse; it's in the title, so it's got to have huge symbolic significance. Want to go and
then refusing to go to the Lighthouse becomes one tool to show the reader James's
shifting, difficult relationship with his father.

James is caught between his profound bond with his mother and his fiercely competitive
relationship with his father. Even at six, he's filled with apparent loathing for Mr. Ramsay
and the place that he occupies in Mrs. Ramsay's life. And James's fixation on Mrs. Ramsay
is by no means one-sided; Mrs. Ramsay wishes that James (and his sister, Cam) would
never grow up: "She would have liked to keep for ever just as they were, demons of
wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters"
(1.10.10). Mrs. Ramsay, as mother of eight, derives much of her identity from being a
Mother (with a capital M); her intense relationship with James (and, to a lesser extent,
Cam) keeps that maternal identity alive.

Of course, the problem with maintaining Mrs. Ramsay as the ultimate Mother is that James
doesn't just want to be her son. He kind of wants to be his dad. He fantasizes about
plunging a knife into Mr. Ramsay's heart and because we have no evidence that James is
actually a psychopath, we have to figure that this is symbolic of a more general desire
to replace his dad, to prevent his father from interrupting James's special tie to Mrs.
Ramsay. And Mrs. Ramsay is, in a subtle way, complicit in this competition between these
two men in her life:

"Perhaps you will wake up and find the sun shining and the birds singing," [Mrs. Ramsay]
said compassionately, soothing the little boy's hair, for her husband, with his caustic saying
that it would not be fine, had dashed his spirits she could see. This going to the Lighthouse
was a passion of [James's], she saw. (1.3.1)

Mrs. Ramsay knows that James, in wanting to go to the Lighthouse, is thirsting after
independence from his father's control. Mr. Ramsay's caustic (or, in other words, harsh)
refusal is squashing little James's spirit. Mrs. Ramsay sees the power struggle going on
here, and does her best to soften the pain on both sides, but in the end, she's as invested
as Mr. Ramsay in keeping things as they are. So she's mad at Mr. Ramsay for being mean
to James, but she also recognizes the necessity after all, if the weather is bad, they can't
sail to the Lighthouse. From Mrs. Ramsay's perspective, it's the natural order of things that
Mr. Ramsay should be able to make James knuckle under. After all, he's the father of the
household. (For more on how the Lighthouse works as a symbol of traditional family
structures, check out "The Lighthouse" in the "Symbols, Imagery, Allegory" section.)

Anyway, all of this kind of changes in Part Three, when Mrs. Ramsay has died and the
Ramsay family is returning, for the first time in ten years, to that old house on the Isle of
Skye. The love triangle is gone: there's no more Mrs. Ramsay for James and Mr. Ramsay
to compete over. So, why, after all this time, does Mr. Ramsay insist that the family sail to
the Lighthouse? Well, he's got a figurative torch to pass to the next generation. He compels
James and Cam to accompany him, and in the process, there's a profound shift of power.

James starts out the trip all, "Resist him. Fight him [...] For [we] must fight tyranny to the
death" (3.4.9). But the thing about tyranny is that it's all very well to fight it when you're one
of the oppressed. It's a lot more seductive when you get to be tyrant. And the thing that is
perhaps going on in this final voyage is that Mr. Ramsay is exerting the last of his control
over the family to pass on his authority to his children and especially, to James. Consider
the moment when they finally arrive at the Lighthouse and James sees: "So it was like that
[...] the Lighthouse one had seen across the bay all these years; it was a stark tower on a
bare rock. It satisfied him. It confirmed some obscure feeling of his about his own
character" (3.12.3, our italics).

What James finds in the Lighthouse is confirmation of his own character, of the character
that he's inheriting from his father, who also loves the Lighthouse. The sudden doubling
between James and Mr. Ramsay is underscored at the end of this paragraph, when James
reflects, "They shared that knowledge. 'We are driving before a gale we must sink,' he
began saying to himself, half aloud, exactly as his father said it" (3.12.3). After all of his
sullen resistance, James has been drawn in at last to the patriarchal power he's desired
since he was six.

What "that knowledge" is, we the readers do not know. It is something ineffable shared
between James and Mr. Ramsay, something that Cam, the sister, witnesses but can't join
in. "But you've got it now" (3.12.15), Cam thinks, recognizing that James has finally
inherited from Mr. Ramsay the praise that he has always wanted.

The thing about the Lighthouse, as we talk about in the "The Lighthouse" section of
"Symbols, Imagery, Allegory," is that it's a symbol of both permanence and transience. The
foundation of the family remains intact, but the man who fill the position of Head of the
Family must change over time. James's final arrival at the lighthouse represents a shift of
power in the Ramsay family. James has finally gotten what he wanted all those years (and
pages) ago in Part One: James gets to be his dad.

Charles Tansley
Character Analysis

Charles Tansley is a student of Mr. Ramsays who was invited to the house for the summer.
No one likes him because he has a gargantuan chip on his shoulder. Its so big that it gets
in the way of pretty much every single interaction he has with another human being. He
painfully feels the fact that he comes from a working class background, and refuses to let
anyone forget it. Although Mrs. Ramsay doesnt like him much, she still works her groove
thang and makes him fall in love with her.

William Bankes
Character Analysis

William is friends with Mr. Ramsay, and thus he warrants an invitation to the summer
house. The man is a childless widower who clearly adores Mrs. Ramsay while maintaining
a friendship with Lily. His perspective on Mr. Ramsay is especially valuable because he
knew Mr. Ramsay in his youth, before a wife and eight kids.

Augustus Carmichael
Character Analysis

He uses opium that stains his beard yellow, and is the only person in the novel impervious
to Mrs. Ramsays charms.

Protagonist

Character Role Analysis

Mrs. Ramsay
Yes, we know she dies halfway through the book. But shes the linchpin of the novel! Shes
a centerpiece in so many different ways. Think about her walk with Mr. Tansley, being
framed in the window with James, and the triumph of her dinner. She creates; she
smoothes over; she brings in harmony. Her absence in the latter half of the book merely
serves to reinforce her role in the first half. Whoa. Thats like a foil.

Lily Briscoe
Wait, isnt Mrs. Ramsay? Oh, but heres our argument: Mrs. Ramsay is a poster girl for
"Womanhood" that Lily Briscoe chooses to reject. Lily is the true protagonist of the novel as
she is the only character who actually succeeds in capturing Time: she does it by
successfully completing a painting. Shes also, dare we point out, alive for the entirety of
the novel, and her thoughts and recollections regarding Mrs. Ramsay are the most
nuanced that we see in Part Three.

Hold your horses! Theres more: Lily is still a spinster in Part Three of the novel, confirming
that she refused to bow to Mrs. Ramsay-like pressure. In fact, Lily feels freedom, relief, and
grief at the absence of Mrs. Ramsay. This, coupled with the successful completion of her
painting, tells us that Lily has walked the longest journey, skinned the biggest hare, climbed
the highest mountain, whatever you want to call it. We call it protagonist-ation.

Foil

Character Role Analysis

Lily Briscoe to Mrs. Ramsay

Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe work as foils because they occupy opposite sides of a
question Virginia Woolf is interested in: what is the appropriate sphere for womanly
creativity? While the two women seem initially to be entirely different from one another, Lily
Briscoe actually finds a lot of inspiration in Mrs. Ramsay. Mrs. Ramsay becomes a kind of
spiritual mother for Lily Briscoe, in a way that contrasts interestingly with Mr. Ramsay's
relationship to James.

The obvious difference between Lily and Mrs. Ramsay is their feelings about marriage. For
Lily Briscoe, marriage represents "a dilution" (a reduction), something from which she
wants to protect herself using her painting. For Mrs. Ramsay, it's an inevitability that she,
"still always laughing, insist that [Lily] must, Minta must, they all must marry [...] (but Mrs
Ramsay cared not a fig for her painting)" (1.9.8).

Mrs. Ramsay, with her investment in Mr. Ramsay's intellect and her faith in the importance
of maintaining social norms, really cannot take Lily's painting seriously. Lily's painting is a
subtle challenge to the institution of the family that Mrs. Ramsay prizes.

However, like William Bankes (and check out our "Character Analysis" of Lily Briscoe for
more on the relationship between those two), Mrs. Ramsay has the sensitivity of mind to
appreciate that Lily's painting does mean something. Maybe she doesn't admire Lily's work
as Mr. Bankes does, maybe she feels that Lily should give up the painting and be married,
but she nonetheless bows her head to be painted by Lily when Lily asks it of her (1.3.7).
She knows that Lily's painting has significance to Lily and, as such, should be respected,
which is more than either Mr. Ramsay or Charles Tansley give Lily.

See, even though they occupy opposite sides of the marriage question, Lily and Mrs.
Ramsay love each other. Mrs. Ramsay is a kind of surrogate mother for Lily Briscoe (who is
motherless, and looked after her father); Mrs. Ramsay loves Lily's independence and
thinks, secretly, that Lily's looks will wear well into age. Lily, for her part, adores Mrs.
Ramsay's investment in the everyday happiness of her family, and admires the love and
affection she shares with the rest of the Ramsay family and the world.

In some ways, Lily Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsay become two sides of the same coin. They
each focus on the small stuff that makes everyday experience valuable and worth having:

The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles,
illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the
other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs Ramsay bringing them
together; Mrs Ramsay saying, Life stand still here; Mrs Ramsay making of the moment
something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment
something permanent)this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there
was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves
shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs Ramsay said. Mrs Ramsay! Mrs
Ramsay! she repeated. She owed it all to her. (3.3.6)

Mrs. Ramsay works her art with the materials of social life: she draws together men and
women into dinner parties and outings to the Isle of Skye. In doing so, she's making her
own version of Lily's paintings. Mrs. Ramsay sets scenes that will fix themselves in
everyone's memories in the same way that Lily's work catches the essences of moments in
time. And perhaps their differences in choice of medium Mrs. Ramsay's social relations
and Lily's paints has more to do with generation than with any real difference between the
two of them. Maybe if Mrs. Ramsay had been born in another time, she would have seized
a paintbrush or a pencil rather than a husband in her pursuit of making "life stand still here."

Mrs. Ramsay and Lily do show up one another's differences. But they also set up a kind
matriarchal lineage, something to compare with Mr. Ramsay's passing on of power to his
son.

Mr. Ramsay (and James) are all about domination (to mask personal insecurity?) and
intellectual ambition. Mrs. Ramsay and Lily center their lives around revelations of everyday
happiness and small truths. This desire to get at the essence of normal life is a project that
Lily learns from Mrs. Ramsay ("[Lily] owed it all to her"), and it's also a project that Virginia
Woolf herself pursues (check out our Orlando guide for more).
Mr. Ramsay to Mrs. Ramsay
Many of Mrs. Ramsays most important characteristics are highlighted when compared to
her husbands personality. For example, Mrs. Ramsay values harmony and preservation of
hope whereas Mr. Ramsay frequently causes discord, getting into petty arguments at the
dinner table, and shattering Jamess hope of going to the Lighthouse. For Mr. Ramsay,
harsh reality is more important than hope. The Ramsay children themselves even cant
resist comparing their parents they love Mrs. Ramsay unconditionally, whereas they often
feel angry at or conflicted about their feelings for their father, occasionally, even to the point
of a brutal murder. You can also see a huge difference between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay when
investigating the actual and potential trips to the Lighthouse. At the beginning of the novel,
James is excited to go to the Lighthouse with his mother, who seems to make everything
fun and hopeful. When James finally goes to the Lighthouse with his father, it is essentially
because his father forces him to, taking much of the joy out of the experience.

nformation Tool

Character Role Analysis

Mr. Carmichael
As Mrs. Ramsay bustles around stroking everyones ego, making sure their every need is
met, only one man dares to say no: Mr. Carmichael. She cant do anything for him, and this
leads her to question her motives for helping other people and being kind. Its human
vanity, she concludes, giving us another layer of insight into her personality.

To the Lighthouse

In A Nutshell

Published in 1927, To the Lighthouse is sandwiched between Virginia Woolfs other two
most famous novels, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Orlando (1928). In our opinion, Woolf is
totally at her best here, as she engages with her ongoing themes of memory, family, and
fiction.

To the Lightbouse takes on some elements of Woolfs own life: she felt stifled by her father
in much the same way that Mr. Ramsay squeezes the life out of his children. And the
sudden deaths of her mother and her sister Stella left her in deep mourning (echoes of Mrs.
Ramsay and Prues deaths inTo the Lighthouse).

But, Woolf herself got fed up with critics who insisted on reading the Ramsays as direct
representations of the Stephens (Stephen was Woolfs maiden name). To the Lighthouse is
also an extended meditation on the relationship between art and life, and on late Victorian
family structures. (Source: Mark Massey, Introduction, To the Lighthouse. Orlando,
Florida: Harcourt Books, 2005, xlviii.)

What makes To the Lighthouse important in literary terms is Woolfs ambitious formal
experimentation. Shes really working her signature style in this novel, as she takes two
days, separated by ten years, to evoke a whole picture of the Ramsay family life. Her run-
on sentences and meandering paragraphs work to replicate what her characters
are thinking in addition to what theyre doing. Woolf is a great example of the Show Dont
Tell School of Narration. Instead of sketching us a stiffly realistic portrait of her characters,
Woolf goes for the emotional impact of their internal landscapes.

Why Should I Care?

Oh! There it goes! Yep! There goes another one! Good-bye to that one! Sayonara to the
next one!

Were talking about moments, man, fleeting, ephemeral, transient moments. You might not
care so much about the moments youre spending here, trying to get a handle on a
"classic" book, but you probably do care about the moment that special someone asks you
to Prom. Or the moment you blow out all your birthday candles with your friends and loved
ones watching. The point is, life is full of beautiful moments.

In their own particular ways, Mrs. Ramsay and Lily try to figuratively nail down life's special
moments. They try to freeze them, and make them permanent. Mrs. Ramsay does it by
creating them out of near-impossible situations, like getting frenemies to kiss and make up.
Everyone remembers that. Lily, in contrast, does it in a much more lasting way: through
painting, which, you know, is like the old-school way of capturing that Kodak moment. And
Mr. Ramsay attempts the same through his writing and academic reputation, which he
wants very much to live on beyond his own life.

Anyway, back to the moment! What makes moments in this novel so complex is that the
characters dont just feel emotions in the moment, they FEEEEL EMOOOOTIONS! In the
first thirty seconds of the novel (depending on how fast you read), James goes from seeing
everything around him as "fringed with joy" to wanting to kill his father in a murderous rage.
Nor is this an anomaly (read: weird abnormal thing) in To the Lighthouse. Each moment in
the novel is rich with emotion and memory.

But, wait! Were not done talking about moments. While the moments are told from one
persons view at a time, Woolf switches perspectives rapidly. We get only a glimpse into
just about everyones head. Whats the point, you say? Well, well defer to Lily Briscoe, who
says that 50 eyes are not enough to see one person properly. In other words, 50 eyes
arent enough to see the truth. But thats what Woolf is trying to get at here: the truth. Life.

What makes it even more complex is that To the Lighthouse actually attempts to answer
that age-old question: What is the meaning of life? Or rather, the meaning of these life
moments we experience, all compiled together. Now, the book doesnt attempt to answer
the question by sitting down and saying, The meaning of life is," but rather by showing us
fleeting moments the lives of several different people who are attempting to extract
meaning from their lives. Cool, huh?
Modernism
Definition:

Fair warning, fair Shmoopers: this one's a doozy. The word modern has a whole
boatload of different meanings, and what constitutes modernism has been hotly
debated for decades.

Let's start at the beginning, shall we?

Some scholars argue that the world became modern just after the Medieval
period, right around the time Europe came out of feudalism. Some argue that
the modern world started with the Enlightenment, when thinkers like John
Lockerevolutionized the world, and reason took a firm hold on public thinking.
And finally, some view the modern period as emerging out of the Victorian era,
in the early part of the 20th century.

To keep things simple, Shmoop's gonna go with the last group. See, the early
part of the 20th century was marked by some big changes (many of which had
been brewing for centuries, and have their roots in earlier timeshence the
debate). There were lots of technological advancements (cars! telephones!
airplanes! duct tape!), but there were also some significant political changes,
like the sun setting on the British empire. Oh, and then there was World War I.
That was kind of a big deal.

In fact, you might say that World War I is the hub around which the whole
modernist wheel turned. Literary Modernism emerged as a result of changes in
the cultural, political, and artistic sensibilities that occurred in the years before,
during, and after that war. When you combine the massive growth of fancypants
industrial technologies with the all-out devastation of the Great War, you get a
recipe for some major angst and major upheaval.

See, the world wasn't quite the same anymore, and writers and artists were
struggling to find new ways to create art that reflected those big changes. When
it came to style, that meant that writers began to play games with time and
order, perspective, point of view, and form. You began to see a lot more novels
with fragmented plots than, say, ones with clear beginnings, middles, and ends.
In poetry, that meant strange metaphors stacked on top of each other, mixing
meters and free verse, and allusions to the past.

Writers chucked linear narratives and chronology out the window in favor of
confusing stories that jumped around. They dumped distant, third-person
narrators in favor of stream of consciousness and angsty confessionals like, say,
that of Prufrock. They referred to traditional works of the past in an effort to
outstrip them.

It was all about defying expectations, shaking things up, and knocking readers
off their stodgy old Victorian feet. Of course all of these stylistic qualities make
modernist literature notoriously difficult. Spend an hour reading Absalom,
Absalom! and you'll see what we mean.

But before you go thinking that literary Modernism was all style and no
substance, we should tell you that it has some major ideas at work, too. It all
started with four dead white guys:

Charles Darwin, who forwarded a theory of evolution and natural

selection

Sigmund Freud, who pioneered psychoanalysis and revolutionized the

way people thought about the brain

Karl Marx, who analyzed class inequalities (to say the very least)

Friedrich Nietzsche, who turned the world on its head when he

proclaimed that "God is dead." Yowza.

This fearsome foursome changed a great many things about the way folks
thought about the world. And that's actually an understatement. Our point here
is that all this revolutionary thinking was unsettling to say the least, and writers
wanted their work to be unsettling, too. Let's buck tradition, they said, in favor
of new, innovative writing that reflects all the changes being thrown our way.

Literary modernists wanted to start a "tradition of the new," as Richard Weston

called it, so they threw out the bathwater, the baby, and the sofa, too.

Famous modernist writers include T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens in
poetry; Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and James Joyce in
the novel; Bertholt Brecht in drama, and artists like Pablo Picasso and Duchamp.
If you spend a few hours poking around these masters' works, you'll see what
we mean about bucking tradition. And then some.

The impact of literary Modernism can't be exaggerated. Well, it could be. We

could say it killed the dinosaurs. But honestly, it came pretty close. It
completely changed the way writers thought about form, style, content, genre,
and just about everything in between. Authors today are still writing under the
shadow of Modernism; in fact, much of what we read today is
considered Postmodern. When everything that comes after you is named "post-
you," you know you're pretty stinkin' important.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941):

A Short Biography

In 1926 Virginia Woolf contributed an introduction

toVictorian Photographs of Famous Men & Fair Women by
Julia Margaret Cameron. This publication may be seen as
a springboard from which to approach Woolfs life: Virginia
saw herself as descending from a distinctive male and
female inheritance; Cameron was the famous Victorian
photographer and Woolfs great-aunt; Woolfs friend Roger
Fry also contributed an introduction and leads us to the
Bloomsbury Group; and the book was published by the
Hogarth Press which Virginia had started with her husband
Leonard in 1917.

Adeline Virginia Stephen was born on 25 January 1882 in

London. Her father, Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), was a
man of letters (and first editor of the Dictionary of
National Biography) who came from a family distinguished
for public service (part of the intellectual aristocracy' of
Victorian England). Her mother, Julia (1846-95), from
whom Virginia inherited her looks, was the daughter and
niece of the six beautiful Pattle sisters (Julia Margaret
Cameron was the seventh: not beautiful but the only one
remembered today). Both parents had been married
before: her father to the daughter of the novelist,
Thackeray, by whom he had a daughter Laura (1870-
1945) who was intellectually backward; and her mother to
a barrister, Herbert Duckworth (1833-70), by whom she
had three children, George (1868-1934), Stella (1869-
97), and Gerald (1870-1937). Julia and Leslie Stephen
had four children: Vanessa (1879-1961), Thoby (1880-
1906), Virginia (1882-1941), and Adrian (1883-1948). All
eight children lived with the parents and a number of
servants at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington.

Long summer holidays were spent at Talland House in St

Ives, Cornwall, and St Ives played a large part in Virginias
imagination. It was the setting for her novel To the
Lighthouse, despite its ostensibly being placed on the Isle
of Skye. London and/or St Ives provided the principal
settings of most of her novels.

In 1895 her mother died unexpectedly, and Virginia

suffered her first mental breakdown. Her half-sister Stella
took over the running of the household as well as coping
with Leslies demands for sympathy and emotional
support. Stella married Jack Hills in 1897, but she too died
suddenly on her return from her honeymoon. The
household burden then fell upon Vanessa.

Virginia was allowed uncensored access to her fathers

extensive library, and from an early age determined to be
a writer. Her education was sketchy and she never went to
school. Vanessa trained to become a painter. Their two
brothers were sent to preparatory and public schools, and
then to Cambridge. There Thoby made friends with
Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Lytton
Strachey and Maynard Keynes. This was the nucleus of the
Bloomsbury Group.

Leslie Stephen died in 1904, and Virginia had a second

breakdown. While she was sick, Vanessa arranged for the
four siblings to move from 22 Hyde Park Gate to 46
Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. At the end of the year
Virginia started reviewing with a clerical paper called
the Guardian; in 1905 she started reviewing in the Times
Literary Supplementand continued writing for that journal
for many years. Following a trip to Greece in 1906, Thoby
died of typhoid and in 1907 Vanessa married Clive Bell.
Thoby had started Thursday evenings' for his friends to
visit, and this kind of arrangement was continued after his
death by Vanessa and then by Virginia and Adrian when
they moved to 29 Fitzroy Square. In 1911 Virginia moved
to 38 Brunswick Square. Leonard Woolf had joined the
Ceylon Civil Service in 1904 and returned in 1911 on
leave. He soon decided that he wanted to marry Virginia,
and she eventually agreed. They were married in St
Pancras Registry Office on 10 August 1912. They decided
to earn money by writing and journalism.

Since about 1908 Virginia had been writing her first

novelThe Voyage Out (originally to be
called Melymbrosia). It was finished by 1913 but, owing to
another severe mental breakdown after her marriage, it
was not published until 1915 by Duckworth & Co.
(Geralds publishing house). The novel was fairly
conventional in form. She then began writing her second
novel Night and Day - if anything even more conventional
- which was published in 1919, also by Duckworth.

From 1911 Virginia had rented small houses near Lewes in

Sussex, most notably Asheham House. Her sister Vanessa
rented Charleston Farmhouse nearby from 1916 onwards.
In 1919 the Woolfs bought Monks House in the village of
Rodmell. This was a small weather-boarded house (now
owned by the National Trust) which they used principally
for summer holidays until they were bombed out of their
flat in Mecklenburgh Square in 1940 when it became their
home.

In 1917 the Woolfs had bought a small hand printing-

press in order to take up printing as a hobby and as
therapy for Virginia. By now they were living in Richmond
(Surrey) and the Hogarth Press was named after their
house. Virginia wrote, printed and published a couple of
experimental short stories, 'The Mark on the Wall' and
'Kew Gardens'. The Woolfs continued handprinting until
1932, but in the meantime they increasingly became
publishers rather than printers. By about 1922 the
Hogarth Press had become a business. From 1921 Virginia
always published with the Press, except for a few limited
editions.

Nineteen-twenty-one saw Virginias first collection of short

stories Monday or Tuesday, most of which were
experimental in nature. In 1922 her first experimental
novel, Jacobs Room, appeared. In 1924 the Woolfs moved
back to London, to 52 Tavistock Square. In 1925 Mrs.
Dalloway was published, followed by To the Lighthouse in
1927, and The Waves in 1931. These three novels are
generally considered to be her greatest claim to fame as a
modernist writer. Her involvement with the aristocratic
novelist and poet Vita Sackville-West led to Orlando
(1928), a roman clef inspired by Vitas life and ancestors
at Knole in Kent. Two talks to womens colleges at
Cambridge in 1928 led to A Room of Ones Own (1929), a
discussion of womens writing and its historical economic
and social underpinning.
Selected Reference Works about Virginia Woolf

There are literally hundreds of books and thousands of

articles about Virginia Woolf. The following is a brief list.

Biographies

Virginia Woolf: A Biography, by Quentin Bell (London:

Pimlico, 1996, 1997 [1972])
Bell (1910-96) was Woolfs nephew and was asked by
Leonard Woolf to write her biography. His personal
knowledge of Woolf and his elegant style mean that his
biography is unlikely to be superseded.

Virginia Woolf, by Hermione Lee (London: Chatto &

Windus, 1997 [1996])
This is likely to be the standard biography for the
foreseeable future.

Reference

Virginia Woolf A to Z: A Comprehensive Reference for

Students, Teachers, and Common Readers to her Life,
Works and Critical Reception, by Mark Hussey (New York &
Oxford: OUP, 1996 [1995])
Mark Hussey seems to have read and assimilated
everything, and provides summaries of plots of Woolfs
books, biographies of the Bloomsbury Group, and critical
works.

Major Authors on CD-ROM: Virginia Woolf, ed. by Mark

Hussey (Reading, UK: Primary Source Media, 1997)
Unbelievably expensive CD-ROM that includes almost all of
Woolfs published works and many of her manuscripts and
typescripts, as well as Virginia Woolf A to Z. Indispensible
for tracking down quotations.

Critical

Criticism in Focus: Virginia Woolf, by John Mepham (New

York: St Martins Press, 1992)
This is a guide to criticism and critical approaches.

Collection of Essays

Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage, ed. by Robin

Majumdar and Allen McLaurin (London: Routledge, 1997
[1975])
A rather expensive collection of contemporary reviews.

Virginia Woolf: Critical Assessments, ed. by Eleanor

McNees (East Sussex: Helm Information, 1994)
A fearfully expensive four-volume collection of criticism.

Bibliographies

A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf, 4th ed., by B. J.

Kirkpatrick and Stuart N. Clarke (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1997).

A Checklist of the Hogarth Press, 1917-1946, by J.

Howard Woolmer, with a short history of the Press by Mary
E. Gaither ([Winchester:] St Pauls Bibliographies, 1986)

International Virginia Woolf Society Bibliographies

Washington State University Libraries: Library of Leonard

and Virginia Woolf