Guy Posts

I picked up “To the Lighthouse” six years ago as a senior in high school. I read about 50 pages, comprehended little of it, and shelved it. I dismissed the commentary on the back cover which casually suggested it was, “without question one of the two or three finest novels of the twentieth century.” I couldn’t follow it, therefore it wasn’t good. 

Part of the difficulty comes in the flowing, yet abrupt style that Virginia Woolf frequently employs. If a scene contains three people and five lines of dialogue, you’ll undoubtedly receive all three people’s interpretations of the exchange, analysis of everyone’s body language, and insight into what characters are thinking that other characters are thinking about thinking about each other— it can get complicated. With Woolf, often times it seems nothing tangible is happening, but a world, a war, of activity is going on in the brains of her characters. 

“To the Lighthouse” is a story about very little. People talk (or not) and time passes. The novel of stuff is in the thoughts and expectations of our characters and Woolf succeeds in addressing what we need vs. what we receive, what we want to say vs. what we do, what we expect vs. what happens. 

Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay co-exist as the gravitational centers of the book. Not rich, but married and in their early sixties, they have enough space in their island mansion to raise their eight kids, as well as house younger men and women who, for whatever reason, want to be around them. The Ramsay’s elicit strong responses from people in the book. People are either entranced by Mrs. Ramsay’s beauty, or are completely dismissive of her effusive personality. People either admire Mr. Ramsay’s success, or consider him a tyrannical leach, feeding off the sympathy of others. 

Lily Briscoe, in her early thirties also finds herself at the house. She’s there to paint a picture, but finds herself struggling to capture something, anything, worth putting to canvas. What she’s looking for she later describes as “that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anything.” Lily’s fiercely independent, probing mind offers us another, eventually important, lens into the Ramsay household. 

Myriad are the vignettes of the human condition, sparks of marital and social mores glimmer as the book crescendos to a few silent minutes of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay’s life. 

It’s presented as a delicate scene, because to Mrs. Ramsay, it is. Though to the Woolf and the reader, it’s unsettling as Mr. Ramsay comes off as a demanding tyrant, in search of sympathy, always taking, and oblivious to the impact this has on others. The exchange begins when the Ramsay’s eyes meet:

Their eyes met for a second; but they did not speak to each other. They had nothing to say, but something seemed, nevertheless, to go from him to her. It was the life, it was the power of it, it was the tremendous hour, she knew, that made him slap his thighs… Don’t interrupt me, he seemed to be saying, don’t say anything; just sit there. And he went on reading.

Woolf’s diction yields the control to Mr. Ramsay. Demanding, asserting that the silence shall remain. Mrs. Ramsay accepts this silence, but, begins to realize that Mr. Ramsay wants the silence only to heighten the tension, to prod, to elicit a greater response from her. 

He wanted something— wanted the thing she always found it so difficult to give him; wanted her to tell him that she loved him. And that, no, she could not do… A heartless woman he called her; she never told him that she loved him. But it was not so— it was not so. It was only that she never could say what she felt

The scene is entirely one sided. Mr. Ramsay wants and Mrs. Ramsay acquiesces by finding a way to deliver:

Then, knowing that he was watching her, instead of saying anything she turned, holding her stocking, and looked at him. And as she looked at him she began to smile, for though she had not said a word, he knew, of course he knew, that she loved him. He could not deny it. And smiling she looked out of the window and said (thinking to herself, Nothing on earth can equal this happiness)— ‘Yes, you were right. It’s going to be wet tomorrow. You won’t be able to go [to the lighthouse].’ And she looked at him smiling. For she had triumphed again. She had not said it: yet he knew.

This constant giving is tragic. Later in the book, Lily Briscoe, still in search of the perfect painting, notes, “That man, she thought, her anger rising in her, never gave; that man took. She, on the other hand, would be forced to give. Mrs. Ramsay had given. Giving, giving, giving, she had died— and had left all this.”

As Lily is painting, Mr. Ramsay approaches her, “this was one of those moments when an enormous need urged him, without being conscious what it was, to approach any woman, to force them, he did not care how, his need was so great, to give him what he wanted: sympathy”

She resists: 

All Lily wanted was that this enormous flood of grief, this insatiable hunger for sympathy, this demand that she should surrender herself up to him entirely, and even so he had sorrows enough to keep her supplied for ever, should leave her, should be diverted… before it swept her down in its flow.

There’s an irony to this. Lily intended to acquiesce, though fails to. “Her feeling had come too late; there it was ready; but he no longer needed it. He had become a very distinguished, elderly man, who had no need of her whatsoever. She felt snubbed.” It’s precisely because she fails to deliver— and thereby unknowingly stands up to him— that she ends up giving Mr. Ramsay something even bigger.

Lily has shown him the weight of being scorned, pushed away. After years of taking sympathy, Mr. Ramsay finely gives his son James a token of approval. James captains the small boat to the lighthouse, and when they arrive at the lighthouse, Mr. Ramsay (who had been silent all trip) delivers the words “Well done!” to him. Here, the reader realizes the trip to the lighthouse has become a metaphorical awakening for Mr. Ramsay.  

As he reaches the lighthouse, “he sat looking back at the island. His children wonder, What could he see?… What was he thinking now? What was it he sought, so fixedly, so intently, so silently?… What do you want… They both wanted to ask. They both wanted to say, Ask us anything and we will give it to you… But he did not ask them anything… He sat and looked at the island and he might be thinking, We perished each alone, or he might be thinking, I have reached it.” 

At the same time, across the water, Lily Briscoe says, “He must have reached it,” as she gazes out across the water, the lighthouse far in the distance, “the effort of looking at it and the effort of thinking of him landing there, which both seemed to be one and the same effort, had stretched her body and mind to the utmost. Ah, but she was relieved. Whatever she had wanted to give him, when he left her that morning, she had given him at last.” 

She had helped him to see the tyrant.