Virginia Woolf
The Window
Chapter I
Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are staying at their summerhouse in the Hebrides with their eight children and several houseguests. James, the Ramsays' youngest child, sits on the floor carefully cutting out pictures from the Army and Navy Stores catalogue. Mrs. Ramsay assures James he will be able to visit the nearby lighthouse the following day if weather permits, but Mr. Ramsay interjects that the weather will not allow it. Six-year-old James feels a murderous rage against his father for ridiculing his mother, whom James considers “ten thousand times better in every way.” Mrs. Ramsay tries to assure James that the weather may well be fine, but Charles Tansley, a stiff intellectual who greatly respects Mr. Ramsay, disagrees.
Tansley's insensitivity toward James irritates Mrs. Ramsay, but she tries to act warmly toward her male houseguests, forbidding her irreverent daughters to mock Tansley. After lunch, Mrs. Ramsay invites Tansley to accompany her on an errand into town, and he accepts. On their way out, she stops to ask Augustus Carmichael, an elderly poet also staying with the Ramsays, if he needs anything, but he responds that he does not. On the way into town, Mrs. Ramsay tells Carmichael's story. He was once a promising poet and intellectual, but he made an unfortunate marriage. Mrs. Ramsay's confidence flatters Tansley, and he rambles incessantly about his work.
The two pass a sign advertising a circus, and Mrs. Ramsay suggests that they all go. Hesitant, Tansley explains to Mrs. Ramsay that, having grown up in an impoverished family, he was never taken to a circus. Mrs. Ramsay reflects that Tansley harbors a deep insecurity regarding his humble background and that this insecurity causes much of his unpleasantness. She now feels more kindly toward him, though his self-centered talk continues to bore her. Tansley, however, thinks that Mrs. Ramsay is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. Like most of her male guests, he is a little in love with her. Even the chance to carry her bag thrills him.
Chapter II
Later that evening, Tansley looks out the window and announces gently, for Mrs. Ramsay's sake, that there will be no trip to the lighthouse tomorrow. Mrs. Ramsay finds him tedious and annoying.
Chapter III
Mrs. Ramsay comforts James, telling him that the sun may well shine in the morning. She listens to the men talking outside, but when their conversation stops, she receives a sudden shock from the sound of the waves rolling against the shore. Normally the waves seem to steady and support her, but occasionally they make her think of destruction, death, and the passage of time. The sound of her husband reciting to himself Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” returns to her the sense that all is right with the world. She notices Lily Briscoe painting on the edge of the lawn and remembers that she is supposed to keep her head still for Lily, who is painting her portrait.
chapter IV
As Mr. Ramsay passes Lily on the grass, he nearly tips over her easel. Lily's old friend William Bankes, who rents a room near hers in the village, joins her on the grass. Sensing that they have somehow intruded on their host's privacy, Lily and Bankes are both slightly unnerved by the sight of Mr. Ramsay thundering about talking to himself. Lily struggles to capture her vision on canvas, a project, she reflects, that keeps her from declaring outright her love for Mrs. Ramsay, the house, and the entire scene.
Bankes, who once enjoyed an intimate relationship with Mr. Ramsay, now feels somewhat removed from him. He cannot understand why Mr. Ramsay needs so much attention and praise. Bankes criticizes this facet of Ramsay's personality, but Lily reminds him of the importance of Mr. Ramsay's work. Lily has never quite grasped the content of Mr. Ramsay's philosophy, although Andrew, the Ramsays' oldest son, once helpfully likened his father's work on “the nature of reality” to thinking about a kitchen table when one is not there. Lily finds Mr. Ramsay at once otherworldly and ridiculous. When Mr. Ramsay realizes that Lily and Bankes have been watching him, he is embarrassed to have been caught acting out the poem so theatrically, but he stifles his embarrassment and pretends to be unruffled.
Virginia Woolf read the work of Sigmund Freud, whose revolutionary model of human psychology explored the unconscious mind and raised questions regarding internal versus external realities. Woolf opens To the Lighthouse by dramatizing one of Freud's more popular theories, the Oedipal conflict. Freud turned to the ancient Greek story of Oedipus, who inadvertently kills his father and marries his mother, to structure his thoughts on both family dynamics and male sexual development. According to Freud, young boys tend to demand and monopolize their mothers' love at the risk of incurring the jealousy and wrath of their fathers. Between young James Ramsay and his parents, we see a similar triangle formed: James adores his mother as completely as he resents his father. Woolf's gesture to Freud testifies to the radical nature of her project. As much a visionary as Freud, Woolf set out to write a novel that mapped the psychological unconscious. Instead of chronicling the many things characters say and do to one another, she concentrated on the innumerable things that exist beneath the surface of speech and action.
Achieving this goal required the development of an innovative method of writing that came to be known as stream of consciousness, which charts the interior thoughts, perceptions, and feelings of one or more characters. Although interior monologue is another term often used to refer to this technique, an important difference exists between the two. While both stream of consciousness and interior monologue describe a character's interior life, the latter does so by using the character's grammar and syntax. In other words, the character's thoughts are transcribed directly, without an authorial voice acting as mediator. Woolf does not make use of interior monologue; throughout To the Lighthouse, she maintains a voice distinct and distant from those of her characters. The pattern of young James's mind, for instance, is described in the same lush language as that of his mother and father. It is more apt to say, then, that the novel is about the stream of human consciousness—the complex connection between feelings and memories—rather than a literary representation of it.
Through these forays into each character's mind, Woolf explores the different ways in which individuals search for and create meaning in their own experience. She strives to express how individuals order their perceptions into a coherent understanding of life. This endeavor becomes particularly important in a world in which life no longer has any inherent meaning. Darwin's theory of evolution, published in 1859 in The Origin of Species, challenged the then universal belief that human life was divinely inspired and, as such, intrinsically significant. Each of the three main characters has a different approach to establishing the worth of his or her life. Mr. -Ramsay represents an intellectual approach; as a metaphysical phil-osopher, he relies on his work to secure his reputation. Mrs. -Ramsay, devoted to family, friends, and the sanctity of social order, relies on her emotions rather than her mind to lend lasting meaning to her experiences. Lily, hoping to capture and preserve the truth of a single instant on canvas, uses her art.
Chapter V
At the house, Mrs. Ramsay inspects the stocking she has been knitting for the lighthouse keeper's son, just in case the weather allows them to go to the lighthouse the next day. Mrs. Ramsay thinks about her children and her tasks as a mother. She also recollects her father's death. Mr. Bankes reflects upon Mrs. Ramsay's beauty, which he cannot completely understand. She is, he thinks, much like the walls of the unfinished hotel he watches being built in back of his home. Mr. Bankes sees more than aesthetic beauty in her, “the quivering thing, the living thing.” Mrs. Ramsay goes on knitting the stocking for the little boy, and lovingly urges James to cut another picture from the Army and Navy Stores catalogue.
Chapter VI
Mr. Ramsay approaches his wife. He is petulant and needs reassurance after his embarrassment in front of Lily and Bankes. When Mrs. Ramsay tells him that she is preparing a stocking for the lighthouse keeper's boy, Mr. Ramsay becomes infuriated by what he sees as her extraordinary irrationality. His sense of safety restored, Mr. Ramsay resumes his strolling on the lawn, giving himself over to the “energies of his splendid mind.” He thinks to himself that the progress of human thought is analogous to the alphabet—each successive concept represents a letter, and every individual struggles in his life to make it through as many letters as he can. Mr. Ramsay thinks that he has plodded from A to Q with great effort but feels that R now eludes him. He reflects that not many men can reach even Q, and that only one man in the course of a generation can reach Z. There are two types of great thinkers, he notes: those who work their way from A to Z diligently, and those few geniuses who simply arrive at Z in a single instant. Mr. Ramsay knows he does not belong to the latter type, and resolves (or hopes) to fight his way to Z. Still, he fears that his reputation will fade after his death. He reminds himself that all fame is fleeting and that a single stone will outlast Shakespeare. But he hates to think that he has made little real, lasting difference in the world.
Chapter VII
James, reading with his mother, senses his father's presence and hates him. Discerning his father's need for sympathy, he wishes his father would leave him alone with his mother. Mr. Ramsay declares himself a failure, and Mrs. Ramsay, recognizing his need to be assured of his genius, tells him that Tansley considers him the greatest living philosopher. Eventually, she restores his confidence, and he goes off to watch the children play cricket. Mrs. Ramsay returns to the story that she is reading to James. Inwardly, she reflects anxiously that people observing her interactions with Mr. Ramsay might infer that her husband depends on her excessively and think mistakenly that her contributions to the world surpass his. -Augustus Carmichael shuffles past.
Chapter VIII
Carmichael, an opium addict, ignores Mrs. Ramsay, hurting her feelings and her pride. She realizes, however, that her kindness is petty because she expects to receive gratitude and admiration from those she treats with sympathy and generosity. Still troubled, Mr. Ramsay wanders across the lawn, mulling over the progress and fate of civilization and great men, wondering if the world would be different if Shakespeare had never existed. He believes that a “slave class” of unadorned, unacknowledged workers must exist for the good of society. The thought displeases him, and he resolves to argue that the world exists for such human beings, for the men who operate the London subway rather than for immortal writers.
He reaches the edge of the lawn and looks out at the bay. As the waves wash against the shore, Mr. Ramsay finds the encroaching waters to be an apt metaphor for human ignorance, which always seems to eat away what little is known with certainty. He turns from this depressing thought to stare at the image of his wife and child, which makes him realize that he is primarily happy, even though “he had not done that thing he might have done.”
The line of poetry that Mr. Ramsay recites as he blusters across the lawn is taken from Tennyson's “Charge of the Light Brigade.” The poem, which tells of 600 soldiers marching bravely to their death, ends with the lines
When can their glory fade? O the wild charge they made! All the world wonder'd. Honour the charge they made!
A meditation on immortality, the poem captures the tumultuous state of Mr. Ramsay's mind and his anxiety about whether he and his work will be remembered by future generations. Here, Mr. Ramsay emerges as an uncompromising but terribly insecure intellectual. He knows the world almost exclusively through words, so he tries to express and mediate his sadness with the lines by Tennyson. He yearns for the “glory” and the “wild charge” of which the poem speaks in the form of brilliant contributions to philosophy. Although he acknowledges a more profound truth—that in the end no immortality exists, and even a stone will outlast a figure as influential as -William Shakespeare—Mr. Ramsay cannot help but indulge his need to be comforted, to have others assure him of his place in the world and its importance. The posture he assumes as he approaches his wife in Chapter VII is one that he returns to often. Again and again, he displays a relentless desire for sympathy and understanding from her.
Mr. Ramsay is not alone in his need for his wife's affections. Through Mrs. Ramsay, Woolf suggests that Mr. Ramsay's traits belong to all men. Charles Tansley exhibits similar behavior in the opening chapters. He navigates the world according to what he has studied and read, and lashes out with “the fatal sterility of the male” for fear that his contributions will be deemed lacking. Mrs. Ramsay believes such daunted and insecure behavior to be inevitable, given the importance of men's concerns and work. She sees men as well as women forced into roles that prescribe their behavior. In her extended sympathy for her husband and in her attempts at matchmaking, Mrs. Ramsay recognizes and observes these roles while trying to make it less painful for the people in her life to have to play them. This question of gender roles, which occupies much space in the coming chapters, is played out most fully in the relationship between Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe. Mrs. Ramsay's maternal and wifely devotion represents the kind of traditional lifestyle to which Lily Briscoe refuses to conform.
Mr. Ramsay, who is obsessed with understanding and advancing the process of human thought, reveals the novel's concern with knowledge. To the Lighthouse asks how humanity acquires knowledge and questions the scope and validity of that knowledge. The fact that Mr. Ramsay, who is decidedly one of the eminent philosophers of his day, doubts the solidity of his own thoughts suggests that a purely rational, universally agreed-upon worldview is an impossibility. Indeed, one of the effects of Woolf's narrative method is to suggest that objective reality does not exist. The ever-shifting viewpoints that she employs construct a world in which reality is merely a collection of subjectively determined truths.
Chapter IX
William Bankes considers Mr. Ramsay's behavior and concludes that it is a pity that his old friend cannot act more conventionally. He suggests to Lily, who stands beside him putting away her paint and brushes, that their host is something of a hypocrite. Lily -disagrees with him. Though she finds Mr. Ramsay narrow and self-absorbed, she also observes the sincerity with which he seeks admiration. Lily is about to speak and criticize Mrs. Ramsay, but Bankes's “rapture” of watching Mrs. Ramsay silences her. As he stares at Mrs. Ramsay, it is obvious to Lily that he is in love. The rapture of his gaze touches her, so much so that she lets Bankes look at her painting, which she considers to be dreadfully bad. She thinks of Charles Tansley's claim that women cannot paint or write.
Lily remembers the criticism she was about to make of Mrs. Ramsay, whom she resents for insinuating that she, Lily, as an unmarried woman, cannot know the best of life. Lily reflects on the essence of Mrs. Ramsay, which she is trying to paint, and insists that she herself was not made for marriage. She muses, with some distress, that no one can ever know anything about anyone, because people are separate and cut off from one another. She hopes to counter this phenomenon and achieve unity with, and knowledge of, others through her art. By painting, she hopes to attain a kind of intimacy that will bring her closer to the world outside her consciousness.
Lily braces herself as Bankes looks over her portrait of Mrs. Ramsay and James. She discusses the painting with him. As they talk about the shadows, light, and the purple triangle meant to represent Mrs. Ramsay, Lily wonders how to connect them and make them whole. She also feels that Bankes has taken her painting from her by looking at it and that they have shared something intimate.
Chapter X
Cam Ramsay, Mrs. and Mr. Ramsay's devilish daughter, rushes past and nearly knocks the easel over. Mrs. Ramsay calls to Cam, asking after Paul Rayley, Minta Doyle, and Andrew, who have not returned from their walk on the beach. Mrs. Ramsay assumes that this delay means that Paul has proposed to Minta, which is what she intended when she orchestrated the walk. A clever matchmaker, Mrs. Ramsay has been accused of being domineering, but she feels justified in her efforts because she truly likes Minta. She feels that Minta must accept the time that she and Paul have spent alone together recently.
Mrs. Ramsay believes that she would be domineering in pursuit of social causes. She feels passionately that the island needs a hospital and a dairy, but rationalizes that she can further these goals once her children grow older. Still, she resists the passage of time, wishing that her children would stay young forever and her family as happy as it now is. Mrs. Ramsay further meditates about life, realizing a kind of transactional relationship between it and herself. She lists social problems and intersperses them with personal anxieties, noting, for instance, that “the bill for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds.” This anxiety extends to her thoughts of Paul and Minta, thinking that perhaps marriage and family are an escape that not everyone needs. She finishes reading James his story, and the nursemaid takes him to bed. Mrs. Ramsay is certain that he is thinking of their thwarted trip to the lighthouse and that he will remember not being able to go for the rest of his life.
Chapter XI
Alone, Mrs. Ramsay knits and gazes out at the lighthouse, thinking that children never forget harsh words or disappointments. She enjoys her respite from being and doing, since she finds peace only when she is no longer herself. Without personality, in a “wedge-shaped core of darkness,” she rids herself of worry. She suddenly becomes sad, and thinks that no God could have made a world in which happiness is so fleeting and in which reason, order, and justice are so overwhelmed by suffering and death. From a distance, Mr. Ramsay sees her and notices her sadness and beauty. He wants to protect her, but hesitates, feeling helpless and reflecting that his temper causes her grief. He resolves not to interrupt her, but soon enough, sensing his desire to protect her, Mrs. Ramsay calls after him, takes up her shawl, and meets him on the lawn.
While Mrs. Ramsay's reliance on intuition contrasts with her husband's aloofness and self-interest, she shares with him a dread of mortality. Mrs. Ramsay's mind seizes “the fact that there is no reason, order, justice.” It is only in her “wedge-shaped core of darkness” that she escapes “being and doing” enough to be herself. She realizes that happiness is, without exception, fleeting and ephemeral. Refrains of “children never forget” and “the greenhouse would cost fifty pounds” and other expressions of domestic anxiety break into her peace and solitude and advance the notion that life is transactional. However, it is exactly this awareness of death and worry that make her moments of wholeness so precious to her. Her sense of the inevitability of suffering and death lead her to search for such moments of bliss.
According to Mr. Ramsay's conception of human thought, Mrs. Ramsay may not be as far along in the alphabet as he, but she has surpassed her husband in one important respect. Unlike Mr. Ramsay, she is able to move beyond the “treacheries” of the world by accepting them. Mr. Ramsay, on the other hand, becomes so mired in the thought of his own mortality that he is rendered helpless and dependent upon his wife.
Lily's complicated reaction to Mrs. Ramsay in this section advances the novel's discussion of gender by introducing a character who lives outside accepted gender conventions. As a single woman who, much to Mrs. Ramsay's chagrin, shows little interest in marrying, Lily represents a new and evolving social order and raises the suspicions of several characters. Mrs. Ramsay suggests that she cannot know life completely until she has married, while Charles Tansley insists that women were not made to be painters or writers. Lily's refusal to bow to these notions, however, testifies to her commitment to living as an independent woman and an artist. Indeed, by rejecting these once universally held beliefs, Lily creates a parallel between her life and her art. On canvas, she does not mean to make an assertion of objective truth; instead, she hopes to capture and preserve a moment that appears real to her. Her determination to live her life according to her own principles demands as great a struggle and commitment as her painting.
Woolf's pairing of Lily with Mrs. Ramsay highlights her interest in the relationships among women outside the realm of prescribed gender roles. Mrs. Ramsay takes on the conventional roles of wife and mother and accepts the suffering and anxiety they bring. At the same time, she remains aware of her power: “Was she not forgetting how strongly she influenced people?” Lily rejects gender conventions, but she remains plagued by artistic self-doubt and feels that others' notice of her work somehow takes the work away from her. Woolf uses the relationship between these women to show the detrimental effect of male society on female artistic vision, and to illustrate the potential intimacy and complexity of such relationships.
Chapter XII
As they walk together, Mrs. Ramsay brings up to Mr. Ramsay her worries about their son Jasper's proclivity for shooting birds and her disagreement with Mr. Ramsay's high opinion of Charles Tansley. She complains about Tansley's bullying and excessive discussion of his dissertation; Mr. Ramsay counters that his dissertation is all that Tansley has in his life. He adds that he would disinherit their daughter Prue if she married Tansley, however. They continue walking, and the conversation turns to their children. They discuss Prue's beauty and Andrew's promise as a student. Still walking, they reach a conversational impasse reflecting a deeper emotional distance. Mr. Ramsay mourns that the best and most productive period of his career is over, but he chastises himself for his sadness, thinking that his wife and eight children are, in their own way, a fine contribution to “the poor little universe.” Her husband and his moods amaze Mrs. Ramsay, who realizes that he believes that his books would have been better had he not had children. Impressive as his thoughts are, she wonders if he notices the ordinary things in life such as the view or the flowers. She notices a star on the horizon and wants to point it out to her husband, but stops. The sight, she knows, will somehow only sadden him. Lily comes into view with William Bankes, and Mrs. Ramsay decides that the couple must marry.
Chapter XIII
Lily listens to William Bankes describe the art he has seen while visiting Europe. She reflects on the number of great paintings she has never seen but decides that not having seen them is probably best since other artists' work tends to make one disappointed with one's own. The couple turns to see Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay watching Prue and Jasper playing ball. The Ramsays become, for Lily, a symbol of married life. As the couples meet on the lawn, Lily can tell that Mrs. Ramsay intends for her to marry Bankes. Lily suddenly feels a sense of space and of things having been blown apart. Mrs. Ramsay worries since Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle have not yet returned from their walk and asks if the Ramsays' daughter Nancy accompanied them.
Chapter XIV
Nancy, at Minta's request and out of a sense of obligation, has accompanied Minta and Paul on their walk. Nancy wonders what Minta wants as she keeps taking then dropping Nancy's hand. Andrew appreciates the way Minta walks, wearing more sensible clothes than most women and taking risks that most women will not. Still, this outing disappoints Andrew. In the end, he does not like taking women on walks or the chummy way that Paul claps him on the back. The group reaches the beach and Nancy explores the tiny pools left by the ebb tide. Andrew and Nancy come upon Paul and Minta kissing, which irritates them. Upon leaving the beach, Minta discovers that she has lost her grandmother's brooch. Everyone searches for it as the tide rolls in. Wanting to prove his worth, Paul resolves to leave the house early tomorrow morning in order to scour the beach for the brooch. He thinks with disappointment on the moment he asked Minta to marry him. He considers admitting this disappointment to Mrs. Ramsay, who, he believes, forced him into proposing, but, as the well-lit house comes into view, he decides not to make a fool of himself.
Chapter XV
Prue, in answer to her mother's question, replies that she thinks that Nancy did accompany Paul and Minta.
Chapter XVI
As Mrs. Ramsay dresses for dinner, she wonders if Nancy's presence will distract Paul from proposing to Minta. Mrs. Ramsay lets her daughter Rose choose her jewelry for the evening, a ceremony that somehow saddens her. She becomes increasingly distressed by Paul and Minta's tardiness, worrying for their safety and fearing that dinner will be ruined. Eventually she hears the group return from its walk and feels annoyed. Everyone assembles in the dinning room for dinner.
Woolf's disjointed story line would have been especially shocking to readers raised on Victorian novels, who were used to linear narratives, elaborate plots, and the mediating voice of an author. Woolf eliminates these traditional narrative elements and presents her characters' competing visions of reality. As Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay stroll on the lawn, for instance, Woolf forces us to weigh and judge their various perceptions. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay's viewpoints conflict over whether it is more important to publish a remarkable dissertation or to have the ability to “notice his own daughter's beauty, or whether there was pudding on his plate of roast beef.” She portrays Mr. Ramsay's cold, domineering neuroses as completely as Mrs. Ramsay's generosity and love. Woolf's goal is not to present one character's experience as the truth but rather to bring opposing worldviews and visions of reality, such as those held by the Ramsays, into a unified story.
Woolf does not describe Mr. Ramsay's philosophical work or the work he admires. Earlier, Lily recalls Andrew's likening of his father's work to musings over a kitchen table, and here Mrs. Ramsay summarizes the philosophy of Charles Tansley as dealing with “the influence of somebody upon something.” While the brevity of these descriptions seems dismissive, Woolf takes her characters' work and anxieties seriously. Woolf rejects not Mr. Ramsay but rather preconceived notions about what a novel should be. Woolf, along with James Joyce and Marcel Proust, was a modernist. One goal of the modernists was to force readers to reassess their views of the novel. Philosophy and politics, as discussed by traditional -intellectuals such as Mr. Ramsay, no longer had to be the dominant subject; war, epic sea voyages, and the like no longer had to be the- dominant settings. As Woolf makes clear, life's intellectual, psychological, and emotional stakes can be as high in the dining room or on the lawn of one's home as they are in any boardroom or battlefield. That she later limits the discussion of World War I confirms this point.
Lily Briscoe emerges as an artist of uncompromising vision. As she stands on the lawn, trying to decide how to unite the components of the scene on her canvas, she gives the impression of being something of a bridge between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay and the worlds they represent. Lily shares Mr. Ramsay's professional anxiety and fears that her work too will sink into oblivion—“perhaps it was better not to see pictures: they only made one hopelessly discontented with one's own work.” She also possesses Mrs. Ramsay's talent for separating a moment from the passage of time and preserving it. As she watches the Ramsays move across the lawn, she invests them with a quality and meaning that make them symbolic. Later, in the last section of the novel, as Lily returns to this spot of the lawn to resume and finally complete her painting, she again serves as a vital link between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay.
Chapter XVII
Mrs. Ramsay takes her place at the dinner table and wonders what she has done with her life. As she ladles soup for her guests, she sees the true shabbiness of the room, the isolation among her guests, and the lack of beauty anywhere, and she believes herself to be responsible for fixing these problems. She again feels pity for William Bankes. Lily watches her hostess, thinking that Mrs. Ramsay looks old, worn, and remote. She senses Mrs. Ramsay's pity for Bankes and dismisses it, noting that Bankes has his work. Lily also becomes aware that she has her own work. Mrs. Ramsay asks Charles Tansley if he writes many letters, and Lily realizes that her hostess often pities men but never women. Tansley is angry at having been called away from his work and blames women for the foolishness of such gatherings. He insists again that no one will be going to the lighthouse tomorrow, and Lily reflects bitterly on Tansley's chauvinism and lack of charm. Tansley privately condemns Mrs. Ramsay for the nonsense she talks, and Lily notices his discomfort. Lily recognizes her obligation, as a woman, to comfort him, just as it would be his duty to save her from a fire in the subway. She wonders what the world would come to if men and women refused to fulfill these responsibilities. She speaks to Tansley, sarcastically asking him to take her to the lighthouse.
While Mrs. Ramsay rambles on to Tansley, William Bankes reflects on how people can grow apart, to the point that a person can be devoted to someone for whom he or she cares little. Eventually, the conversation turns to politics. Mrs. Ramsay looks to her husband, eager to hear him speak, but is disappointed to find him scowling at Augustus Carmichael, who has asked for another plate of soup. Candles are set out on the table, and they bring a change over the room, establishing a sense of order. Outside, beyond the darkened windows, the world wavers and changes. This chaos brings the guests together.
Finally having dressed for dinner, Minta Doyle and Paul Rayley take their places at the table. Minta announces that she has lost her grandmother's brooch, and Mrs. Ramsay intuits that the couple is engaged. Minta is afraid of sitting next to Mr. Ramsay, remembering his words to her about Middlemarch, a book she never finished reading. Meanwhile, Paul recounts the events of their walk to the beach. Dinner is served. Lily worries that she, like Paul and Minta, will need to marry, but the thought leaves her as she decides how to complete her painting. Sitting at the table, Lily notices the position of the saltshaker against the patterned tablecloth, which suggests to her something vital about the composition of her painting—the tree must be moved to the middle. Mrs. Ramsay considers that Bankes may feel some affection for her but decides that he must marry Lily, and she resolves to seat them closer at the next day's dinner. Everything suddenly seems possible to Mrs. Ramsay, who believes that, even in a world made of temporal things, there are qualities that endure, bringing stability and peace.
In another turn of the conversation, Bankes praises Sir Walter Scott's Waverley novels. Tansley quickly denounces this kind of reading, and Mrs. Ramsay thinks that he will be this disagreeable until he secures a professorship and a wife. She considers her children, studying Prue in particular, whom she silently promises great happiness. The guests finish dinner. Mr. Ramsay, now in great spirits, recites a poem, which Carmichael finishes as a sort of tribute to his hostess, bowing. Mrs. Ramsay leaves the room with a bow in return. On the threshold of the door, she turns back to view the scene one last time, but reflects that this special, defining moment has already become a part of the past.
The stunning scene of Mrs. Ramsay's dinner party is the heart of the novel. Here, the dominating rhythm emerges as the story moves from chaos to blissful, though momentar...
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