by Wayne Cabradilla

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf is an experimental work, which not only depicts the daily life of the Ramsay family and friends but also attempts to show the immense, chaotic forces of nature which, to the characters, seems to be pitted against them. This is accomplished by the three different sections of the book which contrast significantly with each other. The first section, the Window, depicts human relationships in general through specific relationships between certain characters and character types, most notably between men and women; Woolf shows that the characters' reactions to certain events are so vastly different that in doing so, this section proves that relationships are subject to perspective. Furthermore, the first section shows some of the characters, most notably Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe, trying to figure the meaning of life struggling in the face of Nature to reconcile their emotional needs. The second section, Time Passes, on the other hand throws out all of the rules established in the previous section about human relations and also depicts the search for the meaning of life as a futile endeavor. The third section, The Lighthouse, shows the characters realizing the meaning of life, or as Woolf puts it, having their "vision" by reconciling their emotional needs with other people against the prospect that all of it is meaningless.

The author of this paper adequately deals with the major themes relating to the characters' visions but neglects some very important points. Among the most important is subjectivity of each character's visions and their approach to this vision; in other words, the author fails to mention how visions are not only different for each character, but also different for men and women, which is one of Woolf's main points. The author's paper talks about the search for a vision of unity by discussing Mrs. Ramsay's and Lily's search but completely disregards Mr. Ramsay's vision, which is not a search for unity but instead a search for truth. Discussion about Mr. Ramsay's search is necessary to understand Woolf's point about the differences between the sexes and what each sex searches for in their search for meaning in their life.

Another problem with the author's paper is the misinterpretation of relationship between the three different sections. The author maintains that the last section shows how the characters struggled to overcome their "overwhelming insignificance and meaninglessness" which are caused by the "everlasting forces of time and space." While Mr. Ramsay and Lily achieve their vision in the third section, they do not overcome their insignificance nor is this insignificance created by Nature. Instead, the insignificance is created within the characters' minds when they try to achieve fulfillment, to complete their search for unity or truth by understanding Nature but they cannot make sense of the confusion presented by Nature; indeed Nature is rife with discord and senselessness. The characters achieve their vision by looking inward and it is there that they find their meaning to life.

As the author asserts, the first section of this book deals with trivial daily life, but underneath the routine of daily life, Woolf shows the characters' eternal search for meaning in life. The method of narration for this section is stream of consciousness, which tends to emphasize the very immediate present and gives significance to small details which seem irrelevant in retrospect. This method is helpful in illustrating each step that Mr. Ramsay, Mrs. Ramsay, and Lily Briscoe take in their search for unity or truth. Also the importance of this method of narration is apparent when in the second section, the method of narration changes dramatically; this will be discussed in further detail later.

First, Mrs. Ramsay's search for and achievement of her vision is the most important of the three in this section. Mrs. Ramsay, the mother of eight children, searches for unity in this section. Unity in this case means the resolving of everyone else's differences. Mrs. Ramsay wishes for everyone to put aside their differences because she dislikes the hateful feelings that certain characters for each other, like Lily's hatred of Charles Tansley. This achievement of unity happens in the climactic dinner scene near the end of the section. The author of the paper does an excellent job in proving this. However, Mrs. Ramsay's vision is only what she sees for a fleeting moment; when she sees everyone together, unbeknownst to her, the characters still feel their dividing hatreds.

One example of unity that Mrs. Ramsay desires is marriage. As Woolf presents it, marriage is the ultimate, consummate form of unity because it takes two separate people and unifies them by stripping the woman of her individuality and making her almost like an attachment or an accessory for the man. Even the women's name is taken away from her. This is obviously Mrs. Ramsay's attitude towards marriage when, thinking of Lily, she says: "With her little Chinese eyes and her puckered-up face, she would never marry; one could not take her painting very seriously; she was an independent little creature" (17). This means that whatever vision Lily has, it should never be taken seriously because she herself did not unite with a male. Mrs. Ramsay plays matchmaker for Lily by trying to hook her up with Mr. Bankes, but Lily has no desire to marry. Even the sacrifice of marriage is shown through her own marriage with Mr. Ramsay. On page 32: "There was nobody whom she reverenced as she reverenced him...instantly a Heaven of security opened before her. There was nobody she reverenced more. She was not good enough to tie his shoe strings."

But the central marriage talked about in this section was the one between Paul and Minta, who reveal their engagement at the dinner scene. Minta is no longer Minta Doyle but Minta Rayley; she is no longer her own person. When Minta and Paul join the dinner scene, it is at this precise moment that the Boeuf en Daube is served. An analogy can be made between the meat and Minta: Minta is now like a piece of meat and she is being served to Paul. Also, while thinking about Paul and Minta, Mrs. Ramsay thinks: "'We went back to look for Minta's brooch, he (Paul) said, sitting down by her. 'We'-that was enough....They'll say that all their lives, she thought" (100). This sufficiently shows their unity; now, they are like one person. These examples show how marriage is the most extreme form of unity and it is important relating this to Mrs. Ramsay's vision since in her vision of unity, everyone is married.

Another example of Mrs. Ramsay's search for unity is her own maternal, nurturing spirit which hates only hatred itself. This is one of Mrs. Ramsay's most important characteristics and therefore it is surprising that this was not emphasized more in the paper. In the beginning of this section, Mr. Ramsay rebuffs his son James because he wants to go to the lighthouse the next day but the conditions would definitely be too rough for sailing. Mrs. Ramsay comforts James, who is very distraught by his father's rude response, by telling him that someday they will go to the lighthouse and then tells him a story. While telling this story, Mrs. Ramsay voices her disapproval of Mr. Ramsay's action by saying: "It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people were different enough without that" (8).

When Mrs. Ramsay talks about inventing differences, she talks about searching for the truth by separating things until they are clear to the viewer. Despite the above quote, Mrs. Ramsay truly does not abhor searching for the truth but rather, as she says, thinking about her husband, who is metaphysician: "Charles Tansley thought him (Mr. Ramsay) the greatest metaphysician of the time, she said. But he must have more than that. He must have sympathy. He must be assured that he too lived in the heart of life; was needed; not here only, but all over the world" (37). This quote implies a few things. A metaphysician is, by definition, someone who tries to figure out the truth about Nature and our own existence so Mr. Ramsay is the perfect example of someone searching for the truth. Here, Mrs. Ramsay does not necessarily disapprove of searching the truth but she does disapprove when searching for the truth causes a person to forget not only their individual own place but also their own as a human being's place in the world, or simply to break up the unity of the world. Quite possibly, these two goals are contradictory. Searching for the truth seems to imply that the person is separating the truth from the disarray. These two goals do come in conflict in this first section but as it will be shown later, Lily achieves both of these goals at the end of the book. This quote provides further support about Mrs. Ramsay's thoughts on searching for the truth: "To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people's feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilisation so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency" (32).

Although Mrs. Ramsay can deal somewhat with searching for the truth, she does have a problem when her kindness is thrown back in her face. This is a very important quote that shows this:

This quote not only shows her adverse reaction to rejected hospitality, but this is perhaps her deepest thought and closest to realizing the truth. Mrs. Ramsay throughout the first section tries to have her vision of unity but at this point, she had a sudden insight into the truth; she could feel the impersonality of it and she was visibly shaken.

After the dinner scene, when the kids went to bed, Mrs. Ramsay once again shows her maternal side when Cam and James get into a fight about a pig skull hung on the wall. This bedroom scene is full of symbolism that at least it should have merited an appearance in the author's paper. Cam, a female, is scared of the skull and cannot go to bed in its presence. James, a male, would scream if it were taken down. First, Mrs. Ramsay tries to comfort Cam but then she comes up with a compromise. She wrapped her shawl around the skull which made it tolerable for Cam. In the words of Mrs. Ramsay: "How lovely it looked now; how the fairies would love it; it was like a bird's nest; it was like a beautiful mountain such as she had seen abroad, with valleys and flowers and bells ringing and birds singing and little goats and antelopes and..." (115). This examples has an even deeper meaning though. This skull symbolizes the truth in the world. A skull comes from and is surrounded by "life". It is a solid, permanent thing surrounded by the ever changing flesh of a pig like the eternal truth is surrounded by the ever changing Nature. Both the skull and the truth are permanent things that remain long after the pig or Nature are gone. As stated earlier, men search for the truth, which explains why James refuses to have the skull moved. Also, women search for unity, despite the ugly truth which is in front of them, which explains why Cam is afraid of the skull. Finally, the shawl that Mrs. Ramsay covers the skull with represents her nurturing. The shawl hides away the truth and makes it bearable for Cam like her nurturing hides away the truth about the chaos of Nature but underneath the shawl and underneath her nurturing, the skull and the truth remain. They are eternal.

The most important scene of this first section is the dinner scene because it is here that Mrs. Ramsay actually achieves her vision. Before the dinner, the women make a rather large fuss over the jewelry that they will wear to the dinner. This contrasts humorously with Charles Tansley, who thinks that the whole thing is a farce and remarks about the damned rot the women talk and how it is condescending to him. When Mrs. Ramsay's family and friends are gathered around the table at first, there is not much unity. Conversation is awkward and divisive. They initially even try speaking in French (90). The characters feel that something is lacking. However, when everyone is gathered around the table and the candles are lit, it is then when Mrs. Ramsay achieves her vision: "for the night was shut off by panes of glass...here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land...outside, a reflection in which things wavered and vanished, waterily. Some change at once went through them all, as if this had really happened, and they were all conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on an island; had their common cause against their fluidity out there" (97). At this time, Paul and Minta come in from outside and Mrs. Ramsay knows that they are engaged. It is here, in Mrs. Ramsay's vision, everyone is united and the chaotic Nature is locked outside, where it seems to melt to her perception. The author of the paper does a good job of describing this scene but forgets to mention what exactly Mrs. Ramsay's vision was.

All of these examples of Mrs. Ramsay are necessary to fully understand the complexities of Mrs. Ramsay's vision. While possibly it could be out of the scope of her paper, the author offers an overly general argument about what exactly Mrs. Ramsay's vision is and what the importance of it is. In other words, the author correctly identifies that Mrs. Ramsay has a vision but she attaches little significance to it.

Besides Mrs. Ramsay's search for truth, the first section also highlights Mr. Ramsay's search for the truth. Although the first section does not spend nearly as much time on this search, the author's paper makes no mention about Mr. Ramsay whatsoever; this is definitely the biggest flaw of the paper. In Mr. Ramsay's typically male mind, he divides his seemingly theoretical, ambiguous search for truth into something as clear and unambiguous as the alphabet on page 34: "He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q.... But after Q? What comes next? After Q there is a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes...Z is only reached once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R...." Also, Mr. Ramsay seems to take this search for truth personally. His ego is bruised because he does not have the meaning of life defined in his mind in some clear table. From page 35: "How many men in a thousand million, he asked himself, reach Z after all?...One perhaps...Is he to be blamed then if he is not that one?"

But Mr. Ramsay is not just a cold, calculating man. He is the father of eight children and he does show a sensitive, or, dare I say, feminine side. One time, when he is reminiscing about his life, he thinks:

This quote shows that Mr. Ramsay is not only in a search for truth, but also in a search for emotional support. At the end of the third section, Mr. Ramsay achieves both, which makes it more significant than Mrs. Ramsay's single-minded vision. Discussion of this is necessary in order to get a more complete idea of what a vision is in To the Lighthouse.

Lily begins her search for the meaning of life in the first section although this is probably the least important search in the first section of the book. Lily's search is also more ambiguous than the previous three characters. Mrs. Ramsay just searches for unity almost solely out of her maternal instinct. Mr. Ramsay conducts a search for sympathy besides his masculine search for the truth but the former easily is something that is striven for by both of the sexes. Lily is different in that she comes the closest in standing in between the searches of the two sexes. She yearns for sympathy and unity and truth. She yearns for meaning. This is the reason why her search is the most difficult and why when this vision is achieved, the book ends. When the wall between male and female desires is torn down inside her mind, and then meaning comes flooding into her, she has experienced the true meaning of life. The book has nothing left to say because there is nothing left to say.

Lily is a painter and she tries to achieve her vision through her painting. She begins her search in the first section by painting. Other characters' visions are simply visions inside the character's head and so they will always be ephemeral. Lily's vision is her painting, which is permanent but still subject to her perception. Despite this fact, she has difficulty translating her thoughts on to the canvas. "She saw the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly's wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral. Of all that only a few random marks scrawled upon the canvas remained" (48). Another difficulty Lily has with her vision is that she is aware of the complexities of Nature and she feels pressed to understand every bit of it. "She felt...how life, from being made up of little seperate incidents which one lived one by one, became surled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach" (47).

The first section leaves Lily's quest unresolved and does not pick it up until she returns to the house at the very end of the second section. In the third section, after Mr. Ramsay embarks on his journey to the lighthouse, Lily sets up her easel on the edge of the lawn by the beach, driven by some need or destiny, to capture the "whole wave" on canvas. Lily has trouble thinking of how to start painting that she directly asks herself: "What is the meaning of life? The great revelation had never come...Instead there were only daily miracles." (161). But also later on that paragraph, she first begins to have her vision. "In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing was struck into stability" (161).

Now that she has a shape, in the fifth chapter, she begins painting. She starts with the blue, which causes her to think of the past. Then she thinks of the Rayleys, whose marriage is now dysfunctional, when she begins painting with the green. She continues painting but then begins to lose confidence. She thinks about her painting, her attempt at a complete vision: "Yet it would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be rolled up and flung over a sofa" (179). This means that she thinks that her attempt to harness and understand all of Nature is futile and instead will be defeated by Nature itself; her attempt at an eternal vision, no matter how earnest, is still temporary. At this point, she cries and howls for Mrs. Ramsay, who had died years ago.

The next time we meet Lily, in chapter eleven, she has regained her composure. She realizes that she cannot hunt down her vision but instead she thinks: "Let it come. If it will come. For there are moments when one can neither think nor feel" (193). It is in this state that Lily has her vision and when she paints her last line, it is complete.

The author of this paper correctly asserts that time cannot stand still and the moment cannot be captured. While the author also asserts that achieving a vision can still have a profound effect on a person, this line of thinking seems to state that Lily's and Mr. Ramsay's visions are wasted journeys, exercises in futility. This fatalistic thinking is best analyzed by comparing it to the second section, Time Passes. When the insensitive, seemingly cruel way that Nature kills Andrew, Prue and Mrs. Ramsay is taken by itself, it suggests that Nature is out to get us, that it is like a vicious lion and the characters' visions are attempts to tame the lion. There is certainly some irony in the juxtaposition of the first and second section, the irony being that in the first section the women spent pages worrying about jewelry to wear to a dinner while a sentence is devoted to Prue's death from childbirth. But it is wrong to assume that the forces of nature are bad. The waves that crash over the sea and the water and the mold that permeate the house in the second section are not wrong. Nature is natural. Instead, it is the need for humans to set up an order, a meaning to life that is unnatural. If a simple mortal being, in all of her transience, cannot hold the meaning of life, it is perhaps that we were not meant to. This is what makes Woolf's analogy of a "vision" so effective. Humans cannot make time stop nor can they control Nature in any way but they can see it and understand it and when a person sees it, she can be so profoundly affected by it, that it is no longer a person trying to understand a foreign world around her but a person who sees herself as part of the world. It is disappointing that the author takes so much offense in the second section by using words like shock and horror. I believe that Woolf's intent for the seeming brutality of this section was to underscore the pitiful attempts we as humans make to try to subdue nature.

In conclusion, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf is a radically experimental book which deals with the meaning of life and the different ways people try to approach it. Woolf creates three different characters, Mr. Ramsay, Mrs. Ramsay, and Lily Briscoe, who search for different things in searching for the meaning of life. The author of this paper does a reasonable job of addressing these searches, or "visions", but leaves out too many important details to show what Virginia Woolf is really trying to say.