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NOVEL II
LECTURE 9
SYNOPSIS
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VIRGINIA WOOLf
1. Her Major Works- A Quick Look
2. Theme of Feminism
3. To the Lighthouse
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SYNOPSIS
3
7. Interior Monologue
8. Mrs Dalloway and Modernism
 Homosexuality
 Mental illness
9. Orlando and Modernism
10. Contextual Background
11. Another Perspective
12. Summary- To the Lighthouse (Chapter 1-9)
Works
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The Voyage Out (1915): tells the story through South America
of a rich woman, Rachel Vinrage, her love story with Terence
Hewett and his sudden death due to a tropical fever, when she
believes that she has reached happiness.
Night and Day (1919): critical towards society, the plot focuses
on two women, sweet Katherine Hilbert and emancipated Mary
Datchet.
Jacob’s Room (1922): tells of a young student at the University
of Cambridge, his loves and his journeys in France and Greece
ad of his death during the world war I.
Mrs Dalloway (1925): the story begins and ends in a span of 12
hours, during which Mrs Dalloway prepares a party.

To The Light House (1927): tells the excursion of a group of
characters to one of the Hebrides islands. The landscape is the
bond that unites the characters among themselves and with
landscape itself.
Works
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Orlando (1928): is a sort of biography of Victoria Sackville-West. In
the book are told the reincarnations of the protagonist Orlando
(that at some point changes sex) in various historical periods, the
vicissitudes of the Sackville-West family from the Elizabethan age to
the present.
The Waves (1931): a kind of poem in prose, where the impressions
of some characters, are presented through a series of monologues.
The Years (1937): marks a partial return to traditional storytelling
techniques. Narrates the story of a generation and their vision of
life.
Between the Acts (1941): reveals as the most poetic of the writer’s
novels, which seeks an appropriate narrative form for years to
attempt to faithfully express their world and changing perceptions.
The book lacks a proper conclusion.
A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
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“ Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.
Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And
women have always been poor, not for two hundred
years merely, but from the beginning of time.
Women have had less intellectual freedom than the
sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not
had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I
have laid so much stress on money and a room of
one's own ”
The main theme is t FEMINISM
A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
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The title anticipates the first interpretation of the
problem which Woolf develops through book. In fact
women have never had a room to study, read or just
think.
For Woolf fundamental to be an independent woman is
the room and 500 pounds a year
The extract about Shakespeare and his talented sister:
Woolf wants to show that, there are different
opportunities offered to women and men and the choice
involves different effects according to the fact that you
are a woman or a man.
A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
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Woolf considers writing fundamental to her
existence and she thinks that to be an artist means
to have a perfect combination of masculine and
feminine qualities, so she tries to solve the problem
by adopting two different styles:
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one for her pieces of criticism and essays, which were
clear, logical, concise ,”masculine”;
the other one for her works of imagination, which were
poetic, clear, transparent, flexible, rhythmic, ”femminine”.
A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
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She has tried all her life to combine the male and the
female into an androgynous mind: calm, stable, not
touched by the consciousness of sex, but she realizes
that this idea is utopian because it represents an escape
from the confrontation with femaleness and maleness…
“Who can measure the fervor and violence of
the heart of a poet when taken and remains
trapped in a body of a woman?
To the Lighthouse
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TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
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The novel is highly autobiographical. It is based on her childhood
recollections of holidays in Cornwall, which becomes an isle in the
Hebrides in the novel.
There are close links between Virginia’s chidlhood and the
Lighthouse
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Mr & Mrs Ramsay and their relationship  Virginia’s own father and
mother
Premature Death of Mrs Ramsay  death of her mom
Death of one of Ramsay children in war  death of Victoria’s own
brother
She writes this novel prompted by a deep psychological urge to
distance herself from obsession of her childhood memories
.Memories element in the novel, however, are transformed and take
on a symbolical and universal values.
The lighthouse
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It’s in the centre of the novel and has a
symbolic rule: its alternation of light and
darkness represents the contradictory aspects
of life.
In fact, as the sea, it reflects – in the first
part - the situation of happiness and
enjoyment of the character.
Then-in the second one- the destructive
aspects symbolizes the pain of the family.
Interior Monologue
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a)
b)
Interior monologue is often confused with Stream of
Consciousness but the former is the verbal expression of
a psychic phenomenon.
It’s distinguished by immediacy  Immediate speech is
freed from introductory expressions like “he thought, he
remembered, he said..”, from formal structures and from
logical and chronological order.
Interior monologue in the “To the Lighthouse” is
characterised by:
The narrator is present within the narration;
The character stays fixed in space while his-her
consciousness moves freely in time.
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Verbal expression of a psychic
phenomen
Immediate speech without
introductory expressions
Interior
monologue
Narrator present
Action takes place within the
character’s mind
Lack of chronological
order
Mrs Dalloway and Modernism
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Feminism
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As a commentary on inter-war society, Clarissa's character
highlights the role of women as the proverbial "Angel in the
House" and embodies both sexual and economic repression.
She keeps up with and even embraces the social expectations
of the wife of a politician, but she is still able to express
herself in the parties she throws.
Sally Seton, who Clarissa admires dearly, is remembered as a
great independent woman: she smoked cigars, once ran down
a corridor naked to fetch her sponge-bag, and made bold,
unladylike statements to get a reaction from people.
When Clarissa meets her in the present day, she turns out to
be a perfect housewife, having married a rich man and had
five sons
Mrs Dalloway
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Homosexuality
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Clarissa Dalloway was strongly attracted to Sally at
Bourton -- twenty years later, she still considers the kiss
they shared to be the happiest moment of her life.
She feels about women "as men feel“ but she does not
recognize these feelings as signs of homosexuality.
She and Sally fell a little behind. T
hen came the most exquisite moment of her whole life
passing a stone urn with flowers in it Sally stopped;
picked a flower; kiss her on the lips.
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The whole world might have turned upside down! The
others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally.
And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped
up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it - a diamond,
something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they
walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or
the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious
feeling! (Woolf, 36)
Mrs Dalloway
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Mental illness
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Septimus, as the shell-shocked war hero,
operates as a pointed criticism of the
treatment of insanity and depression. Woolf
lashes out at the medical discourse through
Septimus's decline and ultimate suicide:
his doctors make snap judgments about his
condition, talk to him mainly through his
wife, and dismiss his urgent confessions
before he can make them.
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Similarities in Septimus's condition to Woolf's
own struggles with manic depression (they
both hallucinate that birds sing in Greek, and
Woolf once attempted to throw herself out of
a window as Septimus finally does) lead many
to read a strongly auto-biographical aspect
into Septimus's character. Woolf eventually
committed suicide by drowning
Mrs Dalloway
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Existential issues
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When Peter Walsh sees a girl in the street and
stalks her for half an hour, he notes that his
relationship to the girl was "made up, as one
makes up the better part of life."
By focusing on character's thoughts and
perceptions, Woolf emphasizes the significance
of private thoughts, rather than concrete
events, in a person's life. Most of the plot
points in Mrs. Dalloway are realizations that
the characters make in their own heads.
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•Fueled by her bout of ill health, Clarissa Dalloway is emphasized as
a woman who appreciates life.
•Her love of party-throwing comes from a desire to bring people
together and create happy moments. Her charm, according to Peter
Walsh who loves her, is a sense of joie de vivre, always summarized
by the sentence, "There she was."
•She interprets Septimus Smith's death as an act of embracing life,
and her mood remains light even when she figures out her marriage
is a lie.
Orlando and Modernism
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TRANSLATION OF LIFE INTO LITERATURE: the life of a writer
which is the story of writing; the turning of life into text and
vice versa, which characterises biography in general; the
problem of literary representation , which tries to turn world
into word.
TRANSFORMATION: oscillation from one state of being another,
in stases of flux and repetition. She links forms and concepts of
subjectivity to historical periods and explores the relationship
between durable and mutable selves.
ANDROGYNY: the sexual ideal is a combination of male and
female attributes which are known and given from the start.
DEPTH OF UNCONSCIOUS: Orlando lives through the centuries
but never contains the totality of time. The self is composed not
only of multiple identities but of multiple temporalities, and the
existence of the unconscious suggests a continuity of identity
through time.
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TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
Context
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Virginia Woolf was born on January 25, 1882, a
descendant of one of Victorian England’s most
prestigious literary families.
Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was the editor of the
Dictionary of National Biography and was married to
the daughter of the writer William Thackeray.
Woolf grew up among the most important and
influential British intellectuals of her time, and
received free rein to explore her father’s library.
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Her personal connections and abundant talent soon
opened doors for her. Woolf wrote that she found
herself in “a position where it was easier on the
whole to be eminent than obscure.”
Almost from the beginning, her life was a
precarious balance of extraordinary success and
mental instability.
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As a young woman, Woolf wrote for the prestigious Times
Literary Supplement, and as an adult she quickly found herself
at the center of England’s most important literary community.
Known as the “Bloomsbury Group” after the section of
London in which its members lived, this group of writers,
artists, and philosophers emphasized nonconformity, aesthetic
pleasure, and intellectual freedom, and included such
luminaries as the painter Lytton Strachey, the novelist E. M.
Forster, the composer Benjamin Britten, and the economist
John Maynard Keynes.
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Working among such an inspirational group of
peers and possessing an incredible talent in her own
right, Woolf published her most famous novels by
the mid-1920s, including The Voyage Out, Mrs.
Dalloway, Orlando, and To the Lighthouse.
With these works she reached the pinnacle of
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Woolf’s life was equally dominated by mental illness.
Her parents died when she was young—her mother
in 1895 and her father in 1904—and she was prone to
intense, terrible headaches and emotional
breakdowns.
After her father’s death, she attempted suicide,
throwing herself out a window. Though she married
Leonard Woolf in 1912 and loved him deeply, she
was not entirely satisfied romantically or sexually.
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For years she sustained an intimate relationship with
the novelist Vita Sackville-West. Late in life, Woolf
became terrified by the idea that another nervous
breakdown was close at hand, one from which she
would not recover.
On March 28, 1941, she wrote her husband a note
stating that she did not wish to spoil his life by going
mad. She then drowned herself in the River Ouse.
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Woolf’s writing bears the mark of her literary
pedigree as well as her struggle to find meaning in
her own unsteady existence.
Written in a poised, understated, and elegant style,
her work examines the structures of human life, from
the nature of relationships to the experience of time.
Yet her writing also addresses issues relevant to her
era and literary circle.
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Throughout her work she celebrates and analyzes
the Bloomsbury values of aestheticism, feminism,
and independence.
Moreover, her stream-of-consciousness style was
influenced by, and responded to, the work of the
French thinker Henri Bergson and the novelists
Marcel Proust and James Joyce.
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This style allows the subjective mental processes of
Woolf’s characters to determine the objective
content of her narrative.
In To the Lighthouse (1927), one of her most
experimental works, the passage of time, for
example, is modulated by the consciousness of the
characters rather than by the clock.
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The events of a single afternoon constitute over
half the book, while the events of the following ten
years are compressed into a few dozen pages.
Many readers of To the Lighthouse, especially those
who are not versed in the traditions of modernist
fiction, find the novel strange and difficult. Its
language is dense and the structure amorphous.
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Compared with the plot-driven Victorian novels
that came before it, To the Lighthouse seems to
have little in the way of action.
Indeed, almost all of the events take place in the
characters’ minds.
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Although To the Lighthouse is a radical departure
from the nineteenth-century novel, it is, like its
more traditional counterparts, intimately interested
in developing characters and advancing both plot
and themes.
Woolf’s experimentation has much to do with the
time in which she lived: the turn of the century was
marked by bold scientific developments.
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Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution undermined
an unquestioned faith in God that was, until that
point, nearly universal, while the rise of
psychoanalysis, a movement led by Sigmund
Freud, introduced the idea of an unconscious mind.
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Such innovation in ways of scientific thinking had great
influence on the styles and concerns of contemporary artists
and writers like those in the Bloomsbury Group. To the
Lighthouse exemplifies Woolf’s style and many of her
concerns as a novelist.
With its characters based on her own parents and siblings, it is
certainly her most autobiographical fictional statement, and in
the characters of Mr. Ramsay, Mrs. Ramsay, and Lily Briscoe,
Woolf offers some of her most penetrating explorations of the
workings of the human consciousness as it perceives and
analyzes, feels and interacts
Another Perspective…
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Published in 1927, To the Lighthouse is sandwiched
between Virginia Woolf’s 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.
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To the Lightbouse takes on some elements of Woolf’s
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 Prue’s deaths in To the Lighthouse).
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But, Woolf herself got fed up with critics who insisted
on reading the Ramsays as direct representations of
the Stephens (Stephen was Woolf’s 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,
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What makes To the Lighthouse important in literary
terms is Woolf’s ambitious formal experimentation.
She’s 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.
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Her run-on sentences and meandering paragraphs
work to replicate what her characters are thinking
in addition to what they’re doing.
Woolf is a great example of the Show Don’t 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.
Summary- To the Lighthouse
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Part One spans approximately seven hours and
takes up more than half the book. It’s set at the
Ramsay’s 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 that’s across the bay
from the Ramsays’ summer home.
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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.
Ramsay’s visiting students, chimes in and supports
Mr. Ramsay’s view that the weather will be rotten.
He’s a very socially awkward young man who is
obsessed with his dissertation.
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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).
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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 Briscoe’s painting.
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(If you’re wondering who Lily is, we are in the same
boat. Although, we gather she’s 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. Ramsay’s.
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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.
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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.
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At dinner, Mrs. Ramsay triumphs. The food is
delicious; she is beautiful; Mr. Bankes has stayed for
dinner; and Paul’s 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.
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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.
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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.
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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 h
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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 Lily’s
thoughts, we hear that she never married, but remained
good friends with William Bankes. Paul and Minta’s
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, it’s clear that Mrs. Ramsay is sorely
missed.
Chapter 1
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James Ramsay, age six, gets super-excited when his
mom tells him that if the weather is good tomorrow,
then they can take a trip to the Lighthouse.
Essentially, wordy Woolf says, in a 101-word-long
sentence, that James is so excited about the
Lighthouse, everything in the present is colored by his
expectant joy of tomorrow’s trip.When Mr. Ramsay
says that the weather will be terrible, James is seized
with a rampant desire to kill his father… with an axe,
a poker, or whatever’s available.
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James likes his mother much better than he likes
his father, clearly.Mr. Ramsay doesn’t mind
disappointing James; he wants his children to
learn early that life is tough.
Mrs. Ramsay, who is knitting, insists that the
weather will be fine. She is knitting stocking
and compiling a number of odds and ends to
give to the Lighthouse keepers because she
feels sorry for them.
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Charles Tansley, who gets a lot of flak for being an
atheist, supports Mr. Ramsay’s point of view that the
weather will be awful.
This is in keeping with his generally disagreeable
character and constant sucking up to Mr.
Ramsay.Everyone leaves the dinner table as soon as
lunch is over.Mrs. Ramsay can see that Mr. Tansley is
feeling left out, so she asks him to accompany her on
her errands. He agrees to.
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On their way out, Mrs. Ramsay stops and asks Mr.
Carmichael, who is sitting on the lawn, if he wants
anything, but he doesn’t.
On their walk into town, Mrs. Ramsay makes Mr.
Tansley feel much better about himself – so much so
that he wants to do something manly and chivalrous
for her, like carry her bag, but she insists on
carrying it herself.
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Mrs. Ramsay sees an advertisement for a circus, and
says that they should all go.Mr. Tansley repeats her
words but they don’t come out right, and soon his
whole sob story spills out: his father worked a lot,
he had a lot of siblings, they never went to the
circus, now he’s doing a dissertation…blah blah
blah.
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Mrs. Ramsay thinks that he’s an insufferable bore
who’s obsessed with all that academic jargon, but
she now sees that this is his way of recovering from
the fact that he’s never been to the circus.
The two of them come to the quay and Mrs. Ramsay
exclaims at the beautiful view. She says her
husband loves the view, and that loads of artists
come to paint it.
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The two of them watch one of the artists, and Mrs. Ramsay
draws a comparison between the artist’s method and the
method used in her grandmother’s day.
(Basically, everyone nowadays paints like this guy named
Paunceforte.)Mrs. Ramsay goes inside a house to talk to some
woman, and as Mr. Tansley waits in the drawing room his
emotions intensify into deep feelings of love for Mrs. Ramsay.
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He’s convinced that she – a mother of eight children,
and 50 years of age – is the most beautiful woman
ever.
He’s now absolutely determined to carry her bag.As
they walk back, Mr. Tansley is on Cloud Nine
because he’s walking next to the most beautiful
woman ever – and he’s carrying her bag. He feels
like a real man.
Chapter 2
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•
•
Mr. Tansley tells James that there’s no way they can
go to the Lighthouse, but he softens his tone, out of
respect for his beloved Mrs. Ramsay.
Mrs. Ramsay thinks to herself that Mr. Tansley is an
awful man to keep bringing that up. She actually
calls him an "odious little man," which is a pretty
good insult.
Chapter 3
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Mrs. Ramsay consoles her little boy, saying that the
weather might still turn fine tomorrow.
She does this not because she actually believes it,
but because she can see that James really wants to
go to the Lighthouse.
Mrs. Ramsay begins turning the pages of a catalog,
looking for a rake or mowing machine.
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Mrs. Ramsay is startled when the men stop talking,
and concludes that Mr. Tansley has been cast off by
the rest of the men. She is fine with this because Mr.
Tansley has hurt James with all of his bad weather
comments, anyway.
Mrs. Ramsay remembers that she has promised to
keep her head down for the portrait that Lily Briscoe
is painting. She thinks briefly that Lily will never get
married, then bends her head again.
Chapter 4
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A man who is not identified – but we later find out is Mr.
Ramsay – comes out of the house shouting lines from Lord
Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade, and almost knocks
over Lily Briscoe’s easel.Lily is relieved that he runs away.
She really hates it when anyone looks at what she’s
painting.But then, she has this moment where she listens to
incoming footsteps and figures out that they belong to William
Bankes.
She’s fine with William Bankes seeing her painting – in fact,
she and William are buddy-buddy.
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Mr. Ramsay stares at them; William Bankes suggests
that he and Lily take a stroll.
They walk over to where they can see the beautiful
water of the bay, and feel united in watching the
waves. How romantic.
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Mr. Bankes thinks about the difference between his
and Mr. Ramsay’s lives. He and Mr. Ramsay were
once good friends, but their lives took different paths:
Mr. Ramsay has a wife and many children, whereas
Mr. Bankes is childless and a widower.
Mr. Bankes believes that Mr. Ramsay is a great man,
but at the same time understands that the "spice" has
gone out of their friendship.
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As Mr. Bankes begins walking back to the house, he
sees Cam, the Ramsays’ youngest daughter, throwing
a rebellious temper tantrum against her nursemaid,
who wants the girl to give away a flower.
Mr. Bankes is amazed that the Ramsays manage to
raise eight children on philosophy (meaning that Mr.
Ramsay works in philosophy and can’t possibly make
enough money).
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In his mind, each of the eight children is connected
with a different superlative. We hear four of them:
Cam the Wicked, James the Ruthless (he’s the one that
wanted to axe his dad two chapters ago), Andrew
the Just, and Prue the Fair.
So, in spite of the aforementioned difficulty keeping
track of who’s who, we at least know that these four
are Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay’s kids.
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Lily thinks of Mr. Ramsay’s work, which Andrew ("the
Just") equates to "a kitchen table when you’re not
there."
Don’t worry if you’re not getting Woolf’s drift. It’s
all philosophical stuff about the nature of reality.
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Lily and Mr. Bankes discuss Mr. Ramsay’s work.As
the two of them walk back, a shot rings out and a
flock of starlings take flight.
Mr. Ramsay yells, "Someone had blundered!" He
then turns and slams his private door.
Chapter 5
73
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Mrs. Ramsay takes her stocking and measures it up
against James’s leg as she, in a flash of inspiration,
decides that William and Lily should marry.
James fidgets deliberately, jealous that the stocking
is for the Lighthouse boy.
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Mrs. Ramsay looks up, confused, and reflects on the
room they are in, and then the whole house. It’s
getting shabbier and shabbier every summer, she
concludes.
She speaks sharply to her boy and he straightens
up. The stocking is too short.
75
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We get a couple of paragraphs about Mrs.
Ramsay’s beauty – how she’s not aware of it, and
how she has a certain personality that is
inseparable from her beauty.Mrs. Ramsay continues
knitting the stocking, kisses her little boy, and
suggests that they go cut out some pictures.
Chapter 6
76
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With the phrase "someone had blundered" ringing in
her ears, Mrs. Ramsay watches her husband
approach.She can sense that he’s distraught, and
gives him time to collect himself.
The two of them chat about Charles Tansley and the
possibility of going to the Lighthouse tomorrow. Mrs.
Ramsay thinks it’s possible. Mr. Ramsay does not, and
is irritated that his wife disagrees.
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Mr. Ramsay thinks that female minds are
irrational.Mrs. Ramsay thinks that it’s indecent for
Mr. Ramsay to crush hope.Mrs. Ramsay bends her
head and Mr. Ramsay then feels bad. He promises
to ask the Coastguards.
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Mr. Ramsay leaves, still murmuring "someone had
blundered" under his breath – only now it’s more
joyful.
Mr. Ramsay walks up and down around the garden,
and thinks for a long time about how to be
amazing.
Chapter 7
79
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Now we get a really, really long paragraph from
James’s point of view about how much he hates his
father. This is, after all, "James the Ruthless.“
Mr. Ramsay comes over and declares that he’s a
total failure.Mrs. Ramsay strokes his ego until he
finally leaves to watch the kids play cricket.
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Mrs. Ramsay sort of crumples after her husband
leaves, but turns back to the fairy tale she is
reading to James.
She’s angry because she doesn’t like feeling better
than her husband.Augustus Carmichael shuffles by
and Mrs. Ramsay asks if he is going indoors.
Chapter 8
81
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Mr. Carmichael does not respond, and we get an
extended ramble down Mrs. Ramsay’s Memory Lane.
We suggest that you take a deep breath right now.
Ok, here we go:Mr. Carmichael takes opium, which
the children say stains his beard.
Mrs. Ramsay thinks Mr. Carmichael is obviously
unhappy and comes to stay with the Ramsays each
year as an escape.Mr. Carmichael doesn’t trust her;
Mrs. Ramsay blames his deceased wife.
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Mrs. Ramsay goes out of her way to be nice to him.
She suspects that her desire to be helpful and nice is
merely vanity, and that Mr. Carmichael’s rejection
of her efforts reveals the pettiness in her character.
And we’re back. Mrs. Ramsay continues reading The
Fisherman and his Wife to James.
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Mr. Ramsay stops, looks at his wife and kid, nods
approvingly, and continues walking.As he walks, he
thinks. You may ask, what is he thinking about?
In a sentence: He wonders what would happen if
Shakespeare had never existed, and from there
somehow concludes that the greatest good of
society requires a class of slaves.
Chapter 9
84
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Mr. Ramsay walks to a piece of land which he can’t
seem to avoid. The sea is eating it away.
And now we have a metaphor! The sea is human
ignorance.Mr. Ramsay always needs praise.
Lily puts away her painting things and Mr. Ramsay
walks back to the house, stopping once to look back
at the sea.
85
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Lily and Mr. Bankes criticize Mr. Ramsay as Lily puts
away her brushes.
Lily is about to criticize Mrs. Ramsay as well when
she sees the look of complete adoration that Mr.
Bankes, age 60, turns on Mrs. Ramsay.
Watching Mrs. Ramsay gives Mr. Bankes the same
feeling he gets when solving a scientific problem.
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As Lily wipes her brushes, she is cheered by the
thought that people can love this way.
She looks at her picture and nearly has a nervous
breakdown because it’s bad!Lily recalls Mr.
Tansley’s words that women can’t paint or write.
Lily joins Mr. Bankes in staring at Mrs. Ramsay.
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Lily begins to think about Mrs. Ramsay, considering
what comprises Mrs. Ramsay’s unique identity.
Mr. Bankes stops watching Mrs. Ramsay and looks at
Lily’s painting.Lily braces herself.
Mr. Bankes asks the meaning of the purple triangle.
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Lily says that it’s meant to represent Mrs. Ramsay
reading to James.
They talk briefly about light and dark and
composition.
Lily feels that she has shared something very
intimate with Mr. Bankes .
Review Lecture 9
89
VIRGINIA WOOLf
1. Her Major Works- A Quick Look
2. Theme of Feminism
3. To the Lighthouse
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Review Lecture 9
90
7. Interior Monologue
8. Mrs Dalloway and Modernism
 Homosexuality
 Mental illness
9. Orlando and Modernism
10. Contextual Background
11. Another Perspective
12. Summary- To the Lighthouse (Chapter 1-9)
Agenda Lecture 10
91
Discussion continue (Chapter 10-19)
 List of Characters
 Analysis of major Characters
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