Home » Reading & Literature » Jane Austen » To The Lighthouse

To The Lighthouse

© Lisa Martin McAfee

Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse is an autobiographical novel in which she strives to deal with her feelings towards her parents. But more importantly, she is struggling to come to terms with the irreparable sense of loss that she feels, thirty-something years later, concerning the death of her mother. The Ramsays, are indeed Leslie and Julia Stephen; and Lily Briscoe is Virginia. The lighthouse is symbolic of that inner place in one’s soul where one find solace, harmony, balance, and atonement.

Mrs. Ramsay is the Victorian ideal of motherhood and womanhood. Like Julia, she has eight children, and overbearing husband who displays outburst of emotion, demands constant sympathy, and entertains a large circle of friends in their vacation home. Mrs. Ramsay offers comfort to all, food and clothes to needy families and is “astonishingly beautiful.” She combines all these attributes into a perfect, harmonious whole, creating a sense of serenity and balance in her home that is truly artistic. Nowhere is this ability shown in more eloquent language that at the dinner party in which she is able to create an inner circle of harmonious balance consisting of a sense of belonging and oneness.

The character of Lily Briscoe is a grown up version of Virginia in this novel. She is a friend of the Ramsays who is visiting them at their vacation home by the sea in Cornwall. It soon becomes evident that she feels deficient in her own abilities to love, and therefore feels inferior as a woman in comparison to Mrs. Ramsay. Lily does not choose to marry, but pursues painting and art instead of the traditional path of becoming a wife and mother. She sees life differently, and so although she adores Mrs. Ramsay, she also struggles to reconcile these feelings of not quite measuring up to this ideal of womanhood. Virginia also struggled with these feeling toward her mother and her own sense of femininity.

Julia was a very intelligent woman, but her husband’s desire for her was linked to her beauty and endless capacity to comfort, and so Julia deferred any intellectuality to her husband. Jane Dunn, in A Very Close Conspiracy states, “This tacit parental view of the incompatibility of intellectuality and femininity was to cause Virginia -- who exhibited both of these qualities supremely -- to falter at times in her own estimation of both her womanliness and her intellect.”

Next we see Mr. Ramsay, who, like Leslie Stephen, is a highly intelligent man prone to fits of “temper and melodramatic displays of grief.” Mr. Ramsay finds Lily to be “skimpy” because she is so unlike Mrs. Ramsay. This certainly conveys how Virginia must have felt how her father thought about her womanliness. Virginia was Leslie’s favorite daughter, and he was very proud of her intellectuality. But, he clearly did not feel that femininity and intellectuality could possibly

The copyright of the article To The Lighthouse in Jane Austen is owned by Lisa Martin McAfee. Permission to republish To The Lighthouse in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.