Light house essay

Light house essay

  Lily admires Mr. and Mrs. Ramsays relationship in visual language. Here Mrs. Ramsay portrays the feminine gender role of care and commitment.  Lily watches Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay

Share a moment of silent, married complicity on the beach as they watch their children play ball, Lily thinks, “So that is marriage…a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball.”

(Woofs 72). Reducing the sacred Victorian ideal of marriage to a series of moments equals the reduction of figurative art into a constructed, abstract aesthetic. Lily’s artistic project, therefore, concerns marriage as much as an artistic vision that rebels against traditional forms of representation. Making marriage “unreal but penetrating and exciting,” Lily defines and devours what she sees from afar, even incorporating elements of her abstract meaning of marriage into her painting. Unable to penetrate into the realm of marriage and intimacy.Lily stands outside, substituting simplified definitions of marriage for actual attempts at Intimacy.

From the novel, Mrs. Ramsey appears to be highly respected simply because she is in a relationship. She is married, and she has a family which she manages with her husband, Mr. Ramsay. On the other hand, Lily is not married, and she hates relationship, she has a fear of the unknown when it comes to marriage matters. Observing the banality of intimate relationships from afar, Lily feels separate from the “unreal” universe of love in which nature celebrates the joyousness of love and marriage. Lily feels separate since she does not enjoy relationship intimacies.

Lily learns that marriage is important and of high respect and can’t be compared to her job of painting. Turning her gaze from the married couple to her painting, she substitutes the hope of art for the hope and joy of marriage. The rapturous gaze William Bankes casts upon Mrs. Ramsay contrasts with the gaze of horror Lily casts on her painting. Hysterically, Lily “could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, and it was infinitely bad! She could have done it differently of

Course…But then she did not see it like that. She saw the color burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral. Of that only a few. Random marks scrawled upon the canvas remained” (Woofs TTL 48). Lily describes her vision in vivid terms, equal to the manner in which she describes the Ramsay’s marriage. She can no more paint the vividness of “burning color on a framework of steel” than she can “the unreal but penetrating…universe” of “being in love” (TTL 48, 46-47). The inadequacy of art as a substitute for the glow of marriage she observes from afar echoes the inadequacies of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay’s relationship. Independent and striving for her vision, Lily spurns traditional intimacy, but finds no comfort in her art.

Mrs. Ramsay, a mother of eight, embodies traditional dominant values about women as submissive, dependent, and domestic. She clearly shows the role of woman in marriage. Mrs. Ramsay nurtures the many people residing at the Ramsay’s summer home. She feels overwhelmed by their coming “to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; Mrs. Ramsey often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions (Dunn 234) Mrs. Ramsay’s sympathy and encouragement sustain her husband’s fragile ego, much as a mother’s breast milk nourishes a helpless infant. Lily Briscoe greatly admires these though her art of painting clearly keeps her off from marriage intimacies.

Lily has no clear understanding of human intimacy that is why she paints. She sincerely desires and admires so much in Mrs. Ramsay’s model relationships. She envies Mrs. Ramsays way of life. She likes her devotion in marriage thinking of Mrs. Ramsay and her “virginal” painting; Lily questions the nature of true human intimacy (Walker 24). Mrs. Ramsay’s ability to attain the “unreal” state of marriage and traditional ideals of womanhood in all their glory puzzles and fascinates Lily, Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of beauty, so that all one’s perceptions, half-way to truth, were tangled up in a golden mesh?…What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through into those secret chambers? What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored? Could the body achieve, or the mind, subtly mingling in the intricate passages of the brain? Or the heart? Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? For it was not knowledge but unity that she desired intimacy itself, which is knowledge (    Woofs TTL 50-51).

Though Lily sees her painting as inadequate to achieve intimacy, she questions the ability of the human sexual relationship to do the same. Her incapacity to love or to be the object of love haunts her, especially as she faces Mrs. Ramsay, loving and loved by many men (Walker 57). Lily wonders, “What art was there…by which one pressed through into those secret chambers?” Mingling art and sex in her mind, Lily wonders at the effectiveness of either to achieve sameness, “unity,” or “intimacy itself.” As unreal and abstract as the Ramsay family “being in love,” Lily longs for and questions the possibility of real intimacy. Lily’s genuine desire for intimacy leads to “leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsay’s knee” in an attempt for physical connection. She attains “Nothing! Nothing! As she leaned her head against Mrs. Ramsay’s knee” (Woofs 51). Lily defines “intimacy” not as sex but as knowledge a deeper spiritual connection attained most efficiently by nonsexual means. Trying to mingle her mind with Mrs. Ramsay’s body, leaning bone against the bone to attain “knowledge,” Lily attempts an intimacy without sexual penetration, but fails.

Mrs. Ramsay shows womanhood; she urges the bonds of marriage upon the younger women in the novel. The artist figure, Lily Briscoe, questions the validity of marital intimacy in her world. Choosing her painting, Lily refuses the societal constraints of marriage in favor of a self-fulfilling vision of artistry and vision. At first substituting her art for intimate human relationships, Lily eventually reaches a real intimacy with Mrs. Ramsay through her final painting. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf exposes human intimacy through marriage as inadequate for Lily, who exists in a condition of modernity unknown to and resisted by the Ramsay’s (Woofs 140). Lily’s experience being a painter and completion of her final abstract painting calls for new, transcendent kinds of intimacy, unmarred by the Victorian idea of intimacy between men and women.

Ramsay is in traditional marriage shows that in every marriage people marry to become one unit but eventually may disagree as a result of a minor problem. She shows the character of a good woman she thinks how a happy marriage should be. “For how would you like to be shut up for a whole month at a time  and to have no letters or newspapers, and to see nobody; if you were married, not to see your wife, not to know how your children were…” (Woolf 5).

Lily is ignoring Mrs. Ramsay as a role of a model of a good woman in the society because of she is having conflicts in her marriage and keeps sensitizing the young women in the society to get married. At the end of her worries about the poor married-but-alone Lighthouse keeper, she asks, “How would you like that?…addressing herself particularly to her daughters”.Mrs. Ramsay reveals her entire motivational for marriage as the fear of isolation. She is skeptical about the marriage ability to fill her need for human connection.

In To the Lighthouse Mrs. Ramsay, the mother dies. Here mother shows the gender role of liberalization for the artist. Ramsay symbolized external pressure to conform to traditional marriage, will change her viewpoint, aiding her in completing her picture (Woof 147). Her decision, vigorous and unwavering, marks an internal change no longer plagued by doubts about her purpose or the correctness of her decision, Lily knows she will complete her task. Mars Ramsay depicts some roles that can be copied by Lily Briscoe as a female artist.

Despite her dissatisfaction, Mrs. Ramsay, a beautiful, symbol of womanhood, shows the link between marriages of young lady in the novel. The artist, Lily Briscoe, asks the validity of marital intimacy in her world. Through her painting, she ignores the societal constraints of marriage for a self-fulfilling vision of artistry and vision (Woofs 78). At first substituting her art for intimate human relationships, Lily eventually reaches a real intimacy with Mrs. Ramsay through her final painting. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf shows human affection during her marriage as inadequate for Lily, who exists in a condition of modernity unknown to and resisted by the Ramsays. Ramsay acts as a role model to Lily, and this shapes her in life.

Lily depicts real definition of anti-mother.  She lacks Mrs. Ramsay’s nurturing, maternal instinct. After Mrs. Ramsay’s death, Mr. Ramsay consults Lily with his aim of reassurance.These were one of those moments when an enormous need urged him, without being conscious what it was, to approach any woman, to force them, he did not care how, his need was so great, to give him what he wanted sympathy”. Lily knows what Mr. Ramsay expects of her, what Mrs. Ramsay would probably have expected of her, were she still alive (Daugherty 78). Lily thinks to herself that she could copy from recollection she had seen from women like Mrs. Ramsey.

Works Cited

Daugherty, Beth Riegl. “’There She Sat’: The Power of the Feminist Imagination in To the

Lighthouse.” Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 37, No. 3 (autumn, 1991), 289-308.

Dunn, Jane. A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Boston: Little, Brown,

And Company, 1990.

Gillespie, Diane. The Sisters’ Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.

Lilienfeld, Jane. “’Where the Spear Plants Grew’: the Ramsays’ Marriage in To the Lighthouse.”

New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, ed. Jane Marcus. Lincoln, NE: University of

Nebraska Press, 1981. 148-169.

Walker, Brandy Brown. “Lily’s Last Stroke: Painting in Process in Virginia Woolf’s to the

Lighthouse.” Virginia Woolf and the Arts: Selected Papers from the Sixth Annual Conference on

Woolf, Virginia. “Blue and Green.” The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan

Dick. San Diego: Harcourt Inc., 1985. 142.