To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: Day 4
Part I, Chapters 9-10
Chapter 9
Lily and William talk about… The Ramsays.
“Directly, one looked up and saw them, what she called ‘being in love’ flooded them. They became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen through the eyes of love. The sky stuck to them; the birds sang through them. And, what was even more exciting, she felt, too, as she saw Mr. Ramsay bearing down and retreating, and Mrs. Ramsay sitting with James in the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending, how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.”
Lily sees Mr. Bankes “gazing at Mrs. Ramsay” in a rapture.
“It was love, she thought… but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain… The world by all means should have shared it, could Mr. Bankes have said why that woman pleased him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem, so that he rested in contemplation of it, and felt, as he felt when he had proved something absolute about the digestive system of plants, that barbarity was tamed, the reign of chaos subdued.”
But as they talk about the Ramsays and as they consider their own and each other’s feelings for their hosts, most importantly, William Bankes moves towards Lily’s painting.
“She braced herself to stand the awful trial of some one looking at her picture. One must, she said, one must. And if it must be seen, Mr. Bankes was less alarming than another. But that any other eyes should see the residue of her thirty-three years, the deposit of each day's living mixed with something more secret than she had ever spoken or shown in the course of all those days was an agony. At the same time it was immensely exciting.”
She survives his seeing it. They talk about it. She explains the shapes, the way she sees Mrs. Ramsay with James as a “dome.”
William Bankes has shared with her something profoundly intimate. They have talked about her painting.
Chapter 10
Minta Doyle and Paul Rayley. Another of Mrs. Ramsay’s fixups. People accuse her, she knows, of “interfering” “making people do what she wished.”
She’s a matchmaker.
She thinks that her children are happier now than they will ever be again.
Finally, finally in this chapter, the eight children are characterized.
Mrs. Ramsay holds a secret darkness, a pessimism greater than her husbands.
At the end of the chapter James asks again about going to the Lighthouse and she says, no, not tomorrow and believes he will remember this disappointment all his life.
Join us on May 15 for a virtual discussion of To the Lighthouse with Mona Simpson.
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The pessimism of Mrs. Ramsey is haunting. We see her signs of doubt, her recognition that she can’t control everything. I’m struck in today’s reading, by how many examples there are of unobtainable love-- Lily’s for Mrs. Ramsey, all other men for Mrs. Ramsey and unobtainable women--“love that never attempted to clutch its object”; Lily’s love for painting and her unobtainable vision; Mrs. Ramsey’s love for children and her hope they might never grow old and her wondering if her own marriage is happy; all of this ending with James’ love for the lighthouse. So much dream like imagery is filtered through through human need.
And the moving between points of view mirror this want, somehow. For me, Lily’s observation of colors-" 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” ––seems similar to how Virginia Woolf is trying to write these characters, shapes and color, small movements against the bigness of ideas and life.
Truly beautiful writing.
Among the very many other things she brings to us (beautifully described in today’s comments from others), Virginia Woolf captures the human condition, at least my condition. I love these kids, “demons of wickedness, angels of delight… happier now than they would ever be again“. And I too love when our home is packed (She heard them stamping and crowing on the floor above her head the moment they woke. They came bustling along the passage. Then the door sprang open and in they came, fresh as roses, staring, wide awake …”); and I too worry when any of them is out of sight, and shiver when any of them faces disappointment or peril of any kind (“he would climb out onto a rock; he would be cut off. Or coming back single file on one of those little paths above the cliff one of them might slip. He would roll and then crash. It was growing quite dark“). I am moved by all of this.