LITR 250 Close Reading 2E

In the beginning of Chapter VIII in the third section of To the Lighthouse, pages 186-187, Virginia Woolf’s unique approach to perspective and introspection create a subjective presentation of reality and relationships, supported by extended metaphors of fluidity and stillness. On a boat trip mandated by Mr. Ramsay to the titular lighthouse, Cam and James anatomize and unfold their feelings towards their father. Cam evolves as the boat moves across the sea while James’s unflinching rage and violence towards the patriarch repeat in this section as the sailboat halts and space contracts to exacerbate his indignation. Woolf thus frames and explores the figure of Mr. Ramsay and the nominal motif of a journey through individual introspection and excurses. ¹

The selection picks up directly from the end of Chapter IV, shifting away from an interlude wherein Lily Briscoe works on her painting and contemplates her own relationships to both Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, the former present in the scene with Cam and James, the latter casting a long shadow over it – James’s hatred of Mr. Ramsay was first introduced in an Oedipal fashion in the novel’s very first chapter, where James sees Mr. Ramsay as basking in “the pleasure of disillusioning his son… [and] ridicul[ing] his wife,” and James perceives his mother as “ten times better in every way than” her husband (Woolf 8). Woolf seemingly disregards flow and a coherent progression of events by bisecting the boat journey with Lily’s artistic journey; her prose instead acts more as combined snapshots from various perspectives about fraught, inscrutable figures like Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. The boat trip is merely a device through which Woolf can open “the picture into the depths of consciousness,” i.e. James and Cam’s internal reflections about their father (Auerbach 540).

While Cam and James were at first united in their mission to “fight tyranny to the death” during the trip to the lighthouse, tyranny being Mr. Ramsay, Cam softens on her father toward the end of Chapter IV (Woolf 167). It is no accident, then, that Chapter VIII opens with the boat still in motion and from Cam’s perspective – the movement of the boat frames the characters’ parenthetical thoughts. Cam contemplates the “green swirls and… patterns” made by her hand in the water and imagines an “underworld of waters” where “in the green light a change came over one’s entire mind” (Woolf 186). These images of fluidity and change reflect the previous excurses into Cam’s subjective reality – her thawing resistance to her father. However, when the wind suddenly calms and the boat stops moving, James stews in the same thoughts that have gripped him throughout the novel (his antipathy for his father), a kind of stillness of thought and emotion.

Though the group’s journey halts for what amounts to little time, James’s ruminations toward his father “take up far more time in the narration than the whole scene could possibly have lasted” (Auerbach 529). For James, “everything in the whole world seemed to stand still,” and thus the progression of time and action halts to give way to his internal reflections and thought (Woolf 186). While time expands to allow for this excurses into James’s internal realities, space contracts in the “horrid calm” and he must feel the “presence” of his companions, the most odious of which is his father (Woolf 186). James spots an attitude in each of Mr. Ramsay’s page turns, which are “now assertively, now commandingly; now with the intention of making people pity him,” and of course that may be the case (Woolf 186-87). However, it is far more likely that James simply perceives these attitudes – that they are a manifestation of his resentment – and Mr. Ramsay is simply reading a book to pass the time. The passage ends with James resolving that, should his father make a quip about the boat having stopped, that he “shall take a knife and strike to the heart” (Woolf 187). James’s dedication to his compact with his sister, and his internal reality of Mr. Ramsay, thus remains constant, as does his perception of the boat ride as an act of despotism, rather than, as Cam as begun to see it, an attempt by Mr. Ramsay to reconcile the past by fulfilling a desire of the deceased Mrs. Ramsay (to go to the lighthouse) and to grow closer to his children.

What should the reader make, then, of the boat ride and, by extension, Mr. Ramsay? Woolf offers no clear conclusion, with Cam and James at first agreeing and later diverging on both subjects through their individual “way[s] of looking at reality” (Auerbach 536). As Auerbach writes in an analysis of another passage from the novel, “we are given not merely one person whose consciousness… is rendered, but many persons” and that the reader is thus “confronted with an endeavor to investigate an objective reality” (Auerbach 536). That objective reality – the boat ride and Mr. Ramsay’s character – is not “restrained by a purpose nor directed by a specific subject of thought,” instead synthesized from multiple and, at times, competing perspectives. The “exterior events,” like the boat moving and halting and then moving again “have actually lost their hegemony,” instead serving to release “the much more significant inner process” (Auerbach 538).

Woolf thus builds in this section additional nuance to the trip to the lighthouse and the fraught character of Mr. Ramsay. One could easily have written the events of the chapter as, “the sailboat briefly hits a calm and stops; the wind soon picks up again and James, Mr. Ramsay, Cam, et al. continue their journey to the lighthouse.” But the “common focus” of the excurses – exploring the children’s relationships to their father; Mr. Ramsay as a whole, and the meaning of the journey – instead holds the weight and meaning of this side of the third and final section of the novel (Auerbach 539). Woolf offers no explicit conclusion or objective reality – is Mr. Ramsay truly a tyrant, or not? – an impartial narrative voice being absent from the novel, but the reader nonetheless grows closer toward an understanding of characters and events in the novel through her experimentation with perspective and presentation of introspection.

Works Cited

Auerbach, Erich, and Willard R. Trask. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature - New and Expanded Edition. REV-Revised, Princeton University Press, 2003.

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. 1st. New York: Harcourt, 1927.