Class: BS English 5th semester morning.

Subject: Fiction 3
Topic: To the Lighthouse.
Sub-topics: Title significance, significance
of three sections.
Submitted by:
Sameet Faisal 01
Moqaddas 02
Ayesha Fatima 05
Nimra Riaz 06
Submitted to: Sir Faheem Arshad.
Title Significance of “To the Lighthouse”.
The title “To the Lighthouse” indicates a voyage, but as so often in modernist literature it is a
psychic voyage. The novel is dominated by process of life to death, youth to maturity, promise to
fulfillment both in the completion of art and in the movement beyond the individual self to
contact with some larger reality. It is the process of living and “the flight of the mind” rather than
external events, that concern Woolf. The lighthouse symbolizes human desire. Lighthouse stands
day and night, season after season it remains curiously unattainable.
James frustrated desire to visit the lighthouse begins the novel and Mrs. Ramsay looks at the
lighthouse as she denies Mr. Ramsay the profession of love he wants so badly at the end of
section 1. James finally reaching the lighthouse in section 3, a decade after he had first wanted to
go, sees that, up close, the lighthouse looks nothing as it does from across the bay. The misty
image he had desired from a distance remains unattainable.
“No going to the Lighthouse, James.”
(Mr. Tansley, The Window,2)
The lighthouse has very different meanings to each character, but for all of them it represents
truth. Mrs. Ramsay sees the lighthouse as the source of comfort and stability even it is in the
distance.
“Sure enough, coming regularly across the waves was
the light of the lighthouse.”
For Lily Briscoe, the lighthouse becomes a sort of fixation during her final artistic vision. She is
watching as Mr. Ramsay’s boat approaches the lighthouse as she approaches the solution to
finish her painting, as the lighthouse becomes more and more obscure her vision becomes clearer
until finally:
“The lighthouse had become almost invisible had melted
away in a blue haze.”
with this she is finally relieved and finished her painting.
The idea of lighthouse as symbolizing truth is strongest in James as at the beginning of the novel
going to the lighthouse is the aspiration for James and at the end when he finally reaches it, he
reflects on his perceptions of the lighthouse:
“The lighthouse was then a silvery, misty looking
tower with a yellow eye.”
and now he sees the lighthouse as a stark tower.
There are multiple truths and lighthouse is considered as destination, an answer that the
characters are all to reach. All the characters are representative of the modernist idea that truth is
subjective and often unreachable. So, the novel’s title can be understood as a description of
experience itself: one moves through life propelled by desire towards the things one wants, and
yet seems rarely to reach them. One’s life, then is the process of moving towards, of reaching, of
desiring. It is “to” the Lighthouse, not “at” it.

Section-I
The Window:
Title Significance:
To the Lighthouse chronicles grief, consciousness, memory, how these are tied intimately
to a place, and how people handle change over time. The first section of the book, “The
Window,” sets up the relationships among the characters, traces the geography (both human and
physical) surrounding the narrative, and breathes life into Mrs. Ramsay, the imposing character
who dies in the novel’s next section.
The window represents an important element in first chapter. Virginia represents in this
section a whole day from morning to night with the meaning of the progress of life. The window
represents the contrast day and night, past and present, and at the same time the speed in which
life happens. The characters see through the window how the days pass and their lives are
developing.
Mrs. Ramsay spends her afternoon sitting at a window, reading to James. Lily Briscoe is
attempting to paint them. The window encapsulates Mrs. Ramsay in a very static position, while
everyone else is caught up in dynamic movement: Mr. Ramsay is walking, Lily is painting, the
children are playing cricket. The window furthermore frames Mrs. Ramsay as the centerpiece of
the whole tableau. Mr. Bankes gazes adoringly at her, Lily looks at her critically in order to
properly paint her, and Mr. Ramsay runs over for sympathy. The window is therefore the
physical manifestation of the more abstract idea that Mrs. Ramsay is the center of the household,
in addition to the idea that she is separate and apart from everyone else (literally separated by a
pane of glass).
Virginia Woolf uses stream of consciousness as a Window into the minds of her
characters, leading readers to regard the concept of time in terms of thoughts rather than how it
.
works in the external world "The Window," the longest of the three parts of the novel,
addresses events that cover about seven hours of time. Stylistically, Woolf anchors time through
events and experiences in the characters lives rather than anchoring time to the traditional
calendar or clock. She stretches or compresses time through the length of the narrative to suggest
the significance and effects of particular events on the lives of the characters. While To the
Lighthouse takes place over 10 years, it also takes place over the course of one day or one 24-
hour period. "The Window" covers an afternoon and an evening; "Time Passes" covers a dark
night that spans 10 years; and "The Lighthouse " covers a morning.
Summary:
In the first section, The Window, we are introduced to all of the characters and become
caught up in the web of relationships at the Ramsay’s summer home. We see a day unfold with
the promise of a trip to the Lighthouse (which never takes place), creating an underlying tension
during the day.
“No going to the Lighthouse, James.” (Mr. Tansley)
As the day unfolds, we see each of the characters from multiple perspectives. Each
character’s private mentations are recorded, as well as other characters’ responses and
interpretations of his/her behavior.
In this first section, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay’s relationship is highlighted, as well as their
distinct personalities, i.e. Mr. Ramsay’s idiosyncracies and Mrs. Ramsay’s struggle to create
harmony. Other characters are seen largely in their relationship to the Ramsays. We are watching
the figures in this novel through as it through a window. We get “inside their heads” as we hear
their thoughts just as they occur to them.
The day passes. Mr Ramsay takes his walks. Mrs. Ramsay flutters about her guests,
meeting their needs. She reads a story to her son. The children romp and act mischievously.
Romance is in the air Mrs. Ramsay encourages Minta Doyle and Paul Rayley and Lily Briscoe
and William Bankes. Dinner becomes an occasion; the Boeuf en Daube is prepared perfectly and
spirit are high, rounded out with poetry,
“And all the lives we ever lived and and all the lives to be
are full of trees and changing leaves.”
The children are put to bed. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay sit, reading, he re-discovering Sir
Walter Scott, she finding the
“Odds and ends of the day stuck to this magnet” a sonnet.
The strength of their feelings for each other, bruised and scattered by the day, returns.
There is a sense of contentment.
“The sky stuck to them, the birds sang through them.”

Critical Analysis:
In the “The Window”, Woolf formulates time as a subject of consciousness as opposed to
chronology. "The Window," draws attention to the characters' locations. Mrs. Ramsay and James
sit in the drawing room while Mr. Ramsay and Tansley engage with them through the window
during their walk and discussion. This placement creates an opposition, which might represent
gender roles. Mrs. Ramsay, mother and wife, remains in the house. Her husband and his male
student find their place outside, near the home but not constricted by it. Where women have the
house, men have the rest of the world. This difference creates tension that looms around the roles
of Mrs. Ramsay and other female characters.
 “The Window”, also emphasize the passage of the time in the novel and show us how the
characters have a fear of death. This anxiety is particularly represented in Mrs. Ramsay who
expresses this when she thinks in her children growing older, at the same time she accepts the
fact that she will die one day at the end of the first chapter, when she decides to look at the
lighthouse.
“Life stand still here.”

Section-II
Time Passes:
Title Significance:
In “Time Passes”, the brief second section of the novel, Woolf addresses the feeling and state of
absence, primarily from the point of view of the Ramsay’s house in which all of the action of the
first section occurred. “Time Passes” provides an intimate overview of the passage of time, from
the omniscient point of view of the abandoned falling house. In “Time Passes”, deep, lyrical,
descriptions of the passage of time, light and dark, silence and noise, are interspersed with
concrete points on the timeline of external plot (marriage, childbirth, death), declared in two or
these short sentences within the confines of brackets, as if to separate the physical world from
the interior one.
To the Lighthouse explores time at every scale. Section I and Section III occur in real time while
the second section demonstrates the inadequacy of clock time to measure human experience. The
real time of “The Window” accelerates to the breakneck speed and the section spans the whole
decade in just a few pages. As Woolf says in the novel:
“Night, however, succeeds to night.”
Without much attention to detail, this view on time lacks the particularity and
complexity of time in The Window and is characterized only by a framework of events. Thus,
the enormity of Mrs. Ramsay’s, Pure’s and Andrew’s deaths, and of World War I, are reduced to
small number of sentences.

Summary:
Time passes more quickly in this section. War breaks out across Europe. Mrs.Ramsay dies
suddenly one night, Andrew Ramsay, her oldest son, is killed in battle, and his sister, Pure dies
from an illness related to childbirth. The family no longer vacations at its summerhouse, which
falls into a state of disrepair: weeds take over the garden and birds nest in the house.
“The place was gone to rack and ruin. Only the Lighthouse beam
entered the room for a moment.”
 Ten years pass before the family returns, Mrs.McNab, the housekeeper, employs a few other
women to help set the house in order. They rescue the house from the oblivion and decay, and
everything is in order when Lily Briscoe returns.

Critical Analysis:
The “Time Passes” section radically alters the novel’s development. Many of the characters form
the first section disappear. This section compresses an entire decade into barely twenty pages.
Woolf chooses to portray the effects of time on objects like house and its contents rather than on
human development and emotions. Because the focus shifts from psychology in “The Window”
to chronology in “Time Passes”, human beings become secondary concern in the second section
in latter section.
Mrs. Ramsay’s death constitutes the death of womanhood and the dismantling of the
domesticated power in the novel. Pure’s death in childbirth strikes out at beauty and continuity,
while Andrew’s death brings out the impact of war. In short, “Time Passes” brings to the
Ramsays destruction as vast as that inflicted on Europe by World War I. When the Ramsays
return to their summer home shaken, depleted and unsure, they represent the postwar state of an
entire continent.

SECTION-III
The Lighthouse:
Title Significance:
The title suggests that the continuity or the journey which started at the beginning of the novel
has now reached its destination. The lighthouse is the ultimate destination which symbolizes
stability and sustainability. The lighthouse stood there unaltered and unscathed throwing the
beam of recollections of Ramsay’s past. It was a souvenir of their existence, that they once
existed as a whole and happy family. Its unaltered shape suggests that nothing has changed over
the course of time which is quite opposite to the reality.
“There it loomed up, stark and straight, glaring white and black,
and one could see the waves breaking in white splinters
like smashed glass upon the rocks.”

Summary:
In the final section, “The Lighthouse,” some of the remaining Ramsays and other guests return to
their summer home ten years after the events of Part I. Mr. Ramsay finally plans on taking the
long-delayed trip to the lighthouse with daughter Cam and son James. Their travel ends as there
is a rare moment of empathy between father and son; Cam's attitude towards her father changes
also, from resentment to eventual admiration.
They are accompanied by the sailor Macalister and his son, who catches fish during the trip. The
son cuts a piece of flesh from a fish he has caught to use for bait, throwing the injured fish back
into the sea.
While they set sail for the lighthouse, Lily attempts to finally complete the painting she has held
in her mind since the start of the novel. She reconsiders her memory of Mrs. Ramsay. Upon
finishing the painting (just as the sailing party reaches the lighthouse) and seeing that it satisfies
her as it has given her a sense of completeness physically and mentally.
“It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down
her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.”

Critical Analysis:
The structure of To the Lighthouse presents strange continuity between drastically discontinuous
events. ‘The Window’ ends as the night falls. ‘Time Passes’ shows series of nights merging into
each other. And finally, ‘The Lighthouse’ opens with a day when the Ramsays are sailing
towards the lighthouse. It is as though their promise of visiting lighthouse is going to be fulfilled
the very next day but in reality, ten years have passed since that promise. The Lighthouse
insinuates the final destination or the milestone which the Ramsays were trying to reach for ten
years. As the section ends, the affairs come to an end and the plot resolves. James and Cam
develop a soft corner for their father and it might be a new start for the family. Lily finally
finishes her painting and her vision of Mrs. Ramsay’s character becomes more defined in her
consciousness as she broods about the deceased lady. Thus the pending and unresolved affairs
finally meet their cause.

Conclusion:
The section is about:
 Reaching the ultimate destination
 Creation of harmonious relationships
Thank You!