The Title

In this text 'To the Lighthouse', the title is itself suggestive. The title 'Lighthouse' itself symbolizes
the deep wish of Virginia Woolf to reach at the destination. the destination for Virginia Woolf is to
reach in the heart of the readers. And to reach her 'inner voice' till the heart and mind of the readers.
With multiple meanings, the lighthouse represents what the main characters find inaccessible at
first, but later accessible, or "enlightening." Lily finishes her painting, and James and Cam Ramsay
reach a connection with their father.
Lighthouse It stands alone and tall in both light and darkness and it, along with its beacon, is a focal
point which Symbolizes strength, guidance and safe harbor; it is Spiritual hermit guiding all those
who are traveling by sea.
Each character has different meaning of the lighthouse.
If we see the lighthouse from the perspective of Mr. Ramsay, he sees the lighthouse as source of
stability and comfort. It stands as strong feelings of ownership.
To Mrs. Ramsay, the predictability of the lighthouse is most important, implying that truth lies in
the cycles that govern life.
For Lily Briscoe, the lighthouse becomes a sort of fixation during her final artistic vision – she is
watching Mr. Ramsay’s boat reached at the lighthouse as she approaches the solution of how to
finish her painting. As the lighthouse is difficult to understand just like that Lily Briscoe finding
problem to complete the picture of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay.

"He must have reached it," said Lily Briscoe aloud, feeling suddenly completely tired out. For the
Lighthouse had become almost invisible, had melted away into a blue haze, and the effort of
looking at it and the effort of thinking of him landing there, which both seemed to be one and the
same effort, had stretched her body and mind to the utmost.

And with this she is finally relieved, and her painting is finished. As the lighthouse disappear and
Lily got some Idea to finish her picture. Thus, this suggest that the lighthouse is also inspirable to
her and she got her vision.
For, James the lighthouse is also symbolized strongest feelings. At the beginning of the novel, it
was ambition of James to go the lighthouse, at the end of the novel they reached at the lighthouse.
Sees that:

 " The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye, that opened suddenly,
and softly in the evening.’’

James arrives only to realize that it is not at all the mist-shrouded destination of his childhood.
Instead, he is made to reconcile two competing and contradictory images of the tower-how it
appeared to him when he was a boy and how it appears to him when he is a man. He decided that
both of these images contribute to the essence of the lighthouse.
And at the end of novel, Mr. Ramsay admires the effort of James. And their relation becomes
stronger. Thus the lighthouse is symbol of goodness. The lighthouse surrounded by sea always
describes and clarifies the human condition in some way.
The lighthouse is stand alone on a rock with the huge construction. At night it stands alone and the
tip of lighthouse there is a ray of light. That light symbolized the ray of goodness, that light gives
direction of sea voyages. the lighthouse is symbolized and it gives glimpses of that it is source of
inspiration. it is symbolized like truth triumph over darkness.

Let’s see that how different critic has explained this symbol in a different ways…
For example
Russel declares that the lighthouse is the feminine creative principle.
Jon Bennett calls the alternate light and shadows of the lighthouse the rhythm of joy and sorrow,
understanding and misunderstanding.

Water surrounding the Lighthouse

Metaphorically, as the element of Water represents the emotions, the Lighthouse is a Symbol for
the Spiritual Strength and Emotional Guidance which is available to us during the times we feel we
are being helplessly tossed around in a sea of inner turmoil.
Lily Briscoe’s Painting
• Symbolizes woman’s struggle in patriarchal society.
• Against gender convention: “Women can’t paint or write”.
• Desire to express (repressed) critique of Mrs. Ramsay’s essence (as an ideal wife and mother) in
the painting.

Lily Briscoe paints a scene that includes Mrs. Ramsay reading to James in the drawing room. She
ponders Mrs. Ramsay's character, who is "like a bird for speed, an arrow for directness,’’
commanding presence opening windows and shutting doors. She doesnot attempts to draw a
likeness but rather another sense of "mother and child," she depicts Mrs. Ramsay as a purple
triangular shadow. Later Mrs. Ramsay in "The Window," Chapter 11, describes herself as a "wedge
of darkness," which resembles a purple triangular shadow. Hence that purple triangular shadow is
actually symbolic for the character of mrs ramsway that she is just like a darkness whose approach
is inaccessible for others like she is being invisible.

Painting represents understanding and catharsis.

 Lily navigates the issue of balance in the painting. Working on the composition, she achieves
a certain understanding by moving the tree (symbolizing love, life, and connection, which for
Lily show themselves in Mrs. Ramsay) to a more prominent position to reflect the Mrs.
Ramsay's essence and importance.
 The act of painting represents catharsis for Lily. At the beginning of the novel, she is anxious
about showing the painting to others. Introverted and sensitive, she is unsure about her
abilities and intimidated by Charles Tansley's derogatory comments about women's
inabilities as artists. Although she continues painting, Lily cannot achieve complete catharsis.
For her, its inaccessible, until she fully understands her feelings about Mrs. Ramsay.
 When Lily finally allows herself sufficient distance, she is able to finish the new painting
with a simple line down the center, achieving the complete sense of balance she has sought,
and she can accept herself as an artist. If she achieves understanding in "The Window," she
achieves catharsis in "The Lighthouse," as she finishes the painting at the same time as Mrs.
Ramsay's husband and children reach the lighthouse.
Ramsay’s Summer House
• The physical condition of the house represents psychological condition of the characters.
• During her dinner party, Mrs. Ramsay sees her house display her own inner notions of shabbiness
and her inability to preserve beauty.
• In the “Time Passes” section, the ravages of war and destruction and the passage of time are
reflected in the condition of the house rather than in the emotional development or observable aging
of the characters.
Ramsay’s summer house is also one of the important symbols of the novel. This is a crucial
symbol to understand. This is the place where all deed happens. Ramsay’s House is a place where
Woolf and her characters explain their belief and observation. During her dinner party, Mrs.
Ramsay’s sees her house display her own inner notions of shabbiness and her inability to preserve
beauty.     
 The way nature is portrayed as an intruder, invading the house, causing its eventual decay,
symbolizes the impermanence of man and his constructions - the question is explicitly posed, "Did
Nature supplement what man advanced?" (201). The fact that the house is the primary image
through which the effects of time are conveyed, even though time has profound effect on the
Ramsay's. Mrs. Ramsay, Prue, and Andrew all die which proves that only Nature can persists.
In the “Time Passes” section, the ravages of war and destruction and the passage of time are
reflected in the condition of the house rather than in the emotional development or observable aging
of the characters. The house stands in for the collective consciousness of those who stay in it. At
times the characters long to escape it, while at other times it serves as refuge. From the dinner party
to the journey to the lighthouse, Woolf shows the house from every angle, and its structure and
contents reflects the interior of the characters that inhabit it.

‘’Nothing stirred in the drawing-room or in the dining-room or on the staircase. Only through the
rusty hinges and swollen sea-moistened woodwork certain airs, detached from the body of the wind
crept round corners and ventured indoors.’’

The Sea
The symbol of Sea appears throughout the novel. The Sea shows the instability of time and
life. The water of sea is symbolic one. It symbolizes the flow of time.
To Mrs. Ramsay at one moment the sound of waves sounds soothing and consoling like a
cradlesong, at others, “like a ghostly roll of drums
remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction
of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had
slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as
a rainbow’’.
Woolf describes the sea lovingly and beautifully, but her most evocative depictions of it
point to its violence. As a force that brings destruction, has the power to destroy the islands, and, as
Mr. Ramsay reflects, “Eats away the ground we stand on,” so the sea is a powerful reminder of the
impermanence and delicacy of human life and accomplishments.
Sometime Sea is beautiful but it may also be dangerous and also can become violent to destroy
everything.

The Storms
• Storms consist of both wind (air) and rain (water). as air is the element representing the mind, and
water is the element representing the emotions, storms symbolize agitated thoughts and emotions.
Metaphorically, storms are our Inner Demons which torment both our mind and our Subconscious.
The rock, reefs and shallow water
The rocks, reefs and shallow waters symbolize the final dangers and miseries which seem to
accompany the end of any turbulent voyage. Just as the saying, "its always darkest before the
dawn", things always seem the most dangerous and hopeless as we reach the end of an emotional
turmoil. This is the point when we feel like tossing up our hands and giving up. These symbols are
showing certainty of life. The rock show the life is too hard to life. It gives suffer, as Mrs. Ramsays
survived her life.
‘’They had tacked, and they were sailing swiftly, buoyantly on long rocking waves which handed
them on from one to another with an extraordinary lilt and exhilaration beside the reef.’’

The Boar’s Skull

• The presence of the skull acts as a disturbing reminder that death is always at hand, even during
life’s most blissful moments.
• Symbolizes transient nature of art and life.
• Mrs. Ramsay’s covering it with her shawl represents her desire to preserve life, or that of Mr.
Ramsay & Lily to be immortal through work/art.
It symbolically presents Mrs. Ramsay’s understanding nature and enduring power to suffer for
others – as she wraps it with her shawl.This is one of the important and mysterious symbols of the
novel. It shows the reality and universal truth. It leads toward right way of life. That death is
ultimate reality.  
            After the completing of dinner party, Children went upstairs for plating some games. Then
Mrs. Ramsay went upstairs to find the children wide-awake, bothered by the boar’s skull that hangs
on the nursery wall. The presence of that skull is something unpleasant and disturbing. This skull
reminder us that death is always at hand. Even during life’s blissful moments. It explains that if we
are so happy in any time, we should keep in mind that we have to die at some moment of life. We
have to leave all things here. This symbol shows ultimate reality of this cruel life that we can die
any time.

"Well then," said Mrs. Ramsay, "we will cover it up," and they all watched her go to the chest of
drawers, and open the little drawers quickly one after another, and not seeing anything that would
do…’.

Rose’s arrangement of the grapes and pears

• Rose arranges a fruit basket for her mother’s dinner party that serves to draw the partygoers out of
their private suffering and unite them. • The basket testifies both to the “frozen” quality of beauty
that Lily describes and to beauty’s seductive and soothing quality. • The absence of fruit basket in
3rd part, signifies the transitory nature of beauty, art and truth.

Refrigerator
Refrigerator in Army and Navy Stores catalogue • On the one hand it is a tool for conserving food,
and as such a symbol of preservation. Refrigerators slow down and stave off decay. • Against that,
the refrigerator is also a symbol of change, of technology changing and presumably improving
human culture. The refrigerator is an instrument of science, and it occupies the same sphere as the
lighthouse.
Symbolically it is associated with her, and with her role as a preserver and shaper of culture. For
example, Mrs. Ramsay is repeatedly shown as someone who is training and shaping her children’s
minds, and her approach to her daughters differs from her approach to her sons. She wants her
daughters and the women around her to support and sustain men, while she wants the men to be a
success in the public sphere.

Fisherman and his Wife

• the parallel between the fisherman’s wife and Mrs. Ramsay. Both make unreasonable demands
upon their husband. The wife keeps asking her husband to return to the sea and request more and
more from the flounder fish.
She has much more in common with the empathetic and reasonable fisherman than with his wife.
On the other hand, Mr. Ramsay and Charles Tansley, despite the truth of their assertions, are as
uncompromising and as unreasonable as the fisherman’s wife.

the casual cruelty shown towards the fish can easily be interpreted as a comment upon male
violence– thoughtless male violence engendered by lack of empathy. The fairytale is subverted and
instead of the dangers of female willfulness and desire we are faced with the dangers and horrors of
male willfulness and desire.
By having Mrs. Ramsay tell such a misogynistic tale Virginia is also indicting Mrs. Ramsay.
Virginia is criticizing and attacking the way in which women are complicit in limiting their ability
to fully realize themselves. Woolf, in her characteristic defiance of such images, takes the
demanding wife and unfortunate fisherman figures and superimposes them over characters of the
opposite sex in the novel. In his constant demand of publicly appropriated praise, Mr. Ramsay
bullies his wife and children with his intellectual neediness, thus finding a parallel role with that of
the overbearing fisherman’s wife. As the painter Lily Briscoe recalls angrily after Mrs. Ramsay’s
death.
“That man, she thought, her anger rising in her, never gave; that man took. She, on the other hand,
would be forced to give. Mrs. Ramsay had given. Giving, giving, giving, she had died--and had left
all this.”

Tree
While the pear tree receives the most attention in the novel, it is noteworthy that the summer house
is surrounded by trees. Representing love, life, and connection, trees protect the home and those in
it, as does Mrs. Ramsay.

In "The Window," Chapter 4, Lily Briscoe and William Bankes pause by the pear tree, discussing
Mr. Ramsay's stalled career, a discussion showing the intimacy of their deep friendship.
When Lily changes the composition of her painting by moving the tree closer to the center, she
affirms the tree's importance as a representation of the inner spirit of Mrs. Ramsay, which Lily is
trying to capture: the love, life, and connection that make her a nurturing, protecting, and stabilizing
force in others' lives.

The Window
The Window, a view to oneself: It is from the window that we have the little of the part-I of To
the Lighthouse. It is not a transparent but a separating sheet of glass between reality and Mrs.
Ramsay’s mind. Mrs. Ramsay experiences such moments of revelation and integration at watching
the window.
Mrs. Ramsay
Mrs. Caroline Ramsay stands as guiding star and harbours emotional safety to other family/guest
members visiting Summer House. She is the spiritual bridge between other humans in the novel.
The character of Mrs. Ramsay is the symbol of the so called ideal image of the women. Which,
society want to see in the Virginia Woolf and Lily Briscoe is the inner and real voice of the writer
Virginia Woolf.
She symbolizes the light of carefulness which illuminates everybody else. In another way,
lighthouse symbolizes the lonliness in Mrs. Ramsay heart. The lighthouse is towering alone in the
sea forever and Mrs. Ramsay lives in the crowd alone. Though she cares about her family and
friends busily everyday, her heart is lonely. She has never opened the heart widely to people around
her not even her husband and she is lonely and arrogant lighthouse herself.