It is enough! It is enough!

Today we finish the first part of To the Lighthouse (called 'The Window'). Herewith some thoughts and observations...

Hello there!

How are you? I have passed a very enjoyable (fresh, gusty, sunny) day in the veggie patch and am now hurrying to get this post out to you, dear reader!

If you’ve just joined us, we are currently reading To the Lighthouse; all the relevant posts are here. If you’re following our reading schedule, we are due to finish the first part – ‘The Window’ – right about now. I do hope you’re travelling along well and if you’re finding it tricky or challenging, I hope there is something in this post that helps you on your way. But do feel free to ask questions in the comments below or in the group chat.

In this post:

1. A brief SUMMARY of ‘The Window’ (part 1 of To the Lighthouse)

2. Some THOUGHTS and OBSERVATIONS about ‘The Window’

3. A RESPONSE TO READER QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS which came in via the group chat.

4. Information on WHAT’S NEXT

1. A short summary of ‘The Window’

This is the story of the Ramsay family (mother, father and eight children: Andrew, Prue, Roger, Jasper, Nancy, Rose, Cam, and James), on holidays for the summer at a house in the Hebrides, accompanied by a few friends and associates (including Mr Tansley (‘the young philosopher’), Lily Briscoe (‘the unmarried artist’), Mr Bankes (a botanist and old friend of Mr Ramsay), Mr Carmichael (‘the older gentleman,’ a poet) and Minta Doyle and Paul Rayley (‘the young couple’).

‘The Window’ covers a single evening in September (pre-WWI) in which the threads of many characters interweave.

A moving tableau

Mrs Ramsay sits with her youngest son James in the drawing room window knitting and helping James cut out pictures from a magazine. Mr Ramsay walks up and down on the terrace outside with Mr Tansley (though Mr Tansley soon leaves to work on his dissertation). He (Mr Ramsay) stops by the window now and then to speak to Mrs Ramsay. Lily Briscoe is out on the lawn with her easel set up painting a picture, soon to be joined by Mr Bankes. Cam and Jasper are out and about – Cam streaking past, later picking flowers; Jasper shooting at starlings. Nancy and Andrew have gone for a walk with Minta and Paul.

Mrs Ramsay smooths over Mr Ramsay’s agitation

Soon Mr Ramsay becomes agitated about something. He snaps at Mrs Ramsay and wanders off through the garden spouting lines of poetry and passing Lily Briscoe and Mr Bankes. Lily and Mr Bankes take a walk out through the hedge to where they can access a view of the bay, and then return via the driveway.

After feeling out of sorts and being helped into a better frame of mind by his wife, Mr Ramsay takes a walk, accompanied by Mrs Ramsay, past the greenhouse and out through the gap in the hedge to look at the bay, the Lighthouse and the town in the distance. When they wander back, Prue and Jasper are throwing a ball to each other in the garden and Lily and Mr Bankes are nearby. Mrs Ramsay is troubled by the absence of Andrew, Nancy, Minta and Paul. They are still not back from their walk.

The assembled Ramsays and guests sit down to dinner

Cam and Jasper are put to bed by Mildred, and the adults and older Ramsay children sit down to dinner. This is the moment when the separate threads of the characters that have mostly appeared alone or in pairs, are woven together momentarily into a whole. The dinner is a climactic moment of communion. At first, things do not come together. Each thread remains separate. But slowly some alchemy takes place and something is created. Andrew, Nancy, Minta and Paul finally arrive. They were held up because Minta lost her grandmother’s brooch on the beach and they all stayed to look for it. It seems that at some point while they were away, Paul has proposed to Minta and Minta accepted him.

Mrs Ramsay comforts her younger children

After the meal, Mrs Ramsay goes to check on the younger children and finds them awake. There’s a pig’s skull nailed to the wall which frightens Cam but which James does not want touched. Mrs Ramsay covers up the skull with her shawl and comforts the children until they go to sleep. Emerging from the children’s room, she finds a group of the others about to go to the beach to watch the waves. Mrs Ramsay enthusiastically encourages them, though she herself retires to the room where Mr Ramsay is reading.

But what about the trip to the Lighthouse?

Throughout the evening there has been discussion about whether it will be fine enough the next day to go to the Lighthouse. James has been desperate to go but Mr Ramsay has been disparaging, saying that the weather is unlikely to permit the crossing by boat. Mr Tansley has irritatingly parroted Mr Ramsay while Mrs Ramsay has continued to say that it might be possible (to cheer James up). Finally, sitting with Mr Ramsay after dinner, Mrs Ramsay admits silently (though Mr Ramsay understands) that he was right; it will be wet the next day.

2. Some thoughts and observations about ‘The Window’

Tomorrow I’ll be sharing a conversation I recorded with

NANCY MILLER

about the dinner party scene – so you will hear more about that then. Today, I wanted to take a closer look at Mrs Ramsay, but first, a brief comment about the ordinariness of the scene just described…

Scenes of ordinary life

Reading over the summary above, one might be struck by how unremarkable the unfolding events are. Fiction writing has trained us to expect drama, a raising of the stakes at each moment. Directly we read about Mr and Mrs Ramsay we begin imagining what crisis might ensue. Perhaps their marriage is in trouble and something will imminently come to a head. Perhaps Lily and Mr Tansley’s cold war becomes a hot one. Perhaps the reason the young party has not come back is because one of their number has been seriously injured, has fallen off a cliff. Perhaps Mr Carmichael finally admits to Mrs Ramsay the foundations of his disapproval of her.

But no. Mr and Mrs Ramsay continue married; notwithstanding the buffeting winds of impatience and misunderstanding, they respect and love one another. Lily finally helps Mr Tansley enter the dinner conversation. The young party returns unharmed. Mr Carmichael enjoys a second bowl of soup.

There are two things I would like to say about this.

First, the subject-matter may seem ordinary, but the thoughts and emotions experienced by the characters are profound. They run the full gamut of human sensation; from trivial to weighty. Second, I’ve read that Woolf wished to bring the reader closer to everyday life, in all its confusion, mystery and uncertainty and, in so doing, reject the artificial structures and categories of Victorian fiction.¹ Woolf thought that fiction’s traditional focus on high drama might work to devalue daily experience.² In To the Lighthouse, there is an alleviation of those literary strictures (comedy, tragedy, romance etc) and an attempt to capture the richness of ordinary life.

A multi-focal portrait of Mrs Ramsay

In our introductory conversation two weeks ago, Nancy and I spoke about the painterly quality of the writing – Nancy said it was impressionistic and I said it was cubist! I think when Nancy mentioned Impressionism, she was describing the layering of details, thoughts and impressions out of which a character emerges in 3D. When I mentioned cubism, I suppose I was tuning into perspective and how we see each character from multiple viewpoints; all perspectives chiming at once. The resulting effect, in both cases is a certain density, multi-layered and multi-focal.

Let’s take the portrait of Mrs Ramsay and her reputed beauty as an example. We hear in chapter 1 and 8 that her cheek is sunk and her hair is grey. And yet…

A beauty stepping among cyclamen and wild violets (Mr Tansley)

In chapter 1, Mr Tansley realises Mrs Ramsay is the most beautiful person he had ever seen: ‘With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets—what nonsense was he thinking? She was fifty at least; she had eight children. Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen; with the stars in her eyes and wind in her hair…’ Rather high flown stuff!

A face composed by the Graces in meadows of asphodel (Mr Bankes)

In chapter 5, Mr Bankes is equally enamored: ‘He saw [Mrs Ramsay] at the end of the [telephone] line, Greek, blue-eyed, straight nosed. How incongruous it seemed to be telephoning a woman like that. The Graces assembling seemed to have joined hands in meadows of asphodel to compose that face.’

And he recognises something idiosyncratic to her loveliness: ‘For always, he thought, there was something incongruous to be worked into the harmony of her face. She clapped a deer-stalker’s hat on her head; she ran across the lawn in goloshes to snatch a child from mischief. So that if it was her beauty merely that one thought of, one must remember the quivering thing, the living thing […], and work it into the picture…’ In chapter 9, Lily Briscoe also alludes to that incongruous element at home in Mrs Ramsay’s beauty; Mrs Ramsay knocking on your bedroom door late at night wrapped in an old fur coat – for, as Lily observes, ‘the setting of her beauty was always that—hasty, but apt’.

No more aware of her beauty than a child (Mr Bankes)

Mrs Ramsay is, Mr Bankes believes, ‘no more aware of her beauty than a child.’ But this is perhaps not so. Mrs Ramsay appears to be aware of it – of its effect. In chapter 8: ‘She bore about with her, she could not help knowing it, the torch of her beauty; she carried it erect into any room that she entered; and after all, veil it she might, and shrink from the monotony of bearing that it imposed on her, her beauty was apparent. She had been admired. She had been loved.’

The sternness at the heart of his wife’s beauty (Mr Ramsay)

Mr Ramsay perceives his wife’s beauty in relation to himself. She is beautiful but inaccessible. In chapter 11, he observes a sternness at the heart of Mrs Ramsay’s beauty: ‘It saddened him, and her remoteness pained him, and he felt, as he passed, that he could not protect her, and when he reached the hedge, he was sad. He could do nothing to help her.’ Though soon he looks over at her and perceives her loveliness: ‘She was lovely, lovelier now than ever.’ And in chapter 19, under Mr Ramsay’s gaze, Mrs Ramsay feels herself admired: ‘She knew that he was thinking, You are more beautiful now than ever. And she felt herself very beautiful.’

An amorphous maternal beauty (James, Cam, Prue)

For the children, Mrs Ramsay beauty is subsumed in her role as mother. They do not see beauty so much as the bright sun of ‘mother’. James sees his mother as ‘ten thousand times better in every way’ than his father. And Prue, on the verge of womanhood, is a child again when she sees her mother after dinner on the stairs: ‘‘That’s my mother,’ thought Prue. Yes; Minta should look at her. Paul Rayley should look at her. That is the thing itself, she felt, as if there were only one person like that in the world; her mother.’

Mrs Ramsay, as described by an impersonal voice

At times it’s difficult to know who’s point of view we’re in, as the narrative voice switches constantly between characters. Now and then, we encounter an impersonal voice or a maybe even a Greek chorus. For who’s point of view are we in, in chapter 5, when the narrative voice asks: ‘But was it nothing but looks? people said. What was there behind it, her beauty, her splendour?’ We know only that this is the opinion of ‘people.’ But who is reporting on this generally held opinion and who then observes that Mrs Ramsay’s ‘simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified. Her singleness of mind made her drop plumb like a stone, alight exact as a bird, gave her, naturally, this swoop and fall of the spirit upon truth which delighted, eased, sustained—falsely perhaps.’

As with that first description of James (which I discussed in Today we begin!) this impersonal voice interweaves seamlessly with those of other characters.

An image emerges

To use Nancy’s analogy of the writing being impressionistic, the portrait of Mrs Ramsay is built up by many brushstrokes during this first part of the novel. Mr Tansley adds his stroke of the brush, then Mr Bankes, Mr Ramsay, Lily and others. Something coalesces on the canvas. Just like a painting of a waterlily which up close seems to comprise only crude daubs of paint but from a distance is vibrantly of a piece, Mrs Ramsay emerges as a single coherent presence through a layering of impressions, observations and opinions from the characters and from herself.

Is it a coincidence, then, that in this literary portrait, Mrs Ramsay often appears framed like a painting or in front of one. Most substantially, she is framed by the drawing room window, but in chapter 5 Mrs Ramsay’s head is also ‘outlined absurdly by the gilt frame, the green shawl which she had tossed over the edge of the frame, and the authenticated masterpiece by Michael Angelo’. And earlier, in chapter 1, Mr Tansley sees Mrs Ramsay pause motionless ‘against a picture of Queen Victoria wearing the blue ribbon of the Garter.’ And, if we are in any doubt of the painterly allusions, we have Lily out on the lawn with her easel set up.

In chapter 19, when Mr and Mrs Ramsay are alone together, Mrs Ramsay moves to the window: ‘partly to turn away from [Mr Ramsay], partly because she did not mind looking now, with him watching, at the Lighthouse. For she knew that he had turned his head as she turned; he was watching her.’ Is Mr Ramsay observing Mrs Ramsay like a painting, framed as she is by the window frame? But there are two things framed by the window at this moment: Mrs Ramsay (standing in front); and (behind; through the window) the Lighthouse.

A moment of creation, a moment of eternity

Mrs Ramsay’s ultimate act of creation is the dinner party where she presides over the creation of a moment of intimacy, something that will remain after everything else is gone. More about the dinner party in the podcast tomorrow!

3. A few responses to reader questions and comments

Earlier in the week I put up a message in our group chat, asking if anyone had any questions. I’ve included those questions below with my responses but would certainly value others’ thoughts on the matters raised!

The constantly changing point of view

I'm really interested in observing the constantly shifting narrative POV. It's tripped me up a few times trying to figure out whose thoughts we're following.

I have been having similar issues with the narratives shifting and as to who is actually narrating and so on.

Yes, the narrative point-of-view shifts constantly! I’ve mentioned this briefly above when talking about the impersonal narrative voice we sometimes encounter. In that chapter (chapter 5), we begin in Mrs Ramsay’s point of view as she measures the half-knitted stocking against James’s leg and observes the shabbiness of the room. Then the viewpoint zooms out slightly so that instead of being in Mrs Ramsay’s head we are observing her via that impersonal voice. Momentarily, we drop into Mr Bankes perspective though this is helpfully signposted by parentheses (signifying that we are also dropping momentarily into another time and place). In the final paragraph of that chapter, we continue to observe Mrs Ramsay from the outside, her head outlined by the gilt frame.

If you’re having trouble keeping track of who is narrating a various points, I suppose you could mark up your copy of the novel in spots that are ambiguous – highlighting when you think it’s Mrs Ramsay, Mr Ramsay, Lily and so on. However, I personally think that a better approach is to loosen your grip on the novel rather than tighten it. Allow your reading to be ambiguous at times – don’t fret if you lose the thread – and leave for later closer, technical approaches to reading and analysis. For the first read-through, be simple and easy and you may find that your brain tunes in after a while, in the same way that you can tune in to a heavy accent which, at first, is nearly incomprehensible.

But this is just what works for me: keep going; reread paragraphs as needed. And I think the advantage of reading at an ordinary pace without too much interruption is that you get a better sense of the lovely rhythm and texture of Woolf’s writing which is lost when you stop a lot and break things down. But if you’re reading for the second or third time, by all means stop a lot and break things down!

Still having trouble? Sometimes reading a chapter out loud can help. And you can of course listen to an audio book version. This was my entry point for Woolf and it helped enormously to hear the writing with its natural rhythms.

One more thing on the constantly changing point of view: notice the lovely effect – there is a lightness and agility to the narrative voice that tends to be stifled in other more conventional approaches to fiction which heavily signpost changes in point-of-view. Here, Woolf perfects a sort of symphonic multi-voiced narrative. The various characters do not announce themselves, they just intersperse their distinctive melodies into the whole.

Someone had blundered!

I know it’s in your podcast (which was excellent), but I’d love for you to cover again your interpretation of Mr Ramsay repeating “someone had blundered”. I understand the context in the poem, but am more curious about whether Mr R feels he has blundered and is trying to encourage himself to move forwards?

Yes, it’s possible! After all, his recitation of the ‘Someone had blundered’ line goes through modulations.³ At first, he is crying it out in a frenzied, alarming way. Mrs Ramsay observes that he is ‘outraged and anguished’. I interpreted this as the effect of someone else blundering and setting Mr Ramsay off balance. Perhaps it’s an innocuous remark similar to the one at the dinner party when someone says: ‘Ah, but how long do you think it’ll last?’ and Mrs Ramsay ‘scent[s] danger for her husband. A question like that would lead, almost certainly, to something being said which reminded him of his own failure. How long would he be read—he would think at once.’

But then (to return to the earlier ‘someone-had-blundered’ moment) Mr Ramsay’s mood changes. He snaps at Mrs Ramsay about the possibility of going to the Lighthouse the following day and is soon sheepish and apologetic. As he wanders away down the terrace in chapter 6, he repeats the line again, ‘Someone had blundered’…

But how extraordinarily his note had changed! It was like the cuckoo; ‘in June he gets out of tune’; as if he were trying over, tentatively seeking, some phrase for a new mood, and having only this at had, used it, cracked though it was. But it sounded ridiculous— ‘Someone had blundered’ —said like that, almost as a question, without any conviction, melodiously.

This moment directly precedes a long moment of introspection for Mr Ramsay when he considers the likelihood that he will never reach R! Perhaps he has been both the charging cavalry (boldly we rode and well!) and the blunderer. Perhaps he is using the fragment of poetry he has to hand and, though not quite matching his mood any longer, it offers a conduit for a new thought – perhaps it is I who have blundered… perhaps it is I who have failed.

Interested in others’ thoughts!

Depictions of sea and waves

[My] question [is] about the setting and how Woolf uses descriptions of the sea / waves to create a certain affect.

Such a great question! I don’t have much space here to get into detail. Somehow this post got quite long! But the thing that strikes me about representations of the sea, waves, ocean, sky and so on is that this seems, in Woolf’s mind, to be allied to time and mortality – that idea that the natural world is inherently inhuman and will outlast us all.

Mrs Ramsay, all too aware of ‘suffering, death, the poor,’ feels that life is ‘terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance.’ And at moments a consciousness of death and mortality intrudes – and those moments are often brought on by an awareness of the natural world. We first encounter the natural world’s ominous connotations in chapter 3 when Mrs Ramsay notices that the sounds of children playing cricket has ceased. She hears

the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, ‘I am guarding you—I am your support’, but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but 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—this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror.

Mrs Ramsay tries to arrest the effect of nature and time with her green shawl. In chapter 5 she uses her shawl to try to protect a picture frame which ‘in two weeks would be the colour of pea soup.’ And, more memorably, in chapter 18 she wraps the same shawl around the pigs skull, symbolically covering over death for her children.

Other characters have a similar association with the natural world. Lily looks at the bay and sand dunes in chapter 4 and feels come over her sadness ‘because distant views seem to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest.’ In chapter 6, Mr Ramsay observes that ‘[t]he very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.’ And in chapter 14, Nancy allows her eyes to rest on the wavering line of sea and sky until she becomes ‘hypnotised, and the two senses of that vastness and this tininess […] flowering within it made her feel that she was bound hand and foot and unable to move by the intensity of feelings which reduced her own body, her own life, and the lives of all the people in the world, for ever, to nothingness.’

The house that they are staying at is hemmed in by a hedge – a tamed, human-shaped form of nature – and characters pass often from the safe enclosure of the hedge out to see the bay. It acts as a bulwark between the human world of the family and the vast, inhuman landscape beyond.

In her essay, ‘On Being Ill’ written in 1925 (which I wrote about here), Woolf explored these ideas, though from a different angle – the experience of being ill. When sick, we lie down. Recumbent, we look up and observe a spectacle – the massive, fluctuating cinema of the sky – and see that it is divinely heartless. Nature is self-sufficient. It does not need humans. ‘It is only the recumbent who know what, after all, nature is at no pains to conceal – that she in the end will conquer.’⁴

Woolf’s use of punctuation

I’m curious about Woolf’s use of punctuation and if you have any thoughts on that! I loved how the chapter 14 was in parenthesis for example.

Oh yes, I love that chapter as well. The parentheses there seem to signify that we are glimpsing a point of view occurring some distance away from the main action (and even a little out of step, time-wise, with the story – chapter 14 ends with the party of four making it back to the house yet the next chapters show Mrs Ramsay still worrying about their whereabouts and the dinner party commencing without them.

Another bit in parentheses is mentioned above – it’s the moment when we have a glimpse of Mr Bankes speaking with Mrs Ramsay on the telephone and making arrangements to take a train. Again, the parentheses appear to indict a scene from a different time or place that is here sewn into the narration. I suppose the use of brackets also gives a feeling of the action taking place offstage somewhere. In the wings.

Soon we will have a very interesting usage of square brackets in the Time Passes sequence. More on that soon! And there is also probably much to say on Woolf’s use of semi-colons. I will think on it!

A bit more on Mrs Ramsay please!

We've had a detailed think through on Mr Ramsay but some thoughts on Mrs R? How others see her and how she sees herself.

Well, I’ve included some observations about Mrs Ramsay above, but feel like I’ve hardly scratched the surface. As mentioned previously, I will, tomorrow, be uploading another conversation I recorded with Nancy about the dinner party scene, which of course involves some discussion of Mrs Ramsay.

And do add further thoughts below on Mrs Ramsay if you like! There is so much to dig into (Lily Briscoe also has some fascinating observations to make about Mrs Ramsay – see particularly chapter 9). For now, let me leave you with that lovely moment in chapter 11: after earlier thinking ‘it will end, it will end,’ Mrs Ramsay has a momentary strong awareness of her own fortune and happiness – she has known exquisite happiness, she thinks – and ‘waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!’

4. What’s next

TOMORROW, I will upload another conversation I recorded with Nancy about the dinner party scene.

And, if you’re reading with us, please aim to have finished ‘Time Passes’ (the second of three parts) by this time NEXT WEEK.

Phew! Did you make it to the end! Jolly well done! It is enough! It is enough! Until very soon!

1. Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, Harcourt, 2005, p 130.

2. Briggs, pp 130-2.

3. We mention it in the podcast, but in case it’s not clear, this line comes from the poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ by Tennyson.

4. Virginia Woolf, ‘On Being Ill,’ in The New Criterion, January 1926, p 39.