Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary
work.

THE TRANSIENCE OF LIFE AND WORK

Mr. Ramsay and Mrs. Ramsay take completely different approaches to life:
he relies on his intellect, while she depends on her emotions. But they share
the knowledge that the world around them is transient—that nothing lasts
forever. Mr. Ramsay reflects that even the most enduring of reputations,
such as Shakespeare’s, are doomed to eventual oblivion. This realization
accounts for the bitter aspect of his character. Frustrated by the inevitable
demise of his own body of work and envious of the few geniuses who will
outlast him, he plots to found a school of philosophy that argues that the
world is designed for the average, unadorned man, for the “liftman in the
Tube” rather than for the rare immortal writer.
Mrs. Ramsay is as keenly aware as her husband of the passage of time and
of mortality. She recoils, for instance, at the notion of James growing into an
adult, registers the world’s many dangers, and knows that no one, not even
her husband, can protect her from them. Her reaction to this knowledge is
markedly different from her husband’s. Whereas Mr. Ramsay is bowed by
the weight of his own demise, Mrs. Ramsay is fueled with the need to make
precious and memorable whatever time she has on earth. Such crafted
moments, she reflects, offer the only hope of something that endures.

ART AS A MEANS OF PRESERVATION

In the face of an existence that is inherently without order or meaning, Mr.

and Mrs. Ramsay employ different strategies for making their lives
significant. Mr. Ramsay devotes himself to his progression through the
course of human thought, while Mrs. Ramsay cultivates memorable
experiences from social interactions. Neither of these strategies, however,
proves an adequate means of preserving one’s experience. After all, Mr.
Ramsay fails to obtain the philosophical understanding he so desperately
desires, and Mrs. -Ramsay’s life, though filled with moments that have the
shine and resilience of rubies, ends. Only Lily Briscoe finds a way to
preserve her experience, and that way is through her art. As Lily begins her
portrait of Mrs. Ramsay at the beginning of the novel, Woolf notes the scope
of the project: Lily means to order and connect elements that have no
necessary relation in the world—“hedges and houses and mothers and
children.” By the end of the novel, ten years later, Lily finishes the painting
she started, which stands as a moment of clarity wrested from confusion.
Art is, perhaps, the only hope of surety in a world destined and determined
to change: for, while mourning Mrs. Ramsay’s death and painting on the
lawn, Lily reflects that “nothing stays, all changes; but not words, not
paint.”

THE SUBJECTIVE NATURE OF REALITY

Toward the end of the novel, Lily reflects that in order to see Mrs. Ramsay
clearly—to understand her character completely—she would need at least
fifty pairs of eyes; only then would she be privy to every possible angle and
nuance. The truth, according to this assertion, rests in the accumulation of
different, even opposing vantage points. Woolf’s technique in structuring
the story mirrors Lily’s assertion. She is committed to creating a sense of
the world that not only depends upon the private perceptions of her
characters but is also nothing more than the accumulation of those
perceptions. To try to reimagine the story as told from a single character’s
perspective or—in the tradition of the Victorian novelists—from the author’s
perspective is to realize the radical scope and difficulty of Woolf’s project.
THE RESTORATIVE EFFECTS OF BEAUTY

At the beginning of the novel, both Mr. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe are drawn
out of moments of irritation by an image of extreme beauty. The image, in
both cases, is a vision of Mrs. Ramsay, who, as she sits reading with James,
is a sight powerful enough to incite “rapture” in William Bankes. Beauty
retains this soothing effect throughout the novel: something as trifling as a
large but very beautiful arrangement of fruit can, for a moment, assuage
the discomfort of the guests at Mrs. Ramsay’s dinner party.

Lily later complicates the notion of beauty as restorative by suggesting that

beauty has the unfortunate consequence of simplifying the truth. Her
impression of Mrs. Ramsay, she believes, is compromised by a
determination to view her as beautiful and to smooth over her complexities
and faults. Nevertheless, Lily continues on her quest to “still” or “freeze” a
moment from life and make it beautiful. Although the vision of an isolated
moment is necessarily incomplete, it is lasting and, as such, endlessly
seductive to her.

Motifs

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help
to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

THE DIFFERING BEHAVIORS OF MEN AND WOMEN

As Lily Briscoe suffers through Charles Tansley’s boorish opinions about

women and art, she reflects that human relations are worst between men
and women. Indeed, given the extremely opposite ways in which men and
women behave throughout the novel, this difficulty is no wonder. The
dynamic between the sexes is best understood by considering the behavior
of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. Their constant conflict has less to do with
divergent philosophies—indeed, they both acknowledge and are motivated
by the same fear of mortality—than with the way they process that fear.
Men, Mrs. Ramsay reflects in the opening pages of the novel, bow to it.
Given her rather traditional notions of gender roles, she excuses her
husband’s behavior as inevitable, asking how men can be expected to settle
the political and economic business of nations and not suffer doubts. This
understanding attitude places on women the responsibility for soothing
men’s damaged egos and achieving some kind of harmony (even if
temporary) with them. Lily Briscoe, who as a -single woman represents a
social order more radial and lenient than Mrs. Ramsay’s, resists this duty
but ultimately caves in to it.

BRACKETS

In “Time Passes,” brackets surround the few sentences recounting the

deaths of Prue and Andrew Ramsay, while in “The Lighthouse,” brackets
surround the sentences comprising Chapter VI. Each set of sentences in
brackets in the earlier section contains violence, death, and the destruction
of potential; the short, stabbing accounts accentuate the brutality of these
events. But in Chapter VI of “The Lighthouse,” the purpose of the brackets
changes from indicating violence and death to violence and potential
survival. Whereas in “Time Passes,” the brackets surround Prue’s death in
childbirth and Andrew’s perishing in war, in “The Lighthouse” they
surround the “mutilated” but “alive still” body of a fish.

Symbols

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent

abstract ideas or concepts.

THE LIGHTHOUSE
Lying across the bay and meaning something different and intimately
personal to each character, the lighthouse is at once inaccessible,
illuminating, and infinitely interpretable. As the destination from which the
novel takes its title, the lighthouse suggests that the destinations that seem
surest are most unobtainable. Just as Mr. Ramsay is certain of his wife’s
love for him and aims to hear her speak words to that end in “The Window,”
Mrs. Ramsay finds these words impossible to say. These failed attempts to
arrive at some sort of solid ground, like Lily’s first try at painting Mrs.
Ramsay or Mrs. Ramsay’s attempt to see Paul and Minta married, result
only in more attempts, further excursions rather than rest. The lighthouse
stands as a potent symbol of this lack of attainability. 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 now that he is a man. He decides that both of these images contribute
to the essence of the lighthouse—that nothing is ever only one thing—a
sentiment that echoes the novel’s determination to arrive at truth through
varied and contradictory vantage points.

LILY’S PAINTING

Lily’s painting represents a struggle against gender convention,

represented by Charles Tansley’s statement that women can’t paint or
write. Lily’s desire to express Mrs. Ramsay’s essence as a wife and mother
in the painting mimics the impulse among modern women to know and
understand intimately the gendered experiences of the women who came
before them. Lily’s composition attempts to discover and comprehend Mrs.
Ramsay’s beauty just as Woolf’s construction of Mrs. Ramsay’s character
reflects her attempts to access and portray her own mother.

The painting also represents dedication to a feminine artistic vision,

expressed through Lily’s anxiety over showing it to William Bankes. In
deciding that completing the painting regardless of what happens to it is
the most important thing, Lily makes the choice to establish her own artistic
voice. In the end, she decides that her vision depends on balance and
synthesis: how to bring together disparate things in harmony. In this
respect, her project mirrors Woolf’s writing, which synthesizes the
perceptions of her many characters to come to a balanced and truthful
portrait of the world.

THE RAMSAYS’ HOUSE

The Ramsays’ house is a stage where Woolf and her characters explain their
beliefs and observations. 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. 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
mirror the interior of the characters who inhabit it.

THE SEA

References to the sea appear throughout the novel. Broadly, the ever-
changing, ever-moving waves parallel the constant forward movement of
time and the changes it brings. 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 decimate islands, and, as
Mr. Ramsay reflects, “eats away the ground we stand on,” the sea is a
powerful reminder of the impermanence and delicacy of human life and
accomplishments.
THE BOAR’S SKULL

After her dinner party, Mrs. Ramsay retires upstairs to find the children
wide-awake, bothered by the boar’s skull that hangs on the nursery wall.
The presence of the skull acts as a disturbing reminder that death is always
at hand, even (or perhaps especially) during life’s most blissful moments.

THE FRUIT BASKET

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. Although
Augustus Carmichael and Mrs. Ramsay appreciate the arrangement
differently—he rips a bloom from it; she refuses to disturb it—the pair is
brought harmoniously, if briefly, together. The basket testifies both to the
“frozen” quality of beauty that Lily describes and to beauty’s seductive and
soothing quality.