To the Lighthouse 1175narrated in the first section). Gradually, memories
of that day come back, like flashes in her mind, and
this stimulates Lily to work again on the painting
she had started on that day. Nevertheless, the act of
remembering is so painful and the sadness so dif-
ficult to overcome that she has to engage in a long
grieving process before letting the inspiration flow
again. The difficulty that Lily experiences in work-
ing is shown both by her will to fix, in the painting,
an image she feels is no longer existent, and by the
consequent feeling of aimlessness, which leads her
to think how useless it is to create something when
everything is destined to disappear, anyway. It is this
same feeling, though, that makes her slowly realize
how the work of art carries the potential to be eter-
nal and to preserve, as Mrs. Ramsay wished to, the
beauty of the moment forever. Once she has over-
come the sense that her panting would be useless (“it
would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be
destroyed. But what did that matter?”), Lily plunges
into the act of creation and eventually finishes her
picture, which recreates the pain and emptiness of
loss but at the same time also challenges death with
the ability to strike a timeless moment into stability.
Teresa Prudente
Gender in To the Lighthouse
The contrast and confrontation between feminine
and masculine perceptions and between points of
view and attitudes is one of the most important
themes in To the Lighthouse, deriving from Virginia
Woolf ’s constant examination of the issue of gender.
Female and male characters in this novel possess dif-
ferent and often contrasting traits. This contrast is
revealed in the first part of the work in the complex
relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, while in
the third part the focus shifts to the confrontation
between Mr. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe.
Initially, the traditional division between man’s
“abstract” attitude and woman’s “sensitive” approach
to reality seems to be confirmed by Woolf ’s char-
acterizations. Mr. Ramsay is in effect portrayed as
“different from other people, born blind, deaf, and
dumb, to the ordinary things, but to the extraor-
dinary things, with an eye like an eagle’s,” while
Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe prove extraordinarily
sensitive to the details of ordinary experience, which
they endow with an extra significance. Nevertheless,
this conventional approach is soon reversed, show-
ing how Mr. Ramsay’s abstract attitude proves to
limit his intellectual work as well as his understand-
ing of human beings (“he sees the world as an illus-
tration”), and how, in parallel, the sensitive feminine
approach is not so much an emotional reaction as
an important process of knowledge that brings the
subject to understand the meanings behind ordinary
experience—“to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a
table, and yet at the same time, it’s a miracle, it’s an
ecstasy.”
Because of these substantial differences in per-
ception and thought, communication between men
and women is portrayed in To the Lighthouse as dif-
ficult and often susceptible to misunderstanding.
Nevertheless, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay also share a tacit
understanding, which allows them to communicate
without words, as happens in the scene at the end of
section 1, and are taken for this by the solitary Lily
as “the symbols of marriage” embodying a perfectly
balanced union.
The figure of the female artist plays a funda-
mental role in defining the issue of gender in this
novel. In the third part of the novel, Lily faces sev-
eral conceptual problems, starting from her attempt
to convey with her painting the atmosphere in the
house in Skye, now lost after the death of her friend.
In section 3, Lily’s artistic inspiration proceeds in
parallel to the reemergence in her of memories of
Mrs. Ramsay, and in this sense she is compelled to
detail her friend’s personality. This implies Lily’s
understanding of both Mrs. Ramsay’s solitary atti-
tude and her symbiotic life with her husband. In this
sense, both Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe are shown
as female subjects who try to escape the limitations
imposed on them by male culture; on the other
hand, the confrontation and dialogue between the
two genders is portrayed as essential and comple-
mentary to the definition of the self.
Similar to Mrs. Ramsay, who feels the pressure
of her domestic and social role, Lily is inhibited
by Mr. Ramsay’s tacit judgment of her capacities,
which amplifies her lack of confidence: “Every time
he approached—he was walking up and down the
terrace—ruin approached, chaos approached. She
could not paint.” It is nevertheless this challenge