To the Lighthouse Plot Analysis

Most good stories start with a fundamental list of ingredients: the initial situation,
conflict, complication, climax, suspense, denouement, and conclusion. Great writers
sometimes shake up the recipe and add some spice.
Admittedly, it's kind of tough to talk about To the Lighthouse in terms of plot trajectory because,
while time does certainly move in the novel, "plot" would seem to suggest that there's some sort
of definite goal to the narrative. And yet, really, the book seems like it might be more of a three-
part portrait than a real beginning-middle-end kind of story. Still, there are two characters who do
have something approaching plot: Lily Briscoe and James Ramsay. Both are actively striving for
something, so we're going to organize our plot analysis to see what they actually get.
Initial Situation
Both James Ramsay and Lily Briscoe are trying to find places for
themselves within the society of the Ramsay family.
At the start of Part One ("The Window"), James Ramsay is six, Lily Briscoe, thirty-four. James is
the baby of the Ramsay family and much-beloved by his mother, but he feels fiercely competitive
with his father, who occupies a place in Mrs. Ramsay's life that James cannot hope to occupy.
Lily Briscoe, on the other hand, is an impoverished friend of the Ramsay family whose uncertain
social place is due to the fact that she's thirty-four, unmarried, and not very conventionally
attractive. Not a good situation for a woman in the 1920s to be in. But she has a strong, mutually
affectionate relationship with Mrs. Ramsay that sustains her throughout her stay with the Ramsay
family on the Isle of Skye.
Conflict
James wants to go to the Lighthouse, though his father says that the
weather won't be good enough to go. Lily Briscoe wants to paint,
though Charles Tansley has told her to her face that women can't
write or paint.
James's desire to go to the Lighthouse and his father's (and Charles Tansley's) insistence
on refusing is the main conflict through which James's difficult relationship with his oppressive
father gets represented. Mr. Ramsay wants all of his children to behave on his terms and to strive
according to his orders. James's rebelliousness shows that the main conflict of James's life is
going to be with his father and his father's power over James's life.

Lily Briscoe, like James, is sadly squelched by a man with more status than she has Charles
Tansley. She wants to paint, but to do so seems to be a threat to the masculine system of
intellectual hierarchy that both Mr. Ramsay and Charles Tansley rely upon. Lily's trying to find a
way, as a woman, to pursue her own artistic development freely, but she's meeting lots of
obstacles along the way because of her gender and relatively low social status.
Complication
Both James and Lily rely on Mrs. Ramsay as a kind of alternative
model of power to Mr. Ramsay's bullying tyranny. But Mrs. Ramsay
throws them each a curveball by not really supporting either James's
trip to the lighthouse or Lily Briscoe's painting.
The beautiful, charming, perhaps secretly frustrated Mrs. Ramsay seems at first like one possible
alternative to the oppressive Mr. Ramsay. But 1) Mr. Ramsay turns out not to be all that bad, with
his massive secret insecurity, and 2) Mrs. Ramsay turns out not to be all that great. We mean,
she's still lovely and sympathetic, but she knows that James isn't going to get to the Lighthouse.
And she regrets the fact that she disguised the truth from him ("She felt angry with Charles
Tansley, with her husband, and with herself, for she had raised his hopes" [1.18.8]), but she still
lied to him in the name of preserving his feelings.

In the end, while she's angry at Mr. Ramsay for oppressing James, Mrs. Ramsay does nothing to
change his behavior. In fact, Mrs. Ramsay actively wishes that James would stay a child forever
(1.10.10) because she loves him as a child. This works directly against James's desire to grow
and replace his father. Similarly, Lily Briscoe is fully aware that Mrs. Ramsay is willing to care for
Lily but only on her own terms. She's not willing to go out on a limb for Lily's painting ("one
could not take [Lily's] painting seriously" (1.3.7), thinks Mrs. Ramsay). And she still believes that
Lily must marry William Bankes. Lily feels Mrs. Ramsay's pressure on her to be married and
resents it, despite her affection for Mrs. Ramsay as a person.
Climax
World War I strikes and the Ramsay family suffers a series of losses
that change the shape of both the house on the Isle of Skye and of
the family itself.
In the midst of James Ramsay's efforts to get to the Lighthouse and Lily Briscoe's efforts to get
recognition for her artwork, To the Lighthouse draws its focus away from the people of the novel.
The second part of the novel experiments with the passage of time through focusing on the
shifting, decaying form of the semi-abandoned house on the Isle of Skye, with limited
interruptions for the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay, Prue Ramsay (she falls ill in childbirth), and Andrew
Ramsay (he is killed in France by a mine during World War I).

These deaths must leave the structure of the Ramsay family forever changed (as, not to get too
melodramatic, the intrusion of World War I left England forever changed see how Virginia Woolf
gets at massive movements of history through the lens of the everyday? Good stuff!). So this
section of the novel provides a kind of climax for James and Lily: they're left in suspension (as are
we, the readers), waiting to see what's going to happen to them now that Mr. Ramsay has lost the
soothing, socializing influence of his wife. They were trying to find places for themselves in the
Ramsay family as it was in the first section; now, they must work out what space there is for them
in the Ramsay family as it will bein the last section.
Suspense
It's the beginning of Part Three, and ten years have passed. What are
James and Lily going to do now that Mrs. Ramsay, who gave both of
them a place in the Ramsay family, has died? What are they now
going to work towards?
The third part begins with Lily Briscoe asking, "What does it mean then, what can it all mean?"
(3.1.1), and boy, we're right along with her. What does all of this mean? That's where the
suspense comes in: we're waiting to see if there's going to be any purpose or conclusion given to
the James Ramsay and Lily Briscoe story lines now that Mrs. Ramsay has died.

And we find out almost immediately that there is going to be some kind of continuation with the
plot lines of Part One. James is finally getting his expedition to the Lighthouse, but this time, it's
on his father's terms and he's being forced to go with his sister Cam. As for Lily Briscoe, she still
feels the oppressive force of Mr. Ramsay that interfered with her painting so many years ago.
And she, like James, is picking up where she left off:

She must escape somewhere, be alone somewhere. Suddenly [Lily] remembered [...] There had
been a problem about a foreground of a picture. Move the tree to the middle, she had said. She
had never finished that picture. She would paint that picture now. It had been knocking about in
her mind all these years [...] She had borne it in her mind all these years. It seemed as if the
solution had come to her: she knew now what she wanted to do. (3.1.7-8)

In other words, both James and Lily are picking up their quests again, but they're starting from
different places. They must begin in other ways because the James and Lily and indeed, the
Ramsay family of ten years ago have disappeared. As we read, we wonder if this new James
will reach his Lighthouse and this new Lily will finish her picture, as neither succeeded in doing in
Part One.

The suspense portion of the plot for both of these characters certainly covers most of Part Three.
Both James himself and his sister Cam observe James's growing resentment of his father, as he
chats anxiously with Macalister and continues to criticize and bully his children. This trip seems
almost like an intensification of the strain between the two men, and between Cam, her father,
and her brother that we saw in Part One. On Cam's part, she finds herself feeling drowned in the
competition between James and Mr. Ramsay, seeking comfort in the dreams the steady rock of
the boat inspires: "It was a hanging garden; it was a valley, full of birds, and flowers, and
antelopes" (3.12.3). This echoes the lullaby that Mrs. Ramsay spoke to her when she was afraid
of the boar's skull in Part One, the skull that Mrs. Ramsay wrapped in her shawl to cover it from
view. Cam is capable of being soothed, of ignoring the ugly truths under things. As her father and
James lock in silent struggle, Cam sits to the side, quietly stifling.

James becomes wearily resentful of Cam's unwillingness to take his side (much as his mother
failed really to take his side over the Lighthouse thing in Part One?). So, between his father's
bullying and James's resentment of a female family member, it's almost like old times.
Meanwhile, Lily Briscoe is watching Mr. Ramsay's boat tacking towards the lighthouse, and as
she paints, she considers her relationship to the Ramsay family. Once again, her painting is like a
magnifying glass for her to use small subjects a tree moved towards the middle of the canvas
as a jumping off point for larger explorations of past, present, art, and reality.
Denouement
The denouement is the point in the plot when everything becomes
clear. Both James Ramsay and Lily Briscoe do get their denouements
by the end of To the Lighthouse.
In Part Three, Chapter Twelve, Mr. Ramsay praises James Ramsay for his steering skills. At last,
he acknowledges that James has talents in his own right, that he need not control every aspect of
James's life.

James Ramsay and Mr. Ramsey share a moment of mutual understanding at the Lighthouse,
witnessed by Cam: "[James] was so pleased that he was not going to let anyone share a grain of
his pleasure. His father had praised him. They must think [James] was perfectly indifferent. But
you've got it now, Cam thought" (3.12.15). Mr. Ramsay has at last given some of his power to the
next generation. He will always be a domineering father, but he's brought up James to follow in
his footsteps, and he is willing at last to let James take his place at the Lighthouse. We finally
learn what James's quest to get to the Lighthouse really means: he is taking up the social and
intellectual authority of the Man. (See "The Lighthouse" in "Symbols, Imagery, Allegory" for
more.)

Lily Briscoe, for her part, is attempting to create a different heritage for herself. She's trying to
make peace with the memory of Mrs. Ramsay, both her quiet bullying (why should Lily have
married Mr. Bankes?) and her all-encompassing love (Lily learned a great deal about the
importance of the little things in life from Mrs. Ramsay). Lily's peacemaking with the memory of
Mrs. Briscoe gives her a way to solve her aesthetic problem of how she should be painting:

One wanted, [Lily] thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary
experience, to feel simply thats a chair, thats a table, and yet at the same time, Its a miracle, its
an ecstasy. The problem might be solved after all. Ah, but what had happened? Some wave of
white went over the window pane. The air must have stirred some flounce in the room. Her heart
leapt at her and seized her and tortured her. (3.11.21).

Lily gets the everyday from Mrs. Ramsay, but the "miracle," the "ecstasy" that's all her own
artistic aspiration. "The problem" that she's looking for, how to capture that miracle, is something
that Mr. Ramsay is also, in a sense, seeking. He's got his theorem in Part One that he never
finishes, but Lily's focus on the everyday gives her enough to work with that "the problem might
be solved after all."

It's in this moment of realization that Lily understands that Mr. Ramsay has no authority over her.
She is effectively outside the traditional family structure of the Ramsays. He has firmly
established his heirs, James and Cam, who sail with him to the Lighthouse. Lily is free to do
something different, to carve out an artistic legacy for herself.

Lily has come to realize that Mr. Ramsay doesn't have to bother her any more. She has solved
with art what he attempts to solve with philosophy. Her willingness to look outside the ordered
rationality of social and philosophical structures has given her true inspiration. She has broken
free of the bonds of traditional class and gender roles to capture something more essential: a true
moment of aesthetic revelation.
Conclusion
Both James and Lily have gotten what they've been wanting, so all
that's left for the conclusion is that final "line there, in the centre" to
emphasize Lily's recognition of her own freedom from the
Lighthouse and all it represents.
Following the denouement, we get a final chapter in Part Three. Lily Briscoe sees that Mr.
Ramsay's boat must have arrived at the Lighthouse. It's at this moment, when she observes from
afar Mr. Ramsay's greatest moment of family bonding, that Lily really gets the degree of
perspective on the Ramsay family that she's been searching for all of these years. Lily and Mr.
Carmichael (a successful poet) have both achieved an aesthetic resolution. They may not share
the Ramsay family's social status, but their abilities to capture the essence of such scenes gives
them intellectual and artistic security outside the conventions of marriage and family life. Lily has
come to understand that all of the minor pressures of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay on her fate have
fallen away which is perhaps why the Lighthouse (and all the social and family pressures that it
represents) "had become almost invisible, had melted away into a blue haze" (3.13.1). Lily has
solved the problem of the Lighthouse and how she can operate independently of it as a single
woman artist: she has, at last, completed her painting.