Virginia Woolf is moving from one consciousness to another, from one group to another, exploring the significance of their reactions. The dinner-party given by Mrs. Ramsay for their guests is an opportunity for the novelist to use this shifting point of view. She passes from one mind to another, for the characters continue their isolated existence, thought they are together. They only become temporarily united owing to Mrs. Ramsey’s powerful influence and the harmony thus achieved in her own triumph.
Handling of time means that a presentation of certain moment in somebody’s life, a moment that reveals what the character feels not necessary connected with something in exterior world. Lily Briscoe, experiences her epiphany which does not so much consist in the line she adds to her painting, as in the state of mind she lives, a state of unusual vision covering life in general Mrs Ramsay’s role in particular. She feels that Mrs Ramsay is a very special person. It is not something she knows, but something she feels. The relationship between Lily Briscoe and Mrs Ramsay is a kind of mirror-image of Shakespeare’s relationship with the young man.
Woolf’s struggle to liberate herself from this patriarchal ideal of womanhood is reproduce within the novel by Lily Briscoe: while she deeply loves and venerates Mrs Ramsay and basks in her maternal care, she wholly rejects her values, not only by refusing to cooperate in her match-making plans, but also in several smaller ways.
“To the Lighthouse" is a book in three parts, in three movements. All of it is laid at the summer home of an English family named Ramsay in the Hebrides, the first portion occupying an afternoon and evening, the second portion constituting an interlude of ten years during which the house remains unoccupied, the third portion occupying a morning at the end of these ten years.
The Ramsays are a middle-aged couple, when the book opens, with eight children, who have with them at their summer place about half a dozen friends. Husband and wife, though very different, are in love with each other. Mrs. Ramsay, who though fifty is beautiful, has charm, intelligence, understanding; also she is a little anxious to have a hand in things, a little anxious to be liked, a little anxious to keep her illusions and have others keep theirs. Her children love her; they do not love their father--she works harder to hold their love. The best minds about her seemingly mistrust her a little dislike her a little, for her charm is persuasive rather than compelling. She watches those about her without mingling too much, both because she chooses a vantage point – symbolized by the window – and because of her personality she becomes the dominant and focal figure of the group.
Ramsay is less easy to understand, possibly because he is given less attention. In many ways he is a more interesting as well as original character: brilliant no doubt, but introverted, lacking those immediate graces which win for his wife the greater love of their children, lacking warmth, too, and a sense of social compromise--rigid in his truthfulness, a man, a thinker, where his wife is a woman, a psychologist. He lacks sensitiveness, one feels, either that or his sensitiveness is a very deep and hidden one. He loves his wife; they have a fundamental understanding, yet he is not a "help" to her in their relationships with others.
And around them are their children and their friends, the fumbling Lily Briscoe, the one-sided and arrogant yet somehow pathetic Tansley; a true product of early environment: the serene Mr. Carmichael, somehow about the clash of personalities; the unimportant couple who become engaged. They are an assortment of lives, most of them moving in different directions, yet moving, at least intermittently, under the influence of Mrs. Ramsay, who, beneath the stress of their presence, cannot quite find the chance to live her own inner life.
In the final part of the book persist an ironical mood, to re-establish a scene with the sorry changes time has wrought, reduce a symbolical achievement when it is finally made to the level of negation. The long opening portion seems to be carrying you ahead toward something which will be magnificently expressive, and then this final portion becomes obscure, a matter of arcs, of fractions, of uncoordinated notes. By comparison with the rest this final portion seems pale and weak.
This part is free from the idealising presence of Mrs Ramsay and all that she stood for: in the absence of feminine beauty the eye is now drawn to objects rather then people. Perhaps there is a reason for this, perhaps Mrs. Woolf meant to show that with Mrs. Ramsay's death things fall apart, get beyond correlation Life seems drifting, as the Ramsay drift over the bay in their boat, and all their physical vigour and all their reaching of the lighthouse at last conveys no significance.
The truth is that this final portion of the book strikes a minor note, not an intentional minor note which might still in the artistic sense be major, but a meaningless minor note which conveys the feeling that one has not quite arrived somewhere, that the story which opens brilliantly and carries on through a magnificent interlude ends with too little force and expressiveness.
The narrative is concerned to discourage conventional moral judgements on these two different ways of making time stand still, and to avoid overvaluing Mrs Ramsay’s self sacrifice at the expense of Lily’s single/minded commitment to her vision. It does this by interrogating Mrs Ramsay’s need to be indispensable, and by resolves through he conscientious performance of her role.
In "To the Lighthouse" there is nobody who even approaches Clarissa Dalloway in completeness and memorability, but on a smaller and perhaps more persuasive scale Mrs. Ramsay achieves powerful reality. The other characters are not fully alive because they are not whole enough. Most of them are one-dimensional fragments that have been created with great insight but insufficient vitality. They have minds, moods, emotions--but they get all three through creative intellect. For passion Mrs. Woolf has no gift, her people never invade the field of elementary emotions: they are hardly animal at all.
“To the Lighthouse” has not the formal perfection, the cohesiveness, and the intense vividness of characterization that belong to "Mrs. Dalloway." It has particles of failure in it. It is inferior to "Mrs. Dalloway" in the degree to which its aims are achieved; it is superior in the magnitude of the aims themselves. For in its portrayal of life that is less orderly, more complex and so much doomed to frustration, it strikes a more important note, and it gives us an interlude of vision that must stand at the head of all Virginia Woolf's work.
Encounters again her strikingly individual mingling of inward though with outward action in which the "stream of consciousness" style is liberated from its usual chaos and by means of selection and a sense of order, made formally compact--one finds the method applied to somewhat different aims.
“To the Lighthouse” is a sustained meditation on time and art, morality and creativity, with meditations on different genres. Is concerned with exploring the meaning of experience, the essence of life, love, marriage and personality. It holds a place apart in Woolf’s fiction, owing to its non-urban setting and focus on childhood and relations between parents and children. The novel is considered to be the symbol of the achievement of the characters wishes. The alternating light and shadow of the lighthouse beam is considered to symbolize the alternation of joy and sorrow in human life and human relationship.
