Art and Beauty

To the Lighthouse examines the nature of art and beauty, giving credence to commonly accepted understandings even as it puts forth alternative definitions. Weaving in pieces of a Sir Walter Scott novel and the lines from a Shakespeare sonnet, To the Lighthouse showcases the beauty of canonical art masterpieces, and in the person of Mrs. Ramsay, the novel presents a traditional ideal of human beauty. Indeed, Mr. Bankes imagines her “classical” beauty on the other end of the telephone.

The power of such beauty—in both art and humans—can work for good. The literature the characters read gives joy and consolation, as Mrs. Ramsey delights in the loveliness of the sonnet’s words and Scott’s prose frees Mr. Ramsey from anxiety about his public image. Further, such artworks can inspire faith in an all-encompassing human project. After reading Scott, Mr. Ramsey no longer cares whether it is he or someone else who “reaches Z” – someone will, he knows, and that’s enough. Mrs. Ramsay’s human beauty likewise consoles and inspires: those around her admire her and feel strengthened by her spirit. Mr. Tansley is filled with happiness just by sharing Mrs. Ramsay’s presence and attempts to be kinder and more generous for her sake. Paul attributes his courage to propose to Minta to Mrs. Ramsay’s effect upon him. Still, beauty can also exert less positive influences. Lily observes that beauty can reduce and obscure, concealing the complexity of life beneath it. Admiring Mrs. Ramsay’s beauty, Lily tries to see past it to “the living thing” that so animates her.

As it considers the nature of beauty, the novel also considers beauty’s makers. The characters of Mr. Carmichael and Lily afford a view on art in the process of being created by as-yet unestablished artists. In each case, beauty springs unexpected from unlovely circumstances. Out of the opium-addicted, shuffling Mr. Carmichael of The Window springs the incongruous sublimity of his poems, which meet with such apparent success subsequently. Through Lily’s meager existence, self-doubts, and despair arrives the painting she completes in the novel’s last section. Yet the novel does not limit the making of beauty to the production of fine art objects. It understands human conduct and daily life as a form of art also. Thus Mrs. Ramsey’s orchestration of herself, her family, and her guests is repeatedly described in terms ordinarily applied to artistic composition and Lily recognizes Mrs. Ramsay’s person as an aesthetic force, a masterpiece.

In broadening our understanding of art and beauty, the novel shifts the emphasis from finished product to process – rather than limiting “art” to concrete, enduring, delimited artifacts, the novel shows that art can also be a spirit, a frame of mind, a form of vision. Thus, Lily ends the novel satisfied even though she knows that her painting itself will not be immortalized, will almost certainly be forgotten. She feels content knowing that she has participated in art and beauty just by making the painting, just by having “her vision.”

Gender

Though the novel’s stream of consciousness jumps from perspective to perspective, the theme of gender remains in focus as each character considers gender roles and relations from his or her own standpoint. Mrs. Ramsey delights in her womanhood, successfully fulfilling the traditional female roles of caregiver, homemaker, beauty, comforter of men. Lily, on the other hand, resents those same traditional roles, resisting the pressure to fill them and then, when she succeeds in such resistance, feeling her defiant pride undercut by anxiety and self-doubt. Having successfully refused to give Mr. Ramsay the female sympathy he craves in The Lighthouse, for example, Lily thinks she must be a failure as a woman and, wracked by regret, spends the rest of the morning trying to make it up to him. Among the male characters, Mr. Tansley and Mr. Ramsay aspire to strength, chivalry, and intellectualism, trying to inhabit the traditional male role of female protector and evincing an enduring prejudice against female “irrationality” and “simplicity.” Still, even as the men look down on women, they depend on them. Mr. Tansley and Mr. Ramsay are both utterly reliant on Mrs. Ramsay and other female characters for praise and crave female sympathy to keep their egos afloat. Even when Mr. Ramsay recognizes this need as a weakness in himself, he remains unable to overcome it and thus demands of Lily in The Lighthouse the same sort of support he’d demanded from his wife ten years earlier in The Window.

Aside from considering men and women’s individual gender roles, the novel also considers the gender relations within a marriage and presents two models of domestic union. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay represent the conventional ideal (indeed, Lily thinks they have suddenly transcended themselves and become a symbol as they stand on the lawn). Though the marriage of course possesses its gender-bending quirks—Mr. Ramsay is emotionally needier, Mrs. Ramsay, more emotionally restrained—it generally operates as a conventional heterosexual romantic partnership: Mr. Ramsey is the “rational” breadwinner, Mrs. Ramsey the “comforting” homemaker. They love one another deeply and act as a team. Within this model, both are happy. Mrs. Ramsay especially praises the virtues of marriage and her eager matchmaking attempts to set up all single characters in a marriage like hers.

Though not seen first-hand, Minta and Paul’s marriage as imagined by Lily in The Lighthouse presents a point of contrast with the Ramsay marriage. It’s hinted in The Window that Minta is not entirely happy about being betrothed to Paul, and the subsequent marriage is rife with struggle and argument. Yet, over the years, relations between Paul and Minta are repaired by something that would traditionally be considered a marriage disaster: Paul takes a mistress and, thereafter, he and Minta are a team again. Remembering Mrs. Ramsay in The Lighthouse, Lily imagines holding up the example of Minta and Paul as well as of her own contented, unmarried life as evidence that Mrs. Ramsay was wrong to advocate so single-mindedly for conventional marriages. Indeed, the novel presents marriage and gender alike as complex, continued negotiations between the sexes, each facing a set of expectations that seldom fit but are nevertheless worked around, worked through, and reinvented.