To the Lighthouse: The Window, 17 Summary & Analysis

Sitting down at the head of the dinner table, Mrs. Ramsay is suddenly overcome with fatigue and hopelessness. “But what have I done with my life?” she thinks, while orchestrating the seating arrangements and beginning to serve soup. Seeing Mr. Ramsay frowning at the other end of the table, she can’t believe she’d ever loved him. She feels her life is over, she’s “past everything.” She resents the “sterility of men” who leave all “the effort of merging and flowing and creating” of the dinner table to her. But, shaking herself, she begins the work of it since there is only her to do it. She asks Mr. Bankes if he’s gotten his letters in the hall.

Watching Mrs. Ramsay, Lily notes that, asking Mr. Bankes about the letters, Mrs. Ramsay goes from looking old and remote to looking bright again. She is amused thinking she perceives pity for Mr. Bankes in Mrs. Ramsay’s question. Lily thinks Mr. Bankes isn’t pitiable, since he has his work. Thinking with sudden joy of her own work, Lily places a saltshaker on the table to remind her to move the tree in her painting. She resents Mr. Tansley sitting smack in the view in front of her and eating with “bare unloveliness.” Still, she notes that “it was almost impossible to dislike anyone if one looked at them” and observes that she likes his blue eyes.

Mr. Tansley resents Mrs. Ramsay’s yoking him into small talk about letters and resolves “not…to be condescended to by these silly women.” He finds the whole ritual of dinner absurd and useless and thinks women are an impediment to “civilization.” He “asserts himself” by remarking that they won’t be able to go to the Lighthouse the next day. Lily, repulsed by his charmlessness, mockingly asks Tansley to take her to the Lighthouse. Tansley, infuriated at being teased and at being the shabby object of everyone’s loathing, snaps back at her rudely that the journey would make her sick. Immediately he regrets speaking crassly in front of Mrs. Ramsay. He feels that even though he has long supported himself, helps out at home, pays for his sister’s education, still all anyone pays attention to is his being “a dry prig.”

Mrs. Ramsay is meanwhile asking Mr. Bankes all about the Manning family from whom he’s received a letter and whom she used to know. She recounts her own memories and is delighted by all the details Mr. Bankes offers, somewhat puzzling Mr. Bankes. When Mr. Bankes asks whether he should send along her love in his reply, she quickly insists not as she and the Mannings have grown apart. Mrs. Ramsay thinks how strange that she has not thought of the Mannings all these years and that they may have not thought of her either. Mr. Bankes feels glad that he has stayed close to the Mannings and the Ramsays.

Mrs. Ramsay has to turn away for a moment to consult with a servant and, left hanging, Mr. Bankes is filled with regret at coming to dinner, which he only did in the first place to please his old friend Mrs. Ramsay (he usually eats in his lodgings). But, looking at her, he does not think the waste of time was worthwhile because here, isolated from his work, he is left to wonder sadly “what does one live for? Why…does one take all these pains for the human race to go on,” “questions one never asked if one was occupied.” Though when Mrs. Ramsay returns her attention to him and apologizes politely, Mr. Bankes politely protests there is no need for apology.

Overhearing Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Bankes’ expressions of etiquette, Mr. Tansley, having never spoken “this language” of etiquette, recognizes its insincerity and prepares to use it as future ammunition against the Ramsays. He can tell his few friends how tedious he found his stay at the summerhouse, how nonsensical their conversation. Still, at the moment, he flails, furiously trying to break into conversations around him to no avail. Lily notices “as in an X-ray…the ribs and thigh bones of the young man’s desire to impress himself” but, remembering his sexist assertions about women not being able to paint or write, resolves not to offer him an opportunity to do so even though she knows it is part of “a code of behavior” that women must help young men assert themselves, as young men must help women in times of physical danger.

Yet, seeing within Mrs. Ramsay’s quick glance an immense desperation imploring Lily to help her with Mr. Tansley, Lily once again must “renounce the experiment” of not being nice to young men and be nice to Mr. Tansley. Asking him earnestly if he will take her sailing, Lily immediately puts Mr. Tansley at his ease and he prattles on about his sea prowess while she thinks how the cost of Mrs. Ramsay’s ease has been her own sincerity.

Disappointed to find Mr. Bankes has lost interest in discussing the Mannings, Mrs. Ramsay feels “something lacking.” Overcome by “the disagreeableness of life,” Mr. Bankes feels likewise. They turn to listen to the others discuss the fishing industry. Everyone listening feels, “’The others are feeling [genuinely impassioned about the fishing industry]. Whereas, I feel nothing at all.” Watching Mr. Tansley lambasting the government, Mr. Bankes hears in Mr. Tansley’s voice a disdain for his own generation and jealously starts arguing with Mr. Tansley about politics.

Mrs. Ramsay hopes Mr. Ramsay will say something characteristically wise and make the subject of the fishing industry something one can actually care about, as his words make any topic worthwhile. But, looking down the table, she sees Mr. Ramsay is contorted with disgust, infuriated that Mr. Carmichael has ordered seconds on the soup. “He loathed people eating when he had finished.” Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay send “questions and answers” in their eyes, each understanding the other perfectly. Mr. Ramsay hates people “wallowing” in meals, but wants Mrs. Ramsay to note he has nevertheless “controlled himself” from an outburst. Mrs. Ramsay protests that he in fact shows his emotion “so plainly” on his face, where everyone can see. Why can’t he hide his feelings? she wonders.

Mrs. Ramsay gets up to light the candles, pitying Mr. Carmichael for having to suffer Mr. Ramsay’s visible disgust and thinking how she respects his composure and dignity. Knowing he does not like her only contributes to her respect for him.

Mrs. Ramsay admires Rose’s arrangement of the fruit bowl, which looks to her like “a trophy” from the sea floor, “Neptune’s banquet,” a whole world to explore. She notices Mr. Carmichael, too, admiring it, as “his eyes…plunged in…and returned, after feasting, to his hive.” She feels she and he united by looking.

Mrs. Ramsay lights the candles and the light turns the indoors into stable, orderly ground and the outside into a watery space “in which things wavered and vanished.” “As if this had really happened,” everyone becomes “conscious of making a party together…on an island,” united against “that fluidity out there.”

Paul and Minta enter as the main course is being brought in, apologizing for being late, and Minta can feel right away that she has that intermittent glow that she knows she has or doesn’t based on how “some man looked at her.” She can tell she has it from how Mr. Ramsay jokes with her. She had once been terrified of him but, finding that he enjoyed teasing her, made friends by acting “even more ignorant than she was.” Mrs. Ramsay knows all about her husband’s affection for Minta and all voluptuous tomboys like her. She feels not jealous but grateful to those girls for “laughing at [Mr. Ramsay]…till he seemed a young man,” “attractive” and unburdened. For her part, “she liked her boobies” and has saved a place for Paul next to her.

As he starts to explain the cause for their delay, Mrs. Ramsay can tell just from Paul’s using the word ‘we’ that he and Minta are engaged. Serving out the beef (which has been made specially for the occasion of Mr. Bankes consenting to dine with them), Mrs. Ramsay feels the special dish is also in tribute to their engagement, an event summoning “two emotions, one profound”—for marriage is a serious thing, “bearing in its bosom the seeds of death—and one lighthearted, wanting to dance mockingly around “these people entering into illusion glittering-eyed.”

Mr. Bankes finds the beef delicious and praises Mrs. Ramsay, feeling, once again, that she is remarkable, wonderful, an object of “reverence.” Mrs. Ramsay is pleased and energized by the admiration she hears restored to Mr. Bankes’ opinion of her. She talks about English cooking and vegetables.

As Mrs. Ramsay talks, Lily observes how she is at once “childlike” and “frightening,” how she always gets her way, as Mr. Bankes is having dinner with them and Paul and Minta must be engaged. She thinks Mrs. Ramsay puts “a spell” on people just by the force of her desires. She contrasts Mrs. Ramsay’s “abundance with her own poverty of spirit,” and thinks how Mrs. Ramsay “worshipped” love, the “strange…terrifying thing” with which Paul silently glows. Lily contrasts herself with Paul: “he, burning…bound for adventure; she, aloof…moored to the shore.” She asks about the brooch and hearing Paul is secretly planning to find it first thing the next morning, asks to go with him. Paul chuckles in reply and Lily hears in that sound a profound indifference to her. She feels “scorched” by “the heat of love, its horror, its cruelty, its unscrupulosity.”

Seeing the saltshaker reminds her about her painting, and Lily consoles herself that she doesn’t have to get married, and can be spared “that dilution.” She reflects on “the complexity of things”: she feels contradictory. She simultaneously admires love for its grandness, its beauty, its eternal desirability and disdains it for its dumb barbarism.

Mrs. Ramsay, talking about milk in England, sees Lily’s distance (as Lily thinks about love) and draws Lily into the conversation. Talking on, she observes that Lily and Mr. Tansley “suffered from the glow of [Paul and Minta].” Yet despite Lily’s meagerness and pursed appearance, Mrs. Ramsay admires in her a spark no man will see—unless the man is much older. She thinks again that Mr. Bankes and Lily should marry and plans to get them on a walk together.

Mrs. Ramsay feels suddenly that everything is, “for no special reason,” right and good in the moment, a feeling that “partook…of eternity” and shows “a coherence, a stability,” and something unalterable that “shines out” against “the flowing, the fleeting.” It gives a sense of “peace.” She thinks that it is out “[o]f such moments” that “the thing is made that remains for ever after.” She feels it’s the stillness “about the heart of things.”

As the men argue about literature and Mr. Tansley aggressively flaunts his opinion to assert himself, Mrs. Ramsay feels her eyes effortlessly unveil the speakers, like light moving underwater so that the fish are illuminated suspended and quivering. As she sees and hears those around her, their speech is “like the movement of a trout when” the whole element in which he hangs in is visible. “[T]he whole is held together.” Though she would, “in active life…be netting and separating one thing from another,” she is now silent, “suspended.”

As the men argue about literature’s endurance and legacy, Mrs. Ramsay can see that, while Mr. Bankes is unperturbed in his “integrity,” Mr. Ramsay is starting to grow agitated, inwardly worrying about the endurance of his own work. The whole table feels tense “without knowing why.” Minta rescues the mood by foolishly brushing off Shakespeare, which gives Mr. Ramsay an opportunity to laugh at her. Mrs. Ramsay is grateful Minta is there to take care of her husband’s need for praise but wonders if that need is her own fault.

When offered a piece of fruit, Mrs. Ramsay declines it and realizes she has been unconsciously guarding the beautifully composed fruit bowl, hoping nobody would take a piece to disturb the composition. But someone just had. Mrs. Ramsay looks sympathetically at Rose.

Mrs. Ramsay looks at all of her children and, seeing they are titillated by some mysterious joke, feels a little sad for not knowing what they are thinking. Their faces look “mask-like,” and they seem like “watchers” elevated above the adults. Though Mrs. Ramsay notes that Prue, who has been looking with interest at Minta all night, is beginning to “descend” into the adult world. Mrs. Ramsay inwardly assures Prue that she will have love’s happiness, too, that she will be happier than Minta “because you are my daughter,” because “her own daughter must be happier than other people’s daughters.”

Dinner is done and Mrs. Ramsay swells with affection for everyone, even Mr. Tansley. She hears everyone’s voices “as at a service in a cathedral,” not listening to the words. She hears laughter, then speech, then Mr. Ramsay saying something she knows is poetry by rhythm and tone “of exaltation and melancholy” in his voice.” (The poem is “Luriana Lurilee.”) She thinks the words sound like flowers floating on the water outside the window. Though she doesn’t know the meaning of the words, but feels she speaks them, articulating what she had been thinking all night. She knows everyone else must be feeling the same way. Mr. Ramsay bows to her at the last line of the poem and she feels him more affectionate than ever and is filled with “relief and gratitude,” returning the bow as she walks through the door he’s holding for her.

Mrs. Ramsay waits for a moment on the threshold “in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked.” Then, she exits and, even looking back over her shoulder, knows it is changed, “had become…already the past.”