Gender Theme Analysis

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.