Back to Virginia Woolf Seminar Home Page
Updated June 5, 2002
Created August 15, 1997
1. "Had there been an axe handy, or a poker, any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children’s breasts…" (4). Some critics claim that James had a love/hate relationship with his father. In this scene and many like it, we observe the hate, but what about love? Did you find evidence of James’s admiration for his father? If so, what examples did you find and how does it shape his character? 2. "Indeed, she had the whole of the other sex under her protection; for reasons she could not explain, for their chivalry and valour, for the fact that they negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finance; finally for an attitude towards herself which no woman could fail to feel or to find agreeable, something trustful, childlike, reverential; which an old woman could take from a young man without loss of dignity, and woe betide the girl—pray Heaven it was none of her daughters!--who did not feel the worth of it, and all that it implied, to the marrow of her bones!" (6). "Prue, Nancy, Rose—could sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers; in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other; for there was in all their minds a mute questioning of deference and chivalry, of the Bank of England and the Indian Empire, of ringed fingers and lace, thought to them all there was something in this of the essence of beauty, which called out the manliness in their girlish hearts, and made them, as they sat at the table beneath their mother’s eyes, honour her strange severity, her extreme courtesy…" (6-7). Mrs. Ramsay’s daughters did not feel the same way that she did about showing reverence to or taking care of men. They had their own ideas of how they wanted to live their lives differently from the way she had lived hers. Why do you think Woolf did not allow the Ramsay daughters to be more vocal even in thought? Why did she choose Lily Briscoe to be the "rebel"? 3. "That windows should be open, and doors shut—simple as it was, could none of them remember it?" (27). Mrs. Ramsay thinks of the open windows and closed doors many times in To the Lighthouse. What was Woolf trying to express about Mrs. Ramsay’s character? 4. "It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q." (33). What are your thoughts on Mr. Ramsay’s Q? How far do you think Mrs. Ramsay has come in the alphabet of thought? Mr. Tansley? Will Mr. Ramsay ever reach the other letters or is he truly past his prime? 5. "…and that all this desire of hers to give, to help, was vanity. For her own self-satisfaction was it that she wished so instinctively to help, to give, that people might say of her, ‘O Mrs. Ramsay! dear Mrs. Ramsay . . .Mrs. Ramsay, of course!’ And need her and send for her and admire her? Was it not secretly this that she wanted…" (41). What similarities has Woolf given to her main female characters? How are Clarissa and Mrs. Ramsay similar? Helen Ambrose and Clarissa? 6. ". . . how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach" (47). How does Lily’s statement connect with her own painting and Mrs. Ramsay’s view on life? 7. "She could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She could have done it differently of course; the colour could have been thinned and faded; the shapes etherealised; that was how Paunceforte would have seen it. But then she did not see it like that. She saw the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral. Of all that only a few random marks scrawled upon the canvas remained. And it would never be seen; never be hung even, and there was Mr. Tansley whispering in her ear, "Women can’t paint, women can’t write…" (48). What does this scene convey about Lily’s ambitions? In what ways can you compare her dilemma to Shakespeare’s sister, Sally Seton, or any other Woolf character? 8. "Sitting on the floor with her arms around Mrs. Ramsay’s knees, close as she could get, smiling to think that Mrs. Ramsay would never know the reason of that pressure…Could loving…make her and Mrs. Ramsay one" (51)? What are the reasons for Lily’s pressure? Is she in love with Mrs. Ramsay or simply in love with the life Mrs. Ramsay has? 9. "…she and James shared the same tastes and were comfortable together" (56). Why does Mrs. Ramsay feel so comfortable with James? What qualities did James and Mrs. Ramsay share? 10. "There it was before her—life. Life, she thought—but did not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband…for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance" (59-60). Why do you think Mrs. Ramsay takes such a negative view of life? If she were not married with children how do you think she might have chosen to live her life? 11. "…she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance" (60). Why did Mrs. Ramsay die? Did life finally "pounce" on her? Did she give too much to everyone around her until she had no more to give? 12. "Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by" (62). Woolf puts her own words into Mrs. Ramsay’s head. Can you find any other passages where the words thought or spoken seem to come "straight from the horse’s mouth?" 13. "…she looked out to meet the stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke…" (63). What does Mrs. Ramsay feel for the Lighthouse? What emotions does it raise in her? 14. "…it might be true that she minded losing her brooch, but she wasn’t crying only for that. She was crying for something else. We might all sit down and cry, she felt. But she did not know what for" (77). What do you feel are the reasons that Nancy believes they could all cry? Is it because of Mr. Ramsay, Mrs. Ramsay, or something more? 15. "For it was extraordinary to think that they had been capable of going on living all these years when she had not thought of them more than once in all that time…Yet perhaps Carrie Manning had not thought about her either. The thought was strange and distasteful" (88). Why does it bother Mrs. Ramsay that Carrie Manning may not have thought of her over the years? Does she secretly feel empowered and that others should look up to her, despite her feelings for and actions toward her husband? 16. "James must go to sleep too, for see, she said, the boar’s skull was still there; they had not touched it; they had done just what he wanted; it was still there quite unhurt" (115). In your opinion what does the boar’s skull symbolize? 17. "He wanted something—wanted the thing she always found it so difficult to give him; wanted her to tell him that she loved him. And that, no, she could not do…A heartless woman he called her; she never told him that she loved him. But it was not so—it was not so. It was only that she never could say what she felt (123-124). Parallel this scene with those in The Voyage Out and Mrs. Dalloway. What conclusions do you draw about the relationship of these characters and those of the other texts?