The beautiful, charming, perhaps secretly frustrated Mrs. Ramsay throws them each a curveball by not really supporting either James's trip to the lighthouse or Lily Briscoe's painting.

Ramsay as a kind of alternative model of power to Mr. Complication Both James and Lily rely on Mrs. Lily's trying to find a way, as a woman, to pursue her own artistic development freely, but she's meeting lots of obstacles along the way because of her gender and relatively low social status. She wants to paint, but to do so seems to be a threat to the masculine system of intellectual hierarchy that both Mr. Lily Briscoe, like James, is sadly squelched by a man with more status than she has – Charles Tansley. James's rebelliousness shows that the main conflict of James's life is going to be with his father and his father's power over James's life. Ramsay wants all of his children to behave on his terms and to strive according to his orders. James's desire to go to the Lighthouse – and his father's (and Charles Tansley's) insistence on refusing – is the main conflict through which James's difficult relationship with his oppressive father gets represented. Lily Briscoe wants to paint, though Charles Tansley has told her to her face that women can't write or paint. Conflict James wants to go to the Lighthouse, though his father says that the weather won't be good enough to go. Ramsay that sustains her throughout her stay with the Ramsay family on the Isle of Skye. But she has a strong, mutually affectionate relationship with Mrs. Not a good situation for a woman in the 1920s to be in.

Lily Briscoe, on the other hand, is an impoverished friend of the Ramsay family whose uncertain social place is due to the fact that she's thirty-four, unmarried, and not very conventionally attractive. Ramsay's life that James cannot hope to occupy. James is the baby of the Ramsay family and much-beloved by his mother, but he feels fiercely competitive with his father, who occupies a place in Mrs. Initial Situation Both James Ramsay and Lily Briscoe are trying to find places for themselves within the society of the Ramsay family.Īt the start of Part One ('The Window'), James Ramsay is six, Lily Briscoe, thirty-four. Both are actively striving for something, so we're going to organize our plot analysis to see what they actually get. Still, there are two characters who do have something approaching plot: Lily Briscoe and James Ramsay. And yet, really, the book seems like it might be more of a three-part portrait than a real beginning-middle-end kind of story. Admittedly, it's kind of tough to talk about To the Lighthouse in terms of plot trajectory because, while time does certainly move in the novel, 'plot' would seem to suggest that there's some sort of definite goal to the narrative.

To the light house novel