Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
The Differing Behaviors of Men and Women
As Lily Briscoe suffers through Charles Tansley’s boorish
opinions about women and art, she reflects that human relations
are worst between men and women. Indeed, given the extremely opposite ways
in which men and women behave throughout the novel, this difficulty
is no wonder. The dynamic between the sexes is best understood by
considering the behavior of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. Their constant
conflict has less to do with divergent philosophies—indeed, they
both acknowledge and are motivated by the same fear of mortality—than
with the way they process that fear. Men, Mrs. Ramsay reflects in
the opening pages of the novel, bow to it. Given her rather traditional
notions of gender roles, she excuses her husband’s behavior as inevitable,
asking how men can be expected to settle the political and economic
business of nations and not suffer doubts. This understanding attitude
places on women the responsibility for soothing men’s damaged egos
and achieving some kind of harmony (even if temporary) with them.
Lily Briscoe, who as a -single woman represents a social order more
radial and lenient than Mrs. Ramsay’s, resists this duty but ultimately
caves in to it.
Brackets
In “Time Passes,” brackets surround the few sentences
recounting the deaths of Prue and Andrew Ramsay, while in “The Lighthouse,” brackets
surround the sentences comprising Chapter VI. Each set of sentences
in brackets in the earlier section contains violence, death, and
the destruction of potential; the short, stabbing accounts accentuate
the brutality of these events. But in Chapter VI of “The Lighthouse,”
the purpose of the brackets changes from indicating violence and
death to violence and potential survival. Whereas in “Time Passes,”
the brackets surround Prue’s death in childbirth and Andrew’s perishing
in war, in “The Lighthouse” they surround the “mutilated” but “alive
still” body of a fish.
