Mrs. Ramsay and the pasts of her guests and children
haunt the novel’s final section. As Lily stands on the lawn watching
the Ramsays’ boat move out into the bay, she is possessed by thoughts
of Mrs. Ramsay, while Macalister spins out stories of shipwrecks
and drowned sailors, and Cam reflects that there is no suffering
on the distant shore where people are “free to come and go like
ghosts.” At first, Mrs. Ramsay exerts her old pull on Lily, who
begins to feel anxious about the choices she has made in life. But
as her thoughts turn to Paul and Minta Rayley, around whom she has
built up “a whole structure of imagination,” Lily begins to exorcise
Mrs. Ramsay’s spirit and better understand her old friend. Though
she readily admits in regard to her imagining of the Rayleys’ failed
marriage that “not a word of it [is] true,” she believes that her
version of their lives constitutes real knowledge of the couple;
thus, the novel again insists upon the subjective nature of reality.
These thoughts allow Lily to approach Mrs. Ramsay, who insisted
on Paul’s marriage, from a new, more critical, and ultimately more
truthful angle.
Lily’s longing for Mrs. Ramsay is a result of understanding
her as a more complicated, flawed individual. When she wakes that
morning, Lily reflects solemnly that Mrs. Ramsay’s absence at the
breakfast table evokes no particular feelings in her; now, however,
Lily calls out Mrs. Ramsay’s name, as if attempting to chant her
back from the grave. Lily’s anguish and dissonance force us to reassess her
art. Mrs. Ramsay’s beauty has always rendered Lily speechless, but
Lily now realizes that “[b]eauty had this penalty—it came too readily,
came too completely. It stilled life—froze it.” She mimics Mrs.
Ramsay’s psychological gesture of smoothing away life’s complexities
and flaws under a veneer of beauty. Continuing to paint, Lily feels
a deeper need to locate the Ramsays’ boat on the water and reach
out to Mr. Ramsay, to whom a short while earlier she feels that she
has nothing to give.
