Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
The Transience of Life and Work
Mr. Ramsay and Mrs. Ramsay take completely different approaches
to life: he relies on his intellect, while she depends on her emotions.
But they share the knowledge that the world around them is transient—that
nothing lasts forever. Mr. Ramsay reflects that even the most enduring
of reputations, such as Shakespeare’s, are doomed to eventual oblivion.
This realization accounts for the bitter aspect of his character.
Frustrated by the inevitable demise of his own body of work and
envious of the few geniuses who will outlast him, he plots to found
a school of philosophy that argues that the world is designed for
the average, unadorned man, for the “liftman in the Tube” rather
than for the rare immortal writer.
Mrs. Ramsay is as keenly aware as her husband of the passage
of time and of mortality. She recoils, for instance, at the notion
of James growing into an adult, registers the world’s many dangers, and
knows that no one, not even her husband, can protect her from them.
Her reaction to this knowledge is markedly different from her husband’s.
Whereas Mr. Ramsay is bowed by the weight of his own demise, Mrs.
Ramsay is fueled with the need to make precious and memorable whatever
time she has on earth. Such crafted moments, she reflects, offer
the only hope of something that endures.
Art as a Means of Preservation
In the face of an existence that is inherently without
order or meaning, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay employ different strategies
for making their lives significant. Mr. Ramsay devotes himself to
his progression through the course of human thought, while Mrs.
Ramsay cultivates memorable experiences from social interactions.
Neither of these strategies, however, proves an adequate means of
preserving one’s experience. After all, Mr. Ramsay fails to obtain
the philosophical understanding he so desperately desires, and Mrs. -Ramsay’s
life, though filled with moments that have the shine and resilience
of rubies, ends. Only Lily Briscoe finds a way to preserve her experience,
and that way is through her art. As Lily begins her portrait of
Mrs. Ramsay at the beginning of the novel, Woolf notes the scope
of the project: Lily means to order and connect elements that have
no necessary relation in the world—“hedges and houses and mothers
and children.” By the end of the novel, ten years later, Lily finishes
the painting she started, which stands as a moment of clarity wrested
from confusion. Art is, perhaps, the only hope of surety in a world
destined and determined to change: for, while mourning Mrs. Ramsay’s
death and painting on the lawn, Lily reflects that “nothing stays,
all changes; but not words, not paint.”
The Subjective Nature of Reality
Toward the end of the novel, Lily reflects that in order
to see Mrs. Ramsay clearly—to understand her character completely—she would
need at least fifty pairs of eyes; only then would she be privy to
every possible angle and nuance. The truth, according to this assertion,
rests in the accumulation of different, even opposing vantage points.
Woolf’s technique in structuring the story mirrors Lily’s assertion.
She is committed to creating a sense of the world that not only
depends upon the private perceptions of her characters but is also nothing
more than the accumulation of those perceptions. To try
to reimagine the story as told from a single character’s perspective
or—in the tradition of the Victorian novelists—from the author’s
perspective is to realize the radical scope and difficulty of Woolf’s
project.
The Restorative Effects of Beauty
At the beginning of the novel, both Mr. Ramsay and Lily
Briscoe are drawn out of moments of irritation by an image of extreme
beauty. The image, in both cases, is a vision of Mrs. Ramsay, who,
as she sits reading with James, is a sight powerful enough to incite
“rapture” in William Bankes. Beauty retains this soothing effect
throughout the novel: something as trifling as a large but very
beautiful arrangement of fruit can, for a moment, assuage the discomfort
of the guests at Mrs. Ramsay’s dinner party.
Lily later complicates the notion of beauty as restorative
by suggesting that beauty has the unfortunate consequence of simplifying the
truth. Her impression of Mrs. Ramsay, she believes, is compromised
by a determination to view her as beautiful and to smooth over her
complexities and faults. Nevertheless, Lily continues on her quest
to “still” or “freeze” a moment from life and make it beautiful.
Although the vision of an isolated moment is necessarily incomplete,
it is lasting and, as such, endlessly seductive to her.
