To the Lighthouse: The Window, 8 Summary & Analysis

Mrs. Ramsay considers Mr. Carmichael who has been coming to the summerhouse every summer for years and still doesn’t trust her. She blames his wariness on his cruel ex-wife. Still, his behavior hurts her, and “her own beauty [becomes] present to her” as she reflects that she is usually liked so well by everyone, that all kinds of people admire her and seek her out for her consoling, sympathetic spirit. Yet she recognizes, too, that she is not only hurt by Mr. Carmichael’s wariness of her, she is troubled by what that hurt suggests: that her desire to be warm and giving towards people is only vanity, and more a desire to be wanted than a desire to help. Then, telling herself that she is, after all, no longer such a beauty, she returns to focusing on the story of the Fisherman and his Wife that she is reading to James.

Mr. Ramsay passes the window just as Mrs. Ramsay reads about the Fisherman reluctantly going out to sea, thinking ‘it is not right’ and yet going. Mr. Ramsay nods and continues on the lawn, contemplating, after remembering a newspaper article on Shakespeare’s house, whether Shakespeare and, by extension, all great men are necessary to civilization. Disgusted by the possibility that “the greatest good” depends upon “a slave class,” Mr. Ramsay resolves to “argue that the world exists for the average human being,” that art is a superfluous decoration incapable of conveying life’s essence. He thinks how he will have to collect his thoughts in time to lecture at Cardiff next month.

He walks to the edge of the lawn and looks out at the sea. The perspective zooms out to observe that it was Mr. Ramsay’s destiny, “whether he wished it or not, to…stand…alone…facing the dark of human ignorance, how we know nothing and the sea eats away the ground we stand on.” There, he retains only his intensity of mind, all fame and personality stripped from him. He is likened to the marking “stake driven into the bed of a channel” which onlookers observe from their own distant positions of safety with gratitude “for the duty it has taken upon itself” of marking.

Murmuring that “the father of eight children has no choice—,” Mr. Ramsay turns back to look at Mrs. Ramsay and James. He admits he is “for the most part happy,” in his family, in the prospect of talking “’some nonsense’” in Cardiff. The perspective zooms out to note the disguise of the phrase ‘some nonsense,’ in which Mr. Ramsay pretends not to like the thing that actually makes him most happy. Mr. Bankes and Lily consider such falsifications “rather pitiable and distasteful,” thinking how Mr. Ramsay manages to be simultaneously “venerable and laughable.” Mr. Ramsay walks towards the house stopping now and then to turn and stare into the sea, then turn back away.