To the Lighthouse, XIX through end

As much as I enjoyed reading To the Lighthouse, I feel like there is no way I could actually appreciate the enormity of Woolf's creation without close reading every page. However, here's my first few stabs at an interpretation.

While marriage itself is not the focus of the novel, it certainly addresses the idea of happiness. I found Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay's marriage to be an interesting characterization of what realistic happiness looks like. Initially (as mentioned in my last post), their marriage seems a little strange, due to the Oedipal dynamics with the son James. The extent to which Lily idealizes the Ramsays makes the reader think that their marriage is in reality far from perfect.  However, as the book progresses, this image shifts. In one scene, "Their eyes met for a second; but they did not want to speak to each other. They had nothing to say, but something seemed, nevertheless, to go from him to her. It was the life, it was the power of it, it was the tremendous humour, she knew" (119). The extent of their closeness here, and the fact that they reach such a mutual understanding, "life" and "humour" without even communicating is testimony to the strength of their relationship, and seems to represent an ideal, yet realistic equilibrium that amounts to happiness. At the end of the same scene, Mrs. Ramsay says "'yes, you were right. It's going to be wet tomorrow. You won't be able to go.' And she looked at him smiling. For she had triumphed again. She had not said it: he knew" (124). All Mrs. Ramsay has to do for her husband to know that she loves him is to concede to him on this one little thing (though since this little thing is about the lighthouse, it's obviously not trivial). Both Mr and Mrs. Ramsay are obstinate, but in this way they reach a coexistence, an understanding about how their love works that accommodates both of their dispositions.

Beyond marriage, Woolf addresses other paths to happiness or understanding, specifically art and intellect. Mr. Ramsay, the intellectual, presents one route. However, the effectiveness of intellect to confer happiness is contested. Lily observes that "But now he had nobody to talk to about that table, or his boots, or his devour, and his face had that touch of desperation" (156). The "table" mentioned refers back to his philosophical studies (also mentioned in my first post), but this philosophizing is depicted as lonely: being too deeply buried in ideas that no one else can understand leads only to "desperation." In contrast to Mr. Ramsay, who is "good" at what he does (thinking), there is Lily, who is bad at painting. However, the ending of the novel suggests that art, whether good or bad, more likely leads to true understanding and happiness than does even the highest form of intellect. The last lines of the novel read: 

"With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision" (209). After the entire novel filled with constantly shifting images, mingled perspectives, and the intangibility of the lighthouse, Lily is the only character who "saw it clear," is able to feel like something is "finished," who has a "vision." The fact that this vision occurs through painting badly emphasizes the power of art over intellect, of passion over skill, in facilitating illumination of the world and resolution in one's life. 

Mr. Ramsay is also used to illustrate and discuss misogyny and identity. Though he manages to have this "perfect" understanding with Mrs. Ramsay, he fails to understand other women. When he watches Lily paint, "Why, thought Mr. Ramsay, should she look at the sea when I am here?" (151). This represents a lack of understanding on two levels: he cannot fathom why a woman would not be focused primarily on a man, and it does not occur to him that Lily's gaze on the sea is unrelated to his presence, is rather caused by other more complex thoughts and deliberations. This relative cluelessness implies that male ideas about women are selfish and incomplete, and do not do justice to the complexity of female minds. Later on,  "He thought, women are always like that; the vagueness of their minds is hopeless; it was a thing he had never been able to understand; but so it was" (167). This more explicitly draws attention to Mr. Ramsay's inability to "understand" women, but the use of "hopeless" and "never" here also illustrate that he has made no attempts to do so. He complains of the "vagueness of their minds," again exemplifying the misogynistic idea that women are intellectually inferior. The fact that Mr. Ramsay eventually fails to attain the "vision" that Lily does essentially negates his approach to happiness and his world view, including his misogynistic tendencies. And of course, the fact that Woolf herself (a woman) wrote this incredibly intricate intellectual masterpiece in itself defends women against any accusations of cognitive inferiority. 

Random, particularly beautiful quote:
"only the Lighthouse beam entered the rooms for a moment, sent its sudden stare over bed and wall in the darkness of winter, looked with equanimity at the thistle and the swallow, the rat and the straw" (138).