To the Lighthouse: The Lighthouse, 1 Summary & Analysis

Lily sits at the breakfast table feeling how strange and unreal everything seems. Mr. Ramsay, Cam, and James are supposed to go to the Lighthouse but are late and disorganized. Nancy asks Lily what should be sent to the Lighthouse and Lily finds the ordinary question absurdly unanswerable. Lily finds the strange unreality of everything scary but also exhilarating.

Avoiding Mr. Ramsay’s “wild gaze” of “imperious need,” Lily takes her easel out on the lawn in just the place she’d painted from ten years ago. She feels now that she knows how to paint the picture she’d tried to paint back then.

Yet Lily is distracted by Mr. Ramsay’s constant approach as he paces the terrace. She recalls how, when she’d arrived the night before, he’d said to her in front of the six children, “’You’ll find us much changed.’” Then he had ordered teenage Cam and James to be ready for an early trip to the Lighthouse the next morning, which they consented to with obvious resentment. Lily thought “this was tragedy—not palls, dust, and the shroud; but children coerced, their spirits subdued.”

Unable to paint because she is so distracted by Mr. Ramsay’s imposing presence, Lily thinks angrily that he only knows how to take, while Mrs. Ramsay had always given. She, Lily, will be forced to give, she thinks and, after inwardly lamenting the unfairness of the situation, she decides to get it over with and to give Mr. Ramsay the sympathy he needs so she can get back to painting. She tries to make her face assume “the rhapsody, the self-surrender she had seen on so many women’s faces,” including Mrs. Ramsay’s.