The sea is a recurring symbol in To the Lighthouse, and a recurring motif that establishes this symbol is the waves on the shore of Skye. Woolf frequently invokes waves as comparands in metaphor and simile, as in Chapter 3 of "The Window":
...the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, 'I am guarding you - I am your support,' but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life...
Here, waves are a measure of time, a guaranteed rhythm, the passing of which is at times soothing and at times sinister; the sound of the waves on the shore will never cease. As is the case in many of Woolf's metaphors, this passage morphs into a reflection on the meaning of life itself: how must we live when the constant ticking of time is simultaneously reassuring and mortally terrifying?
In Chapter 9 of "The Window," Woolf changes the comparative power of waves to represent the assemblage of an entire life from discrete moments:
And what was even more exciting, she felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.
In this simile, Lily Briscoe compares her movement through life, moment to moment, to the way that a wave assembles itself from the sea and carries one onto the shore. As Lily feels it, the meaning of life—the shape of this wave—is inextricable from the individual moments of time. In fact, the little incidents are the very things that give the wave its shape. This metaphor illustrates a central theme in To the Lighthouse: one's experience of time directly effects one's sense of purpose and one's understanding of life's meaning.
In its great catalogue of human relationships, To the Lighthouse contains many accounts of interpersonal tensions. The friendship between Mr. Bankes and Mr. Ramsay is no exception, and at one point in Chapter 4 of "To the Window," Bankes recalls the very moment it all went south. This moment makes a subtle metaphor about Mr. Ramsay's domestic role as husband and father:
...this was suddenly interrupted, William Bankes remembered (and this must refer to some actual incident), by a hen, straddling her wings out in protection of a covey of little chics, upon which Ramsay, stopping, pointed his stick and said 'Pretty — pretty,' an odd illumination into his heart, Bankes had thought of it, which showed his simplicity, his sympathy with humble things; but it seemed to him as if their friendship had ceased, there, on that stretch of road. After that, Ramsay had married.
This anecdote constructs a parallel between an over-protective hen and Mr. Ramsay. Bankes would appear to imply, through this metaphor, that when Ramsay married and started a family, he thereby committed to a domestic life—one of "simplicity"—much like that of the hen Mr. Ramsay points out. To Bankes, Ramsay's appreciation of the hen is evidence enough of this transition, and it is this act that leads to the "pulp going out" of their friendship. It is implied that Bankes loses respect for Mr. Ramsay in this moment.
Mr. Ramsay is at times violent, at times cruel, and often insecure in To the Lighthouse, but he is also a committed family man—a hen—and a devoted husband and father. Contradictions like these are a vital undercurrent of Woolf's nuanced portrait of human relationships in To the Lighthouse, and she embraces them as an inherent part of life's great complexity.
Mrs. Ramsay transfixes many of the characters in To the Lighthouse, who, in turn, comprehend and appreciate her beauty in each their own way. In Chapter 5 of "The Window," Mr. Bankes alludes to classical artwork as he makes a metaphorical comparison between Mrs. Ramsay and an ancient sculpture:
'Nature has but little clay,' said Mr. Bankes once, hearing her voice on the telephone, and much moved by it though she was only telling him a fact about a train, 'like that of which she molded you.' He saw her a the end of the line, Greek, blue-eyed, straight-nosed. How incongruous it seems to be telephoning to a woman like that. The Graces assembling seemed to have joined hands in the meadows of asphodel to compose that face.
Describing Mrs. Ramsay as a sculpture made by Nature herself, Mr. Bankes observes that Nature must have used a rare and magnificent clay indeed. In fact, Mrs. Ramsay appears to have been sculpted according to the Classical Greek ideal of beauty, as this passage is rife with allusions to the aesthetics and mythology of Greek antiquity. Bankes even goes so far as to remark that the Graces themselves—the group of Greek goddesses in charge of everything from artistic creativity to fertility—must have teamed up in the Asphodel Meadows, which is to say in the Greek underworld, to create Mrs. Ramsay. These allusions are powerful reminders of Mrs. Ramsay's singular hold over the other characters in the novel, and the invocation of the Asphodel Meadows—that portion of the underworld where normal, mortal souls are sent after their death—perhaps also foreshadows Mrs. Ramsay's eventual death in "Time Passes."
In Chapter 7 of "The Window," after a particularly intense altercation in which Mr. Ramsay desperately sought sympathy and praise from Mrs. Ramsay, Woolf depicts Mrs. Ramsay's recovery through metaphor and allusion:
Immediately, Mrs. Ramsay seemed to fold herself together, one petal closed in another, and the whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon itself, so that she had only strength enough to move her finger, in exquisite abandonment to exhaustion, across the page of Grimm's fairy story, while there throbbed through her, like the pulse in a spring which has expanded to its full width and now gently ceases to beat, the raptures of successful creation.
In this passage, the narrator compares Mrs. Ramsay to a flower—closed but pulsing with life and preparing to bud—as she reads Grimm's "fairy story," revealed shortly hereafter to be "The Fisherman and his Wife."
On one level, the allusion to the Grimm tale, which generally concerns a fisherman sailing through a stormy sea, relates Mrs. Ramsay's concerns over her son's impending voyage to the Lighthouse. On another, however, the allusion has much greater significance: "The Fisherman and his Wife" is perhaps the most misogynistic of the Grimm tales, as an account of the titular Fisherman's struggle to keep up with his wife—depicted as a caricature, and stereotypically needy—as she levies increasingly unrealistic demands on her husband.
There is a level of irony to the inclusion of this story at this moment: in the marriage dynamic between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, Mr. Ramsay is the needy one. It is Mr. Ramsay who is viciously insecure and constantly seeking praise. Mrs. Ramsay, meanwhile, inverts the trope of the Grimm tale as she provides for her husband and struggles to meet his emotional needs. By making an allusion to "The Fisherman and his Wife," Woolf simultaneously underscores Mrs. Ramsay's own strengths and criticizes the vicious stereotyping against women that is so common in literature.
In To the Lighthouse, Mr. Ramsay constantly seeks praise and sympathy from the women in his life—particularly from Mrs. Ramsay, while she is alive. In Chapter 7 of "The Window," the reader sees James's experience of his father's neediness through both metaphor and simile:
...and James, as he stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy. Filled with her words, like a child who drops off satisfied, he said, at last, looking at her with humble gratitude, restored, renewed, that he would take a turn; he would watch the children playing cricket.
Woolf transforms Mrs. Ramsay into a brilliantly flowered tree and Mr. Ramsay into an arid scimitar, a blade that strikes into the wood. This is James's violent interpretation of his parents in a moment of tension, as Mr. Ramsay tries to get what sympathy he can from his wife. The metaphor sharply contrasts Mr. Ramsay's brutality with Mrs. Ramsay's stoic beauty, until—when Mr. Ramsay is content and relents—Woolf shifts to a breast-feeding simile: like a child who drops off satisfied, he draws back.
Much of To the Lighthouse explores gender roles in the novel's early 20th-century setting. Here, metaphor and simile come together to characterize the gender dynamics of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay's relationship: first in terms of violence, as Mr. Ramsay's insecure masculinity transforms into a weapon that seeks to fell Mrs. Ramsay's stately flowering tree. Second, in terms of motherhood and nurturing, as Mrs. Ramsay provides her husband with the sympathy he craves and enables him to relax once more. These characterizations also reverse the traditional depictions of heterosexual relationships, in which the man is stoic and the woman needy, to cast Mrs. Ramsay as a constant and stable source of power in her relationship. These literary devices emphasize this immense power, rather than make Mrs. Ramsay out to be a victim of her husband's insecurities: a great tree in bloom, standing strong against an attack, and a great mother, protecting and feeding her family.
The sea is a recurring symbol in To the Lighthouse, and a recurring motif that establishes this symbol is the waves on the shore of Skye. Woolf frequently invokes waves as comparands in metaphor and simile, as in Chapter 3 of "The Window":
...the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, 'I am guarding you - I am your support,' but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life...
Here, waves are a measure of time, a guaranteed rhythm, the passing of which is at times soothing and at times sinister; the sound of the waves on the shore will never cease. As is the case in many of Woolf's metaphors, this passage morphs into a reflection on the meaning of life itself: how must we live when the constant ticking of time is simultaneously reassuring and mortally terrifying?
In Chapter 9 of "The Window," Woolf changes the comparative power of waves to represent the assemblage of an entire life from discrete moments:
And what was even more exciting, she felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.
In this simile, Lily Briscoe compares her movement through life, moment to moment, to the way that a wave assembles itself from the sea and carries one onto the shore. As Lily feels it, the meaning of life—the shape of this wave—is inextricable from the individual moments of time. In fact, the little incidents are the very things that give the wave its shape. This metaphor illustrates a central theme in To the Lighthouse: one's experience of time directly effects one's sense of purpose and one's understanding of life's meaning.
Throughout the novel, as characters come and go and even die, Lily Briscoe continues work on her painting of the Ramsays. She gets off to a rocky start, however, and conveys as much through a combination of imagery, metaphor, and allegory in Chapter 9 of "The Window":
She could have wept…. it was infinitely bad! She could have done it differently of course, the colour could have been thinned and faded; the shapes etherealized; that was how Paunceforte would have seen it. But then she did not see it like that. She saw the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly's wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral. Of all that only a few random marks scrawled upon the canvas remained. And it would never be seen… and there was Mr. Tansley whispering in her ear, 'Women can't paint, women can't write...'
In this passage, Woolf uses the language and visual imagery of paint and painterly technique to catalogue Lily's creative crisis: she frets over the mixing and application of colors, the merits of an impressionist "etherealizing" aesthetic, and the influence of the painter character Paunceforte. Though Lily has a visceral artistic vision for her piece, she is beset by doubt from the criticism of Mr. Tansley, who insists that women are incapable of creative expression—even as Lily determinedly sees her painting through to completion over the course of the novel.
Lily's painting process, affected by both personal and societal woes, functions in To the Lighthouse as an allegory for Woolf's own writing process and, more generally, for creative expression as an ineffable human pursuit. For women like Briscoe and Woolf, who found themselves up against the gender roles of their time and the misogynistic expectation that works of art were for men alone to create, this expression is an existential challenge to their place in society.
After the climactic dinner party in Chapter 19 of "The Window," Mrs. Ramsay gradually begins to reflect on the dinner conversation. She conveys her thoughts on the night through a beautiful combination of visual imagery and metaphor:
And she waited a little, knitting, wondering, and slowly those words they had said at dinner, 'the China rose is all abloom and buzzing with the honey bee,' began washing from side to side of her mind rhythmically, and as they washed, words, like little shaded lights, one red, one blue, one yellow, lit up in the dark of her mind...
As Mrs. Ramsay reflects, Woolf uses the movement and imagery of the ocean to portray how her thoughts move around her head—side to side, lapping like little waves. At the same time, Woolf also uses color imagery to evoke how the words of the conversation come back to Mrs. Ramsay. As the words blink like colored lights, this synesthetic simile recalls the twinkling lights of a city or an ocean liner far out at sea.
Ocean imagery and metaphor can be found tucked into almost every corner of To the Lighthouse, and here Woolf uses the ocean to bring the outside in: the internal life of Mrs. Ramsay mirrors the surrounding ocean environment of the Isle of Skye.
When the Ramsays leave the house in the beginning of "Time Passes," the rooms are plunged into darkness. In the beginning of Chapter 2, Woolf describes the steady onslaught of darkness using a potent combination of hyperbole, metaphor, and personification:
...with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof a downpouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which, creeping at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say 'This is he' or 'This is she.'
First, the darkness gains the liquid qualities of water: when the "thin rain" drums on the roof, the darkness begins to "downpour" and begins a great "flood." Then, Woolf personifies darkness and it becomes a burglar sneaking through the house unseen: stealing "round window blinds" and creeping into bedrooms. Finally, darkness becomes something else entirely—something primordial, suffocating, and sinister. It "swallows up" everything it touches, consuming the house until "there was scarcely anything left of body or mind."
This passage rests on a bit of hyperbole—darkness is an immaterial thing, a lack of light, that does not in fact possess any such destructive qualities. This characterization fits with the shift in focus that occurs in "Time Passes," away from the thoughts and relationships of the Ramsay family and their friends that dominate the first and third sections of the book and toward the environment of the house, the land around it, and the passing of time itself. Abandoned by the Ramsay's, the house begins to deteriorate—and darkness and shadow may reign supreme.
In Chapter 11 of "The Lighthouse," Lily reaches a new height of exasperation with her portrait of Mrs. Ramsay. She conveys this exasperation through metaphor:
Get that and start afresh; get that and start afresh; she said desperately, pitching herself firmly again before her easel. It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically one must force it on.
Lily grapples for a decade with her portrait of Mrs. Ramsay, and she only completes it in the very closing pages of the novel, after Mrs. Ramsay has died and when a group of the remaining Ramsay's make it to the lighthouse at last. Woolf uses Lily's struggle with her painting, and her tempestuous thoughts that accompany this struggle, to explore the torturous creative process that all artists must face. In this metaphor, an exasperated Lily compares the "human apparatus for painting or for feeling"—Woolf equates the two—with a useless, decrepit machine that breaks down at the worst possible time. Despite the seeming impossibility of working with such a machine, however, humans insist both to feel and to paint; they incessantly return to emotion and art.
The focus on this machine, and on Lily's artistic struggle, fits neatly into the ideas about art and beauty that are explored throughout To the Lighthouse. For Lily, as for Woolf, the act of creation is an end unto itself, a heroic journey to paint or write despite one's "broken apparatus." To return to this journey over and over is its own accomplishment, and by the end of the novel the status of Lily's portrait matters far less to her than the fact that she painted it at all.
