To the Lighthouse Chapter nine

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Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, Chapter 9 questions
Lily Briscoe feels that Mrs. Ramsay is mistaken into thinking that marriage is the best kind of life that a woman must have, she thinks that Mrs. Ramsay is trying to control other people’s destinies by engaging in matters she does not understand. Lily feels that Mrs. Ramsay and she does not represent the same generation and therefore the differences in how they think about marriage, she feels that Mrs. Ramsey is a conservative while she belongs to a modern world where marriage is not everything or source of joy to a woman. As the evening approached, Lily Briscoe realized that the universal law required marriage to be part of life. It became clear to her that she was trying to be an exemption to nature (Woolf 40-41).
Lily’s physical closeness to Mrs. Ramsay is significant to her since it makes her feel intimately closer to Mrs. Ramsay and satisfy her desire of oneness. The physical closeness of Lily Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsay also helps Lily to feel secured, provide her with comfort, fulfill the desire for unconditional love and as a way of seeking attention from Mrs. Ramsey. Lily is not seeking to have the knowledge that Mrs. Ramsay is having. She understands that Mrs. Ramsay had treasures in her mind and heart, but her primary desire was to be one with Mrs. Ramsay if love was possible to do that, she loved Mrs. Ramsay. Her physical closeness to Mrs. Ramsay was out of the desire for intimacy, desire for unity, want to be one with her.

This desire can be depicted from the passage “. . . Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? For it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself . . . (Woolf, 42-43)”
Work cited
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse, feedbooks, 1927. Pdf.