To The Lighthouse Dinner Scene Analysis

In Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, the character Mrs. Ramsey wants her dinner to be a memorable night, she wishes to make it a time for unity, for everyone to have a good time. In James Joyce, short story The Dead, we see Gabriel struggling with his inner thoughts and his experience with feeling trapped in the society he lives in. The dinner scene is important to the theme and setting of both novels because of the significance of the events that occur, and how it relates to both authors. Woolf’s struggle with dealing with ephemerality, art, and with Joyce’s desire to escape and feelings of isolation, all relating to how society was in that period. Even though Woolf and Joyce come from two different countries, what brings them together …show more content…
Ramsey’s vision going from obscurity to clarity. Mrs. Ramsey’s mind is no longer a disaster, because we see how everything falls into place, and the contentment and remembrance that Mrs. Ramsey wanted in the dinner. Part of these feelings have to do with Mrs. Ramsey’s feeling of ephemerality, she acknowledges that the dinner must end, it is brief, but the memory is forever, or so she hopes. The dinner scene was intended to get into all the character’s head, we see Mrs. Ramsey as an artist, like Lily, but her art is ephemeral. She creates moments and connections with people. The dinner is her art, the moment when she turns her head to hold on to the moment and then lets it slip out of present tense and become a …show more content…
Ramsey plans the dinner for that day, contrasted to The Dead where it is known that the dinner happens every year. In The Dead the dinner scene the guest are celebrating because of the holiday season, we see a loving interaction between the guests compared to the guest in TTL, where each character is experiencing their own challenge inside their head. I think this is important to the plot, because it gives you a perspective of what the author thought was most important. Joyce was mainly focused on repetition, and planning how to escape the routine that his aunts (Ireland) had planted on him, while Woolf focused on getting to the lighthouse (the escape). In The Dead we see snow, ice, and we hear depressing piano music, in Lighthouse we see summer, and the ocean. Here, we see how Joyce is giving us the imagery of gloom and paralysis producing symbols to show what his country is suffering