Write a 5 to 6-page paper (12-point type, 1 margins) on one of the topics

below. Make sure your paper includes close analysis of specific passages and
a real thesis/argument, an analytical proposition about the work(s) youll be
examining that your analysis will explore and support. Remember that a
thesis must be a sort of theory about the work that needs to be provedit
should not be obvious on the face of it; the classic non-thesis is, There are
many examples of X in Y.
Please keep plot summary to the bare minimum necessary for a reader
familiar with the text(s) to follow your argument and concentrate, as always,
on analysis.
Discuss the importance of Lily Briscoes painting to the novel. How
does including the figure of an artist in the process of creating and
executing a work (over the course of ten years) resonate with other
features of To the Lighthouse? If you like, you can limit your paper
mostly to a discussion of the way the painting functions in either
The Window or The Lighthouse.
Only Lily Briscoe, she was glad to find; and that did not matter. But the sight
of the girl standing on the edge of the lawn painting reminded her; she was
supposed to be keeping her head as much in the same position as possible
for Lily's picture. Lily's picture! Mrs Ramsay smiled. With her little Chinese
eyes and her puckered-up face, she would never marry; one could not take
her painting very seriously; she was an independent little creature, and Mrs
Ramsay liked her for it; so, remembering her promise, she bent her
head.(chap 3).
The question being one of the relations of masses, of lights and shadows,
which, to be honest, he had never considered before, he would like to have it
explainedwhat then did she wish to make of it? And he indicated the scene
before them. She looked. She could not show him what she wished to make
of it, could not see it even herself, without a brush in her hand. She took up
once more her old painting position with the dim eyes and the absentminded manner, subduing all her impressions as a woman to something
much more general; becoming once more under the power of that vision
which she had seen clearly once and must now grope for among hedges and
houses and mothers and childrenher picture. It was a question, she
remembered, how to connect this mass on the right hand with that on the
left. She might do it by bringing the line of the branch across so; or break the
vacancy in the foreground by an object (James perhaps) so. But the danger
was that by doing that the unity of the whole might be broken. She stopped;
she did not want[] (chap9)
But it had been seen; it had been taken from her. This man had shared with
her something profoundly intimate. And, thanking Mr Ramsay for it and Mrs

Ramsay for it and the hour and the place, crediting the world with a power
which she had not suspectedthat one could walk away down that long
gallery not alone any more but arm in arm with somebodythe strangest
feeling in the world, and the most exhilaratingshe nicked the catch of her
paint-box to, more firmly than was necessary, and the nick seemed to
surround in a circle forever the paint-box, the lawn, Mr Bankes, and that wild
villain, Cam, dashing past. (chap 9)
She had done the usual trickbeen nice. She would never know him. He
would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and
the worst (if it had not been for Mr Bankes) were between men and women.
Then her eye caught the salt cellar, which she had placed there to remind
her, and she remembered that next morning she would move the tree further
towards the middle, and her spirits rose so high at the thought of painting
tomorrow that she laughed out loud at what Mr Tansley was saying. Let him
talk all night if he liked it.
She saw her canvas as if it had floated up and placed itself white and
uncompromising directly before her. It seemed to rebuke her with its cold
stare for all this hurry and agitation; this folly and waste of emotion; it
drastically recalled her and spread through her mind first a peace, as her
disorderly sensations (he had gone and she had been so sorry for him and
she had said nothing) trooped off the field; and then, emptiness. She looked
blankly at the canvas, with its uncompromising white stare; from the canvas
to the garden.
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. She stared, frowning. There was the hedge, sure enough.
Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her
canvas. There it washer picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines
running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the
attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she
asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were
empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. 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.
Mr Bankes, she would have liked to have said. But he did not want
compliments (most men do, she thought), and she was a little ashamed of

her impulse and said nothing while he remarked that perhaps what he was
saying did not apply to pictures
The disproportion there seemed to upset some harmony in her own mind.
She felt an obscure distress. It was confirmed when she turned to her picture.
She had been wasting her morning. For whatever reason she could not
achieve that razor edge of balance between two opposite forces; Mr. Ramsay
and the picture; which was necessary. There was something perhaps wrong
with the design? Was it, she wondered, that the line of the wall wanted
breaking, was it that the mass of the trees was too heavy? She smiled
ironically; for had she not thought, when she began, that she had solved her
problem?