In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf's undermining of traditional male and female distinctions is directed at contrasting male and female and in showing the need of each for the other not merely in biological terms but in mental terms. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay contrast with other characters in the novel to show the difference between a mind essentially all male or all female and the androgynous mind, a mind yearning more toward unified humanity than a single sexual identity.
The primary contrast is between Mrs. Ramsay and Lily, the artist, the individual who best understands the need for the merging of male and female. She completes her painting because she has this understanding, the fusion of seeming opposites. Yet, Lily also admires Mrs. Ramsay seeing her as one who
resolved everything into simplicity; made these angers, irritations fall off like old rags; she brought together this and that and then this, and so made out of that miserable silliness and spite. . . something--this scene on the beach, for example, this moment of friendship and liking. . . (Woolf 248-249).
Mrs. Ramsay's female mind is manifested outwardly in the roles she takes, roles as wife, mother, and hostess. Lily, on the other hand, represents the artistic temperament, and in the novel her creativity with ideas and images is set in contrast to Mrs. Ramsay's ability to understand people and life. The latter is seen as a particularly feminine capability, a feminine way of looking at the world that is beyond the male. Lily in her painting can capture a moment and make it eternal, taking it out of life, as it were, while Mrs. Ramsay deals with events in the flow of life, with all the change and confusion that this implies.
The contrasts between Lily and Mrs. Ramsay are many. Mrs. Ramsay is married and believes that the married life is the only way for a woman to fulfil herself, while Lily is unmarried and expresses herself through her painting, through...