SOURCE: “Where the Spear Plants Grew: the Ramsays' Marriage in ‘To the Lighthouse,’” in New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, edited by Jane Marcus, University of Nebraska Press, 1981, pp. 148–69.

In the following essay, Lilienfeld contends that the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay is founded on Victorian social and personal principles that are destructive to them both and that Woolf, in To the Lighthouse, is attempting to offer an alternative in the third part of the novel.

They had reached the gap between two clumps of red-hot pokers. … No, they could not share that; they could not say that. … They turned away from the view, and began to walk up the path where the silver-green spear like plants grew, arm in arm. His arm was almost like a young man's arm, Mrs. Ramsay thought, thin and hard, and she thought with delight how strong he still was, though...