To the Lighthouse Lesson Plan

Why does Mrs. Ramsay revere Mr. Ramsay if she hates his pursuit of truth with no regard for people’s feelings? What is more important—the truth or people’s feelings?

The novel does not necessarily give us answers to these questions. Mrs. Ramsay thinks Mr. Ramsay is very smart, and looks up to him because of this. But she cannot stand the way he dashes James's hopes to go to the Lighthouse, even if he's correct that the weather may be bad. Woolf does not tell readers which character is "right"; indeed, modernism as a whole does not present the world as having concrete truths the way previous literature did. Readers get many views of a character or an idea in the novel, but...