When I first read To the Lighthouse as an undergrad, I became interested in analyzing and thinking about the novel in terms of its embedded Grimm fairytale, “The Fisherman and His Wife.” Throughout “The Window,” Mrs. Ramsay reads this fairytale to her youngest son, James. The story tells of an impoverished husband and wife who catch a magic flounder that grants them wishes. The greedy wife’s demands become progressively more elaborate, ending with her desire to wield godlike powers. In the end, the hapless fisherman and his demanding wife find themselves back in their original state of squalor, the wife clearly to blame. Why would Woolf choose to enfold such a seemingly misogynistic tale into her narrative?

As a tale that lectures against the dangers of a greedy and insatiable woman, “The Fisherman and His Wife” presents gender identities and caricatures as they are most traditionally realized. Woolf, in her characteristic defiance of such images, takes the demanding wife and unfortunate fisherman figures and superimposes them over characters of the opposite sex in her text. In his constant demand of publicly appropriated praise, Mr. Ramsay bullies his wife and children with his intellectual neediness, thus finding a parallel role with that of the overbearing fisherman’s wife. The role of doting and subservient spouse thus falls on the shoulders of Mrs. Ramsay. As the painter Lily Briscoe recalls angrily after Mrs. Ramsay’s death, “That man...never gave; that man took. She, on the other hand, would be forced to give. Mrs. Ramsay had given. Giving, giving, giving, she had died—had left all this” (170). And if the couple embodies demarcated roles, then it is Lily, in her grasp of artistic power, who becomes the androgynous figure able to evade these gender expectations. Woolf’s surprising use of such a misogynist myth thus acts a revealing framework for other forces at work in the novel.

Woolf includes direct references to the fairytale in four chapters of “The Window.” As children, houseguests, and her husband bustle around her, Mrs. Ramsay sits with her son James in her lap, reading him the Grimm story. Significantly, Lily’s painting, embodying the most important creative act in the book, is of “Mrs. Ramsay reading to James” (Woolf 55). The fairy tale makes gentle intrusions throughout this section, lapping in and out of view like the waves rippling on the beach outside the family’s drawing room window. Musing on Minta and Paul, her children, her dinner party, and her husband, “Mrs. Ramsay wondered, reading and thinking, quite easily, both at the same time; for the story of the Fisherman and his Wife was like the bass gently accompanying a tune, which now and then ran up unexpectedly into the melody” (59).

This fantasy tune provides ideal ambient noise for Woolf’s critique of gender roles. Just as the hapless fisherman and flounder give and give to Ilsebill in “The Fisherman and His Wife,” the maternal Mrs. Ramsay fills the quiet gaps and inconspicuous spaces in her family’s world, incessantly giving and caring for the figures in her household and circle of friends. Though she takes satisfaction in this role, she also questions her reason for so stupendously fulfilling the demands of domesticity: “For her own self-satisfaction was it that she wished so instinctively to help, to give, that people might say of her, ‘O Mrs. Ramsay! dear Mrs. Ramsay…Mrs. Ramsay, of course!’ and need her and send for her and admire her?” (45). Drawing admiration from all, she is the figure who entertains and match-makes unmarried visitors, fusses over the children, and fills each room with a warm, maternal presence to which every character feels inextricably drawn. As Annie mentioned, her beauty and essence are magnetic.

But for all the feminine relish she finds from her role as matriarch, Mrs. Ramsay also realizes, however fleetingly, the price it exacts: “So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent” (41). Like the flounder and the fisherman, Mrs. Ramsay spends her resources on a bottomless well of need. Woolf uses this vocabulary of commodity and exchange throughout the novel. But just as in the Grimm story, constant giving to insatiable mouths incites disaster. Mrs. Ramsay, Woolf writes in brackets, does not hold unlimited resources of self to expend.

An insecure writer and philosopher, Mr. Ramsay embodies the male world burdened by its important, intellectual works, one that sees women as the figures that must provide solace and reassurance. Just as the pushy wife taxes vitality from her environment with her increasingly extravagant wishes, Mr. Ramsay harps on his incessant needs as a man of learning. The Grimm tale finds a revealing echo in Lily’s astute description: “He is petty, selfish, vain, egotistical; he is spoilt; he is a tyrant; he wears Mrs. Ramsay to death…” (28). Throughout “The Window,” this selfish vision of the world informs Mr. Ramsay’s relational interactions. As a figure of authority and dominance, the overbearing, erudite patriarch bullies his family and guests into accepting that the journey to the lighthouse cannot be made on the day when his children, especially James, desire.

As the fisherman’s wife desires the praise merited to those above her (king, pope, emperor, and God), so too the fickle Mr. Ramsay searches for ingratiating words and investments of self from the women in his life. The morning after Mrs. Ramsay dies, he, “stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out” (132), still reaching and grasping for the magical woman who fulfilled his wishes through decades of marriage and the birth of eight children. But he cannot grasp her, and when his doting fisherman and flounder figure dies, Mr. Ramsay looks for another female to fill this role. His eyes fall on the likable Lily Briscoe, Mrs. Ramsay’s character double and the woman nearest within reach. As Mr. Ramsay decides before their journey to the lighthouse in the final section of the novel, “…an enormous need urged him without being conscious what it was, to approach any woman, to force them, he did not care how, his need was so great, to give him what he wanted: sympathy” (154). But it is a role Lily knows she cannot fill, and Woolf, through artistry and defiance of gender expectations, safely prevents Lily from becoming a replacement wish-giver in her subverted Grimm fantasy.