To the Lighthouse emphasizes Mrs. Ramsay’s physical presence and her physical beauty as characters note, with reverence, the power she seems to embody. Many of the male characters in the novel are marked by their intellectual or creative superiority; they enact the traditional role of the distinguished, intellectual, accomplished gentleman. These men are concerned with both intellectual and English identity; Mr. Ramsay, preoccupied with the longevity of his influence, worries, “The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare” (35).  Mr. Ramsay’s intellectual output is also described with military diction—he  envisions himself as a “dying hero” (35) and “the fine figure of a soldier” (36). Despite the grandiosity Mr. Ramsay and other male characters feel towards their accomplishments, they often doubt themselves and fixate on Mrs. Ramsay, and her beauty, for validation and justification of their worth. These important men, themselves embodying the masculine strengths of the English identity, desire encouragement from Mrs. Ramsay, the embodiment of the domestic and feminine values of Englishness. The text, in articulating how the men root their confidence in Mrs. Ramsay and her physicality, suggests that Mrs. Ramsay’s body itself becomes the site of a sort of national maternal hope.

Mr. Ramsay’s anxiety over the long-lasting importance of his work is subdued by his wife’s physical presence or his remembering her physical beauty. Mr. Ramsay creates for himself a dichotomy of man/woman and intellectual/physical, to soothe himself. By doing so, he better understands his place in the nation and feels his importance. As Mr. Ramsay watches his wife reading, Woolf writes, “And he wondered what she was reading and exaggerated her ignorance, her simplicity, for he liked to think that she was not clever, not book-learned at all. He wondered if she understood what she was reading. Probably not, he thought. She was astonishingly beautiful. Her beauty seemed to him, if that were possible, to increase” (121). Mr. Ramsay values his wife’s physical beauty because focusing on her appearance allows him to reduce her meaning to her body. In focusing on her physical appeal, he can ignore her mind and imagine her as ignorant and simple, which increases her beauty and encourages his own individual sense of self-worth.

In “The Window,” the pre-war section of the novel, Mrs. Ramsay’s body is established as a source of peace, rest, and encouragement. The male and female characters in the text look towards Mrs. Ramsay and feel their anxieties soothed. She possesses some power connected to a domestic and national hope; she is the maternal body appointed to take care of the home, hearth, and nation. Her hospitality, her love, and her beauty nurture the other characters and prepare them for their individual tasks in life. She empowers Paul to propose to Minta (78) thus carrying on the English nation through a new family. In the same way, her presence soothes Mr. Bankes—“the sight of her...had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem...that barbarity was tamed, the reign of chaos subdued”(47) Woolf writes—thus carrying on the English nation through intellectual victory.

However, despite the power and strength of her physical body—the maternal site of English hope—it can not endure the war, and she dies. Mrs. Ramsay’s death occurs in the war section of the novel and though her death is not explicitly caused by the war, it is thus connected to it. Significantly, the fact of her death is told through her physical absence: “Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty” (128). Lily Briscoe, especially, feels the emotional and physical weight of Mrs. Ramsay’s absence and the war’s figurative conquering of Mrs. Ramsay’s body. As Lily returns to the Ramsay house and tries again to finish her painting, she becomes overwhelmed by the void caused by Mrs. Ramsay’s death. Woolf writes, “For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? (She was looking at the drawing-room steps; they looked extraordinarily empty.) It was one body’s feeling, not one’s mind. The physical sensations that went with the bare look of the steps had become suddenly extremely unpleasant” and later: “Oh, Mrs. Ramsay! she called out silently, to that essence...that abstract one made of her” (178). Looking at the vacancy of where Mrs. Ramsay previously perched causes an emotional experience that manifests itself physically for Lily as she feels Mrs. Ramsay’s absence so deeply that she thinks of her sadness as an experience, not of mind, but of body.

The trauma and extreme nature of Lily’s loss is connected, in some way, to the greater losses caused by the war and the ruined promises made to an entire generation. For example, Woolf writes, “Somebody had said, [Lily] recalled, that when he had heard of Andrew Ramsay’s death (he was killed in a second by a shell; he would have been a great mathematician) Mr. Carmichael had “lost all interest in life’’’ (194). Elsewhere, Lily connects the physical absence of Mrs. Ramsay to the dashed hopes of Prue’s life (200-201), who, a beautiful woman herself, possessed such promise for marital and maternal greatness. In the similarities between the death of Mrs. Ramsay and the doomed fate of her children, the text suggests that Mrs. Ramsay’s passing means something more than the loss of an individual woman. As Lily notes, she remains hung up on what Mrs. Ramsay signifies, on what she represents; she focuses on Mrs. Ramsay’s “essence” or “that abstract one made of her” (178). Mrs. Ramsay becomes representational, an abstraction of meta meaning: that of loss, of dashed hopes, of the failure of the maternal nation, of the death of some aspect of the English identity in World War I.