After reading “The Window,” part one of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, I found myself particularly drawn to Mrs. Ramsay’s description of commencing the dinner service. Within this description, Mrs. Ramsay examines the “sterility of men,” through the metaphorical vehicle of a stalled watch: “Again she felt, as a fact without hostility, the sterility of men, for if she did not do it nobody would do it, and so, giving herself the little shake that one gives a watch that has stopped, the old familiar pulse began beating, as the watch begins ticking – one, two, three, one, two, three. And so on and so on, she repeated, listening to it, sheltering and fostering the still feeble pulse as one might guard a weak flame with a newspaper” (83). The passage establishes male impotence, and presents Mrs. Ramsay as the sole character that may restart, reinvigorate it. However, it is the feminine that must shake itself, who must first be reinvigorated with violent energy to find a state of normalcy. Thus erotic imagery is employed, instituted by the fleshy, vital human “pulse,” suggesting Mrs. Ramsay’s own sexual responsibility in the task of revitalization. It is this onus of responsibility that seems to continually separate her from visions of the window, light, and the Lighthouse, in which she finds joy and perhaps an escape. There is also an interesting way in which Woolf writes a rhythm or musicality into the passage. By way of alliteration, there is a feigned heartbeat created in “began beating” and “begins ticking,” as well as a certain euphony of rhyme that is mirrored later in “sheltering and fostering,” in the –ing ending. Mrs. Ramsay also alludes to the waltz in her triple time of “one, two, three” of the watches reinvigorated ticks. The passage, which begins as a description of the dinner service, has now come to signify a delightful medley of images: a dinner table full of guests, a stopped watch which has been shaken back to life, and a woman imprisoned by the need or desire to fix male impotence, who must use all her sexual prowess to fix this catastrophe, while also waltzing to pretty music, perhaps alone, as if in a child’s jewelry box. The performativity which Mrs. Ramsay seems to suggest is necessary to her role, and certainly seems to be, has trapped her in this unending waltz of regeneration, of having eight children and yet still Charles is described as sterile, of a problem that she cannot solve. It is a lovely passage, and I can’t wait to read the rest of the novel.