The famous dinner scene in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

The dinner scene - toward the end of the long first section of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse - is a classic example of modernism in literature, a scene in which the author's narration (3rd person) seems to flow among the adults (there are 15 at the table I think, including the 8 children, most of whom have almost no role in the novel or at least the narrator has no access to their interior lives - contrast w/ Faulkner? - which is probably a good thing, w/ Woolf sensing where her strengths and weaknesses lay), and flow is the right metaphor - building off "stream" of consciousness but in this instance not one consciousness but many. Many small interior dramas play out over the course of the dinner, most notably Mrs. Ramsay's continued attempt to play the good hostess and, to a degree, matchmaker, but also we see the insecurity of the academics - Mr. Ramsay and his acolyte Tanley - worried about their stature in the world and missing the life around them; we see a few loves blooming, or potentially so: Minto and, what's his name?, the handsome young man who walks to the seacoast with he and gallantly (stupidly) pledges to find her lost brooch (anyone knows it's washed away to the sea), and Lily Briscoe (perhaps the character closest to VW herself?, unsure of herself socially, a bit of an outsider and eccentric, dedicated to her art - though in an amateur way, unlike VW) and Bankes (?), the self-confident, widowed scientist - but we also sense that neither of these relationships will develop, nor will Tanleys with Prue (let alone his fascination w/ the much older Mrs. Ramsay) - there's so damn much insecurity and propriety in this assemblage. Any reader has to admire Woolf's craftsmanship not only in executing this complex scene but in setting up the back stories for most of the characters over the span of the first 150 or so pages; yet - each time I've read this section I've wished the stakes were higher, that they'd really gotten into some kind of debate or argument, that someone would do or say something outrageous and dramatic, that we could sense someone's life was at a point of crisis and that this dinner would be a turning point in someone's life. This scene is like an artful painting that never quite grabs you with its beauty, insight, or emotion.

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