To The Lighthouse...Mrs. McNab

It seems to me that at the end of "Time Passes" Woolf suggests that Mrs. McNab and what she represents will save the house/world from chaos. Woolf gives a concise biography. Mrs. McNab is seventy and her life has been one of hard work and drudgery. She has "incorrigible hope" which Woolf contrasts to "the mystic, the visionary, walking the beach...stirring a puddle, looking at a stone, asking themselves 'What am I,' 'What is this?'" (131). We could equate the visionary with the Ramsays/upper middle-class Victorians. Woolf's contrast seems to be that though the idealist may be necessary to the progress of the world, it is the pragmatist's work that will save the world and keep it in order.

We could equate the idealist's visions to the technologies of the Industrial Revolution that made life better, faster, richer. The idealists, however, could not see beyond the vision and those technical advances were used against civilization during World War I. (One example is that this is the first war where airplanes were used to drop bombs on cities.)  On the other hand, the pragmatist can see the consequences and feels disapproval. Four times in the section Woolf has Mrs. McNab looking ("leering" is used several times) in the mirror and this "seeing" is always associated with hope, at one point described as "incorrigible," that is, hope that cannot be destroyed, uprooted; hope that stays regardless of upheaval.

"If the feather had fallen, if it had tipped the scale downwards, the whole house would have plunged to the depths to lie upon the sands of oblivion" (139). If Germany had won the war, civilization as the British knew it would have been doomed. "But there was a force working; something not highly conscious; something that leered, something that lurched; something not inspired to go about its work with dignified ritual or solemn chanting....Mrs. McNab, Mrs. Bast, stayed the corruption and the rot...[Thus] some rusty laborious birth seemed to be taking place" (139).

By the end of chapter IX, the house and garden are cleaned and put in order. "It was finished" (141) here refers to the cleaning of the house but it can also represent the rebuilding of the post-war world. "It was finished" is also the phrase Lily uses at the end of the novel when she completes her painting.  Change is echoed by Woolf in this repreated phrase.