Boar’s skull

The Boar’s skull is both a source of immediate fear in the nursery and a fixed presence in the abandoned house. In the children’s room, its horns and looming shadows disturb Cam and James; Mrs Ramsay covers it with her shawl and turns it, through rhythmic reassurance, into an imagined landscape. Years later the skull is still there, now mouldy among the house’s deterioration: a once-manageable domestic object made newly conspicuous by neglect.

In the Nursery

The skull has been nailed to the wall, and Mrs Ramsay regrets having allowed it to be put there. She had asked Mildred to move it, but the instruction was forgotten. Near eleven at night, Mrs Ramsay finds James awake and quarrelling, Cam sitting bolt upright, and Mildred out of bed. Cam cannot sleep with the skull in the room, while James screams if anyone touches it. The children’s distress gives the object a power its mere presence in the room might otherwise conceal.

Cam sees the horns spread across the room, and the light does not dispel her fear: wherever it is put, a shadow remains somewhere. Mrs Ramsay tries to make the skull harmless by describing it as an old black pig, like the pigs at a farm. Cam’s perception resists this practical explanation; the skull still seems to branch threateningly toward her.

Covered and Reimagined

Mrs Ramsay responds not by removing the skull but by covering it. After searching the chest of drawers for something suitable, she takes off her own shawl and winds it round the object. She then lies close beside Cam and supplies a series of gentler images: a bird’s nest, a beautiful mountain, a garden, and a place filled with flowers, bells, birds, goats, and antelopes. Cam begins repeating these images as her eyes close, and Mrs Ramsay continues in a slow, increasingly mechanical rhythm until Cam falls asleep.

The act changes what the child can bear without changing the object itself. The horns remain under the shawl; when Mrs Ramsay crosses to James’s bed, she reassures him that the skull is still there and unharmed. James checks that it has not been touched, then asks whether the family will go to the Lighthouse the next day. The scene places the skull beside the children’s need for reassurance: it is at once an unsettling physical presence and something Mrs Ramsay can temporarily render safe through care and imaginative speech.

The Skull in the Deserted House

The skull persists into the years when the house is left unattended. When Mrs McNab returns to the nursery, she complains that the rooms are damp, the plaster is falling, and the beast’s skull has gone mouldy. The complaint locates the object within a broader failure of upkeep: rain enters, rats occupy the attics, locks are missing, and doors bang. The skull that Mrs Ramsay once managed with a shawl and a story now appears as one more neglected thing in a house where no one has come to repair or remove it.

Its recurrence sharpens the contrast between the inhabited nursery and the empty house. In the earlier scene, the shawl changes the skull’s appearance for a frightened child while leaving it in place; in the later one, the shawl and the other furnishings belong to a space overtaken by damp, rats, and decay. The skull therefore connects an intimate episode of maternal care with the house’s impersonal deterioration, retaining its place even as the life around it disappears.