Woolfish Modernism

Upon reading and talking about Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse:

Looking at the opening scene we get James Ramsay presented with two ways of looking at the world. One from his mother, that of optimism, hope, and faith, and the other from his father that of logic, reason, and disbelief.

" Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow, " said Mrs. Ramsay. " Mrs. Ramsay is the harbinger of hope for James who wishes very much to go to the lighthouse the next day. Mrs. Ramsay sees the good in providing faith and hope to her son, while Mr. Ramsay insists " 'But,' said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, 'it won't be fine.' "Mr. Ramsay's pessimistic view of the weather shapes the way he sees the world and how he wishes his son to view it as well. Life is not fair, and of course as a man of the late Victorian period Mr. Ramsay as a boy had his belief in faith dashed as a child, and does not want his son to suffer from a similar experience (Eliot's Prufrock feels the same way).

The book sets up such dichotomies of man and woman, and faith versus empirical reasoning, yet Woolf more importantly, as do many modernists, suggests that by setting us up with a third-person omniscient stream-of-consciousness narrator we are left alienated from the Dickens and Trollope and Eliot we were so used to seeing in Victorianism. Does Woolf suggest the need to feel alienated as a reader? Should we side with Mr. Ramsay and his pessimism, or opt for belief and hope in a world, where we orient ourselves towards a lighthouse: a goal, a vision through a narrative that opts for subjectification through it's characters ?