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PURLEY WOMAN BUT…:THE CASE OF MRS. RAMSAY IN

VIRGINIA WOOLF’S TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

Dr. Ernest L. VEYU

The idea of the woman as an estranged and non-conformist person is one of the concerns of Virginia Woolf in To the Lighthouse. Mrs Ramsay leads a life that, in all respects is feminine. She is a traditional woman in a modern setting and a zealous matchmaker in a system where marriage is scorned. She rejects the academic world of her husband and inwardly wants to escape from the tyranny of her husband and societal injustice. Her early and sudden death is a form of exile. No sooner is she with people, than she wants to go away. Virginia Woolf remarks that, “It was her instinct to go, an instinct like the swallows for the south, the artichokes for the sun” (Lighthouse 196).

Although she invites very many people to live with them, to the point that the house is always full, she only tolerates company. People to her are like words to a poet or paint and brush to the painter. As soon as she is done with them, she forgets about them, but remains with the satisfaction of having shaped their destinies (Lighthouse 50).

Her mindset, manner and handling of her husband, children, the guests in the house and life’s situations in general, are artistic. Since hers is a mastery of life, Gideon Muluh has rightly called her a proficient artist of life. When she is not there, things fall apart and get beyond correlation (Majumdar and MacLaurin 196).

She is involved in the lives of others, always with the intention of influencing them and altering their lives. She is a fervent believer in the eternal value of the woman, of marriage, and childbearing. Hermione Lee says she is beautiful, queenly, short-sighted, philanthropic and inventive. Her intimacy with her children nourishes her natural tendency towards fantasy and exaggeration. She is associated with poetry and rests on the hard realities of a man’s world like a child (118).

We get to learn from Mrs. Ramsay that there is an art and a joy in being a mother. She is of the same mind as Gorge Allen who celebrates the role of the mother in childbearing, child upbringing and its contribution to nation building. He is of the opinion that if women realised how noble and important a task it is that falls upon mothers, they would ask no other. If they realised how magnificent a nation might be moulded by mothers who devoted themselves faithfully and earnestly to their great privilege, they would be proud to carry out the duties of maternity (29-30). She is indeed proud of being a mother, yet her motherliness is done with something otherworldly; with a form of inward detachment and freedom.

In her service to her husband and to the male gender as a whole, her aim is to better their condition. When she looks at the men sitting round her dinner table, she realises she must do something, in her right as artist of life, to help them. She notices that nothing seems to hold with the men as they sit before her. Without being forced, she knows that it is all left to her to do something about it:

The whole of the effort of merging and flowing rested on her. Again she felt as a fact without hostility, the sterility of men, for if she did not do it, nobody will do it, and so, giving herself the little shake one gives a watch that has stopped, the old familiar pulse began (Lighthouse 84.)

Bettering the male folk is at the back of Virginia Woolf’s mind, and she seems to let Mrs. Ramsay carry it through. Bernard Blackstone is of the opinion that Woolf is not out to canonise her sex as a whole, but to portray the change in the woman that has to free the male intellect from its conceptual chains and to enrich and fertilise it (28). Mrs. Ramsay does this perfectly well, without subjecting herself to the entire stream of the male chauvinism around her.

Mrs. Ramsay, for all she does and for all her involvement in the lives of others, remains in her own world. She does to others what Virginia Woolf believes the artist should do – expose himself or herself to life and yet be detached from it (Qtd. in Ford 257). She reaches out to others only to return to her world of intuition. She too, like the modern artist, has her subtle way of being estranged and non-conformist.

Mrs. Ramsay seems to have no roots. Nothing is ever told about her youth, infancy and parentage. We do not know what she is called before she gets married. She tells no story about herself as Charles Tansley and the others do. She arranges for people to marry but no one ever knows exactly how she comes into her own marriage. From that background, she is eternally distant and foreign. Her past is an inviolable possession.

When we would have associated her with London, she moves to Hebrides. In this move away from London, though it be called only a resort home, she has rejected the bustle of the town. When she has to go shopping in town, it is called a dull errand. From Hebrides, her wish is to go to the lighthouse. When denied her, or when circumstances do not unite in favour of this trip, she is determined to go somewhere else: she dies.

It is worthwhile to state that in modern literature, death is a means unto personal emancipation. In Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Edna Pontellier goes swimming and wilfully swims on eternally. This is her way of escaping from what she can bear no more. Virginia Woolf did the same. Death becomes an escape route to the woman. Cirlot describes death exactly in terms of liberation: “Death is a supreme state of liberation. In the positive sense then, this enigma symbolises the transformation of all things, the progress of evolution, dematerialization” (78).

In To the Lighthouse, there is a close association of Mrs. Ramsay and the bird of escape, as seen below:

And she opened the book and began reading here and there at random, and as she did so she felt that she was climbing backwards, shoving her way up under petals that curved over her, so that she only knew this is white, this is red…She read and turned the pages, swinging herself, zigzagging this way and that, from one line to another, from one red and white flower to another, until a little sound roused her (Lighthouse 119.)

This little sound that rouses her is made by her husband as though in an intuitive desperate attempt to trap her back to himself. But soon again, she is in the same mood and desire for flight and climbing up branches; “this way and that, laying hands on one flower and then on another…she was ascending, she felt, on to the top, on to the summit. How satisfying! How restful!” (Lighthouse 119).

The purpose of her flight is an attempt to find a better life, a better abode, away from the poverty, from the inadequacy of human relationships, from the green house bill, from the oppressive demands of her husband and the lot of other such things. All the odds of everyday life generally stick to her mind. When she is conscious of these odds, she thinks of the birds in the trees and the distant moon as though wishing to fly there. Her sudden death is most likely the accomplishment of this flight motif.

It is part of her children’s play to rout out the birds and cause them to fly away. She enjoys watching the birds under the threat of her kids, especially the two birds that she names John and Mary. At one of such moments, she is looking out of the window, and sees the following scene:

The rooks trying to decide which tree to settle on. Every time they seemed to change their minds and rose up to the air again, because, she thought, the old rook, the father rook, old Joseph was her name for him, was a bird of trying and difficult disposition. He was a disreputable old bird, with half his wing feathers missing…they were actually fighting, Joseph and Mary were actually fighting. Anyhow they all went up again, and the air was shoved aside by their black wings cut into exquisite scimitar shapes (Lighthouse 80.)

Old Joseph can be no one else but her husband; a bird of trying and difficult disposition. She sees no escape for her Joseph, with half his wing feathers missing. However, she envisages the possibility of her own flight with bliss: “The movement of the wings beating out, out, out – she could never describe it accurately enough to please herself – was one of the loveliest to her” (Lighthouse 80).

During dinner, in the crowd of her children and the visitors, she feels herself in an eddy and drifting away. She lives with a sense of being past everything, out of everything. Jasper Ramsay remarks that their mother lives in another division of the world (Lighthouse 81).

Mrs. Ramsay’s desire to withdraw, to be alone is stronger than one would suspect from a casual reading of the text. Lily Briscoe, an artist, is quick to take note of it. She discovers that Mrs. Ramsay is drifting into the strange no-man’s world where to follow people is impossible and yet their going inflicts a chill on those who watch them go. She wishes she could follow Mrs. Ramsay in this flight of hers, but cannot. Like the rest, she can only follow her with her eyes as one follows a fading ship until the sails have sunk beneath the horizon (Lighthouse 84).

What has been celebrated by many critics as the submission and obedience of Mrs. Ramsay is actually the artist’s withdrawal from conflict and stress, but not resignation to a subservient position. Deep down of her, she holds differing opinions and notions, shielded by her desire to manage men and situations. Outwardly, she chooses what the men like as expressed in Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale, where a woman should help her man to drudge, set guard upon his goods and check the waste; “all that her husband likes is to her taste, she never once says ‘no’ when he says ‘yes’. ‘Do this’, says he; ‘already done’, she says” (377).

This is exactly the kind of obedience Mr. Ramsay requires and this also is the kind of obedience Mrs. Ramsay sets out to offer him, but in the long run, she is the key to his life in almost everything. In stooping to him, she conquers. Mr. Ramsay;

Wanted to be taken within the circle of life, warmed and soothed, to have his senses restored to him, his barrenness made fertile, and all the rooms of the house made full of life – the drawing room, the kitchen; above the kitchen the bedrooms; and beyond them the nurseries, they must be filled with life (Lighthouse 37.)

Her traditional shade of the woman is also a rejection of the current turn in the relationship between the sexes in her milieu. She is an opponent to uncertain change in the face of an evolving society. Since it is unsure and uncertain where these changes will lead to, she prefers the security of the conventional woman. She prefers the detached tranquillity of the home; no job to run to, no queries to answer, and no meetings to attend.

She loves the company of children as a means of escape from the complex world of the mature. She wishes they do not grow so she may forever keep her refuge in them. Her question is: Why should they grow up so fast? Why should they go to school? She also thinks if they grow, they will not be as happy anymore. In her thinking, the fully grown and mature are a sad lot. Therefore, she chooses out of that community by wishing that her children do not grow, and by withdrawing from it herself.

Her interest in the marriage of others and the endless struggle to make matches are also a desperate attempt to flee her own difficult marriage, with an overbearing husband. When the affair she is arranging for Paul and Minta begins to succeed, she is happy with the happiness she would have had for the success of her own marriage. Her joy is expressed in the passage that follows:

Mrs. Ramsay became like a girl of twenty, full of gaiety. A mood of revelry soon took possession of her. Of course they must go; of course they must go, she cried, laughing; and running down the last three or four steps quickly, she began turning from one to the other and laughing and drawing Minta’s wrap round her and saying she only wished she could come too (Lighthouse 116-117.)

Since her beauty is part of her charm, she often withdraws to ensure by mirror and make-up that she is distinctly beautiful. She stands distinguished from the other women and admired by all the men around her. She thinks that she is a unique creature, such that the ill-treatment from her husband does not alter her self-image.

She would be in a crowd, and then make off at once with a sense of secrecy to do something alone. She does not cut herself away from the society with as severing a blade as do Mr. Carmichael and Lily Briscoe , since she must be in the midst of people in order to influence then.

She is purely woman in every aspect of the word, but does not suffer the loss of her identity, and the exercise of her talents. In her own shade, she does better by submission, what the modern woman generally chooses to do by rebellion. Through her life, Virginia Woolf suggests that submission could be a tool for emancipation in the hands of a well-meaning woman.

REFERENCES

Blackstone, Bernard. British Writers. London: The British Council, 1983.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. New York: Penguin Inc.,

1951.

Chopin, Kate. The Awakening and Selected Stories. Louisiana: The

Penguin American Library and the State University Press, 1969.

Cirlot, J. E. A Dictionary of Symbols. New York: Pengamon Press, 1965.

Ford, Boris. The Modern Age: A Guide to English Literature. London:

Cassell and Company Ltd., 1963.

Allen, George. “Plain Words on the Woman Question.” Women in

Public: The Women’s Movement 1850 – 1900. Ed. Patricia Hollis. London: George Allen and Union Ltd, 1979: 29-30.

Lee, Hermione. The Novels of Virginia Woolf. London: Methuen and Co.

Ltd., 1967.

Majumdar, Robin, and Allen MacLaurin. Virginia Woolf: The Critical

Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975.

Woolf, Virginia. To The Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich Publishers, 1989.

About the Author

Dr. Ernest L. Veyu is a researcher and Part-time Lecturer of English Literature in the University of Yaounde 1. His major area of interest is English Literature of the modern period. He has recently developed an interest in women studies.

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