All these simmering dilemmas come to a boil when Katharine, halfway through the novel, hears “a collection of voices” firing a salvo of questions at her: Should she mind that Rodney has transferred his affections to her cousin Cassandra? Should she let herself be seen walking outdoors with Ralph? “ ‘What are you going to do? What does honour require you to do?’ they repeated.” And indeed, for a brief moment she finds solace in the fact that, “like all people brought up in a tradition, [she] was able, within ten minutes or so, to reduce any moral difficulty to its traditional shape and solve it by the traditional answers.” It is comforting to know that “the rules which should govern the behaviour of an unmarried woman are written in red ink, graved upon marble, if, by some freak of nature, it should fall out that the unmarried woman has not the same writing scored upon her heart.” But ultimately Katharine resigns herself to the fact that “the traditional answer would be of no use to her individually” (p. 272).
They are certainly of no use to her in her tortuous relations with Ralph Denham, a solicitor with literary inclinations whom she meets at one of the Hilberys’ gatherings. From the moment he is introduced, he is an altogether more sympathetic character than Rodney. Erudite yet excitable, ambitious but strongly attached to his working-class family, possessing an “odd combination of Spartan self-control and... romantic and childish folly” (p. 25), he seems a fine match for the similarly multifaceted Katharine. But precisely because Ralph and Katharine are so alike, their union is plagued on all sides by doubt and confusion. Their chaotic courtship can make for frustrating reading—occasionally one grows weary of their endless reveries and vacillations—but it also results in some of the most ravishing passages in the novel, and one of the most moving accounts ever written of being in love.
Katharine and Ralph are both “dreamers” who have a painful and difficult time reconciling their lofty dreams—of life, art, love—to fragile reality. The very first time they meet in the Hilbery house, both are struck silent amid the smart chatter and feel “prohibited from the use of a great many convenient phrases which launch conversation into smooth waters” (p. 9). Ralph lives “a life rigidly divided into the hours of work and those of dreams” (p. 112); Katharine, too, frequently falls into “a dream state, in which... there dwelt the realities of the appearances which figure in our world; ... the things one might have felt, had there been cause; the perfect happiness of which here we taste the fragment; the beauty seen here in flying glimpses only” (p. 124). By crude contrast, voices from the real world sound to her “as if they came from people in another world, a world antecedent to her world, a world that was the prelude, the antechamber to reality” (p. 307). (Given all these meditative moments, it should not be surprising that Woolf ’s original title for the novel was
Their perpetual residence in two worlds may make Katharine a fine mathematician and Ralph a passionate poet, but it also makes for rough going on the seas of love. Having barely met her, indeed finding her combination of “quick, impulsive movements” and air of “contemplation and self-control” (p. 8) disarming, he allows a powerful and shadowy image of her to form in his brain, finding himself
much at the mercy of a phantom Katharine, who came to him when he sat alone, and answered him as he would have her answer, and was always beside him to crown those varying triumphs which were transacted almost every night, in imaginary scenes, as he walked through the lamplit streets home from the office (p. 80).
But at the same time, Ralph is “well aware that the bulk of Katharine was not represented in his dreams at all, so that when he met her he was bewildered by the fact that she had nothing to do with his dream of her” (p. 80). She has, in short, become his muse—someone who will praise his victories and spur him to new ones—before they have had a real conversation.
Sensing Katharine’s affection for him, and full of despair over his impossible love for her, Ralph becomes close to Mary Datchet, a crusader for women’s suffrage. Strolling with her in the Lincoln countryside, he realizes that his entire relationship with Katharine “had been made up of dreams” (p. 218) and makes a halfhearted proposal to Mary, admitting, “I never said I loved you.” When Mary understandably tells him that she has no interest in a loveless marriage, a heated Ralph expounds on the risk of a loving one:
“But love—don’t we all talk a great deal of nonsense about it? ... It’s only a story one makes up in one’s mind about another person, and one knows all the time it isn’t true. Of course one knows; why, one’s always taking care not to destroy the illusion. One takes care not to see them too often, or to be alone with them for too long together. It’s a pleasant illusion, but if you’re thinking of the risks of marriage, it seems to me that the risk of marrying a person you’re in love with is something colossal” (p. 220).
This searingly painful outburst goes a long way toward explaining the fondness poets have for acquiring muses to whom they have never spoken, as well as the popularity of long-distance romances—be they the lovers Heloise and Abelard or simply couples on opposite coasts—through the ages. Katharine also despairs of intimacy with Ralph, confessing to her mother that “it’s impossible that we should ever marry.... At the same time... we can’t live without each other” (p. 421).
But Ralph and Katharine cannot abandon each other so easily. A significant turning point in their relationship occurs when they visit Kew Gardens. Walking among the splendid botanical profusion, the pair achieve a new intimacy when Katharine asks Ralph “to inform her about flowers,” and he points out that
they were, in the first instance, bulbs or seeds, and later, living things endowed with sex, and pores, and susceptibilities which adapted themselves by all manner of ingenious devices to live and beget life... by processes which might reveal the secrets of human existence (p. 288).
Far from being shocked by his frankness, Katharine is thrilled: “For weeks she had heard nothing that made such pleasant music in her mind. It wakened echoes in all those remote fastnesses of her being where loneliness had brooded so long undisturbed” (p. 288). For the first time, the couple seem aware of one another not as ghosts but as human beings with bodies and desires. Soon Katharine is intrigued by some orchids, and so, “in defiance of the rules she stretched her ungloved hand and touched one” (p. 289). By the end of the visit and the chapter, she reflects that her love for Ralph may not be hopeless after all:
Why, she reflected, should there be this perpetual disparity between the thought and the action, between the life of solitude and the life of society, this astonishing precipice on one side of which the soul was active and in broad daylight, on the other side of which it was contemplative and dark as night? Was it not possible to step from one to the other, erect, and without essential change? Was this not the chance he offered her—the rare and wonderful chance of friendship? (p. 295).
Further fears ensue in the form of what Ralph calls “lapses”—painful moments when the lovers “cease to be real” (p. 412) to each other—but from this point forth, both Katharine and Ralph grow increasingly eager to move from dreams to reality, from night to day. Ralph writes a letter to Katharine in which, fully aware of the risks of their love, he argues for it anyway in a guarded encomium, since
although human beings are woefully ill-adapted for communication, still, such communion is the best we know; moreover, they make it possible for each to have access to another world independent of personal affairs, a world of law, of philosophy, or more strangely a world such as he had had a glimpse of the other evening when together they seemed to be sharing something, creating something, an ideal—a vision flung out in advance of our actual circumstances (pp. 423-424).
The lovers now “shared the same sense of the impending future, vast, mysterious, infinitely stored with undeveloped shapes which each would unwrap for the other to behold” (p. 429-430). Solitude and company are not mutually exclusive. Emotional carnage gives way to boundless joy. And reality, at least for the time being, wins out over dreams.
