In class discussions of To the Lighthouse strong opinions get expressed. Students champion Mrs. Ramsay over Mr. Ramsay, whom they tend to see as arid and egotistical, and many deem the Ramsay marriage a failure. They point to its conflicts and tensions and find unpersuasive the final line of “The Window” section: “She had not said it; yet he knew,” Woolf’s assertion that Mrs. Ramsay has “triumphed” in an indirect expression of love for her husband. To some Mrs. Ramsay seems smug and controlling—though perhaps this is not surprising since even Lily Briscoe, so mesmerized within the novel by Mrs. Ramsay and so “in love with them all,” acknowledges “there must have been people who disliked her very much,” who found her “too sure, too drastic.” Students seeking to be more analytic write papers about Mrs. Ramsay’s role as a participant in the Freudian triangle. Or cast her as a Jungian archetype of the great mother. Or see the yearning of the other characters for her, and their failure to possess her, as an expression of Lacanian desire that must always remain unfulfilled. And so it goes.
My own young take on Mrs. Ramsay was to see her as the creative center of the novel, almost a kind of artist—not one who is separate like Stephen or Tonio but rather one who dispels separateness in those extraordinary transcendent moments.
I was fascinated by the moment when Mrs. Ramsay contemplates an inanimate object—the lighthouse—and essentially merges with it. In the novel’s third-person indirect discourse, the narrator tells us that
often she [Mrs. Ramsay] found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at—that light, for example . . . . It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leaned to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself.
Mrs. Ramsay merges so completely with the lighthouse beam that looking at it, “it seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her eyes,” and the character feels, “It is enough! It is enough!” Throughout the novel, individuals search anxiously for meaning and coherence in their fleeting lives. Here the searcher is rewarded. Life—if only for a moment (Mrs. Ramsay relinquishes her out-of-body state to return to her web of human attachments; we next see her engaged in random chatter with her husband as they stroll across the lawn)—is enough.
I have never felt myself to be one with a thing. Perhaps the closest I’ve come is at the ocean, where I truly lose the sense of time as I succumb to the water’s vastness and rhythms. Virginia Woolf knows the dangers of such identification. If Mrs. Ramsay is not to be “blown forever outside the loop of time,” like Rhoda in The Waves, or lapse into insanity like Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway when he confuses himself with a tree, she must be able to move from intense to surface levels of existence, from the life that denies the individual body to the life that is lived in it. Mrs. Ramsay breaks her bond with the lighthouse by seeing it “with some irony.” She realizes that it is “so much her, yet so little,” and she calls out to her husband who has been waiting for her to emerge from her reverie.
I love the way Virginia Woolf passes from one consciousness to another, the way she shows the shifts and shoals in human intercourse. She sees that we are opaque to one another, that we use others to bolster our own egotism. And yet communication occurs. I am one of those readers who see the Ramsays’ marriage in a favorable light. But I also think its successes are largely Mrs. Ramsay’s doing.
Mrs. Ramsay has seemed to me the heroine of To the Lighthouse not only because everyone in the book, from her husband to her children to Lily and even disagreeable Charles Tansley, her husband’s disciple, is in love with her but also because more than any of the other characters, she rejects “inventing differences” and strives to bring people together in the face of powerful forces that keep them apart. I find it interesting to compare Woolf’s sense of the factors that impede connection with E. M. Forster’s. As does he, she understands differences of class and gender and all the slights and wounds and miscommunications they can cause. But added to these is something else, something more basic. Morally condemning egotistical individuality, she nonetheless sees that human beings must maintain their “screens,” as she puts it in a diary entry, to preserve their sanity. “If we had not this device for shutting people off from our sympathies,” she writes, “we might dissolve utterly; separation would be impossible. But the screens are in excess; not the sympathy.”
At the dinner gathering, which is the culmination of the novel’s opening section, the screens, because of Mrs. Ramsay, not so much let down as become transparent. Woolf builds the scene for twenty pages in a fascinating crescendo. The gong sounds, bringing to a common table the people who have come and gone throughout the day. But when Mrs. Ramsay takes her place at its head, she feels that “nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate.” She is overwhelmed by the barrenness of her life, the shabbiness of the room, and even the depressing length of the table.
If the general gloom is to be alleviated, Mrs. Ramsay knows she must exercise her special feminine qualities of sympathy and tact and take upon herself “the whole effort of merging and flowing and creating.” Woolf shows how hard this effort is, how recalcitrant are the individuals around the table. But finally, almost magically, the movement
