IF I find myself growing more appreciative of Lily Briscoe, I also draw closer to Mrs. Ramsay, in whom my interest has shifted over the years. These days I’m focused on her standing as an older woman. Her fatigue at having to worry about the cost of fixing the greenhouse roof, her astonishment that the lives of the Mannings have gone on for twenty-five years without her having once thought about them, her looking across the length of the dinner table at her husband and having the double vision of him now and as a young man helping her out of a boat, her pleasure in the beauty of her daughter Prue, and generally, the depth in her life of time past and passing that Woolf conveys so brilliantly—these are details and aspects of the character and story that hold new resonance for me. When Mrs. Ramsay thinks of the future, she thinks of others’ futures—that her son Andrew will get a scholarship and Prue will be happier than other people’s daughters. She is excited that Paul and Minta are engaged and determined that Lily and William Bankes must marry. Certainly some older women, in and out of fiction, can still have personal adventures: they can work, travel, love, suffer, and possibly, even, themselves decide to marry (an opposite-sex or same-sex partner). But Mrs. Ramsay’s bright hopes are for others, not herself—a function of her stage of life as well as character.
Mrs. Ramsay links for me with three other memorable older women in modern British fiction: Forster’s Mrs. Wilcox from Howards End and Mrs. Moore from A Passage to India and, another Woolf heroine, the eponymous Mrs. Dalloway. Of these, Mrs. Moore and Mrs. Ramsay don’t even have first names. And although Mrs. Wilcox and Mrs. Dalloway do—Ruth and Clarissa—they’re not Janes or Beckys or Isabels or Rhodas, young women whose stories we read to watch their destinies unfold, to see what husbands’ surnames they will succeed or fail to acquire. Mrs. Wilcox, Mrs. Ramsay, and Mrs. Dalloway have longstanding husbands and with these a settled social position; Mrs. Moore is a widow. All four are devoted mothers, women who at least in conventional terms have ceded the place of narrative adventure to the next generation. Yet they draw us into their stories. We care who they are and wish for their happiness. The question is not what they will do for themselves—their moods change but not their place in the world—but how they will exert maturely formed selves. Our concern is with their being rather than their becoming, and the palpable mystery of that being seeps like air into others around them. No matter that three, including Mrs. Ramsay, die well before the end of the works in which they appear and death figures prominently in the thoughts of Mrs. Dalloway, the only one still alive on her story’s final page. They are potent figures, lingering in the minds and hearts of those they have touched. You might say they are as potent in death as in life. Potent and creative.
Whereas I used to think of Mrs. Ramsay as the mesmerizing living character of “The Window,” now I pay more attention to her haunting presence in “The Lighthouse.” The future for her that is realized in the novel’s final section—when so many of her hopes for others have proved so poignant (Andrew dies in the war and Prue in childbirth; the Rayley marriage turns out badly; Lily and William Bankes don’t marry)—is as a memory in others’ lives. I think about this kind of future, too, how my children and grandchildren might remember me, and I hope their memories of what I was or said or did, perhaps some remembered moment of fun or counsel, might somehow linger, as if out of time, to comfort and inspire them, to help them to greater happiness. There’s a way of being older that seems to make you more detached and impersonal, less invested in self. Mrs. Ramsay has this quality. I like it in her and aspire to it in myself.
This being said, I know I’m not ready yet to become a permanent “wedge of darkness,” Mrs. Ramsay’s metaphor for her escape from self. I hope still to experience an abundance of moments when life coalesces into wholeness and those inevitably succeeding moments when these become “already the past.” This is our life in time, as Virginia Woolf so beautifully captures its poignant rhythms in her fiction. “So you’re still at it,” my son remarked when I told him some time back of a new important relationship in my life. Yes I am. I have formed a partnership with a wonderful woman who brings to my life new hope for the future, a new chance to mitigate separateness, at least as much as two people can. Her name is Mary Edith Mardis, and she’s an artist—a photographer. She also reminds me a bit of Hans and Ingeborg in Thomas Mann’s story, not only in being blond and blue-eyed but also in seeming more readily sociable than I am. She has a great laugh and an easy manner. And the great thing is that she has chosen me as well as I her. Yet part of me, I know, still remains a Tonio Kröger—or perhaps I should say a Lily Briscoe—buried within myself, always marked as a little
