Mrs. Ramsay - A Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma, Squeezed Into a Book That's Just a Little Too... Tight.

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse holds a myriad of characters, the most interesting and enigmatic of whom would probably be Mrs. Ramsay. The mother of eight and wife to a rather dry intellectual, Mrs. Ramsay consistently contradicts herself. She finds ways to belittle herself next to her husband, and in the same chapter raise herself up as a beautiful, almost goddess-like woman. She both feels powerful and powerless, in an interesting mix of feelings which, if anything, makes her more difficult to understand, rather than shedding light on her personality.

When she reads to her child, James, Mrs. Ramsay contemplates her relationship with her husband, and concludes that “she did not like, even for a second, to feel finer than her husband” (Woolf 42). Interestingly, she even feels that she can’t trust the truth of her thoughts around her husband, as if having true thoughts would make her better than her husband, who prides himself on his intellectualism. That she doesn’t like to feel as if she’s better than her husband points to a classic ideal of the nineteenth century (and even into the twentieth and sometimes today) that the woman was less than the man in a relationship – property for the man to do with as he pleases. It would appear that Mrs. Ramsay conforms to this ideal, that she must always be lesser than her husband – the greater of the two parts of the marriage. However, this represents only one side of Mrs. Ramsay’s proverbial coin. When she isn’t in close proximity to her husband (in either body or mind), she has a very different view of herself. When Mr. Carmichael is over, she admits that, “She bore about with her, she could not help knowing it, the torch of her beauty,” and goes on to describe her own beauty in a very positive sense (44). This first person description, coming again directly from Mrs. Ramsay, depicts the startling foil within Mrs. Ramsay herself. On one side, she adamantly wishes to be lesser than her husband, on the other she clearly knows she’s a very fine, beautiful woman. That she feels two extremes of the spectrum indicates that she really doesn’t know how to feel about herself, and as allows others to define her self-image.

Once more, when Mrs. Ramsay plays with James and thinks about his later life, she thinks how he won’t ever be as happy later as he was when he was a child, but , she “stopped herself, remembering how it angered her husband that she should say that” (62). Even in thought, Mrs. Ramsay has a sense of apprehension towards doing something which might make her husband upset – in this moment, she’s fully incapable of having an independent thought. Society and a very, very long marriage have indoctrinated her to completely accept her husband’s values, even when they are completely different from her own. This Mrs. Ramsay has a completely different outlook from the one who flaunted and openly acknowledged the bright torch that is her beauty. And yet, when Mr. Ramsay leaves her mind, she asserts, “No happiness lasted; she knew that” (67). It would seem that her only encumbrance to being able to form her own thoughts and ideas is her cynical, dry, and even childish husband. As Mrs. Ramsay features prominently in the novel (one could even say her character is the most important), clearly her relationship with Mr. Ramsay is also pivotal. Mr. Ramsay drives her character to be so enigmatic, and quite paradoxical, even. Mrs. Ramsay’s twistedness of character provides an un-grounding point for the rest of the characters. Where everyone else has a set of characteristics that do not seem to change, Mrs. Ramsay finds herself in a constant state of flux depending upon whom she surrounds herself with. As the main character, how, then, can she become dynamic if she already changes her state of mind and being just because of the people she surrounds herself with??

I’d propose (and I’m going out on a limb here, because I’ve never read Woolf before), that she may find a state of steadiness – she can no longer change her mind every so often, but comes to a point where she must choose something and stay with it, thus making a reverse in the world of dynamic characters, and coming to rest in one place rather than finding many new ideas to change her perspective. But, that last bit we’ll have to leave to the novel and each one’s own imagination!