Christopher Brown – 20c Lit, 11

Paper 2, 11/07
Mr. Ramsay, the Modern Man

“His arms, though stretched out, remained empty”; this is Mr.

Ramsay’s predicament in To the Lighthouse (128). Perhaps the most
splitting event of the novel, Mrs. Ramsay’s death affects Mr. Ramsay
more than anyone else. It leaves him dazed, lost—as if part of himself
has died—or as if he has lost an important means of life-support. For
Lily Briscoe, the Ramsay children, and Mr. Carmichael, the event is sad,
but not tragic. For Mr. Ramsay, however, the loss is grievous.
Mr. Ramsay is a man of modernity, and as such, he lives a little
apart from reality. His choice of profession, however, is one in which
his intellectual activities and highest hopes are especially incongruous
with organic, social life. In contrast, Mrs. Ramsay serves as his link to
the world and earthy happiness, things only accessible to him while
she lives. When she dies, Mr. Ramsay is lost in the ephemerality of his
ethereal syllogisms. He seems genuinely a man unsuited to familial
roles, which raises the question of why he married at all.
Near the end of the boat ride to the lighthouse, James thinks that
Mr. Ramsay looks “as if had become physically what was always at the
back of both of their minds–that loneliness which was for both of them
the truth about things” (202-3). Mr. Ramsay’s silent book-reading in the
boat seems peacefully resigned, as if he is in his natural state. Perhaps
this loneliness was at the back of his mind the whole time, but Mrs.
Ramsay kept it quarantined safely in a corner while she lived, through
her constant efforts. It was certainly because of her that Mr. Ramsay
became a father as well as a philosopher.
William Bankes recalls a segment of memory, or imagination, of
Mr. Ramsay before he married. He pictures Mr. Ramsay walking alone,
“by himself hung round with that solitude which seemed to be his nat-
ural air” (20). Then Mr. Ramsay sees a hen with her chicks huddled un-
der her, at which he pauses and merely utters, “‘Pretty-pretty,’ [with]
an odd illumination in…his heart” (21). Soon after this incident, Mr.
Ramsay married, and his friendship with Bankes faded. The marriage
appears as an animal lapse of judgment—a life-altering chink in the im-
pervious outlandishness of his philosophizing.
Mr. Ramsay, father of eight, is naturally a modern pedant. He is
the epitome of the modern man—conceited and caught up in himself.
He seems dissatisfied with normal life, perhaps because the workings
in the Ramsay family are melodramatic and generally inconsequential.
Mr. Ramsay’s highest passions do not translate to the living world—the
world that the rest of the family lives in, and over which Mrs. Ramsay
presides.
In an essay that queries, “Where Does Q Leave Mr. Ramsay?,”
Sandra Donaldson presents Mr. Ramsay as a man caught up in logical
syllogisms, too distracted by the symbols to experience reality. She in-
terprets Mr. Ramsay’s ruminations on Q, R and Z thus: “Symbolic logic
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employs the smallest unit of written language, the letter, whose dis-
creteness distracts Mr. Ramsay in his search for meaning in his life and
work” (Donaldson 329). The problem is not with the logic; instead, “one
of Mr. Ramsay's main troubles is that, as a man, he is only too mortal”
(332). He is self-professedly not one of those savants who scoff at the
linearity of the alphabet of philosophy, and are instantly at each letter
equally. He is limited by his mortality and stuck interminably at the let-
ter Q.
In this predicament of mortality and humanity, Mr. Ramsay is
caught unhappily between the two extremes of familial fatherhood and
philosophical ingenuity. Donaldson points out one a passage wherein
Mr. Ramsay is quite open and revelatory; he recounts at length his
philosophical potency, but ends with his lamenting complaint, “But the
father of eight children has no choice,” which is his rationalization for
not being a genius (Woolf 44). It is as if his fatherhood was an unfortu-
nate accident, which is true only because he holds so tightly to his
philosophical aspirations.
Donaldson, finally, contrasts Mr. Ramsay’s philosophizing with
Lily’s painting, both of which are works in progress. But the difference
is that Lily is hardly as dedicated to her painting as Mr. Ramsay is to his
work; or rather, she is much less obsessive about it. Lily is able to es-
cape happily into the life of the family, and this is what makes her the
savant, in her own field, with a proficiency to which Mr. Ramsay can
only aspire. At the dinner, Lily sits thoughtfully vindicating William
Bankes of his pitiableness. Then, as if inspired by this banality, sud-
denly, “In a flash she saw her picture and thought, Yes, I shall put the
tree further in the middle; then I shall avoid that awkward space.
That’s what I shall do” (Woolf 84, emphasis added by Donaldson). Lily
has made the jump to Z. Similarly, Lily’s description of Mr. Ramsay’s
philosophical work is perfectly simplistic. On asking Andrew to describe
his father’s work, he tells her to think of a kitchen table without seeing
one in the real world. This is only too easy for her: “she always saw
clearly before her a large kitchen table” (23). Lily cannot even compre-
hend the gap that plagues Mr. Ramsay.
Mr. Ramsay, meanwhile, is stuck painfully at Q. Part of Mr. Ram-
say’s problem is that he is lamentably unaware of social formalities.
When he first appears in “The Window,” he is sadistically insisting, to
his youngest son, that they will not be able to go to the lighthouse the
next day. Regardless of how accurate his predications of foul weather
are, his negativity estranges his son. When for the second time he
states his ruling, he tries to “soften his voice,” “in deference to Mrs.
Ramsay,” but the result is “awkward”; his attempt to sound genial is a
failure, because the content of the words is intrinsically disagreeable to
James (14). Mr. Ramsay is tactless, and we see the consequence in
James’ murderous intentions, which instantly form at his father’s first
“it won’t be fine” (4). This is one of Mr. Ramsay’s flaws: “He was incap-
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able of untruth…never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure

or convenience of any mortal being” (4). He lives in a world of logic
and a sort of stoicism—wherein everything seems crystalline.
During the boat ride, James reflects why he disdains his father
so. Since his youth, he has treasured his murderous inclinations toward
his father, but he actually wishes to kill, not Mr. Ramsay, but the “thing
that descended on him…that fierce sudden black-winged harpy, with
its talons and its beak all hard and cold, that struck and struck at you”
(184). He imagines what Mr. Ramsay could do to be a better person;
“he might be pressing a sovereign into some frozen old woman’s hand
in the street…he might be shouting out…he might be waving his arms
in the air with excitement” (184). But this behavior does not befit Mr.
Ramsay; it is simply outside his nature.
At the end of the day in “The Window,” the last we see of Mrs.
Ramsay alive, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are alone together. She yearns for
her husband’s endorsement of the newly anticipated marriage of Paul
and Minta, which would reflect on their own marriage. On the other
hand, he “wanted something–wanted the thing she always found it so
difficult to give him”; he wants his wife’s approval of his own life (123).
He wants her to say she loves him, but she strangely finds this difficult.
She easily reads his facial expression that says, “You are more beauti-
ful than ever” (123). Perhaps, she recognizes the seriousness of his in-
tellectual efforts, and feels a spoken “I love you” would be insufficient.
But returning his look, she conveys to him that she loves him in such a
way that “He could not deny it” (124).
Their conversation resembles in some way the manner in which
Virginia Woolf presents her characters—like “a company of gnats…in
an invisible elastic net”—as a vague conglomeration that feeds on its
ambiguity in order to appear more complex than an opaque sack could
(25). Woolf’s style of presenting characters in a nonlinear series of
snapshots seeks to create fuller characters than she ever could by pre-
cise description. Likewise, the vagueness of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay’s
private conversation seeks to surmount the limitedness of the spoken
word. And it works; they read the expression of the other with more
gravity than words could convey. But perhaps because the effect is so
internal, it is more subject to the decay of time. As soon as Mrs. Ram-
say is no longer constantly present to provide such assurance, Mr.
Ramsay flounders. The wordless gesture appeals to Mr. Ramsay’s intu-
itive side, what little there is of it, but eludes the grasp of his stronger
and more preferred logical side.
After Mrs. Ramsay’s death, Mr. Ramsay becomes extraordinarily
needy, because he does not have, any longer, the constant reassur-
ance and affirmation that she provided. Instead, like a little child, he
grasps unsuccessfully for substitutes from among those he is around.
He falls into ecstasy when Lily praises his boots, exaggerating the
meaningfulness of her simple compliment to inflate the flattery. He
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seeks approbation from his children, as well, by reenacting the trip to

the lighthouse, perhaps because he feels responsible for the failure of
the venture years ago. Yet, despite Lily’s good intentions, she is no
wife-replacement. Without the constancy of Mrs. Ramsay, he is just a
pitiable old man.
Despite his deplorable character flaws, Mr. Ramsay serves won-
derfully as a catalyst for other characters. It is in engaging Mr. Ramsay,
trying to pacify him, that lets Lily complete her painting. She feels es-
tranged, until she can step halfway into Mrs. Ramsay’s role in the
household. After he departs on the boat trip, she follows the boat con-
cernedly until it disappears. Then she wonders, “Where was that boat
now? And Mr. Ramsay? She wanted him” (202). At the very end, at the
relief of being assured that Mr. Ramsay has arrived at the Lighthouse,
she turns back to her painting, and with a single line, finishes it.
More directly, Mr. Ramsay enables Mrs. Ramsay to become the
familial dynamo that she delights in being. She passionately obsesses
over the drama of engagements and the happiness of her children, as
well as the satisfaction of a man whose thoughts she knows lay beyond
her comprehension. Mr. Ramsay is an invaluable complement to the
much fuller Mrs. Ramsay. In the end, Mr. Ramsay is still a chronically
unhappy man, unsatisfied with his philosophical career. But the work is
not about Mr. Ramsay—his part is secondary; it is instead that the fe-
males of To the Lighthouse need needy males in order for them to play
their parts with such perfection.
Works Cited

Donaldson, Sandra M. “Where Does Q Leave Mr. Ramsay?” Tulsa Stud-

ies in Women’s Literature 11.2 (Autumn 1992): 329-336. JSTOR.
Blakley Library. University of Dallas, Irving, TX. 28 October 2008.

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 1927.