Difference
Between character of Mr. Ramsay and Mrs. Ramsay
Prepared by: Richa Pandya
M.A. English Semester – 3
Roll no- 28
Enrolment No: – 206910842019003
Email id: richapandya163@gmail.com
Batch: 2018- 20
Submitted to: S. B. Gardi Department of English, MKBU
Paper
no- 8 Modernist Literature
Topic:
Difference Between character of Mr. Ramsay and Mrs. Ramsay
Introduction
To the Lighthouse is a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf. The novel centres
on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland
between 1910 and 1920. The novel recalls childhood emotions and
highlights adult relationships. Among the book's many tropes and themes
are those of loss, subjectivity, the nature of art and the problem of
perception. In 1998, the Modern Library named To the Lighthouse No. 15 on its
list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
Mrs.
Ramsay
Mrs. Ramsay is a human being of great appeal,
though the facts about her are symbolical as well s literal. She is an
extremely beautiful woman of fifty, an inveterate matchmaker and the mother of
eight children; she is very near-sighted; she exaggerated everything. She is a
practical nurse and much concerned with the improvement of social conditions.
She can create moments of unity that remain intact in the memory,
‘affecting one almost like a work of
are’.
Mr.
Ramsay
Mr. Ramsay, her husband is eleven years older
than his wife, and a teacher of philosophy possessed of a superb intellect. He
is long-sighted, precisely factual and pessimistic. Certainly he is Mrs.
Ramsay’s opposite but he ‘is not a figure of fun’ as many critics have thought
him. He is suggestive of Leshe Stephen, notably in his habit of shouting out
poetry to himself and his detestation of the long dinner parties at which his
wife is so good a hostess.
The
Sea and the Land
The essential difference between Mr. and Mrs.
Ramsay is that whereas he identifies himself with the land and thinks the sea a
destroyer, she like Briscoe believes that life is the sea and not the land. Thus Mrs. Ramsay
felt that community of feeling with other people which emotion gives as if the
walls of partition had become so still that practically it was all one stream
and chairs, table maps were hers, were theirs, it did not matter whose and
would carry it on when she was dead. Mr. Ramsay on the other hand think of ‘the
dark of human ignorance, how we know nothing and the sea eats away the ground
we stand on’. Mr. Ramsay on the other hand thinks of the dark of human
ignorance, how we know nothing and the sea eats away the ground we stand on.
For him, and for James, loneliness.. was.. the truth about things. In the same
way Mr. Ramsay is afraid that he will be forgot, that time will destroy his
work; Mrs. Ramsay however since she does not draw a line around her
individuality, does not fear time.
Factual
Truth : Movement Towards Truth
To the Lighthouse was really the story of a
contest between two kinds of truth Mr. Ramsay’s and Mrs. Ramsay’s. for his
truth is factual truth; for her truth was the movement towards truth: since
truth is always being made and never is made the struggle for truth is the
truth itself. The form of this novel at once expresses and verifies Mrs. Ramsay’s truth. According to
Bergson, certainty can follow only from factual extension of knowledge
resulting in scientific order; such is the order which Mr.Ramsay seeks. Mr.
Ramsay spatializes knowledge : If thought was like the keyboard of a Piano
divided into as many notes or like tge alphabet is ranged in twenty six letters
all in order, then Mr. Ramsay’s Splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in
running over those letters one by one firmly and accurately until it has
reached say the letter Q. “ He reached Q.. but after ? What comes next? After
reached but after ? What comes next? After Q there are a number letters, the
last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glim mere red in the
distance. Z is only reached once by one man in generation. Still if he could
reach R it would be something. Here a logical, scientific procedure toward
truth.
Mrs.
Ramsay, on the other hand, knows by intuition rather than by analysis and is
therefore able to know reality which consists of mobility, qualitative rather
than quantitative diversity, time instead of space. Matter has no duration and so cannot last through any period of time
or change it simply is in the present, it does not endure but is perpetually
destroyed and recreated . Just as matter is absolute logical complexity memory
is absolute creative duration whose ‘parts’ interpenetrate which , according to
Bergson, comes nearest to giving a
satisfactory description of the actual fact directly known which is, for him the
whole reality. Mr. Ramsay matter and lily Briscoe memory undergo such an
‘interpentetration’ in the novel’s close and by doing so given a satisfactory
description of Mrs. Ramsay’s truth.
Emotional Truth : Disregard of factual Truth
The Window is a statement of that truth. This
first part of the novel seems complete in itself. It begins : “yes, of course
if it’s fine tomorrow” said Mrs. Ramsay and concludes again with Mrs. Ramsay
speaking : Yes you were right. It’s going to be wet tomorrow You won’t be able
to go. The conflict is projected as a question about the weather. It is a fact,
stated by Mr. Ramsay will not accept it as truth, because it hurts james, who wants
nothing more than to go out to the Lighthouse. Instead she says, ‘But it may be
fine I expect it will be fine and calls her husband’s fact nonsense. At the
conclusion of this part, when she agrees with her husband that it will rain
tomorrow, it was not because she attaches importance to his truth but because
she knows that he wishes her to say I love you and chooses to say it in this
way. In neither case is the fact itself of any importance whatsoever to her.
Her disregard of factual truth enrages Mr. Ramsay. After all, he is right. Mrs.
Ramsay’s truth was one that must trample upon her husband’s however; but his
truth factual truth was so short – lived that she can distort or deny it without
compunction. Mr. Ramsay himself realized its fragility in a generation, he
thinks he will be forgotten. Even Shakespeare was some day be forgotten. It was
for this reason that his wife was not so essential to him although he overemphasize her ignorance her
simpleness, for he liked to think that she was not clever, not book-learned at
all. He nevertheless wanted to be assured of his genius first of all and then
to be taken within the circle of life, warmed and soothed to have his sense
restored to him his barrenness made fertile and all the rooms of the house be
made full of life . he must be assured that he too lived in the heart of life.
Therefore he must from time to time leave off his metaphysical speculations and
return to his wife to life itself, for sympathy Mrs. Ramsay can communication
to her husband that if he put his implicit faith in her, nothing should hurt
him however deep he buried himself or climbed high not for a second should he
find him self without her. So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect
there were scarcely shell of herself left for her to know herself by all is so
lavish.
Certainty of intuition
Mrs. Ramsay apparent illogicality is actually
the certainly of intuition. For her husband her truth, but without it he would
perish. She knew then she knew without having learnt. Her simpleness fathomed
what clever people falsified. Her singleness of mind made her drop plumb like a
stone alight exact as a bird gave naturally this swoop and fall of the spirit
upon truth which delighted eased sustained falsely perhaps. Falsely perhaps
because her perception of truth has not
yet been proved correct. She has been saw only through the window and the
reader have see her concept of truth with the lighthouse. There was coherence
in things a stability something was immune from changed and shined out. In the
face of flowing the fleeting the spectral like a ruby. This can be glimpsed at
certain moments and of such moment she thought the thing was made that endured.
Just as Mr. Ramsay’s glimmers red in the distance so the something that Mrs.
Ramsay feel to be stable shine like ruby. Her way of meeting it was different
from her husband’s way here being really an hurry an end, and his a means.
Losing personality one lost the fret the hurry, the stir things came together
in this peace this rest, this eternity and pausing there she looked out to meet
that stroke of the lighthouse the long steady stroke the last of the three
which is her stroke. Seven times in this
part of the novel, the perhaps some one had blundered is repeated. Either Mr.
Ramsay or Mrs. Ramsay was wrong and the reminder of the novel show that it was
Mr. Ramsay who had blundered.
The Testing of Mrs. Ramsay’s Truth
The short second part, Time Passes, has been
praised by almost every critic of the novel s a masterpiece of description.
According to Brewster and Burrell it would be hard to find anything in
twentieth century English prose to surpass. Other join the above mentioned
critics in ranking it; as one of the great passages of English prose. But Time
Passes must not be thought of as a piece of impressionistic writing it was
actually the testing of Mrs. Ramsay’s vision by Mr. Ramsay’s facts and the
apparent triumph of those facts. Simply
it describes the effect of ten year’s time upon the little house, the books
become mouldy ; Mrs. Ramsay’s beloved garden was choked with weed; toads;
swallows and mice invade the rooms; the wood rots above all Mrs. Ramsay’s truth
symbolized by the shawl she had wrapped around a frightening skull in the
children’s bedroom falls victim to ‘the facts’. Gradually the folds of the
shawl loosen, so that the skull emerges a skull and not the fairy garden she
had called it when it annoyed cam and James. There was no eternity no
permanence there were only dust, death and decay. Indeed Mrs. Ramsay herself
dies during this ten year interval; her son Andrew was killed in the war; her
daughter Prue died of childbirth. It would seem then that Mr. Ramsay is correct
for the facts of this spatialzed time confirm his pessimism and prove his
wife’s optimism illusory. When Mrs. McNab who has come now and then to dust the
empty house is suddenly asked to have it ready for occupancy she labours for
days with two other workers to repair the revages of time. Finally Mr. Ramsay the remaining children, Lily and Mr.
Charmichael return.
Triumph of her Illusions
However, the last part of the novel, The
Lighthouse shows that it was Mrs. Ramsay who was right and not Mr. Ramsay. Mr.
Ramsay’s ‘lies’ were here proved to have been and still to be the truth,
capable of refuting Mr. Ramsay’s facts. Time passes and yet true time does not pass.
As Lily pointed Mrs. Ramsay’s illusions were ultimately proved to be the
reality.
Conclusion
We see the both character Mr. Ramsay and Mrs.
Ramsay they both are different from the each other. Their mind and the way of
the life style different.
