Difference Between character of Mr. Ramsay and Mrs. Ramsay

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.