MRS. RAMSAY

MRS. RAMSAY
BACKllllllll
Character Analysis
Mrs. Ramsay is about as close as Virginia Woolf ever got to Angelina Jolie: Mrs. Ramsay's beautiful, beloved, charitable, and the mother of many children. (Although, Mr. Ramsay is no Brad Pitt.) But that’s about as far as the similarities go. Mrs. Ramsay isn't a U.N. ambassador, and we very much doubt that she gave birth to, say, James Ramsay in Namibia, as Jolie did with Shiloh. But the point remains: Mrs. Ramsay is the lovely star at the center of the Ramsay family, and at the heart of the novel. Her unexpected death leaves the Ramsay family (and especially Mr. Ramsay) without its anchor.

Mrs. Ramsay is a complex character: she is invested in the importance of marriage between a man and a woman (and all men and all women should definitely be married, according to her), but she clearly sees the flaws in her own marriage. It becomes Mrs. Ramsay's duty to soften her husband's bullying and to support him in public. Even so, she's embarrassed by his constant quoting of poetry in a loud voice, and by his need for praise from the people around him.

In the midst of all of Mr. Ramsay's posturing and performing, he's actually insecure. And it falls to Mrs. Ramsay to soothe those insecurities, because that's what she perceives to be the job of the wife. (We get into this in more detail in the "Lighthouse" section of "Symbols, Imagery, Allegory.")

At the end of Part One, we see a clear division of labor between Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Ramsay: "He found talking much easier than she did," but "she felt herself very beautiful" (1.19.17). He's the one who talks – he's the intellectual one. But she's the one who attracts people and who makes social interactions possible, at least in part because she's beautiful. These are the roles they're each relatively comfortable playing: Mr. Ramsay gets to be the brains if Mrs. Ramsay gets to be the beauty.

The weird thing is, though, that neither of them are completely successful in their gender roles. Mrs. Ramsay loves the flattery of being checked out by the men around her, but she uses this admiration to influence Paul Rayley to marry Minta – a marriage that, Lily Briscoe reveals in the third chapter, is a disaster. Mrs. Ramsay's investment in her traditional gender role as a mother and matchmaker actually damages the people around her.

And Mr. Ramsay spends much of the first chapter secretly wondering why he can't complete the line of logical reasoning that would prove that he's really a genius. Those around him – William Bankes, Charles Tansley, and even Mrs. Ramsay – think to themselves that his last book was perhaps not his best book. The effort of trying to be the intellectual head of both his family (with the rebellious James) and of his social circle (with the ever-striving Charles Tansley) eats away at him inside.

The thing that's interesting about Mrs. Ramsay and her partnership with Mr. Ramsay is that Mr. Ramsay is obviously the oppressive patriarch. But Mrs. Ramsay's pretty darn oppressive, too, in a much subtler way. She's got this total love/hate thing going with Lily Briscoe, who adores Mrs. Ramsay but who also feels that, by being beautiful and completely stubborn, Mrs. Ramsay makes people do things that they wouldn't otherwise do (witness the terrible marriage between Paul and Minta):

But beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it. One forgot the little agitations; the flush, the pallor, some queer distortion, some light or shadow, which made the face unrecognisable for a moment and yet added a quality one saw for ever after. It was simpler to smooth that all out under the cover of beauty. (3.5.19)

The criticism that Lily's offering here of Mrs. Ramsay is this: she was great at pulling together her family. But by doing so, she smoothed over all of the complexities and individual interests of her children and her friends in favor of a greater whole. Mr. Ramsay