Family and God as Manacles in 'To the Lighthouse'
Evaluates the constrictions of family life and the concept of God in Virginia Woolf's novel.
?? so that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman
looking at a girl throwing a ball?And suddenly the meaning
which for no reason at all as perhaps they are stepping out of
the Tube or ringing a doorbell, descends on people, making
them symbolical, making them representative, came upon
them and made them in the dusk standing, looking, the
symbols of marriage, husband and wife.?
(To The Lighthouse)
Alex Zwerdling in his book Virginia Woolf and the real world commends: ?In To The Lighthouse Woolf tried not only to recover the memories of her childhood but also to record her tangled feelings about Victorian marriage and family life as well as about the substitutes for them that some rebellious modern spirits had proposed?
Virginia Woolf and the real world Throughout her novel she stresses the fact that each one of us is alone in a world where family bonds are nothing but manacles to personal freedom and that we live in a universe ungoverned by an All-mighty God. Her view of the world, though, is by no means a bleak one as there is the light and warmth of Art to surround us and unify us.
Woolf?s father, Leslie Stephen describes the family as a sort of First Cause. Virginia Woolf, though, born in 1882 was destined to witness and be a part of a remarkable change as far as family and marriage were concerned. Consequently, the way she depicts Mr. Ramsay in To The Lighthouse is her way of showing the insecurity, confusion and even the desperation hiding behind the Iron-mask of the Powerful Patriarch. She stripes the King of the House off his psychological defenses and leaves him naked before us. She wants us to see the Victorian Myth of domestic relationships collapse. ?Her psychological stripping of her major characters- like Strachey?s in Eminent Victorians- is a version of The Emperor?s New Clothes? Alex Zwerdling Virginia Woolf And The Real World.
This ?emperor? here, Mr .Ramsay cannot communicate with his children, he is impatient, demanding, short-tempered and so self-absorbed that he is always preoccupied with his professional success seeking confirmation from his wife. He has, also, idolized Mrs. Ramsay as a perfect representative of the Victorian Patriarch Model and he strongly holds that each sex is destined to live and act in its own private sphere with no interferences of ant kind. Tansley?s remark ?women can?t write, women can?t paint?(To The Lighthouse) is nothing but a more crude articulation of Mr. Ramsay?s attitude.
Virginia Woolf wants to emphasize the ?sexual polarization of Victorian family life?(Virginia Woolf And The Real World )and the effect it had on the women and offspring of a typical Victorian family.
Mrs. Ramsay, who ?often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions?(To The Lighthouse) reads her son the Grimms tale ?The Fisherman And His Wife?. Woolf?s choice of this story is by no means a random one; it voices Mr. Ramsay?s belief that women are inferior to men and should conform to their wishes. Mrs. Ramsay is, nevertheless, the only one who believes in family and in fact uses all her charm to bring people together. She is the luminous Angel of the House and an ardent matchmaker.
Apart from her, no one else is happy with marriage or family life. Every single character in To The Lighthouse stresses the right to choose. Mr. Ramsay regards his wife and family as impediments to his nobler aim to reach letter ?R? intellectually. ?He would have written better books if he had not married? (To The Lighthouse).
Mr. Bankes justifies the fact that Mr. Ramsay broke his promise assuming that married life must be a burden: ?He had seen him divest himself of all those glories of isolation and austerity which crowned him in youth to cumber himself definitely with fluttering wings and clucking domesticities?.(To The Lighthouse). Charles Tansley disapproves of Mr. Ramsay?s career after his marriage by saying: ?Of course Ramsay had dished himself by marrying a beautiful woman and having eight children.? (To The Lighthouse). Lily Briscoe, too, chooses work and Art over getting married as she thought she: ?need never marry anybody and she felt an enormous exultation? (To The Lighthouse).
Woolf, though, does not blame any of her characters for their belief that vocation, work and family life cannot be integrated. She blames the Victorian World which groomed and nurtured her characters. Woolf wants to stress that ossified sexist beliefs, as well, as the idolization of Women as Angels of the Hearth and of men as devoted people of career, have isolated people from each other. In this sense the self pitying utterance of Mr. Ramsay ?we perished, each alone? is a realistic cry: a mourn depicting the core of human relationships in his times.
Mrs. Ramsay is obsessed with trying to push people towards the altar of marriage. She wants Mr. Bankes and Lily to get married. Lily, though, prefers her Art, while Mr. Bankes, at the dinner table, thinks to himself: ?How trifling it all is, how boring it all is, compared to the other thing-work.?. One of Mrs. Ramsay?s children rushes off to the attic ?to escape the horror of family life?.(To The Lighthouse). She knows that her daughters, Cam and Prue, already have dreams different from hers: ?infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers; in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other.?(To The Lighthouse).
After Mrs. Ramsay?s death, in Part iii, the traditional Victorian family is turned upside down. We see a change in everything. Women can be devoted careerists and artists too, unmarried people can fell happy and fulfilled with themselves, unlike Lily?s past declaration that she felt ?a skimpy old maid, holding a paint brush in the lawn? and of course, love is not always the basis of a marriage?
Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle, the couple brought together by Mrs. Ramsay?s hard efforts are not happily married. Lily remains a ?spinster?, Mr. Bankes remains a ?bachelor? and as Lily says to the spirit of Mrs. Ramsay: ?It has all gone against your wishes? Life has changed completely?. Minta?s frequent infidelities and Paul?s taking up a mistress haven?t broken up their marriage, though: ?far from breaking up their marriage, that alliance had righted it. They were excellent friends? (To The Lighthouse). Life changes and what is moral or immoral changes as well.
The whole book is about change, that is why it is characterized as an inclusive Fiction (Stella McNichol, Virginia Woolf: To The Lighthouse). It allows divergences to coexist in order to bring about harmony. Her characters move towards the same goal through different paths. Mr. Ramsay and his son are brought together when the former praises the boy. While at the same time, Lily Briscoe finishes her painting and concludes her ?vision?. Symbolically, the past returns and shapes the present. Mrs. Ramsay comes back in Lily?s picture and the murderous instinct towards his father is wiped out from James? heart.
All the tiny threads of the story come together, forming a harmony and a delight that owes nothing either to a God or to an ossified Victorian Institution but to life, love and the power of people to change things and transform themselves.
