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Article Excerpt
This essay charts Mr. Ramsay's development as a character in To the Lighthouse by placing his journey in the historical context of Robert Falcon Scott's fatal expedition to the South Pole and in the literary contexts of the works Mr. Ramsay reads and recites to himself throughout the novel.
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In Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Mr. Ramsay imagines human intellectual endeavour as an alphabetical path along which one must tread, in order, from A to Z. Z is the philosophical insight reached by one man in a generation: it "glimmers red in the distance" (34) from where Mr. Ramsay himself stands, firmly ensconced at the letter Q. Mr. Ramsay aspires to advance from Q to R, but knows that he probably will not; he may well already have gone as far as his mind will take him. If any destination short of Z denotes failure, then he will fail.
To comfort himself, Mr. Ramsay imagines his alphabetical struggle as an expedition across a polar landscape, and his failure to reach R as heroic failure: "Qualities that in a desolate expedition across the icy solitudes of the Polar region would have made him the leader, the guide, the counsellor [...] came to his help. [...] Feelings that would not have disgraced a leader who [...] knows that he must lay himself down and die before morning comes, stole upon him. [...] Yet he would not die lying down [...] he would die standing. He would never reach R" (Lighthouse 34-35). Mr. Ramsay draws here upon a convention of triumphant defeat that was perfected by Robert Falcon Scott in the narratives he constructed of his own death in Antarctica in 1912, fifteen years before To the Lighthouse was published. Woolf never mentions Scott's name, but she does not need to: news of the explorers freezing in the snow was an enormous story when their bodies were found by a search party nearly a year after their deaths. The Times of London called it a "shocking catastrophe which the English race and the whole scientific world are lamenting to-day" ("The Antarctic Disaster"); The Independent declared that "the memorable, pitiful story was repeated in every hamlet in Christendom" ("The Antarctic Tragedy"). In 1927, Scott and his expedition would have stood behind Mr. Ramsay's fictive version of himself the way John F. Kennedy and Camelot would stand behind a character in an American novel who imagined himself being shot in an open limousine. Details from Scott's version of heroic death thus provide a context in which the journey to the lighthouse can be understood.
Critics of To the Lighthouse have discussed Woolf's characterization of Mr. Ramsay in terms of patriarchy, philosophy, agnosticism, and Woolf's rendering of her own father, Leslie Stephen. Many read Mr. Ramsay's philosophy in relation to Lily Briscoe's art. Few, however, examine Mr. Ramsay in his own right, and no one has traced the evolution of his character through the lens of the cultural texts to which his discourse directly and indirectly alludes. By situating Mr. Ramsay's struggle for knowledge and fame in the context of existing discourses of heroism, I will argue that Woolf both explicates and complicates the motivations of a character often dismissed as "despotic" (Schlack 57), "self-debilitated" (Beer 34), or a chaser after "immortality, that patriarchal dream" (Donaldson 332). By charting the evolving definitions of heroism Mr. Ramsay appropriates from nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literary, military, and historical ideas of exploration, I will seek both to situate the personal struggles of Woolf's character within some of the prevailing myths and cultural narratives of his generation and to trace his development as a character throughout the novel.
In addition to mapping Mr. Ramsay's journey to the lighthouse in the path of Robert Falcon Scott's fatal 1912 expedition to the South Pole, I will examine the novel's literary dialogues with Alfred Tennyson's 1854 "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and Walter Scott's 1816 The Antiquary in Part 1, and with William Cowper's 1803 "The Castaway" in Part 3. These texts move chronologically backward as the novel moves forward and serve as additional landmarks by which to chart the progress of Mr. Ramsay's motion toward an idea of courage based not on a tragic model of heroic death, but on the possibility of sustaining life in the face of an unravelling and increasingly unintelligible modern world.
The tendency of a thing to flip back and forth between itself and its opposite--of a judgment to swoop from high to low and back again--is one of the most persistent preoccupations in To the Lighthouse. When, for example, Lily Briscoe tries to work out what she thinks of Mr. Ramsay, "impressions poured in upon her [...] and to follow her thought was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one's pencil, and the voice was her own voice saying without prompting undeniable, everlasting, contradictory things. [...] [Mr. Ramsay] is petty, selfish, vain, egotistical; he is spoilt; he is a tyrant; he wears Mrs. Ramsay to death; but he has [...] a fiery unworldliness; he knows nothing about trifles; he loves dogs and his children" (24). This awareness of contradiction, this devotion to a "voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one's pencil" informs Woolf's implicit critiques of both Robert Falcon Scott and Alfred Tennyson, men whose inspiring renditions of heroic death help shape Mr. Ramsay's vision of himself early in the novel. By withdrawing heroic rhetoric in "Time Passes" and then allowing it to reappear in a different context in "The Lighthouse," Woolf trains us to beware of the risk in allowing our respect for the dead to override our horror at their loss; she acknowledges the appeal of heroic myth while teaching us to take care where and how we apply it.
Navy Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his men, Wilson, Bowers, Evans, and Oates, had been in the running for the honour of being the first European explorers to reach the South Pole, but when they arrived there in 1912, they discovered that a team led by Norwegian Roald Amundsen had already come and gone. Scott's party turned around for the journey back to base camp, but died about 130 miles short of it, only eleven miles from the next supply depot.
In "The Window," Part 1 of To the Lighthouse, Mr. Ramsay sees himself as a version of Scott partly because neither manages to complete his journey. On his philosophical voyage from A to Z, Mr. Ramsay finds himself at a standstill, just as Scott did on his return trip from the South Pole. With this resemblance in mind, Mr. R. takes a page from the notebook of Captain S. in framing...
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