Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse"

Mrs. Ramsay of Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” is modeled after Woolf’s mother.  She is the mother of eight children and is characterized by her kindness and by her tolerance, but especially as protecter of those she cares about.  Her husband is the opposite.  He is egotistical and he comes across as insensitive and uncaring.  His self-doubt prompts him to seek sympathy and reassurance from his wife and from others.  With the burden of protecting her children and with the task of reassuring her husband is it any wonder that she might seek solitude as the narrator describes, “For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone.”

This narrative description signifies that solitude is a time for Mrs. Ramsay to free herself from responsibility as a mother and as a wife and to be “by herself” and “To be silent; to be alone.”  However the disclosure, “She could be herself” implies that she is not herself when she acts in other capacities; that there is a private self that is not revealed to others---a secret self.  This may not be true for only, Mrs. Ramsay, but for the rest of us as well.  When the time comes to no longer be “by herself,” “Always, Mrs. Ramsay felt, one helped oneself out of solitude reluctantly by laying hold of some little odd or end, some sound, some sight."  While we are not told what the “odd” or “end” is it might “the long reddish-brown stocking dangling in her hands a moment.”  She is knitting the stocking for “the lightkeeper's son’. . .  “his boy with a tuberculous hip.” Her six year old son, James, will take the gift if, weather permiting, they make the trip to the lighthouse tomorrow. James so wants to go.

Before Mrs. Ramsay's interlude of solitude and its postlude described above the narrator had shared her thoughts about life as such, " She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband. A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone); there were, she remembered, great reconciliation scenes; but for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance" (60). Her view of life is adversarial and embattled and it seems so incongruent with the way she presents herself to others. Little wonder that this "something real" is also "something private."

Evidently, Virginia Woolf created a remarkable likeness of her mother through the character, Mrs. Ramsay. Woolf, was thirteen when her mother died and she stated that she was obsessed with her mother's memory until she wrote "To the Lighthouse." After Woolf finished the novel she said, “I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.”  When Woolf's sister read the novel she said it was like seeing her mother raised from the dead.

The following piece in the Literary Hub by Christopher Frizzelle speaks to the mother-daughter relationship and Woolf's mother as the inspiration for Mrs. Ramsay in the novel.

https://lithub.com/the-day-virginia-woolf-brought-her-mom-back-to-life