Mr. Ramsay is sixty years of age, a university don (professor) and philosopher. He's published a number of books. When Lily asks Andrew what his father's books are about, Andrew says "'Subject and object and the nature or reality'" (23). Lily doesn't understand that and Andrew tells her to think of a kitchen table when she's not there. (I think it's interesting that Woolf has us doing just that in the "Time Passes" section when she places us in the empty summer house.) In other words, Ramsay is an intellectual and someone, as Lily concludes, who "could not be judged like an ordinary person" (23).
There is, however, an "ordinary" side to Mr. Ramsay: husband and father of eight. "They gave him something" according to William Bankes but "they also, his old friends could not but feel, destroyed something" (22). Both Lily and Bankes are trying to understand why it is that Ramsay needs constant support and praise. Perhaps Bankes hits upon the answer when he says, "'Ramsay is one of those who do their best work before they are forty'" (23).
We may be seeing Mr. Ramsay at a very vulnerable time: His eminence is fading and he is concerned about his reputation and his future. In the "present time" of the first section of the novel, he is attempting to think of a subject for the lectures that he has been invited to give "for the young me at Cardiff next month" (43). He seems to fear that he has nothing worthwhile to say. I'd suggest that Mrs. Ramsay knows this and that that is the reason for her defense and support of her husband. However, I can't help but wonder if her attitude merely reinforces her husband's egocentricity.
Do these two guises of Mr. Ramsay, the thinker and the family man, make him in Lily's words, "strangely...venerble and laughable at one and the same time"? We're given what seems to me to be a related question in Ramsay's own ponderings: "Does the progress of civilisation depend upon great men?" (42). Again, what is Woolf suggesting in this complex portrait of the Victorian male?
No comments:
Post a Comment