To The Lighthouse...Mr. Ramsay

I've always enjoyed Mr. Ramsay. One of my favorite scenes is in "The Lighthouse" section (chapter II) when he stands by Lily wanting something--she calls it "sympathy"--from her. He has asked her if she has everything she wanted:

"'Oh, thanks, everything.' said Lily Briscoe nervously. No; she could not do it. She ought to have floated off instantly upon some wave of sympathetic expansion: the pressure on her was tremendous. But she remained stuck. There was an awful pause. They both looked at the sea. Why, thought Mr. Ramsay, should she look at the sea when I am here?" (151; emphasis mine).

Such innocent arrogance! And I think that that is what it is. Mr. Ramsay does not realize the effect he has on people. The question, and it's a very complex question, is what made him the way he is?

Mr. Ramsay is based on Woolf's father, Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), who was an "eminent Victorian."  Stephen was the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. Many readers feel that Mr. Ramsay's monologue on having reached Q but fearing that he cannot make it to R is based on Woolf's early memories of her father (Stephen resigned the editorship in 1890 when Woolf was eight). In fact, in the novel Mr. Ramsay's dilemma in the first section is fear of failure:

"A shutter, like the leathern eyelid of a lizard, flickered over the intensity of his gaze and obscured the letter R. In that flash of darkness he heard people saying--he was a failure--that R was beyond him" (34).

In her memoir "A Sketch of the Past," Woolf describes "the sociable father," "father as a writer," "the tyrant father" and her ambivalent feelings about him.  (As a child Woolf asked her sister Vanessa if she preferred their mother or father. Vanessa preferred their mother while Woolf preferred their father.) In a diary entry of November 28, 1928, one year after To The Lighthouse was published and on the anniversary of her father's birth, she wrote:

"Father's birthday. He would have been 96, yes, today: & could have been 96, like other people one has known; but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books,--inconceivable."

Is this comparable to Woolf's claim that she had to "kill" the phantom angel in the house out of a sense of  self-preservation? It will be interesting to look at the complex portrait of the Victorian man and father that Woolf gives us in Mr. Ramsay.