[In the following essay, Lilienfeld contends that the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay is founded on Victorian social and personal principles that are destructive to them both and that Woolf, in To the Lighthouse, is attempting to offer an alternative in the third part of the novel.]

They had reached the gap between two clumps of red-hot pokers. … No, they could not share that; they could not say that. … They turned away from the view, and began to walk up the path where the silver-green spear like plants grew, arm in arm. His arm was almost like a young man's arm, Mrs. Ramsay thought, thin and hard, and she thought with delight how strong he still was, though he was over sixty, and how untamed and optimistic. …¹

Virginia Woolf projects the Ramsays' relation onto the landscape throughout To the Lighthouse. Here we see that the Ramsays' marriage, based on love, has imperfections like the hedge.² To associate them in this way with the rootedness of Mrs Ramsay's garden might confuse us as to the soil of their union. Is their relation, so embedded in the flux of the waters, the hills of the land, a perception of certain eternally true modes of male-female union?

The beautiful Mrs Ramsay, appearing to be magnanimity robed in charm and grace, has captivated scores of readers. One group, well-represented by Bernard Blackstone,³ David Daiches,⁴ Lord David Cecil⁵ and Roger Poole⁶ sees her as the motherly, all-giving Angel in the House. To these criticis, she has no flaws and is thus unable to ward off harrassment by her desiccated husband, to whom she lovingly sacrifices herself. Opposition to this idealised view was first ventured by Glenn Pedersen⁷ and Mitchell Leaska⁸. They find that Mrs Ramsay—feather-brained self-satisfied manipulator—is actually the reason for her husband's unhappiness and her son's failure to reach the lighthouse.

These diametrically opposed views depend on a common perception: all assume the Ramsays' marriage is the eternal union of the masculine and feminine principle. The masculine principle, seen by James Ramsay as ‘the arid scimitar of the male,’ ‘bitter and barren,’ must, in this view, of necessity draw sustenance from the female principle, the ‘leafy voluptuousness,’ of the wife-mother's self-sacrificing love. It is indeed surprising that Virginia Woolf, outspoken as a feminist, known to object to traditional views of sex roles, should be seen to have created a novel celebrating their unquestioned existence.

She did not, of course. Woolf's vision of the Ramsays' marriage is a mature, sharp critical examination not only of the relations between her own parents,⁹ but also of the destruction wreaked by the Victorian social arrangement on human capacities for freedom and growth. Woolf offers alternatives, for the very women Mrs Ramsay urged to ‘marry, marry, marry’ explode the prison represented by the Ramsays' relation and turn her prescriptions into their critical opposites, thus making Part III of the novel a re-evaluation by the 1920s of their Victorian predecessors. Using the tools of feminist criticism, this essay will examine in detail Woolf's vision of the Ramsays' marriage, proving that as she celebrates and criticises it she makes clear the urgency for creating new modes of human love and partnership. I shall show that the Ramsays' marriage is time-bound, founded on middle-class Victorian roles and values. Arguments that the family as structured by the patriarchy is the bulwark of morality, the state and stable human character have not changed much since the 1850s.¹⁰ It is this ideological persuasion about patriarchal marriage that underlies most criticism of the marriage in To the Lighthouse and obscures Woolf's point that the Ramsays' marriage is debilitating to both parties.

In order to examine the framework of the Ramsays' marriage, it is necessary to make explicit Woolf's hints about the novel's time scheme. Part III takes place in 1919 as the Great War has ended; in it Mr Ramsay tells Macalister that he is seventy-one. Since Mr Ramsay was over sixty in Part I, we know that Part II covers ten years, making Part I occur in 1909. Since Prue is eighteen in Part I, the Ramsays must have been married at least nineteen years, having married about 1889 or earlier. Thus we can argue that the Ramsays had been raised in the England of the 1860s, a time of momentous intellectual turmoil.

Burns's historical analysis of mid-Victorian England¹¹ reveals that underneath the staid and increasing prosperity of the Victorian middle classes were festering issues. One of these, women's inequity before the law, was fiercely protested. The 1860s saw Emily Davies and her sisters organise the assault on the male colleges of Cambridge that finally, in 1948, enabled women to have full rights there. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon's committee kept the issue of women's legal rights before the public for decades, and was victorious in the passing of the Married Woman's Property Act of 1882, the year of Woolf's birth. A strong buttress of this protest was John Stuart Mill's urging of women's suffrage in his 1866 Parliamentary Bill, and in his publication in 1869 of The Subjection of Women.¹²

Growing out of this mid-Victorian revolt were the arguments of the 1880s advocating marriage reform, the widening of women's roles, political action for women, and an end to sex-role imprisonment for men as well as women.¹³ This feminist activity had its theoretical underpinnings in social theories of character and family structure. The Victorians invented the idea that culture itself was relative,¹⁴ and out of this fertile soil grew protests such as Morgan's, Engel's and Westermarck's that ‘human sexual arrangements’¹⁵ were not eternal, natural law, nor ordained by God. Engels saw that men had enslaved women socially, legally and politically, and on their bent backs had invented patriarchal rule.¹⁶ He urged revolutionary change in patterns of ownership, the family and the state.

Attacks even less extreme than Engels's horrified and frightened traditional upholders of the status quo. Leslie Stephen, the original of Mr Ramsay, was typical of speakers for the tradition. To him, the family was both the crystalline form of all cultural bonding and the specific mode of order imposed on civilisation.

Stephen's statements in ‘Forgotten Benefactors’ and The Science of Ethics¹⁷ reveal fears that the reforms saluted by Engels and others were aimed at the underpinning of his own house. To Stephen it was natural law that a wife should have no legal rights, no right to her own property or money, no training for any job, nor any hope of obtaining one. Though he bound Julia Stephen tightly, she resisted covertly.¹⁸ This resistance he met with the emotional blackmail to which he admitted in The Mausoleum Book.¹⁹ But the daughters of Leslie and Julia Stephen were keen observers, and their mother's maintaining of her selfhood and the revolutionary theories of women's new chances filtering down in the culture were not lost on them. They smashed the patriarchal superstructure of marriage as Leslie Stephen enforced it, and reworked the emotional mode of the marriage bond. In it they encompassed friendship, artistic alliance and sisterhood.²⁰ Part of the history of this struggle lies in the argument of To the Lighthouse.

In order to buttress male control of the actual world, Victorians developed an ideology of women's limited potential; this in turn justified the very narrow opportunities for mental vigour allowed the Victorian middle-class woman. Mrs Sarah Stickeney Ellis's idealised marriage and conduct books insist on the strictly circumscribed family role allowed such women, and are a running commentary on Mrs Ramsay's behaviour.²¹

In her marriage manual The Wives of England: Their Relative Duties, Domestic Influence, and Social Obligations, Mrs Ellis insists that wives are by nature inferior to husbands:

[You should remember] the superiority of your husband simply as a man. It is quite possible that you may have talent, with higher attainments, and you may also have been generally more admired, but this has nothing whatever to do with your position as a woman, which is, and must be, inferior to his as a man.²²

It is quite clear that Mr Ramsay's behaviour is based on this assumption, but not so clear that Mrs Ramsay agrees with it.

Mrs Ellis's admonitions about women's constitutional and behavioural inferiority were the superstructure of women's whole training. In the family girls were a poor second to their brothers, who went off to public school and then university while the girls stayed at home to be tutored by ‘a little woman with a red nose who is not well educated herself but has an invalid mother to support.’²³ Virginia and Vanessa Stephen remained home while Thoby and Adrian Stephen went to school, and their inferior education, much like Mrs Ramsay's, paid for ‘Arthur's Education Fund.’²⁴

Wittily agreeing with Mrs Ellis, John Ruskin in his famous lecture of 1865, ‘Of Queens's Gardens,’ admonished, ‘It is not the object of education to turn woman into a dictionary.’²⁵ Ruskin joins Mrs Ellis in insisting that woman must accept God's law as laid down by man: she may be polished, but she is not to be critical; she may be beautiful, but should not be argumentative. So educated, it is no wonder that Mrs Ramsay has no systematic grasp of facts or the practice to shape them into logical structures. Mill uneasily admitted that middle-class women were badly crippled by their narrow education and even narrower prospects: women saw no overarching theoretical principles, no truth, but only the particulars of the moment.²⁶ So circumscribed, their minds were in the state of ‘an educated Elizabethan woman's.’²⁷

Mrs Ramsay's training has the desired effect. While she is not as stupid as her husband needs to think her in order to buttress his own self-worth, Mrs Ramsay is frightened of her own potential for intellectual achievement. ‘Books, she thought, grew of themselves. She never had time to read them’ (I, v, p. 43). Watching her read a sonnet, her husband ‘wondered what she was reading, and exaggerated her ignorance, her simplicity, for he liked to think she was not clever, not book-learned at all. He wondered if she understood what she was reading. Probably not, he thought. She was astonishingly beautiful’ (I, xix, p. 182). Mrs Ramsay's indirect interior monologue illuminates Mill's and Woolf's realisation that the stupider the wife appears to the husband, the more desirable she becomes.²⁸ To make the wife so childlike intellectually that she must remain emotionally dependent was the object of her education and upbringing.

What did it all mean? To this day she had no notion. A square root? What was that? Her sons knew. She leant on them; on cubes and square roots; that was what they were talking about now; … she let it uphold and sustain her, this admirable fabric of the masculine intelligence, which ran up and down, crossed this way, and that, like iron girders spanning the swaying fabric, upholding the world so that she could trust herself to it utterly, even shut her eyes or flicker them, for a moment, as a child. … (I, xvii, p. 159)

The swaying fabric which sustained also entrapped. Mr Ramsay's rational constructs depend on the ideology of Mrs Ramsay's limited sphere.²⁹ Cam uncritically recognises that her father ‘liked men to work like that [as fishermen in danger of drowning] and women to keep house, and sit beside sleeping children indoors' (III, iv, p. 245). Because she has partially given her assent to Mr Ramsay's division of the world into the masculine and feminine sphere, Mrs Ramsay is thus a prisoner of the drawing room.

According to Mrs Ellis, one prisoner of the drawing room should help another: ‘In every mistress of a family, the poor in every neighbourhood should feel they have a friend.’³⁰ To them the wife should give not merely money, but also ‘a few useful hints on the best methods of employing scanty means.’³¹ Perhaps without the condescension of Mrs Ellis, Julia Stephen had entered the lives of the poor in St Ives, Cornwall. Her efforts resulted in the regular employment of a nurse in the town, and many were made more comfortable by her in the poor homes of the fishing village.³² Fully aware of the limitations of this ideology which squandered women's energy on sustaining a status quo dangerous both for the visiting women and for the poor trapped in the structures of a laissez-faire economy, Virginia Woolf reminds us that Mrs Ramsay

visited this widow or that struggling wife in person with a bag on her arm, and a notebook and a pencil with which she wrote down in columns carefully ruled for that purpose wages and spending, employment and unemployment, in the hopes that she would one day cease to be a private woman whose charity was half a sop to her own indignation, half a relief to her curiosity, and become what with her untrained mind she greatly admired, an investigator, elucidating the social problem. (I, i, pp. 17–18)

Mrs Ramsay is here on her way to the vision her adopted daughters live out: one must take action to improve the lives of women shackled to the domestic sphere. In this passage lies an implicit sisterhood which impels Mrs Ramsay towards struggling wives, towards the best in Minta Doyle and Lily Briscoe.

Mrs Ramsay's service to others begins with her self-sacrifice to her husband and children.³³ Explaining this entrapment and its seeming acceptance by so many women, Mill points out ‘Women are brought up from earliest years … to live for others, to make complete a negation of themselves, and to have no life but in their affections.’³⁴ These affections must be severely restrained by the marriage bond.³⁵ ‘Only in the married state can the boundless capabilities of woman's love ever be fully known or appreciated.’³⁶ Engels saw clearly that, unless women's passions were simultaneously denied and curtailed, patriarchal descent might be endangered.³⁷

Giving oneself fully to one's husband, Mrs Ellis argues, is the wife's first duty. The ‘master of the house should be considered as entitled to the choice of every personal indulgence.’³⁸ ‘It is unquestionably the right of all men (no matter their character or position) to be treated with deference and made much of in their own homes.’³⁹ ‘The great business of [a married woman's] life is to soothe and to cheer, not to depress, to weary, or to annoy.’⁴⁰ According to Mrs Ellis, this angel did not require anything beyond the good done by her self-abnegation.⁴¹ For, ‘if the wife can thus supply to the extent of [her husband's] utmost wishes, the sympathy, the advice, the confidence, and the repose, of which he is in need, she will have little cause to think herself unfulfilled.’⁴² To many critics, the Ramsays' marriage could not conform more nearly to the ideal praised by Ruskin, Mrs Ellis and Leslie Stephen.

Virginia Woolf makes it clear that Mrs Ramsay does not agree. The sequestered wife's unconscious anger at her position shapes her behaviour, as for example in I, vi and vii, the argument about going to the lighthouse. Mr Ramsay is infuriated by Mrs Ramsay's comforting James and saying the winds might change. He stamps his foot and says, ‘Damn you’ (I, vi, p. 50), enraged at ‘the extraordinary irrationality. … The folly of women's minds.' It is, of course, this very irrationality in sustenance of which women are denied any intellectual training.

After Mr Ramsay's chastened apology, Mrs Ramsay ruminates on her submission to her family and her self-abnegation

They came to her naturally since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions. Then he said, Damn you. He said, It must rain. He said, It won’t rain; and instantly a Heaven of security opened before her. There was nobody she reverenced as she reverenced him. She was not good enough to tie his shoe strings, she felt.

(I, vi, p. 51; italics mine)

A woman striving for honesty, Mrs Ramsay nevertheless denies her fury. She finds the children's demands reasonable if exhausting, but cannot quite subdue herself over Mr Ramsay's argument, so strongly must she keep down anger. Mrs Ramsay's anger explodes into an excessive paean of devotion. Typical Victorian hypocrisy, idealisation and a refusal to admit and work through anger are the bases of much of the Ramsays' interaction, for Mr Ramsay, like his wife, is forced to lie, conceal, submit.

Seeing his wife silent in her garden, Mr Ramsay resents her separateness from him, then thinks, ‘he would have been a beast and a cur to wish a single thing altered’ (I, xii, p. 106). No, he would have been a normal human being. Could he have admitted some of his less mature feelings to his wife, he might not have needed to exact from her so much support. He seeks to answer his wife's ‘half teasing, half complaining’ remark that their marriage interfered with his work: ‘He was not complaining, he said. She knew that he did not complain. She knew that he had nothing to complain of’ (I, xii, pp. 106–7). Seizing and kissing his wife's hand, Mr Ramsay's beautiful gesture brings tears to her eyes. But to deflect attention to their passionate attachment or to the Victorian myth of women's holiness does not blot out the fact that he does sometimes regret his marriage and feel as trapped by it as she does.

Because she has felt so angry, Mrs Ramsay gives even more of herself when Mr Ramsay comes again to her in I, vii. Still vulnerable from his fantasies of intellectual struggle, Mr Ramsay appears, and Mrs Ramsay, in James's view, seems ‘to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray,’ while she is simultaneously alight, ‘burning and illuminating’; into ‘this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare’ (I, vii, p. 58). The imagery makes clear that this is James' point of view.⁴³ To James his father is ‘lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one’ (I, i, p. 10), a good image of James's fear and hatred of his father's power over his mother. James watches his father displace him as he stands erect between his mother's legs.

Like James, Mr Ramsay wants nothing less than to be ‘assured that he too lived within the heart of life; was needed; not only here, but all over the world’ (I, vii, p. 59). Mrs Ramsay, upright in her gray skirt, gives off the light of the lighthouse to her husband (ibid).⁴⁴ There is sexual invitation in her dancing fire. Their home is her body, and she bids Mr Ramsay roam it with the rhythms of intercourse (I, vii, p. 59–60).

James, enraged, experiences himself as the trunk of the tree his mother offers to his father, and so feels attacked when his father plunges into his mother's body.⁴⁵ But James's image of rapacious plundering is very different from the joyous entering of rooms his mother offers his father, for her waving boughs of fruit deliberately entice the bird. As her husband finishes drinking sustenance from her, Mrs Ramsay experiences a relief as after orgasm, so that ‘in exquisite abandonment to exhaustion’ she feels throb through her ‘the rapture of successful creation’ (I, vii, p. 61).

The imagery makes clear that Mr Ramsay is simultaneously suckling at the breast and entering his wife. A good Victorian wife, Mrs Ramsay dares not discuss her husband's intellectual problems. Thus, rather than encouraging him to tell her in detail what he is so afraid of not having accomplished, she offers sustenance to her husband as ‘a nurse’ does to ‘a fractious child’ (I, vii, p. 60). Through her mode of sustaining him, she encourages his immaturity. But, honest and intelligent, Mrs Ramsay admits to herself the flaws in ‘the rapture of successful creation.’

Mr Ramsay's self-questioning is so strong, and his inability to face it so large, that he accepts, even as does his wife, the limits of the marriage relation. The hedge is not just a signpost of his many past efforts, its leaves being written on with discarded words; it signals the barrier to the efforts he has made for the family situation: ‘Years ago, before he had married … he had worked ten hours at a stretch. One could worry things out alone’ (I, xii, p. 105). But now ‘the father of eight children has no choice.’ To look at ‘the figure of his wife reading to his little boy, he turned from the sight of human ignorance … and the sea eating the ground we stand on, which had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have led to something’ (I, viii, p. 69). He lets family life obscure his view of truth, and so ‘he had not done the thing he might have done’ (I, viii, p. 70). Had he examined philosophically the very ground he stands on, he would, like the honest man he is, have been bound to admit its shortcomings.

But his wife on whom he stands examines the texture of their interchange. She admits her ‘physical fatigue’ is ‘tinged.’ So thorough was her training that the man is not to be questioned that ‘she did not let herself put into words her dissatisfaction’ (I, vi, p. 61). Yet she ‘heard dully, ominously, a wave fall.’ Mr Ramsay's demands have wrenched askew the ‘iron girders' keeping her safe from the ocean's threat. The wave falls through her reading to her son the tale of ‘The Fisherman and his Wife,’ which aptly suggests the price of concealing the flaws in the Ramsays' marriage. In the fairy tale, the fisherman's wife ‘wills not as I’d have her will,’ he says to the flounder. Disgusted with his limited wishes, his wife says, ‘if you won’t be King, I will’ (I, x, p. 87). Even so, Mrs Ramsay recognises her enjoyment of her kingly rights.

Mrs Ramsay, who ‘did not like, even for a second, to feel finer than her husband,’ recognises how she ought to feel: ‘Of the two he was infinitely more important, and what she gave the world, in comparison with what he gave, negligible’ (I, vii, p. 62). Here she cannot admit that her unacknowledged power over Mr Ramsay gratifies her (ibid.). She must subdue herself, lie to her husband, keep her discontent from her children, and get along somehow with the worry that her husband's intellectual abilities are lessening as he ages (ibid.). It is an unfair bargain to each participant, this marriage relation.

John Stuart Mill understood such relations as the Ramsays':

Women are schooled into suppressing [their aggressions] in their most natural and healthy direction, but the internal principle remains, in a different outward form. An active and energetic mind, if denied liberty, will seek for power; refused the command of itself, it will assert its personality by attempting to control others. … Where liberty cannot be hoped for and power can, power becomes the grand object of human desires.⁴⁶

Mrs Ramsay manipulates Mr Ramsay by withholding herself from him as in I, xii and xix, but others she manipulates through ambition, aggression, and a desire for mastery.⁴⁷

For example, she cannot look too closely at her matchmaking between Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle. ‘And here she was, she reflected, feeling life rather sinister again, making Minta marry Paul … ; she was driven on, too quickly she knew, almost as if it were an escape for her too, to say that people must marry; people must have children’ (I, x, p. 203). Neither Minta nor Paul can resist her. Paul seems to feel it is to Mrs Ramsay he has proposed, ‘because he felt somehow that she was the person who had made him do it’ (I, xiv, pp. 118–19). Minta is more mysterious, though Mrs Ramsay does recall to mind a woman's accusations once of ‘“robbing her of her daughter's affections”. … Wishing to dominate, wishing to interfere, making people do what she wished—that was the charge against her, and she thought it most unjust’ (I, x, p. 88).

A circumscribed Victorian woman, Mrs Ramsay has no direct power outside the domestic sphere. She can leave no mark upon the world other than her image in the lives of others. And it is a form of immortality she had wanted in matching Minta and Paul, for, as she climbs the stairs to the nursery, she thinks ‘how, wound about in their hearts, however long they lived she would be woven’ (I, xviii, p. 170).

Only over her children does she exert a mastery as over Paul and Minta, so it is just that Mrs Ramsay should doubly experience her claims to immortality as she climbs toward her last little ones in the nursery. ‘She would have liked always to have a baby. She was happiest carrying one in her arms. Then people might say she was tyrannical, domineering, masterful, if they chose; she did not mind’ (I, x, p. 90). ‘The ideology of motherhood’ is designed to keep women powerless, for the only power they are allowed in patriarchal society is their ambiguous hold on small children.⁴⁸ Though she may drain others of autonomy, Mrs Ramsay has no real power. And, though she may extend in imagination her own parents' furniture to Minta and Paul, it does not become the seat of the Rayleys' marriage.

The model of marriage which Mrs Ramsay wishes passed on to the young people is composed of many silences, many withholdings. Mrs Ramsay does not, for example, like her husband to see her thinking. In I, xii, during the walk in the garden, she asks what he had been thinking. ‘He did not like to see her look so sad, he said. Only wool gathering, she protested, flushing a little. … No, they could not share that; they could not say that’ (I, xii, p. 104). Mr Ramsay's reaction to this self-withholding is to remember his times of solitude before marriage. Mrs Ramsay does not want to be unguarded, as much for protection as from the self-restraint Mrs Ellis insisted on in wives, for ‘the position of looking up to another is extremely unpropitious to complete sincerity and openness with him … there is an unconscious tendency to show … the side which is the one he likes most to see,’ as John Stuart Mill so perceptively named it.⁴⁹

But Mrs Ramsay's silences always retain their ambiguous character. As much as she feels they could not share her philosophical sadnesses, she knows that in silence they speak. Her silence serves to insulate her against her husband, while it equally grants a medium in which to give herself to him in a manner both can accept.

Their sexual relation remains a hint swathed in silence.⁵⁰ Immediately after Mrs Ramsay refuses to share her thoughts about the lighthouse with her husband comes the passage with which this essay began. The couple turn from the gap in the hedge—their relations—and walk off arm in arm. Mrs Ramsay feels a sexual thrill of pride run through her as she admires the shape and firmness of her husband's arm (I, xii, p. 107). Their physical closeness is indicated by such a trifle as ‘she thought, intimating by a little pressure on his arm that he walked up hill too fast for her, and she must stop a moment’ (I, xii, p. 108). They know through years of knowledge communicated through intimacy what their unspoken signals mean. That pressure speaks of a closeness which survives resentment, a physical respect for one another's pace which partly balances the reasons for the silence in which it unfolds.

A physical and emotional need draws the Ramsays together at the end of the day in Mr Ramsay's study. ‘She had come to get something she wanted’ (I, xix, p. 176), and ‘He liked to think that everyone had taken themselves off and that he and she were alone’ (I, xix, p. 181). Soon ‘the shadow, the thing folding them in was beginning, she felt, to close round her. … Through the crepuscular walls of their intimacy, for they were drawing closer together, involuntarily coming side by side, quite close, she could feel his mind like a raised hand shadowing her mind’ (I, xix, p. 184). This image intermingles ‘the iron girders’ of ‘the swaying fabric’ Mr Ramsay has built for his wife's insulation with something more threatening than comforting, implying as it does a force gathering to descend and swamp.

Mr Ramsay's pressure on his wife in the study is at once comforting and aggressive. She meets it with an equal aggression, a sensible reaction considering her circumscribed position. He asks with his eyes, she thinks, for her to tell him ‘that she loves him’. Rather than do so, making excuses to herself about her inability to use language, Mrs Ramsay ‘stood at the window with her reddish brown stocking in her hands, partly to turn away from him, partly because she remembered how beautiful it often is—the sea at night. … She knew he was thinking, You are more beautiful than ever. And she felt herself very beautiful’ (I, xix, pp. 185–6). Women have through the centuries realised their concerns through exactly such indirect action, as Mrs Ramsay does by not telling her husband she loves him.

Her silence becomes physical rejection; instead of speaking, she turns her back on her husband and goes to the window to look at the sea. Now in touch with that element of herself which is the sea and the lighthouse, Mrs Ramsay is certain her husband knows she loves him. But what proof does she have of this? Not one word of this indirect interior monologue issues from him. The wife reassures herself that her behaviour means the same to both, but, in reality, from what does her happiness come? It surges through her very manipulations. Subtly, she gives him verbally an assurance of agreement, for she says the weather will prevent tomorrow's trip to the lighthouse. Mrs Ramsay's repetitions to herself of the words, ‘he knew,’ similar to Mr Ramsay's earlier insistence that ‘he was not complaining,’⁵¹ renders ambiguous what they assert. What he knows is that she has triumphed.

Is she aware of the ambiguity of her ‘triumph’—that favourite word of hers? Mrs Ramsay has done what was expected of her; yet the way she has done so has altered the meaning of her behaviour. She has given in to her expected role, and appears to have subdued her will to that of her husband. But she has not poured out love in a romantic transcendence of barriers.⁵² In fact, the romantic transcendence possible in this instance would mean that Mrs Ramsay is dominated by a husband to whom she gives every last part of herself, as Mrs Ellis suggested Victorian wives should do.⁵³ In resisting, Mrs Ramsay salvages that secret part of herself in touch with the lighthouse from which she draws the energy to continue in her demanding role. Yet she knows herself profoundly and powerfully tempting to her husband as she deliberately arrays herself, like the lighthouse, in her beauty against the night sky.

But, and this is the measure of Mrs Ramsay's sophistication, neither has lost completely. The Ramsays love one another, in spite of their private lies and maneuverings; they communicate very well in silence. Further, does Mr Ramsay want his wife to say she loves him? Perhaps his not saying so outright is equally indicative with her silence that both want certain barriers maintained.

In the economy of the novel, Mrs Ramsay's ascension into unattainability as ‘The Window’ closes, anticipates the loss which comes suddenly as Mrs Ramsay is snatched by death (II, iii, p. 194). A rejecting goddess even as she is just a Victorian housewife, reticent, glad to get a little power over her husband in what is a very unequal allotment, Mrs Ramsay in I, xix, pp. 185–6 merges again into the body of the black night and the lighthouse tower, as she had earlier done in I, xi, pp. 95–7. In I, xix, pp. 185–6, she is ‘to the Lighthouse’. She faces her husband; she is the lighthouse itself, and he is further frustrated in his quest for R. Now unattainable, his wife is part of that for which he has always striven.

Virginia Woolf's subtle vision of this marriage makes clear that it contains unresolvable ambiguities. The Ramsays do love one another; yet their marriage compromise restricts growth, keeps each frustrated, and does not allow mature intellectual interchange. If Mr Ramsay had been able to admit his wife's great intelligence, he need not have faced his intellectual fears alone. If he could have confided to her in clear discourse the very problems he fantasises about, their union would have enabled him to face his tasks and perhaps have brought him closer to R. On the other hand, had Mrs Ramsay had some direct say in the things closest to her husband's heart, if she had had some access, too, to self-fulfilment outside the limited domestic sphere, she would not have insisted on her husband's dependence on her, nor dominated Minta, Paul and Lily. For at the dinner party, when she hears the conversation turn to the subject of artists' immortality, she knows her husband's worst fears will be activated. In a moment of openness she thinks, ‘But she wished it was not necessary [that she assign Minta to assuage his fears]. Perhaps it was her fault that it was necessary’ (I, xvii, p. 162). It is partly her fault that he is dependent on her false praise rather than capable of facing and dealing with his hesitancies about his work. It is no wonder Mr Ramsay is obsessed by his boots—he cannot walk further than the garden in which his trapped wife encloses him. His needs coalesce with her role restraints, and thus each is a lesser being than together and separately they might have become. It is an unfair bargain, finally, this marriage bond, and it needs to be reformed.

The fact that the complexities of the Ramsay's marriage are clear is a tribute to Woolf's power to deal in herself with very deep and painful feelings. At the time of writing To the Lighthouse, she admitted to being obsessed with her parents. The most deeply felt and less verbally available rages and losses Woolf formed into archetypal images and scenes, thus conveying symbolically what psychoanalysts call ‘primary process feelings,’ those feelings we experience before we attain language, from the most primitive layers of the self and psyche.⁵⁴ On a more rational plane, Woolf showed a flawed marriage in so truthful a way that those who do not accept feminist views of the world have always found the Ramsays to be male and female traits personified, and their marriage the best way for role mates to live together.⁵⁵ The language of ambiguity in which the marriage is clothed, however, and the motivations which force each partner to compromise reveal that Woolf was criticising as well as remembering and creating. This criticism shapes the third section of the novel, where Lily Briscoe and Minta Doyle break free of Mrs Ramsay's impositions of her own role restraints on their lives.

Minta Rayley is present only in Lily's memory in part III, but Lily has thought through the dissolution of the Rayleys' marriage. It has become a partnership wherein each member lives a separate life. Minta accepts the fact that Paul has a mistress with whom he shares his political concerns. It is implied that Minta leads a full social and sexual life without Paul (III, v, pp. 257–8). That ‘they were excellent friends, obviously’ (III, v, p. 258) does not change the fact that this marriage flouts Mrs Ramsay's expectations for the couple she united. Mrs Ramsay had expected what Paul had fantasised about:

The lights coming out suddenly one by one seemed like things that were going to happen to him—his marriage, his children, his house; and again he thought, as they came out on the high road, which was shaded with high bushes, how they would retreat into solitude together, and walk on and on, he always leading her, and she pressing close to his side (as she did now).

(I, xiv, p. 118)

Paul here visualises a perfect Patriarchal marriage. The ‘high bushes’ refer back to the Ramsays' gaping hedge. The possessive pronouns which ring with such insistence remind one that Woolf had no illusions about what marriages like Paul's give the unaware male. In fact, Paul is much worse in this fantasy than Mr Ramsay ever is in reality, for Mr Ramsay loves his wife and regards her and his children as theirs, not as some possession solely under his domain. In a buried mark of sisterhood, even as Mrs Ramsay did not always follow where her husband directed, neither does Minta.

Minta's suggested promiscuity is a political action, for it is one way to transcend Victorian restraints on women as males' property. The imagery of garish red and gold in which Minta is always celebrated (III, v, pp. 257–8; I, xvii, p. 149) is highly sexual and in part III Minta is free to luxuriate in a power the Ramsays only discreetly expressed. Interestingly, Minta and Paul's companionship, and their acceptance of one another's intellectual and sexual freedom, could be based on Vanessa and Clive Bell's opening their marriage to include others by 1912.⁵⁶

Mrs Ramsay has manipulated Minta but not vanquished her. Lily Briscoe, however, was in much more danger from Mrs Ramsay's expectations and manipulations than Minta. In some ways Lily Briscoe is the least powerful person in ‘The Window,’ and thus is well chosen to represent the Ramsay girls, who are also powerless under their mother's dominion (I, i, p. 14). Unlike flaming Minta, Lily has no sexual resources to ease her relations with men. Nor are her dealings with Mrs Ramsay free of Lily's anxiety. So great is Lily's love for Mrs Ramsay that it sometimes makes her self-destructive. Under pressure of Mrs Ramsay's expectations in ‘The Window,’ Lily is many times untrue to her feelings of right and wrong. For instance, she is forced to salve Mr Tansley's wounded feelings at the dinner party (I, xvii, pp. 137–8), and her relation with Mr Bankes, whom Lily likes and admires very much, is sometimes strained by her guilt over not wanting to follow Mrs Ramsay's wishes that she marry him.

But Lily Briscoe's complex resolution of her love for and dependence on Mrs Ramsay in part III is a psychological paradigm for women who seek autonomy. In Lily's moving beyond Mrs Ramsay's mode of behaviour we see a major transition in women's use of the power of selfhood, as the centre of power shifts away from the narrow scope of the home to the outer world of work and self-actualisation. Lily comes to cherish in herself powers different from those that motivate Mrs Ramsay. Sorting through her memories and feelings for the older woman in part III, criticising her and the men they had known in common, Lily disentangles herself from Mrs Ramsay's expectations for her in relation to these men, for Lily ‘had never married, not even Mr. Bankes’ (III, v, p. 260). Mourning Mrs Ramsay, Lily arrives at new ways of loving herself and others.⁵⁷

Readers have long known what is now certain, that Lily Briscoe is an artistic surrogate for the author, and that Lily's formal task is analogous to Woolf's.⁵⁸ But as a woman Lily has generally been dismissed as a narrow, scared alternative to Mrs Ramsay; a poor dried-up spinster whose lack of social and sexual panache seriously harms her completeness as an adult, for this is the very way both Ramsay parents judge her (I, iii, p. 29; III, ii, p. 225). But at this moment in our culture we are questioning whether a Mrs Ramsay is the apogee of female development. It is clear now that Lily's refusal to marry, and her avoidance of heterosexuality as Mrs Ramsay had envisioned it, are not a failure to be womanly, for being womanly no longer means being defined by one's relations to men or to one's reproductive system.

Lily's interior union with Augustus Carmichael, (III, v, passim) and her friendship with Mr Bankes, (III, xii, p. 263) prepare her to deal with Mr Ramsay, to whom she turns at last (III, xiii, pp. 308–9). Accepting both the Ramsays as flawed but monumental human beings, no longer trapped into seeing them as all-encompassing archetypes, Lily Briscoe realises that her imaginings about their lives have ceased to imprison hers. She realises that she has rejected Mrs Ramsay's strictures about what is proper behaviour for ‘real women,’ strictures that had crippled Lily's talent and prevented her from finishing her painting. Lily, as she puts the final stroke to her picture, can now accept her validity as a single woman, an artist whose power comes not from manipulating others' lives for fulfilment, but one whose mature vision encapsulates and transcends reality. Mrs Ramsay's mode is thus blasted apart, and the single woman and the married woman are each enabled to reach beyond the domestic sphere and the life and work of the husband or lover to act in the world of maturity and decision. Once Lily has become autonomous she can imagine walking beyond the spear plants in Mrs Ramsay's garden, ‘not alone anymore but arm in arm with somebody,’ either man or woman.

Notes

1. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927) I, xii, pp. 104-7. References in the text (by part, chapter and page) are to this edition.

2. Mitchell Leaska, Virginia Woolf's Lighthouse: A Study in Critical Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970) pp. 117-20; and his The Novels of Virginia Woolf from Beginning to Ending (New York: John Jay Press, 1977) pp. 151-2.

3. Bernard Blackstone, Virginia Woolf: A Commentary (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1969) p. 100.

4. David Daiches, Virginia Woolf (New York: New Directions, 1963) p. 86, for example.

5. Lord David Cecil, ‘Virginia Woolf’, Poets and Story Tellers: A Book of Critical Essays (London: Constable, 1949).

6. Roger Poole, in The Unknown Virginia Woolf (London: Cambridge University Press, 1978), not only finds that the Ramsays' and the Stephens' marriage were a blend of what we now recognise as the sex-role stereotypes of masculine and feminine, but also argues that this division into male and female modes of thought and spheres characterised the marriage of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. For his discussion of Mrs Ramsay as ‘the female mind’, see pp. 260-1.

7. Glenn Pedersenn, ‘Vision in To the Lighthouse’, PMLA, LXXIII (1958) 585-600.

8. Leaska, Virginia Woolf's Lighthouse, p. 120.

9. Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, Moments of Being, Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (Brighton, Sussex: University of Sussex Press, 1976) pp. 64-137. See also Sir Leslie Stephen's Mausoleum Book, ed. Alan Bell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).

10. Compare Lee Holcombe, ‘Victorian Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Woman's Property Law, 1857-1882’, in A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977) p. 15, to Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, 1977) passim.

11. William L. Burns, The Age of Equipoise (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964).

12. On the agitation for the reform of women's education, see Rita McWilliams-Tulberg, ‘Women and Degrees at Cambridge University, 1862-1897’, in A Widening Sphere, pp. 117-45. For a discussion of women's legal situation, see Holcombe, ibid., pp. 3-28. See also John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869), ed. Alice Rossi, in Mill and Taylor, Essays on Sex Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

13. Cf. Mona Caird, Is Marriage a Failure? and The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays (1897), to Mrs Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Wives of England: Their Relative Duties, Domestic Influences, and Social Obligation (New York: Appleton, 1843).

14. Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957) p. 179.

15. Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, ed. E. B. Leacock (New York: International Publishers, 1973), is based on the findings of the anthropologist Morgan.

16. Engels, Family, pp. 120-3. Socialist family theory, investigated by Engels in his insistence on the radical effect industrial capitalism had on family structure, is the basis of most feminist theory of the family: for example, of Annie Oakley, Woman's Work: The Housewife, Past and Present (New York: Vintage, 1976); and Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Los Angeles and Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1978). This view is under intense debate among all schools of family theorists. Peter Lazlett, going beyond his earlier The World We Have Lost (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965), argues in his edition of Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), that the family has always been nuclear—a very radical theory and a radical change from his earlier views (see Household, pp. 2-86, esp. p. 29). Disagreeing with Lazlett, Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977) sets himself diametrically opposite Engels as well (see esp. pp. 661-2). These scholars have not emphasised or even remarked on a point their findings nevertheless make explicit: women have been second-class citizens to men in all traditional family arrangements across recorded time. For feminist criticism of patriarchal family theory see the superb article by R. Rapp, E. Ross and R. Bridenthal, ‘Examining Family History’, Feminist Studies, Spring 1979, pp. 174-200.

17. Leslie Stephen, The Science of Ethics (London: Smith and Elder, 1907) p. 128.

18. ‘Jean Love finds Julia Stephen's nursing career a deliberate attempt on her part to get out of the house and away from her husband's and children's demands—demands she covertly encouraged and expected.’ Personal communication, Harvena Richter.

19. Stephen, Mausoleum, pp. 57-65, esp. p. 60.

20. See, for example, Ellen Hawkes's essay in this volume, as well as Jane Marcus, ‘Some Sources for Between the Acts’, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, Spring 1977, pp. 1-3.

21. Ellis, Wives. See also William B. Mackenzie, Married Life: Its Duties, Trials, Joys (1852); John Maynard, Matrimony, or, What Marriage Is, and How to Make the Best of It (1866); and Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management. Sarah Ellis writes so well, and is clearly so intelligent, one wishes she had been on the other side. It is illuminating to compare these books to such as The Total Woman, available today.

22. Ellis, Wives, 24-5.

23. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1938) pp. 4-5.

24. Ibid.

25. John Ruskin, ‘Of Queen's Gardens’, in Sesame and Lilies (New York: Putnam's, n.d.) pp. 170-1.

26. Mill, Women, p. 190.

27. Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (London: Hogarth Press, 1965) p. 31.

28. Mill, Women, p. 142.

29. To socialists, such ideology keeps intact women's unpaid support of the family under industrialised capitalism. To feminists, such ideology prevents women from taking control of their own lives and from living separately from men if they so desire.

30. Ellis, Wives, p. 215.

31. Ibid., p. 213.

32. It was in upholding this fabric with its narrow lines and visiting the poor and sick that many of the most militant Victorian feminists understood from their work that Victorian economic horrors were indubitably intertwined with women's oppression. As Ray Strachey puts it in a work Woolf knew (see Three Guineas, p. 148, n. 12), ‘as they realized the evils of society, [they] grew dissatisfied with the powerlessness of their own sex, so that quite a short probation in this school [of “social work”] was enough to produce feminists by the score’—The Cause (repr. Bath: Cedric Chivers, 1974) p. 88. Quentin Bell, in Virginia Woolf: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1972) vol. I, p. 38, discusses Julia Stephen's nurturance as a force in all the lives she touched.

33. See Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976) for a full explanation of this. See also L. Blum, M. Homiak, J. Housman and N. Scheman, ‘Altruism and Women's Oppression’, eds C. Gould and M. Wartofsky, Women and Philosophy: Toward a Theory of Liberation (New York: Putnam's, 1976) pp. 222-47.

34. Mill, Women, p. 141.

35. Jill Conway, ‘Stereotypes of Femininity in a Theory of Evolution’, in Suffer and Be Still, ed. M. Vicinus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972) pp. 140-5.

36. Ellis, Wives, p. 111.

37. Engels, Family, pp. 120-3, and passim.

38. Ellis, Wives, p. 76.

39. Ibid., p. 67.

40. Ibid., p. 123.

41. Virginia Woolf later parodied the being whom Coventry Patmore—a close friend of Woolf's grandmother—and Mrs Ellis had enshrined as the Angel in the House.

42. Ellis, Wives, p. 117.

43. Leaska, The Novels of Virginia Woolf, p. 133.

44. See my ‘“The Deceptiveness of Beauty”: Mother Love and Mother Hate in To the Lighthouse’, Twentieth Century Literature, 23 Oct 1977, pp. 345-76, for a mythic interpretation of Mrs Ramsay.

45. According to Freud, children do imagine intercourse between parents as assaultive behaviour.

46. Mill, Women, p. 238.

47. Any reading of novels by Dickens, Trollope and Gaskell, or any opera by Gilbert and Sullivan, will show that married middle-class Victorian women were expected to be matchmakers.

48. Blum et al., in Women and Philosophy, p. 237. Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering, is a brilliant investigation of motherhood in patriarchy, as in Rich, Of Woman Born. See also Jane Flax, ‘The Conflict Between Nurturance and Autonomy in Mother-Daughter Relations and within Feminism’, Feminist Studies, 4, June 1978, pp. 171-89.

49. Mill, Women, p. 512.

50. Lytton Strachey found that To the Lighthouse had no sex in it. This disgusted him; see Michael Holroyd's biography (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968) vol. II, p. 531, n. 1.

51. See above, p. 155.

52. The romantic transcendence of barriers between selves Woolf found a novelist's convention, and rejected it in her first novel, The Voyage Out. This convention, to her, lied about love's complexity.

53. In The Novels of Virginia Woolf, pp. 122-5, and Virginia Woolf's Lighthouse, pp. 65-76, Leaska asks of Mrs Ramsay what Mrs Ellis asks of Victorian wives.

54. See my ‘“The Deceptiveness of Beauty”’, in Twentieth Century Literature, Oct 1977, pp. 350-5; and also Helen Storm Corsa, ‘Death, Mourning, and Transfiguration in To the Lighthouse’, Literature and Psychology, XXI 3 Nov 1971, pp. 115-31, for a superb, albeit Freudian, reading of the movements of the unconscious in To the Lighthouse.

55. See Cecil, in Poets and Story Tellers; Blackstone, Woolf: A Commentary; and Daiches, Virginia Woolf.

56. Bell, Woolf, vol. II, p. 169.

57. See, for instance, Lily's maturity in helping Mr Ramsay stand on his own two feet, and use his boots, III, ii, pp. 229-30.

58. Thomas Vogler, Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘To the Lighthouse’ (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970) pp. 10-13. On the last page of the holograph of To the Lighthouse in the Berg collection of the New York Public Library, Woolf has divided the page into thirds, even as Lily's painting is divided. Down these patches she has drawn a central line, as Lily does, to finish her painting. Psychic unity lies in that strong stroke.