When can their glory fade?
O
the wild charge they made!
All the world
wonder’d.
Honour the charge they made!
A meditation on immortality, the poem captures the tumultuous state
of Mr. Ramsay’s mind and his anxiety about whether he and his work
will be remembered by future generations. Here, Mr. Ramsay emerges
as an uncompromising but terribly insecure intellectual. He knows
the world almost exclusively through words, so he tries to express
and mediate his sadness with the lines by Tennyson. He yearns for
the “glory” and the “wild charge” of which the poem speaks in the
form of brilliant contributions to philosophy. Although he acknowledges
a more profound truth—that in the end no immortality exists, and
even a stone will outlast a figure as influential as -William Shakespeare—Mr.
Ramsay cannot help but indulge his need to be comforted, to have
others assure him of his place in the world and its importance.
The posture he assumes as he approaches his wife in Chapter VII
is one that he returns to often. Again and again, he displays a
relentless desire for sympathy and understanding from her.
Mr. Ramsay is not alone in his need for his wife’s affections. Through
Mrs. Ramsay, Woolf suggests that Mr. Ramsay’s traits belong to all
men. Charles Tansley exhibits similar behavior in the opening chapters.
He navigates the world according to what he has studied and read,
and lashes out with “the fatal sterility of the male” for fear that
his contributions will be deemed lacking. Mrs. Ramsay believes such
daunted and insecure behavior to be inevitable, given the importance
of men’s concerns and work. She sees men as well as women forced
into roles that prescribe their behavior. In her extended sympathy
for her husband and in her attempts at matchmaking, Mrs. Ramsay
recognizes and observes these roles while trying to make it less
painful for the people in her life to have to play them. This question
of gender roles, which occupies much space in the coming chapters,
is played out most fully in the relationship between Mrs. Ramsay
and Lily Briscoe. Mrs. Ramsay’s maternal and wifely devotion represents
the kind of traditional lifestyle to which Lily Briscoe refuses
to conform.
Mr. Ramsay, who is obsessed with understanding and advancing the
process of human thought, reveals the novel’s concern with knowledge. To
the Lighthouse asks how humanity acquires knowledge and
questions the scope and validity of that knowledge. The fact that
Mr. Ramsay, who is decidedly one of the eminent philosophers of
his day, doubts the solidity of his own thoughts suggests that a
purely rational, universally agreed-upon worldview is an impossibility.
Indeed, one of the effects of Woolf’s narrative method is to suggest
that objective reality does not exist. The ever-shifting viewpoints
that she employs construct a world in which reality is merely a
collection of subjectively determined truths.
