Mr. Ramsay is a tempestuous, unpredictable figure in To the Lighthouse, given to erratic and occasionally cruel behavior that sets his family and guests on edge. In Chapter 4 of "The Window" he runs about and makes allusions to poetry, much to Lily Briscoe's dismay:
Indeed, he almost knocked her easel over, coming down upon her with his hands waving, shouting out: 'Boldly we rode and well,' but, mercifully, he turned sharp, and rode off, to die gloriously she supposed upon the heights of Balaclava. Never was anybody at once so ridiculous and so alarming. But so long as he kept like that, waving, shouting, she was safe; he would not stand still and look at her picture.
As Mr. Ramsay makes his ruckus, he quotes Tennyson's poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade." The poem depicts a disastrous cavalry charge during the Crimean War in which an entire brigade is slaughtered, although Woolf uses it in To the Lighthouse as a way to explore Mr. Ramsay's inner life and turbulent ego. The narrator alludes to the poem again in Chapter 6 of "The Window":
All his vanity, all his satisfaction in his own splendor, riding fell as a thunderbolt, fierce as a hawk at the head of his mean through the valley of death, had been shattered, destroyed. Stormed at by shot and shell, boldly we rode and well, flashed through the valley of death, volleyed and thundered—straight into Lily Briscoe and William Bankes.
Here, the crash and burn of Mr. Ramsay's pride is rendered into melodrama by Woolf's weaving of the Tennyson poem ("through the valley of death [...] stormed at by shot and shell, boldly we rode and well, flashed through the valley of death, volleyed and thundered[.]").
In To the Lighthouse, Woolf uses a vast range of literary devices to explore the eccentricities of the characters' inner lives. In this example, she shows how Mr. Ramsay's self-pity takes on epic proportions in his own mind as he affixes it to this tragic narrative of military defeat. Through allusion, he mythologizes his own suffering.
Mrs. Ramsay transfixes many of the characters in To the Lighthouse, who, in turn, comprehend and appreciate her beauty in each their own way. In Chapter 5 of "The Window," Mr. Bankes alludes to classical artwork as he makes a metaphorical comparison between Mrs. Ramsay and an ancient sculpture:
'Nature has but little clay,' said Mr. Bankes once, hearing her voice on the telephone, and much moved by it though she was only telling him a fact about a train, 'like that of which she molded you.' He saw her a the end of the line, Greek, blue-eyed, straight-nosed. How incongruous it seems to be telephoning to a woman like that. The Graces assembling seemed to have joined hands in the meadows of asphodel to compose that face.
Describing Mrs. Ramsay as a sculpture made by Nature herself, Mr. Bankes observes that Nature must have used a rare and magnificent clay indeed. In fact, Mrs. Ramsay appears to have been sculpted according to the Classical Greek ideal of beauty, as this passage is rife with allusions to the aesthetics and mythology of Greek antiquity. Bankes even goes so far as to remark that the Graces themselves—the group of Greek goddesses in charge of everything from artistic creativity to fertility—must have teamed up in the Asphodel Meadows, which is to say in the Greek underworld, to create Mrs. Ramsay. These allusions are powerful reminders of Mrs. Ramsay's singular hold over the other characters in the novel, and the invocation of the Asphodel Meadows—that portion of the underworld where normal, mortal souls are sent after their death—perhaps also foreshadows Mrs. Ramsay's eventual death in "Time Passes."
Mr. Ramsay is a tempestuous, unpredictable figure in To the Lighthouse, given to erratic and occasionally cruel behavior that sets his family and guests on edge. In Chapter 4 of "The Window" he runs about and makes allusions to poetry, much to Lily Briscoe's dismay:
Indeed, he almost knocked her easel over, coming down upon her with his hands waving, shouting out: 'Boldly we rode and well,' but, mercifully, he turned sharp, and rode off, to die gloriously she supposed upon the heights of Balaclava. Never was anybody at once so ridiculous and so alarming. But so long as he kept like that, waving, shouting, she was safe; he would not stand still and look at her picture.
As Mr. Ramsay makes his ruckus, he quotes Tennyson's poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade." The poem depicts a disastrous cavalry charge during the Crimean War in which an entire brigade is slaughtered, although Woolf uses it in To the Lighthouse as a way to explore Mr. Ramsay's inner life and turbulent ego. The narrator alludes to the poem again in Chapter 6 of "The Window":
All his vanity, all his satisfaction in his own splendor, riding fell as a thunderbolt, fierce as a hawk at the head of his mean through the valley of death, had been shattered, destroyed. Stormed at by shot and shell, boldly we rode and well, flashed through the valley of death, volleyed and thundered—straight into Lily Briscoe and William Bankes.
Here, the crash and burn of Mr. Ramsay's pride is rendered into melodrama by Woolf's weaving of the Tennyson poem ("through the valley of death [...] stormed at by shot and shell, boldly we rode and well, flashed through the valley of death, volleyed and thundered[.]").
In To the Lighthouse, Woolf uses a vast range of literary devices to explore the eccentricities of the characters' inner lives. In this example, she shows how Mr. Ramsay's self-pity takes on epic proportions in his own mind as he affixes it to this tragic narrative of military defeat. Through allusion, he mythologizes his own suffering.
In Chapter 7 of "The Window," after a particularly intense altercation in which Mr. Ramsay desperately sought sympathy and praise from Mrs. Ramsay, Woolf depicts Mrs. Ramsay's recovery through metaphor and allusion:
Immediately, Mrs. Ramsay seemed to fold herself together, one petal closed in another, and the whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon itself, so that she had only strength enough to move her finger, in exquisite abandonment to exhaustion, across the page of Grimm's fairy story, while there throbbed through her, like the pulse in a spring which has expanded to its full width and now gently ceases to beat, the raptures of successful creation.
In this passage, the narrator compares Mrs. Ramsay to a flower—closed but pulsing with life and preparing to bud—as she reads Grimm's "fairy story," revealed shortly hereafter to be "The Fisherman and his Wife."
On one level, the allusion to the Grimm tale, which generally concerns a fisherman sailing through a stormy sea, relates Mrs. Ramsay's concerns over her son's impending voyage to the Lighthouse. On another, however, the allusion has much greater significance: "The Fisherman and his Wife" is perhaps the most misogynistic of the Grimm tales, as an account of the titular Fisherman's struggle to keep up with his wife—depicted as a caricature, and stereotypically needy—as she levies increasingly unrealistic demands on her husband.
There is a level of irony to the inclusion of this story at this moment: in the marriage dynamic between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, Mr. Ramsay is the needy one. It is Mr. Ramsay who is viciously insecure and constantly seeking praise. Mrs. Ramsay, meanwhile, inverts the trope of the Grimm tale as she provides for her husband and struggles to meet his emotional needs. By making an allusion to "The Fisherman and his Wife," Woolf simultaneously underscores Mrs. Ramsay's own strengths and criticizes the vicious stereotyping against women that is so common in literature.
At the dinner party, in Chapter 17 of "The Window," Minta Doyle and Mr. Ramsay chat amiably. As this is happening, the omniscient narrator uses allusion in a story that reveals how Minta is extraordinarily intimidated by the man:
How could she be such a goose, he asked, as to scramble about the rocks in jewels?
She was by way of being terrified of him — he was so fearfully clever, and the first night when she had sat by him, and he talked about George Eliot, she had been really frightened, for she had left the third volume of Middlemarch on the train and she never knew what happened in the end; but afterwords she got on perfectly, and made herself out even more ignorant than she was, because he liked telling her she was a fool.
The source of Minta's fear of Mr. Ramsay, she reveals, was her under-preparedness for their first conversation in which he discussed George Eliot's 1871 novel Middlemarch. Woolf makes many allusions to other works of literature in To the Lighthouse, and perhaps it is no surprise that she would reference Middlemarch: famously, Woolf said that the work is "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people."
The author of Middlemarch, George Eliot, was a pseudonym for Mary Anne Evans—another legendary female writer in a time when the literary world was dominated by men—and the novel explores extensively the role of women in society. This is a central matter in To the Lighthouse, as well, which examines the nature of male and female power in a family dynamic as well as the role of women in the art world. This passage is an exploration of those very power dynamics, as the hyper-masculine, aggressive figure of Mr. Ramsay rants on Middlemarch—written by a women about women—to a female character, Minta Doyle.
By the very end of the novel, the Ramsays finally get the chance to sail to the Lighthouse. As they set out on their voyage in Chapter 4 of "The Lighthouse," however, Mr. Ramsay—lost in self-pity—repeats a troubling allusion:
...and then there was given him in abundance women's sympathy, and he imagined how they would soothe him and sympathise with him, and so getting in his dream some reflection of the exquisite pleasure women's sympathy was to him, he sighed and said gently and mournfully:
But I beneath a rougher sea
Was whelmed in deeper gulfs than he,so that the mournful words were heard quite clearly by them all.
Ramsay's poetic quotation comes from William Cowper's 1799 poem, "The Castaway," which recounts the tale of a sailor lost at sea from the sailor's own perspective. Ramsay's decision to quote a poem about a disastrous shipwreck while sailing with his children reflects his preoccupation with death in the aftermath of Mrs. Ramsay's passing and his obsession with his own suffering.
Apparently, Woolf read "The Castaway" with her own father, in the aftermath of her mother's death, and thus these references mark another autobiographical detail woven into the fictional portion of the narrative.
