Virginia Woolfs To The Lighthouse - Portrait of a Real Woman :: To The Lighthouse Essays

To The Lighthouse - Portrait of a Real Woman    Until To The Lighthouse, I had never read eitherthing that so absolutely described women wives, mothers, daughters and artists. I felt like shouting Eureka on every page. These were my thoughts, beautifully written. Virginia Woolf writes of the essential loneliness and aloneness of human beings. In the first passage I am examining Mrs. Ramsay is the heart of the group self-contained around the dinner table. It is because of her that they are assembled. She is the wife, the mother. And the whole of the effort of merging and catamenia and creating tarryed on her. But she feels disconnected, outside that eddy that held the others, alone. She views her husband almost as an inanimate object. She could not understand how she had ever felt any emotion or affection for him. The room has become shabby. Beauty has dissolved. The host for which she is responsible is merely a group of strangers sitting at the alike(p) table. N othing seemed to have merged. They all told sat separate. Mrs. Ramsay understands that she must bring these hoi polloi together. Again she felt, as a fact without hostility, the sterility of men, for if she did not do it nobody would do it. So she drifts into the eddy to do her duty -- albeit reluctantly. ...she began all this business, as a sailor not without weariness sees the wind gormandise his sail and yet hardly wants to be off again and thinks how, had the air sunk he would have whirled round and round and found rest on the floor of the sea. This passage is so true In a traditional family (my family) there is a man (husband and father), a cleaning woman (wife and mother), and children. The woman is claimed by all. She is held responsible, both in the eyes of her family and in her own eyes, for the happiness and well-being of all. She is the glue, the anchor, the spark, the damper. She is lonely but never alone. The idea of drifting to the screwing of the sea can seem inviting Ð to be free and alone This diddle passage aptly illustrates a real womans very complicated feelings about the demands of family and society upon her. I think it is no less valid presently then it was in the 1920s when the book was written.