Name:Janakiba k. Rana

Class:M.A.  Sem:3

Topic: Mythical reading of Mrs Ramsay To The Lighthouse

paper no:09

Roll no:09

Year:2015-2016

Submitted to : Smt S.B.Gardy Department of English,
 Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnager University.

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INTRODUCTION

                      

In this novel Virginia Woolf’s concept of woman’s role in life is crystallized in the character of Mrs. Ramsay, whose attributes are those of major female figures in pagan myth.

The most useful myth for interpreting the novel is that:

                     

The primordial Goddess, who is threefold in relation to Zeus: mother (Reha), wife (Demeter), and daughter (Persephone).

One of the major sources of the myth is the Homeric “Hymn to Demeter: in which the poet compares Rhea with clear that Demeter, and makes it clear that Demter and her daughter Persephone “are to be thought of as a double figure, one half of which is the ideal complement of the other” this double figure is that of the Kore the primordial maiden. Who is also a mother. Also useful in interpreting the novel is the Odeipus myth.

If we look at Virginia Woolf’s diary it shows that she read ‘Greek’ and “On Not Knowing Greek” shows that she venerated it. Even she would have not read jung, freud and Frazer. She would have known about them through other members of the Bloomsbury Group. However there is no direct evidence that she consciously used myth in the writing of this novel. Virginia Woolf in her diary reiterated the role of the  Subconscious in the germination of a novel and noted: “How tremendously important unconsciousness is when one writes”

Mythical reading of Mrs. Ramsay’s character:

                     

In “TO THE LIGHT HOUSE” the myth of Oedipus and the Korel, superimposed momentary upon the novel. Provided a  framework within whose spatial ordering the symbolic people passages, and phrases of the book can be seen to assume a relationship to each other which illuminates their reciprocal functions and meanings.

Several interpretations:

                     

Mrs. Ramsay in not merely Goddness (Blackstone P112), nor light, spirit, and spell(Roberts, P596). She is more than this and more than the main spring of the novel: “She is the meaning of novel.”

Terms of Christian myth:

Or rejection of Christian myth

                      

There is much evidence, both external and internal. Virginia Woolf’s agnosticism appears on many pages of her diary.

                        
           The Christian symbolism is quite as inappropriate for Mrs. Rasmay.

           When the phrase,

           We are in the hands of the Lord.

           Enters her mind, she rejects it:

           “insantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that who had said it?

           Not she had been trapped into saying somet she did not mean.”

Mrs. Ramsay sometimes senses in life, for Zeus was the God who connived with Hades in the abduction of Persephone and was himself the bridegroom by violence of Demeter. Her function is the same on the intellectual level for she gives her protection and inspiration to both art and science.

                        
       To Lily the painter she gives stimulus and understanding.

       To Mrs. Ramsay the philosophy she supplies love, comfort and reassurance.

Myth of Rhea: 

Was the oldest of the Gods, the child of Goen, mother earth, and sopranos.

Rhea has six children three boys and three girls Mrs. Ramsay has eight four boys and four girls.

                     

Like Cronus Mr. Ramsay was sometimes “like a lion seeking whom he could devour…”(233) he has power and authority: “Let him be fifty feet away, let him not even speak to you, let him not even see you, he permeated, he prevailed, he imposed himself. He changed everything”.

                       

In each family the youngest child, a male is the one who opposes the father. Zeus, alone in his excile on Crete, might have reflected like James, “I shall be left to fight the tyrant alone.”

                      

As Rhea protected Zeus from physical harm, so Mrs. Ramsay tries to guard James from psychological wounds.

                      

Mr. Ramsay’s declaration that the weather will not permit the trip to the Light House which dames so passionately desires,

                      

She reflects that children never forget; “She was certain that he was thinking, we are not going to the Light House tomorrow; and she thought, he will remember that all his life.”

• Mrs. Ramsay has many of the physical attributes of a Goddess.
• To Lily’s eyes she seems to wear “an august shape…”she has a “royalty of form..”
• Augustus Carmichael bows as if to do her “homage”
• When Charles Tansley glimpses her standing motionless, a picture of Queen Victoria behind her, he realized that she is the most beautiful person he had ever seen”

Even as he speaks of prosaic things,

“One would be thinking of Greek temples, and how beauty had been with them there in that Stuffy room”

Psychic Qualities:

Mrs. Ramsay’s psychic qualities are also those of a Goddess she is possessed of an intuitive knowledge and wisdom, and exercises a dominion over those around her, seeming almost to cast a spell upon them.

       

Lily Briscoe sees Mrs. Ramsay as:

“Unquestionably the loveliest of people.. the best perhaps.”

Lily laughs at her,

“Presiding with immutable calm over destinies which she completely failed to understand”

Mrs. Ramsay resembles Rhea,

She appears almost an incarnation of Demeter. This divine being, the Goddess of the corn, was the daughter of Cornos and Rhea and the sister of Zeus. But unlike him and the other Olympians, she was, with Dionysus, mankind’s best friend. Here was the divine power which made the earth fruitful.

“Who worshipped, not like the other Gods by the bloody scarifies men liked, but of grain was hallowed, Demeter’s holy grain:”

Symbols of fruitfulness cluster around Mrs. Ramsay.

She plants flower and sees that they are tended. She adorns herself with green Shawl. Through he own stream of consciousness, is an almost obsessive concern that the greenhouse shall be repaired and preserved.

Mrs. Ramsay in all her aspects is feminine and opposed to that which is undesirable in masculinity. When she gives to Mr. Ramsay the sympathy and reassurance he begs, the action is symbolic:

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.”

Earlier in ‘To The Lighthouse’ Mrs. Ramsay has performed an act symbolic of Demeter’s role in the  rescue of Persephone. Going to the nursery, she has covered the boch’s Skull which has kept her daughter cam awake until eleven O’Clock at night covered the Skull with her own green shawl. The symbol of death is banished and obliterated by the symbol of fertility.