to the lighthouse and the fall of mrs. ramsay

Clay Parrish


“...she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.”
Mrs. Ramsay Chapter 6

This was my first moment of “disturbia,” this line in the book kind of jumped out of the page at me, and made me smile, because I thought that it was a great description for Mrs. Ramsay. Woolf’s amazing ability to describe things is something that I have touched on in class before, because she seems to describe common things, and by being intentionally vague, every reader is left with a very good personal image to fit the description. When I read this is made me think of a mother sighing, doling out explanations all day long, spending all day cleaning and rearing children, and being so spent at the end of the day, just as she gets into bed to read a book, her baby cries. There is nothing for her to do but to sigh, lay her book down, and get back to work. Her work is never over, she must be simultaneously strict and loving, protective and prohibitive. To me, this is the perfect description, because a mother seems to soak up every emotion she can every morning, preparing to dole them out as the day goes on, squeezing every last drop out until the end of the day.

“To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other
people's feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilization so wantonly, so
brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without
replying, dazed and blinded, she bent her head as if to let the pelt of
jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked. There
was nothing to be said.”
Mrs. Ramsay Chapter 6

This created another moment of "disturbia” for me because it is such a foreign concept to me. While my mother always taught be to be honest and truthful, other people’s feelings have always mattered more. For Mr. Ramsay to blast through his child’s hope and his wife’s promises just because they may be false seems so foreignly cruel to me. Obviously Mrs. Ramsay agrees, so much so that this is one of the scenes in which Mrs. Ramsay’s tiredness and weakness begin to show themselves. It is as if she has been physically hit, “dazed and blinded.” Clearly she is taxed, spent, much as (relating to the first quote) a sponge losses is ability to retain water after a long time of use. I found it interesting that Woolf says dirty water, because that could be another reference to the sponge from earlier. It is like life has kept hitting her, and for a long time, she fought back, but now her will to fight is leaving her. This is what we looked at in class today, her folding in on herself, drawing away from the person that she used to be. Her husband has made her callus and unresponsive to the things that she would normally protect her children from. I can imagine that at this point, Mrs. Ramsay has a splitting headache.