LitHum Final Project: Glossary

James' relationship to his father centers on the latter's cold and aloof manner. Mr. Ramsay is, for all of his talents, not the most affectionate or attentive man when it comes to his children. His academic work keeps him cloistered from the real world and its problems and he largely leaves the childrearing to his wife. This in essence leaves James without a suitable male role model, which manifests in his development of an attitude of disdain for his father and a preference from a young age for the company of his mother, whose nuturance and tender care for her son brings into sharp contrast the neglectful tendencies of his father. This outward display of malice and ill-will towards his father mirrors what James thinks is his father's indifference toward him, a sort of rebellion against the relinquishing of the paternal duties on the part of Mr. Ramsay.

What James feels toward his father internally is less hatred than a secret reverence and a great disappointment at his father's lack of acknowledgement of his talents and capabilities. Mr. Ramsay does not praise his children, indeed seems to have nothing to say to them unless it is a form of of punishment or displeasure with some aspect of their behavior. James recognizes this as a form of tyranny and urges his sister Cam to fight with him against his father's silent domination of them.

This tension between hatred and reverence, resignation and resistance is something James struggles with greatly after his mother's passing and comes to its most fervent peak during the family's boat trip to the Lighthouse near the end of the book. It is here where James has the realization that he is not separate from his father but inextricably linked to him. The two share an unspoken internal struggle of loneliness and disappointment and James can no more distinguish himself from his father in the same way that Mr. Ramsay, in a moment of great joy for James, comes to the same silent realization and praises his son for the first time.

James' relationship with his father, paticularly this breakthrough toward the end of the novel, represents a struggle for identity, the tension between identifying oneself on the basis of what one is not ("a tyrant") and following the mold of one's parents in the quest to build a life of one's own.

For some textual evidence of this analysis, as Mr. Ramsay sits reading on the boat to the Lighthouse, James observes him, the way he's aged, the physical manifestion of his loneliness, which James recognizes in himself as part of his own reality. In this way, the two are shown to share a bond-the loneiness of the academic who used his work as an escape, and the loneliness of the child who bore the consequences of that escape.

Both too, with the loss of Mrs. Ramsay, now share a new form of loneliness, for Mr. Ramsay the death of his wife, who not only managed the household affairs but constantly reassured her husband, for James the loss of his beloved mother who tried to shield him from the difficulties of the world through an outpouring of love and attention. There is a recognition for James here that these two, father and son, who were once so remote from one another actually have more in common than he previously assumed.

Likewise when James first sees the Lighthouse, he has a sense of wonder and elevation of spirit. He again looks at his father reading and knows at once that this same feeling instilled in him by the Lighthouse is one shared by his father.

Mr. Ramsay had almost done reading. One hand hovered over the page as if to be in readiness to turn it the very instant he had finished it. He sat there bareheaded with the wind blowing his hair about, extraordinarily exposed to everything. He looked very old. He looked, James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the sand; he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their minds―that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things.

He was reading very quickly, as if he were eager to get to the end. Indeed they were very close to the Lighthouse now. There it loomed up, stark and straight, glaring white and black, and one could see the waves breaking in white splinters like smashed glass upon the rocks. One could see lines and creases in the rocks. One could see the windows clearly; a dab of white on one of them, and a little tuft of green on the rock. A man had come out and looked at them through a glass and gone in again. So it was like that, James thought, the Lighthouse one had seen across the bay all these years; it was a stark tower on a bare rock. It satisfied him. It confirmed some obscure feeling of his about his own character. The old ladies, he thought, thinking of the garden at home, went dragging their chairs about on the lawn. Old Mrs Beckwith, for example, was always saying how nice it was and how sweet it was and how they ought to be so proud and they ought to be so happy, but as a matter of fact, James thought, looking at the Lighthouse stood there on its rock, it’s like that. He looked at his father reading fiercely with his legs curled tight. They shared that knowledge. “We are driving before a gale―we must sink,” he began saying to himself, half aloud, exactly as his father said it.

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We later learn that James' father has never praised him, a secret grievance James has been nursing and evidence, along with his silent admiration of his father as he reads his book on the boat, that he actually holds the man in great reverence and desires his approval.

but then like a bird, he spread his wings, he floated off to settle out of your reach somewhere far away on some desolate stump. She gazed at the immense expanse of the sea. The island had grown so small that it scarcely looked like a leaf any longer. It looked like the top of a rock which some wave bigger than the rest would cover. Yet in its frailty were all those paths, those terraces, those bedrooms― all those innumberable things. But as, just before sleep, things simplify themselves so that only one of all the myriad details has power to assert itself, so, she felt, looking drowsily at the island, all those paths and terraces and bedrooms were fading and disappearing, and nothing was left but a pale blue censer swinging rhythmically this way and that across her mind. It was a hanging garden; it was a valley, full of birds, and flowers, and antelopes... She was falling asleep.

"Come now,” said Mr Ramsay, suddenly shutting his book.

Come where? To what extraordinary adventure? She woke with a start. To land somewhere, to climb somewhere? Where was he leading them? For after his immense silence the words startled them. But it was absurd. He was hungry, he said. It was time for lunch. Besides, look, he said. “There’s the Lighthouse. We’re almost there.”

“He’s doing very well,” said Macalister, praising James. “He’s keeping her very steady.”

But his father never praised him, James thought grimly.

Mr Ramsay opened the parcel and shared out the sandwiches among them. Now he was happy, eating bread and cheese with these fishermen. He would have liked to live in a cottage and lounge about in the harbour spitting with the other old men, James thought, watching him slice his cheese into thin yellow sheets with his penknife.

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Perhaps the most sigificant passage in the relationship between father and son comes when Mr. Ramsay finally praises his son for the first time, giving James the sense of pride and shared identity he had always wanted from his father but never got.

old man said. He had seen them clinging to the mast himself. And Mr Ramsay taking a look at the spot was about, James and Cam were afraid, to burst out:

But I beneath a rougher sea,

and if he did, they could not bear it; they would shriek aloud; they could not endure another explosion of the passion that boiled in him; but to their surprise all he said was “Ah” as if he thought to himself. But why make a fuss about that? Naturally men are drowned in a storm, but it is a perfectly straightforward affair, and the depths of the sea (he sprinkled the crumbs from his sandwich paper over them) are only water after all. Then having lighted his pipe he took out his watch. He looked at it attentively; he made, perhaps, some mathematical calculation. At last he said, triumphantly:

“Well done!” James had steered them like a born sailor.

There! Cam thought, addressing herself silently to James. You’ve got it at last. For she knew that this was what James had been wanting, and she knew that now he had got it he was so pleased that he would not look at her or at his father or at any one. There he sat with his hand on the tiller sitting bolt upright, looking rather sulky and frowning slightly. He was so pleased that he was not going to let anybody share a grain of his pleasure. His father had praised him. They must think that he was perfectly indifferent. But you’ve got it now, Cam thought.

They had tacked, and they were sailing swiftly, buoyantly on long rocking waves which handed them on from one to another with an extraordinary lilt and exhilaration beside the reef. On the left a row of rocks showed brown through the water which thinned and became greener and on one, a higher rock, a wave incessantly broke and spurted a little column of drops which fell down in a shower. One could hear the slap of the

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We see throughout this chapter that James is struggling with his identity as it relates to his father. He begins to question his hatred, who he is, the way he and his father are actually similar. This new realization is a turning point in the character development of James.

Yes, thought James, while the boat slapped and dawdled there in the hot sun; there was a waste of snow and rock very lonely and austere; and there he had come to feel, quite often lately, when his father said something or did something which surprised the others, there were two pairs of footprints only; his own and his father’s. They alone knew each other. What then was this terror, this hatred? Turning back among the many leaves which the past had folded in him, peering into the heart of that forest where light and shade so chequer each other that all shape is distorted, and one blunders, now with the sun in one’s eyes, now with a dark shadow, he sought an image to cool and detach and round off his feeling in a concrete shape. Suppose then that as a child sitting helpless in a perambulator, or on some one’s knee, he had seen a waggon crush ignorantly and innocently, some one’s foot? Suppose he had seen the foot first, in the grass, smooth, and whole; then the wheel; and the same foot, purple, crushed. But the wheel was innocent. So now, when his father came striding down the passage knocking them up early in the morning to go to the Lighthouse down it came over his foot, over Cam’s foot, over anybody’s foot. One sat and watched it.

But whose foot was he thinking of, and in what garden did all this happen? For one had settings for these scenes; trees that grew there; flowers; a certain light; a few figures. Everything tended to set itself in a garden where there was none of this gloom. None of this throwing of hands about; people spoke in an ordinary tone of voice. They went in and out all day long. There was an old woman gossiping in the kitchen; and the blinds were sucked in and out by the breeze; all was blowing, all was growing; and over all those plates and bowls and tall brandishing red and yellow flowers a very thin yellow veil would be drawn, like a vine leaf, at night. Things became stiller and darker at night. But the leaf-like veil was so fine, that lights lifted it, voices crinkled it; he could see through it a figure stooping, hear, coming close, going away, some dress rustling, some chain tinkling.

It was in this world that the wheel went over the person’s foot. Something, he remembered, stayed

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The motif here centers around the role of communication or rather the lack of communication between son and father. In the larger picture throughout the work, we get a sense of the internal monologues of many of the characters, but the ability to communicate their feelings, which often take on contradictory aspects, is troublesome. We get a glimpse of the love they share for one another at the conclusion of the dinner scene, but otherwise there appears to be a siloing of feelings. Mrs. Ramsay cannot tell her husband that she loves him. Mr. Ramsay can only hint at his need for reassurance, which his wife has noticed to pick up on. Lily's outlet for her feelings she tries and many times fails to communicate through her paintings. This moment of concluding praise of James by his father is one of genuine feeling expressed, of direct communication.

Addendum:

As I came upon this episode with James and Mr. Ramsay, I was immediately reminded of a scene from the well-known film by Ingmar Bergman, Through a Glass Darkly. Though it has no bearing on Woolf's work or on this analysis, it merits mentioning for the similarity in the relationship difficulties between father and son we find in To the Lighthhouse.

The plot centers around a young woman who is mentally ill and slowly losing her sanity. Her father is a man very much like Mr. Ramsay: A writer, a man of words, aloof from his children, immersed in his work, undergoing an existential crisis while his family falls apart around him.

The young woman's brother Minus, around the same age as James, is caught up in this turmoil and deeply wishes his father would talk to him and recognize his own talents as a writer. At the end of the film, there is a scene with a very similar motif as the one I've described abaove in To the Lighthouse. Minus' father finally speaks to him, acknowledges him as his son, and Minus echoes James in his joy ("Papa spoke to me!").

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Reflections