Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse

I was drawn to a particular passage on pages 14-16 that conditioned my reading of the rest of the novel. The interaction between Mrs. Ramsey and Charles Tansley in this moment reminded me of last week’s assignment of taking the literary tools of impressionism and imagism and using the analytical tools on visual specimens. On page 14, Mrs. Ramsey essentially narrates Tansley’s history back to him, beginning with noting that he should have been a philosopher and then chronologically naming the things that had gone wrong. The narrator notes that at the end of Mrs. Ramsey’s “narrative”, they see Tansley as he is in the present moment, “and then lying, as they saw him, on the lawn” (14). On page 15, Mrs. Ramsey and Tansley witness a man hanging up an advertisement, which is given a rudimentary analysis by Mrs. Ramsey, followed by her in-depth analysis of Tansley’s response to the advertisement and her exclamation. As a response to the image of the circus, Tansley leaves Mrs. Ramsey all kinds of visual and audible hints that she then analyzes. Tansley wishes Mrs. Ramsley could “see” him differently, “gowned and hooded, walking in a procession. A fellowship, a professorship, he felt capable of anything” (15), but realizes she is looking at the man hanging the advertisement. When Tansley attempts to copy Mrs. Ramsey’s excitement about the circus, the narrator describes it as a “clicking” sound, and suggests that the way he says “Let’s go” is so self-conscious that it makes Mrs. Ramsey uncomfortable. The narrator remarks later in the paragraph that the way Tansley says “return hospitality” was “parched” and “stiff”. Aside from having an “untrained mind” (13), unable to “follow the ugly academic jargon” (16) that Tansley uses, the narrator gives Mrs. Ramsey the authority to actually help the reader to come to a compelling analysis of Tansley, by reading him like fragments of an image, lyrics to a song, and incorporating his history and contexts.