Mothers, Daughters, Mrs. Ramsay: Reflections

In her 1923 essay "Jane Austen at Sixty," Virginia Woolf described one group of Austen's admirers as the "twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighborhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult offered to the chastity of their aunts" (Woolf 1924, 261). If we substitute "mother" for "aunt," and imagine how devoted readers might respond to any critique of that figure, we begin to get a sense of the aura surrounding Mrs. Ramsay when I started teaching To the Lighthouse. The year was 1973; I was a newly hired assistant professor, and I was teaching the course on twentieth-century British fiction with a senior male colleague. He was a mild man, a tolerant man, who had studied with Lionel Trilling and saw his role as encouraging his junior partner, but when, in my lecture on To the Lighthouse, I implied that perhaps Mrs. Ramsay was not the idealized vision of womanhood, motherhood, unity, continuity, and fertility that critics at that time painted her to be, and that in fact she dies, he became apoplectic. "How dare you question Mrs. Ramsay's sanctity" is a fair translation of his response. I was floored—and scared; it was clear I had just committed an act of matricide. Summoning my wits, I also summoned Geoffrey Hartman, whose essay "Virginia's Web" had influenced my thought. Look, I said, here's an eminent critic, and a man, an older man, who makes just this point; if my hands aren't clean, the guilt at least is shared. The moment passed, though I don't think he ever quite forgave me for upending his Mrs. Ramsay.

I begin with this anecdote because it introduces my topic: the shifting attitudes toward Mrs. Ramsay over the thirty-five years that I've been teaching the novel and what it tells us about shifting attitudes toward the figure of the mother, particularly among women. This is in many ways a generational story, one that those readers who have been around as long as I have will be familiar with; those who came to the novel more recently might be surprised at the passions swirling around the topic, especially at the time I gave my initial class lecture. My impetus for tracing this story was an article that appeared in the New York Times in June 2007 under the headline "Mommy Is Truly Dearest"; in it the writer argued that for many women in their twenties and thirties their mothers are their closest confidants, and they talk to them at least once a day (Rosenbloom 2007). I happened to be teaching To the Lighthouse when the article appeared, and I began to wonder whether changes in the mother-daughter relationship translated into changes in the reading of the novel. Setting out to test this thesis, I decided to focus on the moment surrounding my 1973 lecture, when feminism and other critical trends were radically reframing not only Mrs. Ramsay but the mother-daughter relationship itself. Recognizing that my own experience of teaching the novel would not be enough, I sent emails to Woolf scholars from different generations asking if they remembered their initial responses to Mrs. Ramsay, whether their readings had changed over the years, what their students' responses had been and were, and whether these had changed. I have incorporated their responses below.

Back, then, to winter 1973. Oddly, I don't remember what my reactions to Mrs. Ramsay were when I read the novel in 1965 at age twenty-two, nor do I remember rereading it until I began to teach it. At this point my memories become very clear, for my encounter with my colleague paled before my next experience of the outrage directed toward my so-called feminist distortion of the text by two far younger men at Middlebury College when I served as an outside reader for a senior thesis on the novel. I, of course, was not alone. As Carolyn Heilbrun wrote that same year, "One criticizes Mrs. Ramsay at one's peril. One of the first critics to suggest...