The Abject Mother: Mrs. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

Abstract

The criticism of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse has often focused on the figure of Mrs. Ramsay who supposedly represents Woolf’s own mother, Mrs. Julia Stephen. For a long time, Mrs. Ramsay as a typically maternal figure had been viewed as the embodiment of idealized virtues of forbearance, care, self-sacrifice and patience. Recently, however, Mrs. Ramsay has been interpreted as an extremely ambiguous character who is not only loving and caring but also terrifying and menacing. Some critics have tried to explain Mrs. Ramsay’s ambiguity by associating her with the Victorian angel of the house, nature as a creative and destructive force, or the archaic, mythic figure such as the Great mother. This paper, however, interprets Mrs. Ramsay as a Kristevan abject mother. According to Kristeva, abjection is fundamentally an ambiguity that is both terrifying and fascinating; it is also located at the border and blurs the boundary between inside/outside, subject/object, and self/other. As something in between that disturbs order and system, abjection threats to disintegrate the boundary of the self and turns a subject into nonidentity. On the personal archeology, abjection appears as a pre-oedipal struggle for a child to separate from the maternal body. In order for a child to take up a position in the symbolic order and to become an autonomous, speaking subject, it must get away from the powerful hold of the engulfing mother by turning her into an abject. In this paper I examine that Lily’s fascination with and horror of Mrs. Ramsay and her struggle to get away from her authority with the aid of the father figure, Mr. Ramsay, and her painting through the lens of the Kristevan concept of the abject mother.