Monday, November 16, 2015
Mr. Ramsey
When we talked about Mr. Ramsey I couldn't help but be reminded of Gabriel Conroy. They are both intellectual men and their intelligence seems to hinder them from being "fully human" in some sense. Mr. Ramsey finds himself distracted from his reality, his wife and eight children, because he is thinking about poetry and his work. He so desperately wants to be remembered for his body of work (as we discussed in class) that he has a difficult time valuing what he does have (his wife and children); he values his family on the surface, but is sort of unable to really connect with his children. Gabriel displays the same problems: he knows how intelligent he is and he struggles to truly connect with the people around him, especially his wife. Obviously there are other differences between the two men, but I think that this theme of "intelligence harming our humanity and ability to connect with others" is interesting.
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Hey MacKenzie, I think you are going to find an insightful little bit on pgs 70 and 71 where Mrs. Ramsay frames this train of thought in her husband. The disconnect from the outside world, and even then his own world; that he is so wrapped up in that brilliant mind of his that he can't "consider the lilies of the goddam field." All this said there is redemption, that even in Mr. Ramsay's self obsessed vanity he can put himself aside for his wife, no matter how petty or hollow the observation he does have the ability to see beyond himself. I strongly believe this is a book with no hero's, just cowards and redemption.
ReplyDeleteThis is definitely an interesting and worthwhile comparison, MacKenzie. Both, as you note, are cultured and intellectual, and both are deficient in terms of interpersonal relations and social vitality. Both ultimately contemplate what remains of a life, of a self, when "all gestures and fripperies" (44) drop away. And yet are both so admirable and complicated, too, and as I said in class yesterday I'm always interested to see how your feelings about Mr. Ramsay evolve as you read the final part of the novel ... I suppose, too, that there are other broader thematic parallels between Joyce's story and Woolf's novel: they both are concerned with time (and the individual life's relation to time), with perspective ("what, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long waste of the ages" (35); "distant views seem to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth already at rest" (20)), with knowing others (in this case, especially with knowing one's own wife), with ego and the surrendering of one's ego, etc. ...
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