Mrs Ramsay’s Vision of Life and her significance in the

novel

Mrs. Ramsay is a beautiful and loving woman, upper-middle-class Victorian wife and mother of eight children who devotes herself to family and friends and who takes pride in making memorable experiences for the guests at the family’s summer home on the Isle of Skye. She emerges from the novel’s opening pages not only as a woman of great kindness and tolerance but also as a protector .

Mrs.Ramsay is portrayed in images of fertility and softness. Also, she is seen as an image of fountain and the flowering fruit-tree. For her children, she is the off-spring of love, protection and warmth. For her guests, she is sympathetic, pleasing and tries to create unity and harmony among them.

Mrs.Ramsay is intelligent but her way of thinking is intuitive, instinctive and fluid. She moves from one idea to another not to carried by reason but irrationally through association. Her values are spiritual rather

than materialistic .

Mrs.Ramsay is portrayed in her positive maternal, sympathetic and loving images. Yet in her treatment of Mr.Tansley , she reveals herself as socially condescending and a snob who feels morally superior to her husband and the other guests .

Her emotional responses and human motives are ambiguous. She surrounds herself with people who need and depend on her in order to control and manipulate them. So her self-sacrifice is a shield which she uses to hide her manipulative.

Ultimately, as is evident from her meeting with Mr. Ramsay at the close of “The Window,” Mrs. Ramsay never compromises herself. Here, she is able—masterfully—to satisfy her husband’s desire for her to tell him she loves him without saying the words she finds so difficult to say. This scene displays Mrs. Ramsay’s ability to bring together disparate things into a whole. In a world marked by the ravages of time and war, in which everything must and will fall apart, there is perhaps no greater gift than a sense of unity, even if it is only temporary. Lily and other characters find themselves grasping for this unity after Mrs. Ramsay’s death

Mrs. Ramsay is a complex character: she is invested in the importance of marriage between a man and a woman (and all men and all women should definitely be married, according to her), but she clearly sees the flaws in her own marriage. It becomes Mrs. Ramsay's duty to soften her husband's bullying and to support him in public. Even so, she's embarrassed by his constant quoting of poetry in a loud voice, and by his need for praise from the people around him.

She wishes to keep her youngest son and daughter in a state of perpetual childhood, and she admits to herself that she prefers ‘boobies’ to intelligent young men, for she can control children and boobies. This manipulative element in her character is alien to her perception of herself, and she is puzzled that Minta’s mother should have accused her alienating her daughter’s affections .

Mrs.Ramsay instinctively identifies herself with Lily the artist and with Carmichael the poet. Like them, she is a creator but her medium is human beings and her form, human relationships .