MEN AND WOMEN: A BALL-IN-SOCKET STORY?

Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon
Northwestern University

I am grateful for the opportunity to reply to Betty Sichel’s paper, both because it has prompted me to re-read Virginia Woolf’s magnificent To the Lighthouse, and because it sets the stage for exploring one of the most powerful aspects of the novel.¹ My response will begin with Professor Sichel’s final point — one with which I am in complete agreement. In exploring this point, I shall raise a question and in the discussion, return to points made earlier in her paper.

Sichel makes the following comment:

The Ramsey family is not disassociated from some larger framework…. This family like any other family is not a self-contained network or web of interacting relationships. Rather, in the background and within its very being, there is an explicit or tacit community that contributes to the education of the infant, her life history, and the way she chooses a life narrative.

How does the community “educate”? According to Gilligan, Noddings, Sichel, and many, many other writers, the community does its job, in part, by designating certain groups to exercise the various esteemed values. Women, we are told, are the caretakers — those who show concern for the needs and feelings of others rather than “the facts” or “logic” of the situation. A woman’s education must teach her those practices and values for which she is responsible, and teach her to exercise them properly.

Take, for example, Mrs. Ramsey, the mother of eight children, the husband of philosopher, Mr. Ramsey, the friend and confidant of such visitors to the Ramsey summer home in the Isles of Skye as artist Lily Briscoe, scientist William Bankes, graduate student Charles Tansley, and others. Mrs. Ramsey, Virginia Woolf tells us, “Had the whole of the other sex under her protection” — her caring — and we see how she exercises “protection” with Charles Tansley, Mr. Ramsey’s student who has has been snubbed by the children and whom she befriends at one point. Inviting Mr. Tansley to accompany her to town on an errand, she describes an old man, Mr. Carmichael, whom they pass:

He should have been a great philosopher, said Mrs. Ramsey, as they went down the road to the fishing village, but he had made an unfortunate marriage. Holding her parasol very erect, and moving with an indescribable air of expectation, as if she were going to meet someone round the corner, she told the story; an affair at Oxford with some girl; an early marriage; poverty; going to India; translating a little poetry “very beautifully, I believe,” being willing to teach the boys Persian or Hindustanee, but what really was the use of that? — ….It flattered [Charles Tansley]; snubbed as he had been, it soothed him that Mrs. Ramsey should tell him this. Charles Tansley revived.

One might argue that in Mrs. Ramsey, Virginia Woolf is showing us how a woman “protects” or cares by giving herself to individuals, for greater or lesser periods of time. Bestowing her attention, she lifts them out of self-deprecating isolation and returns them to the community of others from whom, after all, they are not so very different.

But does Woolf intend us to think that women and not men are educated to care about the feelings of others? That all women are so entrusted and inclined? Here, the message is much less clear, and for good reason, I think. For example, Woolf tells of of Mrs Ramsey’s daughters — Prue, Nancy, Rose — who at least once “sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from [Mrs Ramsey’s]” —

A wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other; for there was in all their minds a mute question of deference to chivalry, of the Bank of England and the Indian Empire, of ringed fingers and lace, though to them all there was something in this of the essence of beauty, which called out the manliness in their girlish hearts, and made them, as they sat at table beneath their mother’s eyes, honor her strange severity, her extreme courtesy, like a Queen’s rising from the mud to wash a beggar’s dirty foot.

The above is an example of Woolf’s genius, it seems to me. Mrs. Ramsey’s daughters are as human beings — at one and the same moment both critical and in awe of the same object. Their mother is both to be honored and eschewed, her devotion to caring both admirable and detestable. And so the daughters pose the question: Need they live as she has lived? Caring as she cares?

The issue with respect to Mr. Ramsey is similarly ambiguous: Does he care about individuals? Does he have power over them because he cares? Woolf describes a moment where the Ramseys sit together reading:

One ought not to complain, thought Mr. Ramsey, trying to stifle his desire to complain to his wife that young men did not admire him. But he was determined; he would not bother her again. Here he looked at her reading. She looked very peaceful reading. He liked to think that everyone had taken themselves off and that he and she were alone. The whole of life did not consist in going to bed with a woman, he thought, returning to Scott and Balzac, to the English novel and the French novel. Mrs. Ramsey raised her head and like a person in a light sleep seemed to say that if he wanted her to wake she would, she really would, but otherwise might she go on sleeping, just a little longer, just a little longer? She was climbing up those branches this way and that, laying hands on one flower and then another.

Here, as we will see again, there is evidence that Mr. Ramsey cares about his wife — cares not to “bother her again,” wishing to protect her from disruption at this moment. As we see, he seems also to care that she is there, even to the point of imagining that they are alone in the house together. Does his return to “the English novel and the French novel” signal his determination to think intellectually rather than sexually at this moment, or does it betray his preoccupation with the abstract and theoretical? Is Mrs. Ramsey’s willingness to be led away from reading by her husband a sign of his control over her? Or is the stifling of his complaint a sign that she is controlling him?

The presence of this ambiguity in Woolf’s presentation of her characters seems to raise questions about a basic assumption that many today hold, namely, that the community educates by inculcating different groups of people with the different values that enable society to exist. On the basis of this assumption, one is justified in speaking, for example, of “masculine” and “feminine” reasoning. “Masculine reasoning” is logical and abstract, one in which “a moral agent cannot consider any special relationship with a particular human being.” Accordingly, says Sichel, Mr. Ramsey “‘blocks out any disturbing sympathy,’ and never sensing his son’s feelings, bends and ‘tickles James’s bare calf with a spring of something.’” Likewise, says Sichel, “Mrs. Ramsey, a personification of women’s way of thinking, recognizes that men’s way of thinking runs counter to women’s very being. Though they adore her, men do not listen to Mrs. Ramsey; they do not take her ideas and judgments seriously.”

While it is possible to abstract so-called “masculine” and “feminine” thinking from Woolf’s descriptions of male and female characters, the practice may do the novel injustice. In my view, To the Lighthouse is a great work in part because it defies such narrow stereotyping. Far from being unintellectual and a non-reader, Mrs. Ramsey does read books and worries about the meaning of her life in an abstract way. She also longs to become “an investigator elucidating social problems” and not simply “a private woman whose charity was half sop to her own indignation, half relief to her own curiosity.” Likewise, as we shall soon see, Mr. Ramsey does not always block out “any disturbing sympathy.”

How, then, does the community educate its members so that its values become their own and its survival is thereby assured? It seems to me that Virginia Woolf’s suggestion is akin to Rousseau’s: men and women must love the same right values. If this be the case, they they will live compatibly and society will survive. Nowhere is this point made more powerfully than in Emile, when Sophie finally betroths herself to her beloved.² The moment comes when Emile and his tutor arrive at Sophie’s well past the appointed hour, having stopped to assist some peasants in distress. The tutor explains the delay to Sophie and says to the reader:

I stop speaking…. But before anyone speaks, Emile approaches his beloved, raises his voice, and says to her with more firmness than I would have expected, “Sophie, you are the arbiter of my fate. You know it well. You can make me die of pain. But do not hope to make me forget the rights of humanity. They are more sacred to me than yours. I will never give them up for you.” At these words, Sophie, instead of responding, rises, puts an arm around his neck, and gives him a kiss on the cheek. Then, extending her hand with inimitable grace, she says to him, “Emile, take this hand. It is yours. Be my husband and master when you wish. I will try to merit this honor.”

It seems that Sophie accepts Emile as her husband when she becomes convinced that his highest priority is not her but that which she sees as the highest priority, namely, the welfare of human beings. His willingness to risk her displeasure so as to help two people in need seems to have moved her. Likewise the mutual embrace of the right values seems also to unite the Ramseys:

“You’re teaching your daughters to exaggerate,” said Mr. Ramsey, reproving [Mrs. Ramsey]. Her Aunt Camilla was far worse than she was, Mrs. Ramsey remarked. “Nobody ever held up you Aunt Camilla as a model of virtue that I’m aware of,” said Mr. Ramsey. “She was the most beautiful woman I ever saw,” said Mrs. Ramsey. “Somebody else was that,” said Mr. Ramsey. Prue was going to be far more beautiful than she was, said Mrs. Ramsey. He saw no trace of it, said Mr. Ramsey. “Well, then, look tonight,” said Mrs. Ramsey. They paused. He wished Andrew could be induced to work harder. He would lose every chance of a scholarship if he didn’t. “Oh, scholarships!” she said. Mr. Ramsey thought her foolish for saying that, about a serious thing like scholarship. He should be very proud of Andrew if he got a scholarship, he said. She would be just as proud of him if he didn’t, she answered. They disagreed always about this, but it did not matter. She liked him to believe in scholarships, and he liked her to be proud of Andrew whatever he did.

Although the style is completely different from Rousseau’s, is not the message the same? What unites the lovers is not what they say but the mutual recognition that each values what the other values and knows it to be good. Despite protestations to the contrary, Mr. Ramsey endorses his wife’s unconditional acceptance of Andrew, and she his desire for their son to achieve scholarly distinction. Virginia Woolf, like Rousseau, seems to offer the reader grounds upon which human beings can unite — grounds which mutually endorsed, allow them to respect and love one another because each can see good in the other.

To the modern reader, it may seem that both Rousseau and Woolf present what one might call a ball-in-socket picture of the relation between the sexes. Accordingly, each sex seems to contribute necessary but different strengths to the union. If the strengths are well developed — well educated — then the ball will fit nicely into the socket and will turn with ease, allowing the smooth movement. Since the strengths of each are different, however, the perspective of each is inaccessible to the other. As Sichel puts it:

Mr. Ramsey never searches to know the other world and the way of life that Mrs. Ramsey personified. Mr. Ramsey never questions whether at times he too should enter into this other way of thinking and knowing. Though men’s language provides “a haven of security” for her life, Mrs. Ramsey does not presume she should speak this foreign language or enter men’s world; she does not entertain the idea that this too should be her world.

I have offered an alternative reading of these two texts, however, which suggests that the ball-in-socket perspective is not the only one to take. Because there is evidence that males and females in To the Lighthouse share characteristics, preferences, and values, a more suitable image might be that of the piano and violin converging upon the tonic key after independent but related sojourns in a Mozart sonata. While a listener might emphasize the differences between the parts that the two instruments play, the piece becomes a unity — because the two converge upon the judgment that here, at last, is home.

Accordingly, one might say that the community educates not by parcelling out esteemed practices and values to different groups — caring to women, rationality to men, for example — but by providing members with a vision of society that all can embrace — a vision that joins them together into a community. While members may indeed be educated to accept and practice the values in a variety of ways, it is their universal endorsement that education must accomplish — if society is to survive.

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¹ Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Brace & World, 1955).

² Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: or On Education, tr. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979).