Resist Tyranny at All Costs! (or at least at a reduced rate)

Godrevy Lighthouse, Cornwall Coast Path Walking

To be stuck in a space with someone with whom you don’t want to be with can be misery indeed, so tyranny must be resisted.

I have not written on To the Lighthouse as of yet, so I will keep this mostly to part three of the book being that we are suppose to do our writing before the discussion of said writing (or should I say, “discussed writing” – semantics, if it was a dog, it would bite me in the butt - too often).  So here I go, jumping into my discussion . . .

Having this last part told from the perspective of only a few people simplifies the story somewhat.  Lily Briscoe is the main storyteller in this last bit, if you can call it storytelling.  It’s more like we invade her mind and are made aware of her thoughts.  As always Mr. Ramsey, the sympathy sponge, is on the prowl seeking pity from any willing person or unwilling as in Lily’s case.  Just as the young man in “Kew Gardens” distracts the insanity in his older companion by touching a flower, something of substance, Lily distracts Mr. “Woe-is-me” Ramsey in his insane search of sympathy.  She brings his attention to his shoes.  And I’m not mistaken or overly stating his mental health because this sentence justifies my supposition:  “They had reached, she felt, a sunny island where peace dwelt, sanity reigned and the sun for ever shone, the blessed island of good boots” (157).  Keyword there is “sanity.”

Now, let’s direct our attention to Mr. Ramsey’s sympathy search.  In one of Erin Mullikin’s posts, she likens Woolf’s writing to rhizomatics.  Being one who does a bit of gardening, I thought she was speaking of plants that propagate through rhizomes when her blog was mentioned in class.  After reading her blog, I see that both ways are related.  Plants that propagate through rhizomes send out little runners and here and there new plants emerge, just as clicking on an internet link leads to clicking on another link, and then another, and so on, and on.  This is how I see Mr. Ramsey’s search for sympathy. He sends his need out for trying to grow his sympathy base.  Lily Briscoe doesn’t accept his request, but almost breaks down when he no longer seeks it; however, if Lily is the hard-packed earth not allowing the plant to send up a shoot, James and Cam represent hardened cement that won’t allow a shoot to even try to penetrate. In women (and family members, but mostly women) he seeks what he needs, an audience for his pain.  Their kind words are fertilizer for his need, his need of sympathy which leads this discussion to James and Cam, the other people on whose thoughts we eavesdrop.  It is from them that we hear the repeated phrase “to resist/fight tyranny to the death” which is directed towards their father (first seen on p. 166).  James has a hatred of his father so immense that he imagines burying a knife in his father’s body.  (But would the hatred die?  I don’t know, I no longer hate my mother; but the slow deterioration of her mind and personality could have a lot to do with that.  A quick death might have left the hatred alive.)  Pity can kill hatred, and James did not want to give his father the sympathy that he so craved; he wanted the hatred to live because his father’s constant egocentric personality could sap one of one’s own being.  He held his family captive.

On page 187 as James imagines knifing his father, he describes his father as a harpy:  “Fierce sudden black-winged harpy, with its talons and its beak cold and hard, that struck at you . . .”  In Greek mythology, a harpy is a bird with a women’s head, and the derivation of the word “harpy” comes from Greek and signifies “that which snatches” (OED).  Basically, James infers that his father’s incessant need for sympathy and attention is womanly, but worse actually in that he takes without having it being offered.  There’s some irony in that Mr. Ramsey is not very manly (in my estimation) because of his wheedling neediness conflicts with his sexism.  On page 168, we learn that Mr. Ramsey believes men should be out fighting the sea and drowning while women sit beside their sleeping children.  So, Ramsey does see himself as being manly because he drowns in his own self-pity and self-interest.

Need of sympathy pervades this section, but this last part does seem to have resolution because Lily states, “It was done; it was finished” (211).  And so am I!  Ta dah!  Later folks.

Woolf, Virginia.  To the Lighthouse.  Ed. Mark Hussey.  New York: Harcourt, 2005.

“harpy, n.”  OED Online.  June 2003.  Oxford University Press.  3 October 2010.