Poor 70-year-old Mrs. McNab struggled to pull the cobwebs out of the Ramsey Home in To The Lighthouse attempting to restore the house to presentable grandeur. This was no easy task for an aging woman battling “too much work for one woman,” in a place that had stood for “all of these years without a soul in it.”
Yet the house remained, suspended in time from the day the residents
left. Showing multiple signs of deterioration Wool f illustrated the decay with
many mice, the leaky roof and the moldy books. “The house was left; the house
was deserted. It was left like a nutshell on a sand hill to fill with dry salt
grains now that the life had left it,” Woolf writes. (Woolf, 1981)
Woolf underscores the abandonment of the house, once bustling with the presence
of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey and their children, as she writes, “The rain came in.
But they never sent; never came.”
Just 29 lines later, Woolf
repeats the passage with a slightly varied word choice: “They never sent. They
never wrote.” (Woolf, 1981) .
The abandonment of this house conjures many speculative
representations for me. Perhaps the closed house “died” along with the strong
maternal figure, Mrs. Ramsey, who simultaneously passed away in London. Or the
house may signify an “end of an era” or a “loss of innocence” as World War I
waged on. The fact that the home “stood
still in time,” indicates an arresting of progress, a subsequent deterioration.
In this sense, the exterior structure may represent the aging patriarch, Mr.
Banks, or the retirement of the Victorian era.
As Mrs. McNab battles the abandoned abode and eventually
enlists the help of Mrs. Bast, readers find McNab particularly troubled by the
inattentiveness of the residents to care for their personal items. “But people should come themselves; they
should have sent somebody down to see. For there were clothes in the cupboards; they had
left clothes in the bedrooms.” (Woolf, 1981) .
Gaston Bachelard offers insights into a potential motive for
the residents to simply stash their belongings away and leave – it was an
effort to preserve order. For Woolf characters, the effort may have been to
preserve normalcy despite the matriarch’s death or the onslaught of war. “In
the wardrobe, there exists a center of order that protects the entire house
against uncurbed disorder. Here order reigns, or rather, this is the reign of
order. Order is not merely geometrical; it can also remember the family
history,” wrote Bachelard, in Poetics of
Space. (Bachelard, 1964)
So inside the home, each family artifact remained in its
designated position, awaiting the return of the inhabitants. While the cupboards
concealed the clothes, hiding them from exposure, the abandoned house transformed itself into a silent relic of a
family that once was, a time that once existed and a vault of family memories. “Nothing it seemed could break that image, corrupt that innocence, or disturb the swaying mantle of silence which, week after week, in the empty room, wove into itself the falling cries of bird, ships, hooting, the drone and hum of the fields, a dog’s bark, a man’s shout and, folded them round the house in silence,” Woolf writes.
The task was left to Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast to inject life
back into the house by dusting off the past and creating a place for the
future. Woolf writes that the pair seemed “guided” by a force. “But there was a whole force working;
something not highly conscious; something that leered, something that lurched;
something not inspired to go about its work with dignified ritual or solemn
chanting.” (Woolf, 1981)
For Bachelard, this life-force may be explained by the fact
that the home was inhabited by the two and would soon open its doors to the
family once again. “A house that has been experienced is not an inert box.
Inhabited space transcends geometrical space,” Bachelard writes.
With the grass cut, the carpets cleaned, the beds changed
and the cobwebs eradicated, the house stood once again as a gathering point for
the remaining Ramseys and awaited the return of Lily Briscoe.
Works Cited
Bachelard, G. (1964). The Poetics of Space.
New York: The Orion Press.
Woolf, V. (1981). To The Lighthouse. New York
: Harcourt.
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