Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Karolína Zlámalová

The Depiction of Parenthood in To the Lighthouse Bachelor's Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph.D.

2017 / declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

Karolína Zlámalová I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor

Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph.D., for his guidance. Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: Family in the British Context 4

1. 1 The Victorian Family - The Stephen Family 11

1. 2 A Different Family 15

Chapter 2: The Depiction of Family in Woolfs Novels 19

2. 1 The Voyage Out 20

2. 2 Night and Day and Mrs Dalloway 23

2. 3 Orlando 25

2. 4 The Waves and The Years 27

2. 5 Between the Acts 29

Chapter 3: The Family in To the Lighthouse 31

3. 1 The Ramsays 31

3. 2 The Stephens & the Ramsays 40

Conclusion 48

Works Cited 55

Summary (English) 59

Resume (Czech) 60 Introduction

The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye,

that opened suddenly, and softly in the evening. Now—

James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white-washed rocks;

the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was barred with black and

white; he could see windows in it; he could even see washing spread on the

rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it?

No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing.

The other Lighthouse was true too (Woolf, To the Lighthouse 200-201).

In the final part of the novel To the Lighthouse, the reader sees James comparing the idealized memory of the lighthouse, distanced both physically and metaphorically, with the cold reality he now faces as an adult. When forty-four-year-old Virginia Woolf was writing a novel on family and childhood, she might have had to similarly deal with the duality of the actual events and her memories of them. To the Lighthouse has a specific place among Woolf s novels not only because it deals with family life, but also because of strong presence of an autobiographical element. It is often presented as a fact that the main couple of the novel, the Ramsays, is based on Woolf s parents, mainly because of the references Woolf herself made in her diaries. However, when reading the novel itself and learning more about Woolf s parents and the family situation from different sources than her own diary, one sees that explaining everything in terms of autobiography is a simplistic way of dealing with this issue, which can cause a misinterpretation of this novel. This bachelor diploma thesis will try to put the novel into context and analyse the portrayal of parenthood and family life there from three different angles: the reality of family life in the British context at the time; the depiction

1 of parenthood and family in other novels written by Woolf; and the family life of the

Stephen family.

The thesis aims to answer the following questions: to what extent does the model of the family depicted in To the Lighthouse fit into the traditional image of the family at the time; to what extent does it fit into the context of other Woolf s novels; and what are the extent and the character of the autobiographical aspect in the novel. Apart from the primary text of the novel and other works by Woolf, the thesis will mainly draw from

Hermione Lee's biography of Woolf (1999), Ann Ronchetti's The Artist-Figure,

Society, and Sexuality in Virginia Woolf s Novels (2013) and Sara Ruddick's "Learning to Live with the Angel in the House" (1977).

The first chapter will deal with the image of the family in the British context during the lifetime of Woolf s parents and during her life and with its transformation.

Woolf s parents were people of the Victorian era; a period often stereotypically associated with stability and domesticity, but also with conservatism and moral hypocrisy. The Victorian family alone is a topic extensively dealt with in literature by both its supporters and opponents (among whom Woolf belonged), some of whose opinions will be mentioned. This chapter will mainly concentrate on what the Victorian upper middle class family looked like and will also deal with the phenomenon of

"the Angel in the house". Then the changes in family life during Woolf s adult life, the first half of the 20th century, will be briefly discussed. Lastly, to give some idea of

Woolf s background and to show a specific example of the Victorian upper middle class family, the Stephens' family life will be described, and to show what kind of families

Woolf encountered during her adult life, some often nonstandard families of the members of the Bloomsbury group, with whom Woolf was in a close contact, will be mentioned.

2 The second chapter will show how Woolf dealt with a family and parenthood in her other novels. It will deal individually with her novels, except for Jacob's Room in which parenthood plays very little role. It will show how much attention she gave to family life in her works and how she depicted it. Additionally, it will analyse the impact parenthood has on male and female characters in Woolf s novels and consider the complicated issue of mothers-artists which keeps reappearing in her works. Lastly, it will show whether there was any development in way Woolf approached this topic during her career, and it will show how surprisingly small a role she gave to child characters.

After putting the topic into the wider context, the last chapter will concentrate on parenthood and family life in To the Lighthouse. The aim of this chapter is to provide an analysis based on extracts from the primary text, and to show how exactly and to what extent the novel is autobiographical and which parts should rather be considered

Woolf s artistic intention. First, the individual family members will be introduced. The family relationships will then be analysed based on the interactions among characters. It will be also mentioned how the reader learns about the individual characters - whether from the description of the others, from their own inner thoughts or from their actions and utterances - and how this influences the way one perceives the characters and the story. Moreover, the chapter will concentrate on the amount of attention given to the child characters and see whether the author 'treats' her child characters differently than the adults. The last subchapter will address the character and the extent of the autobiographical aspect in To the Lighthouse. It will present some scholarly positions on this issue and analyse the text with the help of secondary sources, and see in which aspects are the characters of the Ramsays based on Woolf s parents.

3 Chapter 1: Family in the British Context

This chapter aims to briefly describe family in the British context during the lifetime of Virginia Woolf and her parents. Specifically speaking, the lifetime of her parents means the period from 1832, when Leslie Stephen was born, until his death in

1904, which almost exactly corresponds with the Victorian era. Virginia Woolf was born during the Victorian era, in 1882, but spent most of her adult life in 20th century

England. She lived through the Edwardian period, the First World War and died only during the Second World War, in 1941. Therefore, the period to be discussed here is more than a hundred years. The chapter will concentrate mainly on the family life of a similar social group as was the Stephen family, the upper middle class, which should also correspond with the Ramsay family in To the Lighthouse. A lot of what will be stated did not apply to aristocracy, and also the experience of working class differed significantly. Except for the general outline of family life and its changes, the chapter will also mention the Stephens' family life and family lives of those close to Virginia

Woolf during her adulthood.

The word "Victorian" involves a lot of connotations. Many imagine the

Victorian society as an uptight and conservative one. Speaking about family,

'domesticity' is one of the terms often associated with this period. As Claudia Nelson in

Family Ties in Victorian England (2007) points out, Queen Victoria often stressed that she herself was a mother of a big family and presented the "family devotion as the answer to the woes of public life" (6). For a Victorian person, family was supposed to be a safe place of retreat from the outside world. Yet the word 'person' might be slightly misleading here, because this applied to one specific group of people more than to the others.

4 Victorian society was still very much oriented on men; according to Stephen

Marcus in The Other Victorians (2008), the Victorian ideals were "manliness, solidity, certitude of self, straightforwardness, sincerity and singleness of being" (263). In this period, the spheres of influence for genders in the middle class were strictly divided:

"Woman's appropriate sphere of influence was seen as domestic, and with this a clear line was drawn between the 'female' values expressed in the well-run Victorian

Christian middle-class home and the 'male' public values of a fast-expanding capitalist economy" (Hogan and Bradstock 1). Bearing this in mind, the interpretation of what was written above may be the following: a man was the one entering the outside, and woman's role was to create a perfectly functioning place aimed at his recreation. At the time, work was seen as the foremost priority, which only contributed to the importance of the male role. As William J. Reader in Life in Victorian England (1964) explains,

"'authority', except in the special case of the Queen, nearly always meant male authority" (8). This was not only because a woman was supposed to be concerned with the domestic sphere, but also because according to the prevailing image she was

"weaker in body and mind and generally in most ways inferior" (8). Knowing that she had very little to offer to the outside world, woman's role was to support the one who had.

What was presented to be an ideal woman of the Victorian times was "the Angel in the House", named after a famous poem by Coventry Patmore (Hogan and

Bradstock 1). Both British and American authors dealt with this almost mythical being in their works. The reader can see her features for example in the characters of Adele

Ratignolle in Kate Chopin's The Awakening (Beer and Nolan 84) or Agnes Wickfield in

Charles Dickens' David Copperfield (Golden 13). However, as John Morris in

Exploring Stereotyped Images in Victorian and Twentieth-century Literature and

5 Society (1993) points out, "though dominant in Victorian sexual ideology, [the Angel] is strikingly absent from the best literature", and he says he doubts "there is a wholly unironic portrait of her in any major novelist expect Dickens" (32). Among critics of the

Angel belonged for example Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who attacked her in satirical essay "The Extinct Angel" (Davis 164). Similarly Virginia Woolf criticized the Angel in her essay "Killing the Angel in the House", in which she also gave her description:

She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly

unselfish. She excelled in difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself

daily. If there was a chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught, she sat in it

- in short, she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own,

but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above

all -1 need not to say it - she was pure (3).

The Angel in the house was a perfect wife and mother, sacrificing herself constantly for the happiness and comfort of the others. Doing this not only without complaints, but doing this happily. Caroline Gatrell in Hard Labour (2004) calls this an "emotional labour" (68) - controlling one's own emotions while concentrating fully on both the physical and the mental needs of others.

The Angel does not seem to have much of her own personality. The personality she has aims to please others. One cannot imagine a woman called 'the Angel' not to be charming. As Reader quotes one female writer, Victorian girls were taught that they should "be amiable, inoffensive, [and] always ready to give pleasure and to be pleased"

(121). Naturally, the last thing a man coming back home from "the woes of public life" wanted was to encounter new woes there.

6 The last characteristic of the Angel is, just as Woolf herself wrote, "above all" important. The Angel was pure. According to Anne Hogan and Andrew Bradstock in their introduction to Women of Faith in Victorian Culture (2016) she "embodied sexual purity and a strong sense of Christian morality" (1). Purity was important, and explains a lot of almost religious and supernatural terms used when describing this ideal. This was strongly connected to the fact that sex was a big taboo and "sexual experience, especially for woman, should be contained wholly within marriage, and sexual pleasure, even married sexual pleasure (again, especially for women), was widely held to be sinful" (Reader 141). Reader claims that the reason for seeing pleasure as sinful was that it was hindering man from his work. And Christian morality was important as a strength holding a marriage together (142). As a result of stressing these aspects, women's adultery was treated much more strictly than men's, because a woman who committed it was seen as if she "betrayed both her family and all womankind"

(Nelson 9). While for a man, adultery was wrong but understandable, for a woman, it was something going against her natural character.

Additionally, purity is strongly associated with children, which brings about the image of naivety, which is not far from intellectual inferiority. This, however, did not have to be seen as a flaw. As George M. Young claims in Victorian England (1953),

"eighteenth-century man preferred his woman fragile, and nineteenth-century man liked them ignorant" (90). And not only did he like that, he was also in the position of power to keep them that way, since women's access to education and profession continued to be very limited and this was changing only very slowly.

The position of women was one of the reasons the Victorian family was a target of great criticism, especially among writers, famous ones being for example Samuel

Butler and George Bernard Shaw. They called it 'the family system', a force corrupting

7 natural bonds between family members and transforming it into "a painful burden of forced, inculcated, suggested, and altogether unnecessary affection" (qtd. in Zwerdling

147). The topic of freeing an individual from these family bonds can often be seen in works such as Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's

Profession and George Gissing's The Odd Women. Woolf herself dealt with the topic in both her fictional and essayistic works, for example in "Killing the Angel of the

House", where she claims that in order to pursue her ambition of becoming a writer and literary critic, she first had to kill the idea of the Angel and the personality traits she represents, which were imposed on women by society. As Alex Zwerdling in Virginia

Woolf and the Real World (1986) points out, what other authors also criticized in the

19th century family was "the hierarchical structure, unmanageable size, lack of privacy, and pervasive hypocrisy" (172). As will be shown below, these all could be, to some extent, applied to the Stephen family.

Nevertheless, it is necessary to keep in mind that this is a one-sided point of view. It is true that, especially after the First World War, the Victorian era was seen quite negatively, as T. O. Lloyd points out in Empire, Welfare State, Europe (1993):

"The fashion of the decade was to look at Victorian prudery with disgust, at Victorian literature with amusement, and at Victorian architecture as little as possible" (99). And obviously, for some intelligent, creative or more independent individuals, the social rules must have been rather restrictive; yet "the fact that unquestionable standards of right and wrong were generally held to exist, backed by the force of established authority, was an immense support to many people" (Reader 6). To many this meant a welcomed relief from necessity to deal with moral issues allowing them to concentrate on their private lives and work (6-7).

8 One of the points of criticism mentioned above was the "unmanageable size" of the Victorian family. When hearing the term 'Victorian family', many are probably likely to imagine a large family with several children. From statistics we know that in the first decades of the 19th century, and the average was 5, 75 children per woman

(Woods 5). In rural areas, however, it was often a case that while six or seven children reached adulthood, a woman gave birth to twice as many (Reader 49). As a result of strictly divided roles in a family, with women fully responsible for the domestic sphere and men for ensuring material security, it was difficult to stay alone, especially with children, and therefore it was very common to remarry after the death of a spouse

(Nelson 11). Compared to previous time periods, upbringing of children became softer, but more "vigilant and moral" (Young 2). Similarly to their mothers and fathers, children's roles also differed radically, especially in the education they received; while sons were often sent to boarding schools and received formal education (Nelson 12) girls were more likely to be schooled at home. This meant that children were taught from the young age that brothers are the ones leaving the house, while sisters are staying inside, and were prepared to fit into similar system once they grow up.

After 1860, a decline in fertility began and continued until 1940, when the average number of children per mother was just two (Woods 5-6). It seems likely that one of the influences on fertility decrease was the spread of contraceptive methods since

1870s among higher classes and educated circles. Nevertheless it took quite some time until these reached the lower classes as well (Reader 161). It seems only natural that if women got a chance to more effectively control whether they would have children or not, they started to, because

as long as there was no way of limiting the number of children a normally fertile

couple could produce, a married woman's liberty was very severely curtailed

9 unless her husband was at least comfortably off. Then she could have help in

looking after her children and her own time and energies would not be severely

strained (Reader 161).

Kenneth O. Morgan in The Oxford History of Britain (2001) claims that the reason for a decline in fertility was the ambition of middle class women to live a life outside domestic sphere (546). The passage quoted above also mentions that this was the case

"unless [the] husband was at least comfortably off, because otherwise, there were servants to do most of the household chores. This obviously meant that the richer the family was and the more servants they had the less actual work and more free time woman had.

The issue of domestic servants is strongly connected to another of Morgan's arguments: "The need to maintain the house, and to pay the servants and school and university fees, encouraged restriction in the size of middle class families from the

1870s" (546). As displayed above, the ability to keep servants was a key issue for a middle class woman, and when later on, with increase in various job opportunities for working class, servants' wages started to grow, it became more difficult for a family to afford one. During the Victorian era, middle and upper class families always "contained at least one servant, and often three or more, to see to the house, kitchen and children"

(Nelson 16), and this continued in the 20th century, but the numbers were decreasing.

Around 1911, it was still a standard for the middle and upper classes to have a servant; however, 60 % of those families had only one servant, and only 20 % had more than two (Lloyd 25).

Household innovations were another reason for decreasing number of families with multiple servants in the first decades of the 20th century. Electricity, water and gas

10 made housework significantly easier and again gave women more time for different activities (Crafts 127). Big changes in a society and gender roles came with the First

World War. The deployment of men in huge numbers meant working class women for the first time penetrated many areas of life until now restricted to men, especially in the work sphere. However, while real-life experience differed, the ideology was changing only slowly. During the war, women were still celebrated mainly as "mothers, the representative of family life and domesticity" (Grayzel), and the stress on purity and fidelity shows the fact that so called 'separation allowances' "were tied to their good behaviour" (Grayzel). The persistence of Victorian thinking can be seen in the fact that women taking men's work was seen as just another expression of "feminine self- sacrifice" (Bourke). Even after the war, while naturally both women's employment in various spheres and education opportunities were increasing, motherhood and domestic sphere continued to be seen as women's main concern.

Since there were more opportunities for women's employment and fertility was declining, the trend of the decreasing number of domestic servants continued, and between the wars, middle class wives did housework mostly themselves (Greenfield

184). While many middle class women worked before their marriage, they were almost always expected to leave work with marriage and first pregnancy. For women, moving to suburban areas often meant losing contacts with families and being alone to raise children and to take care of the house. As a result, many women felt isolated and dissatisfied with the role of home-stay wives and mothers (McKibbin 82-84).

1.1 The Victorian Family - The Stephen Family

A lot has been written on Virginia Woolf s family environment and upbringing.

The aim of this part of the thesis is not to give a detailed description, but rather to

11 generally outline the important facts and events, especially those useful for analysing the depiction of family in her novels and specifically in To the Lighthouse.

Virginia Woolf was born as Adeline Virginia Stephen into a venerated literary family; her father, grandfather, great-grandfather and other male members of family were famous authors (Bond 24). Families of both her parents belonged to academic, intellectual circles. Woolf herself wrote that she was "born not of rich parents, but of well-to-do parents" (qtd. in Lee 51). For both her parents, Julia and Leslie Stephen, it was their second marriage, so Virginia grew up in a large family consisting of children from her mother's first marriage: George, Stella and Gerald Duckworth; Leslie's daughter Laura, whom he had with his first wife; and four Stephen children: Vanessa,

Thoby, Virginia and Adrian. Moreover, Hermione Lee in her biography of Woolf

(1999) names various members of the extended family, contacts with whom were kept mainly by Julia (92), some of them living close and often coming to visit.

As the niece of the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, the model of the painter Edward Burne-Jones, the wife of Leslie Stephen and the mother of Virginia

Woolf, Julia Stephen was a romanticized figure and we know a lot about how others saw her. Yet there is not much one can learn directly from her; during her life, she only published "a short essay on nursing an entry in the DNB [Oxford Dictionary of

National Biography] on her aunt... [and] one or two letters to newspapers" (Lee 83).

There is also a posthumously published collection of the fairy tale stories she was telling her children and some essays on women's service (83). From what is known, she seems like the kind of person too busy to write, or not considering it an appropriate activity for a woman; and she took a pen only to please her children, or to comment on women's role from a practical, moral point of view. As Virginia remembered her, Julia

Stephen was the centre of a big family, always surrounded by its members and by her

12 friends and admirers. Sara Ruddick in "Learning to Live with the Angel in the House"

(1977) describes her as "practical, effective, and energetic, making constant continuous charitable rounds, travelling always by omnibus" (183). Like the Angel, she was always sacrificing herself for the others. Woolf wrote in "A Sketch of the Past": "I can see now that she was living on such extended surface that she had not time, not strength, to concentrate ... upon me .... Can I even remember being alone with her for more than a few minutes?" (qtd. in Bond 30). In the third chapter we will see how Woolf expressed some of these feelings in To the Lighthouse.

Though one can learn a lot about Julia Stephen, even more attention seems to be given to Virginia's difficult ambivalent relationship with her father. When she was born, Leslie Stephen was fifty, so in her memories, he was always an old man (Lee 68-

69), but it would be wrong to forget, that he managed quite a lot before Virginia was born. He was a "brilliant, productive person" (Bond 50), a scholar, known "for his rational agnosticism, his 'determination to separate ethics from religion', his scholarly interest for the eighteen century, his concern to place literary history in its social context, and his commitment to biography as an essential tool for historians and critics", and also an athletic man, a mountain climber (Lee 70). Yet having a daughter with difficult relationship towards him, who became a more famous author than he had been, it seems that instead of his work, he is mainly remembered as a moody and tyrannical old man.

Leslie Stephen would appear to have been a difficult man to deal with, and it seemed to him and to the children, that his constant demands were one of the reasons

Julia died so soon. Nevertheless it does not appear that their marriage was an unhappy one, since "they shared a view of life as work a refusal of Christian consolations, a great admiration for each other, and passionate literary tastes" (Lee 94). Also, no

13 matter the way in which it was expressed, from Leslie's writings it is obvious, that he loved his wife and children (Bond 50).

Julia Stephen was not the only Angel in the house. Stella Duckworth, Julia's daughter from her first marriage, was described by Woolf as a person "without any character or ambition of her own" (qtd. in Bond 28). She was extremely devoted to her mother, who was far stricter to her than to the other children; when Leslie pointed this out, Julia said it might be true, because she "felt Stella part of herself' (29). Already during Julia's life, Stella assumed some of her responsibilities and after Julia's death she filled up her place not only in care for the children and household, but also as an outlet for Leslie's emotional demands. It is often suggested, that Stella's death two years later was also partly due to Leslie's demanding nature, and Woolf used their relationship as an example of the "tyranny and hypocrisy of Victorian fathers" (Lee

136). Once again, after Stella's death, Leslie transferred this behaviour to his other children, especially Vanessa, resulting in Vanessa remembering her father more negatively than Virginia did (144-145).

The life of the Stephen family was divided between Hyde Park Gate in

Kensington, London, a high and dark house where the family lived together with a cook and seven maids (40); and Talland House, a summer house in St. Ives, where the

Stephens spend three or four months every year between 1882 and 1894 (a year before

Julia's death). Woolf remembered those summers very fondly (21-26), as a childhood idyll filled with morning lessons with Julia, afternoon walks with Leslie, and various hobbies, such as "cricketing boating, swimming, billiards, botany, bugs, photography, astronomy, album-making, family journals and plays", and various visitors often coming for dinner or to stay with the family (31).

14 The children were all first schooled by their mother, but when they became older, the paths of brothers and sisters parted - while Thoby and Adrian received a formal education, Vanessa and Virginia did not. Vanessa, however, was still leaving every day for her painting classes, but Virginia studied alone at home, read extensively and received German classes from her father and later various private lessons, especially in classic studies (140). It was not common for a girl to receive a formal education at the time, and Leslie was perhaps also worried about Virginia's health.

Moreover, the schooling she received in his study was definitely not a poor one. Yet it seems that Virginia never quite forgave Leslie for not having been willing to invest in her education the money he paid for her brothers' studies (146).

Virginia Woolf famously wrote that if Leslie Stephen lived till his nineties, "his life would have entirely ended [hers]" (146). He did not though, and his death in 1904 was the beginning of Woolf freeing herself from the gloomy Victorian environment of her adolescence years, exploring the different ways of life and establishing herself as an author.

1. 2 A Different Family

During her adult life Virginia Woolf maintained contacts with many artists and scholars, some of them being members of the Bloomsbury group or she was introduced to them through some of its members. Many of those people lived unconventional lives, not dealing with the issues of majority population, enabled to do so by artistic circles they spend their lives in (and often by inherited financial security). For example the homosexual relationships, at the time still "the illegal, the banned" (239), were in the

Bloomsbury group a normal topic of conversation, and views on sexuality generally

15 were relaxed compared to the public opinion. Associating with these people, Woolf had an opportunity to observe various family arrangements.

The most well-known unorthodox family arrangement of the Bloomsbury is also the one closest to Virginia. Her sister Vanessa became an artist just like Virginia did, but was also a mother of three and definitely the bolder sister in the sense of sexual relations. She married Clive Bell, an art critic, in 1907, and had two children with him.

The beginnings of their relationship showed how strongly she opposed traditional middle class family life - as Frances Spalding in Bell's biography (2015) describes, instead of denying it, Vanessa continued with her artistic carrier; instead of becoming

"a monument of virtue and chastity", she took a great pleasure in reading Lytton

Strachey's indecent poems and speaking openly about sexuality in mixed company (64).

More typically, after her first son Julian was born, Clive, "like most upper-middle class fathers at this time, left the work involved entirely to mother and nurse" (77). And by

1909, except for flirting through correspondence with Virginia, Clive also started the first of his many extramarital affairs. Interestingly enough, at this point, outspoken and open Vanessa seemed to have preferred to not discuss this topic with others (77-78).

Vanessa herself then started an affair with the painter and art critic Roger Fry (99), only to later fall in love with homosexual painter Duncan Grant, succeed in seducing him and giving birth to his daughter, and to spend most of her life afterwards in "rural retirement at Charleston in Sussex, where she painted with [him], raised her three children, was frequently visited by Roger Fry, Clive Bell and the Woolfs, and tolerated the presence of Grant's lovers" (Ronchetti 10).

Duncan Grant himself was an interesting personality and many relationships in the Bloomsbury group centred on him. Except for Vanessa, he also had an affair with her brother Adrian (Lee 154), Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes (239) and David

16 Garnett, who later, to a great distress of her parents, married Angelica, Duncan's daughter with Vanessa (702). In his later years after Vanessa's death, Grant was taken care of by his long-time friend Paul Roche, despite Roche having a wife and five children ("Painter's model...").

Lytton Strachey, one of the central figures of the Bloomsbury group and a close friend of the Stephen sisters, spend his later years living with Donna Carrington, a painter desperately in love with him, and her husband Ralph Partridge (Ronchetti 10).

John Maynard Keynes was another of the Bloomsbury's young men involved in several homosexual relationships in his younger years, only to later marry a popular Russian dancer Lydia Lopokova (Lee 465-464) and spend the rest of his life with her in what appeared to be a happy marriage.

Though usually considered not a member of the Bloomsbury group, when speaking about unconventional families around Woolf, there is at least one more name to mention. Vita Sackville-West, the inspiration for Woolf s Orlando, was a fascinating character, an aristocrat who travelled widely and a successful author (Ronchetti 81).

With her husband Harold Nicolson they had a good relationship, exchanged countless affectionate letters and cared for their two sons; at the same time they both pursued their own homosexual extramarital affairs (Lee 482). It seems to have been a well- functioning arrangement, though Vita herself claimed in a letter to Harold that it "would be dangerous to ordinary people" (qtd. in Lee 482).

Vita's comment shows her awareness of her not belonging to "ordinary" people.

And, just like most of those mentioned above, she truly did not. They had a chance to live extraordinary lives because they were provided with education, finance and inspirational friends and acquaintances. And though they definitely had to deal also with

17 disagreement and criticism, they were lucky enough to be a part of the circles which allowed them to pursue their private lives relatively freely.

18 Chapter 2: The Depiction of Family in Woolf s Novels

Together with historical documents, fiction can be a valuable source from which we learn about a family and its changes. From Woolf s novels, To the Lighthouse is considered to be the one dealing especially with family and parenthood. Nevertheless, as an inseparable part of human life, it appears in her other works as well. The aim of this chapter is to briefly summarize Woolf s portrayals of parenthood in her novels.

Since the thesis deals with the depiction of parenthood in her prose fiction, the chapter will not address her opinions on parenthood presented in essays such as "A Room of

One's Own" and "Three Guineas" or in her diaries and correspondence, though those will be mentioned in an introductory part of the chapter. While the chapter aims to concentrate specifically on parenthood (both motherhood and fatherhood, though the bigger attention is given to the former) and not on marriage, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish these two, because they go almost always together, with very few examples of children born out of wedlock (such as Evelyn in The Voyage Out). As will be shown below, Woolf mostly presented parenthood as a feature (often predominant) of one's character but rarely went into details analysing it.

It is also important to specify, that the chapter will deal with parenting in a literal sense, and not with metaphors using parenthood, which appear quite often in Woolf s works, when describing a relationship of a character towards product of their intellectual and artistic activity. For instance, in the case of Orlando, Ann Ronchetti in

The Artist-Figure, Society, and Sexuality in Virginia Woolf s Novels (2013) argues that

"it appears that 'The Oak Tree,' whose manuscript Orlando has habitually kept in her bosom, is far more valued as a 'child' than her biological offspring" (90). Woolf used these metaphors often in her diaries as well, describing "the process of writing in terms

19 of sexual reproduction and maternity" (5), for example in the case of The Years, calling the creative process "a long childbirth" (Woolf, Diary 1936-1941 31). Married but childless, Woolf naturally dealt with the topic in both her diaries and correspondence, for example in her 1926 diary there is an often quoted sentence: "A little more self control on my part & we might have had a boy of 12, a girl of 10" (Woolf, Diary 1925-

1930 107), which might be referring generally to her mental state, because self-control was what Leonard always asked from her (Lee 314), but is sometimes interpreted as her having problems with self-control during sexual acts as a result of alleged sexual abuse

(326-327). She used to compare herself to her sister Vanessa, who managed to be a mother in both literal sense and in metaphorical artistic sense. As Ronchetti states,

Woolf "found her sister's unusual life as devoted mother, successful artist and custom- flouting bohemian particularly engrossing, deeply envying her maternity, but occasionally disparaging her metier, painting" (11), and also wrote in her diary that she

"put [her] life blood into writing, & [Vanessa] had children" (Woolf, Diary 1936-1941

120), suggesting doubts about Vanessa's full devotion to her artistic work or about value of its results. Because of her own experience and the experience of those around her (it was already mentioned that being a member of the Bloomsbury group, she had a chance to observe a less conservative family arrangements than the one she grew up in), when handling the topic of parenthood, she often concentrated on the issues parents- artists are dealing with. This chapter will show what attitude towards this topic she presented in her novels and whether this attitude changed throughout her life.

2.1 The Voyage Out

Woolf s first novel, The Voyage Out, describes the journey of the main protagonist Rachel to South Africa on a ship. Marylu Hill in Mothering Modernity

(1999) suggests that metaphorically, her journey is back to her mother, who died when

20 she was a child (169). Rachel was brought up by her aunt, who wanted to make her "the kind of woman her mother would have liked her to be" (Woolf, The Voyage Out 97-98).

In the group of tourists on the ship, there are several married women who are mothers as well; these two features are presented as two sides of the same coin. While

Rachel naturally engages in contact with them, as young and single she sometimes feels left out, for example when she abruptly leaves during the conversation "prosperous matrons" (60) are having about children. The married women are often presented as

"intelligent individuals with creative ability who are unable to realize their potential as autonomous beings or as artists" (Ronchetti 21). Rachel, who is considering getting married, contemplates this issue. She meets a woman, Mrs Thornbury, who seems truly satisfied with her role of a mother and wife, but Rachel feels that this was at the expense of her individuality, "having been reduced to archetypal motherhood through marriage"

(Ronchetti 21): "This long life and all these children had left her very smooth; they seemed to have rubbed away the marks of individuality, and to have left only what was old and maternal" (Woolf, The Voyage Out 390). The choice of words "all these children" shows the attitude Woolf presented quite often in her works, not dealing with children as individuals with personalities or stories. They are usually not physically present, but are mentioned only as a factor causing a change in one's character; change which is in most cases presented as a change for the worse.

Another mother in the novel is Rachel's aunt Helen. When the reader encounters her on the first pages of the novel, she is in deep sorrow from having to leave her children behind, with her husband who is "feeling it awkward to stand beside a grief that was greater than his" (2). Here and again few paragraphs below, the reader can see that it is clearly stated that her grief as a mother is incomparable with the grief a father feels:

21 Yes, she knew she must go back to all that, but at present she must weep.

Screening her face she sobbed more steadily than she had yet done, her

shoulders rising and falling with great regularity. It was this figure that her

husband saw when, having reached the polished Sphinx, having entangled

himself with a man selling picture postcards, he turned; the stanza instantly

stopped. He came up to her, laid his hand on her shoulder, and said, 'Dearest.'

His voice was supplicating. But she shut her face away from him, as much as to

say, 'You can't possibly understand' (3).

At this point, her grief seems deep, maybe even slightly theatrical and exaggerated.

However, as Patricia J. Smith in "The Things People Don't Say" (1997) points out, it is not explained why is she setting out for such a long journey and later in the text, "little subsequent reference is made to the children or to her concern for them" (130).

While Helen is a wife and mother just like other women on the ship, the reader may see that in fact she does not quite fit in their group, and prefers books and intellectual talk with men over gossip. During a conversation about servants,

Mrs Dalloway claims that being a nurse is a pleasure, because one gets to spend time with babies, to which Helen responses that "nothing would induce [her] to take charge of children" (Woolf, The Voyage Out A3). Nevertheless, because she is married and has children, she is provided with "a facade of matronly privilege and propriety that allows her hidden inclinations to pass undetected" (Smith 131). In other words, in order to present a woman as not defined by her marriage and motherhood, Woolf made her not interested in men sexually.

At the end, Woolf s strongest point against marriage and motherhood is the faith of the main protagonist Rachel. According to Hill "Rachel dies, because she cannot

22 otherwise escape being pulled into the social prison of wifehood and motherhood"

(169). These are presented as a threat to "her autonomy as a woman and the free exercise of her art as a musician" (Ronchetti 136). Woolf made clear that this threat is basically inevitable by choosing to let Rachel die. At this point, Woolf got to one of the major issues she dealt with in her works. Because there obviously is another way for

Rachel and other characters - not to get married. Yet Woolf was painfully aware of the difficulties this choice brings to woman's life, as one sees the way she would portray women who decide to not get married and instead fulfil their professional and artistic ambitions, showing them as confined to loneliness and frustration.

Woolf s effort to protect her female artist characters from marriage and motherhood (in case of Rachel, at every cost) is something that can be seen in her later works as well, though with time it seems that she was "more at ease with the image of the woman artist as a heterosexually active being" (137). This, however, was the time of writing Orlando, and before, she wrote four more novels - Night and Day, Jacob's

Rooms, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. While Jacob's room does not particularly deal with parenthood and will not be analysed here, and there is a separate chapter dedicated to To the Lighthouse, in both Night and Day and Mrs Dalloway there are parts concerning family life worth mentioning.

2. 2 Night and Day and Mrs Dalloway

As Ronchetti argues, in Night and Day we can see that not only women are prevented by families from pursuing their dreams (36). As an oldest son, Ralph Denham has to take care of his family after the death of their father, although he would much prefer living in the countryside as a writer. The aunt of the main protagonist Katherine also mentions a relative - uncle John, who took a position as a judge in India, which is

23 "a pretty title, but still, not at the top of the tree" (Woolf, Night and Day 124). She concludes by saying: "if you have a wife and seven children ... well, you have to take what you can get" (124). Another example is Katherine's cousin Cyril, who has to provide for the three children he has outside wedlock (85).

Interestingly enough, in Mrs Dalloway, the main protagonist Clarissa is portrayed both as a mother and as an independent character with a rich inner life, which differentiates her from, for example, Mrs Ramsay, who is mostly identified through her motherhood. Ronchetti claims that the reason for this is that Clarissa is portrayed as a not fully sexualized woman, sleeping alone as a result of her weak heart

(Ronchetti 137) and also spending several hours a day by herself (65). It seems that this physical independence (and obviously the fact that she has only one and already adult daughter) allows her character to also psychologically go beyond being a wife and a mother. Nevertheless, also in Mrs Dalloway parenthood appears as a destructive factor to one's character. Sally Seton, Clarissa's idealized youth love, with whom "they spoke of marriage always as a catastrophe" (Woolf, Mrs Dalloway 34), becomes Lady

Rosseter, who has "five enormous boys" (171). When Peter Welsh meets her after the years, he thinks: "Lord, Lord, what a change had come over her! the softness of motherhood; its egotism too" (187). Christine Froula in Virginia Woolf and the

Bloomsbury Avant-garde (2007) describes the change claiming that "[t]he Goddess of

Conversion could display no prouder trophy than Lady Rosseter. The bold and visionary

Sally suppresses her passion for truth to become a very paragon of conventional prosperous matronhood" (124). Though there surely were other changing factors

(marriage, time, social status) causing Sally to transform into Lady Rosseter, it seems that Woolf stressed motherhood by giving her five sons. And we can see how big then

24 change was, when Clarissa at first cannot recognize her at the party (Woolf, Mrs

Dalloway 171).

2. 3 Orlando

As was mentioned before, Woolf s opinion on a woman being both an autonomous artist and a wife and mother seems to slightly alter with Orlando, a mock- biography of Vita Sackville-West, written in a lighter tone than most Woolf s works.

The main character, living through centuries, first as a man and then as a woman, manages at the end the seemingly impossible - to become a married woman and a mother while also being a successful writer. The seemingly impossible is resolved very easily by "marrying boldly and well" (Ronchetti 82), because Orlando "chooses a spouse who conveniently spends most of his time as an adventurer at sea, allowing her much independence as a woman and poet" (137). It seems quite clear, that Woolf was in a way satirizing the institution of marriage. Orlando realizes, that while in the previous centuries she desired a lover, in the apathetic 19th century she wants a husband (Ryan n. p.), this urge demonstrated by her fixation on the wedding ring:

... poor Orlando felt positively ashamed of the second finger of her left hand

without in the least knowing why. At this moment, Bartholomew came in to ask

which dress she should lay out for dinner, and Orlando, whose senses were much

quickened, instantly glanced at Bartholomew's left hand, and instantly perceived

what she had never noticed before-a thick ring of ether jaundiced yellow

circling the third finger where her own was bare (Woolf, Orlando 150).

From this moment, Orlando gets desperate and "it now seem[s] to her that the whole world was ringed with gold" (151). This continues to bother her till next day, when she is "forced at length to consider the most desperate of remedies, which [is] to yield

25 completely and submissively to the spirit of the age, and take a husband" (152). This might be interpreted as Woolf trivializing the institution of marriage, when she showed an urge to wear a ring as a main reason for considering it. This mockery continues with

Orlando getting engaged to a man she just met, while still treating him like a lover, learning his name only after their first night together (Ryan n. p.).

Similarly to the way she treated Orlando's marriage depicted Woolf her motherhood. The childbirth is briefly announced "at the end of a long, comical digression by a narrator on natural desire" (Ronchetti 83) and her son is basically never mentioned again. The only references to Orlando being a mother appear when she is shopping and items on her list are "boy's boots, bath salts [and] sardines" (Woolf,

Orlando 187) and when she deliberates over fame, thinking that "with [her] guineas

[she]'ll buy flowering trees, flowering trees, flowering trees and walk among [her] flowering trees and tell [her] sons what fame is" (195). At this point the reader sees that she already has more than one child, yet, maybe surprisingly for the reader, pregnancy and childbirth are not mentioned (while the work on completion of the manuscript is dealt with extensively). Vita Sackville-West herself criticized Woolf in a letter to her husband for the decision to make Orlando get married and have children. She argued that it both served no purpose and did not modify the character of Orlando at all (Ryan n. p.). This is interesting, because what Sackville-West seems to have considered a fault

(and from a point of view of logic of the story it probably also is), was actually Woolf allowing at least one of her female characters not to be altered by parenthood. This was possible because Orlando was not supposed to be meant entirely seriously and does not seem to have aimed for a psychological credibility. Therefore, Orlando could receive from her creator what other Woolf s female characters (and most women living in

Victorian England) could not - to have a child and be an author at the same time (Hill

26 203). Nevertheless Ronchetti claims that "Orlando's seeming obliviousness to her children and her husband's frequent absence suggest Woolf s continuing reservations about the compatibility or wifehood and maternity with artistic creativity in women"

(137). Indeed, the fact that the only woman character in Woolf s novels managing to be both a mother and wife and a successful author is the same character that lives for centuries and changes gender halfway through the story can be seen as a strong argument against believing that Woolf considered combining these two roles realistic.

2. 4 The Waves and The Years

In The Waves, the reader once again encounters a character with artistic ambitions which are not fulfilled and it is suggested that having a family played a role in it: "About this time Bernard married and bought a house ... His friends observed in him a growing tendency to domesticity ... The birth of children made it highly desirable that he should augment his income" (Woolf, The Waves 204). However The Waves shows us a different point of view of parenthood in one of the characters, Susan, who embraces her motherhood and identifies herself through it. She characterizes her love as

"the bestial and beautiful passion of maternity" (105). Her love is possessive; she expresses content in creating and owning: "I have had peaceful, productive years.

I possess all I see. I have grown trees from the seed ... I have seen my sons and daughters, once nettled over like fruit in their cots, break the meshes and walk with me, taller than I am, casting shadows on the grass" (150). By this she creates a safe space far from her memories of the past: "I think sometimes of Percival who loved me. He rode and fell in India. I think sometimes of Rhoda. Uneasy cries wake me at dead of the night. But for the most part I walk content with my sons" (152). In the previously quoted part, she mentions both sons and daughters, yet interestingly enough here she speaks only about sons, who are probably supposed to protect her in a similar way she

27 would expect from a husband. Nevertheless, when she leaves the safe space of her farm, she feels uncomfortable among her childhood friends because of her looks (105), and she feels that her maternity differentiates her from them: "I shall push the fortunes of my children unscrupulously. I shall hate those who see their faults. I shall lie basely to help them. I shall let them wall me away from you, from you and from you" (105). At the end, she expresses doubt about her life choice, and sometimes she is "sick of natural happiness, and fruit growing, and children scattering the house with oars, guns, skulls, books won for prizes and other trophies, ... of the unscrupulous ways of the mother who protects, who collects under her jealous eyes at one long table her own children, always her own" (151). Ronchetti suggests that she shows an awareness of the fact that her choice, maybe influenced by her insecurities, was paid off by not fulfilling her personal potential (94). Even in the character that seems to be destined to this lifestyle and repeatedly expresses satisfaction with it, Woolf at the end doubts the truthfulness of her motives.

The novel The Years portrays the Victorian family as an institution, and depicts its impact on its members, not only women, but men as well. For example Martin,

"despite his fondness for women and children" (Woolf, The Years 109) remains unmarried because he does not remember the family he grew in very fondly: "It was an abominable system, he thought; family life; Abercorn Terrace. No wonder the house would not let. It had one bathroom, and a basement; and there all those different people had lived, boxed up together, telling lies" (180). Martin is not the only one reluctant to become a part of family. There is also Peggy, another in line of Woolf s intellectual women characters, who Evelyn T. Chan in "Professions, Freedom and Form" (2010) characterizes as "a person whose profession has so consumed her that is has also consumed the woman in her" (608). Although it seems that she would like to have

28 children, her profession "does not allow for sidetracks to alternative and unexplored areas in life" (608). Once again, "Penny can be seen as Woolf s commentary on a society that allowed women either success in work, or success in motherhood, but not both" (608). Woolf showed that it is possible to choose a different path; nevertheless, she also seemed to be doubtful about the possibility of this path to give women fulfilment in their lives.

2. 5 Between the Acts

In Woolf s last posthumously published novel, Between the Acts, parenthood is represented by a married couple Isa and Giles. Patricia Cramer in "Virginia Woolf s

Matriarchal Family of Origins in Between the Acts" (1993) claims that the couple represents the polarity of patriarchy and matriarchy (167), here put into the context of historical period. While Giles is associated with violence and war, Isa is a part of the

'matriarchal group' together with Aunt Lucy and homosexual Dodge. Lucy represents a pacifist form of matriarchal society and Isa, though considered as a wife and mother to be a part of the conventional one (173), feels attracted to it. She admits, that she secretly writes poetry in a book bound like an account book, so that her husband would not find out (Woolf, Between the Acts 12). Nevertheless, at the end, she returns to her husband and chooses the self-destructive ideal of family love, as a result of her "entrapment in a patriarchal version of the heterosexual love plot" (Cramer 177-78). The danger of war made Woolf even stricter toward patriarchal society, which she strongly associated with war. Even the positive women features, such as "maternal and romantic love[,] can no longer be viewed as private or innocent emotions" (181), because as a result of them, patriarchy is protected and most likely reproduced. During the war, Woolf went further than in her previous works. Motherhood is no longer a destructive force only towards

29 a mother and her individuality, but is actually harmful towards society, because it was compromised as a tool supporting patriarchy.

As could be seen above, parenthood was not a topic Virginia Woolf gave a main role in her novels and she generally paid little attention to it. She did not go into depth in its psychological analysis, but when she analysed it, it was an analysis of the concept of being a parent rather than analysis of its actual psychology or of a parent-child relationship. With the exception of To the Lighthouse, young children play basically no role in her novels and very little attention is given to their characters. Their existence serves mainly as a modifier of their mother's character. Woolf connected parenthood so strongly with the patriarchal Victorian social system she condemned, that she presented it as a tool to prevent a woman from fulfilling her potential and being free to do as she wishes. She made clear, that for a woman in her historical period, it is impossible to be an artist/professional and a wife/mother at the same time. We can see a slight progress in a sense that in her first novel The Voyage Out, she did not see other way of protecting her main protagonist than letting her die; while in Orlando she presented the character that manages both of these roles. However, since the character also lives for hundreds of years and changes gender, it is a question whether Woolf was not implying that being a fully sexualized woman and a rightful member of society and an artist at the same time is a miracle close to immortality and an ability to change one's gender.

30 Chapter 3: The Family in To the Lighthouse

3.1 The Ramsays

In the previous chapter, we could see that Woolf perceived parenthood more as an abstract force than as a real life experience and she gave a little attention to it in her works. Children practically do not appear in her novels and do not have their own

"voice" in a sense of engaging in direct speech, with the exception of Elizabeth in

Mrs Dalloway, who is already an adult and her character exceeds the role of a daughter.

To the Lighthouse is the only novel by Woolf this cannot be applied to. In To the

Lighthouse, family life is the main topic the author dealt with. To see how she depicted a family and family relations, it is important to first see how she depicted the individual members of these relations and then their interactions with each other.

The first part of the text, "The Window", set before the First World War, shows a day in a life of the Ramsay family in their summer house on Hebrides. In this part, the reader sees all family members, and also their guests and servants. The second part

"Time Passes" is written in more lyrical tone and informs about the war and deaths in the Ramsay family. They no longer visit the house, which is slowly decaying. This situation is interrupted by the message that the Ramsays and their guests are after ten years coming for a summer. The last part "The Lighthouse" shows a part of one day during this visit.

Generally we can say that there are two angles from which the reader learns about individual characters: directly - from their direct speech, indirect speech and their inner thoughts and monologues; and indirectly - from descriptions by other characters and thoughts other characters have about them. The use of these means is one of the factors influencing how the reader perceives the characters.

31 The central point of the novel is the mother, Mrs Ramsay. That is how the reader knows her, because similarly to her husband she has no first name in the novel. The most attention is given to her, and we learn a great deal about her both directly and indirectly. As for direct speech, she occupies a significant part of all direct utterances, and a lot of attention is also given to her inner thoughts and feelings. Indirectly, the thoughts of majority of other characters concentrate at some point on her, and, for example, the painter Lily Briscoe is thinking about Mrs Ramsay almost every time she appears in the text.

The reader learns about Mr Ramsay, a metaphysician, through his dialogues, though he speaks less than his wife, and his inner monologues, which are compared to his wife much less concerned with people around him. He gives some thoughts to her, but as for children, in "The Window" he thinks about them only collectively. Most of his thoughts are concerned with himself and his work. Similarly to other characters in

Woolf s novels, it is suggested that marrying and fathering a big family prevented him from producing "better books" (Woolf, To the Lighthouse 11). He is a character who arouses strong and often contradictory emotions in people around, so also inner monologues of the others tell a great deal about him.

Compared to their parents, the children are given less space, and as will be shown below, the reader learns about them mostly indirectly, from observations and thoughts of the adults. The only two characters to whose own perspective is given more attention are the youngest two children, James and Cam, especially in the third part of the text.

Generally, the direct speech of the children is very rare; in the whole novel, there can be found only about fifteen cases of direct speech acts of all of the children together

32 and for example Roger does not speak directly once, neither do we learn about his thoughts. What is also interesting is Woolf s use of direct speech in conversations between children and their parents. Often there is only the part of the dialogue said by the parent, but when it comes to child's response, it either is not a direct speech act, or it is not pronounced at all.

James, the youngest of the Ramsay children, is six in the first part of the book.

He is mostly together with his mother, who enjoys their time alone, because they

"shared the same tastes and were comfortable together" (63). We know a lot about his inner feelings and thoughts, especially about the hatred towards his father. These feelings appear at the beginning of the text, and continue till the final part which is set ten years later. In "The Lighthouse", while on the boat, a lot of attention is given to

James' thoughts and to the extreme ambivalence in his relationship towards his father.

He keeps calling him a tyrant, remembering the disappointment his father caused him when he was a child; yet at the end he is extremely pleased with father's praise. What is interesting is the way the reader learns about James' thoughts. There are a lot of his inner monologues, but when it comes to a direct speech, there is practically none.

Interesting examples are the two instances when he is trying to ask his mother about the trip to the lighthouse:

In a moment he would ask her, "Are we going to the Lighthouse?" And she

would have to say, "No: not tomorrow; your father says not." Happily, Mildred

came in to fetch them, and the bustle distracted them. But he kept looking back

over his shoulder as Mildred carried him out, and she was certain that he was

thinking, we are not going to the Lighthouse tomorrow; and she thought, he will

remember that all his life (69).

33 But he wanted to ask her something more. Would they go to the Lighthouse

tomorrow? No, not tomorrow, she said, but soon, she promised him; the next

fine day. He was very good. He lay down. She covered him up. But he would

never forget, she knew, and she felt angry with Charles Tansley, with her

husband, and with herself, for she had raised his hopes (124).

In the first case, the exchange never really takes place, but the message is communicated. The second instance is more difficult to interpret. There is no typical direct speech in quotation marks, and on James' side it is not clear whether the question is actually pronounced aloud; yet Mrs Ramsay's answer is followed by "she said", which leaves little space for a discussion. In several other instances Mrs Ramsay talks to

James and interacts with him, yet there is never direct answer from him. Interestingly enough nothing much changes in the final part of the book, where James is sixteen-year- old young man. He is addressed by his father's praise, but there is no reaction.

The second youngest child, Cam, also appears both as a seven-year-old girl in

"The Window" and as an adult in the final part of the text. In the former, she is nicknamed by Mr Bankes "Cam the Wicked" (29) and described as "wild and fierce" (28). Her mother complains that she always fights with James, and at one point basically sends her away so that she could be alone with her brother (63). The reader learns nothing about Cam's feelings about this; her perspective appears only in the third part of the book. Compared to her brother, her relationship to the father is more ambivalent. With James she is "united by their compact to fight tyranny to the death"

(178), but she cannot help feeling that her father "was most loveable, he was most wise; he was not vain nor a tyrant" (204-205). Therefore, when her father decides to make her smile at him, she is torn between desire to answer the beloved father when he expresses interest in their puppy, and obligation not to betray her union with James (182-183).

34 At the end, she answers only his first question and leaves the second one unanswered.

Moreover, the first answer does not directly follow the question, but there is a passage in between describing James' unpronounced pressure and her inner dilemma. The only other time when she speaks directly (in a sense that the utterance is in quotation marks) is also answering a question, this time from her mother, and she only repeats a message for her (62). Similarly to James, it is interesting to see her communication with

Mrs Ramsay about the skull on the wall:

She could see the horns, Cam said, all over the room. It was true. Wherever they

put the light (and James could not sleep without a light) there was always

a shadow somewhere. "But think, Cam, it's only an old pig," said Mrs. Ramsay,

"a nice black pig like the pigs at the farm." But Cam thought it was a horrid

thing, branching at her all over the room. "Well then," said Mrs. Ramsay, "we

will cover it up," (123)

While Mrs Ramsay's turns in conversation are in quotation marks, Cam's turns are in a form of reported speech, which for the reader creates the feeling of identification with

Mrs Ramsay, while Cam's utterances are on a same level as Mrs Ramsay's thoughts.

Jasper is one of the characters whose inner thoughts we learn only very little about. We know from observations of the others, and his parents' thoughts and conversations that he "believed that one could make a soup from a seaweed" (34), and that he likes to shoot birds, which bothers his mother (66), but his father thinks it is

"natural in a boy" (73). The only character trait that is mentioned is, that similarly to his mother, he likes to exaggerate and this is a source of their jokes (87). He also participates at the dinner, and his mother reads from his and other children's faces that they have some inside joke (117). Here however, he is not referred to as an individual.

35 Lastly he is mentioned by Cam in the third part of the book, when she answers to her father that Jasper is the one responsible for caring about a dog. The only time when he is given a voice is before the dinner, when he and Rose come to help their mother choose her jewels, however, the reader first learns that "Jasper and Rose said that

Mildred wanted to know whether she should wait dinner" (87), and this cannot really be considered his speech, because it is presented as something he and his sister said, and they only interpret someone else's utterance. Only later when his mother scolds him for shooting birds, he answers (90), but again while her question is in quotation marks, his answer is not.

Rose is a similar case like Jasper. We learn some information about her from her mother, for example that "her mouth was too big, but she had a wonderful gift with her hands" (66), which is apparent when she nicely arranges the fruit for a dinner (117).

Even in the case of her daughter who is still a child, Mrs Ramsay gives attention to her looks, which represent her future marriage prospects. Rose's individual voice appears when she says that she does not like Charles Tansley's tie (14). We may see her inner thoughts when the narrator says that Mrs Ramsay's daughters "could sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers" (12), though it in fact is not her private thought, but somethings shared (or assumed that is shared) among the three girls.

Roger is a child given the least attention - there is no direct or indirect speech, no record of his thoughts, and he is never mentioned alone, only as one of the older children who mock Tansley (12) and who might start laughing at the dinner (104), and one of the two children who "are wild creatures now" (66).

36 There is an interesting development in the case of Nancy. At the beginning, she also does not really appear as an individual, but later the reader gets to see things from her point of view on the walk with Andrew, Minta and Paul, but she does not engage in conversation (83-84). Then her voice appears when she is already an adult, and is dealing with the issues her mother would be dealing with, if she was still alive, specifically with the question of "What does one send to the Lighthouse?" (160). There is the empty space after Mrs Ramsay, who surely would know what to send to the lighthouse. Because of her and Prue's deaths, it seems that it is Nancy's turn to adopt the role of caretaker.

Andrew is one of the children who is given more attention, but we again learn about him mostly from descriptions of others. Mr Bankes calls him "Andrew the Just"

(29), his mother points out that "even her husband admitted that his gift for mathematics was extraordinary" (66), and for reason which is not explained he is a favourite of

Augustus Carmichael, so much that when he dies young on battlefield, Carmichael loses

"all interest in life" (209). In conversation his parents have about him, we learn how their positions differ - while his father would be proud, if Andrew got a scholarship, his mother claims she will be proud even if he does not (75). There are only three instances of Andrew's direct speech in the text (22, 105 and 137), and in all cases the message is short and not of particular importance. Nevertheless, compared to his siblings there is quite a deep insight into his thoughts during the walk with Nancy, Minta and Paul, where he contemplates his opinion on Minta (82-83) and then on women in general, upset by the fact that they "had no control over [their] emotions" (85).

The oldest daughter Prue is nicknamed by Mr Bankes "Prue the Fair" (29) and described by her mother as a "perfect angel" (66). Her beauty is mentioned several times in the text, and Mrs Ramsay also already thinks about her potential marriage. Not

37 unlike her siblings, the reader knows basically nothing about her thoughts, the only inside into them is when she is thinking with pride about her mother at the end of the dinner (125). She performs direct speech act three times, answering her mother's question (87), engaging in a short exchange with Andrew and Lily (137), and unhappily murmuring in Lily's memory of the day when Mr Ramsay found an earwig in a milk

(214). Lily remembers that Prue was "always so occupied, it seemed, seeing that nothing went wrong, that she scarcely spoke herself (216), and describes her terror when Mr Ramsay found the earwig and threw the plate with it out of the window.

Interestingly enough it seems that it is Prue who feels responsible for it, not

Mrs Ramsay. At the end, Prue does not have a chance to enjoy the domestic life her mother predicted for her, because she dies a year after getting married.

To analyse the parent-child relationships, it is important to look at their actual interactions. The biggest number of interactions is between Mrs Ramsay and the youngest child James, with whom she spends most of the time. More importantly, they spend the time together alone. With her other children, the interactions are shorter and less intimate, usually consisting only of practical questions and commands, for example when she asks Cam about the message from the cook (62) and Prue if Nancy went for a walk with Minta and Paul (81), and when she tells Andrew to hold a plate lower so that she does not spill the food (114). There is no direct interaction between

Mrs Ramsay and Roger. Compared to his wife, there are very few interactions between

Mr Ramsay and any of his children. He speaks directly only to James and Cam on the boat in the third part of the text. The only time he engages in some kind of contact in the first part of the book is with James when he crashes his excitement about going to the lighthouse the next day. However, this is not in fact a conversation or interaction between Mr Ramsay and James, because Mr Ramsay reacts to Mrs Ramsay's promise

38 that "if it's fine tomorrow" (9), they will go for a trip. Similarly, his comment on James once writing his own dissertation is only a reaction to Mrs Ramsay's comment on his treatment of Charles Tansley (38). Therefore it seems that the only direct contact of

Mr Ramsay with his child in "The Window" is when he tickles James' feet (38).

Otherwise, there is neither verbal nor nonverbal communication between him and any other of his children in the first part of the book, but there are some instances when he stops and watches Mrs Ramsay reading to James, while not actively entering the situation. Though he does not talk to the children, he talks about them with his wife, yet usually, he only reacts to her remarks.

We have seen that while in To the Lighthouse Woolf gave the characters of children the most attention from all her novels, she still did not give them "equal treatment" to adults. Generally we learn more about the children from observations of the others than from their own thoughts. However we know far more from their thoughts than from their direct utterances, which are scarce; and if children do speak, often they just report speech of the adults. The parents have a different approach to their children; while Mrs Ramsay refers to the children in her thoughts individually,

Mr Ramsay thinks about them as a group, and they are also often referred to collectively by other characters. In some cases, Woolf even used the plural form for a verb not normally used as such, for example in: "Jasper and Rose said that Mildred wanted to know whether she should wait dinner" (87) and for inner thoughts which should be typically reserved for an individual: "her daughters, Prue, Nancy, Rose-could sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers; in

Paris, perhaps; a wilder life" (12). Both cases can be seen as a proof of little regard

Woolf gave to their individualities. When concentrating on parent-child interactions in the text, we could see that there are practically no contacts among Mr Ramsay and his

39 young children, and intimate and private contact is only between Mrs Ramsay and the youngest James, and while Cam is only a year older, she is already expected to entertain herself alone, and the same goes for the rest of the children.

3. 2 The Stephens & the Ramsays

In the first chapter, some basic facts about the Stephen family were presented, but it did not go into detail analysing its members' characters and their relationships, because the aim of the text is not to analyse the Stephen family, but to contrast it with the Ramsay family depicted in To the Lighthouse. This subchapter will address the autobiographical element in the novel using both the primary text and opinions of various scholars presented in the secondary sources.

Woolf herself wrote in her diary that the novel was "to have father's character done complete in it; & mothers; St Ives; & childhood" (Woolf, Diary 1925-1930 18).

However, as Zwerdling points out, while she tried to be faithful to the reality, she did not like the simplistic interpretation that the characters were her parents, and although when writing she had an opportunity to go through biographical materials about them, she decided not to and rather "shape the characters according to her own vision" (181).

A lot has been written on the relation between the Stephen family and the characters of the Ramsays, and opinions of scholars on this topics varies: Ruddick claims that interpreting To the Lighthouse as an autobiography is simplistic, and argues that "it is best to think of Mrs. Ramsay - Mrs. Stephen as a complex, continually changing persona in her daughter's life" (181). Because she died when Virginia was young, she became a mythical figure haunting her most of her life. Ruddick also claims that while Mrs Ramsay reminds her of Mrs Stephen, in case of Mr Ramsay, he does not seem like Mr Stephen of Woolf s childhood at all (196). Lee says, that it is "very

40 tempting to read To the Lighthouse ... as a simple transcription of Virginia Stephen's family life" (474). While she calls it a "profoundly autobiographical novel, very close, in places, to the Mausoleum Book, and to her parents' letters, to the 'Reminiscences', to her early diaries and memoirs, and to the later 'Sketch of the Past'" (474), she also points out that Woolf did not depict herself only as one character, but rather identified with several characters. Similarly Mrs Ramsay is not based only on her mother, but as

Woolf herself mentioned, partly on Vanessa, and Lily's feelings towards Mrs Ramsay can be likened to Virginia's feelings for Vita Sackville-West (474). Moreover, Lee argues that some character traits we see in both Mrs Ramsay (inclination to feelings concerning death) and Mr Ramsay (anxiety and fear of being forgotten) are not only her parents', but also Woolf s own. Alma H. Bond in her Who Killed Virginia Woolf?

(2000) presents several quite bold claims on Woolf s mental state; these claims are based mainly on analysis of Woolf s novels. Naturally she also deals with To the

Lighthouse, and argues that Woolf herself admitted that character of Mrs Ramsay "was modelled almost entirely upon that of her mother" (27). Zwerdling, on the other hand, claims that though in some aspects the depiction of both parents is faithful to reality, in other aspects, this is not a case at all (182-183, 188).

First there are what appear to be the basic facts: while the Stephen family was visiting Talland House between 1882 and 1894, and they never returned to stay there after Mrs Stephen's death (Lee 21), the first part of the novel is set in year directly preceding the First World War, the second part briefly describes the war and following years, and the last part is set ten years after the first one. The houses are situated on very different places: Talland House was close to St. Ives in Cornwall, and To the Lighthouse is set on Hebrides. The family in To the Lighthouse consists of parents and eight children, which is same as the Stephen family. However, in To the Lighthouse, it is

41 presented as if all children were offspring of the Ramsays' marriage, and for the

Stephens this was not the case. Also, while it is not quite clear when it happened, it seems that at least during the last two visits of St. Ives, Laura was already institutionalized (Lee 101), and as the sons were growing older, they attended boarding schools and it is possible they were not always able to spend the whole summer with the family in St. Ives. As for the ages of the children, the oldest, George Duckworth, was 14 when the family first visited Talland House and 26 at the time of the last visit; the youngest, Adrian, was born a year after their first visit, and was eleven in 1894.

Similarly to the novel, the family was often visited by their parents' friends, for example by Joseph Wolstenholme, who "consoled himself with mathematics and opium" (qtd. in "Adrian Stephen...."), which is not unlike Augustus Carmichael in To the Lighthouse.

Despite varying opinions on the autobiographical element in To the Lighthouse, there is quite a consensus in seeing Mrs Ramsay as a faithful imitation of Mrs Stephen.

After Vanessa had read the novel, she wrote to Virginia that "it is almost painful to have her so raised from the dead" (qtd. in Lee 474). According to Lee, the main features of

Mrs Stephen were that she "was very beautiful and very sad" (81), always surrounded by people she took care about and sacrificed herself to, but also was admired by. This is indeed very similar to the image of Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, whose beauty is mentioned several times in the text, for example by Charles Tansley (Woolf, To the

Lighthouse 20), by Mr Ramsay (130) and by Lily (213); and despite being active and positive in interactions with others, she has moments of deep melancholy, when she contemplates life and death (e. g. 14, 67). It probably does not help, that her husband consumes a great part of her energy with constant demands for sympathy. His demands exhaust her because "she did not like, even for a second, to feel finer than her husband"

42 (46). This is interesting, because throughout the novel, she actually is the stronger, more practical and competent spouse; in other words, she has what Ruddick calls "allegedly

'masculine' features" (198). Similarly, "in Woolf s eyes, the marriage [of her parents] seems to have been created and sustained by Mrs Stephen" (184), or, as Nigel Nicolson puts it in his biography of Woolf (2000) "she controlled him by her submissiveness"

(n. p.). Though being the stronger one, Julia Stephen seems to have held traditional views on gender roles and male dominance, bringing up her children in accordance with them, holding conservative views on women's education (Lee 100), and also signing an

"Appeal against Female Suffrage" (83). Nevertheless, unlike Mrs Ramsay, who feels inadequate because of her "untrained mind" (Woolf, To the Lighthouse 15), she "had a sense of vocation and professional commitment" (Zwerdling 188). In spite of having been very family-centred, she gave a lot of her time to nursing the sick and the poor with great dedication (which Mrs Ramsay had as well), and did not underestimate her ability to become at least sort of an expert in a sense that she wrote an essay on it (189).

There is also a difference in her family's position towards this: when Mrs Ramsay starts speaking about the condition of dairy in London, she is laughed at by her children and her husband (Woolf, To the Lighthouse 112), but when Mrs Stephen wrote a collection of children's stories, her husband accompanied it with his drawings (Zwerdling 190), which shows an interest in her activities.

Zwerdling also argues that compared to Mrs Stephen's strong opinions on faith of an individual, Mrs Ramsay shows hesitation when she thinks: "We are in the hands of the Lord" (Woolf, To the Lighthouse 71) and "then reproves her wandering mind for drifting into ... banalities" (Zwerdling 190).

Another difference between Mrs Stephen and the character of Mrs Ramsay is their treatment of children. According to Ruddick, Mrs Stephen was supposed to have

43 been "severe, occasionally short-tempered and critical" (183) with her children, which is not quite the image one gets about Mrs Ramsay from To the Lighthouse, who is in her interactions with the children (except for James) mainly brief and practical, but always kind and patient. Additionally, there is a difference in treatment of Prue, who being the beautiful oldest daughter who died early seems to have been at least partly based on

Stella Duckworth. While harshness with which Julia treated Stella was already mentioned in the first chapter, and the nickname "The Old Cow" (Lee 119) also speaks for itself, Mrs Ramsay does not show any sign of criticism when Mr Ramsay finds an earwig in the milk and Prue feels responsible for it; on the contrary, she is "assuring her that everything was well" (Woolf, To the Lighthouse 216), and generally she "seems to show a special affection for Prue" (Ronchetti 72). This discrepancy might be a result of

Woolf s attempt to idealize the memories of her childhood and her mother.

In To the Lighthouse, Mr Ramsay is someone who has a "splendid mind"

(Woolf, To the Lighthouse 40) and very few people are as intelligent as he is, but is also weak and has a great need for sympathy, demanding it first from his wife (44) and then from Lily (166). This is similar to Mr Stephen we know from Woolf s memories, "self- indulged, tyrannical, grieving widower" (Ruddick 196). An important difference Lee points out is that Mr Stephen was well aware of this behaviour, while Mr Ramsay seems to be doing to unconsciously (73). His emotional dependence and need for praise is evident when he comes to Mrs Ramsay, reading to James, and by telling her that he

"was a failure" (44) demands sympathy from her. Bond claims that Mr Stephen and

Mr Ramsay also shared a habit of "blustering, bulling and manipulating" people (48).

However, according to Leonard Woolf both Virginia and Vanessa exaggerated Leslie

Stephen's bad character traits and were unfair to him, and Woolf herself actually agreed in her memoir, writing that when "trying to dissociate themselves from their father's

44 view of the world, they 'made him the type of all that [they] hated in [their] lives"'(Zwerdling 182).

As Zwerdling argues, while Mr Stephen shared a lot with the character of

Mr Ramsay, for example that "he idolized his wife, was often impatient and short- tempered, was intensely uneasy about his professional success, and constantly demanded reassurance and sympathy from women" (183), there were also many differences. Unlike Mr Ramsay who talks about his children only when his wife starts the conversation and does not really interact with them, when in St. Ives, Leslie Stephen regularly took his children for long afternoon walks (Lee 31) and Woolf wrote about

"his willingness to play with children for hours when they were very young [and] to read their favourite books aloud" (183). Moreover, from references in his letters to

Julia, we see a great interest he took in his children and pride with which he spoke about

Virginia (Nicolson n. p.). He was also supportive in her writing, discussed with her what she had read, and mentioned in a letter to Julia that she would "really be an author in time" (n. p.). This also shows that he certainly did not hold the traditional Victorian view of women being destined to domestic sphere. On the contrary, in another of his letters to Julia, he claimed he believed that "women ought to be as well educated as men" and they "ought to learn something thoroughly when [they] grow[] up, thoroughly enough to be able to make [their] living by it, if it is of the paying kind, or to be an authority upon it, if it is not" (qtd. in Zwerdling 184). Mr Ramsay, on the other hand, romanticizes the traditional separation of gender roles: "He liked that men should labour and sweat on the windy beach at night; pitting muscle and brain against the waves and the wind; he liked men to work like that, and women to keep house, and sit beside sleeping children indoors, while men were drowned, out there in a storm" (Woolf, To the Lighthouse 178-179).

45 We see that Woolf made her parents in some aspects more Victorian (in the negative sense of the word which was fashionable at her time and in her circles), than they seem to have been from the documents we have, which might be explained by the quote above about making a stereotype of everything they hated from their father.

Unlike Mr Ramsay, Leslie Stephen's view on gender roles did not confirm the stereotypical Victorian image, and unlike Mrs Ramsay, Julia Stephen did not see herself as intellectually inferior creature unable to pursue her ambitions.

With the exception of James, who is often identified with Adrian Stephen, the child characters in To the Lighthouse are mostly not seen as the depiction of Woolf s individual siblings, probably also because they are not given sufficient attention as to depict a real person. Yet there can be found some similarities. As was mentioned above, there is some resemblance between the Ramsays' oldest daughter Prue and Stella

Duckworth, though the way Mrs Ramsay's relationship with her is depicted does not correspond with the image we have of Mrs Stephen's treatment of Stella. When the second oldest daughter Nancy assumes the responsibilities of Mrs Ramsay and Prue, this might be seen as a parallel with Vanessa's position after Stella's death, who with

Thoby in school became a target for all Leslie's demands (Lee 145). However, since

Lee points out that while for Virginia, relationship toward her father was ambivalent,

Vanessa's affection for him was obscured entirely (144), we may also see Vanessa in the position of teenage James, seeing that no matter their promise to fight tyranny, his sister still feels an affection towards their father and he is alone. Except for the extremely ambivalent relationship towards father, another reason to identify Cam with

Woolf is simply because she was the second youngest child, with her youngest brother

Adrian seen as model for James. In the text, it is not suggested that Cam would be upset by the fact that her mother gives far more attention to James, but this reality is portrayed

46 very clearly. This is strongly connected to Mrs Ramsay's general preference of men over women, saying that there was something men "lacked" (Woolf, To the Lighthouse

12) and therefore women were supposed to care for them. Also if something bad happens, she tends to blame women (Ronchetti 73). These both seem to be biographically correct - as Lee claims, "Adrian was their mother's favourite" (112), and it also seems that while Mrs Stephen "was capable of passionate attachment to males.. .we know less about her relations to women" (Ruddick 183), and it was already mentioned how strictly she treated Stella. Another reason to see Adrian as James is because the main theme of the novel, James' disappointment over not going to the lighthouse, was based on Adrian's real disappointment when he was not allowed to accompany his older siblings on the trip (Lee 33), although in real life, it is not specified which parent was the one who forbade the trip.

47 Conclusion

The thesis dealt with the depiction of parenthood in Virginia Woolf s novel To the Lighthouse while setting it in its historical context and in that of Woolf s other novels. It also dealt with the autobiographical aspect of the novel and tried to determine its character and extent.

The first question the thesis aimed to address was whether the Ramsay family as depicted in To the Lighthouse can be seen as a traditional family of the time period.

Since the thesis concentrated on the description of their family life, which can be seen mainly in the first part of the book "The Window", the timing is right before the First

World War. When looking at the Ramsay family, one sees many aspects that are usually attributed to the stereotypical Victorian middle class family; yet the Victorian era ended ten years before the novel is set.

As was stated in the first chapter, the average number of children in 1860 (at the very beginning of the Victorian era and 50 years before the novel is set) was almost six, but then the decline started and continued until the Second World War, when the number of children per mother was only two. It is interesting that the Victorian family was often criticized for its "unmanageable" size, yet most of the Victorian era fertility was actually declining. Nevertheless, the Ramsays with their eight children would be above average even in 1860s. In Chapter 1 we also learned that from 1870 there was a spread of contraceptive methods and couples started more effectively control number of their children. This does not seem to be the case of the Ramsays, since sometimes, it appears from Mr Ramsay's inner thoughts as if he would prefer a smaller family, or at least that providing for such a big family poses a problem. Another reason for a fertility decline was that it was more expensive to keep servants and women wanted to have

48 time for their own activities, not only for housework. Having enough servants to not do any housework and have free time was a privilege of the upper classes. When it comes to the financial situation of the Ramsays, the reader learns that they "were not rich" and it was difficult to "feed eight children on philosophy" (Woolf, To the Lighthouse 28) and on several places in the text, Mrs Ramsay is worried about the price of greenhouse repairs. Yet one does not see Mrs Ramsay cooking, cleaning or doing any household chores; she cares for children, but definitely not all the time, and she still can go for her errands in the town and visit the poor and the sick, so she is not only confined to domestic life. In the novel, there is Kennedy, the lazy gardener; Mildred, the cook;

Maria, the Swiss girl; and Ellen. In the first chapter, it was mentioned that the number of servants was decreasing and in 1911, while it still was a standard for middle and upper middle classes to have servants, in 60 % of families there was only one servant, and only 20 % had more than 2 servants. This would mean that the Ramsays belong among the elite, which is not the image the reader gets from the novel.

The first chapter also dealt with the phenomenon of "the Angel in the house", a perfect Victorian middle class housewife and mother. Generally speaking,

Mrs Ramsay, extremely caring and sympathetic, fulfils the image of the Angel; she is a good mother and a capable housewife, creates a pleasant atmosphere, and even as a mother of eight she is still admired for her beauty. In being caring and sympathetic she performs what Gatrell calls the "emotional labour" - controlling one's own emotions while concentrating on needs of others. Woolf claimed that this concentration was so absolute, that the Angel "never had a mind or a wish of her own" (Woolf, "Killing.

3). However in the case of Mrs Ramsay one sees that she has the ambition of becoming

"an investigator elucidating the social problem" (Woolf, To the Lighthouse 15). She suppresses the ambition not only because she needs to give her full attention to her

49 family, but because she feels she is not intellectual enough to do that. This brings us to another aspect of this Victorian ideal, because the Angel was considered to be and expected to be weaker and less intelligent than her husband. Mrs Ramsay indeed believes in this, though in the novel she actually appears as the active and competent one in the couple. Moreover, even her husband does not fit into this model with his constant need for emotional support. She is well aware of this and very upset by the idea that people could learn that she actually is the strong one. This awareness of reality when it comes to her husband, children and social issues shows that Mrs Ramsay is not as naive as the Angel was expected to be.

This also brings us to another common criticism of the Victorian society and family: hypocrisy. The hypocrisy of the Ramsay family is that the image presented outside and sustained by Mrs Ramsay is sometimes not faithful to the reality. An aspect in which Mr Ramsay well fulfils the idea of a Victorian father is the fact that his interactions with children in the novel are minimal. Mrs Ramsay also further perpetrates the Victorian system in a sense that she brings up her children in the same gender roles she herself holds so firmly. When she thinks about the future for the girls, it is in the context of their potential marriage. Seeing her it is difficult to imagine that only a year later, the First World War would start and with it women would enter a work place and public life in great numbers, and would continue to do so after the war. The last part of the book "The Lighthouse" is set during this time period, which seems already very far from the times of Queen Victoria; yet Mr Ramsay on the boat thinks how he likes the traditional separation of gender roles - men working outside and women waiting for them at home.

Mr Ramsay's thoughts on the boat may seem sentimental, because the world he describes is disappearing. Similarly, the world Woolf depicted and the characters of the

50 Ramsays seem to reflect the Victorian era more than the pre-war years. It is not difficult to see that this was her purpose - to depict the family she remembered from her childhood, the family she saw as Victorian.

The second chapter dealt with the question of how family depicted in To the

Lighthouse corresponds with the way Woolf depicted parenthood and family life in her other fictional works. The chapter analysed other families the reader encounters in her novels and pointed out some similarities in the way Woolf portrayed them. Generally speaking Woolf did not give a lot of attention to family life in her novels and treated parenthood more as an abstract phenomenon. She preferred describing the impact of this phenomenon on one's character over describing actual real-life family situations and interactions. She was also quite unequivocal in portraying this influence as a negative one, changing characters into unfamiliar matrons (Sally Seton in Mrs Dalloway), suggesting that parenthood causes women to lose their individuality (Mrs Thornbury in

The Voyage Out), or having them in an introspective moment realize that they may not enjoy the family life as much as they thought they do (Susan in The Waves). In all her novels, Woolf struggled with woman's role: she seems to have had troubles depicting a woman fully satisfied with the role of a mother; she never introduced a woman who would manage to combine family life with pursuit of her ambitions; and she expressed doubt on possibility of finding contentment in choosing a career over having a family.

Moreover she gave very little space to young children; they appear rarely in her texts and almost no attention is paid to their individualities. Seeing these basic characteristics of Woolf s depiction of family it seems that To the Lighthouse shares a little with her other works. To the Lighthouse deals extensively with family and family life, and analyses its actual realization, showing us countless interactions among its members and also presents the thoughts and feelings of characters concerning other family members

51 and family life. The children are treated as individualities and portray different personalities which engage in interactions and relationships as well. And Mrs Ramsay, the mother, is a deeply developed character with a rich inner life.

Nevertheless there are still similarities with Woolf s other works. Mr Ramsay is a similar character to Ralph Denham in Night and Day and Bernard in The Waves, a man who was prevented by having a family to take care of from pursuing his dreams and becoming successful. Even the perfect mother Mrs Ramsay has a moment when she realizes that with children she cannot invest as much as she would like to into her charitable activities. Moreover children's individuality is another rather problematic point. They are definitely given more space than in Woolf s other novels; they have names, they engage in conversations and the reader also sees their inner thoughts.

However paying more attention to their role, it becomes clear that it is smaller than the role of adults, especially their parents. In case of some of them, the reader learns only very little about them, and does not see their own perspective. What is surprisingly rare is a direct speech, because children almost do not engage in it. Even if they are asked, commanded or praised by adults, they often do not verbally or visibly react and if they speak, it is often only reporting of someone else's words. With the exception of James, whose inner thoughts are portrayed in detail even as a child, the characters are mostly given more space once they are older. Also, there are still several instances when adults perceive them not as individuals, but collectively. In conclusion, though To the

Lighthouse is a novel about family, which itself makes it an exception in Woolf s works, the character of her portrayal does not change significantly.

Lastly the thesis tried to address the extent of the autobiographical aspect in To the Lighthouse. This complicated topic has been dealt with extensively in various sources; one can often read claims that To the Lighthouse is "the most autobiographical

52 of her works; the characters of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are based on those of Leslie and

Julia Stephen" (Fuller-Coursey 578). While this might be true, reading the novel simply as a story of the Stephens' family life would be a misinterpretation. What contributes to the complexity of the issue is the fact that Woolf herself expressed an ambition to create a literal portrayal of her parents and childhood, but did not like to see the characters as their imitations. Based on the comments she and her family made, and based on the secondary sources, it seems clear that seeing To the Lighthouse as an autobiography is simplistic, yet the autobiographical element plays an important role.

Mrs Ramsay and Mrs Stephen share numerous traits: they both are mothers of big families, beautiful and admired, with inclination to melancholic thoughts. What differentiates them is the treatment of children, because Mrs Ramsay never shows the severity Mrs Stephen was remembered for, especially in her treatment of Stella, which seems to have been very unlike the way Mrs Ramsay treats Prue. Also it does not seem that Mrs Stephen shared Mrs Ramsay's distrust in her own abilities.

The relation between Mr Stephen and Mr Ramsay is similarly complex. Some traits, such as doubts about value of their work or devotion to their wives, they definitely share. Some traits they share, but might have been exaggerated or transmitted from Woolf s unhappy adolescent period into the childhood depicted in the novel. It seems that Mr Ramsay in the novel is not Mr Stephen from the times the family was spending their holidays in St. Ives, the happy times when Julia was alive and Virginia was a child, but the tyrannical and emotionally demanding widower from her teenage years. And lastly, some of the characteristics seem to be Woolf s artistic intention, or maybe her attempt to make her father a symbol of the Victorian family system she loathed. Unlike Mr Ramsay, Mr Stephen took great interest in his children and actually spent time with them. Despite his image of the Victorian patriarch (image to which

53 Woolf greatly contributed), he held progressive opinions on women's education and encouraged his daughter's writing.

Though it might be tempting to assume that if a fictional character and a real person share several character traits, it means they share all of them, it is important to clearly separate the characters of Woolf s parents and the Ramsays in order to prevent misinterpretation. Also, from what was written above, it seems that rather than seeing

To the Lighthouse as a faithful portrayal of the reality of the Stephen family's summers in St. Ives, it should be seen as the depiction of Woolf s childhood as she remembered it. With a perfect mother, who died so soon that her idealization could not be avoided, and with a father who lived only long enough to be remembered as the tyrant spoiling her adolescent years.

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—. Killing the Angel in the House: Seven Essays. Penguin Books, 1995.

—. Mrs Dalloway - Broadview Edition. Edited by Jo-Ann Wallace. Broadview Press, 2012.

—. Night and Day. Edited by Julia Brigs, Penguin Books, 1992.

—. Orlando: A Biography. Granada, 1977.

—. To the Lighthouse. Grafton. 1977.

—. The Voyage out. Hogarth Press, 1929.

—. The Waves. Grafton, 1977.

—. The Years. Penguin Books, 1968.

Young, George Malcolm. Victorian England: Portrait of an Age. 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 1953.

Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. University of California Press, 1986.

58 Summary (English)

The bachelor diploma thesis "The Depiction of Parenthood in To the

Lighthouse'" dealt with the way family life and parenthood are portrayed in this Virginia

Woolf novel. Apart from the primary text the thesis used various secondary sources, mainly Hermione Lee's biography of Woolf, Ann Ronchetti's The Artist-Figure,

Society, and Sexuality in Virginia Woolf s Novels and Sara Ruddick's "Learning to Live with the Angel in the House". The thesis aimed to analyse this literal portrayal in the context of the upper middle class family in Great Britain at the time, in the context of

Woolf s other novels, and in relation to Woolf s own family background. The first chapter of the thesis dealt generally with the upper middle class family in Great Britain during the Victorian era and the first half of the 20th century and with its changes, and also mentioned the family life of the Stephen family and some of those close to Woolf during her adulthood. The second chapter concentrated on the way Woolf dealt with parenthood, family life and children in her novels and on the amount of attention given to these topics. The last chapter analysed the characters of the parents, the Ramsays, their children and the family relationships in the novel with the use of extracts from the primary text. It specifically concentrated on the means through which the reader learns about the individual characters and their feelings and on what can be understood from the use of these means. Additionally, it dealt with the character and extent of the autobiographical aspect in To the Lighthouse and presented some scholarly opinions on this matter.

59 Resumé (Czech)

Bakalářská diplomová práce „Vykreslení rodičovství v díle K majáku" se zabývala způsobem, jakým jsou rodinný život a rodičovství vyobrazeny v tomto románu

Virginie Woolfové. Kromě primárního textu práce využívala různé sekundární zdroje, především pak životopis Woolfové od Hermiony Leeové, „The Artist-Figure, Society, and Sexuality in Virginia Woolf s Novels" od Anny Ronchettiové a „Learning to Live with the Angel in the House" od Sary Ruddickové. Cílem práce bylo analyzovat tento literární portrét v kontextu rodiny vyšší střední třídy ve Velké Británii v dané době, v kontextu ostatních románů Woolfové a ve vztahu k rodinnému zázemí Woolfové.

První kapitola práce se zabývala obecně rodinou vyšší střední třídy ve Velké Británii během viktoriánské doby a první poloviny dvacátého století a jejími proměnami, a také zmínila rodinný život Stephenovi rodiny a některých blízkých Woolfové během jejího dospělého života. Druhá kapitola se zaměřila na způsob, jakým se Woolfová zabývala tématy rodičovství, rodinného života a dětí ve svých románech a na množství pozornosti, která je těmto tématům věnována. Poslední kapitola analyzovala postavy rodičů Ramsayových a jejich dětí a rodinné vztahy v románu za použití úryvků z primárního textu. Konkrétně se zaměřovala na prostředky, pomocí kterých se čtenář dozvídá o jednotlivých postavách a jejich pocitech a na to, co lze z užití těchto prostředků vyrozumět. Kapitola se také zabývala charakterem a mírou autobiografického prvku v „K majáku" a prezentovala odborné názory na toto téma.

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