A psychoanalytical reading of Mrs. Ramsay in ‘To the Lighthouse’ in relation to Virginia Woolf’s personal life

Sonia Salam; Shaukat Ali Khan; Kashif Ahmad

doi:10.47264/idea.lassij/6.1.16

Authors

Sonia Salam Department of English, Abdul Wali Khan University, Mardan, Pakistan. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6159-7600
Shaukat Ali Khan Department of English, Abdul Wali Khan University, Mardan, Pakistan. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4548-7065
Kashif Ahmad Department of English, Abdul Wali Khan University, Mardan, Pakistan. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2777-1609

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.47264/idea.lassij/6.1.16

Keywords:

Freud theory of personality, psychoanalysis, psychosis, neurosis, trauma, unconscious, art, perfection, character, self and character, correlating character

Abstract

This paper explores Woolf's self into her character: Mrs. Ramsay and vice versa. The narrative of 'To the Lighthouse' offers a detailed description of her characters' inner selves and their outlook on life based on their interior designs. Woolf has drawn her characters based on incidents chiselled from her personal life. Her personal life suffered incessantly from jolts of fear, psychosis, neurosis, and attempts of suicide on various occasions. To compensate for the injuries and trauma of the past, Woolf is at her best in drawing the character of Mrs. Ramsay, which is full of love, life, and harmony, contrary to her own life, which was full of trouble and mental sickness. Woolf could not manage her personal and conjugal life smoothly, but Mrs. Ramsay, on the contrary, successfully kept her family connected till her death. Our main argument is Aristotle’s stance on Art that artists, in reaction to the realities of the physical world, create an imaginative world of perfection. According to the novel's psychological nature, Freud’s theory of personality has been adopted in exploring and correlating the character of Mrs. Ramsay (the brainchild of Woolf) with Woolf’s personal life.

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