The Narrator and Mrs. Ramsay on a Train

Landres

 The Narrator and Mrs. Ramsay on a Train

“[W]e were torn asunder, as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train [...]”

(“The Mark on the Wall,” 1).

The narrators in the writings of Virginia Woolf take on the perspective of an observer looking out of a train window as the locomotive rushes past scenes. The narrator fixes her gaze on that object which presents itself to it and turns its attention to the next object as soon as it has presented itself, leaving the first behind. This pattern of appearance, fixation, and digression in the narrator’s mind mirrors that in the characters’ minds. In To the Lighthouse, for example, this pattern is played out in the mind the narrator and in that Mrs. Ramsay when Mr. Tansley tags along on her errands.

Mr. Tansley has just begun to be roused from his ill-humor by Mrs. Ramsay’s encouragement and implicit flattery. In his ecstasy due to this rise, he goes as far as to fantasize himself coming to future greatness under the approbation of her gaze—but, in the present, her gaze is already turned elsewhere: “A fellowship, a professorship, he felt capable of anything and saw himself—but what was she looking at? At a man pasting a bill” (To the Lighthouse, Harcourt Publishing, 11). Moreover, the narrator jumps onto Mrs. Ramsay’s train of thought and continues with it, turning from Mr. Tansley’s self-concern to fixate on the beautiful movement and colors of the image before Mrs. Ramsay’s eyes. 

The narrators of Woolf’s stories are particularly grabbed by objects in motion, such as the “vast flapping sheet” (11) of this episode. The primary role of the narrator in her act of observing is to fix, whether purposely or accidentally, in its beauty the moving, flapping, unfolding thing (at least for the time being). So as the narrator shares Mrs. Ramsay’s gaze on the wild, flapping bill, it is gradually stilled and fixed to the wall. Perhaps, however, the bill is only briefly imbued with a fixity, not fixed permanently. This magical control of the narrator, and of the characters, apparently to fix moving objects resembles James’ ability to “crystallise and transfix the moment upon which [the] gloom or radiance [of the wheel of sensation] rests” (3).

In the narrator’s description of the image of the man pasting the bill, she remarks that only half of the wall is covered by the fixed bill and, furthermore, that the bill is fixed to the wall by a one-armed man; the narrator adds up a whole picture from these two halves. This image may be taken as a metaphor for the concurrence between the world of external phenomena and that of internal psychic phenomena (of which we spoke in class). The man’s arm symbolises passive internal phenomena, which heedlessly streams forth, partially in response to external phenomena and partially motivated by a will of its own; and the vast flapping bill symbolises, more broadly, all external, ephemeral phenomena. These two phenomena converge with the fixation of the bill, which may express the creative attempt to join these two phenomena, to preserve evidence of both upon their conjunction in the mind’s eye of the narrator. Each phenomenal article is only half of the material that the narrator employs in her act of fixation, and each may only be crystallised in conjunction with the other.