Chapter Three

The Illusion of Transcendent Love: Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse





How to combat this notion of the double self ? In the modern world the social sphere assumes a critical importance, as it is seen as the locus of authenticity and presence. This is especially true with regard to intimate relationships. The individual's drive to find fulfillment in these relationships indicates a need for libidinal authenticity and also a need to locate a univocal image of the modern self that, as we have seen, has become binary. Can the subject ground itself in a more authentic reality through a loving relationship, or is this belief, too, an illusion ? A sharp critic of this belief in a transcendent, unifying love is the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).

Nietzsche could scarcely contain himself regarding many subjects, including the idea of marriage. An authentic philosopher, he felt, would not tolerate this idea. In On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Nietzsche expressed his belief that marriage is anthema for the philosopher, for it would only be an impediment to his goal, the maximal expansion of power. Considering philosophical history, Nietzsche finds that as a rule, the great philosophers have abstained from marriage. He names Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant and Schopenhauer--all philosophers of genuis who substantiate this view. A married philosopher, Nietzsche says, is an oxymoron, and he views such a person as a subject fit for a comedy. Nietzsche's thoughts on the philosophy of gender differences are of particular importance when discussing relationships between the sexes. In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-86), Nietzsche develops the idea that man's happiness is projected as willing and woman's happiness as obeying, with the intention that this way a conflict of wills, which is the source of unhappiness, can be eliminated. "Everything about women is a riddle," the old woman tells Zarathustra, "and everything about women has one solution: that is pregnancy." Continuing, the little old woman tells Zarathustra he has to take a whip when he goes to women.

Critics such as Robert Ackerman have observed that Nietzsche bases his model of gener relations on the archtypal modest women who are more attentive to surface meaning that men and, as a result, are more in tune with Dionysian realities. In this way, Nietzsche affirms the European version of gender differentiation, where men and women cannot understand one another because each reacts to a projected ideal as if it were the actual other. According to Nietzsche, there is a Dionysian flux underneath these arrangements. The possibilities for each gender are communicated to children through dichotomized roles, permitting character traits that are vital for creative acts to be transmitted to male children, and permitting those traits that are necessary for the biological continuation of the humankind to be transmitted to female children. For men, mothers provide the foundation of religion and morality, while fathers indicate how traditions can be altered and overcome. This tradition, Nietzsche says, derives from the Hellenic society of ancient Greece, where men and women were educated to different tasks.

Nietzsche has several aphoristic remarks which, taken together, illustrate the full scope of his concept of gender difference. In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), we learn that the sexes deceive themselves about each other, because at bottom they honor and love only themselves. Men and women are not able to understand one another; their perspectives on one another are false because of their partial nature. The Joyful Wisom (1882) reports that men actively corrupt women by creating female images to which women are then expected to conform. Men pressure women to conform their will to male desire and, whereas both men and women dress themselves up with morality, only men go so far as to create a whole ideological consciousness to justify the world to themselves. In this chapter, we will see two marriages where the male figures do exactly this; in Ramsay's case, it is through the ideology of Western rationality and, in Verloc's case, it is the ideology of anarchist politics.

As we have stated, because both sexes view the self as being mediated through images, what both men and women see when they view the opposite sex is essentially a projected image. A result of this projective confusion has an almost universal effect of gender skepticism, gender chaos and gender oppression. Neither sex presupposes the same feelings and the same concept of love in the other. An aphorism in Human, All Too Human (1878) says that a satisfactory marriage must retain a component of friendship: "Marriage as a long conversation: When entering a marriage, one should ask the question: do you think you will be able to have good conversations with this woman right into old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but most of the time is spent in conversation." Men, believing women to possess an unapproachable calm, fantasize that through women they can attain their best self. This, Nietzsche says, is the misjudgment which causes the distance of the feminine to be reproduced continually; this distance is also the fantasy required for the creative will, and this distance is maintained if the myth of womanhood remains unbreached.

This short reading of Nietzsche serves as the preface for a chapter that focuses on the institution of marriage as presented in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907) and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927). In their characterizations of the two married couples, the Verlocs and the Ramsays, Conrad and Woolf show how these relationships, supposedly happy marriages, have become domestic struggles between husband and wife. It is an interesting point of comparison between these two authors, for both Conrad and Woolf ask the question, "Why are men, and especially women, so deperately unhappy with the state of affairs in modern marital relations ?" Analyzing the representation of each marriage, this chapter presents both male and female perspectives in an attempt to show how the perpetuation of romanticized gender-identities leads to the creation of male-female relationships based on the power relations of dominance and subjugation. Taking the conclusions gained from the explication of various textual passages, we will then attempt to understand why communication is such an impossible prospect for these two married couples.

Starting with the very first passage of Agent, Conrad sketches a satirical portrait of a modern-day bourgeois fammily corrupted by the husband's ideological identification with a subversive group that wants to see the framework of society thrown out of joint. Adolf Verloc, an overweight, unprofessional anarchist, poses as a stationary salesman during the daym while secretly operating as a distributor of pornography. His wife, Winnie Verloc, is a submissive and loyal companion, sincerely devoted to Verloc's every need. Having no children of their own, the family is completed by Stevie, Winnie's mildly-retarded brother who looks up to Verloc like a father. In the early section of the book, Verloc receives an order from Vladimir, the head of an anarchist organization, to create an explosion that will get the attention of the anti-terrorist conference in Milan. Vladimir, too, believes that marriage is strongly contrary to an active criminal life, and he denounces Verloc's marriage as "an apostasy." In a sense, says Wendy Moffat, Vladimir is justified, for Verloc's authenticity as a secret agent is constantly called into question by his bourgeois life-style. We begin our close reading of Agent with a chapter in which the domestic farce that has been the Verlocs' home-life becomes the scene of a domestic tragedy.

Conrad's most pivotal chapter begins after both husband and wife have learned that Stevie was the sole fatality in the terrorist explosion that was meant to destabilize the scientific foundation of society, or, as Vladimir puts it, "the source of material prosperity." Verloc enters the home in a distressed state of mind, not because he is upset over Stevie's death so much as he dreads the coming confrontation with his wife. When he meets his wife for the first time after this secret has come out, all he can do is mutter, "I didn't mean for any harm to come to the boy." This non-apology causes Winnie to go numb, and she assumes a stoic, unflinching demeanor, refusing to show her face. Verloc pauses, observes his wife with "an undiscerning glance" and, to alleviate her grief, says, "It's the damned Heat, eh ? ... He upset you. He's a brute, blurting it out like this to a woman." Winnie, who has remained silent all the while, uncovers her face just long enough to say to her husband, "I don't want to look at you so long as I live." Dismayed by this sudden exclamation from a woman, a person whom he thinks of as being naturally inexpressive, Verloc reacts in surprise. It is clear that he does not understand the full meaning of his wife's exclamation. Winnie's emotional reactions have been entirely misinterpreted by her husband, who, like a primitive, is not even fully conscious of death as the end-point of life. He is a man so weak in sensibility that he is entirely unable to comprehend his wife's overpowering feelings of bereavement. After Verloc makes a few more inapporpiate gestures at consolation, Winnie, instead of raising her voice, again becomes a subdued and impassive object, seemingly unaware of her surroundings.

Here we have the Conradian picture of the difficulties facing men and women in their attempts to develop an empathic dialogue: unlike the heroes of Lord and Darkness, in Agent we have a man, Verloc, who is oblivious to both his wife's feelings of severe distress and her need for kindness and compassion; the woman, Winnie, emotionally and intellectually underdeveloped, can only feign ignorance when asked about herself. Still, this psychologically uncultivated man feels that he loves his wife, but the extent to which this love is real consists only inasmuch as he "imagines" that he receives love from her. Verloc considers his wife to be his intellectual inferior, on a level similar to a child. This is way, for the first time in their married lives, when he takes her "into his confidences," he is so surprised that he is literally struck speechless by his sudden realization of the possibility of direct communication. It is at this moment that Verloc experiences something of a revelation.

His newly expanded mind suddenly cleared of its prior concerns, including that of Stevie's death, Verloc becomes aware of his wife as a fully cognizant individual. He becomes acutely aware of his being perceived by his wife, whose gaze has now become invested with new meaning and significance. Yet, although Verloc has become conscious of Winnie, he still lacks the empathic sense necessary in order to understand her feelings. Unable to articulate his half-comprehended new insight into his wife's being, he can only try to console his wife, who, he thinks, is "taking it very hard." "You'll have to pull yourself together dear," Verloc says, "What's done can't be undone." Seeing his wife's expressionless face, he cannot help but misjudge her feelings and, still trying to be helpful, tells her, "What you need is a good cry." At this suggestion, Winnie can only fall into tearless despair, for her brother's death was such an unexpected occurrence, and such a violent end, that she is beyond tears. She looks at her husband, and realizes that this is the man who is responsible for Stevie's departure. Verloc, meanwhile, has forgotten about Stevie altogether; instead, he is deep in thought, separated from his wife, talking to himself excitedly. Bragging about his power in the anarchist movement and "in harmony with the promptings of his genius," Verloc declares his intentions to exact vengence. Conrad notes with curiosity the presence of two simultaneous attitudes in Verloc's character. There is Verloc the anarchist, whose hatred towards the social order is counterbalances by another Verloc, the one who has created an image of the female self which he is both drawn to and repelled from.

This passage on Verloc's psychology indicates that he has created an image of the female self as a being in which he has invested his complete faith. As the resolute guardian of his trust, this woman, Winnie, repays his investment of trust and faith by forever pledging her fealty to her husband. For these two people, marriage between man and woman has become a contract, a strangely inappropriate consummation of their feelings for one another. Locked into a domestic setting, these two people do not share their innermost selves with one another; this marriage is a felicitous agreement only to the extent that this couple can exclude their private selves, the most intimate depth of their own being. Of course, this includes a prohibition against sharing their own personal desires, as well as the spiritual components of their lives. When Conrad adds the thought that, "No system of conjugal relations is perfect," he is being ironic, for the Verloc marriage is as far away as possible from perfection.

This seemingly irresolvable situation, the combination of a woman unable to express her feelings and a man unable to intuit them, causes Winnie to wish that she could become like the figure of woman from ancient times, the Biblical woman in mourning. This is the archtypal female persona whose face is hidden by a veil, whose clothing is torn, whose eyes shed tears of rage, and whose teeth clench with savage fury; this figure is the "imprecise, but perfect," counterpart to her husband's love. This figure represents the essential being of woman who, no longer a submissive creature, is a woman empowered with the violence and authority normally associated with a man; this is a woman whose quest for personhood has been realized, who now possesses the ability to articulate her character as men do. At this point Verloc chastises his wife, telling her, "It is you who brought the police about our ears. Never mind, I won't say anything more about it," to which he generously adds, "I don't blame you." Continuing to speak to his wife in this patronizing fashion, he tells his wife, "I am too fond of you for that." In this way, this distorted relationship between man and woman finds its prime source of communication: through irony, role-playing and, in this instance, flattery, the husband whose conceives of the female self in this fashion believes women to be submissive creatures whose must be appealed to by means other than those of direct communication.

Only half-aware of her husband's presence, Winnie Verloc stares off in a daze, hearing only fragments of a voice. As Conrad writes, "What were words to her now? What could words do for good or evil in the face of a fixed idea?" Clearly, this fixed idea is her brother's death. It is then that she has a realization of the full implications of what Stevie's death means for her life. Now seeing reality with different eyes, Winnie has become aware, not only of the finality implied by Stevie's death but, in addition, his death causes her to think of him as the representative of her being, the protector of "her contract with existence." Looking at her husband, she realizes that this is the person who is responsible for Stevie's disappearance, now occupying the very same house, the very same room, as she does. In his introduction Martin Seymour-Smith suggests that Stevie meets his death as a result of his abundant sense of empathy for the world, for death is the result of one's enduring kindness, gentleness and compassion. In much the same way, Winnie now sees Stevie's life as "a life of single purpose and a noble unity of inspiration, like those rare lives that have left their mark on the thoughts and feelings of mankind." This image of Stevie's martydom causes Winnie to see her brother as a Christ-like figure who, in having been abandoned to die by her husband, has broken the contract she had agreed to, rendering the marriage invalid. Now a free woman, Winnie feels as if it is no longer necessary for her to remain in the world at all. Relinquishing all of her connections to her former existence, Winnie agrees to the abandonment of the self, as she can see no other purpose in live other than the one that was eradicated by her husband, who betrayed all of the sacred vows, to have and to hold, to love and to cherish, to raise a loving family in the eyes of God--all of these promises, implicit in the sacrament of marriage, were destroyed when Verloc left Stevie alone to die.

This point of view being completely foreign to his way of thinking, Verloc feels none of the ethical weight that has paralyzed his wife. Holding this false conception of the female self, he has shaped his ethical standards to conform of his narcissistic conception of himself as an individual in whose view love is purely a one-way circuit; for Verloc, marriage is a relationship where he receives love and sexual pleasure, and never gives in return. That Verloc derives satisfaction from this set-up is evident from the fact that he maintains this bourgeois existence while, in his other existence, he plays at being a secret agent who is known for his loud vocal presence and his lack of competence as a revolutionary. In this way Conrad presents the psychological formation of the male self who, feeling content in his beliefs, considers himself to possess the true picture of the world. He will contintue to believe in this picture of the world as grows older, becoming more assured of his beliefs with each passing year, with each pound of flesh that his body acquires until, finally, he has blotted out the being he has ignored, the female self that he has failed to understand. When Winnie respond to him without a word, leaving through the kitchen door, Verloc feels some disappointment, for she does not seem to appreciate the greatness of his intelligence, his anarchistic ambitions, or his infinite capacity to receive her favors.

Mark Conroy sees the lack of love between husband and wife, and the resultant subjugation of Winnie's role in the family, as a reflection of the social world of industrial Britain and, too, of the political world that affirms the legitimacy of an unfair distribution of power. Verloc's world is a world of surveillance where the effectiveness and the legitimacy of the status quo has been denounced by an obscure terrorist attack. The widespread distrust and the disturbing moral skepticism in Conrad's world develops as a result of the effacement of the border between the public and private realms. Regardless of which role he chooses, Verloc's life is consistently inauthentic; he is unable to carry out his private role as Stevie's caretaker and Winnie's husband and he is unable to fulfill his public persona as an arachist; this is a symptom of this phenomenon. The writer who has best sketched this process is Michel Foucault who, in Discipline and Punish (1977), depicted how the structure of torture and death was increasingly supplanted by indirect methods of surveillance and threat; the threat of punishment works to intensify and internalize the repressive violence that was once a direct instrument of vengence; the act of God that founded the sovereign order is refashioned into the ever vigilant eye of God. Foucault names this movement "Panopticism," adapting this name from Jeremy Bentham's concept of a pan-optic prison-system where the prisoners are kept from seeing each other, while simultaneously allowing them to be seen, from all directions, by the guards. Betham felt that this prison exemplified the art of surveillance, being in accord with the principle that "power should be invisible and unverifiable."

Conspiring to destroy the foundation of political society, the anarchists decide to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, which they see as the equivalent of the eye of God, in that it is an instrument of social control. The eye of the observatory is the ultimate political institution, in that it grounds and gives form to time. Foucault studies the techniques of surveillance which, beginning with the seventeenth century, played a role in the evolving systems of law and legality: the strict partitioning of space and the constant surveillance and recording of all movement. These two techniques found their apotheosis in nineteenth century Panopticism. Motivated by the desire for absolute surveillance, the social nexus of Conrad's world finds expression in the Verloc's marriage which, being based on the dialectic of domination and submission, exemplifies the feelings of mutual distrust between the sexes. Following the displacement of the boundary between public and private, the human ability to break through the class limitations of the family, ideology and environment remains inhibited. To liberate the human spirit from the code of subjugation and domination, the social hierarchy of sexual relations must be recognized as something that promises freedom but realizes itself as slavery; because the boundary between public identity and private freedom has been erased, these characters have acquired enigmatic identities that, being concealed from themselves and from each other, brings about their alienation from one another, as in the case of the Ramsays, or their definitive destruction, as in the case of the Verlocs.

For the Verlocs, this shell of anonimity that affects the public space of English society calcifies around the private space of the home, and causes the domestic setting to become a prison. The character of Ossipon sees a trap in all intimacy; the collapse of the public/private distinction serves to infect intimacy with suspicion. In discussing this novel, most critics have addressed the complexity of terrorist activity within the political world; however, these critics fail to appreciate, as Conrad pointed out in the book's subtitle, that Agent is "a simple tale," and that the true heart of the book's content is Winnie Verloc's straighforward story of marital conflict. In his preface, Conrad asserts that Winnie Verloc is the center of the novel. There could be no better example of the confluence of respectable moral values and disrespectful behavior than in marriage. Wendy Moffat points out that, in Conrad's view, "respectability" was the essential basis of "middle-class Victorian ideas about criminality, class, and sex roles." Viewing the domestic setting as supplying the basis for morality, Conrad focuses his narrative on the oxymoron of an anarchist marriage. Although Conrad, as Jeffrey Meyer points out in his biography, held essentially mid-Victorian assumptions about woman's place, Agent radically dismantles the structures of gender relationships and, simultaneously, it dismantles the idealistic view of the domestic sphere as an area removed from danger. While Agent claims to be of less significance than either Lord or Darkness, the above statements show that it is to be distinguished by the ideological complexity that lies beneath the surface of the narrative.

While not as violent as Agent, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is also a tale that calls us to recognize how sexual identities are at play within a domestic setting. This novels centers on a relationship between a man and a woman, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, who, like Mr. and Mrs. Verloc, reveal how both male and female psychology has been constructed by the gender-identies society has imposed upon them. In the first section of the book, entitled "The Window", Woolf shows how this marriage has developed from romanticized conceptions of men and women. We will begin with an analysis of Mr. Ramsay, whose prime concern is to determine the objective nature of reality by means of a rational, subject-centered reason. He wrestles with abstract questions such as, "How do we know the world is real if our entire epistemological understanding of it comes through the senses ?" Woolf writes an internal dialogue that is meant to be, simultaneously, both a parody and an accurate representation of Mr. Ramsay's thoughts.

It is clear that Mr. Ramsay conceives of knowledge on the basis of order, an idea that Woolf satirizes in a humorous fashion. This is the intellectual thought-process of this famous thinker. Mr. Ramsay, for whom knowledge is a sequential pattern that proceeds in an orderly fashion, as stable and rigorous as the letters of the alphabet. Ramsay sees knowledge as proceeding in a linear fashion, a concatenation of propositions that can be systematized and filed through like a row of index cards. For him, this chains of facts leads to a transcendent plateau where an eternal being awaits the first philosopher to arrive at Z. A conception of knowledge that is both elitist and heirarchical, there are, for each site along the way, a set of positions which are subordinated to other, dominant ones. Yet Mr. Ramsay is not concerned, for he has arrived at Q, a highly coveted position. He is not so sure about which position to take next, but this does not matter; all that matters is the next step forward. Completely committed to intellectual progress, Mr. Ramsay sets his sights on R, his next step. Until the time comes to move from his current position, he will entrench himself here, at Q. He likes it here, where he can look down, and savor the heights he has ascended to. Perhaps, when he reaches R, he will have found a proof of external objects; perhaps then, he will have no problem imagining the existence of tables and chair, even an entire house, when he is not present.

Indeed, this speculative puzzle appears to have been Mr. Ramsay's life's work, which, one might say, makes him an anarchronism, for he is still trying to solve David Hume's epistemological riddle about the existence of other minds, or, as Ramsay says, external objects. As Andrew says to Lily, when asked to summarize his father's work, "Think of a kitchen table...when you're not there." Lily, who has no clue what tomake of this statement, associates this obscure language with Mr. Ramsay's work which, whenever she imagined it, took the shape of a large kitchen table. This problematic conception of material objects without the presence of a perceptive subject, while commonsense for Lily, is for Mr. Ramsay the source of great consternation.

Stanley Cavell has suggested that, in the modern period, our desire for a firm ontological proof of God's existence has sublimated into a new form, that is, the attempt to prove the existence of external objects; he attributes this shift to the disappearance of God from our philosophical equation. With Cavell's statement in mind one might agree that, perhaps, Woolf intends us to see Mr. Ramsay's endless quest for philosophical glory as indicative of the failure of the Ramsay's marriage. If so, then one could draw a further comparison between our two couples: like Verloc's abandonment of the Christ-like Stevie, Mr. Ramsay's inability to prove the existence of external objects also constitutes the husband's turning away from the divine being. Cavell's point is plausible, even when applied to Woolf's novel, for Mr. Ramsay obsessed over this problem so deeply that it carries over into his life, shaping his conception of manhood, which he sees and being intrinsically tied to his romantic vision of the great man who, committed to a set of abstract ideals, sacrifices himself in their name.

Nietzsche's remark that a married philosopher is a contradiction in terms seems particularly appropriate when analyzing Mr. Ramsay's marriage. Here is a man who has a wonderful wife and has many beautiful children, yet because he conceives of life on the basis of philosophy, he is unable to take part in the life of his family. Ironically, his children regard their father much like Hume's table--as an absent presence, a distant figure whose cold judgmental eye put them under constant scrutiny and criticism. In fact, James Ramsay despises his father for comporting himself like a nobleman, with posture that conveyed an attitude of magnanimity and language that was a succession of terse, pithy remarks.

As a result of his solipsistic philosophical pretensions, Mr. Ramsay is a man hwo is unable to communicate with either his wife or his children. Instead of sharing his life with his family, he has spent his life searching for philosophical proof that the world exists. As a result, he has fallen out of the world, and has become an island. This passage reveals that Mr. Ramsay sees his intellectual journey as one of complete solitude. In his mind, thinking is a form of combat where he stands alone against the facts of the world. He conceives of the acqusition of knowledge through a series of militaristic, romantic battles where knowledge is the enemy, something to be wrestled to the ground and penetrated by the male sex. However, Woolf makes it clear that Mr. Ramsay is not the heavy, ponderous intellectual he pretends to be, saying that "It was sympathy [Mr. Ramsay] wanted, to be assured of his genius, first of all, then to be carried into the circle of life."

Is all the blame for the state of marriage, then, due to masculine errors ? No, in this respect the marriage is one of equals got, as Woolf shows us, while Mr. Ramsay has been fantasizing about being a great philosopher, Mrs. Ramsay has been constructing her own fantasy-identity. One can see from these passages that, just as our analysis of Mr. Ramsay's view of himself showed, Mrs. Ramsay, too, has constructed a conception of her own identity that is based, not on reality, but on a fantasy. In her fantasy of beinbg, Mrs. Ramsay conceives of herself as the life-giver, the central focal-point of the family and the central site of meaning for her husband. As she is the life-giver, she is able to weave the social fabric of her world as she sees fit, a position that is of utmost importance (for reasons we shall discuss later). As the central focal-point of her family, she is aware that her picture of the world is also the family's picture of the world. So closely connected is she with the life of her family that she begins to feel her identity slip away, replaced by an eternal "pulse" or "throb" which, like the contraction of a collective heart, brings her into even closer contact with her family. Eventually, this throb of life becomes so overpowering that she can no longer perform the simple task of reading a fairy-tale to her son. It is then that the deafening roar of these contractions becomes, as Mrs. Ramsay sees it, like an aura passing between herself and her husband. She, as the central site of meaning for her husband, the guardian of his secrets, has become invested with his being. Never again will she wholly belong to herself, but will always be aware of the two sounds that represent their eternal wedded bliss.

Certainly, this is by no means meant as a reproach towards Mrs. Ramsay. If anything, this type of expanded awareness of being represents the ideal of marriage. The more problamtic aspects of Mrs. Ramsay's psychology are to be found, not in her relationship with her husband, but in her relationship with her children. The next passage we will look at takes place when Mrs. Ramsay, after watching her children at play in the carefree days of their childhood, suddenly has an idea.

Here we find Mrs. Ramsay, the life-giver, the focal point of her family, wanting to ensure the continual preservation of her loving family. Thinking this way, she conceives of a plot that will bring about the order necessary for the preservation of history. Like her husband, she wants to see order installed in a permanent, stable way, but unlike her husband, whose thoughts are focused on the intellectaul strivings of the self, her sole province of concern is the family. It is the institution of marriage, she decides, that will bring about the effect she wants. In marriage one can protrac6t the period of childhood forever. In marriage one can escape death, and all of the misfortunes that come with life as well. In this way, too, her desire for power will be fulfilled, for by arranging marriages, she will become the main organizing consciousness of the family. As a result of her having been placed as the central point of focus in the life of the family, Mrs. Ramsay becomes concerned almost exclusively with how other people feel, deferring her desires to actualize her own being in her eagerness to increase the size of the family. Yet, although her will is to witness the proliferation of the family, Mrs. Ramsay feels a distinct sense of "dissatisfaction" with her life. I interpret this feeling to be the result of her basic lack of power in the larger social world. In an attempt to extert her power in her own way, Mrs. Ramsay plays matchmaker, manipulating her world the only way she can, through the pairing of domestic partners like Paul and Minta.

Sheldon Brivic offers a Nietzschean view of the marriage when he says that, in bourgeois history, men have been separated from women in the heirarchical terms of active and passive sex roles. Under this pernicious development of marriage, love is conditioned by the self's subordination of the other. Woolf's depiction of the marital relationship, and the developmental strictures that accompany it, constitutes the central focus of this novel. Feeling that every manifestation of love exacts its own destructiveness, Woolf emphasizes the need to radically transform the structures of human relationships. Brivic claims that Woolf, while recognizing the damaging effects of fixed gener positions, does not hope to extirpate these differences completely, for she perceives that love is contingent on the existence of difference and otherness. In an attempt to reconcile these unyielding differences, Woolf proposes the need to recognize that male and female are found within each person.

Completely devoted to each other, the Ramsays display a sublime unification of sexual personae, providing a harmonious foundation for the life of the family. Symbiotically, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay extract from each other something that each sex needs. Mr. Ramsay asks his wife to fortify his masculine concept of himself, which is defined by his books; in giving her husband comfort, Mrs. Ramsay impairs his ability for independent thinking. His sense of losing his masculine strength makes him cling to his wife's comfort all the more, even as he struggles with his drive to blame her. Clearly, the streucture of the Ramsays' relationship is one of dominance and subjugation for, as Brivic says, "she builds him up while he tears her down." He knows that he should not blame her and he struggles to avoid it, but his rational efforts to do so are undermined not only by the unfair gender system, but by the structure of love. Mrs. Ramsay inhabits an emotional space devoted to celebrating life with her affirmatrive capacities while Mr. Ramsay claims a logical space devoted to analytic reasoning that operates through the force of negation.

Operating under the social belief that neither the masculine nor the feminine systems can coexist without the other, these characters are forced to find their roles through marriage. The gender system which prescribes identities on the basis of sex makes the harmful aspects of love inevitable, for the conflicting perspectives of male and female are shaped by this same gender code. Mrs. Ramsay has a disposition of rigid self-denial, a devotion that the Victorians understood as the manifestation of absolute love. Woolf's novel demonstrates the artificiality of male aggression and the myth of female passivity. Mrs. Ramsay's zeal to spread the blessings of marriage pressures Paul to see Minta as a prospective wife, when in truth their union seems doubtful. The subjugation of the female and the domination of the male comprises an opposition between gender that, in some respects, affects every marriage. In her essay "A Room Of One's Own" (1929), Woolf proposed that the mind contains elements of both sexes, and that both are needed if one hopes to find "complete satisfaction and happiness." As it is mortally dangerous to be restricted to one sex only, a person must be "woman-manly or man-womanly."

Perhaps Nietzsche is right after all. Perhaps these two men, a philosopher and a revolutionary, should never have married. Supposedly, they are both rigorous intellectuals, but it must be seen that each man surrounds himself with the comfortable life-style of a bourgeois gentleman. For Nietzsche, certainly, this would be reason enough to view them with skepticism. By refusing to see their wives as equals, these men keep the female self hidden from view, veiled in obscurity, and forcing the women to become silent partners in the marriage--secondary individuals who will never presume to detract from the greatness of their men.

The similarities between these two men are noteworthy. Both of these men are on solitary quests to alter the world through the strength of their convictions, Ramsay through his "splendid" philosophical intellect, Verloc through his political "genius." In addition, both desire to be love for their own sake. Most importantly, both men shine the image of their genius into the mirror of the world, and expectantly wait to receive their own image reflected back at them, taking the form of a woman's love. In their attempt to realize a transcendent and unitary love, these men make their sacrifices in the name of truth, a true social order through a proletarian revolution, or a true ontological proof of the world's existence through a metaphysical breakthrough. In both cases, the actualization of the male self is brought about in a way that further displaces the female condition, whose silence reveals her submission to as patriarchal code of dominance and subjugation.

Perhaps it is these two men, then, on whom the greater proportion of the blame should fall. Then again, as this critical analysis has shown, it is true that both husbands and wives are caught between two opposing images of themselves, one based on a fantasy they have received from their cultural and psychological background, the other being an image based on some semblance of reality. In no way do these images receive an equal amount of attention; rather, the attempts made by these characters to subsume their lives entirely into these fantasy-identities has significant detrimental effects on their marital lives. For some of these marriages, like the Verlocs, an inability to perceive the partner's emotions effectively prevents any communication between husband and wife, while in the Ramsay's marriage, both husband and wife project a fantasy image of the female self as the center of familiar existence. In truth, all four people construct fantasy identities that allow them to preserve their individual fantasies of being; the men select roles as revolutionaries, either political or philosophical, while the women choose to become mothers, either to a family of children or to a single individual. Regardless of their respective positions of subjugation or domination, we can see, finally, that both men and women contribute to this relationship where the women become only an appendage, an extension of the male body, created from the rib of male vanity. If love fails in the attempt to overcome the dualism of the modern subject by restoring the self to its unitary image, must the modern subject remain consigned to this binarism as if it were something fundamentally pre-given ? As the last chapter will show, Conrad and Woolf employ variant interpretations of the modern self in their attempts to overcome this pernicious and self-imposed dualism.