Summer '07 Reading: 'To The Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf

[Janine]

You're making sense Janine, I just don't agree. I understand what you're saying. From my point of view think of it this way. If a book is crap as a work of art, then who cares what the biographical relationship is? No one is ever going to look up the biographical relationship of my poems or short stories to my life. Once a work is an aknowledged classic for itself, then it is interesting and enlightening to understand it in the context of the author's life.

Virgil, I agree that the one preceeds the other - for one thing none of us would be paying attention to a book that was 'crap', as you put it. Yes, this book is a classic and it is art. I'm not disputing that one bit. In fact I feel it is like a painting - the whole novel. It is quite beautiful, although I feel the tone of the novel is shadowed with a sadness I can't quite put my finger on. It actually depressed me to read it again. As someone here said it is not at all optimistic. I have actually read one critc who thinks it is humorous at times and I can see shreds of that aspect, such as Mr. Ramsey reciting "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and also, the cleaning woman not keeping the house up as she should. Still although there is some humor there is much pathos in the passages.
But asside from all of this debating about the author's role in the novel, I would really like to know somethings about the novel. I recall when I first read it I had tons of questions. Maybe I should just ask some here and see what the responses will be. For instance - why did the Ramseys feel it was necessary to be surrounded by others who were non-family members each year they went to the island on vacation? One of the daughters mentions it and how she wishes they could just go by themselves some year. Do you think she is indicating a need for family closeness? I also wonder why each character is so critical of each other character? I keep reading that at the end James is really more like his father or starting to identify with him. I can't exactly get through to this idea and how he is like the father. Can you help me with that, to better understand it? Why does Mr. Ramsey resent his wife going to take things to the poor? Also, why does it seem the author presents her doing it, but not entirely out of charity, for the unfortunate/sick families. I have always been a bit confused on this point. Is it because she feels she is not devoting enough time and closeness to her own family. It always feels like it is resented by the children in the family and the husband.
One thought came to me about the attic and the two children arguing about the pig head on the wall - James wants it, so does he seem more like the father in this way (with his stubborness) and now Cam is more the sensitive one, or her mother. At the end again, Cam and James are together in the boat and have pledged to hold fast against the father, but it seems that James gives way to the father at the end and that bond of hate is broken between brother and sister. At the end when Lily draws the line on the canvas and this is suppose to represent Mrs. Ramsey, maybe I am lame, but I could not really see this as a deep meaning. I know she is the central figure even after she has died in the third part of the book.
Sorry to toss so many questions out there, but I thought it might stimulate some more conversation in other directions.

[Walter]

Janine, I think those are exactly questions that can and should be directed at the book and, no, none of them are 'lame.' Far from it. In my view they will direct us, the readers, to a much closer reading of the text, where I believe we will find indications, here and there, that suggest answers. To me that is the pleasure of re-reading and trying to understand a book more deeply, for, surely, the story looks different the second time around.
So for one stab in the dark, the straight line did not strike me as so strange, because it seemed to me that it had already been suggested that the painting was non-representational, and possibly quite surreal. I don't have the book in front of me (my bad!) but the gentleman had to ask Lily what the triangle was (and Mrs Ramsay was it, in Lily's answer?). In that context, a straight line might possibly arise by free artistic association with a more detailed object or idea or abstract concept. So, the straight line? Perhaps Mrs Ramsay as the central guiding line for the family; or maybe the straight line-of-sight with which Lily saw Mrs. Ramsay in her epiphany at the end; or maybe a straight dark line to achieve balance among all the other elements on the canvas, a balance Lily was once described as having difficulty with achieving; or ???. Anyone else?

[rich14285]

"holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down."
The above taken from "To The Lighthouse", cited in a discussion thereto, might serve as an example of a kind of thinking inherent in Virginia Woolf's depression, and by extension to alot of other people in depression or one might say melancholy. My point being that alot of people blame "God himself" for all the ills of this world, and to do so, I should like to suggest is simply not scriptural. The question becomes, does evil come from God? Further, if so then how can one pray for goodness from an evil God? Woolf's theology is askew. She never seems to have found the light in the darkness! She is not just talking about "darkness and desolation" that engulfs "millions of ignorant and innocent creatures", as she withholds the light as if playing God. Perhaps, she is talking about her own inability to find the true light, the light that created the light so to speak. And therefore what light she had found as a young person isn't strong enough to save her from her adult darkness.

[Walter]

I heavily doubt that not finding the true light, or correct thinking, has anything at all to do with clinical depression (the illness). I think we should definitely distinguish sadness from depression, which has much deeper roots from everything I have read about it. Welcome aboard, however!

[rich14285]

Thanks for the welcome!

[Virgil]

Janine, I'm going to answer several of your questions with a wrap up of Part I, The Window. I think this will complete my understanding of Mrs. Ramsey as a character.

First notice how Mrs. Ramsey is characterized in Lily's painting:

Nothing could be cooler and quieter. Taking out a pen-knife, Mr Bankes tapped the canvas with the bone handle. What did she wish to indicate by the triangular purple shape, “just there”? he asked.

It was Mrs Ramsay reading to James, she said. She knew his objection— that no one could tell it for a human shape. But she had made no attempt at likeness, she said. For what reason had she introduced them then? he asked. Why indeed?—except that if there, in that corner, it was bright, here, in this, she felt the need of darkness. Simple, obvious, commonplace, as it was, Mr Bankes was interested. Mother and child then—objects of universal veneration, and in this case the mother was famous for her beauty—might be reduced, he pondered, to a purple shadow without irreverence.

A purple triangle, symbolizing power, strength, and as mother and child, a modonna with child.

And then a couple of chapters later, when Mrs. Ramsey is in her stream of conscious contemplation, she conceives of herself:

No, she thought, putting together some of the pictures he had cut out— a refrigerator, a mowing machine, a gentleman in evening dress— children never forget. For this reason, it was so important what one said, and what one did, and it was a relief when they went to bed. For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of—to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed; one after another, she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless. There were all the places she had not seen; the Indian plains; she felt herself pushing aside the thick leather curtain of a church in Rome. saw it. They could not stop it, she thought, exulting. There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stability. Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience (she accomplished here something dexterous with her needles) but as a wedge of darkness.

She concieves of hersef as a wedge of darkness, which connects to Lily's purple triangle. But then she identifies with the lighthouse light:

Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity; and pausing there she looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke, for watching them in this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things one saw; and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke. Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at—that light, for example.

She identifies with the third stroke, "her stroke." Triangle, wedge, third stroke, all based on the number three. What does the number three signify? Let's return to Lily's painting where Lily is pondering the form after Mr. Bankes has questioned her:

She could not show him what she wished to make of it, could not see it even herself, without a brush in her hand. She took up once more her old painting position with the dim eyes and the absent-minded manner, subduing all her impressions as a woman to something much more general; becoming once more under the power of that vision which she had seen clearly once and must now grope for among hedges and houses and mothers and children—her picture. It was a question, she remembered, how to connect this mass on the right hand with that on the left. She might do it by bringing the line of the branch across so; or break the vacancy in the foreground by an object (James perhaps) so. But the danger was that by doing that the unity of the whole might be broken. She stopped; she did not want to bore him; she took the canvas lightly off the easel.

"It was a question [of] how to connect the mass on the right hand with that on the left hand." To connect one with two requires three, the completion of a triangle, the third stroke. Mrs. Ramsey is the connecting foil, bringing isolated people together. You know this is the most curious stream-of-conscious novel I have ever come across. Most stream of conscious novels maintain one person's stream of conscious for either a extended length or at least a chapter. Woolf not only crosses from one person's stream of conscious to another from paragraph to paragraph, but she often crosses from one person's consciousness to another's in the very same paragraph. This is not by accident, it is aesthetically representing something. The isolation of the interior mind crosses and touches other people through a special person, a person who brings people together, tries to arrange marriages, invites guests to her home, and through a dinner party (a last supper, perhaps?) unites individuals to a community. Notice this at the beginning of the dinner party:

Raising her [Mrs. Ramsey] eyebrows at the discrepancy—that was what she was thinking, this was what she was doing—ladling out soup—she felt, more and more strongly, outside that eddy; or as if a shade had fallen, and, robbed of colour, she saw things truly. The room (she looked round it) was very shabby. There was no beauty anywhere. She forebore to look at Mr Tansley. Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her. Again she felt, as a fact without hostility, the sterility of men, for if she did not do it nobody would do it, and so, giving herself a little shake that one gives a watch that has stopped, the old familiar pulse began beating, as the watch begins ticking—one, two, three, one, two, three. And so on and so on, she repeated, listening to it, sheltering and fostering the still feeble pulse as one might guard a weak flame with a news-paper. And so then, she concluded, addressing herself by bending silently in his direction to William Bankes—poor man! who had no wife, and no children and dined alone in lodgings except for tonight; and in pity for him, life being now strong enough to bear her on again, she began all this business, as a sailor not without weariness sees the wind fill his sail and yet hardly wants to be off again and thinks how, had the ship sunk, he would have whirled round and round and found rest on the floor of the sea.

"Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her." She brings them together. She feels each guests (Tansley's impoverished upbringing, Bankes's family loss) isolating pain, "for if she did not do it nobody would do it, and so, giving herself a little shake that one gives a watch that has stopped, the old familiar pulse began beating, as the watch begins ticking—one, two, three, one, two, three. " One, two, three! The third connecting stroke, completing the triangle. Notice later when she lights the candles:

Now eight candles were stood down the table, and after the first stoop the flames stood upright and drew with them into visibility the long table entire, and in the middle a yellow and purple dish of fruit. What had she done with it, Mrs Ramsay wondered, for Rose’s arrangement of the grapes and pears, of the horny pink-lined shell, of the bananas, made her think of a trophy fetched from the bottom of the sea, of Neptune’s banquet, of the bunch that hangs with vine leaves over the shoulder of Bacchus (in some picture), among the leopard skins and the torches lolloping red and gold... Thus brought up suddenly into the light it seemed possessed of great size and depth, was like a world in which one could take one’s staff and climb hills, she thought, and go down into valleys, and to her pleasure (for it brought them into sympathy momentarily) she saw that Augustus too feasted his eyes on the same plate of fruit, plunged in, broke off a bloom there, a tassel here, and returned, after feasting, to his hive. That was his way of looking, different from hers. But looking together united them.

and a little further down:

Some change at once went through them all, as if this had really happened, and they were all conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on an island; had their common cause against that fluidity out there.

Mrs. Ramsey unites their individual isolations against the "fluidity out there," the natural forces bent on human destruction. It all pulls together, the isolation, the uniting into a community, the fight against life's darker forces.

[Quark]

Janine, I think maybe we should take these questions one at a time. I'll try to say something about Lily's art before I go to bed. You say,

At the end when Lily draws the line on the canvas and this is suppose to represent Mrs. Ramsey, maybe I am lame, but I could not really see this as a deep meaning.

I don't know if the line that she draws is really all that crucial, but I do think that her art form is important. In the third chapter Lily reflects on her artistic problems:

"She must try to get hold of something that evaded her...it evaded her now when she thought of her picture. Phrases came. Visions came. Beautiful pictures. Beautiful phrases. But what she wished to get hold of was the very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anything. Get that and start afresh" (196).

It doesn't seem overly important at first, but I think it creates a distinction that can make the rest of the book much more understandable. There are two forms of art discussed here: one that is superficial and another that is somehow deeper and more true. The first kind is attractive, but it isn't complete. Lily uses this kind of representation when she thinks of Tansley or Carmichael. For example, Lily becomes aware that she only thinks about Tansley's sexist and self-important side. She doesn't consider his altruistic moments--like when Tansley educated his little sister. Lily comments on this unfair characterization when she says,

"Her own idea of him was grotesque...Half one's notions of other people were, after all, grotesque. They served private purposes of one's own. He did for her instead of a whipping boy. She found herself flagellating his lean flanks when she was out of temper" (200).

The kind of representation that she uses here is very superficial and biased, and Lily's aware of this. She says, "But this was one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail" (198). Most of the characters seem to think in this way. They think about each other from the position of their own self-interest in this surface-only sort of way. Look at how Tansley thinks of the dinner party in the first chapter:

"For he was not going to talk the sort of rot these condescended to by these silly women. He had been reading in his room, and now he came down and it all seemed to him silly, superficial, flimsy... They never got anything worth having from one year’s end to another. They did nothing but talk, talk, talk, eat, eat, eat. It was the women’s fault. Women made civilisation impossible with all their “charm,” all their silliness" (88).

Here we get another critical statement, but is it really fair? No, it isn't at all. We know that Tansley is only hurt because the women don't respect him and he can't find any way to assert himself. The representation that Tansley makes of the women is motivated by his own selfishness. Lily, on the other hand, is trying to get to the reality of the situation. She believes that people manipulate the world around them to reflect what they want to see. So, in order to escape the selfish kind of art, she tries a more surreal approach. Her painting of Mrs. Ramsay doesn't show her beauty, but it shows her thought. It tries to get past the appearance which can be easily manipulated, and realize what is truly there. And, in the end, she doesn't care whether it's appreciated or not. She says of her painting, "It would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself...She looked at the steps; they were empty. She looked at her canvass; it was blurred" (211). Lily doesn't have the anxieties that the Ramsays have about the future because her world isn't consumed by selfishness. She's indifferent to the change that the Ramsays fear.

So, what does it mean when Lily draws a line in her canvass? It shows that Lily is trying to get beyond the shallowness of ordinary interpretation to find something real to represent. And, to a degree, she succeeds. She finishes her painting and has her vision.

[Virgil]

Hmm that's an interesting reading Quark. I haven't gotten to that point in this reading yet, but I always felt that Lily made the connection with Mrs. Ramsey at the end with that straight line. Almost like when she was alive and made all sorts of connections. I'm not sure why it's a straight line, only that the lighthouse is a line if conflated to a abstraction. Perhaps the line completes the triangle, as I described Mrs. Ramsey in the above post.

I agree that all the characters fail to see the humanity of each other, all except Mrs. Ramsey. She can see the three dimensional nature of everyone, and can empathize with all.

One thing I disagree with what you state:

There are two forms of art discussed here: one that is superficial and another that is somehow deeper and more true.

I think all art is glorified in the novel, whether Rose's fruit basket arrangement or the Boeuf en Daube perfectly cooked, or the dinner party itself, perfectly arrangd with the seating and the candes and the right conversation. All are things wich bring people together out of their isolation.

[Quark]

Virgil, I think you're right to compare Mrs. Ramsay to the triangle, but I don't think the triangle is meant to represent connection or togetherness. The triangle isn't some nexus between lonely people. It's the loneliness itself. In the section you quote from chapter XI, Woolf narrates,

"To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed; one after another, she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless. There were all the places she had not seen; the Indian plains; she felt herself pushing aside the thick leather curtain of a church in Rome. saw it. They could not stop it, she thought, exulting. There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stability. Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience (she accomplished here something dexterous with her needles) but as a wedge of darkness."

The triangle isn't a link to the outside world or some illumination of the inner thoughts of others. The triangle is a wedge of darkness; it represents the hidden, uncommunicable thoughts of the individual. This is what Lily is trying to represent--those thoughts that Mrs. Ramsay and the rest of the characters are unable to express. I see Lily as the one trying to understand others and give expression to the actual world. This is what makes her art more substantial than the "superficial" art that I referred to earlier. The "superficial" art is--as Mrs. Ramsay puts it--the thing that "now and again rises to the surface". This art is imperfect and motivated by selfishness. For example, why is the Boeuf en Daube perfectly cooked? It might have something to do with Mrs. Ramsay's attempts to match people up. We can see during the meal that she gives potential couples better portions. And, as I argued earlier, Mrs. Ramsay's match making is only self-preservation. She wants to live on in the hearts of others, and she uses marriage and charity as the means. So is the Boeuf en Daube Mrs. Ramsay's method of reaching out and expressing her "wedge of darkness"? No, it isn't at all. It doesn't bring anyone together, and it doesn't resist the dark forces of life which threaten them. After all, she knows her charity isn't enough, and we know that the couples she set up won't be happy together. So, no, the Boeuf en Daube isn't really the same as Lily's painting, but it is an expression of some kind. It must be considered some form of art. I just think it might be different than the kind of art Lily hopes to achieve.

[Virgil]

Interestng Quark. I'll have to think about that. You don't then see Mrs. Ramsey as being the center of the novel then.

[Quark]

Mrs. Ramsay is still at the center of the book, but she is what's being represented. She isn't the one representing. Lily is the artist. She is the one seeing into the lives of others and trying to find something permanent that will resist the darker forces of life. Lily finds expression for the "wedge of darkness", and she even tries to explain the hedge for Mr. Ramsay. That doesn't mean that Mrs. Ramsay isn't the center of the novel. After all, it is her triangle.

[applepie]

I've officially given up on the novel. I still can't get into the way that Woolf writes. I've managed to get through a good portion of the story, but I find that I have no liking for the characters from what I have understood. I just can't read another page, so I'm going to bow out on this book, and instead look towards the August reading. I'm glad many of you have enjoyed the book, but I doubt I'll pick up anything written by Woolf again.

[rich14285]

I heavily doubt that not finding the true light, or correct thinking, has anything at all to do with clinical depression (the illness). I think we should definitely distinguish sadness from depression, which has much deeper roots from everything I have read about it. Welcome aboard, however!

My point was more in the sense of the light of the scripture that speaks of salvation in terms of health, healing, and deliverance from the dominion of the usurper who gained authority what with the fall of Adam. One hears of many instances of depressed people finding a new life in their spirit, by receiving a baptism of and in the holy spirit. So, in a sense, correct thinking is not unrelated to the subject at hand.

[Janine]

Hi Virgil and Quark, sorry it took me so long to get back to you. I think I have the August blahs. I can't seem to get back on track this month or with this book. I thank you both for your fine remarks. They both were quite helpful and insightful to the questions I possed. I continue to read your posts and find I am gathering more ideas/information about the novel.
Thanks again for being so helpful and addressing my questions. The discussion so far has been illuminating.

[Quark]

Janine, you brought up a lot of good questions, and I don't want to lose them all in the confusion. Let's take another one.

I keep reading that at the end James is really more like his father or starting to identify with him. I can't exactly get through to this idea and how he is like the father. Can you help me with that, to better understand it?

James does grow closer to his father, and I think because of two reasons. First, James is looking for positive affirmation from his father. In the third section, he finally gets the compliment he's looking for and it brings the two of them closer. Cam picks up the importance of this:

"There! Cam thought, addressing herself silently to James. You've got it at last. For she knew that this was what James had been wanting...He was so pleased that he was not going to let anybody share a grain of his pleasure...His father had praised him" (III, XII).

Mr. Ramsay is able to win over James by simply showing his son some respect. This certainly brings the characters closer together, but there is another connection between the two of them that makes James identify with his father. Mr. Ramsay keeps repeating a line from a poem that goes, "we perished, each alone. But I beneath a rougher sea". This recitation isn't meaningful only to Mr. Ramsay; the children themselves almost "shriek aloud" when they imagine him about to repeat the line. In this poem Mr. Ramsay is unloading all his loneliness and failure, and the children can feel this two. We've already established why Mr. Ramsay is alone and unsuccessful, but in this third section we see that James and Cam feel the same way. James looks at the lighthouse and Woolf tells us,

"So it was like that, James thought, the Lighthouse one had seen across the bay all these years; it was a stark tower on a bare rock. It satisfied him. It confirmed some obscure feeling of his about his own character...James thought, looking at the Lighthouse stood there on its rock, it's like that. He looked at his father reading fiercely with his legs curled tight. They shared this knowledge. "We are driving before a gale--we must sink," he began saying to himself, half aloud, exactly as his father said it" (III, XII).

James learns what his father has known for sometime when he reaches the Lighthouse: that life is dreary and lonely. James, like his father, is a "stark tower on a bare rock". James makes a similar poetic comparison earlier in the chapter when he thinks of Mr. Ramsay: "He looked as if he had become physically what he always was at the back of both their minds--that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things" (III, XII). James becomes more like his father here because they have both realized the same tragedy in their lives.

"holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down."
The above taken from "To The Lighthouse", cited in a discussion thereto, might serve as an example of a kind of thinking inherent in Virginia Woolf's depression, and by extension to alot of other people in depression or one might say melancholy. My point being that alot of people blame "God himself" for all the ills of this world, and to do so, I should like to suggest is simply not scriptural. The question becomes, does evil come from God? Further, if so then how can one pray for goodness from an evil God? Woolf's theology is askew. She never seems to have found the light in the darkness! She is not just talking about "darkness and desolation" that engulfs "millions of ignorant and innocent creatures", as she withholds the light as if playing God. Perhaps, she is talking about her own inability to find the true light, the light that created the light so to speak. And therefore what light she had found as a young person isn't strong enough to save her from her adult darkness.

I doubt that Woolf was trying to make a theological statement in To The Lighthouse. The book is pretty secular--almost atheistic. The only time that God or Faith is mentioned is when Mrs. Ramsay inadvertently blurts out the pious statement, "We are all in the hands of the Lord". She doesn't really believe this, though, and she concludes that religion can't save the world from those "darker forces of life" we've talked about.

I've officially given up on the novel. I still can't get into the way that Woolf writes. I've managed to get through a good portion of the story, but I find that I have no liking for the characters from what I have understood. I just can't read another page, so I'm going to bow out on this book, and instead look towards the August reading. I'm glad many of you have enjoyed the book, but I doubt I'll pick up anything written by Woolf again.

There are two long lists of names, and the people in either group can't understand the other one. At the top of one of the columns it reads: "People who like Virginia Woolf" and the other says, "People who find her prose impenetrable, her stories depressing, and am glad they never have to revisit this author". They are long lists; many people have been coerced into reading her, but the final conclusion on Woolf is always unclear. Really, I'm surprised the verdict so far has been this positive. Usually, the division is closer to half pleased and half annoyed. I, myself, really enjoy Virginia Woolf, and I think this novel is her most profound work. I can see where some people may be put off by her, so I won't challenge you're decision to drop the book. All I can say is that I like her characters. I actually find them believable. Think of some of the Victorian novels where the characters experience all kinds of cruelty in their childhood but somehow turn out to be perfect human beings in adulthood. The characters in so many other novels can be so flat and one-dimensional. Lily Briscoe and the Ramsays are great because they actually think, have flaws, and at the same time you are sympathetic towards them. Isn't that how we find people in life? Why shouldn't that be the way it is in our novels?