Mrs Ramsay's Wifes Role In Pride And Prejudice

the role of women in the novel

The female protagonists are Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe.
Mrs. Ramsay is Mr.Ramsay’s wife. She is bighearted with kindness and she is also the protector of the family. Mrs.Ramsay is the one who takes care of the guest in the family’s summer house as the hostess, as she also takes care of her eight children and the household. She follows traditional gender roles were the man is the dominant in the family yet she also believes that men's egos needs support from her. She feels that is her obligation to play this role primarily when she is around men. “Indeed, she had the whole of the other sex under her protection; for reasons she could not explain, for their chivalry and valour, for the fact that they negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finance; finally for an attitude towards herself which no woman could fail to feel or to find agreeable, something trustful, childlike, reverential; which an old woman could take from a young man without loss of

Unlike Mrs.Ramsay, Lily is not at all ladylike. She does not believe that women needs to get married and have a family, she rejects it. Lily does also reject the average norm that she have to be feminine, she rejects her femininity. But thereafter begins to mock herself for not following her gender role: “there issued from him such a groan that any other woman in the whole world would have done something, said something—all except myself, thought Lily, girding at herself bitterly, who am not a woman, but a peevish, ill-tempered,dried-up old maid, presumably.”, mocking herself for not behaving as a lady should “Lily wished; had she only pitched her easel a yard or two closer to him; a man, any man, would staunch this effusion, would stop these lamentations. A woman, she had provoked this horror; a woman, she should have known how to deal with it. It was immensely to her discredit, sexually, to stand there