Critical Summary of Neel's "Photography of Antarctica"

In “The Photography of Antarctica: Virginia Woolf’s Letters of Discovery,” Alexandra Neel explores how photographic language offers the reader insight into the mind and through processes of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse.  Neel begins by showing Mr. Ramsay’s infatuation with the Antarctic voyage of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, a British explorer who died during an expedition to Antarctica.  As Mr. Ramsay relives the Captain’s voyage in his own thoughts, he begins to ponder the attainability of knowledge in a metaphorical journey to the end of the alphabet.  Neel argues that Mr. Ramsay’s determination to move from the letter Q, which signifies the level of thought he has already reached, to the letter R, a level beyond that which even his own mind has endured, shows that he believes knowledge is both linear and obtainable, and possibly finite.  This strain of thought transfers to Mr. Ramsay’s perception of imagery, which he also sees as limited and obtainable.  Symbolized by the flicker of a lizard’s eye, Woolf conveys Mr. Ramsay’s point of view through the language of still photography, but in accordance with Mr. Ramsay’s thoughts, these images are strangely concrete and specific, and portray scenes and actions on their most simplistic, fundamental level, and often consist of Mr. Ramsay simply stating what is happening before him.  In a dramatic conclusion to Mr. Ramsay’s venture into the life of Captain Scott, Neel writes that he experiences a sort of death just as the way Scott did, and instead of being the photographer of his subjects as he was previously in this segment, he instead becomes the photographed, making his failure to reach any conclusion to his internal conversation as obtainable (or unobtainable) as the letter R is to him.  Neel writes that this process of objectification is mitigated in the mind of Mrs. Ramsay, who does not depict imagery as a series of objective acts but instead as points in time of a continuous, ever-changing landscape.  In addition, this sense of photography can have a mind of its own, as Neel writes that in the “Time Passes” section, there are no human characters to relate the imagery to the reader, yet the photography simply happens upon itself, supporting the idea that photography is more closely related to the concept that has Mrs. Ramsay instead of that of Mr. Ramsay.