1. Opening space of the novel: uses of spatiality in Jacob's Room
Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (JR) takes the form of an observation of Jacob Flanders, between childhood and young adult age, when he dies in the Great War at the age of 26. However, Jacob is but a particle in the worlds of his friends and family, and of people who exist in either loose or invisible connection to his world. As the novel is intriguing especially in its structure, the first part of this chapter will investigate the spatiality n relation to the structure of the book. The question which the first part will strive to answer is of how is spatiality of the novel tied to and expressed by the novel’s structure. Auerbach’s analysis of a section from To the Lighthouse in “Brown Stocking” offers an approach framing this part. I will also approach the problem of space typographically: JR is sectioned into a sequence of stretches of text with spaces dividing those. I will explore their position and meaning in the novel. I will treat them as space protruding through the text of JR. How this kind of sectioning constellates the space in which the novel moves will be another implication of the interaction between spatiality and the structure of the novel. Deciphering Woolf’s treatment of empty spaces in the spatial stanzas will rely on McLaurin’s interpretation, which stems from his careful analysis of Roger Fry’s influence upon Woolf’s work. Woolf’s quest for the new novel entails the use of space as a means of expression. How she opens selected features of the Victorian novel to let in space for the new ones is the question of the second part of this chapter. The approach in this part is inspired by Dusinberre’s analysis of Michel de Montaigne’s influence upon Woolf’s critical discourse and applies her findings to the text of JR. Part B scrutinizes Woolf’s treatment of dichotomies, primarily the one of linearity and non-linearity, which has the direct relation to the space of the novel in the terms of its conception. The second part is meant to accompany the structural analysis from the first part in attention to other problems of spatiality of the novel.
In order to capture the complexity of the structure of the whole of the novel – an indispensable element of its ‘space’ – let me now investigate the pattern of the first chapter in detail with attention to the sectioning. In the opening stanza, Betty Flanders is sitting on a beach, writing a letter to Captain Barfoot in Scarborough. Her three sons, John, Archer and Jacob are playing on the beach, and the mother is watching them. Probably remembering her deceased husband, Betty observes the world undulating through her tears. As she cannot see Jacob, she asks Archer to find him. There the narrator steps in, explaining how long Mrs. Flanders has been a widow, capturing her grief, and the sympathy it evokes in Mrs. Jarvis, the rector’s wife, accompanied by her meditations on the nature of marriage. Be it the tearful vision of the physical world, or the meditation on the sorrows of widowhood, the whole of the first stanza embraces a loneliness and the grief in which it is encapsulated, perceived both from within and from without Betty’s self. The focus changes many times within the first stanza, and Betty’s sadness stands apart from this profusion. The stanza manages to anchor the beginning of the novel, yet starting somewhere in the middle of the letter. This is exactly what Woolf does to the reader; she casts him in the middle of a day and tells everything with the aim at disarray.
The following (second) stanza, a new section with a new perspective of a separate entity on the beach belongs to a painter Charles Steel. As a mirroring and independent eye, Charles is painting Betty, as a part of his horizon. The perspective, previously with and within Betty, has turned on her and made her from a subject into an object. This stanza, though, is separated from the previous one with Archer’s call “Ja-cob! Ja-cob!” which reappears twice on the same page and thus gives an impression of a refrain (8). Zwerdling interprets this reappearing call for Jacob as a lament and a symbolic line in JR which is seen, as well as To the Lighthouse, as an elegy for the dead (Zwerdling 81). The lines of the refrain familiarize the flow of the text even more with poetry. This visual quality of the form of the text reminding the reader of a poem is supported by the elegiac character of the text in the meditation which is a part of the third stanza, following the second refrain. The meditation on the mood and quality of Archer’s summoning call evokes once again “an extraordinary sadness” (9). The elegiac content, the recurring phrases and refrains endow the text with a character of poetry in prose. Consequently, if Woolf’s text of JR may be considered as prose poetry, then the stretches of the text may be logically called stanzas.
After a short introspective stanza looking inside the painter’s mind and conveying a sense of dissatisfaction with his art, there is a sudden turn to little Jacob, playing on a rock. As the stanza does not specify Jacob’s position in relation to the other characters, a sense of detachedness and isolation underlies the whole of the text thus introducing the central character of the novel. The isolation attaches, at the same time, a characteristic melancholy to his figure. He is alone, being looked for, even the people Jacob accidentally runs into appear only as “the large red faces” and thus more frightening than humane (10). Similarly, the Nanny he squints at against the sun turns into a rock (11). Zwerdling points out that Jacob’s death is symbolically envisioned from the very beginning with the discovery of the skull, to which Jacob stubbornly clings in embrace (83). Accidentally, Jacob and Betty meet round the rock. This accidental reunion is a perfect instance of a coincidence, which functions as a linking of two previously detached stretches of text at one point, where space and time intersect. The sudden dovetailing effect draws attention to an issue of the ruggedness of reality, as a multifaceted phenomenon.
While observing the Flanders on the way from the beach, the sixth stanza scrutinizes the skull in detail and invents its future which will never come true. It thus spins into the future with the skull, although imaginary. Temporally, this digression transcends the frame of this episode, which finishes somewhere at the gate of the house. A similar “temporal enjambment” appears in the adjacent still-life of Mrs. Pearce’s front room. A couple of hours evade before the “bareness of Mrs. Pearce’s front room was fully displayed at ten o’clock at night when a powerful oil lamp stood on the middle of the table” (12). This stanza then continues well into the night, and this is the loop where I position the enjambment: the reader is the observer of the house, meanwhile Archer awakes and Betty lulls him (eighth stanza). These two events belong to two different stanzas, where the seventh enjambs the eighth as well as the ninth, in which Betty briefly talks to Rebecca. This pattern then doubles in the “temporal encroachment” of the tenth stanza on the preceding two. The space of the seventh and tenth stanzas frames the scene in the eighth and the ninth.
Allen McLaurin studies Woolf’s employment of empty spaces as a device which is derived from the visual arts. In a passage devoted to Woolfian spatiality “Space: hollowing out a canvas” McLaurin beholds the function of the spatial dimension in Woolf’s work in relation to freedom, which, as an interpretation stems from Roger Fry’s visual art theory of space: “the picture space and the relation of the volumes to that space, their situation within it and the vivid evocation of the circulation of air around them […] is, in fact, the consummation of their plastic freedom” (Fry qtd. in McLaurin 89). McLaurin notes that the “price of this freedom is the ‘emptiness’ of space. Space [….] can be seen as a reassuring freedom or its frightening negation” (89). Woolf preserves this ambiguity about space in an equation between space and silence. It is in her essay on Sickert, where she discovers ‘a silence at the heart of art’. Reading Woolf’s diaries, McLaurin elaborates on the importance of Woolf’s studies of Proust. Proustian ‘lingering’ means rumination, dwelling in time-space over certain important passages. This is what Woolf attains by framing (92). McLaurin labels Woolf’s method of spatial and visual framing of minute but essential episodes into silent stretches of space surrounding the miniature of childhood, which I have outlined as encapsulated in between the seventh and tenth stanzas of the first chapter (92). “Her [Woolf’s] special moments are instantaneous and spatial” (93).
The spatiality of the first chapter has a most intense and plastic effect. Shifting perspectives changing subject into object tie different points in space together, as well as coincidental intersections of trajectories, which with an impression of suddenness blend two or several detached realities / spaces / scenes together, but also emphasize the “ruggedness” of reality, its dispersion in space. Proportionally, the text spends five stanzas over an episode which stretches probably over an hour. The remaining several hours of the day and a larger portion of night are given another five stanzas. The effect of time thus stretched and spatial relations investigated in detail enforce a sense of interconnectedness which gives the first part of the introductory chapter a very strong filmic in addition to the spatial quality. Each stanza is tied to the others in spatial terms; some transcend temporally the frame of the episode and give it a multiplicity of time layers. However, there is an opposite correspondence between the spatial scope of the content and the length of the stanzas (the spatial coverage of the form), as it is in the second part of the first chapter, which is given much longer stretch of time and space but simultaneously “squeezed” into four stanzas. Out of eight pages of chapter one, five are devoted to the beach and the way home, three to the house and the stormy night.
The spaces between the stanzas serve as motion for the focus of the plot, but also, the stanzas themselves are containers of spaces, which according to McLaurin’s interpretation exercise a faculty of framing or dwelling on the “special moments” of Woolf’s texts. These “spatial stanzas” have distinctive features, and in order to uncover the shapes of these in the context of the whole novel, let me now investigate them in wider relations to one another.
As mentioned above, the spaces in between the stretches of text play their part in the way they substitute the shifts in space and focus – they are suggestive of motion within the novel. With the possibility of travelling between different places, the reader may pursue a number of events at the same time, or, witness an event in its complexity. A number of stanzas speak about places or events that happen simultaneously. Adrian Velicu interprets this phenomenon of simultaneity as strife for unity, which should summarize the spaces covered simultaneously, and thus assembled into a whole (Velicu 33 – 34). Indeed, it is questionable, whether the simultaneity of scattered actions in scattered places, such as the two visits paid at the same time by Captain Barfoot to Betty Flanders and a Mr. Dickens seeing to Mrs. Barfoot (26 – 31) is trying to encompass a unity. Is not this (Woolfian) reality rather impossible to unite in its multifaceted nature?
Chapter 8, similarly to chapter 1, is rounded off with a stanza expressing a cold winter night in London. Empty streets of London are filled with “spaces of complete immobility”, and “the land seemed to lie dead” (106). The frozen landscape of London is conserved in the stillness of this image, where, anything humane and moving is scarcer then this “nothingness” and therefore seems intrusive and oppressive as “stiffly and painfully the frozen earth was trodden under” (106). Both chapters (1 and 8) are similarly “framed” (cf. McLaurin 92), or, in the case of chapter 8, dwelt on by these ‘containers of emptiness’. The stanza of frozen fields of London isolates, intensifies and resonates with Jacob’s solitariness, a sense of coldness and a lack of human warmth, which he experiences after Florinda’s betrayal, as “a young man alone in his room” (103). The two spatial stanzas have a similar effect of “framing” (McLaurin 92) and “dwelling” (cf. McLaurin 92); however, these are not the only functions which the spatial stanzas profess. Alternatively, the empty stanzas of chapters 3 and 4 bridge changes of settings. They open up different spaces on which the chapter wants to focus. The description of empty Jacob’s room in chapter 3 marks a transition between two different stages of a student’s day in Cambridge - “the feathery white moon never let the sky grow dark” – the stanza starts with a nightfall (41). “It will be quite dark in Neville’s Court long before midnight, only the pillars opposite will always be white, and the fountains”, states how Jacob’s place will persist throughout the night (41). Jacob’s place is thus specified in the qualities which endure independently of Jacob’s presence. The place itself outlasts Jacob and is paid greater attention than Jacob himself, as “he wasn’t there. Dining in the Hall, presumably” (41). The world surrounding him is defined by him and speaks of him to its visitors notwithstanding his absence. Jacob’s room is a vehicle of his self, and from the visit first to his room, the focus remains inside other rooms, and observes what “shapes” within them as a contrast to what the daytime outside in Cambridge was like in the previous stanzas of chapter 3 (47). A similar effect is present in the emptiness of chapter 4 (Jacob and Timmy Durrant sailing at Land’s End), which is saturated with images of silent and unpopulated spaces. Chapter 4 constructs a bridge between Jacob’s childhood, his adolescent life in Scarborough and Cambridge, and his young adult years in London. The whole of the text uses the spatial quality in the scales which themselves increase from little spaces dividing stanzas, to the whole stanzas as containers of still lives and empty spaces, to the whole of chapters, as chapter 4. This follows a movement of a yacht, watches the yacht on its trajectory as it intersects with other vessels or, again, as it appears in the profusion of other perspectives and then turns to Mrs. Pascoe’s house and the universe of her life, as a simultaneous reality to that of Jacob and Timmy’s on their yacht. Similarly to the scene on the beach from the first chapter, the sail on the sea is given a great plasticity thanks to the mirroring presence of Mrs. Pascoe’s universe, and this spatial quality thus stretches across several stanzas. Woolfian literary space in JR is a pulsing and stretching phenomenon, with the faculty of framing, reverting attention, or, on the other hand, bridging multiple realities.
The portrayal of multifaceted reality spreading across a larger space and squeezed into only a short stretch of time reappears many times throughout JR. The previous detailed discussion of chapter 1 shows how the whole scene on the beach is moulded into a plastic portrait, the plasticity induced by multiple perspectives, coincidental links and coalescences in space (Jacob runs into Betty Flanders at the beginning of the sixth stanza) and time (Mrs. Pearce’s house stands there before and after the Flanders return from the beach, is autonomous in its inanimate existence, and the stanza investigating its space thus reaches into the time both preceding and surpassing the Flanders’ arrival). The interconnectedness of the multiple facets (actions within stanzas) in the first chapter brings about the remarkably plastic and spatial effect. Another kind of simultaneity is used in the two concurrent visits in chapter 2. The two visits are simultaneous in time and tied with the Barfoot couple – the Captain visiting and Mrs. Barfoot being visited. Simultaneity, though, is expressed also through space. Chapter 3 – the Cambridge chapter, spends a large amount of its own space upon expressing the atmosphere of a university town. What makes up Cambridge? Three rooms, three men, three different lives – these constitute a building, these constitute Cambridge. The narrator, dividing the stanzas spatially, gives each man an amount of space in a separate stanza. Their rooms are filled with their thoughts, and their lives. There is a sense of co-existence, and yet of indifference and a lack of interaction between the three rooms. Literally, the three stanzas/rooms/lives have everything and nothing in common. None of the three is thinking of another, yet, they are at the same time within the same space (42 – 45). Looking at Velicu’s understanding of the Woolfian reality now, this strife for unity (Velicu 33 – 34) seems rather a portrayal of scatteration of space and, consequently, of reality. I will speak of a portrayal of a scattered and multifaceted reality which assembles a whole of heterogeneous nature.
I have brought up the complexity of structure of JR as an essential element building up and built up by the novel’s spatiality. The novel is, graphically, composed of the stanzas and divided by spaces. Conventionally, as there are considerable shifts in space between the stanzas, and sometimes leaps in time as well, the spaces substitute the narrator. These spaces are wedged in between the stanzas, and stand where the traditional narrator would have to account for such a shift. They add up to the effect of multiple subjects, as will be discussed with the regard to Auerbach’s “Brown Stocking”. The stanzas themselves become, with this quality of scatteration in space, only hints at / fragments of the actual reality – cut off from the narrator, from the past and the future, and connected by coincidence with some of the surrounding reality.
The narrator takes up its role as if unwillingly, and at many points, his voice appears mingled with many others. On the very first page of the novel the narrator is heard: “Such were Betty Flanders’s letters to Captain Barfoot – many-paged, tear-stained” (7). There follows a delineation of facts: “Scarborough is seven hundred miles from Cornwall: Captain Barfoot is in Scarborough: Seabrook is dead (ibid.).” Who is speaking here? It is not specified grammatically or typographically, but from the context it is rather Betty’s internal voice. Auerbach, in “The Brown Stocking” carries out a careful analysis of Woolf’s narrator in To the Lighthouse (TTL). According to his study, there is a major attenuation of the objectively seeing narrator, guarding the reader from a point situated outside the novel. As in TTL, the objective standpoint in JR is minimized to minor utterances, and therefore, the narrator exerts a very small power as to the guidance of the reader (452).
The narrator proceeds:
Tears made all the dahlias in her garden undulate in red waves and flashed the glass house in her eyes, and spangled the kitchen with bright knives, and made Mrs Jarvis, the rector’s wife, think at church, while the hymn tune played and Mrs Flanders bent low over her little boys’ heads, that marriage is a fortress and widows stray solitary in the open fields, [….] lonely, unprotected, poor creature. Mrs Flanders had been a widow for these two years. (8)
Here the switch to another, subjective mind is within one sentence. The mediation upon Betty’s grief is opened by the narrator, but then, it is Mrs. Jarvis empathising with Mrs. Flanders at a mass: the mass and the sympathizing feelings belong to a different place – a church in Scarborough, and to a different time. The switch within one sentence is from one subject to another, revealing first a reality somehow distorted through Betty’s tears and then Mrs. Jarvis’s private feelings about Betty, her fate, and the fate of wives and widows in general. Intertwining Betty’s and Mrs. Jarvis’ voice, Woolf includes a “multiplicity of subjects” in her narrator, and thus includes a multitude of perspectives, diminishing the role of objectivity (Auerbach 453).
At times the narrator’s voice stands apart from this choir of minds. Such is the rumination on the nature of Archer’s call: “The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks – so it sounded” (9). The voice pondering Archer’s call judges and empathizes with its mood and solitary nature. There is some accordance between the uncertainty of what the voice wants to specify and who this voice actually belongs to. It partially specifies itself as “solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks” (ibid.). One could, simultaneously, assign these qualities to Woolf’s specification of this ephemeral but resonant sensation. One may also ask: Is it the painter speaking who Archer has just ran into? Or some knowing presence, evaluating, ruminating and empathizing? In order to capture something imperceptible, Woolf makes up an imperceptible entity of an imperceptible voice. Throughout the novel, Woolf’s narrator acquires a whole spectrum of voices. There is a contradictory correspondence between the content and form of the narrator’s discourse. For example, if the narrator acquires an uptight tone, the content of such a discourse will be on the nature of “uptightness”: “There is something absolute in us which despises qualification. It is this which is teased and twisted in society. People come together in a room. ‘So delighted,’ says somebody, ‘to meet you,’ and that is a lie” (154). The voice is double-edged and self-derisive. As if to justify its presence, it must always put on a new tone, but the content of its own discourse repudiates its tone. Woolf dissolves the indispensable and single-minded narrator by its changeable tone, and by its self-negating employment. At times she intentionally makes it unnecessary, pedantic and disposable: “then here is another scrap of conversation; the time about eleven in the morning; the scene a studio; and the day Sunday” (136). Parodying the narrator, Woolf does not hesitate to use its voice to invite the reader to do the job for it: “for you have committed a crime, are infected with yellow fever as likely as not, and – fill in the sketch as you like” (103). The dash gives space for the reader to fill in, Woolf’s parody on the narrator documents how easily the reader may dispose of it, which Woolf does herself by omission, opening thus the space of the novel to the readership.
This spatially multiple portrait of reality, and the space that substitutes the narrator create a discontinuous text. One of its effects enables all thinkable kinds of simultaneity. This discontinuity of the text has a logical opposition in a textual linearity, which, contrastively, requires a linearity of the temporal sequence of the plot, a unity of (objective) perspective, which is ensured by the omniscient and omnipresent narrator, and a unity of place. In the chapter on Woolf’s reading of Montaigne, Juliet Dusinberre deconstructs Woolf’s essayist discourse. Woolf’s inspiration in Montaigne is crucial to the understanding of the non-linearity of her texts. Montaigne resents the logical structure and the pursuit of an argument to conclusion as the ground of essay-writing. His writing celebrates irregularity and motion, “‘without model and without aim’”. […] ‘For my part I circulate in myself’.” Furthermore, the circular development of argument is related to orality – mouth-to-mouth, rather than printed knowledge – which Dusinberre takes from Ong (54).
This “celebration of irregularity and motion” reverberates through JR and, casts a new light on its structure. For what I have defined as “discontinuity” is an embodiment of these. I have argued that the discontinuous text is an organic part of the portrayal of a reality in its multifaceted and heterogeneous nature and of the novel’s openness. Woolfian time-space retains fluidity in both dimensions (spatial and temporal) – Woolf freezes a point in place and gallops across centuries:
Fix your eyes upon the lady’s skirt [….] It changes; drapes her ankles – the nineties; then it amplifies – the seventies; now it’s burnished red and stretched above a crinoline – the sixties; a tiny black foot wearing a white cotton stocking peeps out. Still sitting there? Yes – she’s still on the pier. The silk is now sprigged with the roses, but somehow one no longer sees so clearly. There’s no pier beneath us. The heavy chariot may swing along a turnpike road, but there’s no pier to stop at, and how great and turbulent the sea is in the seventeenth century! (20)
Parallelly to this “gallop across centuries” Woolf opens up alternative futures, or, darts forward, out of the text, with an object of symbolic value. Thus Jacob’s skull “would turn to powder, or some golfer, hitting his ball one fine day, would disperse a little dust – No, but not in lodgings, thought Mrs. Flanders” (11). This is a future alternative to “the real one” as Jacob actually takes the skull home, but this is happening parallelly to another story, which originates, perhaps, in Betty’s consciousness. Alternatively, the darting motion into the future follows the “real” one, as it is with the delineation of the life cycle of Mrs. Flanders’ letter to Mr. Floyd in chapter 2 (23). Indeed, Woolf juxtaposes the uncertain loss of the letter with Mr. Floyd’s accidental and last meeting with Jacob before Jacob’s death, which recurs in chapter 13. Motion, for Woolf, is not only spatial, but temporal too. The stratification of parallel worlds on the temporal axis is another fashion of opening her text.
Not only does Woolf disrupt the traditional linearity of the flow of the text (and the plot), she, in accordance with Montaigne’s “for my part, I circulate in myself”, endows whole stanzas, paragraphs and sentences with a cyclical quality. In the second chapter, there is a strong memory which is related in a cyclical, non-linear pattern. Jacob found an interesting insect in the wood, “the tree had fallen the night he caught it [….] And his mother had taken him for a burglar when he came home late” (25). The same incident recurs again after a short paragraph musing on the scientific description of the insect. “The tree had fallen, though it was a windless night [….] It was after twelve when he crossed the lawn and saw his mother in the bright room, playing patience, sitting up. ‘How you frightened me!’ She had cried” (ibid.). The memory is of a clash of two worlds, and of Jacob’s detachedness from the world of his mother’s. Although the reader cannot be perfectly sure of the point of view throughout this stanza, most of it belongs to Jacob. Woolf imprints the circles of his mind going round and round the memory into the structure of the paragraph. This image of a fallen tree is “the starting point” of the cyclical memory. As a cycle, though, cannot have a starting point, there is an infinitude conserved within this cycle: the memory is composed of both a mother scared and a tree that fell, they are infinitely tied to one another.
A circular motion concealed within one sentence, interestingly, “rounds off” the tenth stanza of the first chapter (cf. Hilský 30): “The child’s bucket was half-full of rainwater; and the opal-shelled crab slowly circled round the bottom, trying with its weakly legs to climb the steep side; trying again and falling back, and trying again and again” (14). The sentence encircles a stanza which itself makes a frame (or a circle) round a memory of childhood, as mentioned above. Even McLaurin’s idea of framing in fact contains an idea of cyclicity. The crab circling at the end of the first chapter, upon which McLaurin models his idea, presents a link to Woolf’s “circulating” structure. “Circulating,” because JR moves in cycles of stillness and flux. I will discuss this pattern of circulation in the conclusion to this chapter.
The opposition of the linear and the circular is accompanied by a whole set of other oppositions, constructed already in the times of Montaigne. Dusinberre makes clear that the opposition of male and female is vital to the identity of both notions which are constructed in this opposition to one another. Although Montaigne allows his identity a feature of traditionalism, as mentioned above, he frequently sees himself on the other side of the scale (Dusinberre 55-56).
Montaigne’s own programme of oppositions contrasts, among others, “rules and irregularity” and “society and solitude” (ibid.). His aim, though, is destructive of endorsement of these oppositions: he intends to collapse and conflate the notions defined as distinct, “he unsettles the philosophical roots of all the mental structures which most Humanists [….] take for granted in this period” (59). Montaigne admits the “fluidity and cultural relativity of his own gender construction” (61). Woolf had the capacity to perceive the double-edged nature of the notion of maleness and its impact in her own culture. “Montaigne….speaks from the heart of a space he has made for himself” (63). Montaigne’s self, and this is something that Dusinberre traces in Woolf’s awareness of Montaigne, “can only speak from a place of dissolution of those divisions” (63).
Playing on and coalescing dualities, Woolf opens up a new space in JR. As discussed, the text of JR presents a play on linearity vs. circularity or discontinuity of space and time. Simultaneity, which may be seen as the outcome of this play, has itself a whole gamut of forms. Woolf juxtaposes two worlds when she conjures up a mystical figure amid a London street:
Long past sunset an old blind woman sat on a campstool with her back to the stone wall of the Union of London and Smith’s Bank, clasping a brown mongrel tight in her arms and singing out loud, not for coppers, no, from the depths of her gay wild heart – her sinful heart – for the child who fetches her is the fruit of sin, and should have been in bed, curtained, asleep, instead of hearing in the lamplight her mother’s wild song, where she sits against the Bank, singing not for coppers, with her dog against her breast.
Home they went. The grey church spires received them; the hoary city, old, sinful, and majestic. (71 – 72)
Woolf plays with the specificity of the exact point in space (“[the] woman sat on a campstool with her back to the stone wall of the Union of London and Smith’s Bank”) which is used as the only solid mark of the text. The passage, devoted to the woman, does not specify her origin, name or appearance. Instead, it dwells with an emphasis on pleasure the song gives the singer, and the fullness of that feeling “singing out loud […] from the depths of her sinful heart – for the child who fetches her is the fruit of sin [….] The grey church spires received them; the hoary city, old, sinful and majestic”. The old, grey, sinful mother merges with the old, hoary and sinful city. Her child is the child of the city too. Woolf makes the beggar woman an impersonation of the “wild and sinful” face of London. The repetition of phrases (“singing not for coppers”) enforces the rhythmical quality of the paragraph. Starting and ending with the same message of “an old blind woman […] clasping a brown mongrel […] singing out loud”, the paragraph is an epitome of Woolf’s employment of circularity. Dusinberre connects, with a reference to Ong, circularity of a message to orality. Thus this is a stretch of a text which is sung over and over again. Woolf herself recycles this image in Mrs. Dalloway, and indeed, this woman is Woolf’s own mythical figure. The biographic - and therefore real – origin of the image translates into her text with a mystical dimension. The passage of a blind singing woman is almost identical with Woolf’s diary entry. What has been omitted, though, conveys the inquiry into an unknowable world of this woman: “How many Junes has she sat there, what scenes she can go through, I can’t imagine. O damn it all, I say, why can’t I know all that too?” (qtd. in Bell 74) The truth of this woman is unknowable, and this is also the only knowable reality about her. This woman is not only a personification of the city, and of its “feminine” part, she is also a merge of the real and the mystical, the truthfulness and disingenuousness, of the palpable and the irrecognizable / imperceptible. This is suggestive of what Dusinberre recognizes as Woolf’s ‘Que-sçais je?’ which, with a reference to Montaigne questions the duality of truth and falsehood, as truth belongs “to a world susceptible to control, causality, direction and design, but that world is a man-made fiction” (Dusinberre 61).
It would run against the grain of the concept of Woolf’s openness to try to disembowel the body of JR of individuated dualities. Inherent as they are to the novel, they present a tissue woven into the whole of it and thus their individuated extrication would not be any good. In chapter 9, Woolf literally saturates the text with such suggestive oppositions:
The rain poured down. The British Museum stood in one solid immense mound, very pale, very sleek in the rain […] The vast mind was sheeted with stone; and each compartment in the depths of it was safe and dry [….]
Stone lies solid over the British Museum, as bone lies cool over the visions and heat of brain. Only here the brain is Plato’s brain and Shakespeare’s; the brain has made pots and statues, […] and crossed the river of death this way and that incessantly [….] Meanwhile, Plato continues his dialogue; in spite of the rain; […] in spite of the woman in the mews behind Great Ormond Street who has come home drunk and cries all night long, ‘Let me in! Let me in!’
In the street below Jacob’s room voices were raised.
But he read on. For after all Plato continues imperturbably [….] Jacob, who was reading the Phaedrus, heard people vociferating round the lamp-post, and the woman battering at the door and crying, ‘Let me in!’ as if [….] a fly, falling from the ceiling, had lain on its back, too weak to turn over. (116-117)
There is “an enormous mind” of “Shakespeare” and “Plato”, “each compartment” of it “safe and dry”. This mind is strictly male, compartmentalized, sober, and, enclosed with “solid stone”. This mind “crossing the river of death incessantly” is eternal and ever-persistent. The perfection of a male, sober and rectangular solidity is attacked by a “woman”, who is outside, wet with the rain, “drunk”, and demands to be “let in”, or included, but her voice reminds Jacob (persistent in reading Plato) of something as ridiculous and petty and ephemeral as a “fly falling from a ceiling on its back”. There is a badly-behaved, petty-minded and small-brained woman wet with rain, vociferating outside a solid mould enclosed and enclosing eternal knowledge in its dry, safe and neatly organized compartments. In the light of Woolf’s previous effort to merge oppositions, this cannot be but a joke (compare Lee 1-15). Woolf does revert the solemn solitude of Jacob’s mind in the very same chapter on his way home from the pub into drunken gayness.
Intentionally, there is no coherent effort at making young Flanders’s life story the focus of the novel, which, as with beads on a string, looks into afternoons, evenings, days or nights scattered across Jacob’s life, or, existing within his short life span. Although, as the title indicates, Jacob is the central character of the novel, the story of his life is embedded in sketches of moments of other lives, other places and other worlds. The text of the novel does not constitute a linear flow, but is a sequence of stanzas. The spatial constellation of these stanzas reflects Woolf’s attempt at a portrayal of a scattered and multifaceted reality which assembles a whole of heterogeneous nature. This heterogeneity will in To the Lighthouse change into a careful composition. JR, however, is characteristic by its intentional scatteration in space, which is reflected in its non-linear structure.
The space of Jacob’s Room, as well as its structure is circulating in cycles of stillness and flux. Stillness and flux may be seen as constituents of another opposition inherent to the novel. As shown in the analyses of oppositions in JR, in the light of Dusinberre’s explication of Montaigne’s influence on Woolf, the writer’s intention has turned out to be the conflation of the absoluteness of these divisions, and she does so in a dialectics of these oppositions (Dusinberre 59). These oppositions alternate, merge and continue to inhabit one another. JR now populates, now empties of any sign of life. Emptiness alternates the whirl of life, solitude exchanges society, and death follows life. Jacob, as a protagonist, does not fill Jacob’s Room entirely, is both absent and present in his room. As the space of Jacob’s Room exists in clusters which are liberated by the nothingness, emptiness and immobility of the spatial stanzas, Woolf repeats this imperceptible cycle of irregularity endlessly.
2. Plunging in the ‘city-ocean’: the space of Woolfian London in Mrs Dalloway
“There was an emptiness about the heart of life” thinks Clarissa Dalloway, the heroine of Virginia Woolf’s fourth novel “that marked her own sense of artistic independence and maturity” (Showalter xi). This “emptiness at the heart of life” in Mrs. Dalloway (33) builds up into a theme of solitude, one of the core themes of the novel (Hawthorn , Zwerdling 120 - 141). Woolf embeds the development of these themes in London landscape. Casey’s statement enlightens my intention in writing this chapter on MD: “Whatever is true for space and time, this much is true for place: we are immersed in it and could not do without it. To be at all – to exist in any way – is to be somewhere, and to be somewhere is to be in some kind of place [….] Nothing we do is unplaced” (ix). Of course, solitude, anonymity and isolation are phenomena spatially determined. I want to show how Woolf uses spaces and places in MD and how she infuses these themes within the spatial dimension. I will also pay some attention to the structural elements of MD in order to account for their influence and interconnectedness with the space of London as the sole setting of the novel.
I will first attempt to investigate possible links between the spatial situation of the self and the sense of the self and the correspondence between the two, as it is depicted in the text. I will rely on Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. His phenomenological study of intimate spaces and their interaction with the universe provides a substantial theory of perception of space, stripping it of geometrical dichotomies. Another substantial interest of this chapter will be to try to answer the question of how Woolf’s London is created, and consequently, how her space is created. The theory which upholds this question is Stanzel’s narratological explication of the “schematization of literary space” from Teorie vyprávění [The Theory of Narration]. To look into the nature of Woolf’s space, this chapter will then examine the dichotomies of space (inside / outside, intimate / universal) and try to discover how Woolf discloses these. I will employ Wilson’s gendered perspective on the urban space from The Sphinx in the City to attempt to provide an insight into the masculine / feminine dichotomy of the city and serve as a platform for my unveiling of Woolf’s inscription and embodiment of these principles in the space of the city.
Clarissa Dalloway goes to buy flowers to Bond Street. As she walks through the streets and parks of London, she experiences an intense immersion inside her self and in the feelings of her self:
She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or they were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out at sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day [….] to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.
[….] Did it matter, then, she asked herself […], did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely [….] or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. (8-10)
Clarissa has a “sense” “of being out, out, far out at sea and alone”. Clarissa feels at sea, in the deepest waters as a lonely sailor or a swimmer, the city supplying the metaphor of ocean with its “ebb and flow”. “We all know that the big city is a clamorous sea [….] one hears the ceaseless murmur of flood and tide” says Gaston Bachelard (28). Bachelard derives the metaphor of a city as an ocean from its “roar” and “hum” (28). Identically, Clarissa describes what pulls her in the atmosphere of the city, as something “absolutely absorbing” and it is “all this; the cabs passing”. It is the hustle and the bustle of the city, its “bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans” (4), which evokes the changeableness and the sonority of the ocean. The metaphor is reinforced from the very beginning of the novel: “What a plunge!” (3) Clarissa thinks as she enters the fresh morning and acquires the freshness herself as if she just literally plunged into water. It is the massive and overwhelming sense of the lively “city-ocean” of freshness and liveliness (Bachelard 29) which devours and absorbs Clarissa; her mind and her body become constituted of these masses of water - in other words she experiences a state of coalescence with the space she has become a part of. However; this ocean, simultaneously with its gulp, paradoxically separates her from others with its masses of water, and gives her self a space for intense introspection (the state of anonymity), which in turn brings about the intense sense of solitude of her self.
What happens in Clarissa’s mind as it is enjoying its solitude? Her introspective reflection has a contradictory character. Clarissa’s reluctance to label anybody or, consequently herself with anything (“She wouldn’t say of any one in the world now that they were this or they were that” [8,9]) is in tension with her sense of her “being part, [….] of trees at home; of the house there [….]; part of people she had never met;” (9). Similarly, her sense of being “outside, looking on” (9) contrasts with her vision of how “she sliced like a knife through everything” (8). The image of a knife slicing and separating, ambiguously, evokes both a capacity to permeate (to a centre) and separate (cause to be separated from a whole, alienated), and is therefore double-edged in this ambiguity, constituting a capacity to become an essence, a centre, and to delineate borders, to separate / alienate such essences. These contrasting images of a lack of identification (and therefore anonymity and alienation) and identification with the surrounding environment, and of indifference to and control of surrounding space have an oscillating character. Bachelard invents a spiral to depict and expound this oscillation in the identification of the centre of the self:
But what a spiral man’s being represents! And what a number of invertible dynamisms there are in this spiral! One no longer knows right away whether one is running toward the centre or escaping [….]
Being [….] does not stand out, it is not bordered by nothingness: one is never sure of finding it, or of finding it solid, when one approaches a centre of being. And if we want to determine man’s being, we are never sure of being closer to ourselves if we “withdraw” into ourselves, if we move toward the centre of the spiral; for often it is in the heart of being that being is errancy. Sometimes, it is in being outside itself that being tests consistencies. Sometimes, too, it is closed in, as it were, on the outside. (Bachelard 214-215)
Let me identify Bachelard’s “being” with Clarissa’s (Woolf’s) sense of self. Thus Clarissa’s fluctuating sense of self (and notice how many times the gerund “being” reappears in the excerpt from MD) becomes more understandable in the light of this phenomenological play with placing “being” on a spiral. Where the spiral is “running toward its centre” (Bachelard 214), Clarissa sinks inside her self, as she is walking, ruminating on intimate and delicate questions, of which she would probably never let anybody know (“Did it matter, then, she asked herself […], did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely [….] or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?” [9]). The same spiral “is escaping” (Bachelard 214), when Clarissa undergoes feelings of “being out, out far out to sea” (9) and thus is finding a part of her self outside herself.
Woolf depicts Clarissa’s sense of self as undefined and diffused, “being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself” (10), and thus “in being outside itself […] being [Clarissa’s sense of self] tests consistencies” (Bachelard 214). Clarissa, immersed in her self undergoes this intense scrutiny of her identity. The images expressing such scrutiny are of the outside world. As she is “spread ever so far” (10), “like a mist” (10) she has a trait of indefiniteness, of some imperceptibility, which returns to this fluctuation. Even Bachelard’s employment of “sometimes” implies this fluctuation of the sense of being, which I identify with Clarissa’s perception of herself either outside, as a part of other things, images or people, or peering inside her self. The sense of self and the spatial situation of the self (existing only as an image within the self, or embodied in the surrounding of the subject) coexist in an immediate contact with the close influence of the situation / placement of the self on its sense / definition. It is the situation of the self, the “where”, that connects the sense of self and / or Bachelard’s spiralling being to the topic of this thesis.
Let me now return to the theme of the city in the novel. The question is what importance the urban space has in the novel. How is the London of MD constructed? Stanzel’s Teorie vyprávění [The Theory of Narration] holds that the narrational portrayal of space is focused on a selection of the things portrayed. The space that is narrated, is according to Roman Ingarden “a schematized formation” , which is only partially specified, and the remaining parts are undefined (145-146). Literary portrayal of space may be understood as a continuum of such a reduction of data (145-146). Selection or reduction of the particularities causes a semiotic promotion of these (149). Furthermore, Stanzel claims that with the personalized narrator, the portrayal of space is strictly perspectivistic through the reflector’s consciousness (148). To penetrate into the space of Woolfian London, it will be best to continue to follow Clarissa on her walk.
From the beginning of the novel, Clarissa is the reflector and her way through London takes the form of the schematized space. At “Mulberry’s the florists” (13), which was the aim of her walk, Clarissa is interrupted while choosing from the profusion of flowers by a “shot in the street” (13). This sudden interrupting sound attracts attention of everybody in Bond Street and starts off a section which, with the focus on the car and the airplane respectively glides through the space of London and the minds of the people who populate its space. In Stanzel’s terms this section is told through a number of reflectors, whose observations alternate with the personalized narrator and who focus on the car and later on the plane. In fact, the section is separated and thus individuated from the body of the text by spaces, and is one of the ten sections of the whole body of MD. This gives the scene, which maps the London of MD, an individual standing.
The car becomes the fulcrum of all interest and scrutiny of the life in Bond Street. “Everything had come to a standstill. The throb of the motor engines sounded like a pulse irregularly drumming through an entire body” (15 – 16 emphasis added). The intensity of attention concentrated in the gaze (“a standstill” [15]) of everyone attracted to the car, grows into one body, exemplified in “an entire body” in the text. Woolf reminds the reader that it is the middle of June and that “the sun became extraordinarily hot because the motor car had stopped outside Mulberry’s shop window; old ladies on the tops of omnibuses spread their black parasols; here a green, here a red parasol opened with a little pop” (16). The street is the summer street, the colours of the parasols symbolize the beauty of the street, and what Woolf selects of the surrounding space as exponents of such space. It is unclear to whose perception these parasols constitute the space of the “standstill” situation in Bond Street. Woolf selects the points “sticking out” enough to distract the attention of “an entire body” of the crowd closely watching the car. This uncertainty about to whose voice the passage belongs to is a sign of the personalized narrator.
In the introductory part of Clarissa’s walk, as I have said, it is she who is the major reflector of the scene. Bond Street, as Mrs. Dalloway is walking through it, constitutes of “its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter, one roll of tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for fifty years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock. ‘That is all,’ she said, looking at the fishmonger’s” (11). However much Clarissa’s concluding “that is all” refers to the paragraph describing her mixed feelings about “being Mrs. Richard Dalloway” (11), it also sums up all the incentives impressive enough to protrude through Clarissa’s immersion in her self. Important to say, that all these particularities appeal specifically to her, and constitute Clarissa’s London, an individual’s perception of (its) space. I will further refer to this phenomenon of Woolf’s mixing images of the intimate thoughts and the surrounding universe in the analysis of Peter Walsh’s dream.
If the digression to the colours of parasols disperses the previously concentrated focus, it is immediately centred with all attention back to it. “Every one looked at the motor car” (16). Sentences cut short thicken the tension of the hot summer moment and the focus always returns to the car – it is mentioned three times in the paragraph. Paradoxically, the focused car is estranged from the space which concentrates on it: “nobody knew whose face has been seen. Was it the Prince of Wales’s, the Queen’s, the Prime Minister’s?” (15) Everybody is trying to guess. “Nobody knew” (15). All attention is concentrated into an unknowable point.
“Gliding across Piccadilly, the car turned down St. James’s Street” (19), the car is changing its place, but the reaction, the “agitation” (19) it leaves in every one remains to reverberate. “Tall men [….] standing in the bow window of White’s [….] perceived instinctively that greatness was passing,” they approve as well as the “white busts and [….] syphons of soda water seemed to approve” (20). Also “Moll Pratt with her flowers on the pavement wished the dear boy well (it was the Prince of Wales for certain)” (20). Woolf literally pours many reflectors into one flow – a multiplicity of reaction, which, as it is conditioned and raised by the car, spatially covers the trajectory of the car. While the car is moving, the reaction always renews itself in a new reflector. This sameness of reaction, fragmented in a multiplicity (a number of reflectors), is reminiscent of Clarissa’s feeling that she “would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or they were that” (8) in this lack of identification or distinction of one subject / reflector from another. This flow, pouring from one mind into another, then switches the focus from the car to the aeroplane. Woolf empowers the spatial technique with a lengthened perspective, which gives her the possibility to capture a vaster space disclosed under the longer trajectory of the plane.
In my attempt to reconstruct the space of Woolfian London, I have followed the car in order to grasp the concurrent flow that the text of MD merges the minds it creates into. I have pointed out that the sense of “sameness fragmented into multiplicity” is reminiscent of Clarissa’s reluctance to identify her self or others’ selves with anything particular. It is characteristic of the space of London, a proponent of an urban landscape, to bring up a question of the fragmentation of sameness of a human subject in an open space. Hawthorn recognizes the problem of alienation in this issue: “the city is a space where most people are, and yet where least human contact seems to take place” (66). Alienation belongs to the city, “human relationships of the city dweller are such as […] stress his own separation from them” (66). As witnessed, Clarissa walking feels as lonely and separated from others as a lonely sailor at sea. The sense of disconnectedness is what Hawthorn calls “the atomism of the city” (65). This phenomenon was “aesthetically experienced by Virginia Woolf as a problem of perception which raised problems of identity” (65). The sense of self in MD is spatially conditioned.
In retrospect, there are traceable three stages in which alienation is observed. The first stage is Clarissa’s immersion in her self and the spiralling sense of her self in space. Woolf explores the feelings of an individual. The second cycle is the fragmentation of the sameness of feelings of the subjects, the particles of the crowd watching the car united by its trajectory. The third cycle follows another piece of guess work of individuals – everyone trying to decipher what the plane is writing in the sky – which is similar to the mystery of a noble person in the car in the second cycle. They are all after the same, yet they all try to guess the riddle separately. As pointed out above, Woolf only lengthens the perspective in order to motion through space and to include different scales of space in her novel. This she does from the person to the crowd to the city. This elongation of perspective is reminiscent of Woolf’s use of spaces and spatial stanzas in JR, where the space “stretches” from little spaces dividing stanzas, to whole spaces contained in the “spatial stanzas” (a room, a street, a cliff and the view from this cliff). Accordingly, the employment of lengthening perspective “expands” the space of MD.
The previous discussion of space in JR disclosed a theme of opening the space or of letting in space by the means of disruption and merging oppositions. I have shown Woolf’s attention to the opposition of linearity and discontinuity / cyclicity, disingenuousness and truth, and discussed how Woolf ridicules the clear-cut distinction between male and female. Each of these oppositions has been discussed in relation to its spatiality. Woolf investigates another set of oppositions, even more central to the focus of this thesis: inside / outside and intimacy / the universe.
The problem of atomism and alienation evokes an image of imperviousness from the outside. This dual concept of something enclosed to the outside, open space, is criticised by Bachelard. Trying to dismiss the geometrical oppositions ruling our perceptions of space, Bachelard quotes Jean Hyppolite: “You feel the full significance of this myth of outside and inside in alienation, which is founded on these terms. Beyond what is expressed in their formal opposition lie alienation and hostility between the two” (qtd. in Bachelard 212). The primary characteristics of Bachelard’s phenomenology of space are the refusal of geometrical terms. Bachelard documents the possibility of many kinds of perceptions of space, loosening the oppositions of inside / outside, intimacy / universe, on excerpts from French poetry (Spyridaki, Cazelle etc.). Bachelard shows through an example from George Spyridaki that an image of a house – a container of intimacy and a recluse for daydreaming – is perceived and portrayed as translucent and breathing: “I let the walls of my house blossom out in their own space, which is infinitely extensible” (51). As Bachelard explains, this is an image of a house, which is open and so connected with the universe. The poet inhabits the universe. “Or, to put it differently, the universe comes to inhabit the house.” (51). The division between inside and outside is thus abolished.
Woolf merges this dualities of inside / outside and intimacy / universe in mixing images of these. Thus insights into the inner self and intimacy of her characters pop up among images of the outside / universe. This kind of disruption of dichotomies is characteristic of the whole of the novel (even Clarissa’s version of Bond Street, where “salmon on an iceblock” occurs next to her rumination on the nature of her identity is a similar instance of such mixing). An apposite instance is Peter Walsh’s nap in Regent’s Park, or the way he attaches images of the city to his unexpressed tension in the relationship to Clarissa. Bachelard employs an excerpt from Spyridaki, to show that the universe may enter the sphere of intimacy, in daydreaming. When Peter Walsh is dreaming in the open space, Woolf inserts Peter’s dream – a dreamy articulation of Peter’s intimacy – into the universe (the outside, London). She does the same as Spyridaki in negation. Blackstone traces in this Woolfian mixture of images of inside and outside a technique of poetry. “The outside world [….] is for Virginia Woolf a source of symbolism,” which Blackstone calls the “objective correlative; the material object or event which while keeping its materiality corresponds to and adequately expresses thoughts and emotions” (1-2). Similarly, Bachelard bases the concept disrupting the dichotomies in question on poetry.
Peter’s dream comes suddenly. “A great brush swept smooth across his mind, sweeping across it moving branches, [….] and humming traffic, rising and falling traffic. Down, down he sank into the plumes and feathers of sleep” (61-62). The surrounding traffic “rising and falling” is once more reminiscent of ocean, and so it lulls Peter to sleep. Woolf blends images and sounds coming from the outside with the upcoming sleep – the “moving branches” recur throughout the dream, and are an image of the surrounding reality which soaks into the dream and chains Peter’s intimate sphere to the external. At the same time, Peter’s dream presides over the situation: “Nothing exists outside us except a state of mind, he [Peter] thinks” (62). Although his dream might be created of images of the outside world, the world is only the state of mind to him at the moment. Considering the space within the novel that Woolf endows this passage with – out of the ten stretches, his dream constitutes a separate one, as the stretch with the car and airplane scene – this interlude is a transformation of the outside world into Peter’s dream. The dream is a minute but all-embracing universe, an alternative to the one which is banished from the dream. “Nothing exists outside us except a state of mind” is a miniature of this alternative role belonging to the dream.
Woolf lets Peter “sink down” in the depths of the dream. Penetrating deeper into Peter’s subconscious, the text follows him – now “the solitary traveller” (62) – from the outside space of “the forest ride” (63), out of the wood, to “the village street” and “indoors, among ordinary things, the cupboard, the window-sill with its geraniums” (63). This journey, with a tint of heroic fame (“the evening seems ominous; the figures still” [63]), proceeds from a forest to a cupboard with a jar of marmalade (64). Woolf diminishes the space and intensifies its intimacy correlatively with the elongating depth the reader reaches, sinking inside Peter. Inside, there is some most intimate, but unfulfilled, wish of Peter’s spirit: a longing for an embrace, a longing for a heart-warming home. The “homely scene” is a materialization of Peter’s longing for “charity, comprehension, absolution” (62, 63), which is, together with the branches dissolving in the sunlight, a leitmotiv of the dream. Disclosing Peter’s intimate wish, while dreaming on a seat in the park, Woolf juxtaposes the intimate and the universe in this scene.
Peter wakes up with a startling phrase, which on a closer scrutiny is brought on by the meaning of the dream: “‘The death of the soul’ [….]. The words attached themselves to some scene, to some room, to some past he had been dreaming of” (64). Previously, Woolf has built Peter’s wish to deaden his old and unfulfilled feelings for Clarissa into a theme, which is shaped into her burial. When passing by St. Margaret’s church, Peter associates its strikes with Clarissa’s voice, and the sound of the strikes becomes a metonymy of Clarissa’s figure: “It is half past eleven, she [Clarissa] says, and the sound of St. Margaret’s glides into the recesses of the heart and buries itself in ring after ring of sound, like something alive which wants to confide itself, [….] – like Clarissa herself, thought Peter Walsh” (54). But this attachment of sound to the image of Clarissa is rather short-lived: “The sudden loudness of the final stroke tolled for death that surprised in the midst of life, Clarissa falling where she stood, in her drawing-room” (54). Even though Peter cries out to disavow such an image of definiteness, he accompanies this refusal of her death by a mere worry about his own age: “She is not dead! I am not old” (54-55). Her burial is a symbolic attempt to overcome once more the loss of her love and failure to consummate his relationship to the young Clarissa Parry. Consequently, “the death of the soul” (64, 65), as a phrase labelling the moment of Miss Parry’s prudish and cold reaction to an unequal marriage in their neighbourhood (64, 65), opens up an insurmountable chasm which divides and will divide Peter from Clarissa. The phrase springs up in Peter’s mind as he awakes; it cuts the dream off, as the chasm between him and Clarissa cuts him off the fulfilment of the desire which the dream is pregnant with: “charity, comprehension, absolution” (62, 63).
Hawthorn explains this chasm in terms of “the privacy of the soul” (11) which must not be forced or ruined. Peter’s will to force upon the privacy of Clarissa’s self, is, according to Hawthorn, the reason of Clarissa’s breaking up with Peter (48). The need for solitude, after all, is argued for by Virginia Woolf herself: “[The novelist] must expose himself to life […] But at a certain moment he must leave the company and withdraw, alone.” Hawthorn positions the need for a recluse for one’s self in the very heart of the Woolfian definition of the relationship: the relationship hermetically enclosed and denying the separateness of partners is a destructive one (48-54). The relationship between Clarissa and Richard Dalloway preserves such separateness and therefore allows for solitude at the centre of their marriage (48-54).
Apart from “mixing images” of inside and outside to abolish the dichotomy of the same constituents, Woolf lets the feelings of her characters shape the spaces they enter or inhabit. Hodrová holds that the “room is, as a matter of a fact, an extended body of its inhabitant” (217). After Clarissa learns that her husband is lunching alone, and that she is not invited to lunch out with him, she suddenly feels forsaken and solitary. As if to confirm her feelings, which before this message were uplifted and refreshed by her walk, Clarissa recedes. “Like a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower, she went, upstairs, paused at the window [….] There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room [….] The sheets were clean, tight stretched in a broad white band from side to side. Narrower and narrower would her bed be” (33-34). Clarissa’s shrinking bed does not reflect only her immediate feelings of abandonment. Clarissa and Richard have separate bedrooms. “And really she preferred to read of the retreat of Moscow. He knew it” (34). Clarissa’s shrinking bed is a symbol of her sexual coldness. The attic room is her recluse. As I have pointed out with reference to Hawthorn, the central value of the Dalloway’s marriage is the separateness, the preserved solitude of the self. Accordingly, when Clarissa identifies the empty attic room with the “heart of life”, it is that empty space that she needs free for her self. As remarked, McLaurin interprets Woolf’s need for empty spaces in terms of their liberating impact (89-93). The solitude of the self and its liberation overlap.
Regarding dichotomies of space, Wilson inscribes the masculine / feminine dichotomy into the space of the city. Wilson beholds masculine principles in the “triumphal scale, its towers and vistas and arid industrial regions” (7). Feminine principles, on the other hand, range from the “enclosing embrace and indeterminacy” to “labyrinthine uncentredness” (7). Wilson argues that “the city, a place of growing threat and paranoia to men, might be a place of liberation for women. The city offers women freedom” (7). Wilson focuses on the “urban crowd” and assigns it “female characteristics”. Inspired by Le Bon, Wilson uses his metaphor of the Sphinx to characterize the urban mob: “At the heart of the urban labyrinth lurked not the Minotaur, a bull-like monster, but the female Sphinx, the ‘strangling one’, who was so called, because she strangled all those who could not answer her riddle: female sexuality, womanhood out of control, lost nature, loss of identity.” Wilson argues that the city is a liberating space for women. At the same time, there is a dangerous side to the city. Wilson places the danger in prostitution: “it almost seems as though to be a woman – an individual, not part of a family or kin group – in the city, is to become a prostitute – a public woman” (8).
Woolf creates a figure which, as indicated in the previous chapter, reoccurs in the space of her London. The blind, singing beggar woman from JR is a personification of the “feminine” part of the city, a merge of the real and the mystical, the truthfulness and disingenuousness, of the palpable and the irrecognizable / imperceptible. Woolf reworks this revelation of a woman in MD. Where she only alluded to singing in JR, Woolf bases the passage on her song. The description of the song, “bubbling up without direction, vigour, beginning or end, running weakly and shrilly and with an absence of all human meaning” (88), is, in fact, a description of the figure from whom the song is emanating. She is not a human being, but the essence of it. “[….] like a rusty pump, like a wind-beaten tree” (88), she is grown into the Earth, with its water source and its roots, connected so to the essence of being and singing of it. Her song has lasted “Through all ages”, like her, a “million years” (89). Now her burial has approached, and when she passes on “the pageant of the universe would be over” (89). The singer acquires an archetypal feature, with this prophetical message of death. Woolf puts the sex of the “voice of an ancient spring” (88) in dispute. The “ancient spring spouting from the earth” is not sexually categorized, and Woolf assigns this archetypal human essence an androgynous nature. However, she inserts the voice in the throat of a “battered woman – for she wore a skirt” (89). Its incarnation – the figure personifying this bearer of something essential, ancient and therefore archetypal – is feminine.
Woolf inserts the androgynous message from the depths of the Earth into the mouth of a woman. Her mouth is “a mere hole in the earth” and her song is “fertilizing” water (89). She is eternal, as she “would still be there in ten million years” (90). She might seem vulnerable and pitiable, yet her strength dwells in her fertilizing song, which outlasts the “passing generations [….] bustling middle-class people – vanished, like leaves, to be trodden under, to be soaked and steeped and made mould of by that eternal spring”(90). The singing woman is an element of water or earth; she is the elemental part of the city. Incarnated in the woman’s body, she is the female principle of the city. Simultaneously, as she is first beheld by Peter Walsh and then by Lucrezia Warren Smith, Woolf does not conceal their stigmatization of such public exposure of a woman: they call her “the poor creature” and a “poor old wretch” (90). Lucrezia even considers what would happen if “one’s father, or somebody who had known one in better days had happened to pass, and saw one standing there in the gutter?” (90). In the passage from JR Woolf based this revelation on, Woolf rounds the passage off: “The city loves her prostitutes” (JR 72). However dissimilar these passages might be, they both dwell on a description of a publicly exposed, unsightly and old woman. The passage in JR calls her a prostitute of the city. The woman in JR becomes a prostitute of the city by the means of her public exposure. There is a similar extent of exposure to the passage in MD. They are both deeply emotional, mystical, pertaining to an essence, an archetype of the Mother Earth, an archetype of a woman. This emotional element, however indispensable it might be to the archetypal Mother Earth, is simultaneously a feature of a prostitute. Woolf recognizes this “stigma of a prostitute”, as a merge of womanhood and the city. The blind beggar singer from MD is the right embodiment of Wilson’s “womanhood out of control” (7).
Peter Walsh, a representative of the spiky masculine principle in the city (he is always clutching his knife the shape of which is reminiscent of Wilson’s “vistas and towers”) is seduced by the city’s charm. He engages in a “labyrinthine” pursuit of a woman “who, as she passed Gordon’s statue, seemed, Peter Walsh thought (susceptible as he was), to shed veil after veil, until she became the very woman he had always had in mind” ( MD 57). Peter, as she is “shedding veil after veil”, is ‘unwrapping’ her, perceives her as a gift, which emerges from the body of the city. I say the “labyrinthine” pursuit, because it is, again, the “indeterminacy”, the coincidence, or, chaos of the city which offers Peter such uplift. The city swallows Peter, and he becomes “a buccaneer” (58) in the vain pursuit of this gift. Woolf envisions a picture of the masculine (Peter, his knife, and his pursuit) and feminine principles (the embrace of the city, the indeterminate trajectory of his walk, the elusive woman) of the city in combat.
I have shown on Clarissa Dalloway walking to Bond Street as representation of a state of “plunge” into the “city-ocean” as well as into her self. In the light of Wilson’s definition of “feminine principles”, this is an equivalent of the “enclosing embrace” and “liberation” the city offers. “Indeterminacy” is the integral and paradoxically determining constituent of the car and airplane scene as Woolf enters the consciousnesses of an indiscriminate group of people. The car and the airplane, as demonstrated above, serve as devices linking this number of the detached consciousnesses. Clearly, Woolf builds up the space of London on the “feminine” principles named by Wilson. These ‘feminine principles’ of the city in the modernist Woolfian London crystallize gradually into an analogy of Wilson’s (Le Bon’s) Sphinx in the city. Mrs. Dalloway, the crowd watching the car and the airplane, the singer as an embodiment of London’s womanhood, and Peter Walsh strolling through London streets preying on a woman quite aimlessly and fruitlessly, make up such a Sphinx. Woolfian London, then, is built on such feminine principles delineated above in this paragraph.
I have elaborated on the metaphor of the city as ocean which is present in MD. Hélène Cixous considers water “the feminine element par excellence” (qtd. in Moi 117). It is reminiscent “of the comforting security of the mother’s womb” (qtd. in Moi 117). Wilson herself uses an identical argument to contradict the sense of alienation induced in women by the city. Interpreting the space of the city as liberating for women, she argues: “The city is an enveloping presence in their work, and they seem to find its vast amorphousness maternal or even womblike. Instead of disintegrating, they are held by it. Why is it that these feminine experiences are denied?” (158). It is necessary to bear in mind, though, that leaving out alienation from the female experience of the urban space would impose a substantial otherness on women. This thesis, in the wake of Woolf’s ridicule of clear-cut dichotomies, does not leave alienation out of female experience of the urban space, although it does not view alienation as substantially hostile to women. In Toril Moi’s words, “Woolf’s crucial concept of androgyny is [….] a recognition of their [the oppositions’] falsifying metaphysical nature. [….] the goal of the feminist struggle must precisely be to deconstruct the death-dealing binary oppositions of masculinity and femininity” (13). Moi further argues that the concept of androgyny, is of an “unbounded and hence fundamentally indefinable nature” (Heilbrun qtd. in Moi 14). As elucidated by the example of Clarissa’s oscillating sense of self on Bachelard’s metaphor of the spiral, Woolf admits the existence of and even combat between the contradictory senses of the self. Therefore, the urban space might be both liberating / empowering and alienating to women.
It was the aim of this chapter to address two major questions: how solitude, as a central theme of MD, is expressed in spatial terms, and how Woolf constructs and employs the space of London, as the sole setting of the novel. With the centrality of “solitude and anonymity” to this chapter and its consequent influence on the investigation of space and spatiality in the novel, I chose not to talk about the topics of difficulty pf communication and the implicit criticism of the social system, which also lie at the heart of issues which MD wants to expose. These problems are excellently dealt with in both Hawthorn’s and Zwerdling’s studies of MD. This chapter also does not deal with the problematics of Woolf’s attitude to the class structure of the contemporary English society. Quentin Bell devotes a very good elucidation of Woolf’s frequently misinterpreted opinions and actions related to this problem. The “emptiness about the heart of life” (33), remains the key to the answer to both questions of this chapter. Space is both liberating and isolating. Woolf lets this ambiguity reverberate in MD.
3. Shaping ‘formidable space’: comprehending spatiality in To the Lighthouse
To comprehend the spatiality of To the Lighthouse (TL), I will attempt to deal with a concept which is an amalgamation of space and symbolism in TL: “shape.” I use the concept of “shape” to shelter the whole range of meanings. The intention of this chapter is to show how the whole range of images coming all under the same label of “shape,” contribute to the spatiality of TL and how, in turn, these images are spatially “hypostatized” (Holtz). The idea of a spatial image derives from Holtz’s reading of Kermode’s The Romantic Image:
the verbal image (or symbol), autonomous and autotelic, presumably unites meaning and feeling without intervening reflection or discourse: the “image” so hypostatized seems very close to a “spatial” form, and certainly the suppression of discourse, of reflection generally, follows from the disruption of syntax and narrative that results from the impulse toward “spatial” effects. (Holtz)
I have discussed the closeness of Woolf’s novelist texts to poetry by its elegiac form in the first chapter. Furthermore, both McNicholl and Drabble, in the notes on the text of MD and TL respectively, refer to “idiosyncrasies” or even to inconsistency of punctuation and syntax. There is not enough space to discuss the kind of syntactic discrepancies and idiosyncrasies of Woolf’s texts, but, with the reference to the character of her writing as prose poetry, which is supported by the elegiac character of both JR and TL, the closeness to the character of the text with a tendency towards ‘spatial form,’ as Holtz briefly states, is evident. This is further confirmed by the “disruption” of “narrative” in its temporally linear development, which, after the discussion in JR will not be repetitively re-discussed in this chapter, but I will assume, as the form of the novel is elegiac and builds on the experimental character of both JR and MD, Woolf’s non-linear treatment of the temporal axis in TL as well.
Having stated the qualities of Woolf’s text which Holtz labels as the outcome of the “impulse toward spatial effect” I intend to treat Woolf’s symbol of “shape” as the spatial image, with the intention to comprehend the interaction between the spatiality of this image and its meaning, and the spatial effect of the novel. The first part of this chapter will investigate what “shapes” there are in the whole of the novel. The investigation of shapes in TL will look at the shape of centrality, how its centrality is expressed in spatial and symbolical terms and what meaning this implies for the whole of the novel. Since the notion of “shape” does not have a single definition in TL, the question of “shape” is certainly not sufficiently addressed by elucidation of the bearers of centrality. Shapes, which are constituents of this novel, are a merge of spatiality and symbolism which, as Woolf states, is not a riddle with one clear-cut solution. In order to comprehend the relation of shape to the problem of space, I will analyse the symbolism of and the projection of the symbolism into the spatiality of shape. Just as there are a multiplicity of shapes in the novel, there is also more than one concept of what shape represents in general terms. The second part of this chapter will explore the concept of shape as a scene (a gathering of people which is spatially constituted), the concept of shape as a memory and the metamorphosis of such a shape in memory. The metamorphosis of shape will also become a metaphor of the process and act of creation. The third part will explore the process of creation and the importance of space to Lily Brisoe’s art, which, as an indirect autobiographical statement, will serve as a preliminary foundation for the concluding chapter.
This chapter is inspired by my reading of Allen McLaurin’s study of TL from Virginia Woolf: Echoes Enslaved, and also is heavily indebted to Hermione Lee’s interpretation of shape in TL as a metaphor of striving for perfection as a passage to eternity. I discuss Lee’s interpretation in more detail in the third part of this chapter, prior to the conclusion. Lee’s “Introduction” to the Penguin edition of TL from 1992 and particularly Lee’s critical notes provided a priceless insight into the intertextual layers of this novel.
The theme of centrality and its lack are one of the features of shapes which assemble into the novel. The central shape of the novel – at once present and centripetal, at once absent and lacking – is expressed through the figure of Mrs Ramsay. Although her figure exposes these features, there is more then one bearer of this notion of centrality with the task of holding the novel together. As to the bearers of this centrality, Virginia Woolf writes to Roger Fry:
I meant nothing by The Lighthouse. One has to have a central line down the middle of the book to hold the design together. [.…] [I] trusted that people would make it the deposit for their own emotions – which they have done, one thinking it means one thing, another another. I can’t manage Symbolism except in this vague, generalized way. [….] directly I’m told what a thing means, it becomes hateful to me.
The “central line down the middle” is a clasp, a connection, and, it being the Lighthouse, it is also “the deposit for […] emotions” . Viewed structurally, Mrs Ramsay is a character of an identical role to the family and to the book, just as the Lighthouse is elucidated by Virginia Woolf to Roger Fry.
Mrs Ramsay is throughout the first section also aware of the house’s interior. Her awareness of the state of the house grows into identification with it at times and she merges with the core of the house as well. The dinner-party, as a scene which happens inside of the house, has, identically, Mrs Ramsay at the centre of its space. The shape of the house merges with her as the central shape. At the beginning of the dinner party, Mrs Ramsay undergoes a pang of weakness and sudden decrepitude, and she identifies wholly with the run down interior of the house: “she felt, more and more strongly [….] 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” (113). Mrs Ramsay realizes that the role at the gathering to bring everybody together lies only in her person and feels the precariousness of such an undertaking. “Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her” (113). However, to the other adult woman present at the dinner at this moment, Lily Briscoe, Mrs Ramsay’s centrality serves as inspiration: Lily realizes that her painting too needs something central that connects and avoids “awkward space”(115) which she must perceive both in her painting and around herself at the beginning of the party. Contemplating Mrs Ramsay, feeling within her scope, Lily Briscoe “saw her picture, and thought, Yes, I shall put the tree further in the middle; then I shall avoid that awkward space” (115). There is an overlap in the functions of the symbol of a tree. The tree in Lily’s picture is a central shape with the purpose of unifying her picture but is a symbol for Mrs Ramsay as well. I will discuss this in the section which attempts to provide a distinction between shapes with the view to the polarity of the masculine and the feminine.
Mrs Ramsay’s centrality develops a centripetal power. Woolf structures the whole of the dinner-party scene around her. Created by Mrs Ramsay, the dinner-party is a memorable event. Concentration of space around Mrs Ramsay also becomes a sign of this feature of the memorability of events. When Mrs Ramsay commands that the candles be lit, the candlelight provides the party with intense intimacy:
Now all the candles were lit, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candle light, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the night was now shut off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things wavered and vanished, waterily.
Some change at once went through them all, as if this had already happened, and they were all conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on an island; had their common cause against the fluidity out there. (131 – 132)
The whole scene acquires a sense of tight encapsulation of the party of people “shut off by panes of glass” (131) with a heightened distinction of “here, inside the room” and “there, outside” (132), which is reminiscent of the dialectics of inside and outside discussed in the previous chapter. At this moment, however, Woolf employs this distinction to cut sharp lines between the two oppositions in order to unite the participants “in a hollow, on an island” “against the fluidity out there”. The dinner-party itself becomes a ceremony, or a still life, which is there to outlast the fluid time of the dark night outside. “The fluidity” of the night “shut off by panes of glass” imposes a sense of liquidy time-space which dissolves unpityingly one moment after another. With the liquidity of time-space washing against the windows of the dining room, the whole scene creates an image of an inverse aquarium, with the participants of the feast inside of it (“in a hollow”). The scene, both to Mrs Ramsay and Lily Briscoe is a specimen of something that will outlast: “there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, [….] in the face of the flowing, the fleeting [….]. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that remains for ever after. This would remain,” (142) thinks Mrs Ramsay. There is a sense of a strong pressure on the walls of the room, and strong gravity of that occasion, which is centred in Mrs Ramsay. Her figure prevails in the scene, as well as assembling the whole of it together. In this sense, Mrs Ramsay’s power may be interpreted in quite the opposite sense to the one of “a rain of energy, a column of spray” (52). As the one at the centre of family life, as the centre of the family’s members’ orbits, Mrs Ramsay exposes, in the creation of the sense of “common cause against the fluidity out there” (132), a centripetal power. “And directly she went a sort of disintegration set in; they wavered about, went different ways” (151). With her, as a centre of gravity, around which the orbits of the family members are formed, removed, the scene cannot last. There is a bond between her figure and the house, as disclosed above, and the disintegration applies to the house as well, as it disintegrates with her death (Lee, xxxiv).
Mrs Ramsay, glimpsed from a number of perspectives, occupying a stable, and central position in the first part of the novel, plays a similar part as the Lighthouse. Mrs Ramsay’s centrality to the house and the family life is developed in spatial terms. There are three major sections in To the Lighthouse: “The Window”, “Time Passes” and “The Lighthouse”. Mrs Ramsay, being present physically only in the first one, is marked by the title of the section, as well as her central position to the whole of it: she is sitting in the window, knitting a heather-coloured stocking or reading to little James. The half-internal, half-external position on the very boundary of the inside and outside of the house connects the two scopes (internal and external) belonging to her. Her position in the window allows her to survey and communicate with the outside of the house, and makes her an object of observation simultaneously – she is a model for Lily Briscoe’s painting. Visually, the window she is sitting in creates a frame for her figure, as a central object of Lily’s painting (McLaurin 194). Similarly, “The Window” is a frame to her character. This idea of framing does not imply Mrs Ramsay only being an object to Lily’s painting; “with her head absurdly outlined by the quilt frame” (42), the focus on Mrs Ramsay’s figure is generic. This “outline” is the general centralization of Mrs Ramsay’s situation within the first section.
Woolf depicts Mrs Ramsay from a number of perspectives. From the first chapter of “The Window”, Mrs Ramsay’s figure conveys stately queenliness and statuesqueness:
She was now formidable to behold, and it was only in silence, looking up from their plates, after she had spoken so severely about Charles Tansley, that her daughters – Prue, Nancy, Rose – could sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers [….]; though to them all there was something in this of the essence of beauty, which called out the manliness in their girlish hearts, and made them, as they sat at table beneath their mother’s eyes, honour her strange severity, her extreme courtesy, like a Queen’s raising from the mud beggar’s dirty foot and washing it. (11-12)
Mrs Ramsay is the centre of her daughters’ attention, at a moment of symbolic value. As I have observed, her centrality is conveyed by a number of perspectives, but also by the fashion Mrs Ramsay is looked upon. She is “formidable to behold”, conveys “strange severity” and even appeals to “manliness” in her daughters’ “girlish hearts”. As she is framed throughout the first part of “The Window” by the window, the same effect of being put into focus is brought about by this scene. She is contemplated together with the notions chained to her figure – the tradition and heritage of the past – and is equally revered. These are values that could be easily attributed to a work of art, which Woolf, through the medium of the Ramsay daughters attaches to Mrs Ramsay. As the space concentrates around a work of art with the attention paid to it, at this moment, the space is similarly concentrated around Mrs Ramsay.
Interaction with her husband gives Mrs Ramsay a shape of an eternal spring of support. Woolf contrasts the two figures in the imagery of their interaction at the moment when Mr Ramsay is requesting a confirmation of his own value from his wife. Mrs Ramsay is shaped into “a rain of energy, a column of spray” (52), and “a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs” (53). The act of demanding sympathy on the part of her husband is reminiscent of a plunder of mother’s garden, or a rape:
into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak a of brass, barren and bare [….] Standing between her knees, very stiff, James felt all her strength flaring up to be drunk and quenched by the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of the male, which smote mercilessly, again and again, demanding sympathy. (52 – 53)
What are the shapes Woolf assigns to Mr Ramsay? He is the “beak of brass”(52), “the arid scimitar” (53), and “a stake driven into the bed of a channel upon which the gulls perch and the waves beat” (61), he “inspires in merry boatloads a feeling of gratitude for the duty it has taken upon itself of making the channel out there in the floods alone” (61). The three shapes that Mr Ramsay forms in are all solid, geometrical and elongated. When Lily Briscoe later talks to William Bankes about Mr Ramsay, she expresses her dislike of “his narrowness, his blindness” (64). Mr Ramsay is perceived as a shape of permeation, durability and penetration (“a stake driven into the bed” [61]) in his ambition, domination and tyranny (“which smote mercilessly, demanding sympathy” [53]). In accordance with the given characteristics, Mr Ramsay is a phallic shape.
The image of a tree-shape which characterizes Mrs Ramsay returns when she is remembering her feelings from the just passed dinner: “she grew still like a tree which has been tossing and quivering and now, when the breeze falls, settles, leaf by leaf, into quiet” (159). Woolf compares Mrs Ramsay’s openness and capacity to combine and merge people in the society to a patulous shape of a tree, opened and dancing. Identically, as after the assurance she must give to Mr Ramsay, she folds inside her self. However, this eternal spring of energy, cannot last always, and Mrs Ramsay feels that her centrality is, at times, a burden to her. Woolf shapes her into a lonely sailor on a drifting ship: “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 the rest on the floor of the sea” (114). The image of a lonely sailor counterbalances her centrality with a sense of exhaustion of her person. True to what Virginia Woolf states of her use of symbolism in her letter to Roger Fry, she does not hesitate to intertwine these seemingly incompatible images. There occurs an overlap in the two symbolical functions of the tree shape. The first one symbolizes Mrs Ramsay’s rootedness in the family circle and her consequent centrality to it; the second one – probably derived from the first function – is the “central line down the middle” (Woolf qtd. in Bell), which has the task of uniting Lily’s picture. The unifying quality of such a shape, which is, in geometrical terms of indefinite but central to the space, is thus doubled and confirmed in the novel.
When Mrs Ramsay reads a poem, Woolf merges these shapes into one: “she felt that she was climbing backwards, upwards, shoving her way up under petals that curved over her [….] she read and turned the page, swinging herself, zigzagging this way and that, from one line to another [….] she was climbing up those branches, this way and that, laying hands on one flower and then another” (160 – 163). Woolf is merging images from poems Mrs Ramsay is reading, but at the same time, they are conspicuously similar to the “shapes” Mrs Ramsay has been ascribed previously. She is “climbing” (a tree), swinging (on a bough, or in a boat), and “zigzagging” (along the lines of a poem, a sonnet). These images of a tree in a wind or a boat on a waving surface of water join to imply a sense of deep immersion in the images of the poetry Mrs Ramsay is reading, recalling the “shapes” of her simultaneously.
I have touched upon the Woolfian distinction of masculine-feminine dichotomies in both JR and MD. In JR Woolf uses ridicule to expose the contrastive division between the feminine and masculine oppositions ascribed to intellect / mind / thinking. In MD, I discussed the cooperation of feminine and masculine principles of the city, and show that Woolf lets them interact in the London of MD in combat. The scene from TL I have marked as the plunder of the mother’s garden or rape envisions the two sets of masculine and feminine shapes of the spatial imagery in interaction. Later in the novel, there is a recurrent image of a mesh or net, gauze, suspending something evanescent or volatile. Drawing to the close, the talk at the dinner turns to “the square root of one thousand and two hundred and fifty-three” (142). Mrs Ramsay, does not understand, what a square root is. “Her sons knew. She leant on them; on cubes and square roots; [….] she let it uphold her and sustain her, this admirable fabric of masculine intelligence, which ran up and down, crossed this way and that, like iron girders spanning the swaying fabric, upholding the world, so that she could trust herself to it utterly” (142-143). Mrs Ramsay construes herself as “the swaying fabric”, which corresponds with the “rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs” in the swaying movement, and the femininity of the “shape”: non-rectangular and of indefinite, open shape. Here, the image carries another set of features: instability, dependence and an accessorial status. As if to undermine this whole image of feminine supplementarity, Woolf lets Mrs Ramsay daydream of this evanescence of hers, after she building the whole of the section on the dinner-party around her. This concealed sneer of Woolf’s at Mrs Ramsay exposes the double-edged nature of dichotomous classification. There is a buried ridicule under such a distinction into the rectangular and the swaying, as I have outlined in Woolf’s indirect method of repudiating the narrator in JR. The nature of the set of masculine features, on the other hand, is identical to those formerly attached to Mr Ramsay in the analysis of his “shape”. These are the sets of features, which Lily Briscoe’s painting endeavours to combine:
Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like colours on a butterfly’s wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron. It was to be a thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses. (143)
Lily Briscoe’s combination of shapes, and therefore conception of art, is androgynous.
There is an occurrence of a merge of these sets of features in “the dome-shaped hive” (71), “an august shape” (71), “the shape of a dome” (71), “pinnacle” (101), “dome emerging from the mist” (101). Lily Briscoe envisions the shape of dome at the moment of reminiscence of closeness to Mrs Ramsay, and of Lily’s heightened desire “for becoming, like waters poured into a jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored” (70), at the moment when Lily is clutching Mrs Ramsay’s knees. Lily, as an artist and a woman who will never marry, is paying a tribute to Mrs Ramsay, to her beauty and wisdom. The moment of closeness of two women overlaps with the occurrence of “the shape of dome”: the second time the reader comes across “a pinnacle, a dome” it is with Minta, Paul, Andrew and Nancy walking to the cliffs:
as they walked along the road to the cliff, Minta kept on taking her hand. [….] What was it she wanted? Nancy asked herself. There was something, of course, that people wanted; for when Minta took her hand and held it, Nancy, reluctantly, saw the whole world spread out beneath her, as if it were Constantinople seen through a mist, [….] And what was that? Here and there emerged from the mist (as Nancy looked down upon life spread beneath her) a pinnacle, a dome; prominent things, without names. (100 – 101)
The second passage, probably as it is referring to young girls is also more physical but less articulate. Again, there is an intimate situation of two women / girls. As opposed to Lily’s articulated desire “to be one with the object one adored (70)”, there is no wording of one in the second passage. Instead, there is a constant and unanswered question: “What was it she wanted?” The emotion which Minta’s taking Nancy’s hand inspires in Nancy opens up “the whole world spread out beneath her” (100). This “whole world” is probably also the view from the cliff, but, probably an unknown yearning to Nancy for “prominent things, without names” (101). “The pinnacle, the dome” that reappears, then, has some tie with a yearning for closeness, or even a passion inspired by the closeness of two women. Woolf does not express this emotion in erotic terms in TL as she does in MD, nor does this “dome” appear in MD.
The range of different shapes discussed here is provided as a series of examples to provide the approach to the question of how Woolf projects symbolism into the spatiality of shapes. I have outlined several shapes: symbolical shapes of characters, their changeability and scope, the symbolic shape of an encounter (the dinner party, the closeness of two women), and the “gendered” characteristics of shape(s). Visually, shape is an outline enclosing and covering / occupying space. This is also what Virginia Woolf endows with a symbolical and attached meaning in depth. Let me now attempt to elucidate the term of shape by comparing different “ways of shaping” in TL.
I will try here to see how shape is made through Lily’s eyes. As I have explained, quoting Allen McLaurin, it is her vision, which is the artist’s. Previously, I have discussed the shape of one scene: the dinner party in an inverse aquarium. This scene is matched by another one, when Lily Briscoe’s perception of space and shapes is enhanced in the twilight sun:
they were standing close together watching Prue and Jasper throwing catches. And suddenly the meaning which, for no reason at all [….], descends on people, making them symbolical, making them representative, came upon them, and made them in the dusk standing, looking, the symbols of marriage, husband and wife. Then, after an instant, the symbolical outline which transcended the real figures sank down again and they became, as they met them, Mr and Mrs Ramsay watching the children throwing catches. But still for a moment [….]; still, for one moment, there was a sense of things having been blown apart, of space, of irresponsibility as the ball soared high, [….]. In the failing light they all looked sharpened and ethereal and divided by great distances. Then, darting backwards over the vast space (for it seemed as if solidity had vanished altogether), Prue ran full tilt into them and caught the ball brilliantly [….]. (99 – 100 emphasis added)
This is a sketch of a spatial scene, which is composed of outlines of figures. These outlines belong to images or patterns, which are beheld at a particular moment and which, as if accidentally, overlap with some pre-existent ones. The “meaning” “descends on people” and “transcends the real figures” (99). In Lily’s perception “they all looked sharpened and ethereal and divided by great distances” as if these meanings descended on those people detached them from one another and made them a set, where their composition, as on a canvas, conceals a meaning in itself.
The scene is tied in a number of fashions to other scenes from the novel. I have described the liquidity of time-space, which Lily perceives at the dinner-party, as a counterpart to the still memorability of the occasion. Mrs Ramsay herself remembers, when appreciating the memorable value of the dinner-party, “she had already felt about something different that afternoon”, that “It partook [….] of eternity” (142). Since the scene ‘partakes in eternity’, as well as the ball scene (99), it does not create eternity. It is, and in some sense has been a part of eternity. It has been in existence. As I have emphasized above, these scenes suddenly acquire shapes which overlap with some pre-existent shapes. Woolf expresses the perceptions of these scenes spatially, which lays emphasis on their form. Mrs Ramsay, after she is assured that the party is a success, mentally dissociates herself from the party and takes up the part of an observer: “she hovered like a hawk suspended; like a flag floated in an element of joy which filled every nerve of her body [….]; all of which rising in this profound stillness [….] seemed now for no special reason to stay there like a smoke, like a fume rising upwards, holding them safe together” (141). Lily Briscoe’s reflection of the ball scene is accompanied by identical spatially communicated feelings: “there was a sense of things having been blown apart, of space”. “In the failing light they all looked sharpened and ethereal and divided by great distances” (99). The form in the scene with the ball is the vehicle of meaning, which descends on it. Hence the emphasis on its spatiality which is an expression of the importance of its form. The pre-existent shape, as I call it, is the form, which may overlap with the form beheld and which is the original bearer of the meaning.
Let me now look at these pre-existent shapes themselves. Hermione Lee names the shape of the sonnet which Mrs Ramsay is reading (Shakespeare 98) , in her elucidation of shape. She also points out the correspondence between the ghostly apparition of Mrs Ramsay to Lily Briscoe and the final line of the sonnet. To Lily Briscoe, Mrs Ramsay was “ghost, air, nothingness, a thing you could play with” (Woolf qtd. in Lee note 104). How does the sonnet itself contribute to the idea of pre-existent shape in TL? The sonnet speaks about an absent and beloved person to another one. It describes a sadness and want of this absent lover, and the will to insert the picture of the beloved one into the things surrounding the one who is in want: “They were but sweet, but figures of delight, / Drawn after you, you pattern of all those, / Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away, / As with your shadow I with these did play” (Son. 98 ,11 – 14). Here, the pre-existent shape is the outline for the things it is later identified with. It is a “figure”, “pattern”, “shadow” of the beloved person, buried in the memory of the lover who is seeking for a reflection of these in Nature. The pre-existent shapes in TL are based on a similar concept. These pre-existent shapes contain “the essence sucked out of life” (163). They “descend” (99) “rounded” (163) – as if sent from a collective reservoir of memory – to assign their “patterns” (Son. 98, 12) to images or scenes, which they overlap with at the present moment. They are stored in the memory and assigned to objects of changeable nature. As such they must have a dwelling, which is memory. I will analyse the process of excavation of shapes from memory in connection with the concept of distance and also with Lily’s method of creation.
The pre-existent shapes dwell in memory. Mrs Ramsay is thinking about memory and remembering / forgetting, when collecting the shapes her son had cut out. “No, she thought, putting together some of the pictures he had cut out […] children never forget” (85). James was cutting shapes during the argument his mother was having with his father, about going to the Lighthouse. These “shapes” in the form of images of the scene, and also of symbolical shapes I have discussed as assigned to the Ramsay couple have survived in James’s memory. Ten years later, when James, Cam and their father finally undergo the once craven for expedition to the Lighthouse, James is fishing for
an image to cool and detach and round off his feeling in a concrete shape [….]. Something, he remembered, stayed and darkened over him […]; something flourished up in the air, something arid and sharp descended even there, like a blade, a scimitar, smiting through the leaves and flowers even of that happy world and making them shrivel and fall.
‘It will rain,’ he remembered his father saying. ‘You won’t be able to go to the Lighthouse.’ (249 – 250)
“The pre-existent shapes” are residual images persisting in memory, which float up blurred. What is the shape of these memories, then? Is it the original one, the one that has already vanished so that one will never be able to restore its original image? Or the one that floats up, as if involuntarily, extricated from the depths of memory as an ancient excavation, changed thus in form? When James approaches the Lighthouse, he asks a similar question. The Lighthouse, in his dreams, had a different form from the one he is actually approaching. James accepts the twinned quality of memories (which is the double-edged nature of shape). “For nothing was simply one thing” (251). The Lighthouse is both “a silvery, misty-looking tower” (251) and “stark and straight”, “barred with black and white” (251). His dreamy shape of the Lighthouse overlaps in contours with the shape of the actual one, but they are not overly identical. The memory is a reservoir, which conserves and metamorphoses shapes.
Shapes preserved in memory play the crucial role in creation. Lily Briscoe engages in a similar ‘play with shapes’. Throughout the process of her reminiscence / creation, she engages in revealing these shapes buried in her memory. To Lily, a persistent memory of a scene (shape) is what forms the essence of her art. “Metamorphosis of Shapes,” that is what her creative method could be called in the third section of the book. Lily Briscoe links the memory of sudden fondness of Charles Tansley on the beach to one of such moments – sources of inspiration:
This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs Ramsay saying ‘Life stand still here’; Mrs Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent) – this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this external passing and flowing [….] was stuck into stability. (218 emphasis added).
The principle of this scene has been elucidated: a formation of a permanent memory which will outlast the fluidity of time-space. The permanent memory reshaped in her mind at present and metamorphosed into a work of art: that is the “shape” (which parallels the still memory) “in the midst of chaos” (a parallel with the fluidity of time-space). The metamorphosed shape is the work of art, something permanent and resistant to the “chaos” (218), to “this external passing and flowing” (218), as the liquidy time-space described above.
Let me now get back to the example of the metamorphosis of the Lighthouse. The change of its shape is not only the result of an emotionally tinted memory, but of a change in the distance from which James can see it. It is also the distance, which changes the shape of objects in view. After a few hours of sailing, Mr Ramsay points to their house, diminished by the distance they have crossed. “But Cam could see nothing. She was thinking how all those paths and the lawn, thick and knotted with the lives they had lived there, were gone: were rubbed out; were past; were unreal, and now this was real; the boat and the sail with its patch” (225). This distance – some amount of space across which something is perceived, after an equivalent of time to cross this space has elapsed – is a factor which recreates shape. To Cam, the vanished paths of her youth appear as unreal across this huge distance. Distance has a meaning to Lily Briscoe too: “So much depends then [….], upon distance: whether people are near us or far from us” (258). To be able to see things from distance endows power, conception and comprehension. These are the qualities that distance gives to an artist (cf. McLaurin 182).
To contrast this impact of distance upon Cam, Lily’s method of recreating shapes from the past requires an act of distancing herself from the surrounding world and of fusing with (cancelling any distance from / becoming one with) the object / issue she is investigating. Her creative effort resembles a state of plunge in water, known from Clarissa’s state of immersion in her self, which was equally accompanied by the imagery of plunging in water. Lily Briscoe repeatedly describes her creative struggle in similar terms: “All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests” (213). This stage of ‘before and after the plunge’ is repeatedly gone back to. When Lily finally restarts her painting her struggle with the mass on the canvas is compared to the masses of water: “Down in the hollow of one wave she saw the next wave towering higher and higher above her” (214). It is a struggle to create, and it is a struggle to acquire that state of mind in which it is possible to create: “before she exchanged the fluidity of life for the concentration of painting she had a few moments of nakedness when she seemed like an unborn soul, a soul reft of body, hesitating on some windy pinnacle” (215 – 216). Lily jumps from that elevated point into the depths of concentration again some fifteen pages later. “It was an odd road to be walking, this of painting. Out and out one went, further and further, until at last one seemed to be on a narrow plank, perfectly alone, over the sea” (232). This state of mind, indispensable for creation, changes the state of the surrounding environment to liquid. Space in Woolfian terms is capable of that change of state, and this change is a signifier of concentration in general. The concentration of mind or its engulfment is the key to Woolf’s employment of the metaphor which transforms the surrounding space into water / liquid.
Lily has plunged, and is swimming among the waves. How does Woolf envision the continuing process of creation?
With a curious physical sensation [….] she made her first quick decisive stroke. The brush descended. It flickered brown over the white canvas; it left a running mark [….]; and so lightly and swiftly pausing, striking, she scored her canvas with brown running nervous lines which had no sooner settled there than they enclosed (she felt it looming out at her) a space [….]. For what could be more formidable than that space? Here she was again […], drawn out of […] living, out of community with people into the presence of this formidable ancient enemy of hers – this other thing, this truth, this reality, which suddenly laid hands on her, emerged stark at the back of appearances and commanded her attention [….]. Other worshipful objects were content with worship; men, women, God, all let one kneel prostrate; but this form, were it only the shape of a white lamp-shade looming on a wicker table, roused one to perpetual combat, challenged one to a fight in which one was bound to be worsted. (213 – 214)
The reader cannot miss the strong resemblance between the ‘descending brush’ and the ‘descending pen,’ the running mark may constitute the line of either paint or ink. David Daiches marks Lily Briscoe as Virginia Woolf’s “deputy” (82). Not only this section of TL reads as an autobiographical probe into the process of writing / creation itself. Therefore, Lily’s involvement with “space” (214) constitutes an answer to the question of how Woolf employs space as an artistic medium and what “the created space” (as a medium and as an expression) is to Virginia Woolf. With Lily Briscoe as Virginia Woolf’s mouthpiece, I can attempt to detect the indirect authorial manifesto in this passage.
The brush has descended and the lines, disorderly as they are, “had no sooner settled there than they enclosed [….] a space” (213 emphasis added). Lily is defining, she is leaving a mark. The painter is daring into “a formidable space” which is undefined and unknown – it is “looming out at her” (214). Allen McLaurin asserts that space, to Woolf, is defined by the objects it is holding (200). If there is nothing in space, “it becomes a void”, something dreaded and hard to overcome (McLaurin 201). The space of unexpressed ideas / memories /emotions is a space of unformed shapes (McLaurin 201). It is the void that demands the struggle, which is the struggle of creation – the ‘before and after’ of the plunge I have discussed. This plunge, this state of creation is “an ancient enemy of hers – this other thing, this truth, this reality,” as the all-embracing water’s grip, this concentration, which “suddenly laid hands on her” (214). It is only in this “formidable space” (214) that the act of creation happens. The space of undefined ideas and unexpressed emotions, the void space, is indispensable to the artist.
To define this space means to struggle with it. It is the “form” that has the power of defining and that provides the challenge: “this form, were it only the shape of a white lamp-shade looming on a wicker table, roused one to perpetual combat, challenged one to a fight in which one was bound to be worsted” (214). Form, to Lily, is an equivalent to expression. The “space” (213) which the brush “enclosed” (213) in her painting is a shape. If the uncovered space of the canvas may be considered the equivalent of the void to struggle, then shape created in it is the weapon.
Ten years before she restarts the painting, Lily sees the problem in preserving the unity of her picture, not disturbing the kind of balance of masses of light and shadow. She intuitively searches for something central “to connect this mass on the right hand with that on the left” (73). She foresees “that the unity of the whole might be broken” (74). I have emphasized the parallel between Mrs Ramsay’s central part in the creation of the dinner-party, and Lily’s sudden occurrence of the solution to her artistic problem during the party as the need for something central in her picture. As the central shape of “The Window”, Mrs Ramsay’s centrality is the unifying power of the occasion and of the chapter. Figuratively, the need for centrality recurs in Lily’s painting, as the need to unify it. They are both – Mrs Ramsay and Lily Briscoe – creators of unity, each in different terms: Mrs Ramsay, like Mrs Dalloway, by bringing people together at her dinner-party, Lily Briscoe by her struggle to connect the masses of colour in her picture and by her desire to become one with the object of her adoration. Lily Briscoe therefore desires for a harmonious unity of the form that she endows her art with. Simultaneously, to Lily, it is the form, which is the crucial bearer of meaning and makes it also the purpose of her art. As I have demonstrated by the means of the example of the scene with the ball, the sudden overlap of the spatial placement (which is the spatial form) of the figures with a shape pre-existent in Lily’s memory attaches to this scene another, much deeper meaning. The form, which is spatially embodied in shape, is the crucial bearer of meaning to her artistic vision.
Hermione Lee distinguishes the concept of a “completed form” in TL (133-135). She recognizes this concept in the scenes which persist in memory – the dinner where a seemingly inconsistent group of people “is made […] into a coherent whole [….] whose effect is nevertheless grand and transcendental, because it has come about by a creative effort” (133 - 134). She equals shapes of persistent scenes with the shapes is Lily’s painting and Mrs Ramsay’s effort to unite the people at the table to Lily’s struggle to unite the masses / shapes of the painting (134 – 135). Lee extends this concept of creation and recognition of these completed shapes to Mrs Ramsay’s reading of the Shakespeare’s sonnet. “The poem gives her a sense of a completed form” (134). The sense in such a quest for a completed form is a meaning of all human undertaking, and is like Lily’s struggle with “the formidable space” (TL 214). “Acts which give form to life [….] are creative and humanizing. Without creative actions there is only space, like the space caused by death” (134). Lee understands Lily’s artistic act as the will to reshape the surrounding, and presumably chaotic reality into this “completed form / shape” (135).
There is a whole range of paths this chapter could have taken, and therefore, having chosen to tackle the spatiality of Woolf’s symbolism and its impacts on the spatiality of the novel, I have also chosen not to tackle other prominent features of TL, the rich novel in meaning as it is. This chapter, therefore, does not explore rhythm, nor does the whole of the thesis, except of the brief mention in the first chapter. Rhythm and repetition is overly dealt with by McLaurin’s many time mentioned study in this thesis Virginia Woolf: Echoes Enslaved. Neither do I study the symbolism of the settings and spaces in TL as such, which was done by David Daiches in Virginia Woolf.
What is the significance of shape in TL? Shape acquires symbolical value, and is expressive of the part of a character within the novel and of the nature of the focus with which it is scrutinized. It is thus a spatial form which Woolf metaphorically ascribes to the character. Shapes in their spatial form are sexually polarized, which Woolf envisions with a subversive intention as in JR. The merge of the spatially opposite forms of shapes equally implies a will to merge the meaning of the forms these shapes substitute. Shape of a gathering of people means their spatial configuration, which endows such shape with meaning. To Woolf, spatiality is the determinant of the form. Subject to space, shape is a metamorphosing phenomenon. It is a memory, and it is a memory excavated and amalgamated into a work of art. Thus shape also has a meaning of a changing outline of an image. It is thus visible, from thus dense enumeration of detailed definitions of shape, that Woolf construes shape as a three-dimensional phenomenon with a capacity of changing its form. The idea of pre-existent shape puts Woolf’s concept of shape near the concept of archetype.
Space contained in the distance which has the capacity of changing shapes is another factor which alters the form of shape. In the idea of distance, Woolf materializes space-time into a coherent mass. This metaphoric materialization of space recurs as an opposite to any memorable, and thus persistent and unchangeable event / memory / shape. Shape, then, exists in some tension with space. The utter opposition to the concepts of shape is the formidable mutation of space. Shape exists to defy and thus cancel its formidability, serenity and voidness.
Conclusion
As the title implies, this thesis seeks to propose an analysis of the spatial issues in the three novels by Virginia Woolf. The topic of spatiality, though, is by the virtue of its nature interconnected with a variety of others. To understand the complexity of the issues of spatiality of Woolf’s novels, the analysis would have to go much further. It would have to include all Woolf’s novels, criticism and autobiographical writing, and tackle it systematically from a range of perspectives. To name the approaches which would be nnecessary to such an intention, the analysis would have to explore Woolf’s work from the point of view of thematology, taking spatiality and placiality as its theme. Thematology, archetypal criticism and mythological criticism are all related to thematic criticism, of which Gaston Bachelard is considered to be the founder (Pavera and Všetička 349). Thematology explores the overlap of the sujet and place, and occurrence of “topoi,” which, according to Curtius might be contained in stylized figures (Hodrová 8). An example of such stylized figure in Woolf’s work might be the singing beggar woman in the streets of London. Another example of such a “topoi” might be a recurring stylization of a place (Hodrová 8), such as a room, passage, street, garden and its meaning in Woolf’s prose. Archetypal features of Woolf’s work might then be studied through the optics of mythological criticism, which is also interested in the recurrent image. The recurrent is certainly another prominent feature of Woolf’s prose. The recurrent images might also be explored if taken as “figure”, which is the topic of Genette’s and Mauron’s criticism (Hodrová 10). This approach tackles images as chains of associations or schemes, typical only for one chosen poet (10). The closeness of Woolf’s prose to poetry might provide a substantial topic for this kind of exploration.
This thesis has attempted to pursue the issues of spatiality which might be given three different labels: spatiality of the structure and its effects in JR; the interaction of self and the urban space in MD; and the “hypostatized symbol” as the outcome of the novel’s spatiality in TL. Following the circles of the mind rather then those of the hour hand, the discontinuous text of JR cancels temporocentrism. The discontinuous text of JR opens space of the novel for the reader: Woolf invites the reader to (re)create the novel with her in the spaces omitted by her. This space literally protrudes through the text of the novel. The spatial text is riddled with still lives and revelations, forsaken landscapes and cityscapes and envisions plastic image of reality. The reality of such a space is rugged, disorderly and dispersed.
In MD, Woolf metaphorically envisions the cityscape of London as an ocean. Self of the urban inhabitant merges with this ocean – it plunges in it. By this merge, the self tests its own nature. Clarissa’s self spiraling through the streets of London is running out of or immersing in itself. The self and space in MD merge – the inside and outside, the intimacy and the universe are abolished by this merge. Running along the spiral, self experiences feelings of alienation or liberation. Woolfian self preserves its integrity in solitude and its separateness is indispensable. It is, therefore, spatially determined. Woolf’s space is constituted of images – she constructs a multiple reality through her reflectors. The space of cityscape contains a continuum of reflectors, whose sameness of nature is at once fragmented and poured by the text into one flow in MD. Space either confirms or dilutes the sense of self. In Bachelard’s terms, which correspond with Woolf’s prose, the sense of self does not correlate with either openness or constriction of space.
Be it the water as the feminine symbol, the fragmentation of the cityscape, or its intederminate character, Woolf portrays the city in feminine elements. Masculine elements coexist in combat with the city’s chaotic nature. Woolf transposes the discontinuous space of JR into the indeterminate nature of the city of MD. After the dispersal of the reality of JR, MD pours this incongruous nature of reality into a flow.
TL in form is a sequence of symbolical scenes. The cancelled linearity of the novel opens a rift the space of which is occupied by the “hypostatized image”. Woolf “hypostatizes” a variety of images into “shape”. Shape (the “hypostatized symbol”) may have a number of references, faithful to Woolf’s concept of symbolism, as defined by its ambiguity. Thus the symbol of a tree may signify – by its amorphous patulousness and rootedness – Mrs Ramsay’s extended responsiveness and her centralizing stability to the family life she is the fulcrum of. Accordingly, space-time becomes a fluid mass, which is subject to change or inducing change (as the distance changes the Lighthouse). Woolf also employs the “hypostatized image” of “the shape of dome,” which, out of those brought up, exposes the maximum self-referential quality. Its meaning might be arrived at by tracing its spatial occurrence in the text: its spatial situation within the novel defines its meaning. Shape as a spatial configuration is another link between spatiality and form in TL. Form, being at the same time the primary medium of Lily’s (Woolf’s) expression, promotes spatiality to the chief material with which Woolf works. By materializing space, Woolf makes her art spatial.
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