The Mark on the Wall Literary Elements

Short story, stream-of-consciousness, feminist literature

WWI-era Britain

A first-person, presumably female narrator (potentially a stand-in for the author) muses in stream-of-consciousness about the nature and origins of a mark on the wall.

Tone: pensive, melancholy, meditative, speculative

Mood: pensive, moody, restless

The protagonist is the narrator; it seems as though life in general antagonizes her, but specifically, the mark on the wall is a kind of antagonist.

There is a conflict within the narrator as to the cause of the mark on the wall and whether or not she should get up and inspect it.

There is no real climax; rather, there is more of an anti-climax as the woman's husband breaks through her philosophizing to let her know he is going out to buy a newspaper—and to spoil the mystery by flippantly identifying what the mark actually is.

The woman's increasingly melancholy philosophizing foreshadows her gradual descent into a more depressive state of mind and thoughts about death.

The woman ponders that, over a lifetime we lose quite a few items,—in most people's lives, this is an understatement.

1. Shakespeare: the famous English playwright.
2. "Troy, buried three times over" is an allusion to the besieged Greek city.
3. Whitaker's Table of Precedency: an almanac, or a yearbook of contemporary information on education, the government, the environment, and lineage.
4. Landseer prints: Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (1802-1873) was a famous British painter of animals.
5. "this war" refers to WWI.

The imagery revolves around the mark and all of the different things that it could actually be. The author appeals to all of the reader's senses as the woman considers the mark's appearance, consistency, and smell. See the separate "Imagery" section of this ClassicNote for more imagery.

The woman is desperate to know what the mark actually is, yet she never actually gets up from her chair to investigate it further.

There are parallels between the philosophical, melancholic nature of the narrator and the nature of the flesh-and-blood author, Virginia Woolf.

N/A.

1. "...only fragments of pots refusing annihilation, as one can believe."
2. "How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way..."
3. "the head of a gigantic old nail...revealed its head above the coat of paint"