Summary
The story is told in first-person by a (putatively) female narrator sitting in a chair and ruminating. She recalls how she first noticed a mark on the wall in the middle of January that year. She thinks of the fire and its light on her book, and the three chrysanthemums. It must have been winter, for they'd finished their tea and she was smoking. First, she’d looked at the burning coals and thought of a crimson flag on a castle tower, but the mark interrupted this “old fancy.” The mark was small, round, black, and on the white wall.
She thinks of how one’s thoughts swarm on a new object like ants. The mark couldn’t have been for a picture, but perhaps for a miniature of a lady with powdered curls and red lips. The people in this house before them, who were very interesting (and of whom she thinks often), would have chosen an old picture for an old room. They left because they wanted to change their style of furniture. The man said that art should have ideas behind it—but this was when they were being torn apart, the way one is torn apart from the people performing their tasks outside the train as you zoom past.
She decides the mark can’t be a hole from a nail, but does she not want to get up. If she gets up, she still might not be able to tell what it is. She thinks of “the mystery of life” and “the accuracy of thought!” She then decides that it seems like people never have control over their possessions, really, for there are so many lost things—bird cages, iron hoops, skates, a bagatelle board—even jewels are gone. She thinks that, if life is compared to anything, it should be compared to being blown through the Tube and landing without a single hairpin left. Life is rapid, there is so much waste, and it is all so “casual, all so haphazard.”
She wonders why one is not born in the place where one dies: helpless, speechless, blind and trying to focus one’s eyes while groping at the roots of Giants. It would be unclear which were men and which are women—only spaces of light and dark and blobs of indistinct colors.
The mark is not a hole, she avers. Maybe it is caused by a black substance like rose leaf left over from the summer. She is not a great housekeeper, she thinks, noticing the dust on the mantel. It is like the dust that buried Troy. A tree taps on the pane. She wishes to never be interrupted: to just think and be calm. She wants to sink deeper and deeper, away from “hard separate facts.”
To steady herself, she tries to focus on something concrete—Shakespeare. He’ll do. He also sat in the chair and looked at the fire, and ideas fell from heaven into his mind. This is dull, she then thinks. This historical fiction doesn’t interest her. Rather, she wants to light on something pleasant that “indirectly [reflects] credit upon myself,” which is something even modest people who say they don’t like attention enjoy. Thoughts like this:
She came into the room where they were discussing botany and she saw a flower growing on a dust heap; the seed must have been sown in the reign of Charles the First. What flowers grew then, she asks the group? She is thinking of herself—“dressing up the figure of myself in my own mind”—but not outright adoring herself. People are careful not to idolize themselves or get close to something ridiculous about themselves. This is odd, perhaps, but maybe it is not. It is important. Think of this! What if the looking glass smashes, and only the shell of what the person is who is seen by other people remains? This would be a “shallow, bald, prominent world.” It would be hard to live in. When we are on buses or railways, we look at each other, but we when are looking in the mirror, we see the vagueness and glassiness. There is an infinite number of these reflections, and novelists in the future will explore these.
But maybe these generalizations are worthless, she wonders, and she considers the “military sound of the word.” Generalizations conjure Sunday lunches and strolls, ways of talking about the dead, clothes, and habits. It brings up the idea of rules—so many rules, like what tablecloths are to be made of.
These things aren’t real, though, not entirely. There are “half freedoms,” but what takes their place? If you’re a woman, maybe men, because “the masculine point of view… governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes Whitaker’s Table of Precedency.” Since the war, the latter is a “phantom” to many people, though, and will soon be tossed into the dustbin with things like Gods, Devils, Hell, and mahogany sideboards.
Sometimes, the mark seems to project from the wall or have a shadow, sort of like those barrows in South Downs that people say are tombs or camps. She prefers them to be tombs because she has the melancholy of most English people. Some antiquary has to have written a book. Who is an antiquary? No doubt a retired colonel leading aged laborers there, while his wife delights in having him out of the house. He will probably decide it is a camp and will get ready to present his findings; however, he will have a stroke, and his last thoughts will not be of his family but rather of the camp and its arrowhead, which is now at the museum with other old things.
She believes that “nothing is proved, nothing is known.” If she got up to look, maybe the mark would be the head of a gigantic old nail from two hundred years ago which was only just now showing. What would she gain if she looked closer? Knowledge? More to think about? She can think from her chair. Also, she wonders what knowledge truly is. Today’s learned men merely come from a line of witches and hermits who dealt with herbs and the stars. We honor them less and our superstitions fall away as our “respect for beauty and health of mind increases.” It is possible to imagine a world that is quiet and spacious, without police officers, specialists, and other knowledge-bearers. One could sit and gaze and watch the fish in the pond. It is peaceful here in the center of the world, gazing up. If only for Whitaker’s Almanac! The Table of Precedency!
She thinks she simply must go look at the mark. Nature, though, is trying to preserve herself. This train of thought wastes energy and besides, Whitaker’s Table of Precedency cannot be overturned. Everyone follows someone. This, Nature suggests, should comfort a person. Nature’s game is to take away thoughts that threaten to excite or pain people.
Now that she grasps the mark, however, she feels like she’s found a plank in the sea. This is something definite and something real, like when one turns on the lights after a nightmare and sees all the solid furniture in the room.
Her thoughts turn to wood, how it comes from a tree, how trees grow, and how she likes to think of the tree itself. She ruminates on the sap, its standing in a snowy winter field, the sound of birds, the feeling of insects, and how even when the tree falls, it still has life in its move to bedrooms, ships, and living rooms. This tree is full of peaceful and happy thoughts.
Something gets in the way. Where was she? What was she thinking about? Downs? Asphodel? Things falling and slipping, an upheaval of matter.
Someone is standing over her. He says he is going out to buy a newspaper. He sighs that nothing ever happens, and he curses the war. All the same, he adds, “I don’t see why we should have a snail on our wall.”
Ah, she thinks. The mark is a snail.
Analysis
“The Mark on the Wall” is Virginia Woolf’s first published short story, and though it is indeed short, it is certainly not without complexity. Its use of stream-of-consciousness, its subtle commentary on men and women, its introspection, and its assertion of reality as subjective and fungible all prefigure her later works. The story stands as an excellent example of early Modernist writing.
In order to best understand the story, we will take it section by section and end with comments that pertain to the work as a whole.
First, while it is not 100% clear that the narrator is a woman, most, if not all, critics agree that it is. Some see the narrator as a stand-in for Woolf herself; others simply point to the comment the narrator makes about the masculine point of view, as well as the traditional gender coding of the two characters in terms of action, dynamism, and certainty.
The beginning of the story is almost immediately complicated when the reader tries to discern the timeline of what is going on. The narrator is currently thinking about the mark on the wall, but she is thinking about when she first saw the mark on the wall. The fire, the book, the chrysanthemums, and the flag on the castle were all the thoughts she had on that January day when she first saw the mark. Since she says “first,” it is implied that there were subsequent sightings. The mark is still there at the time of the writing of the story, which actually may mean it wasn’t a snail at all, for it is likely that the companion would have removed the snail in his irritation. Critic Mark D. Cyr points out that the narrator also uses two different ways of describing the light in the room—”steady” and “in certain lights”—which suggests different days of viewing the mark.
The first and the last paragraphs are in past tense and everything else is in the present, which Cyr says is indicative of “the inner life of the narrator is present tense except when called upon to act in the chronometric world.” Another timing hypothesis is that the mark was indeed a snail that was removed and now she is reflecting upon the mark it left; this would be an instance of “signed and signifier being granted unity, at least unity in regard to individual responses. For the narrator, contemplating the sign (still present, hence present tense) is the same as contemplating the thing itself (which exists only in the past tense) because in her inner life they obtain the same significance.” Ultimately, it is unclear as to whether the thoughts that are spilling out are from mid-January, or from the time of writing, or perhaps both.
The first thing the narrator’s thoughts go to is the old inhabitants of the house. She then ruminates on the conditions of life itself, which, as any modernist no doubt believed, were rapid, full of waste, and all so “casual, all so haphazard.” Modern life is full of useless stuff that apparently means something but is easily discarded. It is fast-paced and fragmented, like zooming by on a train and catching only glimpses of people’s lives. The items she mentions having lost are, as Nina Skrbic notes, “shattered icons of memory” that do not “provide the basis for a wholly adequate account of history. The objects are not arranged historically and cannot be contextualized.” But Woolf and her narrator care more for the present—albeit the shattered and confusing present—than for the past.
Her thoughts turn to melancholy, conjuring up an image of death and then uniting it with the same darkness and silence of birth. Woolf populates the tale with, as Skrbic writes, “an uncanny experience of the physical world” full of “dream images” and “hinted-at realities” that create a “partly playful, partly threatening sense.”
Deep thoughts are easily subsumed by trivial ones, such as the mark itself and the dust she notices on her mantelpiece; critic Laura Marcus notes, “Not all lines or ‘tracks’ of thoughts are equally rewarding.” External things such as a tree tapping on the glass push her thoughts one way, but she seeks to wrest them back and order them for herself. This is somewhat successful when she thinks of Shakespeare, but she soon admits that she chose something boring to focus on.
In order to alleviate the boredom, she lets her thoughts go as they please. They end up at some gathering she was once at where people were discussing botany. From her current perch in her chair looking back on the self that is in her memory, she marvels at how she perceives herself. She does not adore herself, but she is conscious of protecting herself from a position of ridicule. This leads to one of the story’s most interesting conclusions. Critic Mark Hussey explains: “perception of the objects of the external world can reassure us of our existence, but other people can be seen ‘only as reflections of ourselves’, not as knowable objects in the external world. Seen from without, people are ‘phantoms’ in Woolf’s view.” This, of course, is a hallmark of modernist thought.
Moving on, the word “generalizations” sets off a new train of thought that focuses on how there are many aspects of life that are rule-bound and claimants of reality; these conventions are, as Marcus notes, “part of a rigid, disciplinarian, masculine, and Victorian order.” However, she notes that this war—WWI—has disrupted society’s order and civilized structure (a common theme in the writing of modernists on both sides of the Atlantic), and such rules are rendered as mere “phantoms” thrown away in the same dustbin as other former pillars of society such as “the mahogany sideboards and the Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth.”
A moment later, her thoughts jump to the observation that the mark protrudes and seems to have a shadow, which sends her to the barrows of South Downs and how they may be tombs or camps. Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, she decides she wants them to be tombs because she is “desiring melancholy like most English people.” This line of thought ends with the ironic and absurd thoughts of the dying colonel she made up in her mind, who cares more for inconsequential arrowheads than for his family and wife.
Throughout the story, she wonders whether she ought to get up and look at the mark, but she always decides not to, on account of not knowing whether the knowledge she would gain would make her happy or not. She is critical of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and she envisions a world of peace where specialists and experts aren’t trying to explain everything. Things like Whitaker’s Table of Precedency, with its order, lists, dates, and facts, are simply exhausting and vexing, for such things do not really grasp the messiness of the world.
Another reason why she does not stand up to look is that it occurs to her that Nature wants her to do so, and she sees this game for what it is. It seems that Nature wants her to avoid her wasting of energy on speculation, and on entertaining thoughts that threaten to excite or pain. Nature wants her to be content with the order of things. Woolf makes the case through her narrator that this is perhaps not the best thing, and that it is a typically masculine perspective. That perspective is, as Marcus writes, “fact-bound, hierarchical, constraining,” in contrast with what the female narrator exemplifies: “free-associative thinking...the narrator finds that perceptual undecidability allows the mind to wander freely, into and through history, pre-history, and post-history.”
Choosing to continue looking at the mark on her own terms feels like she has “grasped a plank in the sea.” This is real to her, just as the wood of the wall and the trees outside is real. She lets herself delve into what the experience of being a tree must be like, delighting in its pleasant, peaceful life.
Her reveries end rather abruptly when her companion—most likely her husband—stands up and brusquely says he is going out to get a newspaper. Unlike his quiet and pensive wife, he is all words and action. He curses the war and rues that nothing seems to happen, then points out that they can at least get rid of the snail on the wall. She says, whether in memory or in current time, that it is a snail indeed.
Of course, the narrator’s assertion that it is a snail does not necessarily ring true. In fact, as Skrbic claims, the entire story “confronts the nature of contemporary writing by emphasizing the impossibility of telling a complete story.” The mark is a metonym, she writes, and “its mutations act out the possibilities of story/history.” This is a story that “cannot be nailed down...One of the key pleasure...is that the mark can be anything, which opens up possibilities for creative interpretation rather than closing them down. In this radically fragmented context, memory and less and guiding terms.” Overall, the mark may be a snail or may not be, and, as Cyr says, “the narrator has wanted us to beware of the complacency of our formal, ontological, and epistemological assumptions.”
To conclude, Wayne Nary’s discussion on the Einsteinian approach to art as embodied in the story is a compelling one. He first identifies Woolf’s story as one that plays with free association, Freudian daydreaming, and the relative nature of time. Though Woolf was unlikely directly influenced by Einstein’s theory of the relative nature of time as well as its nonlinearity, she would have been aware of this theory at least in a nebulous way, for it was part of general intellectual discourse. Woolf breaks with the literary past and “gives particular emphasis to the relationship between time and perspective, where motion is always relative to the viewer.” Her perspective in the story is “in total subjectivity,” and she plays with the juxtaposition between “the seated figure, who remains at rest in the present state while he mind’s motion takes her into fantasy, experience, and history.” The reader is drawn into the narrator’s space and speed, and the overall narrative “is rendered inarticulate: only a monologue of memories will do, each a series of sensations without connection or logical progression.” This is Woolf’s new fiction, which, along with the scientific and philosophical studies of the day, asserted that “the old common sense no longer applied to the universe, that worlds move and time passes differently for each of us, and that time, light, and motion are bound together in a new reality.”
