Suzana Zink opens her 2018 book, Virginia Woolf’s Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity, with an extended citation of a piece of “fan mail” sent to Virginia Woolf by an American reader named Isabel Forbes Milton. As Zink summarizes, in her letter, “Milton not only notes the recurrence of the room trope in Woolf’s writing but also uses it as a readerly strategy to engage with the author and her fiction.”[1] Indeed, “it seems to me your people are always in rooms,” Milton writes, extending the figuration to Woolf as writer herself: “I think of you, too, within walls—receding deeper & deeper into the background of whatever room you inhabit […] I often try to picture the house you live in.”[2]

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Although these are only the personal ruminations of an individual contemporary reader, what they nevertheless gesture to is the imaginative architecture of Woolf’s fictional worlds as well as the haunting qualia of the material, so insistent and stirring as to permeate beyond the fictive worlds of Woolf’s characters and envelop the writer herself—at least in the affective imagination of her readers. Milton likes to imagine her not merely as inhabiting space the way a portrait subject would emerge against a static backdrop, but actually “receding deeper & deeper into the background of whatever room [she] inhabits […] defining each mutation of the atmosphere as [she] move[s].”[3] In this, Milton seems to echo Woolf’s own description—in “Street Haunting”—of rooms as atmospheric containers. Storytelling, communication, the built environment, and the forces and motions of modernity here coalesce into a meditative tangle that would come to preoccupy Woolf in consistently complex ways throughout much of her later fiction.  

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Let us take, as an example, Woolf’s 1922 novel, Jacob’s Room. An early text, and less celebrated than some of her later fiction, it nevertheless presents a striking case study, showcasing, early on, Woolf’s distinct modernist imaginary of material space, in which rooms, surfaces, and material qualia generate narrative energy before (and sometimes against) symbolic meaning. Woolf’s novel repeatedly stages moments in which material things—ink, lamps, coats, signage, furniture—assert their own sensuous presence, unsettling the boundaries between representation and the brute facticity of matter. Rather than treating domestic interiors as private refuges and the city as their antithesis, the novel renders both as dynamically interpenetrative environments whose surfaces shape affect, perception, and narrative possibility.

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It is to this notion of the ‘homely’ that I thus turn, for much of the work Woolf ultimately does in mediating between the aforementioned categories is aesthetically rooted in her continued reimagination of domestic space. Woolf will go on to construct her most famous and self-consciously complex vision of the home’s material and spatial mediative function in the 1927 novel, To the Lighthouse (a book which she herself felt was “subtler” and “more human”[4] than Jacob’s Room), yet my goal is to sketch a start here. What ultimately arrives in To the Lighthouse is a product of an escalating and evolving anxiety regarding the function and form of material space in narrative representation and meaning-making that is fully articulated for the first time in Woolf’s fiction with the publication of Jacob’s Room.

 

​Woolf opens the novel with a confrontation between the representational world of language and epistemology (the traditional province of the mind) and the ambivalent material object world with which both the mind and the body must somehow reckon:

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       “So of course,” wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels rather deeper in the sand, “there was nothing for it but to leave.”

       Slowly welling from the point of her gold nib, pale blue ink dissolved the full stop; for there her pen stuck; her eyes fixed, and tears slowly filled them. The entire bay quivered; the lighthouse wobbled; and she had the illusion that the mast of Mr. Connor’s little yacht was bending like a wax candle in the sun. She winked quickly. Accidents were awful things. She winked again. The mast was straight; the waves were regular; the lighthouse was upright; but the blot had spread. (Jacob’s Room, 3)

 

From its opening pages, the text reveals a key thematic concern in the interplay of the world of signs and that of “brute” material “facticity.”[5] The “pale blue ink” demands to be acknowledged as such, as it foregrounds its qualia and verges on excess, “dissolving” the lexical symbol of the full stop, spilling it over its intended borders. At the same time, Betty’s tears make play with the scene of the world before her, forcing solidities to wobble and quiver. Experience is ever-shifting, and the world that is restored (as when she blinks away the trickster tears) is nevertheless a changed one. The material effects of the unruly ink on Betty’s page has set in and created a mark (and punctuated an event) beyond Betty’s intentions. The “blot ha[s] spread,” the ink has asserted the agency implicit in its very materiality (properties of cohesion and surface tension will make liquid spread and seep into a porous page). Hence, the “crises of many kinds” that Douglas Mao traces in Mrs. Dalloway—which “occur under the shade of this allegory of a world independent of allegory, this symbol of what comes before the symbolic”[6]—is already in process of definition in the earliest pages of Jacob’s Room. Mao sees it in Septimus’ registering of material trace as alternately “index” or “sheer sensuousness.” For my own purposes, I define this “sensuousness” with a nod to Charles Peirce’s “quale” (further developed in anthropology as qualia), or the material “firstness” of an object, independent of semiotic formulation, relation, or representation.[7]

 

​I invoke qualia, in particular, in accounting for the objects housed in the text’s various rooms, which compose the affective and thematic landscapes of the rooms themselves. The novel’s first representation of an empty room arrives early:  

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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. […] Mrs. Flanders had left her sewing on the table. There were her large reels of white cotton and her steel spectacles […] There were the bulrushes and the Strand magazines; and the linoleum sandy from the boys’ boots. (7)

 

This room, temporarily vacated by its usual inhabitants, sets up the way in which this text will continue to treat interior space: punctuated by rooms functioning as scenes or tableaus containing numerous threads of stories indexed by material objects momentarily left idle. The oil lamp on the table is simultaneously superfluous (left unutilized) and urging (an object that should not be left alone for long). Mrs. Flanders’ abandoned sewing and spectacles register a narrative interruption at the same time as they tease a number of speculative narrative beginnings begging completion. The sandy linoleum, too, presents as a testament to a day’s worth of activities left un-narrated and an incitement for further action that will begin with the dawn of the new day. These objects index the continuity of human lives. The novel develops their representations further as indexes of the parallel and ambivalent continuity of the object world through which human life attempts to accomplish itself, as outside, the rain pours down, “beating” the aster to the earth, filling an child’s bucket “half-full of rain-water” (8-9). The transition from the oil lamp’s warm glow to the dominion of darkness and rain upon objects abandoned outdoors constructs the sense of ambivalence that enters the scene as it shifts to figuring the object world as it exists beyond human agency.

 

​Later in the text, perhaps in an affective parallel to the transformation of the novel’s protagonist from child to adult, this melancholy gives way to a more explicit anxiety about the presence and function of mundane objects in daily life. In a tableau of objects composing the scene of a workplace corridor, we glimpse:

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Innumerable overcoats of the quality prescribed hung empty all day in the corridors, but as the clock struck six each was exactly filled, and the little figures, split apart into trousers or moulded into a single thickness, jerked rapidly with angular forward motion along the pavement (51)

 

In this momentary temporal suspension, the pattern of objects left temporarily alone and taken up again unravels into something almost sinister. Rather than performing the functions of world-building and narrative scaffolding, the objects in this scene assert their qualia to dominate it. The overcoats’ hollowness indexes a need to be “exactly filled,” turning human agency into a mere object relation—the human body subordinated to the fulfilment of the overcoat’s ‘desire.’ Anxiety replaces melancholy as the dominant affect, focusing the emotional tone of a modernity realized through processes of production and commodification that enact the objectification of the human on a global scale. It is only fitting, then, that the episode concludes with a striking refiguration of the novel’s opening conflict of representation and material “firstness.” As the aforementioned “little figures”—stuffed overcoats—proceed on their evening commute,

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Beneath the pavement, sunk in the earth, hollow drains lined with yellow light for ever conveyed them this way and that, and large letters upon enamel plates represented in the underworld the parks, squares, and circuses of the upper. […] Only at one point—it may be Acton, Holloway, Kensal Rise, Caledonian Road—does the name mean shops where you buy things, and houses, in one of which, down to the right, where the pollard trees grow out of the paving stones, there is a square curtained window, and a bedroom. (51)

 

The intersection of representational and material worlds here is palpably confused. The underworld space that is characterized as so unnatural by the narrator is one that is constructed by “letters upon enamel plates”—objects that index but do not give forth real material spaces to be entered into, felt, inhabited. The unspoken crux of the matter is that the “one point” at which the enamel plates give forth an inhabitable space is almost entirely individual; each index of place only realizable as privatized and isolating—only here and now, only if one emerges from the flow, exits the station. The anxiety that permeates object function extends into representations of space and place. To borrow Anthony Vidler’s characterization, material space hence does not exist merely as “a passive container of objects and bodies,” but is “charged with all the dimensions of a relative, moving, dynamic entity.”[8] 

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This is echoed in Woolf’s broader treatment of the felt force of modernity, appearing first in this text and developing through much of her subsequent fiction. To keep our focus on Jacob’s Room, its most striking expression in this text occurs in the following formulation:

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With equal nonchalance a dozen young men in the prime of life descend with composed faces into the depths of the sea […] These actions, together with the incessant commerce of banks, laboratories, chancelleries, and houses of business, are the strokes which oar the world forward, they say. And they are dealt by men as smoothly sculptured as the impassive policeman at Ludgate Circus. […] his face is stiff from force of will, and lean from the effort of keeping it so. When his right arm rises, all the force in his veins flows straight from shoulder to finger-tips; not an ounce is diverted into sudden impulses, sentimental regrets, wire-drawn distinctions. The buses punctually stop. (125)

 

A scene which begins with the massive, culturally-laden specters of war and empire ultimately diffuses (but does not dissolve) into the parallel materialities of the mechanized modern object world and the biological textures of the policeman’s body at Ludgate Circus. Just as this passage connects the physiological force along the veins and tissues in the policeman’s arm to the traffic patterns of omnibuses in the street, so does it bring into view the matrix of interconnected materialities and symbologies that work together to propel forward something as colossal as world war. “It is thus that we live, they say,” the narrator offers in closing the scene, “driven by an unseizable force. They say that the novelists never catch it; that it goes hurtling through their nets and leaves them torn to ribbons” (125), yet it is exactly through the welding together of the ribbons of material qualia and representational symbols that Woolf has managed to capture this force, tracing its hurtling drift through embodied interstices, motor engines, urban traffic flows, national politicking, and their global embodied ramifications. 

 

​It may seem that we have now departed from the figurations of domestic space which opened this essay, yet it is a feature of Woolf’s text that interior domestic space is closely connected to broader city spaces. As Zink helpfully points out, “Woolf’s rooms are not discrete spaces, conceived in strict separation from other ‘geographies’ of modernity, but, rather, they connect with, and participate in, these geographies.”[9] However, while Zink draws a substantial affective difference between the domestic as “shell-like covering” and the “kaleidoscopic images of the city,” I rather find that Jacob’s Room lends itself to a more complex reading, in which a safe and enclosed domestic space cannot easily be contrasted with an antithetically multidimensional and taxing urban environment. In fact, Woolf’s own figure of the “shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves” threatens to unravel as quickly as it is constructed:

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The proximity of the omnibuses gave the outside passengers an opportunity to stare into each other’s faces. Yet few took advantage of it. […] Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title, James Spalding, or Charles Budgeon, and the passengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all—save “a man with a red moustache,” “a young man in grey smoking a pipe.” The October sunlight rested upon all these men and women sitting immobile; and little Johnnie Sturgeon took the chance to swing down the staircase, carrying his large mysterious parcel, and so dodging a zigzag course between the wheels he reached the pavement, started to whistle a tune and was soon out of sight—for ever. […] Oh yes, human life is very tolerable on the top of an omnibus in Holborn […] and if there is such a thing as a shell secreted by man to fit man himself here we find it, on the banks of the Thames, where the great streets join and St. Paul’s Cathedral, like the volute on the top of the snail shell, finishes it off. (49-50, emphasis mine)

 

The shell as imagined here is a communal one—its bounds and features delimited by the material boundaries and landmarks of the urban landscape, and the life that it encloses is general, public, and impermanent. The interpersonal dynamics of urban citizens here are registered through the juxtaposed cabins of two omnibuses facing each other, each offering up its human occupants for “reading” that is nevertheless not undertaken except at the surface level. The omnibus and the enclosed space that it carves out in the city streetscape—itself an alternate configuration of the “shell secreted by man to fit man himself”—hence allows us to draw a more productive connection between interior domestic and urban public spaces. If, in Mao’s words—“existential crisis begins not with the subject but with the object”[10]—then here, subject and object positions are unsurprisingly muddled:

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The march that the mind keeps beneath the windows of others is queer enough. Now distracted by brown panelling; now by a fern in a pot; here improvising a few phrases to dance with the barrel-organ; again snatching a detached gaiety from a drunken man; then altogether absorbed by words the poor shout across the street at each other (so outright, so lusty)—yet all the while having for centre, for magnet, a young man alone in his room. (75)

 

As an urban flâneur, the subject has as his imaginative focus the glimpse afforded from the street into the private domestic scenes framed by windows as though by frames, yet at the same time, the streetscape as scene of community, modernity, and commodity relation reorients the subject as an object to be observed—observing in turn. What is figured here will receive more developed treatment in Mrs. Dalloway, wherein interaction between two unfamiliar individuals is rendered as interaction between two scenes of unconnected rooms.

 

​This stylization of interior scenes as moments of temporarily arrested mobility set against an otherwise pervasive general modern force of motion interestingly echoes an image that Woolf’s narrator seems to apply to the production of the novel’s very text and narrative: that of “chasms of continuity” (76). As made clear by the novel’s episodic structure, Woolf is interested in fragmentation of scene on a formal level as well as a symbolic one. “In Evelina’s shop off Shaftesbury Avenue the parts of a woman were shown separate” (97), much as parts are continually filled in for wholes over the course of the novel’s progress. As “Street Haunting” further makes clear, however, this guiding focus on contained scene as registered in the material and representative features of the text, has its limitations:

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How beautiful a London street is […] offices and houses where at this hour fierce lights burn over maps, over documents, over desks […] or more suffusedly the firelight wavers and the lamplight falls upon the privacy of some drawing-room, its easy chairs, its papers, its china, its inlaid table, and the figure of a woman […] But here we must stop peremptorily. We are in danger of digging deeper than the eye approves; we are impeding our passage down the smooth stream by catching at some branch or root. […] Let us dally a little longer, be content still with surfaces only (“Street Haunting” 178-9, emphasis mine)

 

If the registering of a material scene lends itself to narrative stimulus—as the beginning, the teasing, of speculative narrative threads—then it is a technique that Woolf seems to find most interesting only as it ever skims the surface. She continually holds her narrative off from probing further or venturing into explication. The voyeuristic eye must continually return to the material surface of the object world, and Woolf facilitates this through a style that continually “bookends” a number of scenes through just such a return. Take, for instance, this scene between Jacob and a young woman:

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The fire burnt clear between two pillars of greenish marble, and on the mantelpiece there was a green clock guarded by a Britannia leaning on her spear. As for pictures—a maiden in a large hat offered roses over the garden gate to a gentleman in eighteenth-century costume. A mastiff lay extended against a battered door. The lower panes of the windows were of ground glass, and the curtains, accurately looped, were of plush and green too.

       Laurette and Jacob sat with their toes in the fender side by side, in two large chairs covered in green plush. (82)

 

We enter into the catalogue of the scene’s material qualities through the depiction of the mantelpiece, registering its connection to the trinket effects of empire (“a Britannia leaning on her spear”), tradition (“a maiden […] a gentleman in eighteenth-century costume”), and domesticity (“a mastiff lay extended”), as well as the safety and comfort indexed by the fire in the hearth against which Jacob and Laurette, in the attitude of a settled married couple, warm their feet. Yet the domestic illusion is broken up by a return (with a twist) to the same object that initiated it, the mantelpiece: “She got up gracefully, calmly. Jacob got up. She smiled at him. As she shut the door he put so many shillings on the mantelpiece” (83). In such clever inversion of a scene (or, perhaps, less inversion than realization of the diverse narrative potentials contained in the initial material tableau) Woolf demonstrates a sleight of hand that makes narrative pressure of mere surface. What matters is not the reality effect, or even explication; it is that “people come together in a room” (115) and that—perhaps—it is by looking at the room that we might arrive at an aesthetic and emotional fulfillment grounded in the surface itself. Woolf’s objects and spaces manifest foremost as narrative openings rather than signs of foreclosed tales or tools of the reality effect—“Paterian flame […] enclosed in the solid thing.”[11]

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In closing, it is worth turning to the space that closes the text itself: the image of Jacob’s empty room and the objects left behind in the wake of his death: “‘He left everything just as it was,’ […] ‘Nothing arranged. All his letters strewn about for any one to read’ (143). This emphasis on the letters left behind is resonant with Woolf’s own experience with posthumous letters—those she wrote in the wake of her brother’s death, in which, rather than reporting the fact of his death to a mutual friend, she rather fabricated an alternate reality. Summarized by Kamran Javadizadeh:

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Virginia went on lying to her friend [Violet Dickinson] for the next month. In nineteen letters, sent over the course of twenty-eight days, she fabricated a vivid story of Thoby’s recovery. […] After two weeks, Virginia slipped herself into the narrative […] And when nearly a month had passed since her brother had died, Virginia was full of talk about what lay ahead.[12]

 

Certainly, Woolf’s experience of her brother’s illness and death left a mark on the text of Jacob’s Room in many ways, but the connection via letters is particularly striking. Woolf devotes several lines—emphatically set aside and punctuated in the Norton edition—to the contents of the letters Jacob leaves behind:

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Bonamy took up a bill for a hunting-crop.

“That seems to be paid,” he said.

There were Sandra’s letters.

Mrs. Durrant was taking a party to Greenwich.

Lady Rocksbier hoped for the pleasure…

Listless is the air in an empty room, just welling the curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker arm-chair creaks, though no one sits there. (143)

 

In the juxtaposed context of Woolf’s own alternate narrative (re)construction in the wake of her brother’s death, these fictional messages take on a proleptic function: narratively imaging a future that is already foreclosed by Jacob’s death but which the material presence of these objects nevertheless stubbornly indexes. Even on the level of syntax and grammar, the past-tense register of Jacob’s own action (the bill for the hunting-crop that has been paid) bleeds into the demand for an implied future action in the presence of the remaining enters that still need to be answered. While in Jessica Burstein’s view of what she terms “cold modernism,” “modernism’s story of the individual has running through its heart the presentation of a world in which the individual has no place,”[13] Jacob’s Room seems rather emphatically interested in tracing the ways in which the object world pivots upon indexing the human—phantom, transient, but nevertheless touched by human attention, anxiety, or absence.

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Perhaps it is fitting end with a return to Milton’s fan letter and the desire it expresses to envision Woolf, the writer, receding into the depths of an undisclosed room. To Milton’s image, we may pose the counter of Leonard Woolf’s own marvelously palpable depiction of Woolf at work, secluded in the back of a the house in what served as a storeroom for the Hogarth Press: “there embedded among the pyramids and mountains of parcels, books, and brown paper sat Virginia with her disembowelled chair, her table, and her gas fire.”[14] Between Milton’s formless, shadowy interior and Leonard’s documented one lies the very tension that animates Woolf’s fiction: the pull between the speculative depths we might only glimpse upon the surface of the material and the power of the material itself to quietly but insistently shape our very seeing.​​

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Notes​

[1] Suzana Zink, Virginia Woolf’s Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 1.

[2] Ibid, 2.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3: 1925-1930, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), entry for 5 September 1926. 

[5] Douglas Mao offers a particularly neat formulation of this tension. See Douglas Mao, Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 48.

[6] Ibid, 47.

[7] For a well-parsed overview of Peirce’s semiotic categories, see: Donald E. Buzzelli, “The Argument of Peirce’s ‘New List of Categories’” in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society (8) 2, pp.63-89.

[8] Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000), 3.

[9] Zink, Virginia Woolf’s Rooms, 5.

[10] Mao, Solid Objects, 43.

[11] Mao, Solid Objects, 37.

[12] Kamran Javadizadeh, “How Virginia Woolf Kept Her Brother Alive in Letters” in The New Yorker (July 8, 2020). Online.

[13] Jessica Burstein, Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2012), 3.

[14] Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939 (London: Hogarth Press, 1970), 53.

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References

Beer, Gillian. Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground. University of Michigan Press, 1996.
Burstein, Jessica. Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art. Penn State UP, 2012.
Javadizadeh, Kamran. “How Virginia Woolf Kept Her Brother Alive in Letters.” The New Yorker, 8 July 2020, www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-virginia-woolf-kept-her-brother-alive-in-letters. Accessed 23 April 2022. 
Mao, Douglas. Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production. Princeton UP, 1998.
Vidler, Anthony. Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000. 
Woolf, Leonard. Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939. London: Hogarth Press, 1970. 
Woolf, Virginia. Jacob’s Room, edited by Suzanne Raitt, W.W. Norton & Company, 2007. 
Woolf, Virginia. “Street Haunting.” Selected Essays, edited by David Bradshaw, Oxford UP, 2008, pp.177-187.  
Zink, Suzana. Virginia Woolf’s Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.