Virginia Woolf Study Guide for "The Mark on the Wall"
...he wall; it stabilizes her as she questions not her own life so much as the nature of society/civilization and its rules. Within this general context, the associations gain significance. Besides features of the surrounding room, "the old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower" and the "calvacade of red knights" (1916) come to her mind first. Why? And why is the "fancy" a recurring one? Why is she glad the mark interrupts it? To know, you must keep accumulating her associations. She next speculates that perhaps the mark was left by the room's preceding owners, people who think "art should have ideas behind it" (1917). The significant aspect of her musings about these people is how she perceives her social interaction with them: abrupt, quick, over with suddenly, like the interaction with a "young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train" (1917). She determines to dismiss the mark since "once a thing's done, no one ever knows how it happened" (1917). But that dismissal leads her to a disturbing thought: "what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilisation" (1917). Remember the "fancy"? What did it involve? an ordered society with flags that mark rank and regiments that are structured into calvacades? Think of the fancy as part of "all our civilisation" from the past. Her mind continues through a litany of things lost in her lifetime--opals, bird cages, hoop skirts, a hand organ, book-binding tools. These recollections cause her to "liken [life] to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour" (1917). She continues with this analogy, liking it, recognizing "the rapidity of life, [but troubled by] the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard" (1917). What about after life is over? She thinks things of nature will be experienced then, after life is over, but she doesn't know, so--she returns to the mark, her stabilizer. However, the mark may "not [be] a hole after all" (1918), she thinks. She wants to sink into realms that she doesn't have to leave--Shakespeare; the thoughts of "modest mouse-coloured people" (1918) about such things as botany and the seeds sown during Charles I's reign; and on and on. At one point, she wonders, "Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people--what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in" (1918). By now, you should have realized that the narrator is probing deep and basic philosophical questions: what is the true nature of the world? what is real? how do we know the difference between what is real and what is not (since change, "rapidity," seems to rule the course of life)? Her questions about the "realness" of society surface when she remembers that at an earlier time, "there was a rule for everything" (1919). What's now in place, she asks? The answer: "Men, perhaps, should you be a woman; the masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes Whitaker's Table of Precedency, which has become, I suppose, since the war, half a phantom to many men and women...[and]which soon, one may hope, will be laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go...leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom--if freedom exists..." (1919). Obviously, the narrator has deep-seated questions about the essential human condition--can we even be free? Her mind goes back to the mark, and just as quickly, through more associations. Artifacts are pulled from varied civilisations over centuries, but their accumulation in a museum (bottom of 1919) is "proving I really don't know what. No, no, no...