The Mark on the Wall

“But as for that mark, I’m not sure about it; I don’t believe it was made by a nail after all; it’s too big, too round, for that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn’t be able to say for certain; because once a thing’s done, no one ever knows how it happened. O dear me, the mystery of life! The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity!”

Here, the narrator directly states the story’s central theme. She is refusing to rise from her chair in order to investigate and empirically categorize the mark on the wall, because she sees that endeavor as an artificial foreclosure of the myriad possibilities of knowledge, being, experience, and perception. To her, to abide by the prevailing norms and conventions that her society has established for creating and formalizing knowledge would be folly—“inaccurate” and “ignorant.” 

“Why, if someone wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour—landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one’s hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one’s hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard […]” 

In Greek mythology, the asphodel meadows are the place that the souls of those who lived unremarkable lives go after they die. This quote, then, signals the narrator’s education in classical mythology, as well as her discomfort with dominant society’s norms. She feels that the conceptual frameworks that she has been given to understand and live life are insufficient. To be told that one spends life fumbling through a chaos of time and experience, only to arrive at the feet of an almighty God “entirely naked” and therefore wholly unprepared and inchoate is entirely unsatisfying. 

“But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one’s eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? As for saying which are trees, and which are men and women, or whether there are such things, that one won’t be in a condition to do for fifty years or so. There will be nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up perhaps, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct colour—dim pinks and blues—which will, as time goes on, become more definite, become—I don’t know what […]” 

In contravention of the previous quote, the narrator here forwards an alternative and decidedly non-mainstream conception of death. While still relying on a mythological invocation (“Giants”), the narrator nonetheless poses an afterlife that is not as sharply rendered and moralistic as are traditional conceptions of heaven and hell. Her version of the afterlife speaks to that which she finds valuable and beautiful: the liminal spaces which, though they may be full of rich sensory detail, do not squelch the possibility of knowledge and experience with anything as vulgar as definitive, deadening, and black-and-white categorizations. 

“And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be caused by some black substance, such as a small rose leaf, left over from the summer, and I, not being a very vigilant housekeeper—look at the dust on the mantelpiece, for example, the dust which, so they say, buried Troy three times over, only fragments of pots utterly refusing annihilation, as one can believe […] I know a housekeeper, a woman with the profile of a policeman, those little round buttons marked even upon the edge of her shadow, a woman with a broom in her hand, a thumb on picture frames, an eye under beds, and she talks always of art. She is coming nearer and nearer; and now, pointing to certain spots of yellow rust on the fender, she becomes so menacing that to oust her, I shall have to end her by taking action: I shall have to get up and see for myself […]”

This is the first appearance of the figure of the housekeeper in the story. The quote plainly demonstrates that the narrator acutely feels the pressure put on her as a woman: she must keep a clean house. The housekeeper’s menacing, meddling, and judgmental presence, as well as the narrator’s continuing refusal to ascertain what the mark is—and by extension, fulfill her feminine duty by cleaning it up—instantiates the narrator’s rebellious position. 

“I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. To steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes […]” 

Here, the narrator decisively states the method of thought and knowledge production that she prefers. Rather than being roused from her own internal life by the artificial and external modes and dictates of her society—here symbolized by the mandate to rise from her chair as well as the insufficient “hard and separate facts” that characterize only a surface knowledge of things—she would rather be left alone, without interruption, in her own stream of consciousness. It is there that she finds true fulfillment and a truer knowledge of self and the world. 

“Shakespeare…A man who sat himself solidly in an arm-chair, and looked into the fire, so—A shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high Heaven down through his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand, and people, looking in through the open door,—for this scene is supposed to take place on a summer’s evening,—But how dull this is, this historical fiction! It doesn’t interest me at all.”

In this quote, the narrator muses on Shakespeare. She recites the romanticized vision of the man that has doubtlessly been perpetuated by the society around her. This vision is meant to valorize the figure of the male genius, and the narrator here expresses her impatience with such uncritical beatification, characterizing it as dull, fraudulent, and without true relevance to her own intellectual life. 

“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, which soon, one may hope, will be laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go, the mahogany sideboards and Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom—if freedom exists […]”

This quote encapsulates the narrator’s engagement with gender and knowledge. On the one hand, it baldly asserts that masculine modes of establishing and ascertaining knowledge exercise unquestioned dominance in her society, so much so that men have no concept of what it is to be a woman inside of the confines of the patriarchal society which they reify. She expresses hope that patriarchal modes of knowledge and being will eventually fade awayand that they are, indeed, already fraying. Melancholically, however, and on the other hand, she acknowledges that these male/patriarchal means of establishing meaning and being are both so pervasive and opaque that whether meaning can be established outside of themremains dubious.  

“In certain lights, that mark on the wall seems actually to project from the wall. Nor is it entirely circular. I cannot be sure, but it seems to cast a perceptible shadow, suggesting that if I ran my finger down the strip of the wall it would, at a certain point, mount and descend a small tumulus, a smooth tumulus like those barrows on the South Downs which are, they say, either tombs or camps. Of the two I should prefer them to be tombs, desiring melancholy like most English people and finding it natural at the end of a walk to think of the bones stretched beneath the turf.” 

This quote demonstrates the richness that the narrator’s stream of consciousness/free association can produce. Instead of essentially using the empirical and intellectual conventions that would dictate that she merely identify and then categorize the mark on the wall, the narrator finds much more fulfillment in using the mark on the wall, and its ambiguity, as a springboard for introspection and imagination. Her act of openly accepting and reveling in ambiguity can be read as a form of rebellion against a (masculine) mode of knowledge which seeks to eradicate ambiguity, and the possible riches that it can produce. 

“No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known. And if I were to get up at this very moment and ascertain that the mark on the wall is really—what shall we say? —the head of a gigantic old nail, driven in two hundred years ago, which has now, owing to the patient attrition of many generations of housemaids, revealed its head above the coat of paint, and is taking its first view of modern life in the sight of a white-walled fire-lit room, what should I gain? Knowledge? Matter for further speculation? I can think sitting still as well as standing up.” 

Here, the narrator boldly indicts her society’s dominant modes of establishing knowledge, and utilizes the issue of rising from her chair as a metaphor for being compelled, against her will, to exercise those modes. She asserts that, if she were to undertake the kind of intellectual and empirical investigation of the mark on the wall that her society mandates (metaphorically represented by her rising from her chair), it would ultimately result in a faulty and unsatisfying conclusion. She asserts that her manner of addressing the mark on the wallby staying seated (and thus metaphorically resisting her society’s mandate)is more valid and fulfilling than obeying the norms and conventions that are forced upon her. 

“And what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interrogating shrew-mice, and writing down the language of the stars? And the less we honour them as our superstitions dwindle and our respect for beauty and health of mind increases […] Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers with the profiles of policemen, a world which one could slice with ones thought as a fish slices water with his fin…” 

Women’s modes of knowledge and being are, historically, much more likely to be condemned as superstitious—the Salem Witch Trials is a prominent example of this phenomenon. This quote piercingly reverses that norm as the narrator pointedly associates the revered men of her society with superstition, and condemns masculine/patriarchal modes of knowledge as detrimental to the beauty and health of the mind. She also asserts that the abolition of the dominion of masculine modes of knowledge would release her own intellect and consciousness into a kind of delicious and beautiful freedom. 

“Here is Nature once more at her old game of self-preservation. This train of thought, she perceives, is threatening mere waste of energy, even some [coalition] with reality, for who will ever be able to lift a finger against Whitaker’s Table of Precedency? The Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor; the Lord High Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of York. Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy of Whitaker; and the great thing is to know who follows whom. Whitaker knows, and let that, so Nature counsels, comfort you, instead of enraging you; and if you can’t be comforted, if you must shatter this hour of peace, think of the mark on the wall.” 

This quote is an intriguingly complex moment in the story. The narrator sarcastically pairs Nature and the dominant masculine ideology that dictates norms for establishing knowledge—and thereby implies that those ideological norms mask themselves as simply natural, rather than engineered and artificial. However, the narrator also curiously refers to Nature using a feminine pronoun. In so doing, Woolf effectively produces a position that is counter to gender essentialism. The narrator’s choice of words implicitly asserts that the masculine ideology that pervades her society is so effective that feminine figures (and by extension, women themselves) can participate in replicating the damaging and oppressive machinations of patriarchy. 

“Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel I have grasped a plank in the sea; I feel a satisfying sense of reality which at once turns the two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades. Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of […]” 

In this quote, the narrator speaks in both literal and metaphorical terms. On a literal level, she asserts that she is much more content to ground and orient herself using physical realities and her own phenomenological perception of those realities, than to soothe herself using the dominant (masculine) intellectual and social modes of establishing knowledge and reality that surround her. Those modes are here metaphorically referred to by her reference to the Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor—those allusions are meant to invoke Whitaker’s Table of Precedency and its mandates to treat ranking male figures in particular ways. 

“One by one the fibres snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth; then the last storm comes and, falling, the highest branches drive deep into the ground again. Even so, life isn’t done with; there are a million patient, watchful, lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, lining rooms where men and women sit after tea, smoking their cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree. I should like to take each one separately—but something is getting in the way […]” 

This quote displays the end of the narrator’s final musing/reverie: the fantasy of becoming a tree. In lush language, she muses on the multiplicity and almost infinite nature of the life of a tree. In so doing, she signals that she would much rather find respite in her (feminine) mode of establishing knowledge, which is characterized throughout the story as associative, content with ambiguity, tolerant and embracing of multiplicity. This feminine mode of knowledge is here analogously tied to the unending, complex, and plural life of a tree. In an ironic and thematically-apt turn, the narrator’s enrapturing reverie is about to be interrupted by her husband at the end of this quote.