The Mark on the Wall

The narrator is a woman who appears to be similar to Virginia Woolf herself in class and circumstance. She seems to be an upper-class wife who is expected to be a domestic creature who looks after the cleanliness of the house. She is also clearly highly educated; her diction and tone display a high degree of formal command of the English language, and her references include Greek mythology, Shakespeare, studies of British royalty, and Whitaker’s Table of Precedency, the last of which is a section of the annually-published Whitaker’s Almanack, which details the hierarchical order in which royalties and dignitaries must be addressed and treated by society. Although clearly knowledgeable about such things, she is often very critical of these markers of class and erudition. Indeed, she wishes for Whitaker’s Table of Precedency to quickly become altogether obsolete, and openly mocks it.

The narrator is markedly ill-at-ease with her contexts. She sees the wifely duty of keeping a home as a most unwelcome imposition, so much so that in her mind, the duty is personified by a menacing housekeeper “with the profile of a policeman” (3). She openly rejects and flouts the norms of the male-dominated society around her; instead, she finds great fulfillment through her mind and its incredibly rich inner life. And, although she is indeed undertaking a quiet kind of rebellion for the entirety of the story, she is plagued by repeated doubts that a true, full escape from the stranglehold of her society is possible. Overall, the narrator is a deeply sensitive, passionate person who insists on her own intellectual freedom.