23 pages • 46 minutes read
Virginia WoolfThe Mark on the Wall
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1917A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Impossibility of Establishing Certitude and Static Meaning
Best expressed through the narrator’s refusal to rise from her chair and assign a definitive meaning and identification to the mark on the wall, this theme permeates the story. Rising from the chair to observe and assign one denotative and connotative meaning to the mark on the wall is metaphorically correlated to the process of using language and empiricism to assign definitive meaning to objects in the world. The narrator’s refusal to execute these actions—and her alternative creation of myriad meanings, images, and possibilities through freely-associating thoughts, feelings, and ideas with the mark on the wall—forwards the notion that the conventions of language and meaning-making which domineeringly proliferate in the world around her are ultimately insufficient and undesirable.
The narrator sees the mandate to use the linguistic, academic, and gender conventions of her society as not only oppressive norms, but as fraudulent ideological tools which purport to name and formalize truth and knowledge while actually masking and limiting all that could be known and knowable. Simultaneously, however, these conventions are inescapable; by virtue of her even using the English language and making use of the references that she does (including Whitaker’s Almanack, Shakespeare, classical and mythology), she signals the fact that she is inexorably ensconced within the dominant conventions of her society. Whether she can help it or not—or would prefer it or not—those conventions are the basic means by which she has been inured to both create and understand meaning. This is where the pathos of this theme is brought to bear: the conventionsthat dictate the creation of meaning are flawed and fraudulent. They purport to create true meaning and knowledge. The narrator sees the holes within this premise, but is still in essence doomed to use it, in order to create meanings that only bear the veneer of verisimilitude while remaining fundamentally un-whole and untrustworthy, due to the nature by which they are formalized and conceived.
The Psychological Tyranny of Patriarchy
This theme is interrelated with the previous one. The conventions the narrator’s society uses to create, establish, and formalize knowledge are inextricably linked to the patriarchal system which serves as the basis for Western twentieth-century social organization. The narrator therefore uses patriarchy, and her place within it as a woman, as an entry point for naming the oppressiveness of the society that surrounds her. The theme is most prominently expressed through, curiously enough, a female figure: the repeatedly-mentioned housekeeper, with a profile that resembles that of a policeman, who hovers over the narrator in the narrator’s imagination, chiding the narrator to rise and attend to the mark on the wall.
The mark on the wall, in this regard, is thus a stain on the narrator’s domestic realm—the realm over which she is supposed to preside as a woman. The fact that this housekeeper exercises a menacing, domineering presence as she impugns the narrator’s domestic skills—and thus her worth as a woman—correlates to Woolf’s thematic argument that patriarchy exercises psychological tyranny over the female narrator’s internal life. The mark on the wall also represents a phenomenological anomaly that, according to the conventions of her society, must be named, categorized, and identified according to its own internal systems of knowledge. Through this thematic coalescence, Woolf argues that the larger conventions and meaning systems of her society at large are inextricably linked to the mandates and expectations of patriarchy. The theme also expresses itself through the narrator’s condemnation of Whitaker’s Table of Precedency, which issues mandates for how titled men are to be addressed and treated in social settings. Each of these elements in the story assert that masculine modes of establishing knowledge, identity, and being exercise an oppressive tyranny over her intellectual and psychological life as a woman.
Related Titles
By Virginia Woolf
