The Mark on the Wall

[Angel]

The Mark on the Wall

Virginia Woolf

PERHAPS IT WAS the middle of January in the present year that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw. So now I think of the fire; the steady film of yellow light upon the page of my book; the three chrysanthemums in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must have been the winter time, and we had just finished our tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time. I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red knights riding up the side of the black rock. Rather to my relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps. The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.

How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it.... If that mark was made by a nail, it can't have been for a picture, it must have been for a miniature–the miniature of a lady with white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations. A fraud of course, for the people who had this house before us would have chosen pictures in that way–an old picture for an old room. That is the sort of people they were–very interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such queer places, because one will never see them again, never know what happened next. They wanted to leave this house because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so he said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder, as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train.

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. Oh! dear me, the mystery of life; The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our possessions we have–what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilization–let me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of losses–what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble–three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ–all gone, and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one 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....

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....

And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be caused by some round 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.

The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane.... 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.... Shakespeare.... Well, he will do as well as another. 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. I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest mouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises. They are not thoughts directly praising oneself; that is the beauty of them; they are thoughts like this:

"And then I came into the room. They were discussing botany. I said how I'd seen a flower growing on a dust heap on the site of an old house in Kingsway. The seed, I said, must have been sown in the reign of Charles the First. What flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First?" I asked–(but I don't remember the answer). Tall flowers with purple tassels to them perhaps. And so it goes on. All the time I'm dressing up the figure of myself in my own mind, lovingly, stealthily, not openly adoring it, for if I did that, I should catch myself out, and stretch my hand at once for a book in self-protection. Indeed, it is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed in any longer. Or is it not so very curious after all? It is a matter of great importance. 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. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror; that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes. And the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps–but these generalizations are very worthless. The military sound of the word is enough. It recalls leading articles, cabinet ministers–a whole class of things indeed which as a child one thought the thing itself, the standard thing, the real thing, from which one could not depart save at the risk of nameless damnation. Generalizations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes, and habits–like the habit of sitting all together in one room until a certain hour, although nobody liked it. There was a rule for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was that they should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon them, such as you may see in photographs of the carpets in the corridors of the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things I wonder, those real standard things? 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 the Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom–if freedom exists....

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 that 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.... There must be some book about it. Some antiquary must have dug up those bones and given them a name.... What sort of a man is an antiquary, I wonder? Retired Colonels for the most part, I daresay, leading parties of aged labourers to the top here, examining clods of earth and stone, and getting into correspondence with the neighbouring clergy, which, being opened at breakfast time, gives them a feeling of importance, and the comparison of arrow-heads necessitates cross-country journeys to the county towns, an agreeable necessity both to them and to their elderly wives, who wish to make plum jam or to clean out the study, and have every reason for keeping that great question of the camp or the tomb in perpetual suspension, while the Colonel himself feels agreeably philosophic in accumulating evidence on both sides of the question. It is true that he does finally incline to believe in the camp; and, being opposed, indites a pamphlet which he is about to read at the quarterly meeting of the local society when a stroke lays him low, and his last conscious thoughts are not of wife or child, but of the camp and that arrowhead there, which is now in the case at the local museum, together with the foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan nails, a great many Tudor clay pipes, a piece of Roman pottery, and the wine-glass that Nelson drank out of–proving I really don't know what.

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. 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 one's thought as a fish slices the water with his fin, grazing the stems of the water-lilies, hanging suspended over nests of white sea eggs.... How peaceful it is down here, rooted in the centre of the world and gazing up through the grey waters, with their sudden gleams of light, and their reflections–if it were not for Whitaker's Almanack–if it were not for the Table of Precedency!

I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really is–a nail, a rose-leaf, a crack in the wood?

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 collision 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.

I understand Nature's game–her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action–men, we assume, who don't think. Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.

Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel that 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.... Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a tree; and trees grow, and we don't know how they grow. For years and years they grow, without paying any attention to us, in meadows, in forests, and by the side of rivers–all things one likes to think about. The cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons; they paint rivers so green that when a moorhen dives one expects to see its feathers all green when it comes up again. I like to think of the fish balanced against the stream like flags blown out; and of water-beetles slowly raising domes of mud upon the bed of the river. I like to think of the tree itself: first the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter's nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling, all night long. The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June; and how cold the feet of insects must feel upon it, as they make laborious progresses up the creases of the bark, or sun themselves upon the thin green awning of the leaves, and look straight in front of them with diamond-cut red eyes.... 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 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.... Where was I? What has it all been about? A tree? A river? The Downs? Whitaker's Almanack? The fields of asphodel? I can't remember a thing. Everything's moving, falling, slipping, vanishing.... There is a vast upheaval of matter. Someone is standing over me and saying–

"I'm going out to buy a newspaper."

"Yes?"

"Though it's no good buying newspapers.... Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God damn this war!... All the same, I don't see why we should have a snail on our wall."

Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail.

source: digital.library.upenn.edu

[Angel]

"The Mark on the Wall" as an Analysis of Human Thought

The Mark on the Wall as an Analysis of Human Thought

While most works of fiction follow a prescribed plot, exploring each idea on a chronological path, Virginia Woolf's "The Mark on the Wall" articulates, instead of action, an internal monologue. Human thought is not linear; in moments of introspection we jump from topic to topic, follow connections ignited by memory, logic or external input. Some critics call this essay a work of fancy, while others consider it a demonstration of control. The question of whether it is a work of subjectivism or skepticism is also a prominent debate. I prefer to view "The Mark on the Wall" as an analysis of the patterns of human thought - including both subjectivist thought and skepticist thought - distinguishing the chaos of introspection from organized writing.

The thought process Woolf explores with "The Mark on the Wall" can be likened to the act of asking a person question after question in immediate succession, not allowing time for the person to contemplate how to phrase his or her response. The narrative begins with a statement so uncertain it may as well have been phrased as a question: "Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall." If this sentence is the question, the following is the answer: "In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw."(2424) This sentence then becomes a question, and the process goes on throughout the story. She remembers that she saw fire, was reading a book, that it was winter, after tea, that she had been smoking a cigarette, and she remembers thinking of a castle flag and red knights. The mark on the wall plays the role of an interruption to this train of thought: "Rather to my relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps."(2424) This relief is an effect of changing to a new tangent during an internal monologue, and changes in tangent are abundant in this work.

To Natania Rosenfeld, "The Mark on the Wall" is "essential to an understanding of modernist subjectivism." Subjectivism holds that all knowledge depends on the sensory perception of the self. The narrator's free-association, in Rosenfeld's eyes, feeds into this "subjectivism," because it is a reaction against imposed structure:

"To attach one's eye to a small spot and let the mind wander is to free oneself of what Bal calls "doxa," official interpretations that hide truth or stunt imagination; Woolf's story contains numerous examples of such doxa, beginning, paradoxically, with "that old fancy"—paradoxically because fancy, in the sense of whimsicality, is precisely what the story would seem to endorse."

"Fancy" is connected to capriciousness and imagination. This word is too weak and light to explain what the story endorses; it certainly expresses capriciousness, but it is more than a simple daydream. The truths realized in the narrator's reverie are not frivolous "fluff" thoughts used to take up time in idle moments. If this story is truly a work of subjectivism, the narrator's thoughts on knowledge are of utmost importance:

"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."(2428)

"Learned men," to the narrator, are merely people who have recorded their experiences. She concludes that if we waste less of our own mental energy thinking about what they saw as "knowledge," the more we can understand our own minds. If not for the narrator's later leaning toward skepticism, which I will soon discuss, this emphasis on her own personal knowledge over knowledge which is accepted by others would define "The Mark on the Wall" as a work of subjectivism. This highlighting of human thought encourages the reader to examine the way the narrator's mind works, following her patterns and noticing changes in direction of attention, as well as the role of reflection in the patterns of the internal monologue.

Another example of a "doxa" that the narrator follows (until she ends that train of thought by looking at the mark) begins with a discussion of tablecloths: She explains the rule for how tablecloths had to be made during a time in the past, which leads into thoughts on reality, followed by the masculine standard of the times, and then a mention of the war and a hope that it will be "laughed into the dustbin where phantoms go," leading to "an intoxicating sense of illegitamite freedom - if freedom exists...."(2427) The narrator trails off here and "attaches" her eye to the mark and lets her mind "wander," free of the doxa that had overpowered her thoughts before she had interrupted them by looking at the mark.

But is the train of thought I described in the previous paragraph truly a "doxa"? It begins with one, the established idea of how tablecloths should be made, but the mind is relieved from the doxa long before it focuses on the mark on the wall. It is not clear whether or not the narrator is looking at the mark on the wall when she escapes from her doxa, although Rosenfeld presents the mark as the only way to stop the mind from pursuing a doxa.

The tablecloths to reality to masculinity to war to freedom train of thought exemplifies what Rosenfeld calls "the Woolfian mode of observation":"The Woolfian mode of observation is a form of inattentive attention that allows the unorthodox and the seemingly incidental to occupy center stage in the mind long enough to un-do certainties about the way the world works or what one "should" believe, but not long enough to harden into new doxa."(Rosenfeld, 353) Taking the narrator's thoughts on reality as an example, (the discovery that "real" things "were not entirely real," wondering what replaces "those real, standard things"(2427) we can see that these thoughts are, indeed, "unorthodox," and if brought up in everyday conversation they would likely be brushed aside as "seemingly incidental," and they clearly question "certainties" and standard rules of thought, but do not form an official doxa.

The one part of the Woolfian mode of observation that does not seem to fit completely in this instance is the awkwardly phrased "inattentive attention." I would argue that the narrator is paying utmost attention to her thoughts and nothing else, aside from the mark on the wall. Dorothy Mackenzie Hoare describes the process in a similar manner, but does not call it "inattentive":

Fix the object (which is here used as a bright flashing thing is used in some hypnotic experiments, and for the same effect—to enable the mind, while having an outward focus of attention, to retreat into the subconscious stream) and let the mind sway round all the associations it brings with the freedom and suppleness of a gymnast. It implies a very delicate balancing of attention—on the one hand sensitiveness to the subconscious free movement of thought or emotion, and on the other, a continual intellectual control.

Attention is simply the direction of thought; one cannot "balance" one's attention inattentively. The idea of letting the mind "sway" may at first seem "inattentive," but the attention in this story is constantly being parceled out, allocated to certain thoughts in a carefully tended manner. Consider the following passage:

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. I understand Nature's game—her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action—men, we assume, who don't think. Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.(2428)

Hinting that she is paying more attention to the order of her thoughts than it may seem at first glance, the narrator mentions knowing "who follows whom." While the jumping from idea to idea may not be planned, it does not occur without the thinker's attention. The "sensitiveness" to the order of thoughts connects to the "contempt" for those "we assume, who don't think," while the narrator proves her "intellectual control" by halting unpleasant thought trains by focusing her attention on the mark. This is one example of Woolf's analysis of human thought: using the narrator as a model, Woolf performs an investigation into human beings' control over their own thoughts – the ability to stop them or take action because of them.

The line between subjectivism and skepticism is hazy, the first claiming that knowledge rests on the individual mind and the second declaring that absolute knowledge is altogether impossible. "The sceptical, relative spirit is a countervailing force, subverting and undoing all frameworks set up by the filing system of the human mind. It releases the facts from their subservience to general principles to which they have been yoked by the absolute spirit. In undercutting all normative ordering, it highlights open-endedness." The most obvious example of skepticism in "The Mark on the Wall" follows the tirade about the Colonel gathering evidence that ends "proving I don't know what." This thought triggers the question of whether knowledge is possible at all: "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... what should I gain? Knowledge? Matter for further speculation?"(2428) The final three inquiries are of utmost importance in distinguishing this work as one of subjectivism or one of skepticism: if the narrator's goal during this sequence of thoughts is to arrive at knowledge, then subjectivism rules the text; if knowledge is not possible and her aim is speculation, then the narrator is following the rules of skepticism. Because a conclusion on this subject is not reached, the line between skepticism and subjectivism remains blurry throughout the story.

"The Mark on the Wall" concludes with the narrator's discovery that the mark on the wall was a snail. This realization ends the story, but it can be assumed that the narrator's internal monologue does not end here – rather, the story proves that internal monologues persist through our waking lives, only interrupted by action. The narrator explains to us that interruptions are part of human thought patterns: "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 collision with reality..."(2428) The final "collision with reality" comes with the story's last sentence. This aspect of human thought, along with doxa, order of thoughts, and reflection, are Woolf's observations on how the mind works in solitude.

source:essayforum.com

[Angel]

How Woolf Thinks

Woolf's prose pleases us with its play – the surprise verbal twist, the weaving of puns and verbal games together, and the wandering path of her prose which first takes us down one path of thought and image, then down another. Those readers taking pleasure in it are willing to dwell on it and allow it to take them where it will. Much different than reading a linear, sparse prose that explains itself at every step (textbook prose, for instance) or the realistic descriptions and simply stated prose of the 18th century. Her work is distinctly modern. This is not to say, however, that her writing does anything it wants and controls her pen. In fact, her work is highly controlled and follows a logic which we can all understand.

Stream-of-Consciousness: Conversation vs. Discussion

These puns are related to, perhaps, the most significant of Woolf's prose innovations: the imitation of our "stream-of-consciousness" in prose. Think of "stream-of-consciousness" as conversation. Suppose you're sitting around with a group of friends talking about a fellow named "Bacon." One makes a mean joke about his personality which uses the idea of "bacon," and that reminds another person in the group about another aspect of Bacon's personal life which is "pig-like," which reminds someone else about the time at a restaurant. . . and so forth." (Mean-spirited, yes, but these things do happen.) Then someone in the group remembers an incident involving a real pig back on the farm which has nothing to do with Mr. Bacon, and the conversation is off on a new track in which the group begins, perhaps, just remembering and reminding each other about childlike incidents. The point is that conversation works this way, apparently drifting aimlessly from point to point, but in actuality there is a logic at work, the logic of "associational" thinking. Formal discussion (and formal academic writing) do not work this way. Formal discussion works its way from point to point in a rather logical and analytical way always attempting to stay on task and focused, always careful to use transitions which direct the reader.

Stream-of-Consciousness–Personal and Private

However, Woolf (and most psychologists) see thought as working like conversation. Conversation is thought in action in a group of people. "Stream-of-consciousness" is an imitation of thought processes within the brain of one, like an internal conversation (and, hopefully, a conversation which will stimulate and engage the reader). It is sort of an externalization of internal thought processes in writing. [Now my parents tried to get me to stop talking to myself. It was, I believe, considered rude, if not dangerous to my general health, because internal conversation seemed "uncontrolled" and private (Did anybody else get this when they were young?). I now think that "talking to oneself," whether it be out loud in writing or in one's own mind, healthy and normal.] But it is private, and being private it can be hard to follow because we are not privy to the imagination and memory of the "conversational" speaker. For these reasons–because it is grounded in the personal imagination and memories of the speaker/writer-- this kind of writing is sometimes thought of as "idiosyncratic," very individual, and at points difficult to understand because the speaker/writer is playing off of and responding to autobiographical ideas and events of which we have no knowledge. Just look, for instance, at the sheer sequence of subjects she makes her way through at the beginning of "The Mark on the Wall." In the second paragraph she

• imagines that the mark is a nail which might have held a miniature painting,
• which reminds her of the person who lived in the house before her
  • his taste in general,
  • his taste for furniture,
  • his theory art, and
• his manner of parting from her which she compares to a scene she once saw out the window of a speeding train when she saw briefly "an old lady about to pour tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball."

All very strange, all very personal memories, all connected tenuously together, like she says in this paragraph, like a swarm of ants trying to carry a "blade of straw . . . and then leave it."

Stream-of-Consciousness: The Nature of Thought

This analogy of thought to "swarm of ants" which forgets its purpose is very apt for her purposes. Elsewhere, in A Room of One's Own, she uses the analogy of a fish again:

Thought -- to call it by a prouder name than it deserved -- had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it [thought] and sink it, until - - you know the little tug - - the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out?

Thought is a form of mental fishing with all its suggestion of casting about with the appropriate bait. Try this, try that, move about, change bait, adjust your depth, it's a hunt for an idea, a continuous process of trial-and-error and searching for the right combination in the context. The black mark on the wall is the bait on her thought.

Stream-of-Consciousness: Male and Female Thinking

In, perhaps, the most complex section of "The Mark on the Wall," there is another kind of thinking described during the course of her mental meanderings, something we might call masculine thought or even adult thought. She is thinking (page 155 if you want to follow along) about what will happen to novels and writing and thinking if the environment (the "forest," she calls it) in which it appears "is there no longer." She supposes that all that will be left is the shell of people who cannot tell stories any longer. In addition, they will no longer see "reality," but will simply see classes of things or "generalizations." Never mind how she got to this point in her thinking; what's important is that at this point she makes one of those conversational leaps saying, "but these generalizations are very worthless. The military sound of the word is enough." She associates this mental characteristic of making generalizations instead of seeing the thing itself in terms of a primary male activity, making war. She compares this style of thinking to having a "standard" (another echo of militariness; standard can be a flag). She protests that these are "habits" and "rules" for thinking about things as simple and everyday as what a "tablecloth" is or is supposed to be. She finally comes down to it on the next page, calling the whole process "the masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes Whitaker's Table of Precedency (a book which laid out the ranking of the aristocracy in England). (In the next paragraph she explores this militarization of thinking further in the imaginary biography of the Colonel.)

On the other hand, she suggests another way of thinking in every part of this passage and the story as a whole, a way of thinking which could be called childlike or feminine, a way of thinking which is richer and full of "an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom." After all children like stories, and generalization takes it away from them. And children, when they look at a tablecloth see exactly what's there, not a standard which informs them about the social status of the table setter. And children like to play with language and talk to themselves and jump associatively from subject to subject rather than "marshal" their thoughts. And, finally, after all, what is thought? A meandering play of the line, a series of ideas stimulated by bait such as the mark on the wall? Or is thought coming in and inspecting the spot, as her husband does, as a male investigator who curses the "war," tells her what the mark on the wall is and walks out. Doesn't he end her thought-fishing by naming the category of things to which it belongs?

source:ulm.edu