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The Mark on the Wall

Virginia Woolf

Start date: November 1, 2022

Finish date: November 30, 2022

Discussion: Short Story/Novella Collection

Why we're reading this: November 2022 - Short Story/Novella
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Short Story/Novella Collection

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What Members Thought

Jun 19, 2014 Laura rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction-20th-century, short-stories, british-literature, e-books, gutenberg, read-2014

Read online at Project Gutenberg Australia.

Opening lines:
Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present 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. ...more

6 likes · Like · see review

Jun 30, 2021 Franky rated it really liked it

Shelves: short-stories, classics, kindle, philosophy, feminism, 2021-reading-challenge

“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.”

Virginia Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall” is a very cerebral, and introspective short story that is incredibly unique in its experimental form and structure, definitely a characteristic of the Modernist movement. What I “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.”

Virginia Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall” is a very cerebral, and introspective short story that is incredibly unique in its experimental form and structure, definitely a characteristic of the Modernist movement. What I found very thought-provoking and interesting is how Woolf establishes a symbol in the physical sense, in this case a mark on the wall, and utilizes this symbol as a catalyst to dig deep into the internal workings of the narrator’s mind.

On paper, on the surface, the story is quite simple: a woman, who sees a mark on a wall, begins a train of thought about various topics, subjects, and issues. While philosophizing in a stream of conscious style process, she is interrupted several times in her thoughts, and then shifts in her thoughts towards another path. Although there is not a whole lot taking place externally from the outside in terms of “action”, internally there is a wealth of introspective thinking from the narrator’s point of view as we (as readers) “see” ideas from her perspective.

I think one of the joys of reading a story like this one is that there is room for quite a bit of interpretation, thought, reflection and analysis. It is like a puzzle that one must put together through careful scrutiny. In one way, the story is just simply a story about thinking, about the thought processes one goes through. In another sense, there is this consistent notion from the inner workings of the narrator that one cannot—and should not—judge something simply from appearance or from its surface level form (which seems to coincide and parallel with the elusiveness of identifying what the “mark” is exactly in the story). In yet other ways, and perhaps looking at the story with a more critical eye, this story is about much deeper issues from the narrator’s meditations and thoughts: gender, roles, expectations, religion, among other key issues.

Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall” is most definitely a complex, contemplative story, one well worth reading and coming back to.
...more

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