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The housemaid and the kitchen table: incorporating the frame in 'To the Lighthouse.' - book by Virginia Woolf
Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1994 by William R. Handley
The determining remains, the ghosts of things, become the subjects of the narrative in "Time Passes." Darkness causes these things to lose their phenomenality, such that they lose the spatial, external shape that allows a human being to identify them. Darkness, Woolf writes, "came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say, 'This is he' or 'This is she.' Sometimes . . . somebody laughed aloud as if sharing a joke with nothingness" (126). Like the kitchen table when no one is there, these things exist in their thingness beyond spatial and temporal categories without body or mind to identify or point--but only in the imagination of Woolf's language. As in Plato's story, there is always someone to point to the things in themselves, to laugh at the well of nothingness that lies beneath or just a step beyond the limits of language and perception. Like the storyteller Bernard in The Waves, art defeats itself in wanting to pull all things together, as if it had that transcendent, godlike power to give a meaning or truth to things that are not lent to human, mortal subjectivity: "But alas, divine goodness, twitching the cord, draws the curtain; it does not please him; he covers his treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them, so confuses them that it seems impossible that their calm should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth" (128).
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Woolf approaches the things in an empty house at a time of mass destruction, and yet some critics of the novel have left out the war in their reading, failing to account for those myriad "whos" within this house of "whats" that they find it difficult to care for beyond the observation that no one is there. Mrs. McNab allows herself to pick flowers to take home with her, for
It was a pity to let them waste. Suppose the house were sold (she stood arms akimbo in front of the looking-glass) it would want seeing to--it would. There it had stood all these years without a soul in it. The books and things were mouldy, for, what with the war and help being hard to get, the house had not been cleaned as she could have wished. It was beyond one person's strength to get it straight now. (135)
The servant who does not sit down at the upper-middle-class dinner table, Mrs. McNab remains in the house that inheritance and philosophy paid for, as they pay for her. But with no one at home she has no great debt to pay and is well suited to have company with things and to care for them once the disruptive economy of waste and war makes help hard to get. "Time Passes" was written "in the gloom of the [General] Strike" (Letters 3: 374), proclaimed by the Trades Union Congress on the evening of May 2, 1926, in support of mine workers who had gone on strike the day before. In relation to "Time Passes," it is interesting that Woolf parenthetically comments in her diary that "(one of the curious effects of the Strike is that it is difficult to remember the day of the week)" (Diary 3: 77). The Woolfs were on the side of the strikers and the strike appears frequently in Virginia's diary; three days after it had begun, she expresses an interest in an exact record of it. But while Britain seemed to many on the brink of civil war, Woolf wanted a peaceful solution (Zwerdling 273). As she makes explicit a decade later in Three Guineas, the problem of war is indissociable from the economic and social status of women and the problem of private property. Patriarchy and capitalism are for Woolf the divisive framers of women's lives; her advice to women, disagreeable to most of her closest friends, is to resist uncompromisingly inclusion in either of those frames.
