The ethics of indecency: censorship, sexuality, and the voice of the academy in the narration of 'Jacob's Room.'

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1997 by Susan C. Harris

It must be admitted at the outset that Florinda cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be said to be a misunderstood genius. Even in a novel where conversation is fragmentary and most dialogue is less than profound, Florinda's utterances stand out as phenomenally banal: "I'm so frightfully unhappy!" (74); "I think there are lovely things in the British museum . . ." "You're such a good man" (80). Descriptions of Florinda stress her inability to read (78-79) or to express herself in writing (94); through Jacob's eyes, she is "wild and frail and beautiful" (78) or "straight and beautiful in body" (82), but if "beauty goes hand in hand with stupidity" (82) this only serves to underscore the fact that she is "as ignorant as an owl" (79). It occurs to the reader, long before it occurs to Jacob, to "wonder whether she [has] a mind" (79), and the answer to the question seems fairly self-evident.

But Woolf also hints that before accepting that answer, it is important to consider how and why it was produced. The contempt Jacob obviously feels for Florinda by the end of the affair is at times shared by the narrator; but the narrator that so despises Florinda has an ulterior motive for producing this portrait. A brainless, ignorant, "animal" (168) Florinda helps the censorial narrator accomplish its particular purpose - a purpose that has grim implications not only for the other women in Jacob's life but for Jacob. Florinda, as characterized by the satirical narrator, "links the inexistent, the illicit and the inexpressible" and makes it possible for sexuality (and anyone identified with it) to be apparently "banished from reality" (Foucault 84).

The initial description of Florinda, which is given to us before her name or personality are sketched in, is written in a voice that is markedly different from that which usually describes her - a voice that, specifically, is far less sarcastic. Both the style and the content of this first portrait warn the reader that whatever other narrators may say afterward about Florinda, any narrative vision of her is doomed to be less than penetrating:

Of the faces which came out fresh and vivid as though painted in yellow and red, the most prominent was the girl's face. By a trick of the firelight she seemed to have no body. The oval of the face and hair hung beside the fire with a dark vacuum for background. As if dazed by the glare, her green-blue eyes stared at the flames. Every muscle of her face was taut. There was something tragic in her thus staring - her age between twenty and twenty-five. (74)

Florinda appears to the descriptive eye as disembodied, a stiff, "painted" and hollow mask over a "vacuum," and there is "something tragic" about the emptiness of the "staring" eyes. It is clear that this narrator, and thus the reader, is allowed to see only the surface, the reflecting veneer, and that whatever is beneath it is to remain unknowable. This narrator acknowledges that what it grasps is a shell, not substance.

Immediately after this has been established, "a hand descending from the chequered darkness thrust[s] on her head the conical white hat of a pierrot" (74). An unseen power forces an identity onto this image, and the previously unreadable mask now becomes part of a costume designed for a particular kind of stock character. Unable to get past the mask, the narrator is now working with the shell, manipulating the mask, animating the silhouette. A vision of Florinda is taking shape; but through the window opened by the first narrator we see that it is taking shape under protest, at the hands of a shadowy and coercive power, and taking a shape that will reflect that power's attitudes and intentions rather than those of the initial narrator, who in this passage demonstrates her consciousness of the limitations of narrative power.