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

After the initial narrator's description, the characterization of Florinda is handed over to what Zwerdling calls the "satiric narrator" - an "older, more experienced, highly skeptical consciousness" whose ironic intrusions work against any "stable sense of [Woolf's] own attitude toward the world she describes" (894), and also presumably prevent any comforting identification between reader and narrator (or reader and Jacob). Zwerdling attributes this effect primarily to Woolf's "satiric intent" (901) as an ironic elegist. But the satiric narrator is entrusted with more important functions than that of "correct[ing] romantic excess" or providing "ironic detachment" (901) from Jacob; and one of those is that of censor. Through its characterization of Florinda, the satiric narrator reveals itself as vitally concerned with disabling, silencing, and dismissing those who might be able to testify to the presence and nature of sexuality in Jacob's life and in Jacob's Room, with ensuring that characters who feel sexual attraction for Jacob or inspire it in him can never tell themselves, or tell the reader, what they know.

When the satiric narrator takes over, Florinda is "still wearing the conical white hat of a pierrot" (77) - still defined by the action of that unseen hand. The satiric narrator's description is thus marked immediately as an external imposition, a coercive manipulation. And the first thing we learn is that her name itself is an imposition, "bestowed upon her by a painter who wished it to signify that the flower of her maidenhood was still unplucked" (77). The satiric narrator thus creates her as an allegorical figure for whom constructed, imposed archetypal meaning has displaced any kind of individual subjectivity. Since the narrator's account of her baptism links that meaning directly to the state of her chastity, chastity becomes abnormally important to Florinda's character, and she is forced to "[talk] more about virginity than women mostly do" (77). Thanks to the painter, and the narrative voice that admits him into the story, Florinda as a character is flattened until the question of "[w]hether or not she was a virgin" threatens to become "the only thing of any importance at all" (79).

This narrator's insistence on keeping Florinda's chastity questionable while simultaneously introducing evidence that could easily resolve any doubt is an early indication of its subtler designs. Florinda's baptism is an act of wishful thinking - an attempt to deny and erase sexual experience that both the anonymous painter and this narrator no doubt know she has had. It is an obvious deletion; and its location in this passage identifies the satiric narrator as a primary vehicle for narrative censorship. But the satiric narrator performs this censorship in a way that seems bound to draw attention to the very experience it is ostensibly trying to suppress. It is important to this narrator to prevent anyone reading Florinda from either believing "implicitly" in her chastity - which even Jacob at his most naive cannot bring himself to do - or being absolutely certain of her unchastity. Her virginity must be kept in doubt - the story must be changed - the truth must not be told, because this ambiguity allows the satiric narrator to keep any candid discussion of sexuality out of the narrative. If this project is to succeed (and, as will be shown, the satiric narrator is backed by powerful cultural forces that very much want it to), Florinda must perform a very specific function, one that involves both perpetually losing and perpetually retaining her chastity.