A conflict of closure in Virginia Woolf's "The Mark on the Wall."

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1996 by Marc D. Cyr

Virginia Woolf's "The Mark on the Wall" concludes with the identification of that mark as a snail, this after several pages of digressions--on history, reality, society, art, writing, and life itself--incited by the flimsy ruse of an ontological inquiry. Readers have reacted variously to this revelation: As T. E. Apter notes, some, like A C. Bradbrook, have found it "exasperating" (54), while others have found the "cruelly disappointing" (Guiguet 217) or "trivial" (Apter 54) or "insignificant" (Gorsky 51) nature of the mark to be important to understanding that Woolf is proposing that objective reality is less important than the world of perceptions internal to each individual, a line of thought that leads ultimately to the idea that what the mark is "really doesn't matter" (Lumpkin 29), or the ironic Doppelganger to this idea, that "The writer deflates herself comically when the mark is revealed as a snail . . . (Gordon 167).

I suspect, however, that if there is a joke here, it is on us, that Woolf, like Mary Carmichael in A Room of One's Own, "is playing a trick on us. . . . [She] is tampering with the expected sequence" (81). We expect closure, so that's what Woolf gives us-or seems to. I don't think the mark on the wall is a snail--or at least it might not be--and while it may not matter what the mark actually is, what it is not (or may not be) could matter a lot.

The first paragraph of the story raises the initial doubt, though it doesn't come into focus until the end. The narrator, writing the story some months after the event, is "now" trying to remember the time of year when she "first looked up and saw the mark on the wall" (77). By remembering the scene, she is able to decide that "it must have been winter time . . . when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time" (77).

I am intrigued by the phrasing here. At the end of the story, when the narrator's disgruntled companion stands and says ". . . I don't see why we should have a snail on our wall" (83), there appears to be little question that he is going to remove it: Upset by the war and unable to do anything about it, he seems unlikely to tolerate a more local and actionable irritant. But the narrator's phrasing, that this was the "first time" she saw the mark on the wall, suggests subsequent sightings: One does not say "first" when one means "only." If the mark were a snail subsequently removed by the companion, it would not have lingered beyond that after-tea session. That the mark still remains at the time of writing, or at least remained for some time after the original event, is possible, even likely, and this would seem to rule out its being a snail.

Let me admit that there are objections that can be raised to this proposal, the most obvious being that the narrator apparently confirms her companion's identification: "Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail" (83). Also, she uses the past tense here, as she does in the first paragraph, when she says "The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantlepiece" (77). The verb tense would seem to indicate that the mark "was" but is no more, as would be the case with the snail removed. One might also point out that, in the course of the story, the narrator's focus comes and goes from the mark itself, so that the "first time" remark may pertain only to the first time she focused on it during that after tea interlude.

Dealing with the last objection first, the phrasing does not strike me as correct: It would be like describing dinner by saying, "The first time I saw my plate was when I cut a slice of beef; the second time was when I speared a carrot; the third time I saw it . . .," and so on. This would be odd even if the period of linear time covered were several hours, and, while the plot duration (if I may use the word "plot" regarding this story) is indefinite, an after-tea sit and smoke interlude would likely be quite short. Perhaps more to the point, our narrator tells us that in that mid-January scene, she was reading by "the steady film of yellow light upon the page" (77; my emphasis), yet later she tells us that she began to suspect the mark to be three-dimensional when she noticed that "In certain lights that mark on the wall seems actually to project from the wall" (80). How can our narrator see the mark in differing "certain lights" when the fight in the room is "steady" and she herself does not move from her chair and so change her visual perspective? It seems likely to me, then, that she has seen this mark in varying lights, which indicates varying times, and that means the mark was not a soon-to-be removed snail (nor one that, left to its own devices, would "walk" away itself).

Considering the issue of verb tense, a number of possibilities open. One must immediately note that, except for the first paragraph and the last line/paragraph, the whole story is in present tense, including references to the mark on the wall, so verb tense offers contradictory evidence for the mark's presence or absence, and therefore for its identification as a snail. The shift to present tense, though, may be simply an attempt by Woolf to embody the kind of thinking/being processes the story exemplifies: As Wayne Narey puts it, Woolf is proposing a vision of "time that cannot be fixed in duration or progression, a time relative to the beholder"; that is, "a life run on emotional time rather than clock time" (37, 39). Therefore, the inner life of the narrator is present tense except when called upon to act in the chronometric world, as in the first paragraph when she is attempting to "fix a date" on the timeline, or in the last paragraph when she is hauled back to the hard, objective world by her companion. This may, then, be an instance of the kind of memory Woolf discusses in "A Sketch of the Past":