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

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

I can reach a state where I seem to be watching things happen as if I

were there. That is, I suppose, that my memory supplies what I had

forgotten, so that it seems as if it were happening independently,

though I am really making it happen. (67)

Therefore, the mark could be a snail that was removed, but in remembering the event the narrator is transported back to the scene so that it seems to her to be happening in the present, or happening over and over, hence the "first time" phrasing.

Other possibilities, not necessarily mutually exclusive, are also available, however. One of these was suggested by a student of mine, Mr. Spendiff,' who mentioned that he once had a job that entailed removing snails from the walls of a house, and he noted that when removed they left a mark where they had been. If the mark on the wall were originally a snail, but at the time of writing the narrator is contemplating this footprint, then we could have here an instance of signed and signifier being granted unity, at least unity in regard to individual responses. For the narrator, contemplating the sign (still present, hence present tense) is the same as contemplating the thing itself (which exists only in the past tense) because in her inner life they obtain the same significance; hence, when seeing the signifier she is able to speak of the signified as though it were present. This may be akin to something else Woolf says in "A Sketch of the Past," in the same paragraph as the remarks I quoted earlier: "I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace; and it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through from the start" (67).

Still another possibility is that what we read in "The Mark on the Wall" is not, in fact, a reminiscence, except for perhaps the very beginning and the very end; rather, all of these "digressions" are the thoughts of the narrator at the moment of writing, summoned into being by thinking about that event that occurred long months before. At the end of the story, the narrator's reveries are interrupted--during the mid-winter scene? at the time of writing, the "now"?--and she tells us that

something is getting in the way. . . . Where was I? What has it all been

about? A tree? A river? The Downs? Whitaker's Almanack? The fields

of asphodel? I can't remember a thing. Everything's moving, falling,

slipping, vanishing. . . . (83; Woolf's ellipses)

If the interruption occurred "back when," and she could not remember the particulars then, immediately after the fact, how can she do so at the time of writing, a time when she must work hard even to recall the time of year in which the original event took place? But contemplating that moment draws from the narrator what may be the same kind of response she had when contemplating the mark on the wall: I say "may be" because of what Woolf says in "Sketches of the Past," when she is searching for a way to organize those draft memoirs, and for the first time she dates her "notes":