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

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

In discussing "The Mark on the Wall" in relation to Einstein's theory of relativity, Wayne Narey comments that

The static mark and the daydreamer's inactivity are juxtaposed to the

mental motion of reflection. The irony of this juxtaposition intensifies

at the end of the story, when the mark on the wall is revealed to be a

snail, symbol of slow and measured existence. (37)

There may be a further irony, though; this "symbol" may be the creation of the companion, an instance of what the narrator calls "Nature's game--her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain," a propensity she specifically notes as belonging to men, though she herself sees "no harm in putting a full stop to one's disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall," despite confessing a "slight contempt for men of action--men, we assume, who don't think" (82). But her companion's remarks reveal that he has been thinking, specifically about the war, more specifically about its lack of progress--"Though it's no good buying newspapers. . . . Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God damn this war!" (83)--and so, as the narrator has been doing throughout, he may have been "reflecting" himself off the mark on the wall until his inner reality breaks the surface and pronounces the mark to be a snail. But how does he know? He's only just stood up, and there's no indication that he has a better perspective or better eyesight than the narrator. He is, however, a man, and as such is conditioned to impose the imprimatur of "truth" on his version of reality, to make of his masculine point of view "the thing itself, the standard thing, the real thing" (80).

But do we have to accept this? The narrator tells us "the great thing" about Whitaker's Table of Precedency "is to know who follows whom"; it is a "comfort" (82). In fiction, it is a traditional comfort to know that closure will follow at story's end, that we will be able to say "Ah." That snail supplies the satisfying click we hear as this story closes shut. Yet the narrator has warned us to beware the complacency of our formal, ontological, and epistemological assumptions, what Woolf calls in A Room of One's Own being "merely lazy minded and conventional into the bargain" (92): The narrator tells us that "nothing is proved, nothing is known" (81), that even "if I got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn't be able to say for certain [what it is]; because once a thing's done, no one ever knows how it happened" (77-78), and were she to "ascertain [what] the mark on the wall is really . . . what should I gain? Knowledge? Matter for further speculation?" (81)

The mark on the wall might be a snail, but, as I've argued, it might not, and this doubt breaks the expected sequence. Mary Carmichael, Woolf tells us, "has every right" to do this if she does so "not for the sake of breaking, but for the sake of creating" (Room 81), and I think the same right may be granted the narrator in "The Mark on the Wall," whose conclusion offers not closure, but opening.