Jacob's Room: Woolf's Satiric Elegy

Abstract

Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room appeared in 1922, the annus mirabilis of modern literature that also produced Ulysses and The Waste Land. Perhaps for that reason, and because the novel was the first of Woolf's longer fictions to break with conventional narrative technique, it is often interpreted as a paradigmatic modernist text rather than as a unique work. Its peculiarities are treated as illustrative of the revolution in twentieth-century literature, though in fact some of them are idiosyncratic. The book was certainly Woolf's first consciously experimental novel; and it has remained her most baffling one: its narrative techniques are so innovative that they call attention to themselves; its central character, Jacob Flanders, seems to be a classic instance of psychological inscrutability in fiction; and its rapidly shifting tone, now somber, now mocking, deprives Woolf's audience of a stable sense of her own attitude toward the world she describes. These problems of narrative method, characterization, and tone are interrelated, as I hope to show, but they can be illuminated only by an attempt to understand Woolf's fundamental aims in writing the particular novel Jacob's Room, rather than by assuming she was interested in fictional innovation for its own sake. Jacob's Room is often taken to be simply a technical exercise. David Daiches, for example, suggests that it was written might say, for the sake of style.' And indeed Woolf's first thoughts about the book in her diary are concerned with method rather than matter: Suppose one thing should open out of another-as in An Unwritten Novel-only not for 10 pages but 200 or so-doesn't that give the looseness and lightness I want; doesn't that get closer and yet keep form and speed, and enclose everything?2 Her diary entries as she works on the book continue to deal more with narrative strategy than with defining the everything, everything the novel is designed to present. Essentially, Woolf was trying to work free of the conventions of realism she attacked with such devastating wit in her essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, that style of fiction in which the character is kept waiting in the wings until his entire environment and life history have been