The Narrative Ecology of “Kew Gardens”: Virginia Woolf’s Ecofeminist Imagination and the Narrative Discovery of Jacob’s Room

Abstract

My discussion of the ecological implications of fictional forms starts in 1917, with what is regarded as the beginnings of Virginia Woolf’s modernist innovation. This chapter identifies Woolf’s experiment with narrative perspective and organic form in Jacob’s Room as a consequence of her writings of the period 1917–22, centrally her short story “Kew Gardens.” Basing on Woolf’s diary entries and letters, I frame her experiment in ecological terms, and propose a connection between the decentered, situated feminist narrative method of Jacob’s Room and what I call her ecological imagination, which is evident in her earlier writings. I first examine Woolf’s diaries and the unusual narrative perspective of “Kew Gardens,” and then outline what I see as their influence on Jacob’s Room. Underlying all these considerations is the ecocritical premise that a text is never separate from its environment: Genres and texts are themselves arguably “ecosystems,” not only in the narrow sense of the text as a discursive “environment,” but also in the broader sense that “texts help reproduce sociohistorical environments” in stylized form (Barwashi 2001: 73). Indeed, an individual text must be thought of as environmentally embedded from its germination to its reception. (Buell 2005: 44)