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Apostate |
Bildungsroman (by Jason Groom) |
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"In Flanders Field" |
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page most recently updated May 30, 2000
Jacob's Room tips
chapter one chapter two chapter three chapter four chapter five more pages on JR Chapter OneThe novel opens with an emphasis on perception. And it opens in the middle of a scene, with no prelude, no introduction. This prepares us for reading the novel. Woolf was deliberately constructing a novel with "no scaffolding. Scarcely a brick to be seen." (See the introduction.) Jacob's room dramatizes. It avoids exposition and explanation. The description in the second paragraph clearly renders the impressionism of Woolf's style. We are in Betty Flanders' consciousness, seeing as she sees, through the individualistic, subjective perception. Remember our class discussion regarding modernism's shift away from belief in absolute truths and also its doubts that there was such a thing as an objective reality that could be verified. The bay may not "really" quiver; the lighthouse may not "really" wobble, but indeed they do quiver and wobble in Betty's subjective impression of them, and for now, this is the only reality she, or we, can know. (More references to perception recur throughout this chapter and the novel.)
We see through Betty Flanders' tears. And thus the descriptive force of the style also announces one of the novels' great themes, and one of Woolf's recurring themes, that of grief, mourning and elegy. She is mourning the loss of her husband, Seabrook Flanders. She is a young widow with three sons. Seabrook's absence from this scene, and from her life, permeates the text. Jacob is also initially absent from this scene. Betty sends his brother in search of him. This initial absence in the text is a foreshadowing of Jacob's later absence. The opening chapter thus provides a prolepsis of the novel's plot. See further discussion of Jacob's last name (Flanders) and some background on World War I, also known as The Great War.
(We talked in class about the various deaths in Virginia Woolf's family, and specifically of how Jacob's Room and other novels evoke memories related to her brother Thoby Stephen, who died of Typhoid in 1906. His name was Julian Thoby Stephen, so this is also worth considering as you consider the relevance of Woolf's allusions to Julian the Apostate in the Cambridge chapters.).
Jacob is described as "such a handful, so obstinate already" by his mother (p. 4).When Jacob first finds the sheep's skull, an image of death, on p. 3, it still has its jaw and teeth. He picks it up and runs and carries it, but his mother orders him to drop it because it is "something horrid." He apparently does drop it, but also keeps the jaw with its teeth. We are not told this, but we discover this when on p. 4, the sheep's skull, "not far from the lovers" Jacob has also seen, is now missing its jaw. Notice the description of the skull, with its peculiarly aesthetic quality. (Eros and Thanatos, sex and death, are often related in literature.) The skull will deteriorate gradually, but at this moment it is the most "unpolluted" piece of bone on the coast of Cornwall. Mrs. Flanders wants no such reminders of death in lodgings. "Throw it away, dear, do," Mrs. Flanders tells Jacob in the next paragraph, referring the jaw he has kept. But Jacob "squirmed away from her." We later see the sheep's jaw "with the big yellow teeth in it" at Jacob's feet in his bed.
Chapter one ends with a description of the effect of the storm. Discuss what the description of the crab may have to do with the novel's theme(s).
In chapter two we meet Mr. Floyd, a suitor who proposes to Betty Flanders by letter. When she reads the word "love" in his letter, she becomes upset and has a vision her late husband, Seabrook "so vividly before her." Again she looks at the world through tears. This time she sees her son Johnny chasing the geese with a stick. She takes his stick away from him, and he struggles to"get free" of her grip. She herds the geese back into the orchard and gastens the gate with a piece of wire. This image of confinement will parallel other images of confinement in the novel. Immediately she decides she can't possibly think of marriage. Is this because of her boys' unruly behavior? Or is it really because she doesn't like men with red hair? She reads the letter again, and again sees in her mind "Johnny chasing the geese, and knew it was impossible for her to marry any one—let alone Mr. Floyd, who was so much younger than she was, but what a nice man—and such a scholar too." (13). Why do you think she is so sure she can't marry?
Chapter two includes the whole story of Mr. Floyd's life in a page (13). After she turns him down, Mr. Floyd leaves for a parish in Sheffield, and invites each of the Flanders boys to take any item they wish from his study. Jacob chooses the works of Byron, the romantic poet; his brother Archer chooses a paper-knife, and John selects the kitten, and Mr. Floyd kindly defends him from the ridicule of his brothers. The novel also shifts forward in time again with Mr. Floyd. Many years later Floyd refers to seeing Jacob recently in Piccadilly, but not stopping him. As it turns out, he will never see Jacob again. Compare this description with pp. 135-136. Before this, John's kitten is named Topaz, who becomes a very old cat (14) while Jacob is still at home.
Notice the death's head moth (14), and compare to the image of the sheep's head in chapter one.
Further images of confinement appear in Ellen Barfoot and Mrs. Jarvis (16-19). Mrs. Barfoot is confined by her invalidism. Mr. Dickens, like most humans, needs to feel useful. He likes to think he's helping Capt. Barfoot by taking care of Mrs. Barfoot. "He, a man, was in charge of Mrs. Barfoot, a woman." Yet as much as Mr. Dickens may think that he is protecting Mrs. Barfoot from the knowledge that her husband is seeing Mrs. Flanders, his masculine protection is an illusion. Mrs. Barfoot knows where her husband is.
Unlike Mrs. Jarvis, Mrs. Flanders likes the steadiness, the rigidity of Capt. Barfoot. She likes knowing the rules, and perhaps accepts her confinement. Capt. Barfoot's admiration of Mrs. Flanders has a positive effect on her self-esteem. Do you think Woolf and the novel itself think as highly of Capt. Barfoot and what he represents as Mrs. Flanders does?
Chapter three takes us to Cambridge with Jacob and further develops the theme of perception.
The scene on the train especially pertains to the question of perception, of knowing another person, and of character in fiction. Mrs. Norman thinks, "Nobody sees any one as he is,let alone an elderly lady sitting opposite a strange young man in a railway carriage. They see a whole—they see all sorts of things—they see themselves" (20).
Woolf further refers to narrative technique and echoes her essays "On Modern Fiction," "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" and "Character in Fiction" when she writes "[I]t is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done…" (21).
You may be upset by what appears to be Jacob's misogyny on 22- 24. He has contempt for what he considers the meaningless and trivial social event of the party, yet he eats huge helpings of mutton, ignorant of the fact that he thus deprives the family of mutton for their luncheon. Jacob also underestimates the power of parties, human gatherings, to bring people together, a theme developed in this novel and more fully elaborated in Mrs. Dalloway. Yet he does not reserve his antipathy exclusively for women like Mrs. Plumer. He finds the entire hierarchical structure of society distasteful. Notice the references to hierarchical "ladders" on 23 and 24. Jacob feels confined by the expectations that all young gentlemen face as they are expected to move up the ladder, following not only political and economic ambitions, but required also to attach themselves socially and romantically for the purposes of such advancement.
When he leaves the Plumers, Jacob exclaims "Oh God" in frustration and is glad to restore "his sense of freedom" (24).
Jacob then goes rowing with Timmy Durrant and considers the frustrations of the forms of respectable life, and suggest (as Woolf does) that "there will be no form in the world unless Jacob makes one for himself" (25). Notice how this can be compared to Woolf's theory of fiction as discussed in the essays. The theme of freedom v. confinement for Jacob is also further develped in Timmy Durant's offer of a vacation. At first Jacob bristles and says he intends "to preserve my economic independence" (26).
Much of the rest of chapter three is taken up with references to books and the life of the mind and the "talk" that goes on at Cambridge. The young scholars take language very seriously. Compare p. 28 with p. 72. The character Erasmus Cowan is named after a Christian theologian (Erasmus) of the 16th century. See the page on Erasmus for further discussion of this allusion.
Notice how chapter three also brings in the harsh reminder of the clock as a measure of time. Clocks become ominous things in Jacob's Room, as reminders of the objectification of time and human life and the dangers of orthodoxy. "Hardly a seamless flow, the narrative of Jacob's Room resists clockwork," writes William R. Handley in "War and the Politics of Narration." Handley discusses the connections between Woolf's narrative methods and her critique of war's appropriation of human beings and its clocklike aspect. He argues that Woolf believed that the power of art resides in its ability to defend individuals against the dehumanizing control of those who wield political power. And I think of Bertrand Russell's comment on World War I (The Great War) in light of Handley's essay, and Woolf's A Room of One's Own as well as this book: "And all this madness, all this rage, all this flaming death of our civilization and our hopes, has been brought about because a set of official gentlemen, living luxurious lives, mostly stupid, and all without imagination or heart, have chosen that it should occur rather than that any one of them should suffer some infinitesimal rebuff to his country's pride." Notice how Woolf critiques pride in this novel and elsewhere.Hermione Lee's biography is also useful in discussing Leslie Stephen's character and the effect having such a prideful and needy father had on Woolf.
Notice on p. 32 the discussion of form:
"Meanwhile behind him the shape they had made, whether by argument or not, the spiritual shape, hard yet ephemeral, as of glass compared with the dark stone of the Chapel, was dashed to splinters, young men rising from chairs and sofa conrners, buzzing and barging about the room. . ." Compare this to the description of the luncheon party at the Plumers on 22-24 and to the discussion of form and character on 25.
For further discussion of chapter three and the importance of Julian the Apostate, see the page on Julian the Apostate.
The image of the wind, the branches, and the sails on 32 also anticipates the novel's ending.
In Chapter four, Jacob does go with Timmy on vacation, and meets Clara Durrant, Timmy's sister. Notice her reactions to Jacob. How does she view Jacob? How does she describe him? What does Jacob seem to think of Clara? Can you tell by the way he acts when he's around her? Notice how Clara is the one on the ladder (46) while Jacob holds it. Compare this to the references to the ladder of social hierarchy in chapter three and to the story of Jacob's Ladder in the Bible. What did you think of the way that Jacob offers to hold the wool while Mrs. Durrant is knitting? Did this give you a slightly different view of him than you had before?
Notice how the chapter ends, again with an image that calls attention to the question of perception. Mr. Clutterback may be too late to see Jacob and to say goodbye, but he is not too late to sit for a portrait by Miss Eliot, who plants her tripod upon the lawn. This is not he first instance in the novel where we see a foreshadowing of Lily Briscoe's character in To the Lighthouse. Go back to chapter one (2) and Mr. Steele for another reference to a person who would like to create visual art. Miss Eliot has been looking through Mr. Clutterbuck's telescope. The novel emphasizes perception and distortion, and it also emphasizes the contrast between the small and the large, the near and the far.
Chapter Five begins with an apparent reference to Virgil (48), but it turns out that Jacob is mistaken; it's actually Lucretius (52). Jacob is perceived as different from other people largely because of his serious interaction with books (50). Signs and semiotics are at play on 50-51; the "gay wild heart" of the old blind woman with her illegitimate child is not unlike Virgil's wild song and Jacob's wild desires. The references to opera on 51 also reinforce the theme of hierarchy, but at the same time hint at the note of tragic or wayward love.
Woolf directly intrudes into the narration of the novel with the narrator speaking as "I" and continues to elaborate on the frustrating task of constructing narrative fiction that defies boundaries and hierarchies of form and society: the "observer is choked with observations" (52) and "though I have no wish to be Queen of England—or only for a moment—I would willingly sit beside her; I would hear the Prime Minister's gossip" (52).
And Jacob writes an essay and sends it out, but it is rejected by three different journals, and he knew "no one would ever print" it when he sent it out. The lid is "shut upon the truth"—Jacob, is, in short, silenced (53), and this silencing echoes many others throughout the novel. Compare the limitations of form Jacob faces in the novel with those that Clara Durrant also faces in trying to record her life in her "shilling diary" (53). She cannot quite get the truth of Jacob down in her diary, just as Woolf suggests it is impossible to truly known another person and impossible to render characters in fiction according to the restrictive observation of traditional narrative techniques. This theme is further developed from 53-55.
There are comments about the young woman's language, and about Jacob needing to find his tongue, that suggest the question of narrative and sexual difference.
Chapter Five ends on p. 55 with the following sentence:
"And all the bedroom windows were dark—the Pages were asleep; the Garfits were asleep; the Cranches were asleep—whereas in London at this hour they were burning Guy Fawkes on Parliament Hill."
This refers to the yearly celebration of Guy Fawkes night, where the historical figure Fawkes is burned in effigy all over England.
Guy Fawkes, 1570-1606, tried to blow up King James I and the Houses of Parliament in 1605 in what was known as The Gunpowder Plot. The plot was foiled when he was caught in the Palace of Westminster on 4th November 1605. On 5th November "every year since 1605, every town and village in England lights bonfires, lets off fireworks, burns an effigy of him and celebrates the fact that Parliament and James I were not blown sky high by Guy Fawkes." For more information on the historical and religious background that led up to the Gunpowder plot, visit Jeremy Boot's website on Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot at (yes that is a second x in the index. html) http://www.innotts.co.uk/~asperges/fawkes/indexx.htmlIn the next chapter, chapter 6, Jacob meets Florinda during this celebration. Notice how chapter 6 begins: "The flames had fairly caught." There is no introduction, no exposition, just as at the beginning of the novel, we also begin in medias res, with words Betty Flanders speaks that refer to activity that has already begun. No explanations are given in the novel. Rather, Woolf dramatizes, and we as readers must draw inferences and fill in whatever explanations are necessary just as we would, say, in a play or film, as the action unfolds before us. Remember what Woolf wrote about "no scaffolding: scarcely a brick to be seen." (See the introduction to your text.)
The novel's many allusions, such as the literary ones to Virgil, Dante, Byron and others, as well as the allusions to flanders Field, Guy Fawkes, Erasmus, and Julian the Apostate, also offer suggestive parallels for the careful reader to follow.
We'll discuss the remaining chapters in class.
Julian the
ApostateJacob's Room as
Bildungsroman
(by Jason Groom)Erasmus The Great War and
"In Flanders Field"Forum seminar index
page most recently updated May 30, 2000