Nature, Being, and War in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room

Abstract

The modernist movement in literature and culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries ushered a momentous shift in the manner in which art and literature was perceived and expressed- it shook traditional consciousness and questioned the conventional. The year 1922 was particularly remarkable in initiating a new approach towards how literature can be realized. Modernism has deconstructed the classical, white, able-bodied “Vitruvian Man”, against their temporal and spatial positioning. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), an outstanding modernist writer pioneered the stream of consciousness narrative technique. However, recent research works have delved into the natural elements that prevail in Woolf’s writings. In Woolf’s works, nature forges a profound relationship with the corporal reality that permeates the lives of her characters. Nature forms a significant part of Woolf’s writing and how human lives are entwined in it, whether consciously or unconsciously. Woolf, in fact, focussed on authoring the autobiography of Elizabeth Barret Browning’s cocker spaniel Flush, after completing the onerous task of writing The Waves. Louise Westling contends in her pivotal article “Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the World” that throughout Woolf’s career, she “increasingly placed human ambitions and systems of meaning against the backdrop of enormous geological forces and vast reaches of time. Increasingly, she sought to portray the non-human, or what David Abram calls the ‘more than human’ world within which we are tiny and only momentary presences” (856, Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies). Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is a prime example of how her writing shifts from human centrality towards animality. In this paper I shall explore how Woolf’s experimental novel Jacob’s Room heralds her ecological experience through her feminist narrative technique and questions the anthropocentrism of the Western culture that is preoccupied with the semantics of war and destruction.