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What point is the author making in "Kew Gardens"?

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Virginia Woolf's "Kew Gardens" emphasizes the significance of seemingly mundane moments in life, illustrating how these "moments of being" can deeply influence our lives. The story departs from traditional narrative structure, using stream of consciousness and vignettes to capture the essence of life in a garden setting. Woolf contrasts everyday experiences against the backdrop of larger historical events, like World War I, highlighting the continuity of nature and personal memory amidst societal changes.

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Woolf wanted to reinvent fiction, as she did biography, to capture the pieces of life she felt had been left out of both forms. She believed that life was not lived in the "big" events of history, be they the passage of an act of Parliament or a wedding day, but in the small, unremarked domestic moments that color every life. We all have "moments of being" in which we are very much attuned to the world around us. These are moments we remember, and these seemingly insignificant times can have deep influence on how we live our lives and what we do in the future.

In "Kew Gardens ," Woolf attempts to capture such moments of being, seemingly unimportant, that the various cavalcade of characters passing by experience against the sensual backdrop of the garden, a backdrop that will color their memories of this day, as it...

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has other days. For example, Simon, out with his wife, remembers proposing to another woman, Lily, years ago in a garden, as a dragonfly refused to settle on a leaf and Lily refused to marry him.

Although the story is set during World War I and a time of vast industrial output, those are not the only events going on. People are still walking around gardens, remembering their ordinary moments, wondering if they could have arranged their lives differently, and living everyday life. As Woolf puts it, the outer world might be:

a vast nest of Chinese boxes all of wrought steel turning ceaselessly one within another . . .

but, within that outer shell of steel, this world of nature still rolls on.

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The eNotes study guide has a good discussion of the themes in this story. Those themes include loneliness and alienation, gender roles, and nature.

It's not surprising that you're having difficulty with the story. Woolf's style of writing in stream of consciousness can be difficult to follow. One other complication with "Kew Gardens" is that it is not a typical short story, with a beginning, middle, and end. The typical short story elements (rising action, climax, denouement) are missing as well. The story is just a series of vignettes set in a park.

Maybe it will help if you put yourself in the narrator's place. Imagine that you are sitting on a bench in Kew Gardens (which is a park in London). You alternate between watching the snail make its progress along the leaf and listening to snippets of conversation of the people who pass by. Perhaps that will help you to grasp what Woolf was trying to do.

Another way to think of the story is to imagine it as an Impressionistic painting. Just as artists used little dots of paint to depict a scene, so also Woolf is using little bits of conversation to depict the action.

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