[In the following essay, Rosenfeld juxtaposes the style and themes of the two pieces collected in Two Stories: “The Mark on the Wall,” and Leonard Woolf's “Three Jews.”]

Five years after their [Virginia and Leonard Woolf's] marriage, in 1917, the newly founded Hogarth Press issued its first publication. The Woolfs saw their press as an opportunity for creative and intellectual freedom, and as a respite from mental labor. It would enable Virginia to publish what she chose—and thus, more easily, write what she chose—and provide a forum for avant-garde writers whom more conservative publishers might turn away. Its first production was a pamphlet-size volume containing a short story by each member of the couple.

Two Stories encapsulates the fraught dialectic of imagination and sociological fact that informed the Woolfs' marriage as well as their fiction. Leonard's story, “Three Jews,” is so laden by its theme of sociological destiny as to imply the impossibility of imaginative transcendence; its central character is a grave-digger, and the story ends with a figurative burial that might be read as Leonard's self-burial as Jewish writer. Hermione Lee calls “Three Jews” “a signpost pointing down a road [Leonard] would not take—as a fiction writer, as a Jewish writer”; Virginia's “The Mark on the Wall,” on the other hand, signaled “a completely new direction, the beginning of a new form and a new kind of writing” (Virginia Woolf 359). The yoking of these stories is powerfully suggestive; like the engagement notice to Lytton Strachey, they comprehend a union tugging in two directions. Leonard Woolf's departure from fiction and increasing involvement with “real world” politics and history shadowed Virginia's literary flights, her development of a fictional style at first quite fantastical, and gradually more and more deft in its interweaving of fantasy and fact. The Hogarth Press was the spawning ground of those parallel trajectories, and its first publication contained them in embryo.

Both Woolfs were snobs, but her snobbery, directed at people recognizably different from herself, energized her fiction: the energy was compounded of both the snobbery itself and the desire to overcome it. Virginia saw that objectifying others is a way of objectifying the self—for better and for worse—and also that the boundaries between self and other are finer than class politics and entrenched prejudice allow. It is easier, however, to ignore the boundary beneath oneself, attempt empathy for the person lower down, than to recognize one's real identification with that person—to feel, in fact, that one is something of an imposter on the higher rung. For Leonard, snobbery lurked dangerously near self-hatred, just as his acceptance by elite groups, a form of tokenism, bordered on rejection. He was a Jew in England: a species Theodor Herzl described as fundamentally self-divided when he referred, in an 1897 article, to “the efforts of amphibious-minded men to combine ancient tradition with an exaggerated imitation of national customs” (qtd. in Finestein, Jewish Society in Victorian England 177). It is this amphibiousness that informs the family caricatures in The Wise Virgins and constitutes the subject matter of “Three Jews.”

If, as Homi Bhabha has written, the subaltern's mimicry parodied the colonialist original, the early-twentieth-century metropolitan Jew in English masquerade was in a trickier position, both less and more of a parody. He was allowed to don gentleman's clothing—he was, in fact, enjoined to do so as a condition of membership in English society, barred him if he maintained orthodox garb or Eastern European customs; yet, this entrance once permitted, he often exposed himself by the way he wore his clothes. His masquerade could not function as satire, for he was always in the minority in a land that defined itself—despite universalist rhetoric—as both Christian and insular; when the gentleman-Jew served as parody, it was himself he mocked. The balancing act British Jews performed in the early and mid-nineteenth century, which won them their political emancipation—a victory with “the aura of a bargain” (Finestein, Jewish Society in Victorian England 147)—involved the insistence on difference in religious belief only. Socially and culturally, English Jews declared themselves to be thoroughly English; though never persecuted for their religion, they became a new sort of crypto-Jew, adopting all the customs of the host society while keeping their Jewish habits for home and family.

An antiessentialist philosophy was at work in the insistent self-Anglicization of British Jews through the late nineteenth century and into the early twentieth. That philosophy assumed no racially or even culturally inherent Jewishness, but instead that individuals of Judaic background and persuasion could be molded into perfect and wholehearted citizens of their new nation. The process of molding was to be performed as quickly and efficiently as possible on new immigrants; it was carried out by Jewish organizations that mimicked, even down to name, clubs and organizations of the larger society: the Jewish Working Men's Club, the Jewish Lads' Brigade, the Jewish Soup Kitchen, and so on.¹ Those very names embody the division that made Anglo-Jewish identity so vertiginous: the prefix suggests separateness, particularist or parochial considerations, but the purpose of these “Jewish” organizations was, almost exclusively, an acculturation in Englishness. At the same time, the names expose the ambivalence behind the apparently antiessentialist, liberal ideology of acculturation: if immigrant Jews were publicly incongruous only by virtue of Polish customs or Yiddish speech, and these groups had no religious purpose, why call them “Jewish”? Jews were a separate group in English society, and it was as a separate group that they formed smaller groups to expedite and prove their assimilability and loyalty to the new nation—a distinctly paradoxical enterprise.

The bifurcated nature of Anglo-Jewish identity, and the antialienism that formed the particular English quality of English antisemitism, provide the subject matter of “Three Jews.” It is a story about the failure of Anglicization, a failure the author seems to ascribe on the one hand to an essential Jewishness that will out despite masquerades (or that will not out despite efforts at eradication), and on the other to tenacious Jewish exclusivism. The story neither represents nor apparently indicts British antisemitism; yet the narrator, even as he exaggerates Jewish incongruity, places such unflattering emphasis on the norms of English respectability as to suggest yet a third reason for the unassimilability of the Jews: a distinct, almost laughable (if one dared laugh aloud), even pathetic (if one dared say so) lack of magnetism in British ways.

It is here—on the subject of English uptightness—that Leonard's story both joins and parts ways with Virginia's “The Mark on the Wall.” The short stories—“Mark,” “Kew Gardens,” “An Unwritten Novel,” and various others—that adumbrate Virginia's first stream-of-consciousness novels (Jacob's Room and Mrs. Dalloway), also read like sketches leading up to her famous modernist pronouncement on “reality” of character, the 1924 essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” All are concerned with transcending demarcation; the eponymous mark on the wall transmutes, in the essay, into the “markers” of character so clumsily deployed by Edwardian realists, and the entire corpus of short prose from the period between Night and Day and Mrs. Dalloway is an experiment in conveying character from within rather than marking it from without. A principle of Woolf's modernism, this idea was also central to her politics: in A Room of One's Own, she would expound her repugnance toward all forms of categorization and measure, the tools of territorialization and of the colonizing of women and others.

But Virginia Woolf was not marked in the way Leonard was. To be her father's daughter was both advantage and disadvantage; it was not a stigma. Wearing the masquerades of upper-middle-class femininity (white hats, white drapery, tea-table decorum) did not mean inviting disdain—although inhabiting a woman's body did mean categorical exclusion from public life. Virginia's examination of exclusion and inclusion led her to conclude in A Room of One's Own “how unpleasant it is to be locked out; [but] it is worse perhaps to be locked in” (24), and the conviction that there was more space on the outside—space in which to question, parody, and reconceive the inside—informs the early articulations of her modernism. Leonard's firm position as a man, a Cambridge graduate, and an ex-imperialist, was always undermined, potentially if not in fact, by his precarious station as English Jew; this tenuous identity made it more difficult to choose the outside, for the stigmatized cannot really escape.

The very structure of “Three Jews” nails home the fact of Leonard's entrapment, while the structure of “The Mark on the Wall,” inclusive, inconclusive, and suggestive, opens out into Virginia's further flights. Her story embodies possibility even when it rails against containment, while his shows up alternatives as vain fantasy. As in some of his other short fictions, the main story of “Three Jews” is encased in a double frame, and the awkwardness of this construct echoes the story's theme: the ill-fittingness of Anglo-Jewish identity. Each of the story's three speakers occupies a different position on the spectrum of that identity: the narrator who begins the tale is evidently the most assimilated, but as the story unfolds, the idea of progressive assimilation is complicated. Is it a ladder, on which the most Anglicized is most privileged? Or is the most Anglicized also most self-deluded, most thoroughly self-parodying, and thus most profoundly uncomfortable? Answers suggest themselves but are never proposed, and the identity of the first narrator is never fleshed out, so that it is tempting to find in his character signs of Leonard's stance toward the questions he raises.

Like Virginia in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Leonard concerns himself with character as seen through the eyes of another. Here the encounter arises from an explicitly escapist desire: on a Sunday in early spring, the first-person narrator chafes at the sooty airlessness of his city environs. He boards a train to Kew Gardens (the scene of another of Virginia's early stories), which provides at least the taste of nature amid excessively ordered and regulated grounds. So far, the plot gives a foretaste of A Room of One's Own, in which imagination is both vivified by the lawns and streams of Oxbridge and constrained by its sexist strictures. But the strictures in “Three Jews” are not imposed by an identifiable authority, arising instead from a general aura both less definite and more ubiquitous than Virginia's Oxbridge beadle. The first indication that the narrator is not at home in Kew comes with the surprising national characterization of the season and weather: “It was spring there, English spring.” Once invoked, the adjective recurs, and recurs again, accompanied by other repeated modifiers:

Yes, the quiet orderly English spring that embraced and sobered even the florid luxuriance of great flowers bursting in white cascades over strange tropical trees. … And the spring had brought the people out into the gardens, the quiet orderly English people. … They looked at the flaunting tropical trees, and made jokes, and chaffed one another, and laughed not very loud. They were happy in their quiet orderly English way. … They did not run about or shout, they walked slowly, quietly, taking care to keep off the edges of the grass because the notices told them to do so. … I watched them eating plum-cake and drinking tea quietly, soberly, under the gentle apple-blossom.

(TS [Two Stories] 6-7; italics mine)

The narrator's cool, sarcastic, half-admiring distance from the “English” people implies that he is a foreigner, a tourist, perhaps, culling observations to repeat at home. But the description of “florid … strange tropical trees” (so perplexing to the English), incongruously set against “gentle” apple-blossom, metaphorically indicates the narrator's identity: he is not a tourist, but a transplant—one whose alien roots inevitably “show.” The luxuriant blossoms of imported flora are analogized almost instantly in the floridity of the second Jew, a man who appears in the tea gardens with a good deal more than the conspicuous energy of Ralph Denham arriving to Sunday tea at the Hilberys'. That second Jew, whose narrative will shortly take over, is a veritable catalog of orientalist and antisemitic stereotypes: his movement is “bustl[ing],” his face “dark fat … and inscrutable,” his mouth “sensual” and eyes “mysterious” and heavy-lidded, and, says the narrator, “I noticed the slight thickness of the voice, the over-emphasis, and the little note of assertiveness in it” (7). But he is recognized almost immediately by the way he wears his clothes—as though they belonged to another.

Whose side are we on? The story presents the reader with a narrator who is both native and excluded, who measures the man opposite by an alien standard that we know already to be alien to himself, as well. The story that follows concerns a third Jew, whose tale the second man recounts only once he and the narrator have compared notes on the subject of their own conspicuousness and the question of “belonging.” Both feel entitled to possess or claim their surroundings; both feel, however, that their surroundings would never claim them; and, as nonbelieving Jews, both feel deracinated. The third man, however, though also a skeptic, is not deracinated; his tenacious Jewish parochialism gives him a rootedness-despite-transplantation that the story conveys as at once enviable and primitive.

The third man is a grave-keeper and, though he presides over a dusty Jewish cemetery, represents a spirit that, far from dying out, thrives ever more stubbornly in the face of opposition and adversity. “By Jove!” says the second Jew, whose idiom distinguishes him from the third he is about to describe—and, presumably, from the first as well, whose locutions are more highbrow—

You couldn't mistake him for anything but a Jew. His arms hung down from his shoulders in that curious, loose, limp way—you know it?—it makes the clothes look as if they didn't belong to the man who is wearing them. Clever cunning grey eyes, gold pince-nez, and a nose, by Jove, Sir, one of the best, one of those noses, white and shiny, which, when you look at it full face, seems almost flat on the face, but immensely broad, curving down, like a broad high-road from between the bushy eye-brows down over the lips. And side face, it was colossal; it stood out like an elephant's trunk with its florid curves and scrolls.

(11)

This eloquent description seems implausible, overdetermined—a fabulistic flight that almost touches the fantastical digressions of “The Mark on the Wall” and other early stories by Virginia. But her fantasies are the deliberate meanderings of a narratorial imagination refusing to be pinned down, a mind willfully defying rules and roles, refusing simple plots. The satirical fervor that seizes the second Jew in his description of the third marks an ugly confinement at the very moment of imaginative flight: it is imagination in the service of self-hatred, creativity immured in textbook racism. Sociological entrapment defeats the desire for transcendence; prejudice strangles a potentially original mind: the Anglo-Jewish writer, this passage seems to suggest, is damned both ways. If he chooses the questionable universalism of “Englishness,” he denies his particular origins; if he seeks his origins, he becomes an anachronism, a displaced particularist; caught between the two impossibilities, he is forced to tell self-defeating stories.² Incongruous in the tea gardens, he takes up residence in a graveyard.

The third Jew's story is simple enough, though its ending exposes the ambiguity of the entire tale. Having failed in business, he has taken a job as grave-keeper, an inglorious position but sufficient to provide a comfortable living for his wife and two sons. When the second Jew visits the grave of his first wife, he converses with the grave-keeper on matters of belief and concludes, “‘He isn't a Jew now any more than I am. We're Jews only externally now. … Even he doesn't believe, the keeper of Jewish graves!’” (14). But the ending of the story proves this wrong; the second Jew returns to the graveyard some time later and finds the third in a state of defiant misery, Job-like and gloriously stiff-necked. The ultimate disaster has occurred: his son has married a Christian woman. The grave-keeper's condemnation of his son in fact mingles two kinds of stiff-neckedness, one that might be called Jewish, the other, perhaps, classically English—for in the end, it seems, he is more disturbed by the son's crossing of class borders than he is by his departure from the fold:

“That eldest boy of mine, he's no longer my son—… I had a servant girl here working in my house, a Christian serving girl—and he married her behind my back. He asks me to sit down to meat with a girl, a Christian girl, who worked in my house—I can't do it. … Times change: I might have received his wife, even though she was a Goy. But a servant girl who washed my dishes! I couldn't do it. One must have some dignity.”

He stood there upright, stern, noble: a battered scarred old rock, but immovable under his seedy black coat. I couldn't offer him a shilling; I shook his hand, and left him brooding over his son and his graves.

(17-18)

Thus the story ends, contradicting some of its earlier elements: the point of view has changed, a piece of the frame has dropped out—the last words, without quotation marks, belong to the second Jew rather than the initial narrator—and what had seemed ludicrous now appears sublime. The incongruous English Jew is a figure of biblical pathos, and assimilation, represented up to now as an inevitably failing gambit, the performance of a monkey in a top hat, appears as a tragedy. The description seems unambivalent; the characterization derives from Sholem Aleichem rather than a proto-Nazi textbook. But this Tevye, rooted in his eternal displacement, recalls the specifically displaced previous narrators; the story, after all, is about “Three Jews.” The title lumps them together, even as each is at pains to distinguish himself from the next, and the ending signals a fading out in two directions: the loss of distinctive Jewishness in intermarriage (and the inevitably non-Jewish offspring), and the loss of distinction the first narrator undergoes through seeing himself in the other.

The recognition, after all, is mutual: the grotesque Jewish businessman gravitates to the narrator's tea-table even as the latter labels him Other. They speak the same language, though each notes the “distinctive Jewish speech” of the next man. Therein lies the story's irony: the very distinctions that the first Jew notes in the second, the second in the third, would be noticed by a fourth in the first; not even the most assimilated is exempt.

That the word “distinction” has a particular English connotation, one that will never apply to these three figures, is the tragic irony of Anglo-Jewish identity. Leonard Woolf could never be “distinguished”—wherein precisely lay his attraction for Virginia Stephen, whose hand is in this text as in the whole slim volume. Virginia, in fact, set the type for the story of a Jew marrying a “Goy”; it was her first typesetting venture and resulted in some quirky errors, mostly in punctuation and spacing. The last line of the story is half-effaced by a sloppily printed woodcut, one of three illustrations commissioned for the volume from the painter Dora Carrington. The story is thereby given an additional valence, for Carrington, like Virginia, had a fraught alliance with a Jew. Her much-documented relationship with Mark Gertler (possibly alluded to in the grave-keeper's reference to his faithful, second son, a painter?) ended in a breakup, supposedly because his sexual demands were too much for her, conceivably also because they combined with his East End background and notorious unwashedness to make him seem deeply alien.

The shadowy textual presence of Mark Gertler highlights the issues of class, nationality, and religion that Leonard's story raises. Gertler belonged to that group of Jewish immigrants who were simultaneously seen as an embarrassment, and aggressively cultivated and Anglicized, by the more prosperous, more rooted and more “Western” British Jews whose own continuing acceptance depended upon “civilizing” the recent arrivals.³ Yet he came late enough, with the great influx of the last two decades of the nineteenth century, to belong to that generation which changed the profile of English Jewry and exposed its paradoxes: ten years younger than Leonard Woolf, he grew up in squalid East End poverty, speaking Yiddish, unashamed of his background—yet nonetheless wishing to escape it for airier, brighter spaces in which he might cultivate a modernist art. He never rejected his class or his family, though he did leave his religion behind; his Orthodox parents, like the grave-keeper in Leonard's story, were surprisingly tolerant—indeed, proud—of a son whose vocation violated the biblical law against creating images.

This universal desire for escape, which constitutes a fundamental trope of early English modernism—escape from parents, forefathers, British philistinism, traditional realism—informing the rebellious outcries of Carrington as well as Gertler, Virginia as well as Leonard, represents both the suture and the split between “Three Jews” and “The Mark on the Wall.” Insofar as Leonard's English Tevye seems finally to reject his new daughter-in-law on the basis of class rather than religion, he aligns himself, however unconsciously and coincidentally, with English values: class values both Leonard and Virginia consciously rejected even as their lives and livings depended upon them. The dependence was somewhat different in the two cases, however: Virginia, as the next chapter will note, relied on others' service for her own creative freedom—and sometimes just shied clear of including Leonard in the servant category: “Poor devil,” she wrote flippantly to her friend Jacques Raverat in 1923, “I make him pay for his unfortunate mistake in being born a Jew by discharging the whole business of life. This induces in me a sense of the transitoriness of existence, and the unreality of matter, which is highly congenial and comfortable” (L [The Letters of Virginia Woolf] 3:58). That Leonard's psychic comfort also depended upon class-consciousness is underscored by Virginia's remark. Ironically, it was precisely such prejudices as hers against which his own snobbery was erected, in order to align him with English insiders rather than immigrant newcomers; yet his position as potential target of these prejudices helps explain his deeply principled egalitarianism. This lifelong stance comprehended the realms of gender, economic, and imperial relations; if, when it came to the relations between Jews and the Gentile majority, he was ambivalent and ultimately passive, perhaps he may be forgiven, considering the double bind of Anglo-Jewish identity and the aversions of those he most loved and admired.⁴

But Virginia Woolf's remark about confining Leonard to “business” while she pursues her fantasies casts light on more than the failings that formally characterize and thematically inhabit Leonard's story of closed possibilities; it also elucidates the contradictions inherent in Virginia's early modernist experiments, superficially universalist in ethos yet undergirded (and, to a critical eye, undercut) by a form of deeply rooted particularism. “The Mark on the Wall” echoes the structure of “Three Jews” in containing three encounters; each is a frustrating convergence between a narrator desiring complete freedom and some other figure or figures, real or imaginary, trying to impose confinement. Like the indecorous shatterings and willful obscurities Woolf attributes to Messrs. Joyce and Eliot—though not, curiously, to herself—in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” the demonization of those jailers and the textual meanderings that seem intended to confound them arise from a counterreaction that energizes her early prose. Hermione Lee cites a 1930 letter to Ethel Smyth in which Virginia describes her early experimental work during her long illnesses of the early teens:

I used to make up stories, profound and to me inspired phrases all day long as I lay in bed, and thus sketched, I think, all that I now, by the light of reason, try to put into prose (I thought of the Lighthouse then, and Kew and others, not in substance but in idea)—after all this, when I came to, I was so tremblingly afraid of my own insanity that I wrote Night and Day mainly to prove to my own satisfaction that I could keep entirely off that dangerous ground. I wrote it, lying in bed, allowed to write only for one half hour a day. … I shall never forget the day I wrote “The Mark on the Wall”—all in a flash, after being kept stone breaking for months. The “Unwritten Novel” was the great discovery, however. That—again in one second—showed me how I could embody all my deposit of experience in a shape that fitted it. … I saw … when I discovered that method of approach, Jacobs Room, Mrs. Dalloway etc—How I trembled with excitement; and then Leonard came in, and I drank my milk, and concealed my excitement, and wrote I suppose another page of that interminable Night and Day (which some say is my best book).

(L 4:231; in Lee, Virginia Woolf 370; italics mine)

The structure of confinement—the body in bed, the mind constrained to function on traditional lines—pierced through by flights of imagination is a founding trope of the early fiction. It is a dialectic that works through the later fictions in ever subtler, more formally complex and sociologically astute fashion: as Woolf grows more and more alert to social conditions and prejudices, she seams the material and the metaphysical more closely, illuminating their interdependence. The sickbed was a prison, which paradoxically liberated her fancies.⁵ This was the case in an extreme sense during her long illness of 1913-1915; for the rest of her life, briefer stints in bed would function as periods of fertilization, during which Leonard, nursing her, would appear less as warden, more as nurturer. But in the early fictions, written, as it were, straight from the prisoning bed and the recent experience of young womanhood as itself an imprisonment, the ambivalence is more intense. It shows itself in her conception of character, whose development can be traced through “The Mark on the Wall” to “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” to Mrs. Dalloway, in which compassion toward the ill-treated mental sufferer is at last diametrically balanced with a condemnation of social villainy.

From the start, Woolf's modernism was based on the idea of character, bound up with questions of empathy, of the precise distance between self and other. Thomas Caramagno describes the process both critics and therapists must undergo to comprehend texts or symptoms that elude their conventional notions of order—a process of understanding, and liberating themselves from, their own countertransference: “What is essential, in understanding both literature and manic-depressive illness, is the ability to open oneself up to experiences, reactions, emotions, and ideas that do not slavishly reinforce our defensive, narrow, entrenched strategies for coping with self-world transactions” (The Flight of the Mind 76). It is a process Woolf herself underwent in the early modernist experiments, with an important difference: rather than seeking authorization and reinforcement, she strove vehemently against all figures who might represent such authority—so vehemently that she came close, at times, to reincorporating the exclusivist attitudes they represented.

This fraught paradox of liberation founded on enclosure, rebellion compromised by resentment, animates the two texts in one volume that together signal three important developments: the incorporation of “the Woolves” as a working team, the ultimate demise of Leonard's fictional enterprise, and the launching point of Virginia's bold literary experiments.⁶ The founding of the Hogarth Press freed Virginia to write what she chose, as she chose—and “The Mark on the Wall” is a chronicle of that liberation. It sits oddly next to Leonard's story of essentialism and entrapment, and challenges the reader's capacity for maintaining tension in the face of seeming breakdown⁷—thus mimicking the very challenge Woolf was facing in the early fiction. Again, Caramagno's discussion of Woolf's anti-countertransference illuminates both her development and the stance required of the reader of the Woolves' only dually (but not co-) authored volume:

Can we … possibly read what the writer writes? Woolf thought we could, if, paradoxically, we tolerated disorder while detecting patterns; by combining disorder and pattern … we might see something new. What, exactly, would that new thing be? It doesn't matter, just as long as we start seeing what previously could not be seen, the différance of the text, the voice of the Other, which urges us to question every assumption we hold sacred. …

(The Flight of the Mind 86)

The voice of the Other does not inhabit “The Mark on the Wall,” which is, in a sense, a univocal text. But it is also a text of différance par excellence, in which the principle is never to mark, always to seel—and always to see differently. The narrator, who never leaves her chair during the story, builds her defiantly senseless narrative around a mark on the wall, a kind of Rorschach blot, which is neither one thing nor the other but whatever the narrator (and, implicitly, the reader) wishes it to be. This is the principle and the plot of the narrative, in whose course various conclusions—definitive ideas—are rejected in favor of inconclusion. The other persons who appear in the story are engaged, it seems, solely to embody those rejected notions: first, the former inhabitants of the room, a wife and a husband met so fleetingly as to make clear that we are not in the realm of realism—“he was in the process of saying that in his opinion art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder, as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train” (20); second, a “house-keeper, a woman with the profile of a police-man … [who] talks always of art … [who comes] nearer and nearer” until she nearly compels the narrator to get up and examine the mark on the wall—“But no. I refuse to be beaten. I will not move. I will not recognise her” (22); and third, an imagined group of people in a room, who spawn elaborate reflections:

And then I came into the room. … [I]t is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed in any longer. … It is a matter of great importance. Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people—what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking in the mirror; that accounts for the expression in our vague and almost glassy eyes. And the novelists in future will realise more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories … but these generalisations are very worthless. … Generalisations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons. … How shocking and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks … were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom.

(24-25)

Talking to herself, the narrator addresses in this one long passage both the socio-/psychological questions of Leonard's story and the ideas of intersubjectivity that will inform all Virginia Woolf's further work. The conventions of the Sunday afternoon walk, so stultifying, so dictatorial, and yet so easily dispensed with, mark the boundary between Leonard's identity and Virginia's; from here on in, that boundary will also define the progress of their respective careers. For Leonard, the convention was not so easily rendered unreal: recognition of the customs of the Christian sabbath was the price he paid for admission in non-Jewish society. Had he denied the substantiality of those customs, he would have been ghettoized, reconfined, as it were, to the soot and chimney pots his narrator flees at the start of “Three Jews.” For all their worldliness and bohemianism, his set were also parochial—parochial, indeed, in the name of worldliness. It is this conflict between the imposition of one's own vision on others and the validation of another's mode that defines the narrator's mental convolutions in “The Mark on the Wall.” Trying to find her way between definition and discovery, she is not yet comfortable in the realm of intersubjective relations; seeking freedom, she paradoxically confines herself to a room, an inanimate sign, and a misanthropy arising from fear of confinement. Others disturb her because they raise questions about the relation between narcissism and mutual understanding, prejudice and self-realization. Encounters are dangerous because the other so often sees us as a shell, a mere projection of his or her own fears and preconceptions. Not to engage with others, however, is to elude the self—to elude, also, the moral and political questions so pressing in a society that defines most encounters between people as encounters between types, either harmonious (because homogenous) or hierarchical (because incongruous). In this instance, the narrator settles for a tree, advancing from the inanimate stain to an organic object with which, in an almost ludicrously beautiful final fancy, she intensely empathizes, imagining the feel of cold, the song of birds, the feet of insects, from the tree's point of view. It is an engagement that falls short of activism; but the final moment of the story, with the sudden intrusion of a second presence, begins to imagine an affirmative relation toward an Other that will be elaborated and complicated in Woolf's work henceforth:

Where was I? What has it all been about? A tree? … I can't remember a thing. Everything's moving, falling, slipping, vanishing. There is a vast upheaval of matter. Someone is standing over me and saying—

“I'm going out to buy a newspaper.”

“Yes?”

(30)

Thus the story ends, having raised a complex set of questions about the relations between character and “reflection,” with the latter word punningly deployed to suggest the ways in which two beings can either glassily refract or thoughtfully illuminate each other. The intruding presence in the final paragraphs, which both stanches overwhelming flux and suggests future possibilities, might be that of a husband. Both Leonard and Virginia seem to inhabit their respective narrators; both stories are intensely personal, chronicles of decision, and the figure who leaves the room for the world of action and headlines suggests Leonard himself, leaving behind the fiction-writing venture in favor of an engagement with the real world that might lead to real change, if not for English Jews specifically, then for all those oppressed by conventions and hierarchies.⁸ The figure who remains in the room, half-denying, half-answering the voice of the Other, is the narrator/writer who will favor, more and more, a starting point of stability-in-flux. Already in this story, and wholeheartedly in “An Unwritten Novel” and “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Woolf employs the metaphor of vehicular travel as a way of conceiving character: face-to-face in a railway carriage, author and character partake of one another; if the author, ultimately, is the one who creates character, and is thus hierarchically in a position of power, the idea of movement past an ever-changing landscape and the image of two people in the same carriage⁹ is a corrective reminder that we're all, for better or worse, in it together.¹⁰

On this recognition, Virginia Woolf's future fictions were founded. The limits of her capacity to empathize and equalize define her early prose experiments as much as the ideal of free travel fuels them. No terrain is undemarcated, and Woolf's attitude toward character—like her attitude toward Others—negotiates between the desire to liberate trapped souls and a tendency to redraw the lines of engagement. Snobbery is in almost mortal conflict with the ideal of empathy, making for a particularly turbulent train journey for narrator and character in “An Unwritten Novel,” the story that most clearly adumbrates the narrative and theory of “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” Acutely observing the woman opposite, the narrator realizes time and again that the watcher is also watched, also in danger of construction and misconstruction. To take another's life in one's own hands is potentially an act of hubris. Yet the imagining of that other life is also the supreme act of social empathy; in a sense, all our lives depend on the capacity of others to imagine us. The story plays ceaselessly with this idea, moving beyond the endless play of “A Mark on the Wall” by carrying fantasy out of the compartment of one brain and into another. That crossing rebounds, however, with the narrator's recognition that all such games are determined by the self's preconceptions; the ending of the story is a surprise and a lesson, as the narrator learns that “her” “old woman opposite” is really quite a different character from the one she'd imagined all along. The story concludes, however, with a new beginning, as the narrator readjusts to her discovery. It is such perpetual new beginnings that from here on characterize Woolf's writing, in its refusal to draw character simply as caricature and its continual pursuit of what remains elusive. To mark, she realizes, is to kill the spirit.

The capacity for such ceaseless pursuit is a luxury that characterizes Woolf's modernism. From the point of view of her imaginative privilege, the author conceives herself as a transparent vehicle, conveying the dreams and desires of the disenfranchised to a readership privileged like herself. In “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” this relationship among author, character, and readers is made explicit, again via the metaphor of railway carriages: author and character occupy one carriage, with the readers next door. As Rachel Bowlby reminds us, carriages in that period had no corridors; they were entered from outside, not within, the train (Feminist Destinations 4). It is thus the author's responsibility to penetrate the dividing walls, a performance with profound social implications, and one that can be achieved only through an imaginary disembodiment.

But the author, as a social being, is never disembodied—this is the paradox of Virginia Woolf's empathy. “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” enshrines a new definition of character. The responsible, the imaginative, writer conveys character by conveying the world seen through that character's eyes, rather than describing the character as seen through her own (the writer's) eyes. The writer is a transparent eyeball, taking in another's vision without imposing her own. This is an impossible act, but one worth striving to achieve, and it is in such perpetual striving that Virginia Woolf's art of empathy succeeds. The counterpoint of failure and success is itself instructive. At one point in the essay, Woolf makes a surprising distinction: “[T]he men and women who began writing novels in 1910 or thereabouts,” she tells her audience, “had this great difficulty to face—that there was no English novelist living from whom they could learn their business. Mr. Conrad is a Pole; which sets him apart, and makes him, however admirable, not very helpful” (CE [Collected Essays] 326).

Of all possible discriminations, surely this is the least legitimate.¹¹ Is not the lecture's central idea the importance of understanding and learning from those who are “set apart,” through a valiant effort to penetrate differences? The insularity at work in such a statement is contradicted by many others; it was contradicted by Woolf's own marriage. In the essay “On Being Ill” (1930), she wrote, as so often, of the creative value in sickness, comparing it to a strange country: “In illness, with the police off duty … if at last we grasp the meaning, it is all the richer for having come to us sensually first … like some queer odor. Foreigners, to whom the tongue is strange, have us at a disadvantage. The Chinese must know the sound of Antony and Cleopatra better than we do” (M [The Moment and Other Essays] 19). Thus a Pole, it seems, especially one repatriated, eloquent in at least three tongues, using language all the more brilliantly for its late acquisition, could teach young English writers a great deal …

The Jew, unlike a true foreigner, was doubly stymied, both a part of and apart from the country that denied him the very acculturation it insisted upon. This dual vision hampered Leonard Woolf's autobiographical fiction, whereas Virginia Woolf's work, even when the subject matter was far from her own daily life, always arose from her unusual capacity to leave the self behind even when the self was speaking. (“When the self speaks to the self,” asks the narrator of “An Unwritten Novel” near the end of the story, thus encapsulating its central questions about intersubjectivity, “who is speaking?”) “I'm amphibious,” Woolf wrote in a diary entry whose flow of fancies evokes the early fictions, “in bed & out of it” (D [The Diary of Virginia Woolf] 3:40); able to inhabit two realms, she was never hobbled in either. But—and the conjunction is of utmost significance—she was a woman, neither schooled nor wanted for public action. Thus she became a deeply political writer of fiction and essays, while her husband turned to traditional genres of political writing: the tract, the history, the argument from hard facts. Between them, they shared contemplation and action, prejudice and understanding.

Notes

1. See Bill Williams, “‘East and West’: Class and Community in Manchester Jewry, 1850-1914,” in Cesarani, The Making of Modern Anglo-Jewry.

2. The lack of a real Anglo-Jewish literary tradition has often been remarked, especially in contrast to America, which boasts a Jewish literature both distinct from and contributing to the twentieth-century canon. Finestein lists several prominent Jewish writers who migrated from England to America, where they found a climate more conducive to their creativity (Jewish Society in Victorian England 198).

3. On the relations between “East” and “West” (Eastern and Western Europe, but also East End and West End) in Anglo-British Jewry, see Cesarani, The Making of Modern Anglo-Jewry. Bill Williams's essay “‘East and West’: Class and Community in Manchester Jewry, 1850-1914,” revises the commonly invoked polarity by describing a third group, the “alrightniks” (after Irving Howe in his history of American Jewry)—immigrant businessmen who mediated between the newly arrived poor and the more acculturated, well-to-do families. Several of the essays in Cesarani discuss the rhetoric used by the latter to describe their mission toward the immigrants; Finestein also offers acute discussions of the subject:

   [T]he assimilation of the Eastern European Jewish immigrants around the closing decades of the century into English and Anglo-Jewish life was of prime importance. Upon the success of that operation was thought to depend the success of Anglo-Jewry and much else besides. Anglicization thus became a moral imperative. Anglo-Jewish communal policy was dominated by considerations of public image.

   (Jewish Society in Victorian England 162)

   Hermann Adler, Chief Rabbi from 1891 to 1911, “did not quite live down his language about the immigrants in a much publicized Succot sermon in 1887 at the New West End Synagogue. It was necessary, he said, ‘to anglicise, humanise and civilize’ them” (Finestein 177). The language is redolent of British colonialist rhetoric, with the vital exception of “anglicise.” “The Very Reverend Herman [sic] Adler,” according to Cooper and Morrison, “became known as the ‘West End goy’” (Cooper and Morrison, A Sense of Belonging 73).

4. Paul Morrison, director of a BBC series on Anglo-Jewry, remarks:

   I looked at my own back catalogue of documentaries made over twenty years. It is an honourable list. I had dealt with many important social issues—racism, unemployment, education. I had explored many themes of identity and empowerment. … There was much that could be said to be Jewish in my identification with the underdog, in my focus on the psychological scars of marginalisation. … But not one of the films I had made was explicitly Jewish in theme or subject-matter. I wore my Jewishness in my films invisibly, as I had learned to do in my life.

   (Qtd. in Cooper and Morrison, A Sense of Belonging 5)

5. “For Woolf,” Caramagno writes, “manic-depressive illness periodically destroyed control … and so permitted her to return to the creative process unencumbered by the illusion that meaning lay in order alone” (The Flight of the Mind 80).

6. Virginia began referring to herself and Leonard as “the Woolves” during this period; the elegant head of a rather ferocious wolf, designed by Vanessa Bell, was the symbol of the Hogarth Press, appearing on the title page of all publications.

7. The terms belong to Jessica Benjamin.

8. In later published versions, the story ends with an additional piece of dialogue, in which the seemingly-male voice expresses a sense of impotence in the face of real-world events, along with a—compensatory?—certainty about the mark on the wall:

   “Though it's no good buying newspapers. … Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God damn this war! … All the same, I don't see why we should have a snail on our wall.”

   Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail.

   (CSF [The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf] 83; ellipses in original)

9. According to Bowlby, the carriage is third-class; Woolf never makes the distinction explicit, but her statement that “I … jumped into the first carriage I came to,” coming, as it were, from on high (along with her reference, also remarked by Bowlby, to “the character of one's cook”), suggests that this is a leap across class borders.

10. Bowlby's introductory chapter in Feminist Destinations elucidates the many implications of the train setting from the point of view of a critic familiar with British rail travel, both past and present. “The compartment,” she remarks, “does have some of the qualities of the domestic sitting room [favored of Edwardian writers], but this only adds to its curiously ambivalent suspension half-way between two states. … This is a public space superficially identical to a private one, so that the anonymity of the limited number of passengers is all the more significant from its contrast to the scene of intimacy it resembles” (4).

11. In his essay on ethnicity, Werner Sollors questions “[t]he discussion of literature in tribal isolation”: “The ethnic approach to writing … is often in danger of making one generalization (the writer is an X, meaning not a Y) the central, if not the sole, avenue to a text; yet making this Xness central may be circular and tautological (X writes like an X, not like a Y) since it reveals first and foremost this very Xness, a quality which cumulatively achieves the status of a somewhat mystical, ahistorical, and even quasi-eternal essence” (Sollors, “Ethnicity,” in Lentricchia and McLaughlin, Critical Terms for Literary Study 290).

Works Consulted

Works by the Woolfs

Woolf, Leonard. The Wise Virgins: A Story of Words, Opinions and a few Emotions. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.

Woolf, Leonard and Virginia. Two Stories. London: Hogarth Press, 1917.

Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays, Vol. 1. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967.

———. The Complete Shorter Fiction. Edited by Susan B. Dick. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.

———. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Anne Oliver Bell. 5 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-1984.

———. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 6 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-1980.

———. The Moment and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1948.

———. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1925.

———. Night and Day. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1920.

———. A Room of One's Own. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929.

Other Sources

Bowlby, Rachel. Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988.

Caramagno, Thomas C. The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf's Art and Manic-Depressive Illness. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992.

Cesarani, David, ed. The Making of Modern Anglo-Jewry. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.

Cooper, Howard, and Paul Morrison. A Sense of Belonging: Dilemmas of British Jewish Identity. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson in Association with Channel Four Television, 1991.

Finestein, Israel. Jewish Society in Victorian England: Collected Essays. London: Vallentine Mitchell & Co., 1993.

Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Lentricchia, Frank, and Thomas McLaughlin. Critical Terms for Literary Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.