-: Discussion on the Narrative technique in Woolf's Kew Gardens :-
Virginia Woolf's short story Kew Gardens has received much acclaim since it was first published in 1919 ("then more widely in 1921 in the collection Monday or Tuesday, and subsequently in the posthumous collection A Haunted House [published in] 1944" according to WikipediA) and is still popular today. Many critics have asserted that Woolf's short stories were testing ground for themes and methods that she would take up and develop more fully in her novels. This is particularly true for the early, experimental phase of her career as a short story writer, during which she produced two of her most famous stories: The Mark on the Wall and the other, Kew Gardens, which has a snail at its point of focus. In fact, Kew Gardens is often single out as a kind of urtext of Woolf's literary corpus. In his memoirs, Leonard Woolf (her husband) refers to it as "a microcosm of all [Woolf's] then unwritten novels, from Jacob's Room to Between the Acts". The critic John Oakland concurs that the story "contains in embryo many of the issues of forms, theme, content, character, plot, and action which occupied [Woolf] in all her work".
Kew Gardens in southwest London
The Mark on the Wall and An Unwritten Novel both revolve around the fanciful flight of the narrator's mind, while the organizing principle of Kew Gardens is setting rather than character. A third-person narrator describes the goings-on on a July day in and around a flower bed in Kew Gardens, a public garden situated on the south bank of the River Thames, which became a place of respite for the author after the Woolf's move to Richmond in 1915. The narrator's attention alters in the world of the flower bed, snatches of various human thoughts and conversations going on around it. The first is between the married couple, Eleanor and Simon. Simon recalls the unrequited love of his past romantic courtship and how the dragonfly & a leaf serve as the objective correlatives to his hope and desire, whereas Eleanor recalls a primal, maternal kiss. The second set of feet walking by the flower bed belong to a young man calmly accompanying an old who walks erratically, smiling and murmuring as if holding a conversation with himself. The next couple is ‘two elderly women of the lower middle class’ scrutinizing the eccentric old man and then resume their conversation. A young man and woman, the fourth couple, actually enjoying each other's company there. The opening and closing paragraphs of Kew Gardens display not only the story’s experimentation with narrative perspective, but also its affinity with visual art. A narrative self-consciousness that encourages a reader to focus on the snail’s activity now and again.
Characters are rather sketchy, and not a single thread of the story is narrated to completion. In addition to being utterly banal, the "progress" of the snail, the only consistent character, is not even recounted in full. The determinism of character-based plot development, that mainstay of realist narrative, has been superseded by the arbitrariness of spatial and temporal contiguity: what is narrated is narrated for no other reason than that it is what happens to occur in a given space within a given period of time. Thus, Kew Gardens challenges the traditional assumption that a short story must be unified and provides a sense of closure.
Kew Gardens celebrates both the micro and macrocosms of a city life that includes pastoral and urban mechanized experiences, interpretating with human affairs, which are themselves communicated in terms of the intimidate, individual and personal as well as the wider social and political scenes.
Virginia Woolf's short story Kew Gardens has received much acclaim since it was first published in 1919 ("then more widely in 1921 in the collection Monday or Tuesday, and subsequently in the posthumous collection A Haunted House [published in] 1944" according to WikipediA) and is still popular today. Many critics have asserted that Woolf's short stories were testing ground for themes and methods that she would take up and develop more fully in her novels. This is particularly true for the early, experimental phase of her career as a short story writer, during which she produced two of her most famous stories: The Mark on the Wall and the other, Kew Gardens, which has a snail at its point of focus. In fact, Kew Gardens is often single out as a kind of urtext of Woolf's literary corpus. In his memoirs, Leonard Woolf (her husband) refers to it as "a microcosm of all [Woolf's] then unwritten novels, from Jacob's Room to Between the Acts". The critic John Oakland concurs that the story "contains in embryo many of the issues of forms, theme, content, character, plot, and action which occupied [Woolf] in all her work".
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| Kew Gardens in southwest London |
The Mark on the Wall and An Unwritten Novel both revolve around the fanciful flight of the narrator's mind, while the organizing principle of Kew Gardens is setting rather than character. A third-person narrator describes the goings-on on a July day in and around a flower bed in Kew Gardens, a public garden situated on the south bank of the River Thames, which became a place of respite for the author after the Woolf's move to Richmond in 1915. The narrator's attention alters in the world of the flower bed, snatches of various human thoughts and conversations going on around it. The first is between the married couple, Eleanor and Simon. Simon recalls the unrequited love of his past romantic courtship and how the dragonfly & a leaf serve as the objective correlatives to his hope and desire, whereas Eleanor recalls a primal, maternal kiss. The second set of feet walking by the flower bed belong to a young man calmly accompanying an old who walks erratically, smiling and murmuring as if holding a conversation with himself. The next couple is ‘two elderly women of the lower middle class’ scrutinizing the eccentric old man and then resume their conversation. A young man and woman, the fourth couple, actually enjoying each other's company there. The opening and closing paragraphs of Kew Gardens display not only the story’s experimentation with narrative perspective, but also its affinity with visual art. A narrative self-consciousness that encourages a reader to focus on the snail’s activity now and again.
Characters are rather sketchy, and not a single thread of the story is narrated to completion. In addition to being utterly banal, the "progress" of the snail, the only consistent character, is not even recounted in full. The determinism of character-based plot development, that mainstay of realist narrative, has been superseded by the arbitrariness of spatial and temporal contiguity: what is narrated is narrated for no other reason than that it is what happens to occur in a given space within a given period of time. Thus, Kew Gardens challenges the traditional assumption that a short story must be unified and provides a sense of closure.
Kew Gardens celebrates both the micro and macrocosms of a city life that includes pastoral and urban mechanized experiences, interpretating with human affairs, which are themselves communicated in terms of the intimidate, individual and personal as well as the wider social and political scenes.
