ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

Lighthouse,” and narrations of the passage of time as specifically human history, it
runs into the same problem faced by Shelley in “Mont Blanc”: narrative, just like
poetry, can comprehend the nonhuman only with reference to the human.
Even Mrs. McNab’s human presence, however, leaves the narrator’s poetic
voice and its attendant narrative vagueness in a dominant role. In the fifth section,
Mrs. McNab is the central figure though, as Anna Snaith and Pamela Caughie as well
as Tratner have noted, the narrator remains at a distance from her (Caughie,
“Wo(o)lfish” 75; Snaith 77). Mrs. McNab is here a symbol for her class and for the
nonhuman other which “Time Passes” and its narrator have been unable to
comprehend. Makiko Minow-Pinkney argues that Mrs. McNab refigures Mrs.
Ramsay as Culture to her Nature (Minow-Pinkney 101). Although in section six
McNab is figured as a tropical fish, to Mrs. Ramsay’s drowning sailor, here Mrs.
McNab’s nonhumanity is not part of a simple Nature/Culture opposition. She is
compared explicitly to “a ship at sea,” “leering,” “swinging sideways,” “creaking and
groaning” (130-31). Mrs. McNab stands between humanity and nature: a humanlyproduced
object taking the damage of the years upon herself. Margaret Tudeau-
Clayton argues that Mrs. McNab represents “redemptive labor,” but she is also
“associated with the natural forces of degeneration and destruction that she works
against” (Tudeau-Clayton 305). This association, however, is perhaps a bit weak:
neither tropical fish nor creaking ships are forces of degeneration or destruction.
Instead, the ship and the fish alike navigate the storm. Mrs. McNab’s redemptive
work takes place in the larger context of great natural forces; thus her place in “Time
Passes.” She bends, but does not break, as a ship takes on the motions of the sea,
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