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

anthropomorphizing narrative—but in the sense that it becomes ex post facto a
metaphor for Prue Ramsay on her wedding day, laid out for human viewers (and later
by her husband) in a ritual presentation of her body. Spring is simultaneously virginal
and sexual—and this is mirrored in marriage’s simultaneous celebration of prior
virginity and future fertility. However, the seasonal narrative provides a further clue
to the mixing of the virginal and the fertile in the figure of spring: Prue seems to be
married in the spring and dies in childbirth in “that summer” (132). This aspect or
section of the narrative has the chronotope of a masque or allegorical narrative, but
this chronotope is at most suggested rather than fully established. That is, the narrator
engages various generic or discursive modes, but these are more rhetorical allusions
than fully establishes chronotopes. This chronotopic sketch is echoed in a sketch-like
accounting of narrative events themselves. The seasonal narrative and its relationship
to the bracketed narrative is vague enough that Prue’s pregnancy at the time of her
marriage is more suggested than defined. However, Woolf is able to use the multiple
levels of narrative, as well as the lyrical mode of its primary narrator, to at least
suggest the violation of—and the violation inherent in—the traditional, optimistic
marriage plot.
“Time Passes” does not stay long in the spring—in the very next paragraph
(and sentence), “summer neared, as the evenings lengthened” (131). The movement
from spring to summer is associated not with light and day, but with lengthening
evening: paradoxically, the decreasing nighttime seems to increase, if not the night
itself, at least the anticipation of the night. “Time Passes,” even as it explores seasons
and scenes of daytime, is at pains to remind the reader that this is essentially a story
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