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

like to be up here at dusk alone neither. It was too much for one woman, too much,
too much. She creaked, she moaned. She banged the door. She turned the key in the
lock, and left the house alone, shut up, locked” (137). Mrs. McNab here has a voice,
as well as a particular grammar which marks her class position. She is also both
opposed to nature and the effects of the nonhuman passage of time and a symbol of
those effects. She desires more help to stop the creaking of the doors, to maintain the
house’s status as a protective zone for human activity. This opposition to nature
continues in section nine, as nonhumanity again dominates the house: “What power
could now prevent the fertility, the insensibility of nature? Mrs. McNab’s dream of a
lady, of a child, of a plate of milk soup?” (138). Yet, Mrs. McNab is herself like the
decaying, nonhuman house: creaking and moaning (wordlessly) like the door as she
comes into contact with it. The fertility of nature, too, is like the fertility of Mrs.
McNab and her fellow workers as they seek to scrub nature from the household:
Attended with the creaking of hinges and the screeching of bolts, the slamming and
banging of damp-swollen woodwork some rusty laborious birth seemed to be taking
place, as the women, stooping, rising, groaning, singing, slapped and slammed,
upstairs now, now down in the cellars. Oh, they said, the work!” (139).
Work itself resembles to this narrator the workings of nature. Yet, at the same
time, the presence of Mrs. McNab, and later Mrs. Bast and her son, is licensed by the
Ramsays as work against nature and provides the narrative with human focalizers.
Working-class people, and the work that they do, is invisible to the narrator in the
presence of bourgeois narrative possibilities, as for example, when Mrs. Ramsay
orders a silent, undescribed maid to “Yes, take it away” during dinner (87). Only the
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