Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Woolf and the Others at the Zoo
their variety is all that is of signifi cance. In Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus Smith sits in Regents
Park with his wife, and “dun-coloured animals stretched long necks over the Zoo palings,
barking, howling” (21). Recalling the doctor’s advice to make him “notice real things,” Rezia
looks around, despairingly deciding, “what was there to look at? A few sheep. Th at was all”
(22). Th e noisy, intrusive animals described are clearly not sheep, but they are literally eradicated
from Rezia’s view, as if they become imaginary. Woolf increasingly treats Zoo animals
in her writings as empty similes, so that the statues outside parliament are described in Th e
London Scene as being “black and sleek and shiny as sea lions that have just risen from the
water” (37). Such images carry no weight of animality, and the Gardens in fact become for
Woolf a place that aids contemplation upon things quite unconnected to them:
And the truth is, one can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at it vanishes:
but look at the ceiling, look…at the cheaper beasts in the zoo which are exposed
to walkers in Regents Park, & the soul slips in. It slipped in this afternoon. I will
write that I said, staring at the bison. (D3 62)
Here, this large hairy quadruped is inciting in the author consideration of an entity that
is perhaps the antithesis of animality, and routinely produced as the primary uniquely
human characteristic, the soul.
Arranged here in chronological order, these very selective instances might suggest
Woolf as only overcoming the hesitancy of Night and Day by gradually withdrawing to a
position of carefully maintained distance from the Zoo animal. It is as if the actuality of
the bison has had to be all but written out along with its association with metaphorical
animality. So does Woolf’s exploration of the Zoo fail to tackle and overcome the sexist
discourse suspected in Night and Day because of authorial frigidity? Where Craig Smith
suggests that Woolf’s “inhibitions in writing about the body limit her art” (355), perhaps
her appreciation of the Zoo creature is similarly limited.
However, Woolf does come to re-examine and to forcefully re-evaluate the Zoo animal,
notably in her 1928 article, “Th e Sun and the Fish.” Ostensibly describing a solar eclipse,
Woolf’s mind in this piece is soon transported to the Zoo. We are introduced not to another
empty simile, but rather “the complete and perfect effi gy of two lizards” (E4 523). Th ese
animals are having sex but, as Jane Goldman observes, “this is not the celebration of the fl esh
we might expect” (101). Animal sexuality rather emerges as ascetically superior:
one lizard is mounted immobile on the back of another, with only the twinkle
of a gold eyelid or the suction of a green fl ank to show that they are living fl esh,
and not made of bronze. All human passion seems furtive and feverish beside
this still rapture. Time seems to have stopped and we are in the presence of immortality.
(E4 523)
Rather than merely retreating from images of animal sexuality, Woolf is here casting
her own image of the Zoo animal as less metaphorically animalistic than humanity.
Moreover, in fi nding such an image here in the Zoo, she draws attention to the hopelessly
partial vision of the Gardens off ered in Garnett’s heaving animal fallacies. What she ultimately
demonstrates is not a psychosexual avoidance of fallacious human animality but a
fi rm corrective response to its distasteful discourse. Moreover, by revealing the intellectual
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