Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Inside and Outside the Covers
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dealt extensively with Woolf’s revision of the linear and monologic male sentence: to take
an early signifi cant example, more than twenty years ago, Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Writing
Beyond the Ending (1985) demonstrated the way Woolf’s texts not only write beyond
the outcomes allotted to women in patriarchal plots, but also employ oscillating, dialogic
structures to break with sequentially-driven prose. But a closer look at Woolf’s beginnings
leads us even more deeply into the philosophical implications of her textual pluralism,
revealing the integral tie linking beginnings and endings to the modernist ethical text.
Rather than initiating action, beginnings, in Woolf’s works, plunge us into actions
in process, in three instances with fi rst lines that articulate a response to, or continuation
of, something previously written or said: “‘So of course,’ wrote Betty Flanders” (JR 3);
“‘Yes, of course…But,’” says Mrs. Ramsay (TTL 9); and the Fernham speaker opens with
“But, you may say” (AROO 1). Although readers subsequently gain enough information
to hypothesize a generalized situation, the words anterior to the fi rst line are never explicitly
revealed. No fl ashback situates the opening in medias res; we do not, as in epic, stand
outside a story whose ordered structure we ultimately reconstruct. As a result, beginning is
situated not in the narrative but in the process of reading; it is we who begin by “listening
in” to a story that is well underway. For the opening words eff ect a slight hesitation in our
attentive processes. As parts of speech that are, in the linguistic sentence, grammatically
dependent, “but,” “so,” and “yes,” signal an anterior pre-text that we have missed.
Opening to the word “so” in Jacob’s Room, we fi nd ourselves well advanced in a narrative
(with a prior history), written in a letter (with a previously written but not cited
salutation), to an addressee (who may or may not have sent correspondence to which the
present letter is a response). From Mrs. Flanders’s subsequent reference to an “accident,”
readers can imaginatively sketch in a plausible story: one of her sons (Jacob?) presumably
broke something (what?) at a boarding house where they were staying, causing the
family to relocate to other lodgings. When we later grasp how Mrs. Flanders, a widow,
serves as a fl attering looking-glass for Captain Barfoot’s grandiose self-portraits, we can
guess his reciprocal function as the sympathetic refl ector of her own self-dramatization.
But the retrospective reading initiated by our opening questions is never so satisfi ed with
its conclusions that it stops. If “so” precipitates, in the letter, the forward momentum of
Mrs. Flanders’s hand, it initiates, in the reader, the consciousness of a missing antecedent
clause. Lacking a frame, we seek it in multiple places, casting our lines further and further
back in time. Where in the larger narrative do we locate the beginnings of Mrs. Flanders’s
distress? In the accident that precipitated the family’s move? In the fatality of her being
widowed two years before? In the still vaster realm of “the eternal conspiracy of hush and
clean bottles” (14), and the ages-old burden of maternal care in a threatening world? Or,
in the less anthropocentric, more universal rhythm of the weakly crab (caught by Jacob)
climbing and falling back into its bucket, climbing and falling back (16)? And what could
fi ll in the missing exposition for Jacob’s own story? In what sentence is the narrative of
Jacob’s life the clause that follows “so”? In “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf wrote, “I see
myself as a fi sh in a stream; defl ected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream” (80).
Th e “beginnings” of Jacob’s life cannot be fi xed or determined, or it would cease to be a
stream. Strategies of anti-beginning insert the individual into life’s continuum and defi ne
the act of reading as stepping into the fl ux.
While the “so” of Jacob’s Room signals a larger trajectory of time and experience fl ow-