Time Passes
Chapter 9
“The house was left; the house was deserted. It
was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life
had left it. The long night seemed to have set in; the trifling airs, nibbling,
the clammy breaths, fumbling, seemed to have triumphed. The saucepan had rusted
and the mat decayed. Toads had nosed their way in. Idly, aimlessly, the swaying
shawl swung to and fro. A thistle thrust itself between the tiles in the larder…”
I have
chosen this quotation because I think it is really interesting how Virginia
Woolf succeeds in
dehumanizing the Ramsays’ house, portraying a world where death and desolation
reign supreme. Human agency seems to have been superseded by that of natural elements-
night, winter, waves, wind, storms. We, as readers can see, through the eyes of
the house, how these elements interact and affect the house leaving a sense of emptiness
and devastation.
Woolf experiments with space and time. She
makes the reader sense the span of
ten years going by before the house is occupied again. As she does not present
a definite account of ten years passing, we must actively perceive the text and
move into a different frame of mind beyond the absolute of knowing and into one
of sensing and perceiving.
I believe
that the scene in chapter 7 “In spring
the garden urns... and so terrible” is quite effective. By describing a
setting that is really contradictory, Woolf makes us feel both, the stillness
of the day and the chaos of the night. This scene clearly leaves the reader with mixed feelings.
ReplyDeleteVery good choice of quotation with a good deal of reflection.
What a pity you failed to acknowledge your source from www.coplac.org/metamorphosis/metamorphosis.php?id=54Share