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2
The Mark on the Wall
Virginia Woolf was a novelist and essayist. She grew
up in a literary atmosphere and was educated in her
father’s extensive library. The famous group of
intellectuals which came to be known as the
Bloomsbury Group originated in gatherings of
Cambridge University graduates and their friends in
Virginia’s home. Along with her husband, Virginia
started the Hogarth Press which became a successful
publishing house.
In her novels, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse,
she experimented with new techniques, particularly
new ways of capturing the flow of time. She believed
that much imaginative literature is false to life because
it relates episodes in a straight line, whereas our
experiences actually flow together like a stream.
This essay records fleeting impressions and delicate Virginia Woolf
shades of mental experience. 1882-1941

Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year

that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In
order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one
saw. So now I think of the fire; the steady film of yellow
light upon the page of my book; the three chrysanthemums
in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must
have been the winter time, and we had just finished our
tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I
looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time.
I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye
lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old
fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower
came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red

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knights riding up the side of the black rock. Rather to my

relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is
an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps.
The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white
wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.
How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object,
lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so
feverishly, and then leave it... If that mark was made by a
nail, it can’t have been for a picture; it must have been for a
miniature—the miniature of a lady with white powdered
curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations.
A fraud of course, for the people who had this house before
us would have chosen pictures in that way—an old picture
for an old room. That is the sort of people they were—very
interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such
queer places, because one will never see them again, never
know what happened next. They wanted to leave this house
because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so
he said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion
art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder,
as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and
the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back
garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train.
But for that mark, I’m not sure about it; I don’t believe
it was made by a nail after all; it’s too big, too round, for
that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten to
one I shouldn’t be able to say for certain; because once a
thing’s done, no one ever knows how it happened. Oh! dear
me, the mystery of life; the inaccuracy of thought! The
ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of
our possessions we have—what an accidental affair this
living is after all our civilization—let me just count over a
few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that
seems always the most mysterious of losses—what cat
would gnaw, what rat would nibble—three pale blue
canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird
cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne
coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ—all gone,
and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the

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roots of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is to be

sure! The wonder is that I’ve any clothes on my back, that
I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if
one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to
being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour—
landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one’s
hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling
head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper
parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one’s
hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that
seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste
and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard...
But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green
stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges
one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one
not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless,
unable to focus one’s eyesight, groping at the roots of the
grass, at the toes of the Giants? As for saying which are
trees and which are men and women, or whether there are
such things, that one won’t be in a condition to do for fifty
years or so. There will be nothing but spaces of light and
dark, intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up
perhaps, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct colour—dim
pinks and blues—which will, as time goes on, become more
definite, become—I don’t know what...
And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It
may even be caused by some round black substance, such
as a small rose leaf, left over from the summer, and I, not
being a very vigilant housekeeper—look at the dust on the
mantelpiece, for example, the dust which, so they say,
buried Troy three times over, only fragments of pots utterly
refusing annihilation, as one can believe.
The tree outside the window taps very gently on the
pane... I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never
to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to
slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of
hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper,
away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. To
steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that

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passes... Shakespeare... Well, he will do as well as another.

A man who sat himself solidly in an armchair, and looked
into the fire, so—a shower of ideas fell perpetually from
some very high Heaven down through his mind. He leant
his forehead on his hand, and people, looking in through
the open door—for this scene is supposed to take place on
a summer’s evening—but how dull this is, this historical
fiction! It doesn’t interest me at all. I wish I could hit upon
a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting
credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts,
and very frequent even in the minds of modest mouse-
coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to
hear their own praises. They are not thoughts directly
praising oneself; that is the beauty of them; they are
thoughts like this:
‘And then I came into the room. They were discussing
botany. I said how I’d seen a flower growing on a dust heap
on the site of an old house in Kingsway. The seed, I said,
must have been sown in the reign of Charles the First.
What flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First? I
asked—(but I don’t remember the answer). Tall flowers with
purple tassels to them perhaps. And so it goes on. All the
time I’m dressing up the figure of myself in my own mind,
lovingly, stealthily, not openly adoring it, for if I did that, I
should catch myself out, and stretch my hand at once for
a book in self-protection. Indeed, it is curious how
instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry
or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too
unlike the original to be believed in any longer. Or is it not
so very curious after all? It is a matter of great importance.
Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears,
and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all
about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person
which is seen by other people—what an airless, shallow,
bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived
in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground
railways we are looking into the mirror; that accounts for
the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes. And
the novelists in future will realise more and more the

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importance of these reflections, for of course there is not

one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are
the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will
pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more
out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as
the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps—but these
generalisations are very worthless. The military sound of
the word is enough. It recalls leading articles, cabinet
ministers—a whole class of things indeed which, as a child,
one thought the thing itself, the standard thing, from which
one could not depart save at the risk of nameless
damnation. Generalisations bring back somehow Sunday
in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons,
and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes, and habits—
like the habit of sitting all together in one room until a
certain hour, although nobody liked it. There was a rule
for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular
period was that they should be made of tapestry with little
yellow compartments marked upon them, such as you may
see in photographs of the carpets in the corridors of the
royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real
tablecloths. How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was
to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons,
Sunday walks, country houses, and tablecloths were not
entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the
damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only
a sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place
of those things I wonder, those real standard things? Men
perhaps, should you be a woman; the masculine point of
view which governs our lives which sets the standard, which
established Whitaker’s Table of Precedency, which has
become, I suppose, since the war, half a phantom to many
men and women, which soon, one may hope, will be laughed
into the dustbin where the phantoms go, the mahogany
sideboards and the Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell
and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of
illegitimate freedom—if freedom exists...

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Stop and Think

1. What is the string of varied thoughts that the mark
on the wall stimulates in the author’s mind?
2. What change in the depiction of reality does the
author foresee for future novelists?

In certain lights that mark on the wall seems actually

to project from the wall. Nor is it entirely circular. I cannot
be sure, but it seems to cast a perceptible shadow,
suggesting that if I ran my finger down that strip of the
wall it would, at a certain point, mount and descend a
small tumulus, a smooth tumulus like those barrows on
the South Downs which are, they say, either tombs or
camps. Of the two I should prefer them to be tombs, desiring
melancholy like most English people, and finding it natural
at the end of a walk to think of the bones stretched beneath
the turf... There must be some book about it. Some antiquary
must have dug up those bones and given them a name...
What sort of a man is an antiquary, I wonder? Retired
Colonels for the most part, I dare say, leading parties of
aged labourers to the top here, examining clods of earth
and stone, and getting into correspondence with the
neighbouring clergy, which, being opened at breakfast time,
gives them a feeling of importance, and the comparison of
arrow-heads necessitates cross-country journeys to the
county towns, an agreeable necessity both to them and to
their elderly wives, who wish to make plum jam or to clean
out the study, and have every reason for keeping that great
question of the camp or the tomb in perpetual suspension,
while the Colonel himself feels agreeably philosophic in
accumulating evidence on both sides of the question. It is
true that he does finally incline to believe in the camp; and,
being opposed, indites a pamphlet which he is about to
read at the quarterly meeting of the local society when a
stroke lays him low, and his last conscious thoughts are
not of wife or child, but of the camp and that arrow-head
there, which is now in the case at the local museum, together
with the foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful of
Elizabethan nails, a great many Tudor clay pipes, a picture

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of Roman pottery, and the wineglass that Nelson drank out

of—proving I really don’t know what.
No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known. And if I
were to get up at this very moment and ascertain that the
mark on the wall is really—what shall we say? the head of
a gigantic old nail, driven in two hundred years ago, which
has now, owing to the patient attrition of many generations
of housemaids, revealed its head above the coat of paint,
and is taking its first view of modern life in the sight of a
white walled fire-lit room, what should I gain?—Knowledge?
Matter for further speculation? I can think sitting still as
well as standing up. And what is knowledge? What are our
learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits
who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs,
interrogating shrew-mice and writing down the language
of the stars? And the less we honour them as our
superstitions dwindle and our respect for beauty and
health of mind increases... Yes, one could imagine a very
pleasant world. A quiet, spacious world, with the flowers
so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors
or specialists or house-keepers with the profiles of
policemen, a world which one could slice with one’s thought
as a fish slices the water with his fin, grazing the stems of
the waterlilies, hanging suspended over nests of white sea
eggs... How peaceful it is down here, rooted in the centre
of the world and gazing up through the grey waters, with
their sudden gleams of light, and their reflections—if it
were not for Whitaker’s Almanack*—if it were not for the
Table of Precedency!
I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on
the wall really is—a nail, a rose-leaf, a crack in the wood?
Here is Nature once more at her old game of self-
preservation. This train of thought, she perceives, is
threatening mere waste of energy, even some collision with
reality, for who will ever be able to lift a finger against
Whitaker’s Table of Precedency? The Archbishop of
Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor; the
Lord High Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of York.
* Whitaker’s Almanack is a reference book, published annually in the United Kingdom. It
consists of articles, lists and tables on a wide range of subjects.

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Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy of

Whitaker; and the great thing is to know who follows whom.
Whitaker knows, and let that, so Nature counsels, comfort
you, instead of enraging you; and if you can’t be comforted,
if you must shatter this hour of peace, think of the mark
on the wall.
I understand Nature’s game—her prompting to take
action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to
excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight
contempt for men of action—men, we assume, who don’t
think. Still there’s no harm in putting a full stop to one’s
disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.
Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel
that I have grasped a plank in the sea; I feel a satisfying
sense of reality which at once turns the two Archbishops
and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades.
Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking
from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the
light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers,
worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the
impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other
than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of... Wood is
a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a tree; and
trees grow, and we don’t know how they grow. For years
and years they grow, without paying any attention to us,
in meadows, in forests, and by the side of rivers—all things
one likes to think about. The cows swish their tails beneath
them on hot afternoons; they paint rivers so green that
when a moorhen dives one expects to see its feathers all
green when it comes up again. I like to think of the fish
balanced against the stream like flags blown out; and of
water beetles slowly raising domes of mud upon the bed of
the river. I like to think of the tree itself: first the close dry
sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm;
then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it,
too, on winter’s nights standing in the empty field with all
leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron
bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes
tumbling, tumbling all night long. The song of birds must
sound very loud and strange in June; and how cold the

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feet of insects must feel upon it, as they make laborious

progresses up the creases of the bark, or sun themselves
upon the thin green awning of the leaves, and look straight
in front of them with diamond-cut red eyes... One by one
the fibres snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the
earth, then the last storm comes and, falling, the highest
branches drive deep into the ground again. Even so, life
isn’t done with; there are a million patient, watchful lives
still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on
the pavement, living rooms, where men and women sit
after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts,
happy thoughts, this tree. I should like to take each one
separately—but something is getting in the way... Where
was I? What has it all been about? A tree? A river? The
Downs? Whitaker’s Almanack? The fields of asphodel? I
can’t remember a thing. Everything’s moving, falling,
slipping, vanishing... There is a vast upheaval of matter.

Stop and Think

1. What is the author’s perception of the limitations of
knowledge and learning?
2. Describe the unbroken flow of thoughts and
perceptions of the narrator’s mind, using the example
of the colonel and the clergy.

Someone is standing over me and saying:

‘I’m going out to buy a newspaper.’
‘Yes?’
‘Though it’s no good buying newspapers... Nothing ever
happens. Curse this war; God damn this war!... All the
same, I don’t see why we should have a snail on our wall.’
Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail...

Understanding the Text

1. An account of reflections is more important than a description
of reality according to the author. Why?
2. Looking back at objects and habits of a bygone era can give
one a feeling of phantom-like unreality. What examples does
the author give to bring out this idea?

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3. How does the imagery of (i) the fish (ii) the tree, used almost
poetically by the author, emphasise the idea of stillness of living,
breathing thought?
4 How does the author pin her reflections on a variety of subjects
on the ‘mark on the wall’? What does this tell us about the way
the human mind functions?
5. Not seeing the obvious could lead a perceptive mind to reflect
upon more philosophical issues. Discuss this with reference
to the ‘snail on the wall’.

Talking about the Text

1. ‘In order to fix a date, it is necessary to remember what one
saw’. Have you experienced this at any time? Describe one such
incident, and the non-chronological details that helped you
remember a particular date.
2. ‘Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths’. Does
this sentence embody the idea of blind adherence to rules and
tradition? Discuss with reference to ‘Understanding Freedom
and Discipline’ by J. Krishnamurti that you’ve already read.
3. According to the author, nature prompts action as a way of
ending thought. Do we tacitly assume that ‘men of action are
men who don’t think’?

Appreciation
1. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of narration: one, where
the reader would remain aware of some outside voice telling
him/her what’s going on; two, a narration that seeks to
reproduce, without the narrator’s intervention, the full
spectrum and continuous flow of a character’s mental process.
Which of these is exemplified in this essay? Illustrate.
2. This essay frequently uses the non-periodic or loose sentence
structure: the component members are continuous, but so
loosely joined, that the sentence could have easily been broken
without damage to or break in thought. Locate a few such
sentences, and discuss how they contribute to the relaxed and
conversational effect of the narration.

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Language Work
A. Grammar: Content Words and Function Words
A sentence has words in it. What kind of words? It has nouns:
(1a) I looked up and saw the mark on the wall.
and verbs
(1b) I looked up and saw the mark on the wall.
It may have adjectives
(2a) How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object…
and adverbs
(2b) How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object…
Such words have a meaning that can be readily explained;
these words can be defined. They also have content. Nouns,
verbs, adjectives and adverbs are content words. But what about
the remaining words in our examples above? Take for example
the word and. What is its ‘meaning’?
(3) I looked up and saw the mark on the wall.
Its meaning is in its function in the sentence. It joins together
two words, phrases or sentences. It is a conjunction.
A conjunction is a function word. Function words are the kind of
words that we leave out when we send telegrams, when we can
guess at the meaning. Look at this example
…saw mark on wall
What words have been left out in this message? Two
occurrences of the word the. We can call the the definite article.
What is its function? In example (1), it shows that a unique
mark on a unique wall is being spoken about. Virginia Woolf
isn’t speaking about ‘a mark on a wall’, that is, any mark on
any wall. She’s speaking about a particular, definite mark on
a particular, definite wall.
(4) I looked up and saw the mark on the wall.
Definite and indefinite articles are function words. What about
the words I and our?
(5a) I looked up and saw the mark on the wall.
(5b) How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object…
These are pronouns; they occupy the place of a noun. But are
they, therefore, content words, like nouns? We shall argue that
they are not. (Notice that they get left out in telegraphic
language.) We can make up new nouns in a language, but we

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cannot make up new pronouns. Pronouns are a closed set; nouns

are an open set. So, we shall say, pronouns are function words.
The words that remain in our examples are up, on, upon, and
how. The first three are prepositions. Are prepositions content
words or function words? We can argue that prepositions have
meaning, and treat them as content words. (Notice that they
occur in telegraphic language.) Or we can argue that
prepositions are a closed set of words like pronouns, and treat
them as function words. So this question does not have a single
answer.
Finally, what is the function of how in our example in (2)? How,
we all know, usually asks a question; it is a question word. But
our example in (2) is not a question. It is an exclamation. How
occurs in the exclamation (2) in place of the intensifying word
so in (6a)
(6a) Our thoughts swarm upon a new object so readily!
(6b) How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object!
How occurs instead of so in (6b) because the emphasised word
readily has moved to the front of the sentence.
Summing up: Content words are nouns, verbs, adjectives,
adverbs, and perhaps prepositions.
Function words include conjunctions, pronouns, determiners
and demonstratives, quantifiers and intensifiers, question
words, and perhaps prepositions.

TASK
(i) Can you say which words are content words in the examples
below, and which are function words? All the examples are from
the text in this unit.
(ii) Can you name the kind of word (its category as noun, pronoun,
etc.?). A dictionary may help you to do this. You can work in
pairs or groups, discussing the reasons for your analysis.
• Ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it.
• They wanted to leave this house because they wanted to change
their style of furniture.
• I don’t believe it was made by a nail after all; it’s too big, too
round, for that.
• There was a rule for everything.
• The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane.

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B. Pronunciation
We have seen how the segments of spoken language, i.e. vowels
and consonants, combine to produce syllables, words and
sentences. When we articulate these segments, we notice that
there is some variation. That is, in connected speech, we do
not isolate sounds, but several things can happen to the
pronunciation of their individual segments. The speed and
rhythm can cause some segments to have weak forms, some to
drop out, and some put in.
Words, sometimes, have both strong and weak forms, depending
on whether they are pronounced with force. The word ‘is’, for
instance, is pronounced /iz/ when said in isolation, or in
emphasis as in
He is responsible.
[Meaning: He cannot get away from the fact that he is
responsible.]
But in the utterance
He is a doctor
The word ‘is’ has no emphasis, and so it is pronounced as /s/
or /z/.

TASK
(i) Look at the following words

a and had is not

Notice the difference in pronunciation when they are said in
isolation and in normal conversation.
(ii) Find out five more words which have both strong and weak
forms.

Suggested Reading
The Death of the Moth by Virginia Woolf
The Moment by Virginia Woolf.

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