Jacob's Room: A Novel without Heroes

Jacob’s Room lecture by Alison Hennegan, 12 December 2020

Guest Blog: Lisa Hutchins

Jacob’s Room is a work about absence. We learn about its leading character (perhaps not, given the title of this lecture, its hero) through others’ impressions. It also reverberates with references to death. Following her talk on The Voyage Out, Alison Hennegan presented a lecture of truly impressive range and depth, covering everything from its publication history to its literary allusions and relationships to Greek philosophy and women’s education.

Alison described Jacob’s Room as Woolf’s first fully experimental novel and discussed the mixed critical response to its publication in 1922. It provoked strong and contradictory emotions in reviewers and its first readers were left feeling unsatisfied despite being strongly affected by its powerful visual imagery. One reviewer compared the book to the ‘tense, syncopated movements [and] staccato impulsiveness’ of jazz while others questioned whether describing it as a novel was fully sufficient. Woolf’s abilities as a novelist were called into question by readers who sought in vain the familiar signposts of structure, design and narrative, but who nevertheless still recognised her as a genuine artist.

Alison discussed how we encounter images of death from the novel’s very outset. The child Jacob, separated from his family on a Cornish beach, finds a bleached ram’s skull with sea holly growing through the eye sockets. His widowed mother, armed with black parasol, writes a tear-stained letter about a fatal accident and worries about an acquaintance maimed by an explosion. Jacob is frightened by two holidaymakers stretched rigid and motionless on the sand like effigies.

The book is often seen as an elegy for Woolf’s brother Thoby, who died of typhoid in November 1906, aged 26 (Jacob’s age on the eve of war). Thoby’s was the fourth death in the Stephen family within 11 years, and the heavy toll this took on Woolf’s mental health is widely acknowledged. But we learned this is too simplistic a view, with Alison describing Jacob’s Room as more an elegy for the man Thoby could never become.

The book, and its images of death, can be seen as Woolf’s response to the Great War, a lament for a generation and class of young men who formed the lowest ranks of the officer corps and suffered proportionately the greatest casualties. Even Jacob’s family name, Flanders, is shared with the battlefields. Alison told us how the book is saturated with allusions to the literary past, making it impossible not to see an evocation of the war poets.

Alongside social pressure to participate in the war effort, many of these young men felt anxious they might somehow miss out. They had been groomed throughout their schooling for leadership and colonial service, with many delaying or interrupting university studies to serve, and so they volunteered willingly, even enthusiastically. As classical scholars studying a curriculum based on Greek history and literature they would have been used to exclusively masculine society, making the Army a natural environment. This, of course, gave them limited opportunities to form social relationships with women.

Although Woolf wrote elsewhere about women’s access to higher education, we should not take too narrow a view of her ideas about it. Alison reminded us she was ambivalent about its value. Women’s colleges existed at both Oxford and Cambridge but Alison raised the interesting issue of whether Woolf felt they had much to offer. The University focus on the classical world, which ascribed little social or intellectual value to women, was compounded by a narrow curriculum and, in some respects, lower educational standards than might be expected.

As we see in the novel, undergraduate life was heavily policed, with College curfews and a powerful and omnipresent University to enforce discipline. Male discomfort with women is reflected when Jacob’s tutor invites undergraduates to lunch with his family and a deeply uneasy scene ensues. We see how he regards women as an alien species when he reflects on Sunday service at King’s College Chapel in uncomfortable language that compares them to dogs, positions female physicality as obscene and bestial, and assays female value in terms of pleasure to the male onlooker where female ugliness is literally sinful. Women are portrayed as simultaneously weak, frail and fragile while also being monstrous and unknowable.

However, such attitudes do not preclude desire, as demonstrated by Jacob’s affair with the art student Florinda. Afterwards, ever a prisoner of his education and the perception of women that it bestows, Jacob is not much wiser about the opposite sex. Woolf offers a brutal examination of Jacob’s almost exclusively male civilisation as contributing to the disaster of the war, a question more fully present in Three Guineas and also examined by other writers such as E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence.

Jacob’s Room was the first major work published by Hogarth Press, with 1,200 copies printed initially and a second impression within a year. It turned a modest profit with which Leonard was very pleased. It was also the first Hogarth work to have a dust jacket, designed by Virginia’s sister Vanessa Bell, which did not go down well with booksellers. Alison quoted Elizabeth Willson Gordon’s history of the Hogarth Press: ‘The design “did not represent a desirable female or even Jacob or his room and it was what in 1923 many people would have called reproachfully post-impressionist.”’

What a wonderfully apposite, if unintentional, metaphor for the book.

 Next in our Virginia Woolf Season:

·       On Being Still with artist Kabe Wilson, Saturday 19 December at 6pm.