Gertrude Stein tells us that “the whole business of writing is the question of living in contemporariness.” The problem is that nobody knows exactly what contemporaneity is: “in other words, they don’t know where they are going, but they are on their way” (Stein 488). Describing her lived contemporaneity in her short story, “The Mark On the Wall,” Virginia Woolf comments that “if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour … Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked!” (Woolf 38). Modernity, as Woolf says and Stein would surely agree, seems an entirely “accidental affair” (Woolf 38). The premier texts that signify Modernism, Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land, illustrate this accidental nature of Modernity in their meandering, purposefully confused, perspective flooded, and many voiced works. In many of the same ways, Woolf’s Jacob’s Room is also an “accidental” novel, a seemingly loosely strung-together series of events, moving quickly (or slowly) past us that we are lucky to catch.

Perhaps unaware of her own “contemporariness,” to use Stein’s word, Woolf narrates her novel in an almost filmic way. The novel is shown to us through the lenses of a number of poorly set-up cameras or like a movie sped up and slowed at random. Many of the people we meet seem to have simply walked in front of the cameras lying about, like “an old blind woman [who] sat on a camp-stool with her back to the stone wall of the Union of London…clasping a brown mongrel” (Woolf 56), or to have been placed there for a specific scene perhaps, where one is “lit up for a second” and “by a trick of the firelight she seem[s] to have no body” (Woolf 62). These seemingly random highly descriptive depictions that appear everywhere throughout the novel are saturated with details to the point where “in short, the observer is choked with observations” (Woolf 57). It is as if the person controlling the camera, our narrator, has no idea what she is doing. Woolf uses this technique of saturation to slow and break down the act of looking (for us as readers and for us as filmic viewers of the action of the text) to draw our attention to the importance of what Conor calls “appearing” and to give us an opportunity to recognize (and maybe reorient ourselves within) the various subjectivities within the text: at times that of Jacob, the women of Scarborough, the men at the Durrants’ dinner parties, Florinda, Sandra,

Woolf describes us as spectators hanging over Jacob “vibrating” (Woolf 61), the language seeming to suggest the act of viewing a film in a theater where one forgets the seat they are situated in and views the film as a pair of disembodied eyes. For the modern emerging woman, “her engagement in the cinema was instrumental in the construction of a female gaze” (Conor 225), the act of gazing placing women in the role of “spectator” For Conor, the “correlation between spectatorship and modern subjectivity is crucial” (Conor 16). Because the novel is mediated through multiple perspectives, often the non-omniscient narrator, this narrator in indirect discourse with the characters, or what seems like a movie camera, we are able to experience spectatorship through multiple characters and feel the effects of the developing modern female gaze.

The first perspective we are placed inside is that of Jacob as a child on the beach. Though it would seem to be ungendered as he is only a toddler, Jacob sees what he believes to be “a large black woman” who is “sitting on the beach” but as he approaches this woman who he believe to be his nanny, she transforms into a “rock” and “he [is] lost” (Woolf 5). This overturning of his gaze foreshadows the loss of his male objectifying gaze as the novel progresses. Jacob at this stage in the work is “profoundly unconscious” (Woolf 9), an attribute that follows him throughout the work and parallels the “invisibility” of the flaneur (Conor 15). As the novel progresses we see his ability to be constantly aloof diminish in respect to the women he encounters until Jacob eventually becomes conscious of himself in relation to the gaze of Sandra.
Another example of a problematically gendered gaze comes in the passage where we are told to “fix [our] eyes upon the lady’s skirt” (Woolf 13). As the narrator goes on to describe the various fashions as they changed through the decades we are at once shown the objectifying power of the male gaze and the gaze of a woman who is “conscious of the gaze she appears before” and which she “actively seeks to captivate” (Conor 27). This object with the power of agency is termed by Conor, the “objectified subject” (32), a term that suggests the paradoxical reversal of the power structure in the object/subject and spectator/spectacle dichotomy. The spectator, the subject, is often imagined as a disembodied set of eyes, our film viewer and flaneur above, with their power originating from their lack of visibility, but in the case of the modern woman conscious of her visibility, the sexualized body becomes a source of subjectivity. This consciousness of one’s own sexuality and the agency associated with owning it is embodied partially in Florinda and more completely in Sandra.

When we first meet Florinda, Woolf juxtaposes her instantly with the Durrant women who function for Woolf as the Edwardian foils to her more modern, visible, women. As Mrs. Durrant reads the Inferno and Clara sleeps in her parents’ home, “buried in her pillows,” we are told that Florinda is sick in a “bedroom [that] seemed fit for catastrophes” (Woolf 65), perhaps an ironic poke at her average male contemporaries who viewed the growing sexuality of young women as “dangerous” (Conor 217). Another example of a filmic scene over-full with detail, in her description of Florinda’s room, Woolf offers us the chance to experience Florinda’s subjectivity as she ruminates about the fate of her parents and her sexuality. We are told that “she talk[s] more about virginity than women mostly do” and that she “cherished” it more or less “according to the man she talked to” (Woolf 65). This consciousness of the power of her sexualized body is exactly what Conor means as she comments on “the significance of young women’s visibility and their deliberate designs to attract the heterosexual gaze” (211). We are shown Florinda’s intentional manipulation of the male gaze as she is willing take as her name, one “bestowed upon her by a painter who had wished it to signify that the flower of her maidenhood was still unplucked” (Woolf 65), to consciously control the way that men perceive her. As the narrator resumes her tentative focus on Jacob we see the control Florinda is able to exert, as Woolf tells us that “Jacob was restless when she left him” (Woolf 66).
With the introduction of Sandra into the novel we are shown the full realization of the objectified-subject. Using her consciousness of “a panoptical male connoisseur” (Conor 33) Sandra is able “to court the gaze … of men, and to assert her modernity as a sexual subject by … constituting herself as an object within the new conditions of feminine visibility” (Conor 209). She is shown to be aware of her desirability, thinking, “I am very beautiful,” as she stares into a “looking glass” (Woolf 124). Then the perspective immediately switches as Woolf places us within the mind of her husband Evan, who despite his attempts to engage her attention, to seek out her gaze, notices “Sandra’s eyes wander” (Woolf 125). After he realizes that her gaze has left him he becomes aware of his lack of desirability, “with his height, his bulk” and “his inability to impose his own personality” (Woolf 125). Sandra is even able to make the perpetually aloof Jacob aware of his body and appearance, as the narrator tells us “the hook gave a great tug in his side as he lay in his bed … remembering Sandra Wentworth Williams” (Woolf 131), all this the day or so after she took the time to “arrange” herself on the terrace, again, causing Jacob to notice “the extreme shabbiness of his trousers” (Woolf 127).

By constantly changing the lens through which the novel is mediated, Woolf situates her text in the perspective flood that is modernity and illustrates the emergence of the subjective female gaze. While Woolf tells us to “Detest [our] own age,” and to “Build a better one” (92), she seems pretty firmly entrenched in the defining characteristics of her own.

Works Cited

Conor, Liz. The Spectacular Modern Woman. Indiana University Press. Indianapolis: 2004.

Woolf, Virginia. A Haunted House and Other Short Stories. “The Mark on the Wall.” p 37-46. Harcourt. New York: 1944.

Woolf, Virginia. Jacob’s Room. Penguin. New York: 1992.