A room with no Jacob: An aesthetic of absence in Virginia Woolf ’s novels

Abstract

This article explores Virginia Woolf ’s experiments with the narrative that added impersonality to her texts. It focuses on an indefinite narrator’s entries, Woolf ’s making her main characters absent from the plot, and focus shifts from the novels’ anthropomorphic characters. An aesthetics of absence is seen as the key element of Woolf ’s individual style, which defines both the structure and the focalization of her novels. The article analyzes the category of absence in the early Woolf ’s novel The Voyage Out and the subsequent reimagining and deeper development of this technique by the writer, which found expression in her later novels Jacob’s Room, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves. The examples from these works demonstrate how the writer intentionally shifts the focus of the narration from the central characters, thereby creating obstructions for herself as an author in order to discover a new way of telling a story. Appealing to the category of absence is considered in the article as a strategy for finding new ways of constructing narrative. The writer’s experiments with impersonalization show that the absence of the main character does not make it impossible to further develop the narrative: the text goes on even if its characters are silent, passive, absent. In addition, the article traces the connection of the deliberate impersonalization of the text with the writer’s idea of a single universal consciousness that does not disappear after a human’s death: so does the text continue to develop after Woolf made its main characters absent.