ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Virginia Woolf's 'The Mark on the Wall', an early and apparently slight piece which E.M. Forster felt (in Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951: 255), for all its admirable qualities, seemed 'to lead nowhere'. On the other hand, I have long felt there is something special about 'The Mark on the Wall' - and part of its special quality is its seeming inconsequentiality (together with the emblematic inscrutability of the mark on the wall itself - which turns out to be a snail!). Lytton Strachey wrote to Leonard Woolf: 'How on earth does she make the English language float and float?' 1 - a remark which seems peculiarly appropriate to this work. And retrospectively, in a letter of 1931, Virginia herself wrote: 'I shall never forget the day I wrote "The Mark on the Wall", written all in a flash, as if flying after being kept stone breaking for months'. 2 The speed and spontaneity expressed through the style was apparently part and parcel of the composition process. At the same time, 'The Mark' has been called 'a manifesto of modernism', 3 and has the characteristic modernist openness to multiple interpretations.
