The Mark on the Wall

“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.” 

This is the opening line of the story. The narrator explicitly situates herself in the physical as a means of grounding herself. This quote establishes the primacy of subjective perceptions within the narrator’s method of recollection of memories, as opposed to the more objective options of using a calendar, clock, or other external modes of marking or measuring time. Her embodied, highly-situational, and personally-specific details aid Woolf in establishing a distinctly feminine discourse. 

“But as 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. O dear me, the mystery of life! The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity!”

Here, the narrator directly states the story’s central theme. She is refusing to rise from her chair in order to investigate and empirically categorize the mark on the wall, because she sees that endeavor as an artificial foreclosure of the myriad possibilities of knowledge, being, experience, and perception. To her, to abide by the prevailing norms and conventions that her society has established for creating and formalizing knowledge would be folly—“inaccurate” and “ignorant.” 

“Why, if someone 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 […]” 

In Greek mythology, the asphodel meadows are the place that the souls of those who lived unremarkable lives go after they die. This quote, then, signals the narrator’s education in classical mythology, as well as her discomfort with dominant society’s norms.