Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf

First published: 1922

Type of work: Impressionism

Time of work: The last decade of the nineteenth century and the decades of the twentieth century, concluding with World War I

Locale: Mostly England (Cambridge, London, and other areas) and some European countries

Principal Characters:

• Jacob Flanders, the main character, a romantic figure in love with classical literature and culture
• Betty Flanders, his mother
• Dick Bonamy, Jacob’s friend
• Clara Durrant, a young woman who is in love with Jacob
• Sandra Wentworth Williams, a married woman with whom Jacob falls in love

The Novel

The plot of this novel is not nearly as significant as its characterization, and the characters themselves are important for their thoughts, not their actions. Virginia Woolf focuses not on what happens around the characters but rather on what happens within them, most particularly the central character, Jacob Flanders.

When the novel opens, Jacob is a young boy living in the seaside city of Scarborough with his widowed mother and two brothers. These geographical and familial roots provide the youth with his first experiences of complexity, which foreshadow his subsequent struggles to deal with an increasingly complicated world. Though the seaside location is strikingly beautiful, it is not always peaceful and romantic; it is also attacked by powerful storms and hurricanes. Further, though Jacob plays childlike games near the water and finds childlike treasures on the beach, he also discovers unsettling objects, such as a cow’s skull, with its ominous suggestions of change intruding into the changelessness of the sea.

Going to Cambridge in 1906, Jacob begins his pilgrimage forward and backward. He becomes immersed in the twentieth century, experiencing what he cannot identify the modern sense of restlessness and sadness and he attempts to escape into earlier centuries, proclaiming his disdain for what he perceives as the modern civilization and announcing his admiration for previous cultures, particularly that of the Greeks. As both a representative and a victim of the twentieth century, Jacob moves through many relationships, never satisfied with the women he meets, never concerned with the people he leaves behind as he pursues his quest for ideal beauty and happiness. He is the solitary Adam in a post-Edenic world of change, movement, and transience.

As he plunges into the twentieth century, Jacob is obsessed with the ideas and ideals of earlier times. In stating his disdain for modern literature, for example, he so influences one of his lovers that she forces herself to read The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), by Henry Fielding, mistakenly believing that her efforts to move back in time will endear her to Jacob. He does not realize the sincerity of her efforts, being so insulated and obsessed by his own attempts to make meaning out of the increasing chaos he observes around and within himself.

He buries himself within the British Museum, contemplating the mysteries of the past; he reads books such as the Byzantine Empire, looking for clues in that tome; he argues about the ideas of Plato and Socrates, believing that his statements will bring him closer to an illumination of those ancients’ messages. Then he journeys beyond British places and literary spaces. He travels to Greece, seeking to connect with the past that had been inspiring him. What he finds, however, is that he cannot escape what surrounds and shapes him: the twentieth century, with its burdens of change, complexity, and pain. As the narrator puts it, “This gloom, this surrender to the dark waters which lap us about, is a modern invention.” The twentieth century is real, too real, for Jacob, and he cannot escape its influence. He returns to it and to England, leaving behind him in Greece the first woman whom he loves, a married woman who remains as idealized as his notions of Greece.

When the novel ends, World War I has created “such confusion everywhere,” as Jacob’s mother laments. The confusion is reflected in Jacob’s abandoned room. The modern Adam is gone, and his litter and letters remain. Has he committed suicide? Has he been killed in the war? Has he retreated into a self-imposed exile? What remains are his remains and the last words of the book: “a pair of Jacob’s old shoes.”

The Characters

Jacob Flanders is the focal point of this novel, a complicated character who is interesting not only because of his struggles to see and understand the world but also because he provides the reader with the opportunity to observe the other characters’ way of seeing as well. The other characters see Jacob and the world from the outside and find it difficult to describe him. They frequently speak of his being “distinguished-looking,” but they are unable to specify in what way. As the narrator puts it, “distinction was one of the words to use naturally, though, from looking at him, one would have found it difficult to say which seat in the opera house was his, stalls, gallery, or dress circle.” In their attempts to describe him, some characters, such as Clara Durrant, who loves him, see him in sentimental terms, while others, such as Captain Barfoot from Scarborough, see him as simply likable but for no specific reason. In all cases, the characters see only Jacob’s surface, never witnessing the complexity within.

Jacob himself tries to simplify the world and his role in it by a romanticized view of specific people and the specific time in which he lives, the twentieth century. Thus, he has an affair with Florinda, a prostitute, taking her word for it that she is a virgin, telling himself that she looks “wild and frail and beautiful . . . and thus the women of the Greeks were.” His attempt to idealize Florinda, however, is short-lived, for her superficiality becomes apparent to him, forcing him to see the emptiness of his romanticizing.

Similarly, Jacob romanticizes Greece and Greek culture, both before he actually visits the country and as he tries to maintain his romantic views during his trip there. He discusses Greek culture with his friends, arrogantly believing “that they had read every book in the world” and then deciding “in favour of Greece.” He assumes an equally arrogant view as he begins his journey to Greece, determining that “after doing Greece he was going to knock off Rome.” Yet his romantic, reductionist attitude is challenged by a persistent sense of sadness that accompanies him whenever he attempts to glorify the past. What he senses is that the past is indeed past, that time changes all, and that he cannot escape into a vision that either romanticizes previous cultures or reduces the complexities of the present into a simplistic view of the past. In short, Jacob Flanders is forced to replace his innocence with adulthood, just as the simplicity of the premodern period is replaced by the complexity of the twentieth century.

Critical Context

One of Woolf’s early novels, Jacob’s Room reveals the writer’s early efforts to experiment with stylistic and thematic concerns that characterize her later, more sophisticated books, such as Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). Unfinished sentences, seemingly disjointed scenes, stream of consciousness: these techniques suit the ideas of time passing and individuals observing that passage from their unique vantage points. If truth is thus subjective, then the writer’s job is to suggest, not to announce, and that is Woolf’s mode, which her narrator in Jacob’s Room implies in a pair of sentences repeated, word for word, near the beginning and near the end of the novel: “It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said nor yet entirely what is done.” This is Virginia Woolf’s novelistic technique and her philosophical orientation. She whispers hints; she never shouts proclamations.

Bibliography

Fleishman, Avrom. Virginia Woolf: A Critical Reading, 1975.

Guiguet, Jean. Virginia Woolf and Her Works, 1965. Translated by Jean Stewart.

Marcus, Jane. Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant, 1983.

Naremore, James. The World Without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel, 1973.