Jacob's Room

I finished reading Virginia Woolf's experimental novel, Jacob's Room (1922), the other day and was struck by a couple of things: the connections to Mrs Dalloway (1925), and a line that features twice towards the books conclusion.

Woolf herself alluded to the book as an experiment and I think that, in many ways, it lays the foundations of narrative style found in the more successful and better known novel Mrs Dalloway. Particularly prominent is the similarity both books share in their descriptions of London, with its busy streets full of people, automobiles, and omnibuses, creating a somewhat buzzing and chaotic mood.

But of more significance is the evidence of her emerging narrative style - the 'stream of consciousness technique - that served her so well in the latter novel. In Jacob's Room the narrative flows and weaves its way through some 200 hundred characters but, unlike Mrs Dalloway, the narrator is almost always external to the characters, thus allowing for observations and conclusions about characters actions to be made, but without the internal approach that allows each character's consciousness to speak directly. What I'm alluding to, I think, is that Jacob's Room has a more intrusive and unreliable narrator than Mrs Dalloway; it doesn't flow quite as naturally between the characters' minds, thoughts, and actions.

Anyway, moving on, I was struck by the following line which appears towards the end of the novel, as Jacob's mother, Betty Flanders, tries to decide if the noise she can hear is the guns firing on the Western Front: 'she heard the dull sound, as if nocturnal women were beating great carpets.' What, if anything, is Woolf trying to convey through these words? Is Betty trying to forget about the War, and the danger her sons are in, by putting the sound down to something from everyday life? Is Woolf conveying the sounds of War through the only means available to her and all women who have not witnessed the War first hand, i.e. with feminist language? Or, is it simply a simile and I am reading too much into it!

Who knows?