This Unseizable Force

"The skeleton is well wrapped in flesh" (130).

Points for Reflection

Jacob's Room (1922), chps 11-14

1. can we determine, retrospectively, what caused Fanny Elmer’s recent, long illness (94)?
2. Cruttendon notes that he couldn’t live like Jacob, “‘I mean going to an office’” (103). Does the text ever locate Jacob at a particular job site?
3. is Mrs. Jarvis correct in her conclusion that “‘Jacob’s letters are so like him’” (105)?
4. examine closely Woolf’s choreographed confrontation between Nature (ie. the moors) and religion (ie. the church); does one triumph over the other (105-107)?
5. does the narrative back up Bonamy’s observation that Jacob is a romantic (111-12)?
6. can you tell whether or not Woolf approves of Jacob’s literary preferences?
7. does Jacob mature noticeably—does he become a more reflective, knowledgeable hero in the latter chapters?
8. Jacob himself feels soon after arriving in Greece that “there is a stopper upon all [his] emotions” (109). Is this an accurate description of Jacob in general, or does the narrative take us inside his thoughts and emotions?
9. is the friendship between Jacob and Sandra correctly characterized as an “affair,” a category her husband Evan places on their liaison at its very inception (114)?
10. is Sandra a very literary woman?
11. What does Sandra’s sudden question, asked of Miss Cissy Edwards (129-30), reveal about her own state of being?
12. what do Jacob’s reactions to Greek architecture reveal about him?
13. does the narrator delineate Richard Bonamy’s sexual identity?
14. does Woolf’s description of battle betray her opinion about such military conflict?
15. is Jacob’s personal beauty the primary reason women fall for him?
16. does the juxtaposition of Jacob’s goings-on with scenes of Clara, Bonamy, and others back in England suggest that Jacob’s situation is preferable to that of his friends?
17. what does Sandra want from Jacob?  Can you answer the question she asks of herself (127)?
18. if Jacob were to live a long life, would he be destined for greatness and fulfillment?
19. the narrator, after describing Greece and England from an aerial perspective, returns abruptly to Jacob and Sandra—as if the previous descriptions of Nature were irrelevant (129).  Are they?
20. is Nature merely itself, in this novel, or does it symbolize something else?
21. does any force seem capable of conquering that preoccupation with physical appearances that seems to so preoccupy the minds of Woolf’s characters?
22. does the narrator appear enamored of civilization’s order and progress?
23. is Clara Durrant evolving?
24. why does Clara cry out when a runaway horse dashes by?
25. did Jacob profoundly alter Florinda’s life?
26. does the narrative implicitly fault Jacob for not following up with all the women in his life upon his return to England?
27. whose perspective on Jacob is the reader supposed to trust more, that of the (female) narrator who notes his pride and the gaps in his knowledge, or that of the various women who obsess over Jacob? Is the nature of the female narrator's own obsession (this tale is organized around Jacob, after all) substantially different from that of these various female characters? [Morgan H]
28. does your reading support or counter each of the following claims of Judy Little in her article "Jacob's Room as Comedy: Woolf's Parodic Bildungsroman" (1981)?
    • "[T]he educators of the young are seen as ludicrously inadequate" (Norton 232)
    • "Jacob [. . .] receives no revelation, no 'epiphany'" (Norton 233).
    • "He seems to respond to nature, and yet, it is really the narrator whom a landscape moves to lyrical utterance" (Norton 234).
    • "Jacob's education neither crushes him nor ennobles him; it perhaps has not very much to do with him" (Norton 235).
    • "[T]he heritage of the ages is to Jacob a neutral pleasure, something to be enjoyed rather than shouldered and carried onward [. . .]" (Norton 237).
    • "There are in a sense two narrators, or one narrator who insists on giving us a twofold vision of Jacob, a vision that shows the conventional pattern which he 'should' follow, and almost simultaneously points out that he is not following the pattern" (Norton 238).
    • "Nor does Jacob's development hinge upon love or sex" (Norton 239).
    • "Later, back in London, he is essentially unchaged, and still suffering from his unmanageable passions" (Norton 242).
    • "Neither Clara nor Sandra looks very deeply into herself [. . .]" (Norton 242).
      

Over the Top (1918)
John Nash

Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu