Essay: Jacob’s Room and the Uncanny

Virginia Woolf’s 1922 novel Jacob’s Room is set in post-industrialization, post-urbanization England. Throughout the novel, Jacob lives in cities, relocating from Scarborough to Cambridge University to London. Although the premise of Jacob’s Room is realistic, descriptions of these cities are often accompanied by mystical and supernatural imagery. Through metaphors of light and darkness, Woolf explores the role of the city and of education in man’s increasing estrangement from nature. In spite of the city’s bright appeal, Woolf exposes intellectual urban life as an ineffective barrier against the unavoidable chaos of existence and the inescapable mortality of man.

Chapter Three sees Jacob leaving his mother and his home in Scarborough to attend university at Cambridge. His first impressions of Cambridge are of the brightness of its cityscape. “They say the sky is the same everywhere... But above Cambridge--anyhow above the roof of King's College Chapel--there is a difference. Out at sea a great city will cast a brightness into the night” (24). Jacob attributes the unique state of the sky to the intellectual life of the city. “If any light burns above Cambridge, it must be from three such rooms; Greek burns here; science there; philosophy on the ground floor” (30). Jacob is invigorated by the prospect of knowledge and learning; in spite of this, there is already a hint of the unnatural. “Is it fanciful to suppose the sky, washed into the crevices of King's College Chapel, lighter, thinner, more sparkling than the sky elsewhere?” (24). Beautiful as a “lighter, thinner, more sparkling” sky must seem, it is also more insubstantial.

The first place Jacob is shown to visit at Cambridge is the university church. Like his initial impression of the city, Jacob’s reaction to the church carries a sense of the uncanny. “Look, as they pass into service, how airily the gowns blow out, as though nothing dense and corporeal were within” (24). As a reaction to this spectral image, Jacob grasps at order, sense, and control. “What sculptured faces, what certainty, authority controlled by piety... In what orderly procession they advance” (24). The church, it appears, serves a very specific purpose, and not a theological one: it keeps light and order in and nature out. “An inclined plane of light comes accurately through each window ... Neither snow nor greenery, winter nor summer, has power over the old stained glass” (25). The church serves as a steady beacon against the wildness of the world outside. “As the sides of a lantern protect the flame so that it burns steady even in the wildest night ... so inside the Chapel all was orderly” (25).

By Chapter Eight, Jacob has left university life at Cambridge for London. Jacob’s sighting of his lover Florinda with another man provokes a return of the light metaphors. “Then he saw her turning up Greek Street upon another man's arm. The light from the arc lamp drenched him from head to toe. He stood for a minute motionless beneath it” (74). Even though Jacob is experiencing “dark” emotions, he is covered in light. Like the College Chapel, the street lamps serve to keep the chaos – this time of his feelings – at bay. In London, however, all sense of holiness and order is gone. The innocent “lantern” of Cambridge is replaced by the violence of weapons and sin. “The lamps of London uphold the dark as upon the points of burning bayonets. The yellow canopy sinks and swells over the great four-poster” (76). London has become a hub of light waging war against darkness with “burning bayonets”; it is a “four-poster” bed that plays host to people like Florinda and her lovers. It is populated with seedy, strange people and sights. “The street market in Soho is fierce with light” and in it are “flaring gas-jets”, “arms akimbo”, “a little man fingering the meat” and “Shawled women carry[ing] babies with purple eyelids” (76-77). Literature too fails as a higher, purer source of knowledge. “[These are] rude illustrations, pictures in a book whose pages we turn over and over as if we should at last find what we look for” (77).

The city for Jacob begins to fail as a construct to keep the chaos out. No longer does intellectual city life suffice to maintain order and control; cities are merely a different sort of jungle. With this breakdown of the barrier between the artificial and the natural, between the city and wilderness, the spectral scene in the chapel and the mysterious sky over Cambridge begin to be explored. Jacob’s vulnerable, mortal essence begins to be exposed. Stripped of the defenses with which the city endows Jacob, he must face the unknowns of the darkness that waits beyond the “yellow canopy” – the stark realities of life itself. “The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to everyone for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted” (75).

Woolf’s novel aspires to nothing less than such an account of life, whose “nature” is distinct from the “streets of London”. The account of Jacob’s life, then, necessarily contains elements of the inevitabilities of organic existence: the darkness of the unknown and, eventually, death. The little boy Jacob at the beginning of the narrative was a “natural” human, not yet affected by the artificiality of urbanization and classical education. He explored the beach surroundings at Cornwall, was delighted with his investigations of marine creatures and terrified of the discovery that his “Nanny... was a rock” (7). Like a Shakespearean Hamlet, he picks up a skull, and in a sense, he never lets go. As Bonamy surveys Jacob’s messy room, he asks Jacob’s mother, “What did he expect? Did he think he would come back?” (139) The desperate illusion that the light and bustle of the city create does not ever completely fade; hope persists against all evidence of mortality. But the only things left of Jacob are letters, and his bills, and his shoes. In the end darkness triumphs; the skull stays.

Uncanny city

Image by Jiri Benedikt

Woolf, Virginia. Jacob's Room. Arc Manor LLC, 2008. Google Books. Web. 18 May 2012.