ESSAY CEMETERY

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 a...

In her 1923 essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, Virginia Woolf places characterization at the center of the novelist’s concerns. For Woolf, the novelist is defined primarily by his or her obsession with capturing character, a task she deems nearly impossible. “Few catch the phantom [of character]; most have to be content with a scrap of her dress or a wisp of her hair” (21). Despite this ostensible focus on characterization, Woolf has been criticized for creating shallow, incomplete characters in her works. Indeed, in her novel, Jacob’s Room, published in 1922, remarkably little attention is given to the title character. Only a vague outline is provided of the progression of Jacob Flanders from early childhood to his death, and key transitional moments in Jacob’s life are elided from the narrative. Whereas the title character is often absent from the action and narration of Jacob’s Room, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children protagonist Saleem Sinai is omnipresent throughout that narrat...