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Sunday, October 25, 2015

Who's afraid? Why Kew Gardens is not a good introduction to the workks of Virginia Woolf

In some ways Virginia Woolf's short story Kew Gardens is a good intro to her work for those who haven't read her major fiction - in that it is a miniature version of the kind of scene she establishes through odd detail interior monologue, shift in point of view - in To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway and others - but in other ways it's not a good intro at all, in that someone coming across this story without having read any of the novels might just shake his or her head in perplexity and ask: What's this all about? Nothing happens. I think it's the latter - you need to appreciate her work on the grander scale and then come upon this story - not sure when it was written but I think its book-form publication was posthumous, in the mid-1940s - and know what to expect and how to "read" her work. Yes, nothing happens - but we see a quick flash of the entire society of England during the war yeas (i.e, the World War, 1914 - 1918 or so) as seen from the point of view of an invisible and static observer picking out shards of the conversations of passing couples - even shards of their thoughts and memories: A man and wife and children start the procession and he thinks of a previous visit in the garden when he proposed, and then Woolf slyly let's us see that the woman he proposed to was not his wife but a previous love who rejected him; then we have the wife's thoughts  - her remembering her first kiss, and it turns out to be not a man but an elderly matron or teacher. Later a old man walks the path with, I think, his son, and only gradually do we realize that he is mentally disturbed and there's a hint that came about through the shock and disruption of living through the war years - something VW experienced personally and, finally, tragically. Then, snobbishly, there are some women from the "lower middle class," whose conversation is a garble of words - as if these women have no thoughts or sensitivities or memories? Nonsense. We also, for amusement, get the POV of a snail inching across the flower bed. So, yes, not much actually happens but the idea is world collide in even a small sector of society, on a patch of ground, the mind of a person passing us by in the street or on a walkway.

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