Kew Gardens

In her essay “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf defines the difference between moments of “being” and moments of “non-being” (Woolf, Virginia. “A Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being. Harcourt, 1985). Woolf argues that life largely consists of “non-being”: unmemorable moments when a person acts automatically, and their consciousness of the wider world is limited. However, this state of “non-being” is occasionally punctuated by a moment of “being.” In this state, an individual experiences a transcendent intensity of awareness of the moment, the world, and their connection to it. In “Kew Gardens,” Woolf illustrates this idea through her portrayal of the gardens and the characters’ experiences.

The narrative viewpoint of the story exemplifies the experience of a moment of being. In describing the scene, the narrator frequently depicts the human figures and the landscape merging into one. This unity of humanity and nature is also reflected in the smooth shift between the perspectives of the characters and the inhabitants of the flowerbed. Woolf highlights how the movements characters and the wildlife echo one another as “these men and women straggled past the flower-bed with a curiously irregular movement not unlike that of the white and blue butterfly” (84).