The Mark on the Wall

In this stream-of-consciousness narration, a woman sits in a room in her house, and perceives a mark on the wall. Instead of rising to investigate the mark, and to ascertain what it is, the occasion of espying a mark on a wall itself becomes the impetus for an existential investigation of the nature of knowledge itself, and of the vaunted social and academic norms that formalize and delimit what can be both known and knowable. Ultimately, looking at the mark is a plea to be freed from systematized modes of knowledge, perception, and being. With the mark on the wall as an entry point for the interrogation of both perception and the systematic accumulation, normalization, and recording of knowledge, Woolf forwards the argument that the process of ascertaining what something is—materially, psychologically, academically, scientifically—is not the neat one-to-one process that it is widely presumed to be by the society which surrounds her. Instead, she perceives her society’s tyrannical vice grip on the creation and validation of knowledge—which in the story is personified by Whitaker’s Almanack, and a priesthood of male scholars—to be as oppressive and encumbering as it is enveloping. Simultaneously, though, the story is peppered with repeatedly articulated doubts that a more complete and more freeing knowledge does not exist outside the confines of the norms and limitations of her present society’s systems of thought.

The narrator’s repeatedly articulated yearnings for a freedom that may or may not exist can be analogously tied to the use of language itself. Language is, ultimately, a systematic and systematized mode of both creating and formalizing knowledge. By its very nature, language itself then fits into the criteria of the very items that the narrator finds herself bucking against. This irreducible fact therefore fills the story with a measure of poignancy and irony: if language itself is a formalized system that shapes what is known and knowable, and yet formalized systems of knowledge are themselves suspect, harshly limiting, and oppressive, can thoughts realized through language ever be trulytrustworthy? Further, can language ever be used to surpass language itself, and the knowledge that language creates? What can be known outside of language? These are the unanswerable questions that lie at the heart of this narrative.

The story’s strong sense of both pathos and irony also comes to a climax at the story’s end, when the narrator’s husband reveals the mark on the wall—which the narrator has been steadfastly refusing to fully investigate—to be a snail. Thematically, this moment also decisively brings Woolf’s commentary on gender to fruition. Before this point, she has insinuated that men control her society’s modes of knowledge and being, and that she has yearned for an escape, as a woman, from their masculine strictures. The story itself can be read as an assertion of a feminine alternative to the masculine mode of knowledge, which seeks to definitively entomb items into static categories of being.

In a sense, her steadfast refusal to decisively arise from her chair and ascertain what, exactly, the mark on the wall is, can be read as a form of feminine resistance: if men dictate what is known and knowable through strict, one-to-one categorizations, and, in so doing, deaden, oversimplify, and entomb knowledge, then the woman can still take the option of refusing to engage in men’s systems of knowledge at all. She can instead let her own mind wander through free associations set off by the mark on the wall, without having to submit to the masculinized and formalized oversimplification of simply assigning her physical perception one solid (and therefore deadened)identification. That is, she can, until she can’t: in the end, her feminine reveries are decisively and non-consensually interrupted by her husband’s oblivious and definitive pronouncement that the mark on the wall is a snail.

The plot turnthat reveals that the mark on the wall as a snail effectively brings the narrator’s musings on knowledge systems, consciousness, nature, and gender to both a climax and an anticlimax. On one hand, it is climactic because the reader finally finds out what the mark on the wall truly is. On the other, it is anticlimactic because this knowledge is not meant to satisfy the reader: indeed, it reads as an unwelcome and almost vulgar intrusion into the narrator’s delicate and expansive ruminations. Both the narrator’s lamentations about a harshly judgmental woman who impugns her housekeeping skills, and the narrator’s husband’s complaint about a snail on the wall, point to the narrator’s failure as an ideal woman: the snail evidences her inability to keep a clean and tidy home.By all accounts, a snail in the home would invariably be seen as dirty. The narrator’s refusal to see, name, and attend to the mark on the wall as a snail, and her preference for physical passivity in the wake of the mark,thus can also be read as a rejection of the norms that dictate that she must be a good, tidy housekeeper if she is to be a good woman.

The story can also be read in direct relation to the hugely-influential Swiss linguist and semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure’s work. Saussure was essentially a contemporary of Woolf, who died four years prior to the publication of “The Mark on the Wall.” Saussure’s theory of structural linguistics asserts that the linguistic sign is arbitrary: the words that we use (signifiers) and the conceptual meanings that these words create (the signified) are not intrinsically linked in any way. For example, there is nothing fundamental about the word “cat” which links it to the animal known as a cat. The correlation between the word “cat” and the concept of a cat is based on the conventions of language and the arbitrary assignation of meaning and phonetic sounds to words—and therefore, to signified concepts.

According to Saussure, a system of language (la parole) is established through a culture’s mutually-shared and agreed-upon conventions. A culture therefore uses these conventions to create meaning. In so doing, the arbitrary nature of the system itself is often obscured or not fully understood as the basis of signification—because meaning-making takes psychological and cultural precedence. This system of conventions also becomes calcified over time. And, although it is a system fundamentally predicated upon arbitrariness, it exercises a monopoly on the cultural creation of meaning. 

Incidentally, Saussure uses an image of a tree to demonstrate these principles in his work Course in General Linguistics. The narrator of “A Mark on the Wall” is caught up in an extended reverie about becoming a tree—and the delicious joy that could lie therein—when her husband interrupts her at the end of the story. This moment can be seen as a nuanced engagement with Saussure’s theories. For one, the narrator seems very invested in the idea of language as a strict and impenetrable formalized system that is also simultaneously fraudulent (i.e. arbitrary), limiting, and repressive. Her repeated yearning for escape, and the momentary realization of escapethrough, of all things, the fantasy of becoming a tree, can reasonably be read as a riff on Saussure. The narrator intrinsically understands the arbitrary nature of language and meaning-making, while those around her do not. However, unlike the scientific theorizing of Saussure, she embodies and occupies both the signifier and the signified (here instantiated as a tree) with a deeply emotional and sensual sensibility. Using traditional gender binaries, her sensual, fantastical approach is a distinctly feminine foil to the masculine stoic empiricism of both the language systems she rails against and Saussure’s scientific, structuralist theories.