Analysing Virginia Woolf's the Mark on the Wall from an Existentialist Perspective

Abstract

During the world wars, people experienced harsh realities and had no recourse. Traditional values were no longer suitable for the post-war world, but they could not find a new standard of living and suffered a crisis of identity. Given this background, both the existentialist thought of the philosophical world and the literary realm coincidentally turned to exploring the survival state of humankind. As a pioneering writer, Virginia Woolf had a meticulous portrayal and profound thinking about the spiritual state of human beings in the post-war period. The academic research on Woolf's works has mostly explored from the perspectives of feminism, epiphanic moments and narrative style of stream of consciousness, but less from the existentialist viewpoint. However, many of Woolf's works have different methods, leading to the same result with Existentialism. Therefore, this paper tries to analyse the existentialist tendency in Woolf's first stream-of-consciousness short story, The Mark on the Wall, with the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger, the representative figures of Existentialism. The work shows the absurdity of the world and people's despair. The stream-of-consciousness narrative mingles the past, present and future, breaking the linear concept of time. It elaborates that people are free to exist but always face the constraints of established rules and conflicts with others, which coincides with Existentialism. In addition, Heidegger's view of the initiative of things is also reflected in the narrative way of constructing the protagonist's identity by depicting a series of objects in the piece.