My only contribution to Virginia Woolf scholarship would be to point out how regularly her characters stare out of windows, day-dreaming or observing people in the street, avoiding dialogue and interaction with other people in the room, retreating into their own little worlds.
It’s Woolf’s characters’ characteristic pose and suggests an author who spent her whole life looking at the world at one remove, through glass, separated and disconnected. Down there in the street, everyone else is busy, hurrying hither and thither, but Woolf and her characters are the disengaged ones, the still observers. Behind them in the room everyone is talking and chattering but she and her characters are the silent ones, staring out the window at some bigger, looming but never expressed reality.
Colonel Pargiter shut his mouth on the thing he might have said, and turned back again to the window overlooking Piccadilly. Everybody in the crowded street, it seemed, had some end in view. Everybody was hurrying along to keep some appointment.
Upstairs in the bedroom at the top of the house Kitty’s maid Baxter was looking out of the window, watching the guests drive off…
If I try to categorise them there are maybe seven types of this out-the-window looking, specific types of window looking, which can also be grouped under the meanings or interpretations which can be attributed to them.
Note: All the quotations are from The Years which is where I really noticed this mannerism.
- avoidance – avoiding engagement with other people in the room, especially when it all gets too much, which it often does for Woolf’s women
- dissociation – a metaphor for the character’s distance from life, the teeming world of people going about their business
- observing – the utterly passive state of being a mirror, a camera
- prison house – women in particular looking wistfully out the windows of the big, heavy, confining home where the patriarchy has imprisoned them, yearning for escape
- to end a conversation
- out the windows of moving cars and taxis
- and trains
1. Avoidance
He [North] had only been back [from Africa] ten days, and his mind was a jumble of odds and ends. It seemed to him that he had never stopped talking: shaking hands; saying How-d’you-do? People sprang up everywhere; his father; his sister; old men got up from armchairs and said, You don’t remember me? Children he had left in the nursery were grown-up men at college; girls with pigtails were now married women. He was still confused by it all; they talked so fast; they must think him very slow, he thought. He had to withdraw into the window and say, ‘What, what, what do they mean by it?’
They stood at the window waiting for the cab. They stood there side by side, silent, looking out, because there was a pause to fill up, and the view from the window, which was so high over the roofs, over the squares and angles of back gardens to the blue line of hills in the distance served, like another voice speaking, to fill up the pause.
Peggy, bored at Delia’s party, has only one outlet, one recourse:
She was feeling reckless; nothing that she did mattered. She walked to the window and twitched the curtain apart. There were the stars pricked in little holes in the blue-black sky
2. Dissociation
Colonel Pargiter shut his mouth on the thing he might have said, and turned back again to the window overlooking Piccadilly. Everybody in the crowded street, it seemed, had some end in view. Everybody was hurrying along to keep some appointment. Even the ladies in their victorias and broughams were trotting down Piccadilly on some errand or other. People were coming back to London; they were settling in for the season. But for him there would be no season; for him there was nothing to do. His wife was dying..
3. Passive observation
She stood at the window looking up the street. There had been a shower of rain. The street was wet; the roofs were shining…
She turned to the window again. The street was empty, only the branches were tossing up and down in the lamplight…
She looked out of the window again. The rain was falling. When it crossed the lamplight it glanced in long strips of silver light…
Then she strolled over to the window that looked out onto the street. The houses opposite all had the same little front gardens; the same steps; the same pillars; the same bow windows…
For the moment the two girls stood at the window looking into the street…
She lay for a moment looking out of the window…
And there they are, still asleep, in their houses, she thought, standing at the window, looking at the green-grey grass, after their dances, after their parties… The thought pleased her.
4. Looking out from the prison house of home
Moments when Eleanor looks out of the windows at the big world outside which she is fated never to join so long as she has to look after first her mother, then her father i.e. is trapped in a family home which is more like a prison.
She should have finished her chapter for Lucy; but not tonight. She was too tired tonight. She turned to the window…
5. Ending conversations
There’s a fifth type which is going to the window to deliberately end a conversation. This is what Martin does to Crosby in the 1913 chapter.
Martin shook his head. He could not think what to say next. He hated talking to servants; it always made him feel insincere. Either one simpers, or one’s hearty, he was thinking. In either case it’s a lie… And then it was possible for Martin to take out his watch, step briskly to the window and exclaim as if he had suddenly remembered an appointment, ‘By Jove, Crosby, I must be off!’ and the door shut upon Crosby.
6. Out the windows of cars and taxis
Looking out the windows of coaches or cars, of moving vehicles, at the city passing by:
She [Eleanor] looked out of the window [of the chauffeur-driven car]. They were being held up by traffic at the Marble Arch…
7. Trains
And talking about the windows of moving transport, the classic attitude of looking out the window of a train. I think it’s in The Waves that various characters take long train journeys and the narrative describes the particular type of window-gazing you get on trains –watching landscapes, townscapes, telegraph cables dipping and rising between poles, that kind of thing.
For example in 1914 when Kitty, Lady Lasswade, takes a sleeper train the length of England to her family castle in the North, staring out the window most of the way.
Summary
So there are half a dozen or so definable types of window gazing but, generally, it’s a stock action Woolf has her characters resort to when she can’t think what else to do with them. If in doubt what to do next, have your character walk over to the window and soulfully observe random details of London life, the random often disconnected details which flood her stories.
Once you notice it, you realise the window motif is everywhere in her works. It is an important element in lending her stories that vague, undefined but powerful sense of fugitive meanings just escaping your grasp. Maybe if you stare out the window long enough, enlightenment will come…
Edward, leaning out of the window, could still see the trees in the college garden, whitened by the falling rain… Of all the moments in the day he liked this best, when he stood and looked out into the garden.
He stood by the window again. It was raining, but the whiteness had gone.
‘Lord! What a row there’ll be tomorrow,’ said Edward, going to the window and looking out at the rain that was still falling.
He crossed to the window. Red squares showed through the trees.
Maggie stood upright in the window. She watched the couples coming down the iron staircase…
Eleanor stood looking out of the window. The trees in the back garden were heavily lined with snow…
She turned round and stood at the window…
Virginia Woolf in soulful mood.
Books & Boots 