[Vwoolf] They're a' oot o' step but oor Jock

[Stuart N. Clarke]

I recently read this article:

NASH, John, "Exhibiting the Example: Virginia Woolf's Shoes", Twentieth_Century_Literature, 2013, LIX,2:283-308

“My focus is on Night and Day, Jacob’s Room and the essays and reviews of literary
tourism (or literary geography, as she also called it).
“In these works, Woolf often associates shoes with particular museological
contexts so that they become for her a kind of shorthand by which
she questions practices of exhibition and exemplification—issues that go
to the heart of her career-long concern with modes of representation
and perception. Shoes feature less as personal memorials (heavy with the
weight of pathos) and more as figures in a narrative mode which foregrounds
the selection, artifice, and experience of the exhibited example.”

The author certainly knows his Woolf.  When we come to ND:

‘jadedness and disaffection
now define Katharine’s relationship with the great men of the past;
this time it is the visitor, an “American lady who had come to be shown
the relics” (331), who singles out the slippers. “‘What! His very own
slippers!’ Laying aside the manuscript, she hastily grasped the old shoes,
and remained for a moment dumb in contemplation of them” (333).
The writers’ shoes have become the focus of a satire on the “sentimental
journeys” (“Howarth” 5) of the literary tourist’s “dumb” admiration and
despoiling “grasp.”’

The scene is sufficiently extensive, providing enough material for us to discuss/argue about Woolf’s “real” views about the relics of the dead.  So, the scene can arguably fit the author’s contention.

However, when we come to “Jacob’s Room”, all we have is:

‘“What am I to do with these, Mr. Bonamy?”
‘She held out a pair of Jacob’s old shoes.’

These are the last 2 lines of the book  There isn’t an immediate Woolfian context for interpretation, except the whole book.

The reader may be puzzled, of course.  Jacques-Émile Blanche recounted that while staying at
the Belgrave Hotel in London in 1925:
“I had left some of my papers and books in the reading-room when I was called away
to answer a telephone call. [. . .] When I returned I found two women turning over
the pages of a book that belonged to me. One of them was saying to the other: ‘Can
you make anything of it? Have you heard of the writer? It really makes you think
you’ve gone off your head! Was that boy Jacob killed in the War? And what’s all that
about *boots*?” 

Nonetheless, critics are generally agreed that this is a moment of pathos, or, as Nash puts it, there is “a long critical history in Woolf
studies which emphasizes metonymy and pathos in the closing scene.”  He specifically names Bill Brown, Alex Zwerdling, Laura Marcus, and Robert Reginio.

Instead, he argues “against this critical consensus ... Instead, this essay asks *why* shoes came to seem so important
to Woolf and finds the answer in her critique of literary tourism.”

This is all very well, but no one reading JR for even the umpteenth time could possibly deduce from the text that when Mrs Flanders asks, “What am I to do with these, Mr. Bonamy?”, there could possibly be a hidden critique of ‘museology’. You may use JR as yet another example of Woolf’s fascination with shoes and boots, but it is absurd to gainsay the pathos of the last 2 lines of the novel.  You don’t have to be persuaded by the pathos, but what can be intended by Woolf except some form of pathos?

Stuart



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