[Vwoolf] Slater's pins

[Jeremy Hawthorn]

I have long wondered whether Slater's pins really were blunter than the 
average. We know that Woolf used a comment made about (the real) 
Barker's pins by Clara Pater. If one browses critical comments on the 
story all move straight into symbol and metaphor and sexual politics; I 
have not found one that asks whether it is possible that Clara Pater 
really did mean that Barker's pins had no point, or whether she was 
right. It's not that the symbolic /metaphorical extensions are wrong 
(they are I think right), but I wonder whether they are based upon some 
truth in the non-literary world. In contrast, when readers and critics 
come across this passage in Conrad, no-one asks what it symbolises: the 
nails are nails:

"At the bottom the nails lay in a layer several inches thick. It was 
ghastly. Every nail in the world, not driven in firmly somewhere, seemed 
to have found its way into that carpenter's shop. There they were, of 
all kinds, the remnants of stores from seven voyages. Tin-tacks, copper 
tacks (sharp as needles), pump nails, with big heads, like tiny iron 
mushrooms; nails without any heads (horrible); French nails polished and 
slim. They lay in a solid mass more inabordable than a hedgehog. We 
hesitated yearning for a shovel, while Jimmy below us yelled as though 
he had been flayed. Groaning, we dug our fingers in, and very much hurt, 
shook our hands, scattering nails and drops of blood. We passed up our 
hats full of assorted nails to the boatswain, who, as if performing a 
mysterious and appeasing rite, cast them wide upon a raging sea."

Part of this is reader expectation. We expect descriptions of physical 
objects aboard ship in a Conrad fiction to evoke the physical; we expect 
descriptions of physical objects in a Woolf fiction to lead on to 
matters social and experiential.

Thinking about this, I recalled that I had once had a very pleasant 
visit to a museum of needles and pins in the English midlands, so I 
wrote and asked them if they had any information about Barker's pins. 
Alas, they did not. A Google search for Barker's pins threw up hardly 
any hits, but one did suggest that Barker's supplied the medical 
profession with pins - which does not suggest that they produced 
low-quality goods.

So: has anyone ever found out anything about Barker's pins that might 
confirm that they did actually have no point? And do we assume that it 
is Clara Pater who was talking in code to Virginia, or that while /she/ 
had no hidden meaning it is Woolf herself who takes the comment and 
gives it a double meaning in the story?

Incidentally, for anyone with a taste for odd museums (I speak as one 
who has visited the sadly now-closed Liberace museum in Las Vegas), here 
is the web address for the needle and pin museum.

http://www.forgemill.org.uk/

Jeremy H

-- 
Jeremy Hawthorn
Emeritus professor
Department of Language and Literature
NTNU
7491 Trondheim
Norway

(00 47) 73596787 (NTNU)
(00 47) 72887602 (home
(00 47) 90181427 (cellphone)

See details of my forthcoming book at:
https://ohiostatepress.org/Books/Book%20Pages/Hawthorn%20Reader.html

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/vwoolf/attachments/20131118/de70041d/attachment.html>