The Mark on the Wall – Class 12 English Chapter 15 Notes & NCERT PDF

About the Author

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English novelist and essayist and a central figure of the Bloomsbury Group of writers and artists. With her husband Leonard she ran the Hogarth Press. Her novels include Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. She pioneered the stream of consciousness technique, which renders the continuous, unplanned flow of thoughts, feelings and memories in a mind. The Mark on the Wall (1917) is one of her earliest experiments with it. Little "happens" in it: a woman looks at a mark on the wall, and her mind wanders.

Summary

The mark. The narrator is not sure of the date. She thinks it was "the middle of January", with a fire burning and "three chrysanthemums" in a bowl. She sees "a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece". She notes: "How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it."

Guess one: a nail. Perhaps the mark is a nail for a miniature, hung by the previous tenants. That leads her to imagine the tenants and then to reflect on the "mystery of life" and "the inaccuracy of thought". She lists everything we lose in a lifetime: "three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools", bird cages, iron hoops, steel skates, a Queen Anne coal-scuttle, a bagatelle board and a hand organ. Life, she says, is like "being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour".

Guess two: a rose-leaf or crack. She will not get up to look. Her mind drifts to Shakespeare and then to how we protect our image of ourselves, the reflection in the looking glass. Novelists of the future, she predicts, will pursue "these reflections" rather than external events.

Generalisations and rules. She mocks "generalisations": Sunday walks, Sunday luncheons and the rule that tablecloths must have "little yellow compartments"; "tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths". This leads to Whitaker's Table of Precedency, where the Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor and then the Archbishop of York. "Everybody follows somebody." These are the rigid, masculine standards she would like to escape.

Guess three: a tumulus. In some lights the mark seems to project from the wall, like a barrow or tumulus on the South Downs. She imagines a retired antiquary Colonel arguing about whether it is a camp or a tomb and dying before the question is settled. She concludes: "No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known." Learned men, she says, are descendants of "witches and hermits".

Guess four: wood. Wanting something solid, like someone who has "grasped a plank in the sea", she thinks of wood and then of trees. She pictures a tree growing in a meadow, cows swishing their tails beneath it, a moorhen, fish balanced against the stream "like flags blown out", and the tree's long afterlife as timber in bedrooms and ships.

The end. Someone stands over her and says: "I'm going out to buy a newspaper... Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God damn this war!... All the same, I don't see why we should have a snail on our wall." The narrator ends: "Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail."

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