Central to Virginia Woolf s Jacob s Room is the character of Jacob. The title takes his name and throughout the novel we see him from multiple different characters perspectives. However, by the end of the novel, all we are ultimately left with are Jacob s shoes and an unresolved sense of loss. As a result Jacob has often been seen not as a character in his own right, but as a representative of his lost generation.

Few characters in fiction are as fleeting and frustrating as Jacob Flanders. So much and yet so little of him is present in Jacob s Room. He exits the world of the novel as he enters it: as an absence. There is no progression from the calling of Jacob by Archer in the opening of the novel: Ja-cob! Ja-cob! [1], to Bonamy s call at the end: Jacob! Jacob! [2], there is simply the knowledge that Jacob cannot be found, creating a circularity and lack of resolution. Jacob is still a mystery to the reader and the narrator, since the narrator lacks omniscience. Woolf denies us the satisfaction of a continuous first person narrative, accentuating the lack of resolution throughout the text. Jacob is seen from so many different characters perspectives that it makes it almost impossible for him to cohere as a character. As Rachel Bowlby succinctly puts it: Jacob is more an object of other s interpretations and readings than an agent in his own right [3]. Despite the constant perceptions of other characters, the closest the reader gets to any clear characteristics of Jacob is through the enigmatic remark, repeated almost word for word: He is extraordinarily awkward Yet so distinguished looking [4]. However this is meant to be no more than a hint of Jacob s character, as Woolf makes clear earlier in the text: It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints [5]. It would be impossible to sum up Jacob when his life ends so abruptly.

The question is: what was Woolf trying to do with this multi-dimensional, elusive character? Perhaps Woolf created Jacob as a way of representing multiple people, an entire generation. Jacob s Room reads almost as Woolf s very own, incredibly protracted and indirect, Anthem for Doomed Youth , an elegy of sorts. The text in one sense is a working through of grief, a mourning for the men who died in World War One. Woolf s constant refusal to satisfactorily describe Jacob points towards this more allegorical reading. Even when Jacob is fairly extensively described, there is still a suggestion he could be almost any young man. This is most clearly seen when Jacob is on his way to Cambridge. Mrs Norman describes him as nice, handsome, interesting, well built, like her own boy? [6] However it is the image Woolf goes on to use which is most significant, that since Mrs Norman sees nothing but young men all day in Cambridge, Jacob was completely lost in her mind, as the crooked pin dropped by a child in the wishing-well twirls in the water and disappears for ever [7]. Jacob is a fairly typical young man, and could therefore stand is some way for anybody s son, brother or lover. However this image is also a poignant foreshadowing of both Jacob s death and the large scale losses of young men, with no trace of them left and no body to mourn.

Despite Jacob s universality and incompleteness, there is also an element of specificity in Jacob s character, and some critics, such as Kathleen Wall[8], have argued that the elegiac tone of the novel is for her brother, who died of typhoid fever aged 26. However it would seem far more likely that it was Rupert Brooke that Woolf had in mind when writing the character of Jacob. Brooke was a close friend of Woolf s, and after his death from septicaemia, he became synonymous with the lost generation of men from the First World War. Woolf includes certain well known facts about Brooke in Jacob s character, for instance Jacob attends both Rugby school and Cambridge, and his good looks are equally a defining feature. She uses Jacob to explore key questions surrounding Brooke and men like him: of the reasons they felt compelled to join the army (Brooke did so voluntarily), and what their lives might have looked like had they not been tragically cut short. In a review on Rupert Brooke, Woolf asks a question central to Jacob s Room: One turns from the thought of him not with a sense of completeness and finality, but rather to wonder and question still: what would he have been, what would he have done? [9]

Alex Zwerdling argues that much like Virginia Woolf, the reader is left questioning what might have been, as Jacob s life is so abruptly ended. He therefore remains unknowable to the reader since he is still experimenting and doesn t yet have a concrete identity. As a result he argues that: Jacob s Room lacks a teleology [10]. Jacob s Room denies the reader a sense of resolution. The large scale losses of The First World War were in many ways unresolved, with no bodies and a move away from traditional Victorian mourning. Betty Flanders is arguably fairly typical of the time, with no elaborate rituals, it is unclear how she will respond. Her final words are not a lament, but surprisingly practical: what am I to do with these, Mr Bonamy? [11]. This is not a proper articulation of grief, but more a deferral, and there is no indication as to how she might cope. After the immense labour gone into bringing up Jacob, Betty is merely left with his shoes. The book reads like an incomplete Bildungsroman. Therefore acknowledging and mapping all the work that was put into bringing up young men who perished in the war. Unlike Brooke s poetry, Woolf s text lacks sentimentality, and highlights the real difficulty of mourning the generation of men lost in World War One. Woolf does not offer comfort to the reader in suggesting Jacob died for some greater cause: there is no corner of a foreign field// That is for ever England [12], only loss.

In connecting Jacob with Brooke, Woolf was also trying to make sense of the reasons men of his class and generation fought in the war. Throughout the book there is an impending sense of doom. There is an elegiac mood from the outset: with the introduction of Betty the widow. Arguably his father s death shapes Jacob, and is one of many examples of male arrogance, with Jacob s father dying as a result of ignoring his wife s advice. Linden Peach argues that Woolf was interested in looking at a society whose cultural and psychological make-up seemed drawn to war [13]. There seems no doubt Jacob is destined to die in the novel, with Flanders as his second name (a battle where nearly a third of a million men perished in the mud). Zwerdling therefore suggests: we may be reading about his intellectual and amorous adventures, but we are also witnessing the preparation of cannon fodder [14]. It is the institutions that ultimately determine Jacob s death. This can even be seen in his family with the male arrogance of his father and the fact his entire childhood takes place near Dods Hill, an old Roman camp.

The way in which institutions drill warrior like ideology into impressionable young men can also be seen in the precession outside King s College Chapel. The men could easily be soldiers lining up: What sculptured faces, what certainty, authority controlled by piety, although great boots march under the gowns [15]. Presumably the sculpted faces echo classical warriors, and there is a suggestion here of church and state merging in order to create this warrior class. Jacob cannot escape this ideology. Even in the British Library he is surrounded by Greek Warriors, and as Peach argues: Greek culture has been presented to him so as to suggest a particular type of masculinity [16]. However Woolf highlights throughout the novel Jacob s youth and ignorance, and this applies especially to his knowledge of Greek language and civilisation: Jacob knew no more Greek than served him to stumble through a play. Of ancient history he knew nothing [17]. Woolf makes him appear naive, but there is a suggestion that this naivet is exploited by those in power. Makiko Minow-Pinkey argues that Jacob s maleness kills him, in a war that is the inevitable consequence of an inhumane masculine ideology [18]. Jacob s masculinity is essentially moulded and used by those in power.

In conclusion, Jacob s character is undeveloped and unfinished. It is this that makes him so universal and the novel so poignant. Jacob could be both anyone and everyone. His death is inevitable throughout the text, and the institutions ultimately mould him and cause his premature death. His death does not come until the last page and there is no resolution. Woolf avoids this, and the reader is left wondering how Betty Flanders will cope with the loss of her son.

Bibliography

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bowlby, Rachel, Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997)

Minow-Pinkney, Makiko, Virginia Woolf & The Problem Of The Subject (Brighton: The Harvester Press Limited, 1987)

Peach, Linden, Critical Issues Virginia Woolf (New York: St. Martin`s Press, INC., 2000)

Wall, Kathleen, "Significant Form in Jacob`s Room: Ekphrasis and the Elegy", Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 44 (2002): 302-323

Walter, George, The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, (London: Penguin Classics,

2006)

Zwerdling, Alex, "Jacob`s Room: Woolf`s Satiric Elegy", ELH, 48 (1981): 894-913

[1] Woolf, Virginia, Jacob s Room (Penguin Modern Classics, 1965), p.6.

[2] Ibid, p.168.

[3]Bowlby, Rachel, Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press, 1997), p.87.

[4] Woolf, p.58.

[5] Ibid, p.27.

[6] Woolf, p.28.

[7] Ibid, p.28.

[8] Wall, Kathleen, Significant Form in Jacob`s Room: Ekphrasis and the Elegy , Texas Studies in Literature and

Language, 4 (2002), 302-323 (p.303).

[9] Zwerdling, Alex, Jacob`s Room: Woolf`s Satiric Elegy , ELH, 48 (1981), 894-913 (p.897).

[10] Ibid, p.898.

[11] Woolf, p.168.

[12] Rupert Brooke, : The Soldier , in The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, ed. by George Walter

(London: Penguin Classics, 2006), p.108, ll. 2-3.

[13] Peach, Linden, Critical Issues Virginia Woolf (New York: St. Martin s Press, INC., 2000), p.67.

[14] Zwerdling, p.896.

[15] Woolf, p.29.

[16] Peach, p.74.

[17] Woolf, p.72.

[18] Minow-Pinkney, Makiko, Virginia Woolf & The Problem Of The Subject (Brighton: The Harvester Press

Limited, 1987), p. 52-53.