The Mark on the Wall

In this stream-of-consciousness narration, a woman sits in a room in her house, and perceives a mark on the wall. Instead of rising to investigate the mark, and to ascertain what it is, the occasion of espying a mark on a wall itself becomes the impetus for an existential investigation of the nature of knowledge itself, and of the vaunted social and academic norms that formalize and delimit what can be both known and knowable. Ultimately, looking at the mark is a plea to be freed from systematized modes of knowledge, perception, and being. With the mark on the wall as an entry point for the interrogation of both perception and the systematic accumulation, normalization, and recording of knowledge, Woolf forwards the argument that the process of ascertaining what something is—materially, psychologically, academically, scientifically—is not the neat one-to-one process that it is widely presumed to be by the society which surrounds her. Instead, she perceives her society’s tyrannical vice grip on the creation and validation of knowledge—which in the story is personified by Whitaker’s Almanack, and a priesthood of male scholars—to be as oppressive and encumbering as it is enveloping. Simultaneously, though, the story is peppered with repeatedly articulated doubts that a more complete and more freeing knowledge does not exist outside the confines of the norms and limitations of her present society’s systems of thought.