Critical Review: Jacob's Room, A Buried Discomfort

The Elusive Self

Jacob’s Room

Some Buried Discomfort

Louise A. Poresky’s chapter on Jacob’s Room goes into several different themes of the novel. The overall topic is Jacob’s search for the self. Poresky points a great deal of her attention to Jacob’s need to escape from his mother’s imago. She explains that Woolf’s sense of the existence of the parent in the child is obvious in the novel. Jacob constantly tries to find himself by running away from his mother, including anyone or anything that reminds him of her. On page 76 Poresky explains that the reader usually concentrates on the masculine because it is the “portion of composite personality that manifests fear of growth through its wish to over power the feminine.” She continues to explain that Woolf “stylistically abandons realistic clarity of her first two novels and adopts impressionism to reflect this step out of the conscious world and into the dark unconscious.” In the beginning of the novel Jacob is trapped in the conscious world and slowly slips into a much darker and deeper unconscious as he runs from his mother’s intolerability and degree of protectiveness. Poresky states that the only way to find the purpose of the difference in the narrator is to compare normal passages to those where the narrator directly addresses the reader. This is an interesting viewpoint in that she explains that Woolf originally planned for the Narrator to come from the conscious to serve as a “norm:” so that the reader could better pick up on and understand Jacob’s “deep unconscious.” This article really stresses the strong dislike that Jacob holds toward his mother. She is described as being a dark and cold woman who constantly works to repress any passion, a very depressing and oppressing lifestyle. An example of her repression is given on page 80, she repeats that she does not like men with red hair at least two times. She does this in response to reading a letter that Mr. Floyd wrote professing his love for her. An example is given in the article where latter in life Jacob expresses his rebellion, as he does not read a letter from his mother until after making love to Florinda. Jacob is never found throughout the book. It ends with woman being left alone, without him, when in all reality he was never there psychologically. Jacob’s dying in war is explained as being his death from the physical world. Poresky argues at the end of the chapter that he lives on with Bonomy through the wind. This is an interesting analysis, and the entire chapter discussed some unique and valid points.