A Haunted House by Virginia Woolf www.world-english.

org

Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. From room to room they
went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure--a ghostly couple.

"Here we left it," she said. And he added, "Oh, but here tool" "It's upstairs," she
murmured. "And in the garden," he whispered. "Quietly," they said, "or we shall
wake them."

But it wasn't that you woke us. Oh, no. "They're looking for it; they're drawing
the curtain," one might say, and so read on a page or two. "Now they've found
it,' one would be certain, stopping the pencil on the margin. And then, tired of
reading, one might rise and see for oneself, the house all empty, the doors
standing open, only the wood pigeons bubbling with content and the hum of the
threshing machine sounding from the farm. "What did I come in here for? What
did I want to find?" My hands were empty. "Perhaps its upstairs then?" The
apples were in the loft. And so down again, the garden still as ever, only the book
had slipped into the grass.

But they had found it in the drawing room. Not that one could ever see them. The
windowpanes reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves were green in the
glass. If they moved in the drawing room, the apple only turned its yellow side.
Yet, the moment after, if the door was opened, spread about the floor, hung upon
the walls, pendant from the ceiling--what? My hands were empty. The shadow of
a thrush crossed the carpet; from the deepest wells of silence the wood pigeon
drew its bubble of sound. "Safe, safe, safe" the pulse of the house beat softly.
"The treasure buried; the room . . ." the pulse stopped short. Oh, was that the
buried treasure?

A moment later the light had faded. Out in the garden then? But the trees spun
darkness for a wandering beam of sun. So fine, so rare, coolly sunk beneath the
surface the beam I sought always burned behind the glass. Death was the glass;
death was between us, coming to the woman first, hundreds of years ago, leaving
the house, sealing all the windows; the rooms were darkened. He left it, left her,
went North, went East, saw the stars turned in the Southern sky; sought the
house, found it dropped beneath the Downs. "Safe, safe, safe," the pulse of the
house beat gladly. 'The Treasure yours."

The wind roars up the avenue. Trees stoop and bend this way and that.
Moonbeams splash and spill wildly in the rain. But the beam of the lamp falls
straight from the window. The candle burns stiff and still. Wandering through the
house, opening the windows, whispering not to wake us, the ghostly couple seek
their joy.

"Here we slept," she says. And he adds, "Kisses without number." "Waking in the
morning--" "Silver between the trees--" "Upstairs--" 'In the garden--" "When
summer came--" 'In winter snowtime--" "The doors go shutting far in the
distance, gently knocking like the pulse of a heart.

Nearer they come, cease at the doorway. The wind falls, the rain slides silver
down the glass. Our eyes darken, we hear no steps beside us; we see no lady
spread her ghostly cloak. His hands shield the lantern. "Look," he breathes.
"Sound asleep. Love upon their lips."

Stooping, holding their silver lamp above us, long they look and deeply. Long
they pause. The wind drives straightly; the flame stoops slightly. Wild beams of
moonlight cross both floor and wall, and, meeting, stain the faces bent; the faces
pondering; the faces that search the sleepers and seek their hidden joy.

"Safe, safe, safe," the heart of the house beats proudly. "Long years--" he sighs.
"Again you found me." "Here," she murmurs, "sleeping; in the garden reading;
laughing, rolling apples in the loft. Here we left our treasure--" Stooping, their
light lifts the lids upon my eyes. "Safe! safe! safe!" the pulse of the house beats
wildly. Waking, I cry "Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart."

www.world-english.org

• Born: 25 January 1882

• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: 28 March 1941 (suicide by drowning)
• Best Known As: Author of A Room Of One's Own

Name at birth: Adeline Virginia Stephen

Virginia Woolf is remembered as both a feminist and a modernist whose novels often
ignored traditional plots to follow the inner lives and musings of her characters. As a
young woman Woolf moved with her siblings to Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. The
house became a gathering place for writers, artists and intellectuals and this
"Bloomsbury Group" is remembered as an incubator of modern artistic thought. She
married writer and fellow Bloomsbury member Leonard Woolf in 1912, and they
founded the small Hogarth Press. Her first major published work was The Voyage Out
(1915); other books included Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the
Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928). Her 1929 book A Room of One's Own
collected her lectures and meditations on the place of women in literature. Her diaries
also have been widely reprinted. Woolf suffered from depression and fits of mental
illness for much of her life, and finally committed suicide by drowning herself in the
river Ouse near Sussex, England.

Woolf was immortalized in the title of Edward Albee's 1962 play Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf... The heroine of Orlando is loosely based on Woolf's friend (and
some say lover) Vita Sackville-West... Her novel Flush (1933) imagines the thoughts
of a spaniel owned by Elizabeth Barrett Browning... Other members of the
Bloomsbury Group included the novelist E.M. Forster, the economist John Maynard
Keynes and the historian Lytton Strachey... The Hogarth Press published the first
edition of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land... Orlando was made into a 1992 movie with
actress Tilda Swinton in the title role... Woolf was played by Nicole Kidman in the
2002 film The Hours. Kidman won the 2003 Oscar as best actress for the role.

Themes and analysis

The novel itself is preoccupied with a number of issues, most notably madness and
the role of women in society, seen through the minds of Clarissa and the novel's other
protagonist, Septimus Warren Smith. As a commentary on Edwardian society,
Clarissa's character highlights the role of women as the proverbial "Angel in the
House" and embodies both sexual and economic repression. Septimus, as the shell-
shocked war hero, operates as a pointed criticism of the treatment of insanity and
depression. Woolf lashes out at the medical establishment through Septimus's decline
and ultimate suicide. Similarities between Septimus's condition and Woolf's own
struggles with manic depression (they both hallucinate that birds sing in Greek, and
Woolf once attempted to throw herself out a window as Septimus finally does) lead
many to read a strongly auto-biographical aspect into the character of Septimus.

Adopting the plot device used by James Joyce in Ulysses, the narrative present of
Mrs. Dalloway is patterned as the sequence of a single day in June. The novel opens
conventionally enough with the sentence, "Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the
flowers herself." This single event, however, launches us into Clarissa's mind, and
what follows is a plunge into Clarissa Dalloway's past, as the flowers trigger her
memories of the open air at Bourton where she spent her adolescence long before she
became Mrs Dalloway. Her recollection of that time leads her to think of Peter Walsh,
a man with whom she was enamored, as he was at that time.

A paragraph later, Clarissa is back in the present, waiting for Durtnall's van to pass so
that she can cross the road to buy the flowers. It is already apparent from these
opening paragraphs with the fluidity of movement between past and present, which
softens and blurs the lines of their traditional opposition, that Woolf's technique treats
the past as intimately involved with the present. The past is not just treated as a
background for the present, it becomes a part of it by virtue of Clarissa's association
of the freshness of the June morning with Bourton and Peter. Woolf's novel is, like so
many modernist novels, concerned extensively with reconciling the optimism of the
present with the horrifying past of the Great War.

As the day proceeds, we are treated to a number of Clarissa's memories, as most of

her time spent making prepartions for her party reminds her of her earlier life, before
she was old and before she was married, when life was still open and new and free.
She remembers, in particular, how close she came to choosing another man over Mr.
Dalloway, musing with a mixture of remorse and wonder about how different her life
might have been had she chosen differently. Presenting an alternative meditation on
these same themes of memory and regret, we are presented with Septimus' story, as he
dissolves away into madness, locked up in his room under doctor's orders, and unable
to think of anything at all but what terrible damage the past had wreaked on his fragile
mind. By the end of the novel Mrs. Dalloway is able to accept her life as it has
become despite regrets. Septimus is consumed by his memories, unable to break free
of them. Ultimately, he is destroyed by them. When Peter Walsh appears at Clarissa's
party, the novel famously ends on a note of hope and wonder at the beauty of things
even though they have changed:

“I will come,” said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this terror? what
is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with
extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was.
The Story

The narrator, apparently a woman, begins: “Whatever hour you woke there was a
door shutting.” Along with her husband, the narrator experiences the sensations of a
home literally alive with memories. She does not, however, try to keep the reader in
suspense regarding the mysterious openings and closings of doors and windows that
she and her husband witness. Despite the fact that she knows two ghosts wander
through her home, she is not afraid. The ghosts, after all, mean the narrator and her
husband no harm.

The ghosts clearly are conducting a search.