Jacob's Room and the Role of Women

Being only her third novel, I think it’s safe to say that Jacob’s Room shows significant insight into the future career of Virginia Woolf. Like all things with Woolf, the alterations and changes in her writing are not intended to jump out from the page, but it is more accessible with a closer look at Jacob’s Room. Marina Mackay writes in her essay The Lunacy of Men, the Idiocy of Women: Woolf, West, and War about Woolf’s modernist approach to both the first world war and the augmented role of women that followed, and I couldn’t help but see the connections between this particular approach and the fact that almost all of the characters through which we get to know Jacob are women. Perhaps Mackay’s theory about women becoming a greater cultural force in 1920s England has any relation to Woolf’s work on Jacob’s Room simply materializes in retrospect with that idea in mind. After all Rebecca West, with whom Mackay compares Woolf, did not create her own post-war works until after the second world war nearly two decades later, but even if this is the case, to me it simply shows that Woolf’s emphasis on the feminine point of view arrives more from her own life and experiences after World War One.
Within the literary structure of the work Jacob is undeniably the protagonist. However, this does not necessarily mean that we see the world through his eyes. Just like in Kew Gardens and The Mark on the Wall , Jacob is the pivot point where all of these points of view stem from. We do get to see what Jacob is thinking at time, especially when he is alone and Woolf is describing a setting that seems to live halfway between reality and Jacob’s imagination, but all of the key external characters are women. It is this aspect that Mackay would argue makes Jacob’s Room a woman’s reflection of the first World War, and as she boldly compares the works of both Woolf and West, she notes that both feature male characters who are destroyed in the violence that came with the war, and that the female characters symbolically represent the woman’s larger role in society after these events. How women have such a powerful influence within the novel, however, is because the majority of the conversation and development we see in Jacob we hear through them first. Mrs. Flanders is easily the most important woman in the book, especially during Jacob’s childhood. At the beginning she plays her own pivotal role, which includes tying together Jacob and Captain Barefoot, the two main male characters at this time. As the plot progresses, other women take up Betty’s role as she is physically left behind, namely Clara, Sandra, and Florinda, to which Jacob has various degrees of sexual and romantic attractions. This change in the female point of view better reflects Jacob’s growth from a boy into a man, yet by showing his life through the eyes of women, Woolf is strongly associating war with men leaving and never coming back, instead of allowing the reader a look into Jacob’s life while he is away. Perhaps all of this seems almost too obvious given the title of Jacob’s Room, a clear reference to absence, but as she does in most of her writing, Woolf weaves all of these ideas into the unconscious of the reader.