Critical Summary: Virginia Woolf and the Visible World

Emily Dalgarno’s book Virginia Woolf and the Visible World explores the ways in which Woolf uses imagery in her novels. Dalgarno’s primary argument is that Woolf uses imagery in specific places and gives them perspective through her writing that is beyond simple description. Dalgarno writes that Woolf is presented with a conflict between what is writable and the “unrepresentable visible,” which is best described as the difficulty in portraying a specific object or moment as perceived by the initial viewer in the same way to another viewer. As other critics have noted, Dalgarno also emphasizes Woolf’s association of imagery with memory, and Dalgarno argues that what is percieveble by light (an image) is therefore made into an object, correlating with the sense of tangibility that a visual memory suggests. Dalgarno references multiple instances in Woolf’s works, such as the moment when Septimus commits suicide in Mrs. Dalloway, illustrating how the use of narrative has captured the profoundness of the moment in his memory that Septimus relives.