"A Fish in a Stream": on body and memory in Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past”

Abstract

This article examines the deadlocks foregrounded in recreating and reconstituting memory in Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past” from the body’s perspective. “Body” is seen here as a category to reflect upon the meanings of women’s marginality and resistance. Of particular interest are the hiatuses of memory in “Sketch,” for recovering her own body and establishing a voice from within it constituted a conflicting and contradictory process, to which Virginia Woolf responded with unique narrative strategies. General and private perspectives merge, not only because of the troubles of not being personal when writing one’s own life but because Woolf claims that leaving out “the person to whom things happen” is undesirable. Even though she may meet silence when including herself personally in her writings, silence is embraced as a constituent. I suggest that much in the same way Woolf juxtaposes temporalities and subjectivities in "Sketch," personality, impersonality, and their absence (or connectedness, which is another way of seeing it) are also juxtaposed in a kind of palimpsest that does not overlook corporeality but acknowledges it as essential.