『제이콥의 방』에 나타난 애도와 치유의 서사

Mourning and the Therapeutic Narrative in Jacob's Room

Virginia Woolf's third novel, Jacob's Room (1922), is an apparent Bildungsroman dealing with the titular hero's growth and death. However, in this novel of silence and death, nothing is definite and wholesome; everything is fragmentary and indeterminately murky. In this experimental novel Woolf leads us into the room of echoes and mirrors, blurring any clear demarcation between past and present, illusion and reality, certainty and contingency. Jacob's room itself is a metaphor for the novel's ventriloquistic voices only informing some part of Jacob's character: in this room of echoing voices and reflective mirrors the narrative development is circular and overlapping, not linear and progressive. It is quite significant that this fragmentary narrative of many gaps and flaws in the plot development reflects Woolf's dissatisfaction with the Victorian idea of a well-wrought plot and a fully drawn character development. With the World War I, everything traditional is brought to destruction, ruins and fragments, thereby putting our definite knowledge of things into indeterminacies and contingencies. Jacob's Room is the Woolfian elegy to Jacob's death in the World War I and to the traditional Victorian novel at once. In the novel Woolf performs the therapeutic ritual of mourning over the haunting past and the seemingly 'heroic' death of Jacob. Mourning means for Woolf not just the exorcism of separation from the past but also a compromise with the present, however incomplete it might be. In the figurative sense Jacob is the sacrifice on the altar of modernism, and Woolf breaks the new territory of modernistic writing in Jacob's Room. Woolf starts her career as an accomplished modernist writer by paying ritually her tribute and debt to the literary past in the genre of elegy in this novel.