Structure and Anti-Structure: Virginia Woolf's Feminist Politics and “The Mark on the Wall”

This article challenges the idea that “The Mark on the Wall” is an apolitical story, with Woolf trying to experiment with time, space and narrative structures. Arguing that Woolf fills her story with subtle political references (Troy, Charles I, South Downs), this essay offers a close reading of the text in the hope of examining Woolf's feminist pacifism and her critique of male logic and the Great War. Victor Turner's notion of “anti-structure” is used to analyze the narrator's choice of being “betwixt and between” the state of things, or being “neither here nor there”.