Speaking Victims

Abstract

Virginia Woolf sees a young sailor with his girl, his friends, a cottage with flowers, and imagines for herself a picture called ‘The Sailor’s Homecoming’. As she reflects on it other images arise spontaneously, scenes of the sailor drinking tea, opening gifts. Later she hears a woman cry in the night. ‘It had been merely a voice. No picture of any kind came to interpret it.…But as the dark arose at last all one saw was an obscure human form, almost without shape, raising a gigantic arm in vain against some overwhelming iniquity’ (1942: 16). The pictures function for her as opposites, the cheerful image exorcising the horror evoked by the cry in the night. In the morning, she encounters another potent ‘picture’, a gravedigger whose wife is bringing tea. As lumps of clay mingle with the teacups, she learns that the grave is that of the sailor, the cry that of his wife.