The Kew Gardens byVirginia Woolf (1921)
Close Reading:The Kew Gardens byVirginia Woolf (1921)
The plant world
The short story ‘Kew Gardens’ (1921) by Virginia Woof set within a time of industrial and modern human growth, explores the nature of everyday existence within the carefully maintained Kew gardens. Encapsulated within the pristine “oval shaped flower bed”, Woolf suggests a sense of liminality and uncertainty of the human life. The setting presents the struggling dichotomy of industrialisation and romanticism. Yet within plant world, the story intertwines the lives and memories of the characters by revealing the shared universality of human emotions. Woolf’s short story is plotless and experimental dialogue between human and plant encapsulated within an ethereal vivid botanical world.
The vivid description of “a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surfaced” romanticises the setting. The beauty and softness of the colours and shapes of Woolf’s botanical world, contrasts against the reality of the human interactions. However while carefully curated these gardens represent the liminality and fragility of existence yet also the melancholic beauty of life. As industrial human existence pushes the characters to escape to the beauty of the plant world, Woolf utilises these worlds as mirrors of each other. The struggles of the snail mirrors the struggles and conflict of the characters. The first narrative is melancholic as the man opens up to the memory of loss and possibility to his wife. Yet as Woolf presents no conclusion but only a snapshot to the lives of these characters, love and beauty is bounded only as a memory. In essence, the industrialisation of human existence is an invasive presence in which pushes the beauty of the existence into memory.
The notion of the industrial against the romantic world of nature, also opens up the narrative of human and plant relationships. By focusing on the ongoing of the flower bed, Woolf intersects the boundaries of human and plant world. When the young lady of the courting couple “pressed the end of her parasol down into the soft earth”, Woolf connects the snapshots of each linear story. While each set of characters do not know each other, their emotions and memories are linked through a universal understanding. Their desire to evoke the beauty of memory and to escape the urban landscape pushes them to seek the natural world. In essence, Woolf presents the innate instinct of human and nature to coexist in an effort to seek peace. The plant world is not simply a backdrop to human nature but a coexisting space in which mirrors the liminality and ordinariness of life.
The commentaries of life and nature is captured through the plotless short story. With no climax or resolution, ‘Kew Gardens’ is a short story that captures the fragmented nature of human reality and experiences. Woolf makes comment towards the liminality of life within the industrial age, thus urging the reader to delve into the beauty of our ordinary existence and landscape. The first story captures the urgency of possibility through the man’s memory of his rejected past love yet the final snapshot of a courtship in the present day provides a narrative. Thus while life continues, Woolf urges us to appreciate the beauty of the present and ordinary through the beauty of the plants in Kew Gardens because like her story, our existence has no conclusive resolution.
Ultimately, Woolf’s ‘Kew Gardens’ (1921) uses a minimalization of the world of plants to highlight its importance up against the back drop of the period of industrialization. By juxtaposing the discourse of human life with the unappreciated significance of the garden when compared to modernizing London, Woolf is able to drive home the purpose of behind a plotless piece of writing, whose importance gains significance with time.
By Natalie Cheung (z5020266) and Simonn Nguyen (z5112723)
