The Movement Of Virginia Woolf s Kew Gardens - 1722 Words

The movement of Virginia Woolf s Kew Gardens is quite the mutineer towards the traditional writing format of a beginning, middle and ending. Although, the story does eventually end, Woolf creates a space in time within this story s reality where there really is no beginning, nor a way to end it. We just become in the moment, infinitely moving through space and time, observing all tiny details around us. To analyze this story, we have to think of it as an abstract painting, and assume there will be thousands of ways to articulate it, but no matter how long we spend looking at it there will be still so much that we don t understand. That is the gist of how inventively complex Kew Gardens is, and the only way we re going to decipher†¦show more content†¦Within the first few sentences of Woolf s prose, we are immediately submerged into a world of extreme detail, in the rich colors of the flowers and vegetation of a single oval flowerbed, sitting in the center of the Royal Botan ic Gardens of London: From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps 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 surface. (Woolf 1) The sheer detail of the imagery we are given here becomes clearer as we draw closer and closer to the stock of a singled out flower. The narrator appears to have found awe in the beauty of such flowers in nature based on these descriptions. These vivid details come together to bring this scene to life by capturing the pure aspects of the reader s senses: sight, smells, hearing, and feelings. The work of Woolf s prose in this section of detail make the subjectivity and objectivity of the narrative s voice as it focus on every little bright image that it finds moving or in motion. In the next scene, we move further down to the ground of the flowerbed,