Two Stories: An Experimental & Traditional Perspective on Identity and Feminism by Rachel Krumholtz

Published in 1917, Two Stories resembles an unassuming pamphlet, adorned with a plain cloth cover, oblivious to the legacy of its authors. Despite its modest and amateur appearance, Two Stories was the first story published by Hogarth Press, a printing company founded by Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard Woolf, imbuing the publication with an experimental and entrepreneurial spirit, one carried within the pages of the Woolfs’ writing. Even the title Two Stories, printed in bold black ink on the front cover and again on the second page, doesn’t clue the reader on the profoundness of the pages within, stating a mere fact about the content. In fact, seeing the names of the authors on the second page, first “Virginia Woolf” followed by “L.S Woolf”, is the first suggestion that the two stories might be connected by their authors’ marriage and identities. Ironically, the Hogarth press is named after the Woolfs’ home, seemingly imbuing the two stories with themes of purpose and identity–the very ideas that are questioned in their writing.

Through abstract narration and ambiguous grammatical punctuation, Woolf contrasts her experimental piece with her husband Leonard’s conventional narrative prose. For example, “A Mark on the Wall” lacks the traditional climax, resolution, and character development that defines most other stories, instead creating an abstract reflection on life that provides the reader with much freedom for interpretation. In fact, even most of the grammatical edits in the first edition publication, such as the addition of ellipses or commas, instill a continuous and ambiguous tone—ellipses leave much unsaid. Similarly, in the last line, Woolf changes “For it was a snail” to “It was a snail”, perhaps emphasizing her speculation and the vagueness and complexity of the mark. In contrast, “Three Jews” follows three characters in a well-defined plot, containing rich dialogue and precise punctuation (lacking Virginia’s ellipses). 

However, despite their opposing styles, by placing the two stories together in one publication, “Three Jews” complements the ideas of identity, convention, and womanhood in the “The Mark on the Wall”. For example, “Three Jews” begins with a narrator describing his day in London in the first-person, continuing on to interactions between two other Jews in a cemetery. While the narrator seems to immediately identify his companion as a Jew, “You knew me at once and I knew you”, he never explicitly admits to his own Jewish identity. In fact, the narrator nearly disappears from the story entirely when the second Jew begins recounting his tale about the cemetery, a sign of his nebulous identity. This emphasizes the question of identity in “The Mark on the Wall” where the narrator also ponders the “mystery of life” and “what an accidental affair this living” is, never openly admitting her identity like Leonard’s character and perhaps alluding to her own identity crisis. Similarly, London’s “heavy, melancholy dripping sky” in the “Three Jews”, which associates the progress and customs of the city with sadness, reinforces the limitations of customs in the “Mark on the Wall”,“There was a rule for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was that they should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon them”. And, both stories also focus on what it means to be a woman in the early 20th century: in the “Three Jews”, all of the wives are dead and in the “Mark on the Wall”, the narrator reflects on how the “masculine point of view…governs our lives”, demonstrating that female influence and power remain largely absent. Therefore, both stories ponder questions of the meaning of life—in a more traditional form in the “Three Jews” and through experimentation in the “Mark on the Wall”.