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Abstract: Jacob's Room is often categorized as a war novel, despite Virginia Woolf's decision to excise the presence of the First World War from its pages. Jacob Flanders perishes in the trenches, yet the war is never named, leaving behind an empty rift in the text-a conscious choice that reflects Woolf's political disavowal of violence. In the form of an abbreviated Künstlerroman, a novel charting the development of a young artist, Woolf chronicles Jacob's journey from boyhood to manhood: his time at Cambridge, his steps towards artistic inclinations in London, and his appreciation of Italy and Greece during his time as a soldier in the Great War. This tale ends tragically, not with the development of a young artist, but the artist's death during the war. 1 read Jacob's early enculturation into masculinity: he has "been brought up in an illusion," a phrase which shapes the novel's form and prevents individuality of character. In crafting a careful indictment of martial masculinity, Woolf creates a modernist anti-war novel that not only questions what it means to depict war through a pacifist lens but that also challenges the form of the novel itself.
Introduction
In Jacobs Room (1922), Virginia Woolf chronicles Jacob Flanders's journey from boyhood to manhood-his time at Cambridge, his steps toward artistic inclinations in London, and his appreciation of Italy and Greece during his time as a soldier in the Great War. Her tale ends tragically, however, not with the maturation of a young artist but, rather, with the artist's interrupted existence on Flanders Field. Portraying war as negative space, Jacobs Room divides war from the "live, sane, vigorous world" (96). When he realizes he can never fit within the "illusion" that he was brought up to fulfill, Jacob enlists for war while in the "black waters" of a heavy depression (120, 121). In the final chapter of the novel, we learn through his absence that Jacob has been killed: his room lies empty, letters strewn everywhere, "nothing arranged," the detritus of a life and an artistic work cut short, a rift in narrative and in text (155). I argue that Woolf writes her third novel in the form of an abbreviated Kiinstlerroman, a coming-of-age novel which charts the maturation of a young...