30 pages • 1 hour read
Virginia WoolfKew Gardens
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1919A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Flowers
Flowers are a common symbol associated with the innate beauty of nature. In “Kew Gardens,” flowers signify not only physical beauty, but spiritual beauty connected to an enlightened appreciation for the natural world. As seen through the ponderous woman’s character, flowers further the theme of The Connection Between Humanity and Nature by serving as a brief respite from everyday habits. Flowers feature heavily in the narrative’s more descriptive passages, for example:
The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer breeze, and when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed one over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the most intricate colour (83).
As the visual characteristics of flowers are described in greater detail than any of the human characters, they become an emotional presence in the story.
The setting of the story is not just Kew Gardens but a specific flowerbed. This flowerbed is depicted as an ecosystem in itself: various flowers bloom, dew refracts light, and the snail experiences his daily trials. Significantly, the story’s narration only follows the human characters as they pass the flowerbed. By anchoring itself around a single flowerbed, the story demonstrates the ways that multitudinous lifeforms interact in a single day.
The colors of the flowers serve as a symbol. Frequently described in terms of light and vapor, they symbolize the enlightening beauty of nature. The reflected light of their colors expresses connectivity across the entire space. In the final paragraph of the story, the colors of the garden connote innocence, youth, and enlightenment.
The Snail
Woolf personifies the snail by conveying its thoughts in the narrative. Furthermore, the snail motif illustrates the theme of Moments of Being as readers experience the granular details of the natural world from the creature’s perspective.
For the snail, the flowerbed represents the totality of its reality. It is immune to the human concerns experienced by the human characters, such as money, romance, and social status. The intense focus of the snail’s world is communicated by Woolf’s imagery. The author materializes the small-scale world for the reader by describing puddles as “[b]rown cliffs with deep green lakes in the hollows”; grass as “flat, blade-like trees”; pebbles as “round boulders”; and landscaping fabric as “vast crumpled surfaces of a thin crackling texture” (88). By situating the narrator alongside the snail’s point of view, Woolf uses the same stream-of-consciousness technique employed for her human characters. Contrasted with the romantic and financial dramas of the human characters, the snail’s goal to pass the dead leaf takes on weighty significance. The significance and complexity of the snail invest the story with humorous irony.
While the human characters enter the story and then disappear, the snail appears repeatedly, staying rooted in the story’s central flowerbed. Its lingering presence underlines the enduring power of nature.
The City
The city of London contrasts with Kew Gardens. As a motif, it represents social change and modernity. Whereas the garden is natural, serene, and contemplative, the city is technologically advanced, busy, and loud. City sounds disrupt the silence of the garden, thus undermining the garden’s calm.
Even as characters wander the garden, they are beholden to urban values. The elderly women—described as “lower middle class” (91)—derive enjoyment from watching the (supposedly wealthy) older man behave strangely. More particularly, the young man accompanying Trissie is overly conscious of class, money, and social status. The story suggests that the modern world is so overwhelming that a person cannot even fully enjoy the escapism of nature. This dynamic is echoed in the final lines of the story, in which the sounds of the city drown out the silence of the garden.
During Woolf’s era, the modern city was a relatively new invention. When Woolf was born in 1882, London was still changing rapidly through population growth, technological breakthroughs, and the expansion of free market economics. In “Kew Gardens,” this change results in a less fulfilling existence. The story argues that modernization prevents people from appreciating aspects of life such as truth, goodness, and beauty.
Related Titles
By Virginia Woolf
