Personification and Narrative: The Blurred Boundaries of the Inanimate in Hardy and Woolf

From a “traditional” narratological point of view, such texts as chapter one of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native and part two of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse would be categorized as narratives that frequently deploy extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narration with zero focalization, since in each case an omniscient narrator often recounts what happened in the absence of any other witnesses. The adequacy of that categorization, however, becomes questionable once we consider passages such as the following:

In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at such a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen, its complete effect and explanation lying in this and the succeeding hours before the next dawn; then, and only then, did it tell its true tale. . . . The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen.

(The Return of the Native 31)

Nothing stirred in the drawing-room or in the dining-room or on the staircase. Only through the rusty hinges and swollen sea-moistened woodwork certain airs, detached from the body of the wind (the house was ramshackle after all) crept round corners and ventured indoors. Almost one might imagine them, as they entered the drawing-room questioning and wondering, toying with the flap of hanging wall-paper, asking, would it hang much longer, when would it fall? Then smoothly brushing the walls, they passed on musingly as if asking the red and yellow roses on the wall-paper whether they would fade, and questioning (gently, for there was time at their disposal) the torn letters in the waste-paper basket, the flowers, the books, all of which were now open to them and asking, Were they allies? Were they enemies? How long would they endure?

(To the Lighthouse 126)

While these passages emanate from an extradiegetic-heterodiegetic source and involve no human characters, they personify inanimate objects as perceivers and speakers. At issue, then, is the fact that, though the humanness of a narrator or a focalizer tends to be taken as an a priori given, “in fiction,” as Gérard Genette puts it, “nothing prevents us from entrusting that role to an animal . . . or indeed to an ‘inanimate’ object” (Narrative Discourse 244).¹ Not a chief concern for Genette himself, such a problem falls within the scope of the antimimetic narrative study called “unnatural” narratology, which “seeks to describe the ways in which projected storyworlds deviate from real-world frames, and, in a second step . . . tries to interpret these ‘deviations’” (Alber et al., “Unnatural Narratives” 116).² From a mimetic or “natural” point of view, to entrust the narrator’s or the focalizer’s role to the inanimate or the nonhuman is certainly a deviant act, and some critics, whether known as “unnatural” narratologists or not, have discussed this problem in various fictional narratives.³ But at the same time there has been little attention paid to the significance of such a deviation in relation to the problematic of personification as such. As is clear from the above passages, personification is one of the most important problems that underlie the use and abuse of the inanimate or the nonhuman in narrative. In this essay, then, illustrating the subtleties of personification with examples drawn from Hardy and Woolf, I will explore the implications of its workings for the problems of narration, focalization, and space in narrative.

Let us start with the problem of inanimate or nonhuman narration as it occurs in three of Hardy’s poems, “The Mother Mourns,” “Nature’s Questioning,” and “Postponement.”⁴ In each case it is easy to see that something inanimate or nonhuman, after being introduced in the opening, itself plays an active part in narration, serving as the narrator of an embedded narrative. But what may go unnoticed is that such narration by the inanimate...