Chia-Chen Kuo
ABSTRACT
This paper argues that Sir Thomas Browne’s ruminations on the dialectics between life and death, wakefulness and sleep in his books might have influenced Virginia Woolf when she wrote the “Nurse Lugton’s Curtain.” This short story might not be as playful and hedonistic as it seems. On closer scrutiny, it oscillates between life and death, wakefulness and sleep, and reminds us how rare it is when imagination, incarnated as animals in the story, is present, since most of the time humans are either blind to it or have killed it already. Lugton might be blind to her imagination, but Woolf’s writing skill, free indirect discourse and her capacity for scene-making, render her imagination vivid by concealing any human-centered perspectives in the text and by presenting scenes in which the reader can perceive the route that the animals take, which is also the trail that the imagination treads. Without any quotation marks to solidify the speaking subject, the reader can immerse themselves into the consciousness of the text (hence free), but the scenes are still made present through a textual perspective that Woolf embeds in the story (hence indirect). Her engagement with different writing techniques unremittingly reminds us how elusive and slippery imagination is, and artists’ works, e.g., “Nurse Lugton’s Curtain” and Nurse Lugton’s curtain, are (futile) human endeavors to capture it.
KEYWORDS: Virginia Woolf, Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, Urn-Burial, death, life, “Nurse Lugton’s Curtain,” imagination
DOI: 10.30395/WSR.202412_18(1).0004
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