The shawl and boar's skull are mentioned throughout "Time Passes" where Woolf makes us imagine "being" in an empty house. On page 130 we are given this description: "Once only a board sprang on the landing; once in the middle of the night with a roar, with a rupture, as after centuries of quiescence, a rock rends itself from the mountain and hurtles crashing into the valley, one fold of the shawl loosened and swung to and fro." The shawl is compared to a rock, something substantial, natural, accepted. Time has made the thing seem secure, unchangeable. But after centuries of inactivity the rock does what seems unnatural: it falls into the valley. This is an image of unexpected destruction. If we read the shawl as concealment, the image is one of disclosure, exposing what is covered up underneath.
On page 133 we see the shawl again: "But slumber and sleep though it may there came later in the summer ominous sounds like the measured blows of hammers dulled on felt, which, with their repeated shocks still further loosened the shawl and cracked the tea-cups." The time is after August, 1914, and World War I is underway. In fact, the bombs "cause" the further loosening of the shawl. On the same page, in squared brackets, we learn that Andrew Ramsay, now a soldier, was killed in that bombing.
The beast's skull "gone mouldy" is seen by Mrs. McNab, the caretaker. Then we again see the shawl: "The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it. The long night seemed to have set in; the trifling airs, nibbling, the clammy breaths, fumbling, seemed to have triumphed. The saucepan had rusted and the mat decayed. Toads had nosed their way in. Idly, aimlessly, the swaying shawl swung to and fro." If we take the house to represent the structure of Victorian society, the war has destroyed the Victorian way of life. The shawl--that Victorian tendency to ignore or even hide unpleasantness--is coming undone and the beast's skull--the greed of Europe's imperialistic politics--is being exposed to wreck havoc in the world.
The symbolism of this section is working to reveal the mess of war and the mess that the world is in: Swallows are nested in the drawing room, poppies are among the dahlias and the artichokes are among the roses. (Woolf refers to "poppies" several times. The obvious reference is the famous war poem "In Flanders Fields" by John McCrae.) There is no order here but only chaos. What caused the chaos, what caused the war? I'd suggest that Woolf is questioning the viability of the Victorian dream "that good triumphs, happiness prevails, order rules" (132).
However, notice the qualifiers: "The long night seemed to have set in"; "the trifling airs...seemed to have triumphed." What can stop them?
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