The original and profound story of Katharine and Ralph would make Night and Day worth the price of admission. But the novel has much more to admire. Particularly striking is the character of Mary Datchet, whose role in Night and Day can be compared to that of Lily Briscoe in Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse, a self-doubting but driven artist who questions the supremacy of marriage and motherhood. While Katharine is fiercely independent, her self-reliance does not take the form of attending a university or obtaining a job. Mary has done both; and her selfless labors remind us, even as we follow the progress of Katharine’s love, of the alternatives to marriage—whether as a novel’s ending, or a woman’s fate. Katharine even seems fleetingly jealous of Mary’s lifestyle when she inspects her rooms in the Strand: “The whole aspect of the place started another train of thought and struck her as enviably free; in such a room one could work—one could have a life of one’s own” (p. 236).
Woolf herself briefly worked as a volunteer for the suffragist cause, and as she was writing Night and Day, women were slowly acquiring more rights. Early in 1918 those over thirty were granted the vote; perhaps this happy development led Woolf to steer Mary from her work for the society for general suffrage to a society with more broadly leftist concerns. But whomever she is working for, Mary, unlike both Rodney and Ralph, takes great pleasure in her work; and although her attachment to Ralph causes her all manner of suffering and confusion, our final sight of her, working late by lamplight, assures us that “another love burnt in the place of the old one” (p. 389).
Mary is also the only character in Night and Day with a strong sense of her own body. Like Denham, Datchet is the name of a real town west of London, and her scenes with other characters are notable for their physicality. Visiting Mary at home, Katharine is “conscious of Mary’s body beside her” (p. 48). Vacationing in the Lincoln countryside, Mary fondly strokes her brother’s “thick, reddish-coloured locks this way and that” (p. 168) and, out for a walk with Ralph, she gets some “bodily exercise” (p. 192). Back in London, after a long conversation in which Mary tells Katharine of her love for Ralph—who unfortunately loves Katharine—the two women “sat silent, side by side, while Mary fingered the fur on the skirt of the old dress” (p. 242). Mary may finally decide that she prefers work to love, but her bodily awareness, as well as her knowledge that she is capable of passion, ensure that she will avoid the fate of her colleague Sally Seal, whose barely disguised sexual repression makes for one of the novel’s most painfully witty scenes:
Mrs Seal emitted a most peculiar chuckle. She seemed for one moment to acknowledge the terrible side of life which is concerned with the emotions, the private lives, of the sexes, and then to sheer off from it with all possible speed into the shades of her own shivering virginity. She was made so uncomfortable by the turn the conversation had taken, that she plunged her head into the cupboard, and endeavoured to abstract some very obscure piece of china (p. 228).
Also striking is Woolf ’s use of symbolism, which both anticipates her later novels and gives Night and Day its own remarkable texture. Especially notable are birds, whose appearances throughout the novel teach us much about the characters. The night he meets Katharine, a smitten Ralph considers her mind, He then scornfully contemplates his room, which contains “a large perch, ... upon which a tame and, apparently, decrepit rook hopped dryly from side to side.” In a grim parody of his vision of Katharine, “the bird, encouraged by a scratch behind the ear, settled upon Denham’s shoulder” (p. 21). Later Katharine appears to him as “some vast snowy owl” (p. 129). The chintz curtains in the Hilberys’ drawing room are decorated with red parrots—perhaps a hint that Katharine, who wants to soar, feels trapped there; a pompous friend of the Hilberys, chatting with Ralph, calls him “a rara avis [rare bird] in your generation” (p. 131)—another sad travesty of Ralph’s and Katharine’s dreams of flight. And whenever Mary and Ralph are together, the presence of birds— sparrows (p. 140), a “little grey-brown bird” (p. 197), “the swift and noiseless birds of the winter’s night” (pp. 162- 163)-reminds both Ralph and us of the true object of his affection. (Mary, back from one of these outings, decides that she will “take up the study of birds” [p. 143].) In the depths of his despair over Katharine, he imagines “a lighthouse besieged by the flying bodies of lost birds,” then has “a strange sensation that he was both lighthouse and bird; he was steadfast and brilliant; and at the same time he was whirled... senseless against the glass” (p. 342). And once the mutual love between them is assured, he “likened her to a wild bird just settling with wings trembling to fold themselves within reach of his hand” (p. 428). We have come a long way from rooks.
which, for reasons of his own, he desired to be exalted and infallible, and of such independence that it was only in the case of Ralph Denham that it swerved from its high, swift flight, but where he was concerned, though fastidious at first, she finally swooped from her eminence to crown him with her approval (p. 19).
Another important stylistic feature of the novel is Woolf ’s use of leitmotifs—frequently repeated words that call our attention to important themes and that gain new weight and meaning with each appearance. Two words, feelings and consciousness, occur countless times throughout Night and Day. The result is not only poetic resonance but historical context as well, for feelings were of the utmost concern to Woolf ’s Bloomsbury circle, just as they are to characters in the novel (“What is happiness?” Ralph asks in chapter II), and the nature of consciousness had recently been made the subject of intensive study by Sigmund Freud, whose works were first published in English by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press.
And of course the binaries of the novel’s title make themselves everywhere apparent. If “day” is the comforting clarity of norm and tradition, “night” is the alluring murk of vision and innovation. If Mrs. Hilbery’s speech is sunlight, then Katharine’s silence is shadow. The different literary tastes that the characters profess—Rodney enjoys Alexander Pope, while Katharine prefers the brooding Dostoevsky—are as opposite as sun and moon, too. And the contrast between the novel’s two couples vividly illustrates the poles of its title: Rodney’s fondness for Mozart and his residence in “high eighteenth-century houses” (p. 62), and Cassandra’s likeness to “a French lady of distinction in the eighteenth century” (p. 299) (not to mention her sharing a name with Jane Austen’s sister), could not be more different from Ralph and Katharine’s tempestuous romance, as the following conversation between the latter pair shows:
“Rodney seems to know his own mind well enough,” he said almost bitterly. The music, which had ceased, had now begun again, and the melody of Mozart seemed to express the easy and exquisite love of the two upstairs.
“Cassandra never doubted for a moment. But we—” she glanced at him as if to ascertain his position, “we see each other only now and then—”
“Like lights in a storm—”
“In the midst of a hurricane,” she concluded, as the window shook beneath the pressure of the wind. They listened to the sound in silence (p. 369).
But if Woolf’s use of leitmotifs gives Night and Day a Wagnerian density, her sparkling wit comes straight out of Shakespearean comedy. The plot’s intricacies—two couples falling in and out of love; frequent eavesdropping; escape to a “green world,” which brings perspective on the dilemmas of urban life— could have been lifted from plays such as As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Wearing her literary debt on her sleeve, Woolf calls constant attention to these parallels, whether in the form of Mrs. Hilbery’s theories about Shakespeare’s sonnets, or the novel’s many comparisons between Katharine and Rosalind, the lively heroine of As You Like It. (Mrs. Hilbery remarks, “she is Shakespeare—Rosalind, you know” (p. 154.) And when characters step back from the action to comment on its madness—Rodney alone calls it a “season of lunacy” (p. 358), dismisses his love of
