Who Is Mrs. McNab? A Cognitive Stylistic Approach to This Narrative Agent and Narrative Device in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

Abstract

In this article, I investigate the ontological status of the minor working-class character Mrs. McNab, the cleaner in “Time Passes", the middle section of Virginia Woolf’s tripartite novel To the Lighthouse. Woolf regarded this section as the connecting block between the two outer blocks, “The Window” and “The Lighthouse”, in which she aimed to depict an empty house, devoid of human presence, and to highlight the passage of time. This section has often been analysed by literary-stylistic criticism as if written from a non-anthropocentric worldview. However, the presence of a lower-class cleaner and the absence of the upper middle-class characters who predominate in the other two blocks has also raised much debate in the literary arena. Literary critics agree that this character is given a narrative voice, but how this voice functions, and whether this character is granted narrative agency in terms of the class issues and social relations in the period of transition between Victorian England and the early twentieth-century, is an issue which still remains open. Drawing upon cognitive stylistics, I suggest reading this character both as a category-based and person-based character, and as a narrative device. First, I carry out the analysis of the repetitive she-clusters and their semantic prosodies; then, through samples of the section “Time Passes", I analyse how viewpoint blending between narrator/author and character concur to grant narrative agency to Mrs. McNab and to what extent such agency may be limited by our perception of her through the social schemata of a servant, or whether such a perception may undergo a process of schema refreshment. Last, I suggest that this character may also be viewed as a narrative agent by means of which the reader can activate mental processes of TIME and SPACE blending between the three different blocks of the novel. This blending process allows for the completion of the narrative design of the novel: the journey to the lighthouse.

1. Introduction

Woolf conceived To the Lighthouse (Woolf [1927] 2009; hereafter TTL)1 as “[t]wo blocks joined by a corridor” (Goldman 2015, p. 301) in which she had “to give an empty house, no people’s characters, the passage of time, all eyeless & featureless […]” (Woolf 1925–1930, p. 76). This block is devoid of the human presence and narrative voices of the large Victorian upper-class Ramsay family and their guests whom we first encounter in Block I (“The Window”), on a September day several years before World War I, on the island of Skye in the Hebrides (Hussey 1995, p. 301).2 Some of them we meet again, after a ten-year gap, on a single day in Block III (“The Lighthouse”), when Mrs. Ramsay’s youngest child, James, finally carries out the journey to the lighthouse she had long-promised him (introduced in Block I) with his father, Mr. Ramsay, and when Lily’s painting—initiated in Block I—is eventually completed.

“Time Passes” occupies a relatively brief segment of the novel, and a large portion of its ten sections is devoted to depicting the ravaging effects of time on the Ramsays’ holiday house in the absence of its occupants. A non-anthropocentric worldview pervades the description of both the indoor and outdoor spaces, as time and nature actively cause the gradual decay of the house and restore the garden to its primeval state. This section serves as a caesura in the narrative time of the surrounding blocks, since—as Sheehan (2015, p. 47) observes—“Woolf effectively launches a new temporal regime, bolstering and advancing modernist resistance to the hegemony of clock-time. That regime is generally seen as a nonhuman one”.

Yet, Block II marks the entry of Maggie McNab into the narrative, despite Woolf’s stated intention to feature “no people’s characters” (Woolf 1925–1930, p. 76). Mrs. McNab is the elderly cleaner who, together with Mrs. Bast, arrives to restore the Ramsays’ house after a decade of complete neglect. Her presence, in the absence of the occupants encountered earlier and later in TTL, her minor role as a socially marginalised lower-class character and her narrative voice in “Time Passes” have fuelled literary and feminist debates concerning her ontological status (Simpson 2015, pp. 110–21), especially regarding issues of class and social relations during the transition from Victorian England to the early twentieth century.

Caughie (1992, p. 313) contends that “Woolf’s narrative seems to admit its own difficulties in imagining the inner life of this lower-class woman who is outside history”, and although Mrs. McNab is granted a narrative voice in TTL, Caughie argues that “if her past is included in the gaps of the history narrated in parts 1 and 3, she is still denied narrative agency” (Caughie 1992, p. 314). Zwerdling (1986, p. 87) states that Woolf’s reaction to the women’s talks at a meeting of the Working Women’s Guild reveals “a volatile mixture of class feelings”, and despite the fact Woolf taught working-class men and women, ““the lower orders” in her fiction are conspicuous by their absence. When they do appear, they are often given a generic identity, their individual characteristics expunged […]” (Zwerdling 1986, p. 96). Snaith (1996, p. 141) maintains that “[s]tructurally, McNab is marginalized in the narrative as she is essentially given her own section […],” yet “her indirect interior monologue reveals that she is highly conscious” and demonstrates Woolf’s “necessity of letting McNab speak for herself” (Snaith 1996, p. 142). Miller (2010, p. 111) states that “Mrs. McNab does not disrupt Woolf’s portrait of an uninhabited house because she herself seems barely animate […]. Her thoughts remain largely inaccessible to her readers and even to her creator […]”. Bradshaw (2006, p. xxxvi), however, argues that Woolf positions two working-class women, Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast, at the very “centre of her novel and makes them integral to her notion of civilisation, not just two of its nameless and faceless facilitators”. In contrast, (McCracken and Thomas 2020; see also Wilson 2016) assert that such undisputed centrality does not fully smooth out:

the mistress-servant binary, which is maintained by brackets throughout Time Passes. While most of the human action in Time Passes (character deaths and so on) occurs within square brackets, McNab and Bast only appear to have agency outside the brackets, where nonhuman forces—the weather, the sea, plants, animals, ageing objects, decay—dominate. The brackets, then, separate the Mrs. McNabs and Mrs. Basts (aligned with the nonhuman) from the aristocratic Mrs. Ramsays of the novel”.

(McCracken and Thomas 2020, p. 570)

These opposing views highlight the diverse ontological status ascribed to this character which brings us to consider the polysemic valence of character as “an actant, a role, a narrative device and an individual or person” (Margolin 1983, p. 2).

To shed light on the literary debate about McNab’s ontological status, I analyse this character both as a mental representation constructed out of the interaction between the text and the reader’s background knowledge and as a narrative device blending time and space between “The Window” and “The Lighthouse”.3

2. Character and Characterisation

The issue in literary criticism about whether Mrs. McNab is just a narrative voice in the text or a narrative agent fits into the long-standing theoretical issues raised by literary theory, which has viewed character as resembling a real individual or as representing a function in the text or both. Sustaining the position that Mrs. McNab is the objectified narrative voice in “Time Passes" would embrace the Aristotelian, formalist, structuralist and semiotic views that character is stripped of any psychological dimension and is just a textual entity, a sign in the text, a means to plot development (Chatman 1972; Culler 1975; Rimmon-Kenan Shlomith 1983; Hartner 2024). Sustaining instead that Mrs. McNab is a narrative agent would require considering her as an “individual, human or human-like, of whom actions can be predicated” (Margolin 1983, pp. 1–2). If we ascribe both dimensions to Mrs. McNab, we embrace the polysemic view advanced by Margolin whereby character is defined as “an actant, a role, a narrative device and an individual or person” (Margolin 1983, p. 2). According to Margolin’s (2007, p. 76) cognitive psychological approach, character results from complex “text-based mental models of possible individuals, built up in the mind of the reader in the course of textual processing”.

The possibility of studying character falls within the strand of cognitive stylistic approaches (Culpeper 2001; Schneider 2004, 2013; Eder et al. 2011; Balossi 2014), which conceive of character as mental representations arising from the interaction between bottom-up information from the text (i.e., textual cues) and the mental or top-down processes (i.e., our background knowledge, principally social schemata) involved in shaping our impressions and their refreshment during the reading process. In forming our impressions, we do not rely only on our schematic knowledge, that is, on conceptually driven, or top-down, processes. There may be cases in which we rely more on data-driven or bottom-up processes. When top-down processes are favoured, we obtain a category-based impression; if bottom-up processes are favoured, we have a person-based impression, because our impression is derived from the idiosyncratic attributes of the target person (Culpeper 2001, pp. 27–38; Balossi 2014, pp. 35–40). Category—or person-based impressions make up for the rigid dichotomy between flat and round character pioneered by Forster ([1927] 1990, pp. 54–84). We instead have to take into account that the reading of a character may undergo a process of refreshment, which may not confirm our initial impressions of the character. Rather, it may activate a re-shaping of the flat/static and round/dynamic perception of the character, or even activate piecemeal integration when it does not fit into any pre-existing social schemata.

Now, returning to Margolin’s polysemic view of character and to the literary debate about Mrs. McNab, revisited according to Blending Theory/Conceptual Integration (Turner 1998; Fauconnier and Turner 2002; Dancygier 2005; Schneider and Hartner 2012),4 we may also read this character as the actant or narrative device whose action and memory in “Time Passes" triggers the moving from the narrative decompression of time and space to their gradual compression, which eventually blends with the restoration of human time and space of Block I, “The Window”, and Block III, “The Lighthouse”.

Fauconnier and Turner (2002) use the term compression to describe the cognitive process of mentally integrating elements that are factually distinct, such as those separated by time or space. For instance:

[w]hen we see a Persian rug in a store and imagine how it would look in our house, we are compressing over two different physical spaces. […] When we imagine what answer we would give now to a criticism directed at us several years ago, we are compressing over times.

(Fauconnier and Turner 2002, p. 113)

Blending involves such compressions constantly; “it is the act of literally ‘thinking together’ things that are logically, spatially or temporally apart” (Schneider 2012, p. 3). In contrast, decompression refers to the process by which the input spaces remain distinct. These input spaces retain their individual identity, even though they may be perceived differently after being projected into a blend (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, pp. 113–38).

3. Viewpoint Blending in “Time Passes”

Understanding Mrs. McNab also calls for an accounting of different viewpoints, and distinguishing between the viewpoint of the teller and that of character/s in the story, as this distinction is central to the perception of this character (Leech and Short 2007, p. 298; Fowler 1996, pp. 160–184; Snaith 1996).

TTL is a modernist work, in which focalisation is not always distinguishable. The third-person narrator’s viewpoint often blends with the multiple viewpoints of characters, even when the narrative is focalised through a character, or more than one character (Fowler 1996, p. 161). In this respect, Auerbach (2003, p. 536) observes that “[t]he essential characteristic of the technique represented by Virginia Woolf is that we are given not merely one person whose consciousness (that is, the impressions it receives) is rendered, but many persons, with frequent shifts from one to the other […]”. Levenson (2015, p. 23) adds that “[t]he speed of shifting focalisation is conspicuous. It’s not simply that perspective keeps changing in the novel but that it changes abruptly and frequently”. Leaska’s (1970, p. 25) study of multiple narrators’ viewpoints in TTL posits the difficulty of identifying and isolating each narrator’s viewpoint because in the “clause types […] there are no specific verbal cues which consistently differentiate one type from another.” Bradshaw (2006, p. xliv) argues that in TTL “[th]e point of view is ultimately always that of the omniscient narrator, but lexis and tone are continuously shifting depending on the character in focus creating the effect of an ever-changing narrative standpoint”.

In “Time Passes”, the multiple consciousness, continuous shifting between characters’ and narrator’s viewpoints—or viewpoint blending—does not dominate large portions of the narrative, in which the external narrator describes the destructive action of time on the Ramsays’ house (e.g., [NR] “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.” TTL, p. 112); nor does it in the opening and closing of “Time Passes”, in which the voices of some of the characters from “The Window,” are referred to through prototypical categories of narrative discourse (e.g., [DS] “Well, we must wait for the future to show, “said Mr. Bankes, coming in from the terrace.” “It’s almost too dark to see,” said Andrew, coming up from the beach.” TTL, p. 103); (e.g., [FIT] “Here she was again, she thought, sitting bold upright in bed.” TTL, p. 117); this is also observed in the bracketed asides in which the narrator unobtrusively reports factual events about members of the Ramsays that had occurred over the previous ten years, such as the death of Mrs. Ramsay (e.g., [NR] “Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.” (TTL, p. 105), and the return to the house of some of the guests we met in “The Window”, (e.g., [NR] “Lily Briscoe had her bag carried up to the house late one evening in September. Mr. Carmichael came by the same train.” TTL, p. 117).5

Viewpoint blending between the narrator and Mrs. McNab is limited to the shorter and longer stretches of narrative in some of the ten sections of “Time Passes” (Sections 4–6, 8, and 9), where the viewpoint may shift from sentence to sentence, and even within sentences. Among the viewpoints scholars have proposed, ideological viewpoint—defined as “the systems of beliefs, values, and categories by reference to which a person or society comprehends the world” (Fowler 1996, p. 163)—is particularly useful in analysing Mrs. McNab or as a person-based or category-based character. Among the linguistic indicators of ideological viewpoint eligible for analysis is the pronoun she (Dancygier 2008), which the implied author/narrator uses to refer deictically to Mrs. McNab. Clusters analysis (Mahlberg 2007a) helps identify language patterns and study the “personal attitudinal and social values” (Leech and Short 2007, p. 299; Balossi 2020) as well as the semantic prosodies (hereafter SP), (Louw 1993; Adolphs and Carter 2002) between the ideological viewpoint of the teller and Mrs. McNab, ultimately establishing the servant’s agency within the social context of the time.

4. Tools Employed for Cluster Analysis of the She Pronoun

Cluster analysis of the pronoun she in the target text “Time Passes” (Woolf 2001)6 was carried out using computer-assisted methods. Within the framework of corpus stylistics7, a cluster—also referred to by terms such as “lexical bundles” (Biber et al. 1999, p. 990) or “ngrams”—is defined as “a group of words which follow each other in a text” (Mahlberg 2007a, p. 5). As Mahlberg (2007a, p. 5) points out, “[n]ot only does the terminology to refer to such sequences vary, but also the way in which they are studied”.

Within the scope of my analysis, the study of the she-clusters aimed to examine she + verb patterns/clusters related to Mrs. McNab and ascertain their semantic fields (e.g., verbs of cognition, verbs of movement), their negative or positive prosody, and ultimately, the character’s agency, as discussed in the qualitative analysis in Section 5.

The first stage of quantitative analysis involved identifying the she-pronouns in “Time Passes”, and comparing them with their occurrences in the other two sections of TTL. The second stage focused on analysing the she-clusters and assigning them to their respective semantic fields in “Time Passes”.

Wmatrix software—a web-based environment containing corpus annotation tools for grammatical and semantic analysis (Rayson 2009)—was used for part-of-speech (POS) and semantic analysis (USAS—UCREL Semantic Analysis System). The tools provided by the program include the CLAWS POS tagger, a system designed to assign grammatical tags to words in a text (Garside and Smith 1997), and the USAS system, which assigns semantic tags through the SEMTAG (semantic tagger) program (Rayson 2003).

Once the POS and USAS tagging were completed, I was able to view the frequency profiles of words, the POS tags with their grammatical functions,8 and the semantic tags associated with those words. In my case, I was particularly interested in the POS profile of the pronouns she and the semantic profile of the verbs in the verb-clusters processed by AntConc.

The personal pronouns she and the verbs referring to Mrs. McNab were also examined in context through concordance lines. The search term she was used to determine whether it functions as the narrator’s referential deictic for Mrs. McNab, Mrs. Bast, or other female characters in “Time Passes”. The same process was applied to occurrences of she pronouns9 referring to female characters present in, or talked/thought about by other characters in “The Window” and “The Lighthouse”.

The final output for the she pronouns can be viewed in Appendix A. The first column on the left lists the feminine personal pronouns in descending order of frequency, followed in column two by their POS tags (e.g., PPHS1: 3rd person sing. subjective personal pronoun), and in column three by their frequency. Although the focus of my analysis was on she as a subject pronoun, Appendix A also includes a comprehensive output of the POS tags of feminine pronouns and their grammatical categories.

AntConc (Anthony 2024) a multiplatform tool for corpus linguistic research, was utilised for she-cluster extraction through the Cluster Tool. The tool extracted clusters occurring to the left of the node (e.g., she + [verb] + [object]; she + [verb] + [adverb/phrase]) in the target text. The search term for she was set to a cluster size of 5, with a minimum range of 1, and a minimum frequency of 1, to account for low-frequency she + verb collocates.

After cluster analysis was performed by the AntConc cluster tool, I manually matched each cluster to its respective semtag, semantic subfield, and top semantic domain as assigned by Wmatrix SEMTAG.10 The output in Appendix B displays, in the first column on the left, the cluster—she plus the first main verb collocate (e.g., banged, said, was +adjective)—underlined in bold. In the second column, the emboldened verbs are matched to their respective semantic tags, semantic subfields and top semantic domains, and grouped accordingly. In Section 5, the top semantic domains serve to guide interpretation. The inclusion of the detailed USAS categories provides clear and thorough evidence to the reader. The clusters are raw outputs from AntConc and are presented exactly as generated by the system. While they may appear fragmented in form, they are not interpreted as such in the qualitative analysis carried out in Section 5.

5. Analysis: Mrs. McNab as a Narrative Agent

The word-POS frequency profile output of personal pronouns in “Time Passes" produced by Wmatrix shows that she (PPHS1) is the most frequently occurring pronoun (80; cf. Appendix A).11 It is also the top occurring POS in “The Window” (1224), and “The Lighthouse” (597) where, however, it is the deictic utilised by the third external narrator to refer either to the Edwardian matriarch Mrs. Ramsay or the emancipated artist Lily Briscoe. In “Time Passes”, the pronoun she refers primarily to Mrs. McNab. In some instances, however, it also appears as a deictic in the speech or internal thoughts of Mrs. McNab, serving as a back-reference to Mrs. Ramsay.

The repetitive grammatical patterns in the cluster data suggest that she plays an active role (cf. Appendix B), as shown in

Table 1. Repetitive grammatical patterns in she-clusters.

Pattern No.	Grammatical Structure	Description	Example
(1)	She + [verb] + [object]	Focuses on actions performed by she on an object	She clutched at her blankets
(2)	She + [verb] + [adverb/phrase]	Describes how the she-agent performs an action, emphasizing movement or physical state	She rolled like a ship; she sighed there was too
(3)	She + [verb] + [verb]	Combines two related actions, either sequentially or simultaneously	She broke in and lurched
(4)	She + [verb] + [clause]	Introduces thoughts, perceptions, or conclusions	She thought sitting bolt upright

.

Mrs. McNab, as the agent of these predicates, is characterised by recurring patterns that not only describe her physical actions and movements (cf. patterns (1), (2) and (3)), but also highlight her agency (cf. pattern (4)).

This is further illustrated in the she-clusters associated with the top semantic domains (cf. Appendix B). The predicates are linked to General Actions/Making and Movement, but also with Cleaning (e.g., dusted, cleaning, wiping), clearly referring to her occupation as a charwoman. However, the top semantic domains also include verbs of cognition—Psychological Actions, States and Processes (e.g., remember, known, supposed), Linguistic Actions, States and Processes; Communication (e.g., asked, read, said), and predicates referring to Emotional Actions, States and Processes (e.g., dared, didn’t like, was fond of)—all of which suggest the doer’s agency.

If we now consider the collocates of she with several recurring verb patterns in the clusters, the prosodies associated with Mrs. McNab range from negative to positive (Louw 1993, p. 34) as well as neutral.

Table 2. Negative, positive and neutral SP in she-verb patterns.

Top Semantic Domain	Semantic Prosody	Verb	Example
General Actions/Making, Movement	Negative SP	lurched	She broke in and lurched; She lurched dusting wiping; She lurched for she rolled
		clutch	She clutched at her blankets; She clutched the banisters
		rolled	She rolled like a ship; She lurched for she rolled
		banged	She banged the door; She moaned she banged the
Linguistic Actions, States and Processes; Communication	Positive and negative SP	said/say	She said the place was; She would say she had; She dared say all in
		asked	She asked creaking and groaning
		moaned	She moaned; She banged the; She creaked she moaned
Psychological Actions, States and Processes (neutral SP)	Neutral SP	see	She could see her as; She could see her now; She could see Mrs. Ramsay
		known/knew	She had known for close; She had never known them; She knew it as she
		Supposed	She supposed on the lawn; She supposed they hauled themselves
		remember	She could well remember her
		thought	She thought sitting bolt upright

illustrates these patterns, organized by top semantic domain and verb.

Negative SP is mainly suggested in the verbs related to physical movement. For example, “lurch” connotes unsteadiness, while “bang”—as used in the linguistic context of “She moaned. She banged the door”—implies frustration and distress. Similarly, “clutch”, rather than the more neutral verb “grasp”, suggests unsteadiness. The verb “roll” acquires a negative connotation in “She lurched dusting wiping” and “She lurched for she rolled”, both of which signal awkward, uncontrolled movement. The verb of speech and communication “say”, though generally neutral, in “She dared say” points to uncertainty or fear of speaking; the same applies to “ask” in “She asked creaking and groaning”, as the surrounding verbs indicate distress. Similarly, the verb “moan” in “She creaked she moaned she” conveys discomfort and exhaustion.

These prosodies need to be looked at in their wider linguistic contexts, if we want to see how the blending of viewpoints of the servant and that of teller reflect some of the “prejudices about […] the ‘lower orders’ […] typical of the day” (Light 2008, p. xviii; see also Heine 2019).

In the three extracts that follow, I first show that the inference process we activate for Mrs. McNab confirms a negative schema of the servant when the teller’s viewpoint prevaricates. I also show that this schema gradually shifts toward a more positive image of the cleaner, who, despite her role, appears to possess an individuality of her own. This emerges when the teller’s viewpoint is less biased, or when the servant’s viewpoint is more foregrounded.

[1] [NR] As she lurched (for she rolled like a ship at sea) and leered (for her eyes fell on nothing directly, but with a sidelong glance that deprecated the scorn and anger of the world—[FIT] she was witless, she knew it), as she clutched the banisters and hauled herself upstairs and rolled from room to room, […].

(“Time Passes”, p. 107)

In Extract [1], Mrs. McNab is presented through the narrator’s perspective, except for the two short phrases (“she was witless, she knew it”) representing Mrs. McNab’s [FIT]. Both thought and speech are aligned in presenting the cleaner’s physical awkwardness and apparent lack of intelligence; a flaw that, as the [FIT] shows, Mrs. McNab is aware of.

The ideological viewpoint of the narrator is imbued with class-based prejudice in the portrayal of the servant. The descriptions of her movements are dehumanising (“lurched”, “rolled like a ship”) and suggest her clumsiness and lack of control and grace. Her gaze (“leered”) assumes a negative connotation in the juxtaposed sentence (“a sidelong glance that deprecated the scorn and anger of the world”), revealing the servant’s awareness of how others perceive her accepted inferiority (“she was witless, she knew it”).

Overall, the extract reinforces a negative class hierarchy, in which servants are perceived as inferior and almost comic figures. It also exemplifies the class-biased ideological viewpoint of the narrator that runs along other parts of “Time Passes”, including those in which the narrator refers to she by her proper name. Mrs. McNab is thus added to that category of invisible workers: “[…] there is a long history of not noticing or valuing servants, seeing them as functionaries or mere types” (Light 2008, p. xvii).

However, in Extracts [2] and [3], the ideological viewpoint of the teller becomes far less pervasive, allowing space to that of Mrs. McNab, whereby she might also be inferred to be an individual capable of sound judgment, thought and memory.

[2] [FIS] Why, it was all damp in here; the plaster was falling. Whatever did they want to hang a beast’s skull there? gone mouldy too. And rats in all the attics. The rain came in. [FIT] But they never sent; never came. Some of the locks had gone, so the doors banged. She didn’t like to be up here at dusk alone neither. It was too much for one woman, too much, too much. [NR] She creaked, she moaned. She banged the door.

(“Time Passes”, p. 112)

In Extract [2], the [FIS] and [FIT] reveal Mrs. McNab’s negative judgment of the physical decay of the house caused by the prolonged absence of “they” (the Ramsays). In Mrs. McNab’s FIS, a sense of protest against the burdensome work she must undertake is conveyed in the question, along with expressions of distress in the adjacent phrases (“gone mouldy too. And rats in all the attics”). This feeling continues in the [FIT] (“Some of the locks had gone, so the doors banged”) following the adversative “but they […],” and the following phrase (“never came”). In the latter part of the FIT, the cleaner’s discomfort at being alone is emphasised, and her objection to the onerous task is also clearly evident (“It was too much for one woman, too much, too much”). However, the [NR] that follows reinforces a strongly negative ideological stance from the narrator toward the aging cleaner.

In Extract [3], the teller’s viewpoint focalises through Mrs. McNab’s, where she recollects the past, remembering Mrs. Ramsay.

[3] She could see her, as she came up the drive with the washing, stooping over her flowers (the garden was a pitiful sight now, all run to riot, and rabbits scuttling at you out of the beds)—she could see her with one of the children by her in that grey cloak. […]. Yes, she could see Mrs. Ramsay as she came up the drive with the washing […]. She could well remember her in her grey cloak.

(“Time Passes”, p. 111)

In Extract [3], Mrs. McNab’s viewpoint is presented not as the cleaner and physical agent of the house’s restoration, but as an observer. The [FIT] conveys her internal, retrospective perspective, which emphasises memory and perception over action. She “could see” Mrs. Ramsay, she “remembers”; her thoughts are tied more to the past than to the present. Moreover, the description of the garden as “a pitiful sight now” and “all run to riot” appears to suggest a critical judgment, as we already noticed in Extract [2]. However, it may also suggest her lack of control over the deterioration of the house and its garden, with the phrase “rabbits scuttling at you out of the beds”, highlighting how nature has taken over in the absence of human intervention.

The shift to [FDS] (“Yes, she could see Mrs. Ramsay as she came up the drive with the washing”) strengthens the immediacy of Mrs. McNab’s recollection. The repetition of “she could see” and “she could well remember” emphasises her role as a witness to the past rather than as an agent of change in the present. Her agency remains passive, her recollection remains rooted in the past, particularly in recovering the image of the upper-class matriarch.

While Mrs. McNab’s character evolves from a servant stereotype into a more individualised figure, her recollections remain firmly rooted in the past, particularly in relation to Mrs. Ramsay. As I discuss in the following section, Mrs. McNab’s recollection of the past positions her as one of Woolf’s narrative tools in the design of “Time Passes”.

6. Analysis: Mrs. McNab as a Narrative Device

Margolin’s (2007; cf. Section 2) polysemic view of character allows for Mrs. McNab to be interpreted as a narrative device. Using Blending Theory, Mrs. McNab can be analysed as the narrative agent facilitating the mental process of time and space compression across the three distinct sections of TTL. This blending process is activated through the restoration of the Ramsays’ holiday home and her recollections of the past.

Table 3. Input spaces and the final blended space in TTL.

Input Space	Time	Space	Characters
Input Space 1 “The Window”	One day	The house, the garden	The Ramsay family, their guests, and servants
Input Space 2 “Time Passes”	One day after a ten-year gap	The neglected house, and overgrown garden	The servants Mrs. McNab, Mrs. Bast
Final Blended Time and Space “The Lighthouse”	Blended time of past and present	The restored house, the lighthouse	The return of some members of the Ramsay family and guests

represents the input spaces and the final blended space across the three sections of TTL.

In INPUT SPACE 2, decompression with INPUT SPACE 1 is activated by the non-anthropocentric viewpoint of an external third-person narrator, who reports on the house’s deterioration and the absence of its former occupants. The blending process of joining together the images of the one-day time, the space of the house, and the people who inhabited it fails. This is suggested in the quotes below, in which I juxtapose parts of the narrative between “The Window”, and “Time Passes”.

SPACE

[1] The house was left; the house was deserted […]. Toads had nosed their way in. Idly, aimlessly, the swaying shawl swung to and fro. A thistle thrust itself between the tiles in the larder. The swallows nested in the drawing—room; the floor was strewn with straw; […]; rats carried off this and that.

(“Time Passes”, pp. 112–113)

[2] Mrs. Ramsay sitting with James in the window as she sat in the wicker arm-chair in the drawing-room window. And then, while the children rummaged among her things, she looked out of the window.

(“The Window”, p. 41)

TIME

[3] The long night seemed to have set in; the trifling airs, nibbling, the clammy breaths, fumbling, seemed to have triumphed.

(“Time Passes”, p. 112)

[4] “Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,” said Mrs. Ramsay. “But you’ll have to be up with the lark,” she added.

(“The Window”, p. 7)

The abandoned and empty space in [1] overtaken by nature, animals and vegetation does not blend with the human-inhabited space in [2], where Mrs. Ramsay and her son James are present. Similarly, the absence of human clock-time in [3] does not blend with the anthropomorphic time of natural cycles in [4]. The process of compression between INPUT SPACES 1 and 2 is gradually activated by Mrs. McNab, a character who does not originally belong—along with Mrs. Bast—to INPUT SPACE 1. They are never mentioned in “The Window”, yet through Mrs. McNab’s recollections, we understand that she was invisibly present.

The initial process of space and time decompression in SPACE 1 and SPACE 2 moves gradually toward compression as exemplified in the following extracts.

[5] […] and Mrs. McNab […] came as directed to open all windows, and dust the bedrooms.

(“Time Passes”, p. 106)

[6] They came with their brooms and pails at last; they got to work.

(“Time Passes”, p. 114)

[7] At last, after days of labour within, of cutting and digging without, dusters were flicked from the windows, the windows were shut to, keys were turned all over the house; the front door was banged; it was finished.

(“Time Passes”, p. 115)

The process of space compression between INPUT SPACES 1 and 2 is activated through the servants’ incessant labour in [5] and [6], culminating in [7] (“it was finished”). The completed restoration of the house allows the blend of INPUT SPACE 1 with that of INPUT SPACE 2, though after the blending process it may appear in “a different light” (Schneider 2012, p.3), as Mrs. Bast says, “they’d find it changed” (“Time Passes”, p. 115), (“they” here referring to the return of the Ramsays and their guests).

Mrs. McNab also functions as the narrative helper of time compression between the anthropocentric temporality of “The Window” and the non-anthropocentric temporality of “Time Passes”. The process is here activated through her recollections of past events from INPUT SPACE 1 as well as by events that fall outside that specific timeframe (cf. quotations [8] and [9] below). These recollections serve to compensate for the fragmented account of the ten-year temporal gap, conveyed in the bracketed sentences and the characters’ voices at the beginning of “Time Passes”, (cf. Section 3).

[8] She [Mrs. McNab] could see her [Mrs. Ramsay], as she came up the drive with the washing, stooping over her flowers […]—she could see her with one of the children by her in that grey cloak. […] (She had died very sudden at the end, they said.)

(“Time Passes”, p. 111)

[9] […] many things had changed since then […]; many families had lost their dearest. So she was dead; and Mr. Andrew killed; and Miss Prue dead too, they said, with her first baby; but everyone had lost someone these years.

(“Time Passes”, p. 112)

In [8], we recall memories of Mrs. Ramsay and her children, whereas in [9], we learn about the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay and her children, Andrew and Prue. References to the First World War are given, where Andrew got killed along with many others (“everyone had lost someone these years.”), further contributing to the compression. The result is a blending of the temporal dimensions of INPUT SPACE 1 and INPUT SPACE 2, producing a different mental image.

Mrs. McNab functions as a structural agent of continuity, as through her labour and recollections, she reactivates the narrative flow of time, enabling the blending of temporally and spatially disjointed input spaces. Her efforts to make the house ready again are not merely practical but structurally functional, as they help reestablish the chronological continuity of the narrative (“Lily Briscoe laid her head on the pillow in the clean, still room and heard the sea. […] (the house was full again; Mrs. Beckwith was staying there, also Mr. Carmichael.” “Time Passes”, 116). This blending process allows the reader to form a new, compressed mental representation of the restored house and of the temporal framework. This, in turn, enables the conceptual transition to the final blended time and space in “The Lighthouse”, where the journey to the lighthouse is finally made, bringing the narrative design of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse to its completion.

7. Conclusions

This article contributes to the longstanding literary debate on the ontological status of the minor character Mrs. McNab, the cleaner within the shifting social, economic, political, and cultural landscape of the postwar period, a time still influenced by the Victorian view of servants as voiceless and socially marginalised non-individuals. Although Woolf grants Mrs. McNab only minimal narrative space, I have shown that she emerges as a polysemic and complex construct. By applying a cognitive stylistic framework, supported by computer-assisted methods, I examined her agency through both quantitative and qualitative analyses. Mrs. McNab is not only fleshed out as the stereotypical servant but also as a personalised individual. A key challenge in this analysis is the discourse blending in “Time Passes”, where the narrator’s ideological viewpoint—reinforced by negatively slanted prosody—appears to confirm the servant schema, while our impression moves toward an individualised character, when the narrator’s ideological viewpoint is less pervasive. I have also shown that Mrs McNab’s polysemic nature is further underscored by her pivotal role as an actant in the compression and blending of time and space within the narrative. Further research could explore additional textual clues that may support her agency and provide a more extensive analysis of her role as an actant.