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

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

A most interesting paper, shedding new light on Virginia Woolf's narrative technique! 

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• Please check, that in each case, you write Extract or Extracts, the term is italicised.

 

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• always use endash in the main text & the bibliography, indicating the pages
• instructive and helpful appendices

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 1,

Thanks for the review to my proposed  draft.

I have corrected the draft as suggested.

line 5: Abstract (change font size) font size changed

line 9:  1925-1930: 76 à not bold bold deleted

lines 41-42: different font font size  changed to Palatino linotype font 10

lines 42-43: painting – initiated in Block I – is (insert spatia, use endash) space inserted, endash inserted

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lines 84-85: Time Passes à italics  changed into italics

lines 105-106: formalist, structuralist and semiotic- changed to lower case

line 117: insert reference again   here I removed the following phrase "inserted for peer review".

A further reference was added to  (Balossi 2014)

This reference was also added to Section References

Balossi, Giuseppina (2014) A Corpus Linguistic Approach to Literary Language and Characterization: Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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1. 5, n. 4: delete the blue colour of the text after the URL   Done
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Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This draft or prospective article appears very promising and does address a fascinating, though often perplexed aspect of one of Virginia Woolf's most accomplished and highly regarded novels. The article is very well grounded in relevant Woolf scholarship as well as a range of relevant and important critical and stylistic positions and developments.  However, there are some issues and parts of the analysis that require revision before I think that the journal can accept and publish it.

I found the Abstract (lines 5-28) very good, clearly presented and inviting. Indeed, the four intial sections of the argument are generally well presented.  The Introduction (lines 32-96) provides a good statement and summary of the issue under discussion, though with a noticeable problem in line 39.  The novel is set in the summer (yes, September) before the outbreak of WW1 -- that is, 1913 -- and occurs on a nameless island in the Hebrides, not Skye specifically.  The unwarranted assertion of time and place in line 39 need to be corrected, then.  The section on character and characterisation (lines 98-153) is fine and very well referenced, as is the following section on viewpoint blending (lines 155-206). However, a stray comma needs to be removed from line 156 on the latter section.

The 'Tools Employed' section (lines 208-27) provides technical details of the cluster analysis used. I found this section too brief and in need of linking up with and commenting much more on the materials found in Appendices A and B at the end of the article.  The appendices offer large chunks of the 'raw' analysis, so to speak, and the section 'Tools Employed' needs fuller development and qualitative commentary.

The next two sections (lines 229-451) provide the core of the article and argument -- that is, demonstrating stylistically and cognitively the claims that Mrs. McNab can and should be viewed as both 'narrative agent' and 'narrative device' in Woolf's novel, especially its middle segment.  Lines 430-34 makes a key and highly significant claim.  I think there should be more discussion and elaboration of this claim.

Lines 452-9 would seem to be a rather rushed, indeed a much too brief, conclusion.  I think a proper Conclusion needs to be set aside and elaborated, bringing out more expressly and fully what lines 229 to 451 have demonstrated.  As it is, those last seven lines of text seem 'throwaway', as though the author had suddenly run out of time and had too pull down the shutters of the cognitive-stylistic shop quickly.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thanks for the flaws you pointed out to my draft.

Here, I copy the changes .

1. a noticeable problem in line 39.  The novel is set in the summer (yes, September) before the outbreak of WW1 -- that is, 1913 -- and occurs on a nameless island in the Hebrides, not Skye specifically.  The unwarranted assertion of time and place in line 39 need to be corrected, then. 

1.  "Skye" is actually mentioned in the text TTL (Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (OUP, 2009), Section I; cf also Hussey, Mark (1995) p. 301

               like a queen's raising from the mud to wash a beggar's dirty foot, when she admonished them so very      severely about   that wretched atheist who had chased them—or, speaking accurately, been invited to stay with them—in the Isle of Skye. (TTL: 10)

Here is my revised version plus footnote (2) 

Woolf conceived To the Lighthouse (1927; hereafter TTL)[1] as "[t]wo blocks joined by a corridor" (Woolf 1983: 11) in which she had "to give an empty house, no people's characters, the passage of time, all eyeless & featureless […]" (Woolf: 1925–1930: 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: 301).[2]

[2] Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse has often been regarded as the author’s most autobiographical novel as Woolf drew upon her memories at St Ives, Cornwall, at Talland House, where she and her family spent every summer holiday from the year she was born until her mother’s death (Hussey 1995: 301; Fernald, 2014: 6–18).

2. a stray comma needs to be removed from line 156 on the latter section. The stray comma has been removed. 

3 The 'Tools Employed' section (lines 208-27) provides technical details of the cluster analysis used. I found this section too brief and in need of linking up with and commenting much more on the materials found in Appendices A and B at the end of the article.  The appendices offer large chunks of the 'raw' analysis, so to speak, and the section 'Tools Employed' needs fuller development and qualitative commentary.

I fully agree with your points. This section has been changed as follows and the appendices have been modified.

 

4. Tools Employed for Cluster Analysis of the she Pronoun

    Cluster analysis of the pronoun she in the target text Time Passes[1] was carried out using computer-assisted methods.[2] In corpus-assisted research, a cluster – also referred to by terms such as "lexical bundles" (Biber et al. 1999: 990) or "ngrams" – is defined as "a group of words which follow each other in a text" (Mahlberg 2007a: 5). As Mahlberg (ibid.) 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). 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,[3] 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 pronouns[4] 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.[5] The output in Appendix B displays, in the first column on the left, the cluster – she plus the first full verb collocate (e.g. remembered, said) – marked in bold. 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. A selection of these clusters is also presented in Figure 2 (cf. Section 5). 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.

 

[1] The digitised version of TTL utilised for quantitative analysis is from Project Gutenberg eBooks (https://www.gutenberg.org/). Each separate section (The Window, Time Passes and The Lighthouse) was uploaded into the systems for cluster, grammatical, and semantic analysis.

[2] Within the scope of this article, there is no room for a detailed illustration of the relationship between theory and methodology in corpus linguistics in general and in literary study in particular. This issue has been addressed by many scholars (see, for example, Mahlberg 2007b: 219–246; Tognini-Bonelli 2001: 65–98).

[3] The parts of speech are based on the UCREL CLAWS7 tagset (http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/).

[4] By she-pronouns, I refer to all the pronominal forms (e.g. she, her, herself) and their grammatical functions (e.g. subject, object).

[5]The USAS tagset is built on McArthur’s Longman Lexicon of Contemporary English (1981). It is arranged in a multi-layered structure of twenty-one top semantic levels or discourse domains, many of which break down into more detailed semantic subfields (ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/usas/), to which new semantic subfields continue to be added (Archer et al. 2002: 1–37; Piao et al. 2004: 499–502; Balossi 2014: 59–82).

 

 3 Lines 430-34 makes a key and highly significant claim.  I think there should be more discussion and elaboration of this claim.

I sorted out this as follows

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).

4 Lines 452-9 would seem to be a rather rushed, indeed a much too brief, conclusion.  I think a proper Conclusion needs to be set aside and elaborated, bringing out more expressly and fully what lines 229 to 451 have demonstrated.  As it is, those last seven lines of text seem 'throwaway', as though the author had suddenly run out of time and had too pull down the shutters of the cognitive-stylistic shop quickly.

Yes, this what I excpected. I expanded the conclusion to this section and provided a proper conclusion to the  paper.

6. Analysis: Mrs. McNab as a Narrative Device 

[...] 

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." 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. Conclusion

 

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.

Thanks you!

 

 

 

7 Conclusion

This article has aimed to contribute to the longstanding literary debate regarding 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 marked by the Victorian view of servants as voiceless and socially marginalised non-individuals. While Woolf grants Mrs. McNab only marginal narrative space, I have sought to demonstrate that she emerges as a polysemic and complex construct. Through the application of a cognitive-stylistic framework, supported by computer-assisted methods, I have examined the character’s agency using both quantitative and qualitative analyses. Mrs. McNab is not only fleshed out as the stereotypical servant but also as a personalised individual. A central difficulty in this analysis has been 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 towards an individualized character, when the narrator's ideological viewpoint is less pervasive. 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 of this character could explore additional textual clues that may support her agency. Also, her role as an actant could benefit from a more extensive analysis.

Thanks for your thoughtful feedback.