Lilith’s Language

Notes on “The Mark on the Wall” by Virginia Woolf

Abstract

This article aims to discuss an image of Lilith building on how woman, language and art relate in Virginia Woolf’s work, particularly in the short story “The Mark on the Wall”. Our analysis considered Martha Robles’s (2019) thoughts about a Lilith who claims back her own narrative and her own meanings, who returns as a spirit in women who write. This imagery is present in Woolf’s fiction, women who are both thinkers and artists, as well as in the theory she develops in her essays, such as A Room of One’s Own (1929). In our discussion, we resort to the theoretical contributions of Cixous (1976) and Rich (2010) to comprehend what this individual and shared, political and subjective, feminine language and space is and how it is developed in the Wolffian text.