Colour and symbolism in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Blue and Green’

A Victorian lustre

 

Colour is powerful. It modifies our perception of objects in a way that is difficult to communicate through language. Virginia Woolf’s short story ‘Blue and Green’, first published in Monday or Tuesday (1921), makes an attempt at reconciling this power of symbolism with the modernist aim of representing reality through language using unconventional structures and forms.

‘Blue and Green’ portrays a conscious mind grappling with the myriad images that a ray of green light evokes. It is an investigation into consciousness and demonstrates how colour can be a catalyst for the conscious mind to perceive reality in different imaginative ways. Green gives the mind a link between a Victorian ornament (the lustre) and palm trees, parakeets and ponds. It is not as if the lustre has an outside context that informs the viewer’s perception of the object, as may be the case with an ornament taken from another country. The lustre’s transparency gives it a sort of neutrality that allows it to be modified by colour, almost as a blank canvas.

As the green light starts to fade with the coming of night, the viewer’s thoughts have rested on “the ruffled surface of ocean” where “the aimless waves sway beneath the empty sky.”(1) By this time the mind has begun a narrative, in which the new blue light follows the water symbolism in evoking images of the sea, which continue until the end of the story. If the viewer’s meandering thoughts had commenced with the blue light rather than the green, then any number of other images (such as the sky, or bluebells) may have been induced. However, water has been firmly established in the viewer’s mind, finding its outlet through various water-related images. ‘Blue and Green’ is an effective representation of the mind’s journey from perceiving a glass ornament — that it may have perceived many times without event — to revelling in its imagination of the sea, all through the capacity for colour to profoundly affect consciousness.

The philosopher G. E. Moore outlined the immense difficulty of properly explaining colour in his essay ‘The Refutation of Idealism’: “that which makes the sensation of blue a mental fact seems to escape us: it seems, if I may use a metaphor, to be transparent — we look through it and see nothing but the blue; we may be convinced that there is something but what it is no philosopher, I think, has yet clearly recognized.”(2) In true modernist fashion, however, Woolf does not attempt to explain colour but only to represent its effects on the working mind and its ability to adjust the perception of reality in a purely subjective way, since every mind would be affected in different ways.

(1) Virginia Woolf, ‘Blue and Green’ in Selected Short Stories, ed. Sandra Kemp (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 44.

(2) G. E. Moore, ‘The Refutation of Idealism’, in Twentieth-Century Philosophy, ed. Morris Weitz (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966), p. 27. 



Owen Harry