Summary: A Short Story Bursting With Imagery and Symbolism By Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf’s “Kew Gardens” is a short story bursting with imagery and symbolism. The story begins in the Royal Botanic Gardens and then moves forward to describe the garden through various eyes and describe the outside world through the walks of life that live among it. Though there are many characters that the narrator provides an expository view of the Gardens from, a very prominent non-human character within this story, is a snail that resides there. The significance of the snail is beneath its connection and symbolism to the people strolling in the garden or the human world.

The non-human character, who gets the most repetitive representation, the snail is a flat character. It’s only development brought by Woolf is its plight to get past a dead leaf. In comparison to the other characters, the snail isn’t passing through the garden. The garden is its home, and many people come and go with plights and stories of their own.

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The significance of the snail is to show that it, too, is in a mind of its own as all the other characters in the story.

“Kew Gardens” is told from a third-person narrative, actively describing not only the characters but the garden itself. The narrator describes the garden,“The light fell either upon the smooth grey back of a pebble, or the shell of a snail with its brown circular veins, or, falling into a raindrop, it expanded with such intensity of red, blue, and yellow the thin walls of water that one expected them to burst and disappear” .

The story begins with vivid descriptions of the leaves, flowers, weather, everything down to the pebbles lying in the dirt. The snail is introduced within these items that seem totally mundane. The story then moves to describe the human characters passing through the Kew Gardens. A husband, who is lost in his thoughts, is accompanied by his wife and children. The husband thinks about his past and about the woman he had asked to marry him fifteen years prior, in that very garden. He mentions this to his current wife, “Because I’ve been thinking of the past. I’ve been thinking of Lily, the woman I might have married…”. His wife also thinks of her past concerning the garden. As the family returns to their own minds, the snail’s struggle of whether or not to go over or under a dead leaf is taken into account.

As the snail makes its decision, a few more human characters are introduced, two men on a stroll together, and two women out for tea. One of the men, older than the other, recounts his idea for a machine that will allow widows to speak to their dead husbands in a quirky manner as the other seemingly listens and tries to keep his focus off the two women. The narrator takes us back to the snail, “The snail had now considered every possible method of reaching his goal without going round the dead leaf or climbing over it”. This latter illustration was seemingly intended to provide insight that, even though these people have their encounters out in the garden, the snail is still living its life. The audience is aquatinted with two other characters, a young man and woman who aimlessly converse past the very flowerbed that the snail resides.

These encounters with the flowerbed and the aimless snail imply that all of these characters are just as undeveloped as the snail itself. The human characters walk around either all lost in their own world or having aimless conversation while the snail tries to meet a goal. Like when the young man and woman have an unimportant discussion about the prices of tickets to the garden, the narrator quotes, “Long pauses came between each of these remarks: they were uttered in toneless and monotonous voices” . This quote provides a connection between the idle snail and the inactive people within the garden.One reason the snail is significant is because of its aimless goal to get over a leaf in the garden. This is a connection to everyone else that has no real purpose of walking through the garden. Another reason the snail is significant is that, out of all the beautiful flowers in the flowerbed, the author chooses to focus on a snail - an animal that is not often considered. In my opinion, Woolf does this to shed light on the fact that even though everyone has their own lives, it is just as mundane and irrelevant as the snail’s. Maybe Woolf also wanted to imply, since no one in the garden was physically alone, the snail was not alone but he had to achieve his goal alone. The narrator says, “…all these objects lay across the snail’s progress between one stalk and another to his goal. Before he had decided whether to circumvent the arched tent of a dead leaf or to breast it there came past the bed the feet of other human beings”.Perhaps this quote was to identify the isolation of the snail, like the man at the beginning of the story, with his thoughts. The snail seems to prove the theme of isolation within this story.

“Kew Gardens,” has an unusual depiction of the garden. There is a passing description of everything, just as if you were to observe in real life. The snail, in my opinion, is that much more critical because Woolf always returns to the seemingly unimportant snail. There is a connection to the snail and the people in the garden, both the snail and the people are complex but their time in the garden is uneventful. The snail is symbolic of these strolling people because they, too, exist in their own worlds.