The Seba library treats Stocking in 9 passages, across 4 authors (including Auerbach, Erich, Sanford, John A., Jung, Carl Gustav).
she finishes her sentence and also allows her consciousness to dwell for a moment on the measuring of the stocking: we may yet go to the lighthouse, and so I must make sure the stocking is long enough.
Auerbach identifies the act of measuring the stocking as the precise trigger from which Mrs. Ramsay’s extended interior consciousness unfolds, establishing it as the structural pivot of Woolf’s narrative method.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953thesis
the act of measuring the length of the stocking and the speaking of the words related to it must have taken much less time than an attentive reader who tries not to miss anything will require to read the passage.
Auerbach demonstrates that the stocking-measuring episode, negligible in exterior duration, generates a disproportionate expansion of interior narrative time, exemplifying modernist temporal dislocation.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953thesis
The round hole in her stocking expresses both an imperfection… the legs, being that part of our body which connects us with the ground, often stand for the ‘lower man,’ our instinctual desires and feelings.
Sanford interprets the stocking in a dream as a covering for the instinctual, grounded dimension of the self, and the hole within it as an unconscious rupture in the dreamer’s self-idealization.
, Dreams: Gods Forgotten Language, 1968thesis
Yet what realistic depth is achieved in every individual occurrence, for example the measuring of the stocking! Aspects of the occurrence come to the fore, and links to other occurrences, which, before this time, had hardly been sensed.
Auerbach concludes that the stocking-measuring scene epitomizes how modernist fiction discovers authentic psychological depth in the most apparently trivial domestic occurrence.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953thesis
She holds to minor, unimpressive, random events: measuring the stocking, a fragment of a conversation with the maid, a telephone call.
Auerbach positions the stocking within a deliberate aesthetic of the insignificant, arguing that Woolf and allied modernists make the random domestic act the structural basis for genuine psychological revelation.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
Nothing of importance in a dramatic sense takes place; the problem is the length of the stocking.
Auerbach contrasts Woolf’s stocking episode with Homer’s dramatic excursus to argue that modernist narrative dispenses with dramatic tension, using domestic triviality as its sole point of departure.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
One foot is clad with a stocking and shoe, the other is naked and gorily crushed — the head — where is the head?
In Jung’s visionary descent, the stocking marks the boundary between the clothed-civilized and the naked-annihilated on the mutilated body of a child, making it a symbol of violated innocence at the threshold of horror.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009supporting
Knitting her reddish-brown hairy stocking, with her head outlined absurdly by the gilt frame, the green shawl which she had tossed over.
Woolf’s image of Mrs. Ramsay knitting her stocking — framed as both domestic and incongruous — provides the material basis for Auerbach’s analysis of her paradoxical beauty and the narrative technique built around it.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
a woman, perhaps in her late twenties, dressed in a thin cotton coat, with wool stockings and black shoes, is facing to the left.
Hollis invokes the detail of wool stockings in a documentary photograph to anchor an existential meditation on suffering and maternal courage at the threshold of death.
, Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places, 1996aside