In Solid Objects/Ghosts of Chairs by Graham Fraser, the author explores Virginia Woolf’s fascination with inanimate objects disconnected from human attention when they are not observed or outright abandoned, and how she dives into the world nearly entirely devoid of human connection thus sparking a somewhat lifelike reality in these objects, further trivializing human presence and highlighting that all humans, who we view as rightfully important, as profoundly fragile in our world. Furthermore, the author goes on to describe that in Virginia Woolf’s “The Lady in the Looking Glass”, the objects in the room are not only anthropomorphised, but wrapped up in an ecological world of their own as well, creating a deeper sense of meaning in the world of the objects. Then, the author goes on to describe a sense of domestication in the room in the story, as the character Isabella has carefully curated the items that are in there, but also in a sense linking all her items to her in a realm of her making where “sometimes it seemed as if they knew more about her than we”, and in those items lie the real Isabella (Pg. 3). Thus the overarching idea posed by the author is that the “objects in this story are outside human attention in the sense of being unwitnessed (except to the unseen narrator-naturalist), yet they are nonetheless inscribed within the larger human attention of being domesticated—taking the order of their existence within the inhabited space of the tidy and well-arranged house” (Pg.4) The author goes about illustrating these vast ideas about the life and death of objects by taking examples from Virgina Woolf’s works, and interpreting them in a way that goes beyond simply stating that Woolf intends to make these objects seem alive, but to more fully comprehend that not only are they alive, they are controlled and curated by humans but have their own world that can neither be fully seen nor understood by humans, thus creating that idea that humans are fragile even in the worlds they think they have made and mastered. This whole concept is important because it really makes one reconsider just what it means to be human, and how we influence the things and objects we have, and how they not only know us but influence us back.
I found this analysis not only fascinating but in some way deeply unsettling. The idea that we can only control the things we own to the point of arrangement, or that they may know us better than anyone feels very correct in a way, but also isolating. How much does any individual matter if they can’t even be the most important thing in their room? But, it’s also an interesting test in willing to acknowledge that while indeed we may not be any more valuable than our objects, how can you process that? Thus, it in a way highlights how valuable our whole world is, that even your objects exist in a fragile ecosystem of their own reality, and when abandoned or forgotten they too can fall into decay and in a way die. With the analysis by Graham Fraser, I don’t really see any real places I would push back or increase the substance for that matter, then again I am still reeling from this profound realization that we, in a way, are truly no more than the sum of the items we have and the connections we make with others on the way,simply a ghost in our own world trying to leave something behind or find what will make us whole.
