The Aesthetics of Mutability in The Village in the Jungle (1913)

This paper focuses on the representation of change and mutability in Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913) and the creation of an aesthetics of mutability. It suggests that the novel’s unstable state emerges out of Woolf’s understanding of the East and its people and from his perspective on the question of the nature of humanity. Woolf seems to refuse the Conradian perception of the East as immutable and to propose instead a new and realistic vision of the orient and its people, that of a constantly moving and evolving East. The inherent instability of the jungle, it is argued here, extends to the village and its inhabitants and expresses itself through the blurring of boundaries between humans and animals, social classes and even genders. Multiple transformations and reversals in The Village in the Jungle point to the novel’s affinity for unstable states and mutable conditions.