Killing the Greek Master: Claiming Greek for Outsiders in Jacob's Room

(JR 30) This passage, with its submissive great bird and the young men with marching boots veiled by billowy gowns, suggests masculine confidence in technology and order, and it precedes a pastoral interlude that provides a striking contrast. While in the chapel light falls "accurately" through the stained-glass windows-which "neither snow nor greenery, winter nor summer, has power over" (JR 30)-Woolf shifts our attention to an imagined forest that is distinctly disordered and subject to the forces of nature, calling into question the patriarchal values in the preceding section. Immediately following this simile, the pastoral interlude opens with a lantern assaulted by "a curious assembly" of forest insects and a particularly persistent toad, which "scramble and swing and knock their heads against the glass, [yet] seem to have no purpose-something senseless inspires them. [.] Woolf's application of Darwinian language mirrors her repeated contrasts between the presumed safety of the male university and the wildness of nature to undermine masculine claims to strength and virility.