More than once, Woolf alludes to or explicitly mentions prominent locations featured in Greek mythology. The underworld, or "Hades," is a site of particular fixation:
Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to . . . Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office!
Woolf references the "asphodel meadows" (also called the "fields of asphodel")—a part of the underworld where ordinary souls (people who were neither exceptionally good nor exceptionally evil) are sent during the afterlife. This region of the underworld in Greek mythology is somewhat similar to purgatory—a place in-between, a land without extremes.
Combined with Woolf's use of simile, comparing people to brown paper parcels, her allusion to the asphodel meadows evokes inertia or stagnation, implying that people live in a perpetual state of indecision, allowing things to happen but never seizing control. Brown paper parcels have no agency; they are at the mercy of the postal service workers pitching them down the chute.
The existential dread—or nihilism—underlying Woolf's use of allusion and simile in this passage is not unique to her. Several other prominent Modernists, including T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats, dwelt on the problem of human inaction or moral passivity. These anxieties were born in large part from the tragic, large-scale loss of life during the first World War. Many people, including Woolf and other Modernists, saw it as a great failure of civilization and human morality that so many people were allowed to die for no apparent reason. With that context in mind, it makes sense that the narrator alludes to a purgatorial underworld where souls tumble randomly like parcels.
At the beginning of "The Mark on the Wall," the narrator considers the possibility that the mark is, in fact, a nail; subsequently, she imagines a picture of a red-lipped lady hanging on that nail:
If that mark was made by a nail, it can't have been for a picture, it must have been for a miniature - the miniature of a lady with white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations.
Woolf uses a simile here, likening the imaginary woman's lips to "red carnations." This woman in the miniature embodies traditional female beauty standards. One can imagine her as evocative, demure, attractive—designed to be alluring but untouchable. Furthermore, in comparing the woman's lips to "red carnations," Woolf places herself within the ancient tradition of utilizing nature imagery to describe women's physical features.
It is important to understand why the narrator imagines this particular woman, with these particular features. Red is a sensual color, evoking the open sexuality of the "free love" movement that gained momentum in the 1920s. The narrator's description is somewhat reminiscent of American "flapper girls," distinguished by their sleeveless dresses, plucked eyebrows, red lipstick, and scandalous dancing. These women disregarded earlier social conventions about how women should dress and act, preferring more boyish figures to their mothers' corseted silhouettes. On the other hand, this woman from the miniature also has "powdered white curls," signaling that she may be wearing a wig or hairpiece, like the kind an aristocrat or upper-class woman from an earlier time period would have worn. Simultaneously sensual, with "carnation"-red lips that place her in close proximity to the natural world, and genteel, the woman the narrator imagines seems to bridge antiquated and modern definitions of femininity.
The woman the narrator imagines exists between eras, at one with both nature and antiquity, both defiant and demure. The 1920s were a particularly tumultuous time period for women: gender roles shifted as many women joined the workforce and were empowered to wrest control of their sexuality and their lives from the patriarchy. Through this simile, Woolf creates an image of "woman" in a stage of transition, being constantly redefined.
