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Simile
Explanation and Analysis—Parcels and Asphodel:
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.
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