In Old Mrs. Grey, Woolf highlights the lack of autonomy of an elderly woman through comparisons to puppets and descriptions of death as freedom to suggest that death is a rational answer when confronted with overwhelming misery and nonexistent prospects.
Woolf describes death as a field where one is unburdened, a place of rest from the arduous and monotonous workings of life. Suppose: Mrs. Grey begins as the “busiest, most contented” old woman in England, absorbed in the daily chores that she has to attend to. But one day, she stops. There is no one for whom Mrs. Grey washes clothes but herself: her parents are dead, her siblings are dead, and her children have even passed on. She dresses to dirty the clothes she has and she washes to clean the clothes she has dirtied. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. Upon closer inspection, living is quite meaningless, while death is the place over the hills where there is “no washing, no pinning of clothes to lines… but boundless rest… space unlimited, untrodden grass, and wild birds flying hills whose smooth uprise continue that uprise flight.” Here Woolf questions why human beings feel the need to live even when there seems to be no obvious meaning for persisting. We have various images of the elderly, either as benevolent aunts, or cranky uncles babbling away at the ungratefulness of today’s youth. But little do we acknowledge the pain and the loneliness that many of the elderly infirm go through. We do not imagine that, as they sit down for dinner, they are beset with bodily pains for which they have no cure, caused by that inevitable force – decay. They face a table, once filled with smiles, now empty. They eat their gruel until it has gone cold, go to bed, and wake to another day of the same abject misery. Some people find “comfort” in the mundane, in being able to live, but Mrs. Grey does not. Death is a release, its “untrodden grass” free from human interference and its “wild birds” symbols of freedom in the sky. Against this field, the monotonous chores Mrs. Grey endures seem meaningless. Would not immediately bounding embracing death be preferable?
Woolf seems to answer in the affirmative, building her case by describing with painstaking detail Mrs. Grey’s living conditions so that we see what she sees, feel what she feels, and cannot help but empathize with her longing for death. Woolf particularly fixates on the position of the chair where Mrs. Grey habitually sits, for it is the prison to which she is bound. From her chair, her only view is the door in front of her, and even then she does not see the object for what it is, but for what lies beyond. A “seven foot by four” cutout of the fields can be seen through the door, and through it pours sunshine that drowns out a small fire burning in the fireplace. Just as the small flame, Mrs. Grey’s life flickers, liable to be quenched at any moment. The fire being put out by the sunshine is interesting, for light is usually life, and it is antithetical for the flame to quaver before it. Perhaps what Woolf is saying is that Mrs. Grey literally cannot handle life anymore, such that an abundance of it can send her to rest at once. What is more interesting though, is that death is characterized as a place of such light. Society conceives of death as a place of darkness and oblivion, but Woolf rejects that assertion – could death not, in its freedom, actually be brilliant?
But we return to the world of flesh, away from the fields, as Woolf describes Mrs. Grey’s complete lack of autonomy by comparing her to a marionette “spasmodically jerked by a cruel invisible hand.” The image of a wrinkled old woman being flailed up and down like a puppet is grotesque, and inspires sympathy in her state. By using the term invisible hand, Woolf suggests that the woman’s sufferings are not a result of mere chance, but of fate – perhaps ordained by a higher being. If the old lady’s suffering were a result of fate, then a remarkably cruel being governs this world – allowing a woman’s children to die before her, and leaving her alone in a dark room wishing for her death! Mrs. Grey’s pain is made especially terrible by how she is not in control of the quantity or duration of what she endures. She prays daily to “let me pass,” but her prayers are unheard. And what is the point of faith if it is invested in a being who simply doesn’t care? I can imagine Woolf walking into the dark room with the lady who inspired this tale, looking around her, the decay, and the pain etched into the woman’s face, and wondering why God – if He did exist – would allow such misery. By fixating on the details of Mrs. Grey’s residence, Woolf not only conveys to the readers how unpleasant of a position Mrs. Grey has to endure, but also raises the question: why? And who? Who allowed this situation to be created? Why have we allowed this situation to persist?
Perhaps the greatest insult is that Mrs. Grey is not only physically debilitated, she is mentally shackled. Nothing that she sees can touch her soul to the quick anymore because she is eternally trapped by the past, the narrow confines of her knowledge, and her singular desire to be delivered. The only information that can enter her eyes is “faces, and dishes, and fields.” Even her memories offer her no solace. Reminiscing over the past only brings to mind all the people she has lost: her eleven brothers and sisters, her husband, and even her daughter. Most of all, she can’t read or write. This is a point Woolf repeats over and over again, that Mrs. Grey is barred from literature and writing. Because Woolf places such importance on art as a writer, this may be the saddest part of the woman’s isolation and imprisonment. Whereas others who are old and greying can be comforted by their minds and the “voices that have argued, sung, talked for a hundred years,” Mrs. Grey is deprived of intellectual solace. Barred to her are the joys of reading a story or reading the meditations of Socrates and Camus–
But cease, here the page is interrupted: “The jerked limbs were still again.” By diverting the reader’s attention with a description of Mrs. Grey’s jerked limbs, we are made to feel how Mrs. Grey is never able to have a true moment’s rest in her life. Her final line piece of dialogue is painfully ironic: she constantly wishes for death, “Yet I don’t seem able to die.”
Yet, the greatest evil of all is that we as a society do nothing for those who suffer as Mrs. Grey does. We think that we do them a service by providing them with the bare necessities to keep them alive, “with a bottle of medicine, a cup of tea, a dying fire,” when really we are extending their suffering by extending their life. We think that it is better to be alive than dead and “pinion” such people like “a rook” to a door, though death might prove to be more liberating than that sick room, life.
Woolf wants us to sympathize with the desire for death, given the morbid descriptions of Mrs. Grey’s suffering, but how did she come to this conclusion? I theorize that Woolf’s decision to write this essay underlines her morbid fascination with death. Considering her history of depression, I imagine that she had once reached a point in life where she felt as restricted as Mrs. Grey. The description of how Mrs. Grey loses her belief in a meaningful existence and ceases to wash the dishes or do the laundry mirrors the depths of inaction that a depressed person enters. It also brings to mind current debates about assisted suicide. The concept of allowing a person to choose their end has been introduced into contemporary conversation, though many are still opposed to it. The inevitability of death continues to make topics sensitive to discuss. We prolong a person’s life because we consider the opposite – terminating it – to be immoral. We do not like to entertain the possibility that people want to die because we as humans try so hard to live. But, placed in such a situation, would we feel the same as Mrs. Grey?