Kew Gardens setting

Woolf gives “Kew Gardens” a unique feel by focusing much more on the setting than she does on the characters in the story.  Although the characters are important, Woolf writes from the point of view of the flowers and snail and simply allows the characters to walk through for brief periods at a time. If the story were a movie, the camera would not only start in the garden with the flowers and snail but it would remain there for the entire story before moving back and giving a bigger perspective at the end. Most stories involve the same main characters the entire time and change the setting in order to move the story forward.  Woolf does the opposite, she keeps the setting the same and changes the characters to keep the story going.

            By coming at the story with such a setting focused approach, she makes the humans walking by more parts of the setting than they are characters in the story.  People of all ages and physical appearance’s walk through and from the point of view of the snail, all they are doing is changing the light of the scene.  Through her descriptions of the pedestrian’s movements, particularly the borderline insane man, she removes the barrier between animals and humans and is able to express human emotions with animal actions, such as the butterfly representing the suspense of the girl’s wedding proposal response.

            Though they may be thinking about important ideas and memories, all the humans in the story wander through the garden aimlessly.  On a number of occasions, it feels like the humans are unable to find words to express how they feel.  She uses nature once again to describe this frustrating feeling when she says “words with short meaning for their heavy body of wisdom” (86) None of the humans in the story ever really connect with one another and there seems to be something a little off with every human described.  When they talk to each other, they can’t ever find the right words and nobody will listen to them anyway.  We get this view of humans as hazy and somewhat sad because it seems they can’t get anything done. In contrast, the snail is described vividly and seems to have a much clearer head than do any of the humans. He can think clearly and focus on what he has to do.  This is because he doesn’t know words and doesn’t know of interaction. It is words and having to express how you feel to other people that causes this difference and Woolf is describing the difficulty of this task in her story.