Jacob's Room

Chapter 4 returns to the southernmost parts of England. As the novel began with the Flanders family vacationing in Cornwall, Chapter 4 sees Jacob accompany Timmy Durrant to the Scilly Isles. Notably, the Scilly Isles are physically removed from Britain itself. They are located off the Cornish coast, and Jacob must sail six days to reach this remote location, which is further removed from Britain (while remaining part of Britain) than Jacob has ever travelled. 

In this sense, the Scilly Isles represent a physical marginalization. They are on the periphery of the country, geographically removed from financial and cultural centers. The residents of the isle are treated as a novelty by the visiting tourists, who seem astonished that Mrs. Pascoe must “draw her water from a well in the garden” (49). The Scilly Isles represent the fragmented nature of identity, in that the isles are British and foreign at the same time, an amusement for British people to take in on their travels. Similarly, Mrs. Durrant is described as being “of a Highland race” (51). She is Scottish, a similarly British identity that is also distinct from English. 

If the Scilly Isles represent a complicated form of identity, then Jacob’s presence in the Durrant home reminds him of his own fragmented identity and The Complexities of Education and Social Mobility. At Cambridge, he feels like a social outsider due to his perception and fear that he is from a lower social class. Education may be seen as an engine of class mobility, but education, for Jacob, brings him into proximity with people from wealthier families who make him feel insecure and uncertain. The Durrant home is on the Scilly Isles, but it is Jacob who feels like he is on the periphery. He feels like a novelty for the other guests to examine, emphasizing the felt division between social classes.

Jacob may feel like an outsider and he may seem unknowable, but there are aspects of his personality that are very clear. There is an intellectual arrogance to Jacob that is juxtaposed against his social anxiety, introducing the theme of Navigating Social Norms in a Changing World. He has internalized his social class in such a manner that makes him feel inferior to wealthy people, which is evident in the way that he directs his arrogance toward those whom he perceives as his social inferiors. He has a romantic relationship with Florinda, for example, but he does not respect her. He is physically attracted to her, but she seems to him to be “horribly brainless” (79): He does not respect her, so treats her as he feels others treat him. 

Jacob’s dismissal of Florinda as “brainless” also reflects his inability or unwillingness to recognize his own privileges of class and gender. As a poor woman with little social support and few opportunities, Florinda has never been given the chance to become educated and develop her own intellect the way Jacob has. Her lack of intellectual sophistication is thus not an innate trait or a personal failing, but a clear marker of the social barriers that have denied to Florinda opportunities that Jacob has taken as his due by default. In providing glimpses into Florinda’s background, the novel subtly exposes the ways in which social norms still marginalize certain groups of people in Edwardian England.

Jacob’s intellectual arrogance is also fueled by his reverence for Ancient Greek culture. He and his friends, buoyed by youthful naivety, convince each other that they are “probably the only people in the world who know what the Greeks meant” (74). Since Greek culture is so removed in time and geography, the reality is that Jacob and his friends are able to project their own understanding of Ancient Greece back through time. Their understanding of Greece suggests they are falling in love with whichever aspects of the culture they can see in their own selves. Just as the narrator fears that “the observer is choked with observations” (66) and so cannot reach any kind of objective truth, so too is Jacob seeing only himself in Greek culture and, as such, is mistakenly fueling an intellectual arrogance that only further alienates him from others.

As the book reaches the halfway point, a dynamic begins to emerge between the various women in Jacob’s life to highlight The Ineffability of Individual Identity. As well as his mother Betty, Jacob is closely associated with Clara and Florinda in this section. Each of these women has a different perspective on Jacob; they love him in different ways and, in turn, Jacob feels differently toward them all. They become mirrors for Jacob’s character, not necessarily in what his affection for them says about him, but how he affects them. Jacob’s intellectual interests simply bore Florinda, while Clara loves Jacob from afar even though he seems physically uninterested in her. 

These different subjective viewpoints are a microcosm of the novel’s premise, in which the true Jacob is obfuscated by the various overlapping and contrasting versions of him that are understood by others. They all love Jacob for different reasons, yet they love him all the same.