Letters are probably not the "best" place to begin thinking about space and Woolf. But then there is that passage in Jacob's Room which begins, "Let us consider letters - how they come at breakfast, and at night, with their yellow stamps and their green stamps, immortalized by the postmark - for to see one's own envelope on another's table is to realize how soon deeds sever and become alien..." and so on for a page or two (96ff).
Instead of regarding space it seems that letters transcend space, as it were, and provide us with the possibility to ascend the spacial parameters of our everyday lives and to get beyond the space which we ordinarily travel. I write a letter to communicate with a friend to whose location I cannot walk in order to converse. As important as the letter is for communication ("Life would split asunder without them"), it is in its most pragmatic mode a means of negating the material realities of language in space (voices) with a technology founded on a strategic allotment of space ("strategic" in de Certeau's sense), i.e. postal codes, addresses, etc. Yet although the letter becomes part of the abstract postal-machine ("immortalized by the postmark...") and in that sense loses the vivacity of spoken language as in conversation between friends ("The hand in them is scarcely perceptible, let alone the voice of the scowl"), it nonetheless undergoes a journey. The letter moves through space, even if it is conceived as a strategic space, a map. Or rather, I think it might be better to conceive of the letter as moving between spaces. Letters "come at breakfast..." from where?
Woolf writes that letters are written "pushing aside the tea-tray, drawing close to the fire (for letters are written when the dark presses round a bright red cave)" (97). Letter writing is common in Jacob's Room. It opens with Mrs. Flanders writing a letter on the beach in Cornwall, a specific location. Jacob keeps his mother's letters in his pocket, a particular kind of place of its own. Letters are written, sent, received, read. Transition, movement is implicit in the business of touching other's souls, and therefore space is essential for understanding the Letter as well as the person, so to speak. "Jacob's letters are so like him..." (137). What is less important is how the letter gets there, what space it traverses, only if it does or does not. It is less important to understand where the letter was actually written if we can suppose that all letters are written in that same "bright red cave," perhaps the human heart. What matters is that the letter moves. It may not form part of the spatial practice the way walking does, which makes space according to de Certeau through expansion and fragmentation (synecdoche and asyndeton), yet the letter nonetheless is a spacial practice which exempts the sender and receiver from the experience of travel in space (the walking, the driving, the train, etc.) but maintains if not accentuates, perhaps painfully, another experience of space: time. Letters mark a duration necessitated by a movement through space which has disappeared as a referent. Sending letters as spacial practice (as opposed to something purely discursive), is what makes the letter an alien object: "and perhaps we fear or hate or wish annihilated this phantom of ourselves lying on the table" (96). The letter is a "personality" attempting to reach another "personality" across spaces, leaving behind one space for another, a space in which "it" did not originate. The letter has wandered from its birthplace, and this wandering is not unlike walking except that we only perceive it as a phantom walking. It may zig-zag its way to the address, changing as it travels invisibly through space, which is to say changing a personality while that person remains sedentary - travel without traveling.
If sending letters does constitute a kind of spacial practice un/like de Certeau's concept of walking as spacial practice, how could this help us weave in and out of Woolf's use of letters and letter writing in Jacob's Room? It may be as tangled and incomplete a thread as Mrs. Flander's attempts to write letters (never quite finishing the sentence it seems), but with the consistency with which letters and letter writing is broached in the novel, and the poignancy which the practice takes on between the characters as they themselves move in and out, I think it can only prove to be a useful and stimulating line of theoretical inquiry into the novel as a whole.
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