The chintz curtains in the Hilberys’ drawing room are decorated with red parrots—perhaps a hint that Katharine, who wants to soar, feels trapped there; a pompous friend of the Hilberys, chatting with Ralph, calls him “a rara avis [rare bird] in your generation” (p. 131)—another sad travesty of Ralph’s and Katharine’s dreams of flight. And whenever Mary and Ralph are together, the presence of birds—sparrows (p. 140), a “little grey-brown bird” (p. 197), “the swift and noiseless birds of the winter’s night” (pp. 162-163)-reminds both Ralph and us of the true object of his affection. (Mary, back from one of these outings, decides that she will “take up the study of birds” [p. 143].) In the depths of his despair over Katharine, he imagines “a lighthouse besieged by the flying bodies of lost birds,” then has “a strange sensation that he was both lighthouse and bird; he was steadfast and brilliant; and at the same time he was whirled... senseless against the glass” (p. 342). And once the mutual love between them is assured, he “likened her to a wild bird just settling with wings trembling to fold themselves within reach of his hand” (p. 428). We have come a long way from rooks.

which, for reasons of his own, he desired to be exalted and infallible, and of such independence that it was only in the case of Ralph Denham that it swerved from its high, swift flight, but where he was concerned, though fastidious at first, she finally swooped from her eminence to crown him with her approval (p. 19).

Another important stylistic feature of the novel is Woolf ’s use of leitmotifs—frequently repeated words that call our attention to important themes and that gain new weight and meaning with each appearance. Two words, feelings and consciousness, occur countless times throughout Night and Day. The result is not only poetic resonance but historical context as well, for feelings were of the utmost concern to Woolf ’s Bloomsbury circle, just as they are to characters in the novel (“What is happiness?” Ralph asks in chapter II), and the nature of consciousness had recently been made the subject of intensive study by Sigmund Freud, whose works were first published in English by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press.

And of course the binaries of the novel’s title make themselves everywhere apparent. If “day” is the comforting clarity of norm and tradition, “night” is the alluring murk of vision and innovation. If Mrs. Hilbery’s speech is sunlight, then Katharine’s silence is shadow. The different literary tastes that the characters profess—Rodney enjoys Alexander Pope, while Katharine prefers the brooding Dostoevsky—are as opposite as sun and moon, too. And the contrast between the novel’s two couples vividly illustrates the poles of its title: Rodney’s fondness for Mozart and his residence in “high eighteenth-century houses” (p. 62), and Cassandra’s likeness to “a French lady of distinction in the eighteenth century” (p. 299) (not to mention her sharing a name with Jane Austen’s sister), could not be more different from Ralph and Katharine’s tempestuous romance, as the following conversation between the latter pair shows:

“Rodney seems to know his own mind well enough,” he said almost bitterly. The music, which had ceased, had now begun again, and the melody of Mozart seemed to express the easy and exquisite love of the two upstairs.
“Cassandra never doubted for a moment. But we—” she glanced at him as if to ascertain his position, “we see each other only now and then—”
“Like lights in a storm—”
“In the midst of a hurricane,” she concluded, as the window shook beneath the pressure of the wind. They listened to the sound in silence (p. 369).

But if Woolf’s use of leitmotifs gives Night and Day a Wagnerian density, her sparkling wit comes straight out of Shakespearean comedy. The plot’s intricacies—two couples falling in and out of love; frequent eavesdropping; escape to a “green world,” which brings perspective on the dilemmas of urban life—could have been lifted from plays such as As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Wearing her literary debt on her sleeve, Woolf calls constant attention to these parallels, whether in the form of Mrs. Hilbery’s theories about Shakespeare’s sonnets, or the novel’s many comparisons between Katharine and Rosalind, the lively heroine of As You Like It. (Mrs. Hilbery remarks, “she is Shakespeare—Rosalind, you know” (p. 154.) And when characters step back from the action to comment on its madness—Rodney alone calls it a “season of lunacy” (p.