Symbol: The Miniature
In musing over what the mark might be, the narrator briefly considers the possibility that it is a nail once used by the previous inhabitants of house for decoration; dismissing the idea of the décor being a portrait and deciding instead it would be a “miniature of a lady with white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations.” This miniature, in turn, would have no tangible connection to the reality of the family because they were the type who would have made such an aesthetic choice only on the basis of conventional expectation. One of the themes of the story is a railing against convention, and the miniature symbolizes the failure of authenticity that comes with convention.
Symbol: Mirror
The mirror that reflects with “vagueness, the gleam of glassiness” is the author’s symbol for the tradition of fiction as a representation of reality. In her call for writers to portray “not one reflection but an almost infinite number,” she is disengaging the fiction from its long history as a reflection of reality by implicating its limitations in her call for the techniques of modernism to wipe away the failed conventions of the past.
Symbol: Whitaker's Table of Precedence
This is a reference to a British almanac that delineates rule of succession: “The Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor; the Lord High Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of York,” and so forth. As a symbol, Woolf charges it with being more biblical in spirit, outlining a system devised by man that has, over time, been endowed with an inviolate truth normally reserved for natural orders. It symbolizes the "masculine view of things" in its claim to order, knowledge, hierarchy, and absolute fact; the narrator, thus, decries it as a symbol of everything that frustrates her.
Symbol: The Tree
As the story draws to its conclusion, short lines of dialogue are preceded by a long paragraph densely packed with metaphor and imagery. The narrator contemplates how a tree continues growing through the life cycle of man, paying no more attention to those lives than humans pay to the daily growth cycle of the tree. The tree is life; it grows rhizomatically as opposed to hierarchically. It has multiple lives and hosts innumerable realities in its branches. The tree is the symbolic opposite of the reference book: it represents the natural order of things that those who stand at the altar of Whitaker completely miss.
