flint -waves -2019 Flashcards
the waves presents a challenge to the reader
it is an exploration of the workings of the minds of the six named characters within the text
conveyed through a series of dramatic soliloquies (as Virginia Wools termed them),
interspersed with passages of depersonalised prose which describe constantly shifting patterns of light and water
passing from dawn to dusk
spring to winter, across the globe
throughout tall of this, no authorial comment is offered but, in many ways
one may read the novel as Woolf’s investigation of her own patterns of thought
lois and bernard both become
successful business men
bernard has a wife and family whilst
Louis takes rhoda as his lover
Rhoda
subsequently commits suicide
Susan marrie a farmer and
has children
Jinny leads an active London social life
moving from one young man to another
the homosexual aesthete, Neville is intensely private
with one close friend at a time
but it is not these customary material of much fiction
which count in the waves
Woolf ha moved away from
conventional patterns of plot
here she goes further than previously in the direction of demonstrating that identity
rather than depending on the concrete circumstances of a person’s life, is primarily constructed from within, through individual’s deployment of language
Wordsworth’s prelude: ‘who, looking
inward, have observed ties that bind the perishable hours of life
each to the other & the curious props’
in the novel, Woolf, Like Wordsworth, is preoccupied with the particularising details of language through which one establishes
one’s own private sense of identity, internalising aspects of the outer world
it is these details which distinguish
her characters from one another
the syntax of their sentences works in the opposite direction
reminding one that similarity and difference can coexist
their utterances are soliloquies,
self presentations, and self justifications, rather than communication with one another
all of the speakers in The Waves have certain set phrases or habits of thinking
to which they return, carrying them through talismans
‘stream of consciousness’ a term often loosely used of Woolf’s prose in this novel, is in fact
inappropriate in its suggestion of a continuous flow
instead, the images of waves, with their incessant, recurrent dips and crests, provides a far more helpful means of understanding
wolfs representation of consciousness as something which is certainly fluid, but cyclical and repetitive, rather than linear
additionally, (…) the novel dramatises how identities themselves do not stand, ultimately, clear and distinct
but flow and merge into each other
the very act of questioning the purpose of life, the vacillation between
sensations of stability and insecurity, is, for Woolf, something which links otherwise disparate individuals
Louis is linguistically, and hence (…) emotionally joined with Rhoda since
both speak of flinging out words and thoughts like fans of seed being broadcast on bare ploughland, which suggests that connections exist between those who on the surface may appear dissimilar
all the monologues are bound together by references
to Percival, the boy idol, the future administrator of the British empire, who dies, not in battle
all have their language permeated by references to
waves and water, to light: a frame of reference which is also found in the impersonal interludes
these interludes originally served both to give ‘ a
background- the sea; insensitive nature and to give Woolf scope to comment on the art of the narrator, presenting the workings of a mind severed from the body;’
while each of the characters is individualised, language here works to flatten out difference by
indicating the continual oscillation of extremes and opposites which takes place in the world: between land and water, winter and summer, the interior of the room and the flight of a bird, the simultaneous presence of violence and beauty
the interludes indicate Woolf’s desire to present the world in terms of cohesion and unity, whatever the apparent variance of each person’s
perception of life
Woolf’s diary 1929: ‘Now is life very solid, or very shifting?’…
‘I am haunted by the two contradictions. this has gone on forever: will last for ever; goes to the bottom of the world- this moment I stand on. Also it is transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall pass like a cloud on the waves’
just as characters establish their selves through their thought patterns, so Woolf, during the time that she was writing the novel, continually represented by her own mental state by means of a figurative employment of waves and water which ebbs and flows
throughout her own diary writings
there is nothing new in this preoccupation with water. it goes back to Woolf’s earliest
memories, where it is equated with contentment and plenitude. a recognition that a steady rhythm beats behind life
‘life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills- then my bowl without a doubt
stands upon memory’ [VW 1939]
but water, for Woolf, does not always represent such security. The Voyage out (1915), her first novel, not only includes the actual voyage to Santa Marina, but connects Rachel’s sinking
into her fatal illness and delirious despair with being submerged beneath the surface