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
‘it is of laying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I
should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive’
The Voyage out: on the one day she regains proper consciousness, ‘she has come to the surface of the dark, sticky pool
and wave seemed to bear her up and own with it’
the sea offers, as in the case of The Voyage Out, the sense of unfathomable, potentiality cruel and
unpredictable depths, depression invariably overcame Woolf after finishing the novel
Diary III 1926: ‘oh it is beginning its coming- the horror- physically like a painful wave swelling about the heart
tossing me up. I’m unhappy unhappy! Down God I wish I were dead. Pause. but why am I feeling this/ Let me watch the wave rise.”
Rhoda’s trepidation at life, he failure, her refusal to accept her identity in the material world
which is conveyed through her inability to cross a puddle, and Bernard’s vision of vaster, deeper waters, with their surface repeatedly troubled by the menace of the breaking fin
[Diary III 1926] Woolf started to record her aim of writing
‘something mystic, spiritual’ ‘something abstract and poetic’
Woolf conceived of The Waves as the representation of ‘A mind thinking’; not a sexless, nor androgynous mind, but the mind of a woman:
‘I am anxious that she should have no name. I don’t want a Lavinia or a Penelope. I want “she” [Diary III 1926]
T.S Elliot: poetry ‘is not
the expression of personality, but an escape from personality’
it is clear that she saw in the practice of poetic principles, as she understood them, an opportunity to escape from suspicions about her own
egoism and desire for praise
above all it is the capacity of poetry to compress and intensify to which she returns in her diary
and which makes sense of the method which she attempts to develop in relation to the wave
Woolf does not seem to have defined poetry in formal terms concerned with versification, but to have
equated it with a capacity to express intense feeling
close parallels between musical composition and The Waves may be made- the use of counterpoint
the taking up of a theme first by one instrument and they by another; the use of combination of words (or sounds) for immediate emotional impact rather than for their referential capacities
‘I am writing the Waves to a rhythm not a plot… through the rhythmical is more natural to me than
a narrative, it is completely opposed to the tradition of fiction and I am casting about the time for some rope to throw to the reader
this ebb and flow parallels the intensity and lull in each of the characters’ lives: for each, with the possible exception of Rhoda, constantly living at a finely tuned pitch, alternates an acceptance of the ordinary and everyday with vivid flashes
of memory or attempts to freeze their perceptions of the passing moment in singular, startling images
it is a novel in which Woolf seeks to convey, most intimately,
a sense of herself
it is not auto biographical in the sense of a life history
(…) but an examination of the workings of the creative mind in so far as they can be separated from the life history of the individual
in the long soliloquy which brings the waves to a conclusion
Bernard ponders the theme of his individuality
[Bernard at the end] he locates the origins of this uniqueness in childhood, and in the varied responses to
physicality which each of the children manifested
Bernards sense of his own bodies vulnerability and sensitivity to pain could be located in the memory of the piercing arrows of sensation which shot
through him as Mrs Constable raised the sponge above her head and squeezed it: a moment which defined, for him, the distinction between that which was within him and that which was outside himself
[Bernard] in a city street, not only must he keep his body inviolate from the roaring threat of an omnibus, but he
establishes other forms of assertion
[bernard] yet in the end, he finds that he can be far less confident in his assertion of uniqueness, for when he looks back at memories
he finds that they are composed of associations, of presences, in which others are undeniably
Louis is the arranger
and the organiser
Neville has a poetic precision his choice of literary language and is
granted the capacity to articulate some of Woolf’s own ideas about the challenge off impersonal poetry makes upon the reader, who needs a myriad eyes, like an outriding lamp on a boat out at sea on a rough night
[neville] needs patience, the desire to make an effort of understanding
and acceptance
Susan is associated with fecundity, with motherhood as a
form of creativity
Rhoda inhabits the shadowy world of the imagination: we have already seen how her metaphysical
crisis brought on by the inability to cross the puddle sprung from Woolf’s memory of her past insecurities
the waves exhibits Woolf’s fascination between the
relationship between self and body
at one level, the idea of the body presents an imaginary wholeness of being
which we spend our lives trying to reach, even to re-enter
But then as befits writing about something which is seventy percent water,
Woolf never forgets that the body is a stable entity
Rather than looking at bodies from the outside
as objects to admire (…) or to criticise, Woolf is concerned with representing subjective notions about the body
differing modes of self-awareness concerning bodies- both one’s own and other peoples-
form one of the prime means of distinguishing one character from another
one sees that see is making the point that one’s reactions and responses towards
ones own body are in a constant state of flux and rearrangement
Woolf Is concerned with representing
subjective notions about the body
not even Jinny, who can claim that ‘My imagination is my body’s’, can take
continual comfort from recognition of its material being since one’s perceptions of the container one both is, and inhabits, are shown to shift
the sense of self is assailed from within and without: from Chaos of the world outside
and by the mixture of fluids within
This can be seen particularly clearly in the case of Neville who tries to retain
a highly poised, neat image of himself
he feels a mixture if fear and exultation as he nears London
as his own heart goes out to meet the metaphorical heart of the bustling city
[Neville] his apprehension about the waves of urban life seems linked to the barely distinguished disgust
with sexuality which he expressed when younger, hating ‘dangling things; … dampish things… wandering and mixing things together’, despite the ease with which at an adoring distance he could contemplate Percival lying ‘naked, tumbled, hot, on his bed’
sex, like death, or rather the thought of death, had the capacity, for Neville,
to remove distinctions between mental and physical
Jinny (the character whom Woolf gives her Father’s pet name for herself) is, on the other hand, confident of the power of the body
it acts as a sexual magnet, a centripetal force
Indeed, often compared to fire, she is the echo in the text of the candle flame
or lamp around which moths fatally flutter [jinny]
[jinny] ‘my body lives a life of its own’ expressing grave and allure
whilst at the same time she retains control over it: ‘I open my body, I shut my body at my Will’
[jinny] time brings vulnerability. Although when young she is anxious to see as much of her narrow, rippling body in the looking glass, when much later she catches sight of her reflection unawares in the tube station
she sees herself solitary shrunk and aged, a little animal, whimpering, sucking her flanks in and out with fear. even Jinny needs effort of the mind to prepare herself to see the identity she wishes to have reflected back to her
Mirrors need not tell the truth, when one is in command
of one’s powers of perception: they reflect back, Woolf suggests, what one sets out to see
Susan’s confidence in her body is of a different kind
(…) Sharing involves the acknowledgement of other’s needs, and therefore of separateness, whilst Susan’s mode of existence is merging with natural forms
[susan] she fantasised as a child of becoming a wild woman of the woods with matted hair, eating nuts, peering for eggs through the brambles, sleeping in hedges
as a child, too, her sense of language is elemental. she is ‘tied down with single words’ whilst Bernard and the others soar away, weaving words into phrases; as an adult too, she complains ‘I do not understand phrases… the only saying I understand are cries of love, hate, rage and pain’
[susan] for a while her lack of communication with other humans leads to her own dissatisfaction to the point where she complains
’ I am sick of the body’;
[Louis] conscious of his outsider status, he wants to feel his individuality swamped, wishes ‘to feel
close over me the protective waves of the ordinary’
Rhoda needs at times to touch the firm rail at the end of the bed, or to try to keep the chest of draws firmly within her gaze in
order to stop herself sinking beneath waves of panic
[Rhoda] at other moments she is willing to see herself as. translucent, like a leaf
with the light shining through it
more problematic is the portrayal of Percival, an absent centre, who fascinates the other characters with his physical masculine beauty and aura but who
is never allowed a voice
the sense of waste and loss which his early death brings to all six characters can be
linked to the premature death of Woolf’s much loved elder brother Thoby
Woolf wrote of Bernard’s death in terms of triumph and bravery in the face of finality and on the one hand
while on the other hand setting this finality against a more consolatory image: ‘eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and rise again’
