The Waves

The Waves was published in 1931 and is considered Virginia Woolf's most difficult and high modernist text. It his her third and last experimental novel after To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway.

The Waves is highly stylised and poetical: It consists of soliloquies of the six characters Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis and alternates with descriptive pastoral interludes written in italics. These passages describe the impression of the diurnal progress of the sun on a seascape, its play of light, shadow and colour. In the soliloquies one of the characters reflects about their life spent together from childhood to maternity. A seventh character Percival who died in youth forms hereby a voiceless center. In general the novel describes their life-long and agonizing introspection. In this way Woolf examines different concepts of individuality and the self, as well as diverse concept of community. In her diary Woolf wrote that that the six were not meant to be separate "characters" at all: “The six characters were supposed to be one, I'm getting old myself ... and I come to feel more and more how difficult it is to collect onseself into one Virginia”. So each character can be seen as individual in itself but they also compose central consciousness together. The novel is difficult to categorise, as Woolf herself conceives it as “a new kind of play … prose yet poetry; a novel and a play” (p.68). It is often called a Künstlerroman because it is dense with literary allusions and many recent critics have praised the novel's eloquent silence, symbolic university and sense of cosmic unity.

Sources: Goldman, Jane. The Cambridge Introduction to Virgina Woolf. Camebridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Lee, Hermoine. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.

Suggested further reading: Beer, Gillian. Virgina Woolf: The Common Ground. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996. Warner, Eric. Virginia Woolf: The Waves. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.