The Waves

infobox Book |
name = The Waves
title_orig =
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image_caption = 1st edition cover
author = Virginia Woolf
illustrator =
cover_artist = Vanessa Bell
country = United Kingdom
language = English
series =
genre = Experimental novel
publisher = Hogarth Press
release_date = October 8 1931
english_release_date =
media_type =
pages = 324
isbn =
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"The Waves", first published in 1931, is Virginia Woolf's most experimental novel. It consists of soliloquies spoken by the book's six characters: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis. Also important is Percival, the seventh character, though readers never hear him speak through his own voice. The monologues that span the characters' lives are broken up by nine brief third-person interludes detailing a coastal scene at varying stages in a day from sunrise to sunset.

As the six characters or "voices" alternately speak, Woolf explores concepts of individuality, self, and community. Each character is distinct, yet together they compose a gestalt about a silent central consciousness. Bernard is a story-teller, always seeking some elusive and apt phrase; Louis is an outsider, who seeks acceptance and success (some critics see aspects of T. S. Eliot, whom Woolf knew well, in Louis); Neville (who may be partially based on another of Woolf's friends, Lytton Strachey) desires love, seeking out a series of men, each of whom become the present object of his transcendent love; Jinny is a socialite, whose Weltanschauung corresponds to her physical, corporeal beauty; Susan flees the city, in preference for the countryside, where she grapples with the thrills and doubts of motherhood; and Rhoda is riddled with self-doubt and anxiety, always rejecting and indicting human compromise, always seeking out solitude (as such, Rhoda echoes Shelley's poem "The Question"; paraphrased: I shall gather my flowers and present them--O! to whom?). Percival is the god-like but morally flawed hero of the other six, who dies midway through the novel on an imperialist quest in British-dominated colonial India. Although Percival never speaks through a monologue of his own in "The Waves", readers learn about him in detail as the other six characters repeatedly describe and reflect on him throughout the book.

Similar in style to another modernist work, James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", the novel follows its six narrators from childhood through adulthood. While Joyce's novel could be considered a Bildungsroman, Woolf's novel is more concerned with the individual consciousness and the ways in which multiple consciousnesses can weave together. "The Waves" is different from a Bildungsroman in that the self may very well be considered to be its own society. The difficulty of assigning genre to this novel is complicated by the fact that "The Waves" obliterates traditional distinctions between prose and poetry, allowing the novel to flow between six not dissimilar interior monologues. The book similarly breaks down traditional boundaries between people, and Woolf herself wrote in her "Diary" that the six were not meant to be separate "characters" at all, but rather facets of consciousness illuminating a sense of continuity. Even the name "novel" may not accurately describe the complex form of "The Waves". Woolf herself called it not a novel but a "playpoem."

References

Cite book
publisher = Cambridge University Press
isbn = 0521625483
pages = 308
last = Roe
first = Sue
coauthors = Susan Sellers
title = The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf
date = 2000-05-08

External links

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