50 pages • 1 hour read
Virginia WoolfThe Waves
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1931A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Waves
In The Waves, the eponymous motif of waves is the most important motif, deeply linked with Woolf’s design of the novel. Both thematically and structurally, the concept of the wave runs through the flowing stream-of-consciousness style, the novel’s exploration of time, and the artistic conceptualization of human lived experience. The title informs the reader that the wave will be integral, and it becomes increasingly clear that its significance is largely conceptual and metaphorical in the novel (i.e., one of imagery, structure, and ideas rather than of setting or plot). The opening of the novel presents the first of the poetic interludes, in which the waves are most literally described as scenes. These wave-themes interludes, and their juxtaposition with the human-interest narratives of the full chapters, are essential to Woolf’s treatment of time, especially the parallel she creates of natural and human time. The waves represent natural time and create a philosophical, universal context for the lives of the characters. Waves are paradoxical as an image: they are beautiful and destructive, eternal and fleeting, emotive and impassive. They are also used in the novel to be expressive of tumultuous human emotion and/or the indifference of the universe: Rhoda finds herself drawn to water and its nihilistic qualities at times of particular emotional stress. Bernard’s final soliloquy explicitly links his sense of mortality and defiance with the image of the wave at the novel’s close.
Cycles
The novel explicitly highlights the human life cycle in places, such as in Bernard’s discussion of his conflicting feelings of grief at Percival’s death and joy at the birth of his own son. Susan, similarly, compares her life raising small children to that when her mother was dying, linking the experiences of birth and life and its overlapping continuities and alterations.
The Waves also indicates an extended cycle in its structure. The deliberate parallelism of the “natural” time lasting a day and “human” time lasting a lifetime hints at the concept that human life is cyclical or renewed; as the sun will rise again, so will human life, the book suggests. This imagery is reinforced by Bernard’s final passages linking ideas of death with the setting of the dawn. This dawn in the narrative echoes the day-span structure and the dawn at the novel’s opening. Describing the dawn, he says “yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again” (228). Bernard speaks literally of daybreak, but his words connote the life cycle and the cyclical motion of the wave image.
Leitmotifs
Woolf uses leitmotifs in each of her characters’ narratives to reveal their individual characters, their modes of expression, and the ways in which they interact with the world. A leitmotif is a recurring pattern that is associated with a particular person, idea, or situation. For Susan, the major leitmotif is imagery of the natural world that she uses to describe ideas about herself and her life. For Jinny, a leitmotif is light and shining things, particularly associated with beauty, sensory experience, and the night time. Bernard’s major leitmotif is the recurrent idea of “making phrases,” which expresses his need to formulate language, often complicated, in order to understand himself and others. Rhoda is associated with images of waves and darkness; these are linked to her sense of despair. Neville’s narratives treat Percival as a leitmotif, a recurrent short-hand image of Neville’s unreachable aspiration for love and beauty. For Louis, a major leitmotif is physical human settings: He expresses himself constantly by thinking of locations such as banks, lavatories, gymnasiums, and eating-houses. These are linked to his obsession with the subtle distinctions of social demarcations and his place within them. In weaving these patterns through the narratives, Woolf is able to present her characters’ different ways of seeing the world but also how their experiences overlap, are universal, and mutually influential.
Related Titles
By Virginia Woolf
