Virginia Woolf, The Waves, and The Self

The waves, represent the inner life force that resides within every human being until our vanishing sets it free.

‘A whole flower to which every eye brings its own contribution,’ observes Bernard as he sits surrounded by his childhood friends. For me Virginia Woolf never ceases to amaze with her painful insights into the human psyche or consciousness. She is the only author (from those I have read) that so masterfully delves and exposes the inner mechanisms of the self. Having said this, The Waves is a novella which wrestles with the hustling of consciousness. It is engulfed with the internal nature of the human experience and the sharp contrast this 'interiority' casts upon the outside world. Woolf is engrossed with the perception of the self by the self, and the perception of the self by society. In a characteristic passage of this personal and social issue, Bernard reflects, ‘I am made and remade continually. Different people, draw different words from me.’ The same character notes again in anguish, ‘Here’s Bernard! How differently different people say that! There are many rooms- many Bernards.’ These outcries splash unto the reader’s eyes and shake the foundations and the assumptions regarding the fixity of one’s self. Woolf seems to be obsessed with this question: Who am I? This undying inquiry becomes a demand which befalls on each of the characters. The most prominent of the sufferers, Rhoda, identifies with nothing. She has no life plan, no purpose, and ultimately she has no reason to live. As she says, ‘I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell’. The concept of losing the ‘I’ is reoccurring in Woolf’s piece and it insistently betrays the illusionary nature of the self. Her characters many times fall in and out of this oppressing desire to be - and to be good. There is this societal expectation to be someone and to be better than someone else. Therefore, an individual with no sense of self, whatever that means, becomes threatened by the rigid and formulated regulations of society. Thus, one of the implications that arise from this work is, Must you be someone, in order to be permitted life?

It’s like there is always a huge eye following each of the characters, casting its evaluations upon their facade. This theatrical act of being results to the demolition of a unified body. As Bernard observes, ‘We suffered terribly as we became separate bodies’. This realization prompts one to think about one’s identity and its purpose in the world. What does your role say about you? It becomes apparent that the self is never separate from the other, so that the inside is always in correlation with the outside. Hence, Woolf also explores the interpersonal effects of engaging the self with the other. There is the need to construct one’s life according to the conditions of one’s environment. There must be an exchange of bodies and minds in order to paddle through life. Rhoda, has vindicated the obscurity of life, the meaninglessness of ‘this’ and ‘that’, and eventually, she kills herself. Therefore, her suicide poses the question,

‘How can one overcome the fluidity of the internal facets of oneself, so as to live a life that is harmonious and self- affirming?

* Painting by Lionel Walden

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