By Kendyl Daley
Edited by Coco Usher and Olivia Wigod
In The Waves, Virginia Woolf beckons the ear to the mouth of a conch, from which six seas are heard quietly lapping, from which six voices echo from the belly of the shell, calcified and nacreous about a single “soft soul” (Waves 153). By a radical act of undefining, the conventions of character are redefined; Woolf distills the self into ephemeral soliloquy, while mystifying the borders of body, sex, and mind. Centering the lives of Bernard, Louis, Neville, Rhoda, Jinny, and Susan, The Waves returns to their origins as a single being, born of a shared mother. While experience and expectation abrade the edges of their sameness, the group remains bound in mind and body, unable to shed their shared soul or their symbiotic sensibilities. Told from a carousel of male and female identities, The Waves coalesces as a fragmented androgynous consciousness, through which Woolf enacts her impulse for an androgynous creative mind. As established in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf idolized androgynous writers and believed they were freed from the constraints of “sex”—a term employed as a catch-all for biological difference and gender construction. To Woolf, androgynous writers could inhabit a cross-pollinated mind; they could balance male and female intellect, overcoming the predetermined limitations of sex. But The Waves, while experimental in character, pales in its depiction of androgyny; regardless of their fluid characterization, the protagonists devolve into a six-fold sex binary. The novel’s sex-typed characters are symptomatic of Woolf’s limited scope of sexual fluidity; thus, while radical in its technique, The Waves is a testament to Woolf’s traditional understanding of sexual identity.
The fictive world of The Waves arises from the senses of its characters and their circuit of telepathic monologues. Woolf first suggests the cerebral closeness of the protagonists in reference to their original body: Bernard addresses how the group was “separated by [their] youth” and “suffered terribly” in becoming “separate bodies” (72, 145). Louis thinks “we changed, we became unrecognizable” (73). Though cleaved from their shared body, mental tethers persist: Rhoda, among the others, laments, “I am broken into separate pieces; I am no longer one” (61). Neville remains “changed by addition” and notes the pain of being “mitigated…adulterated… part of” another (46). Throughout the novel, the characters’ entangled bodies and recursive sensibilities homogenize their individuality, and as the sinews of their selfhood wear thin, they become one sentient entity. According to Richardson, in The Waves, “fluid ephemeral impressions seem to replace the stable, objective world one finds in the traditional novel” (693). A “many-petalled flower” from one somatic root, the characters in The Waves are both “many, as individuals, and one, as an abstraction”; they are six fractals of one conscious experience (Hargreaves 144; Woolf 74).
As when the six characters sit side by side, melting into each other with Bernard’s incantatory phrases, Woolf’s mystification of sex aggregates their identities into an androgynous consciousness. Bernard muses, “nor do I always know if I am a man or woman, Bernard or Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny, or Rhoda – so strange is the contact of one with another” (Waves 168). Standing by the urn with Rhoda, Louis sees the group and wonders, “Are they men or are they women? They still wear the ambiguous draperies of the flowing tide in which they have been immersed” (138). Rhoda, who admires their genderless bodies, is disappointed when she discerns that “they are only men, only women” (138). By sowing seeds of sexual instability, Woolf emphasizes the fluidity of the group, who frequently question their sex and the sexes of others. Percival’s impenetrable masculinity also accentuates the sextet’s sexual fluidity; Louis thinks, “It is Percival, who makes us aware that these attempts to say, ‘I am this, I am that,’ which we make, coming together, like separated parts of one body and soul, are false” (80). Consequently, Woolf rectifies Percival’s masculinity with his lack of voice and his unceremonious death, after which she can privilege the permeable sex of the intertwining characters. Throughout the novel, the characters question the unstable boundaries of their bodies, and joined with the dynamic point-of-view of The Waves, they consolidate as a multiplicative androgynous consciousness.
In a letter to Vanessa Bell in 1927, Woolf writes, “Greatly though I respect the male mind, and adore Duncan (but, thank God, he’s hermaphrodite, androgynous, like all great artists) I cannot see that they have a glowworm’s worth of charm about them” (Letters 381). Two years later, she published A Room of One’s Own, in which she contemplated women’s writing, financial freedom, and the androgynous mind. While critiquing the aesthetics of women’s writing, Woolf proposes that women need 500 pounds per annum and a room of their own; only then might they develop their craft; only then might they strive to write androgynously. She idealizes a mind like Shakespeare’s, which is “incandescent, unimpeded,” and “man-womanly” (A Room 57, 95). As she articulates in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf understands androgyny as intellectual: “in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female… in the man’s brain the man predominates over the woman…in the woman’s brain the woman predominates over the man” (95). To Woolf, “it is when this fusion takes place that a great mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties”—this is the mind in which one may foster a creativity akin to her visionary idols (95).
Applying the logic of A Room of One’s Own to The Waves clarifies Woolf’s perception of androgyny while providing a theoretical basis for the woman writing in Elvedon. The woman in Elvedon writes from a room of her own, undisturbed; Bernard thinks “I cannot interfere with a single stroke of those brooms. They sweep and they sweep. Nor with the fixity of that woman writing” (201). Boone ties Bernard’s vestigial memories of Elvedon to “part of his preconscious history preceding identity” (633). Thus, by narrating the group’s genesis from Elvedon, Bernard surfaces the former self buried in his mind. The woman at Elvedon, primeval writer and pseudo-mother, is the author of their fictional realities; she is narrator, and perhaps, Virginia Woolf herself. In the privacy of Elvedon, the writer cultivates the fertilized mind that Woolf envisions, and from her visionary imagination, she authors the abstract, androgynous sextet. Like the droplet, pendant and pregnant, that “forms on the roof of [Bernard’s] mind,” the woman writer births the children, conceived in brain rather than body (Woolf 133). Following A Room of One’s Own, The Waves enacts the principles of Woolf’s seminal work; the woman at Elvedon widens the scope of women’s fiction, while harnessing the androgynous psyche that Woolf foresaw for those with funds and independence.
The Waves further draws from A Room of One’s Own, as androgyny is housed in six bodies rather than a single sexless character. In The Waves, the whole is more androgynous than the sum of its parts. The characters form a balanced spectrum of men and women with various degrees of heterosexuality—aside from Neville, whose queerness is an intermediary between the masculine and the feminine. Sex informs their interactions with the world and their “struggle between a fragmentary, feminine language of the body and the narrative, masculine language of the mind” (Harris 24). Richardson outlines how the characters “oppose and reflect each other,” from Bernard’s hyper-symbolic phrasemaking, to Rhoda’s disembodiment, to Susan and Jinny, who “talk in a little language such as lovers use” (Richardson 703; Woolf 83). The term “little languages” is Bernard’s description of the communicative, feminine sensuality of his female friends, in contrast with his own tortured search for significance—the “masculine” impulse to catalogue his life by “making phrases” in his pocketbook (Woolf 171). These sex-typed characters are congruent with A Room of One’s Own, in which Woolf contemplates the possibility of an androgynous mind; however, her perception of sex remains physical and predetermined. According to Hargreaves, Woolf’s conception of androgyny “is not a theory of social transformation,” but rather “an exploration of the condition of the writer’s mind” (70). As such, the appeal of androgyny “as a trope of the literary imagination” is its inability to “threaten social hegemonies” (70). In A Room of One’s Own, these reservations are plainly stated; Woolf proposes that education should “fortify the differences” between the sexes: “it would be equally piteous if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only?” (85). As such, The Waves captures the tension between Woolf’s desire for androgynous creativity and her struggle to break free from binaries of sex. A Room of One’s Own is a testament to the oppression of women; Woolf understood that women were not yet politically or intellectually autonomous. Thus, embodied androgyny was interpreted as a threat to femininity, as though androgyny would dilute the meager pool of womanhood with male pollutants. Intellectual androgyny, then, satiated Woolf’s desire for sexual fluidity without further destabilizing her status as a woman.
In reference to A Room of One’s Own, Brown writes that “the whole tenor of the work is to elevate femaleness at the expense of maleness” (200). A similar impulse undergirds The Waves; as Hargreaves suggests, androgyny is “corrective to what [Woolf] saw as an exaggerated, excessive masculinity” (95). Corrective androgyny explains Perceval’s demise, as well as the privileging of Bernard’s perspective. Richardson writes that “Bernard is obviously a spokesman for, even a persona of Woolf” (707). Bernard also strives to become an androgynous writer; he imagines himself “joined to the sensibilities of a woman”; he yearns for a “little language”; he hopes his novel will embrace “every known variety of man and woman” (Waves 44, 39, 143). But in line with Woolf’s priorities, Bernard never realizes his novelistic aspirations. Hindered by a self-conscious search for meaning, he cannot capture the powers of the androgynous mind—he is forever inferior to the woman at Elvedon, who has “remained there all [his] life” (145). Barred from incandescence, he surrenders, letting his book of phrases drop to the floor (175). In this unideal world, Mrs. Moffat answers to a man, as a foil of the male “gardener with the black beard,” gathering the leaves of Bernard’s failed novel (9). Alternatively, Bernard opposes the woman at Elvedon and Woolf herself. Fettered by his masculinity, he fails at writing, while the woman’s androgynous mind—albeit dualistic—animates her genius.
Androgyny is the question that flits beneath the surface of Woolf’s The Waves, but like a fin in a waste of waters, it emerges; it recedes; it evades her. Though Woolf strives for androgynous fusion, she ultimately returns to the comfort of sex-typed characters. Though radically characterized, the identities of the sextet do not disrupt social hierarchies, sexual binaries, and most importantly, Woolf’s hard-fought status as a woman writer. From the seclusion of Elvedon, Woolf explores androgyny from a distance, enacting her intellectual understanding of androgynous creation. In essence, The Waves is the work of Woolf’s idealized androgynous mind; a mind that guards the unstable grounds of female creativity from the maleness rampant in the rooms, pockets, and lives of women writers.
Works Cited
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Brown, Nathaniel. “The ‘Double Soul’: Virginia Woolf, Shelley, and Androgyny. Keats-Shelley Journal, vol. 33, 1984, pp. 182-204. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30212934.
Hargreaves, Tracy. “Virginia Woolf.” Androgyny in Modern Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
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