50 pages • 1 hour read
The Waves
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Background
Literary Context: Modernism
Modernism developed in the late 19th and early 20th century as a response to the earlier Romanticism that had informed the Western artistic tradition. While Romanticism created romantic, dramatic, and heightened interpretations of the human experience, modernism sought to depict human life as realistically as possible. Major social and political upheaval such as organized labor, women’s rights, the technological revolution, and World War I prompted Western artists and authors to seek a new mode of expression and representation. Modernism was a revolutionary interpretation of the human experience, focusing on the detail of normal, everyday lives over social or moral themes, and making more space for female and other marginalized voices.
Modernism emphasizes human psychology as a primary lens of human consciousness. In the late 19th century, the psychological texts and theories of Sigmund Freud changed the way people understood their own minds. Modernists adapted psychology into a new form of literature that honored the psychological experience, making narratives that were concerned with the experiences and processes of consciousness, very often in the first-person. One major effect of this is that the first-person narrators of modernist works express self-reflective psychological and existential concerns, such as the meaning of life and the construction of their identity.
To this end, modernist authors developed “stream of consciousness” narratives, a flowing, poetic style that seeks to capture the fleeting impressions of the individual experience, combining actions, thoughts and feelings with hopes, dreams and memories, often in a non-linear structure. Modernist literature is highly experimental, as authors sought new ways of writing to represent the human experience more closely; compared to the structures of the realist literary tradition, these works can seem unstructured, impressionistic, and sometimes oblique. Woolf’s use of the stream-of-consciousness narrative in The Waves is an important and unique example of her experimental work in this style, with its fluid, musing first-person narratives that segue into one another. Recognized as an assured exemplar of modernist creativity, The Waves is concerned primarily with identity formation, the existential search for meaning, and the ways in which community and society can both hinder and propel personal development.
Authorial Context: Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was born as Virginia Stephens in London, England, and raised in an affluent household that encouraged her intellect and her creativity. As a young adult, she helped create an intellectual community in Bloomsbury centered around her siblings and their friends, now known as the Bloomsbury Group. Proponents of modernism, the Bloomsbury Group were highly influential in its development through the early 20th century.
Her first piece was published in 1904, followed by a considerable quantity of journalism, stories, essays, and novels. In 1912, Virginia married Leonard Woolf and they created the Hogarth Press, publishing Virginia’s works and others of their community. The Bloomsbury Group adopted a freer, more bohemian style of life and used art and literature to advocate for feminist causes and new progressive policies and ideas. The Woolfs were happily married but Virginia is also known to have engaged in lesbian affairs, reflecting the unusually liberal sexual attitudes of the Bloomsbury Group at that time. Woolf’s own bisexual identity and relative sexual freedom of The Bloomsbury Group (which included several gay or bisexual men, also writers and intellectuals, such as Duncan Grant, Maynard Keynes, and James Strachey), is mirrored in the revolutionary openness with which Woolf explores both sexual orientation and gender identity in her works. Sexual freedom of expression was a key tenet of the Group’s modernist approach, fostering the exploration and development of the “true” self, and the rejection of establishment social rules.
Throughout her work, Woolf uses stream of consciousness to explore modernist themes. Both in style and subject, she captures the fast-changing world she lived in. Shifts in the understanding of gender roles, sexuality, class, and technology are explored in her narratives, which are situated within modernist themes such as subconscious, time, perception, female identity, industrialized cities, and the impact of war. Her revolutionary narrative style made her one of the most prominent writers of the 20th century. Woolf published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915, followed by Night and Day (1919), Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925), and To the Lighthouse (1927). Each of these works explores modernist themes and is experimental in purpose and design but not until Orlando (1928) did Woolf write a novel fully in the stream-of-consciousness style. Her later works The Waves (1931), The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941) are considered the pinnacle of literary modernism, with The Waves the most poetically impressionistic of all her works.
Woolf experienced periods of depression and mental illness throughout her life. She described herself as hearing voices and having uncontrollable anxieties and impulses, as being unable to concentrate, or to write. She died from suicide in 1941.
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