Abstract
Focusing on the end of The Waves, O’Hara examines Woolf’s ironic homage to death. Using Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to investigate the meaning of “phantom flower” in conjunction with the “phantom table” in To the Lighthouse, O’Hara suggests the modernist sublime is contingent on the instability of relativity, which can also be seen in the paradoxical intention—to both continue and to break from tradition—in the novel. The sacrifice and suffering entailed in this dual desire results in the ghosts of future selves haunting the darkness of an author’s solitude, finally reborn as works that fuse the present writer with the masters of the past.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Michael Herbert and Susan Sellers, eds. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf: The Waves (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
I am indebted particularly to the following critics and their work in the formulation of my reading of the novel: Jane Goldman, Columbia Critical Guides: Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse and The Waves (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998);
Jane Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism, and the Politics of the Visual (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
Jane Goldman, The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006);
Molly Hite, “Introduction” to Virginia Woolf, The Waves (New York: Harcourt, 2006);
Michael Weinman, Language, Time, and Identity in Woolf’s The Waves: The Subject in Empire’s Shadow (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012); and
Michael H. Whitworth, Authors in Context: Virginia Woolf (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). As with all the critics noted, my indebtedness does not include the nature or terms of my argument, which are my responsibility, for better or worse.
For critical papers on this aspect of the novel, see Laura Davis and Jeanette McVicker, eds. Virginia Woolf and Her Influences: Selected Papers from the Seventh Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf (New York: Pace University Press, 1998).
The best books on this topic to which I am indebted are as follows: Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
Gillian Beer, Virginia Woolf and the Common Ground (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); and
Christine Froula, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
For the latter, as they affect the novel, as well as Woolf generally, see Thomas C. Caramagno, The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf’s Art and Manic-Depressive Illness (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1992) and
Maria DiBattista, Virginia Woolf’s Major Novels: The Fables of Anon (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980).
On the subject of modern writing (and revisionary reading) as displaced romance, see Daniel T. O’Hara, The Romance of Interpretation: Visionary Criticism from Pater to De Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
How much of William Blake’s prophetic books Woolf knew I am still exploring, but my sense at this point is that The Waves has much in common with The Four Zoas. That is, it is more like a romantic visionary psychomachia than it is like even Woolf’s own earlier efforts in the novel. J. Hillis Miller, in The Waves as Exploration of (An) Aesthetic of Absence,” University of Toronto Quarterly 83, 3, (Summer 2014), 659–677, appears to be updating this genre to end all genres for our digital age.
See Jean Mills, Virginia Woolf, Jane Ellen Harrison, and the Spirit of Modernist Classicism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014).
See Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (New York: Vintage, 1999).
See Lisa Marie Lucenti, “Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: To Defer That ‘Appalling Moment,’” Criticism, LX, 1 (Winter 1998), 75–97.
In James R. Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), this topic of how Beckett draws from modernists other than Joyce is repeatedly explored more fully, with respect to Yeats and Woolf.
Susan Wolfson, ed. Byron: Selected Poems (London and New York: Penguin, 1996), p. 414.
One idea I do not have enough space and time for, as suggested to me by Vanessa Loh, is to read Ian McEwan’s Atonement (New York: Random House, 2001) and Woolf’s The Waves, in light of “Waves Theory: An Anachronistic Reading” in J. Hillis Miller’s Communities in Fiction: Commonalities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). I urge her and, I hope, many others, to continue elaborating in future such revisionary readings not only back to the past but also forward to present.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Daniel T. O’Hara
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
O’Hara, D.T. (2015). Woolf’s “Unborn Selves” in The Waves. In: Virginia Woolf and the Modern Sublime: The Invisible Tribunal. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137580061_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137580061_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-59059-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-58006-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)