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Vision and Violence in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

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Otto P. D., University W. K., Peggy Otto is assistant professor of English at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green K.

Analyses/Rereadings/Theories: A Journal Devoted to Literature, Film and Theatre

2015

vol. 3

issue 2

Virginia Woolf describes her artistic goal in The Waves as an attempt to create “an abstract mystical eyeless book.” Yet, in creating her eyeless book, one that eschews a single narrative perspective, Woolf amasses abundant visual details. For each of her six characters, visual images mark significant moments of being. In fact, Woolf emphasizes the characters’ capacity for sight as a vulnerability that allows them to be violated and wounded over and over. This article analyzes connections between visual imagery and themes of violence in the novel to demonstrate how they cohere into an extended metaphor for the ways in which acts of looking can elicit powerful emotions that threaten to fragment individual identity in painful ways. While Woolf’s novel has received critical commentary that focuses on the role of vision in the narrative and critics have also noted how violence in the text supports other themes, the explicit relationship between sight and violence has not yet been fully explored. A close examination of the visual imagery in key scenes of the novel demonstrates how Woolf engages the reader to participate in the characters’ deepening sense of fragmentation as they are repeatedly assaulted by experience, as the eyes themselves become symbols of the twin dynamics of desire and destruction.

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Woolf V.

Poznańskie Studia Polonistyczne. Seria Literacka

2013

issue 21

179-185

The image of moths gathering around a source of light recurs in Woolf’s private writings and becomes an import motif also in her novels and essays. It is most probably the description of moths in her sister’s letter that become an initial inspiration for writing of The Waves, Woolf’s most radical experiment in novelistic form, where she strives to create a subject-less perspective. On the other hand The Death of The Moth, a 1927 essay, whose first translation into Polish comes together with the present commentary from the translator, is a crystal-clear description of the world as seen by the writer/narrator at her desk, surrounded by exuberant life but witnessing death.

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1 Analyses/Rereadings/Theories: A Journal Devoted to Literature, Film and Theatre

1 Poznańskie Studia Polonistyczne. Seria Literacka

1 Otto P. D.

1 Peggy Otto is assistant professor of English at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green K.

1 University W. K.

1 Woolf V.

1 2015

1 2013

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Vision and Violence in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

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