The Waves

Study Guide by Course Hero

character takes a turn directly speaking to the reader,

What's Inside revealing his or her own thoughts about events and characters
in the story.

j Book Basics ................................................................................................. 1 TENSE

d In Context ..................................................................................................... 1
a Author Biography ..................................................................................... 4
h Characters ................................................................................................... 5
k Plot Summary ............................................................................................. 9
c Chapter Summaries .............................................................................. 15
g Quotes ........................................................................................................ 30
In The Waves, the first-person soliloquies are told in the
present tense, while the introductory interludes are relayed in
the past tense.
ABOUT THE TITLE
In the novel The Waves, waves offer symbolic opportunities to
compare the chaotic rhythms of human lives to those of the
sea. Virginia Woolf's working title for the text was The Moths.
In choosing The Waves instead, she directs a focus on the vital
waves of human emotion at the center of each chapter rather
than on the human fragility that the working title suggests.

l Symbols ..................................................................................................... 33

m Themes ....................................................................................................... 35
d In Context

j Book Basics Influence of the Edwardian and

AUTHOR
Virginia Woolf
Georgian Eras
In her famous essay "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" (1924),
YEAR PUBLISHED
Virginia Woolf observes that "on or about December 1910,
1931
human character changed." Although Woolf was writing about
GENRE the importance of the novel in changing times, writer and
Fiction former professor of English Edwin Kenney Jr. (d. 1992) notes
that Woolf's essay became a source for historians—up to his
PERSPECTIVE AND NARRATOR present—writing about social and cultural change in the
Each of the nine chapters of The Waves begins from the Edwardian period, the era that corresponds to the reign of
perspective of a third-person omniscient narrator. This King Edward VII (1841–1910; reigned 1901–10).
objective narration, set off in italicized type, describes the
different positions of the sun in the sky during one day. There Woolf's essay did not merely chronicle the times but linked the
are six main characters in The Waves, and each character relationship between values in individual lives with the sweep
serves as a first-person narrator. Through soliloquies, each of historical change. In a sense, Woolf wrote a model for a
The Waves Study Guide
modern approach to history and an argument for the new
novel, including The Waves.
In "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," Woolf describes the
Edwardian stress on "the issues implicit in the historical
relation of an individual character to the social conditions and
institutions defining possibilities in communal life." Despite her
birth date, Woolf claims in the essay that she is a Georgian,
belonging to the period of history from 1910 to 1936
corresponding with the reign of King George V (1865–1936).
She says she is after what is "real in individual human life," a
matter of personal concern and a model for creating
characters for a novel. Woolf notes that "after the hypocrisy of
the Victorian age ... a time was at hand when a real society was
possible." She means a society of "people of moderate means"
whose lives embody the social and political turbulence of 1910.
The Waves, in which specific aspects of personality define
each character, satisfies her claim. Using a psychoanalytic
model, Woolf demonstrates each character's reality in terms of
early life experience. She builds from there with details of adult
experience tied in each case to childhood terrors and their
resolution. Thus, Woolf uses the principles for writing an
autobiography to write fiction. She treats her characters as
though they are real people.
In the novel Woolf resists what she calls the hypocrisy of the
Victorians by laying bare the difficulties of ordinary life. She
recognizes that human life is a sad struggle, and each person,
like each of her characters, does the best they can do with
what they have in their specific backgrounds and memories.
Kenney points out that in the United Kingdom in 1910, "the
feelings that the poor, the workers, the Irish, and women" had
about themselves and their places "in the social scheme of
things" changes so drastically "that ordinary conventions ...
were also being forced to change." The year 1910 marked the
death of Edward VII and the ascension of George V. Edward's
death caused panic over the disruption of the social order in
people's daily lives. The world was rapidly changing, and Woolf
equated panic and fear of change with individual health,
including her own problems with depression.
Kenney notes that the events pointing to change in 1910
include "the fight over Irish Home Rule, threats of Civil War in
Ireland, the beginnings of suffragist militancy, the mass
movement of workers into unions, strikes in the mines and on
the docks, and fear of war with Germany." According to Woolf,
"the prevailing sound of the Georgian Age" is "the sound of
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In Context 2
breaking and falling, crashing and destruction." There is
violence in the streets. A constitutional crisis in 1910 caused by
the budget, the Parliament bill, and Irish Home Rule leads to
the dissolution of Parliament and violence as union workers
and women seem to fear an upheaval of their newly won rights.
Members of the Women's Social and Political Union are brutally
beaten back during their march on Parliament. By 1913 the
suffragettes begin their now-famous, well-organized window
smashing, burnings, and bombings that lead to arrests,
resulting in hunger strikes and the torture of forced feeding.
The escalation of violence by the worker's unions as well as
the suffragists leads historians to use the term hysterical to
describe the times. Although there are "justifiable social and
political reasons," there are no real explanations for the
"widespread and corresponding violence" that meets the
changes at the end of 1910.
In The Waves, Bernard, quite an ordinary fellow, admires the
working-class life. In fact, he idealizes it as he gazes at the
lighted bedroom windows across the river from where he
stands at Hampton Court in Chapter 8: "What a sense of
tolerableness of life the lights in the bedrooms of small
shopkeepers give us!" His back is to the residence of kings. He
faces into the future. Readers also learn that he talks to
plumbers; that is, he lives outside an old world of stubborn
class boundaries and the excesses of the nobility. The
"tolerableness of life" is an interesting phrase. It is a goal of
modern life: that despite the challenges, the best one hopes
for—and Bernard idealizes—is that life be tolerable or bearable
despite the horrendous demands imposed on each individual.
Modernism and Representation
Woolf is a modernist writer, for whom the task of representing
humanity is not a matter of presenting lifelike depictions but of
getting at the essence of the human spirit. She appreciates the
value of extreme responses without a need to explain them.
Revelation is not rational, Woolf believes. She states, "Such
moments of vision, when a new force breaks in, and the ... past
suddenly has meaning ... lies too deep for analysis." This notion
of revelation or intuition rather than logic is central to the
appreciation of the structure of The Waves.
One can see the changes and experiments in Woolf's work as
well as in the works of the most determinedly radical of
modernist writers of the period. These include the Irish novelist
The Waves Study Guide
and short story writer James Joyce (1882–1941); the expatriate
American poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965); the American poets
William Carlos Williams (1883–1963), Marianne Moore
(1887–1972), and Ezra Pound (1885–1972); and the novelist and
playwright Djuna Barnes (1892–1982). All had come to
recognize that what was real and human could not be
represented in conventional ways.
For these writers, the complete and syntactically logical
sentence is not the mode for representing life. In reality,
humans do not think in complete sentences; people receive the
world in fragments and impressions. Humans speak to their
intimates in monosyllables and make up names for those they
love. Humans have complicated feelings for which they cannot
find words. For the modernist writer, invented words, wild
metaphors, and sentences that disrupt the ordinary experience
of reading and the ordinary passive nature of the reader are
key.
Woolf is determined to make each of her novels a new sort of
experience for the reader, and she believes in the "common
reader," the well-intentioned person who likes to read. Just as
the ordinary person can manage to understand the
characteristics of early-life speech or speakers whose diction
(word choice) and grammar may be unconventional, so too
could the common reader grow accustomed to disruptions of
convention in the work of the writer.
In the British Empire after 1910, the boundaries of social class
were weakened. People of different races and social classes
who shared a language but not necessarily dialects, vernacular
habits, or accents had to learn to talk to each other. Modernist
writing reflected these changes. Writing erupted with working-
class slang, the tortured vernacular of refugees from the
collapsing empire, dream language, fractured syntax, and
neologisms. Also, under psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud's
(1856–1939) influence, the language of the unconscious—the
language of the self—is seeded with the bits and pieces of
information that individuals convey to intimates or keep private.
Sex, moreover, is no longer a forbidden topic, although the
writer has to tread carefully. Literature was energized by the
spontaneous nature of some work and the formal concerns of
others. Woolf's diaries in the years she labored on The Waves
document the care, thought, and worry she put into the radical
form of this work.
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In Context 3
How to Approach the
Modernist Text
Art that breaks convention has an aesthetic function in the
renewal and refreshment of a culture's vision. The modernist
text has, most critically, a social function as well. The social
function is closely related to the radical nature of change that
Woolf attributes to the political and artistic events of the year
1910. Modernist texts, in their experimentation, make demands
not usually associated with the passive act of reading. First,
the works demand a generosity of spirit or healthy curiosity
that one might extend to an interesting stranger. Shifts in
sentence forms and the shapes of words offer a challenge and
a gift to the reader of a modernist text. Such shifts make
reading an active rather than passive sport.
The emphasis on form as well as narrative in the modernist
text is instructive. There is an ethical function to such texts, for
the reader discovers his or her humanity in willingness to
entertain radically strange forms. For the reader of a modernist
work, there is an anxiety to reading as well as an enlargement
of spirit, a generosity in entertaining difference among
individuals.
The Symbol Defined
Woolf wanted text to work like a great painting or a symphony.
There needs to be a direct line established from the work to, in
Woolf's case, the reader's heart. Woolf said: "We are parts of
the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth
about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no
Shakespeare ... we are the words; ... we are the thing itself."
Her philosophy can be seen in her use of symbols.
On Saturday, February 7, 1931, Woolf celebrated the
completion of The Waves and had something important to say
about the intensely personal system of symbols and images
that constitute the emotional center of the text. Her ability to
record "real" humanity was her accomplishment and the labor
she acknowledged as she worked to complete this, perhaps
her most personal and most deftly coded novel.
In her diary entry for this day, Woolf describes her joy and
sadness at the moment she completed The Waves. Her elation
is replaced by tears as she thinks about writing the name of
The Waves Study Guide
her dead brother, Julian Thoby Stephen (1880–1906), on the
first page. Acknowledging her deep sadness at the loss of her
beloved Thoby, she says she "tossed aside" all her prepared
symbols and instead presented them as images. In this way,
she says, she hopes "to have kept the sound of the sea [and]
birds, dawn [and] garden subconsciously present, doing their
work under ground."
To apply Woolf's advice about the nature of symbols in the
novel is to appreciate the deeply felt emotions of the
characters in the text—the achievement of "real" life.
Conventionally, a symbol seeks its meaning in an equivalence.
For instance, sunrise might equate to a new day, hope, fresh
energy, or a birth. Waves that travel in rows and hit the shore
together could equal a force of nature or an invading army on
horseback. For the most part, however, Woolf's images and
symbols are too complex for equivalences. They are instead
impressionistic; it is far simpler to ask how something makes a
reader feel than to ask what something means.
a Author Biography
Early Life and Education
Virginia Woolf, christened Adeline Virginia Stephen, was born
January 25, 1882. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a
prominent historian, author, and mountaineer. Her mother, Julia
Prinsep Stephen, was also a published author in her field of
self-taught expertise: nursing. Woolf's childhood home was a
bustling place that included her three biological siblings and
four half-siblings. While their brothers went to school, Virginia
and her sisters were educated at home. Woolf's writing career
had an early start—at age nine she began writing Hyde Park
Gate News, a newspaper chronicling family events. Publication
of the cheeky articles stopped upon her mother's death in
1895, an event that sent Woolf into her first of many
depressions. She had her first mental breakdown three months
after her mother's death. Her father's death in 1904 triggered
another major mental breakdown.
After Woolf recovered, she and her three biological siblings
moved into their own house in the Bloomsbury section of
London, where they continued their studies and honed their art
and writing. The residence became a magnet for radical artists,
writers, and thinkers, including the British novelist E. M. Forster
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Author Biography 4
(1879–1970) and the British economist John Maynard Keynes
(1883–1946). The Bloomsbury Group, as they dubbed
themselves, questioned ideas commonly accepted by society
in search of what is good and true. Woolf herself questioned
popular literature of the era with her first novel, Melymbrosia,
which aimed to explore aspects of life omitted from traditional
Victorian novels. It was finally published in 1915 as The Voyage
Out.
Marriage and Writing Success
Woolf married the British writer Leonard Woolf (1880–1969) in
1912. Five years later, the pair established a home-based
publishing house called Hogarth Press, named after their
home, Hogarth House, which was located in Richmond, a
suburb of London. A major goal of their endeavor was to
publish experimental, modernist works that would typically not
be picked up by commercial publishers. Together they
published their own writings as well as works by the British
author Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), American-born author
T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), and the Austrian psychoanalyst
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939).
In between bouts of manic depression, Woolf continued writing
literary reviews, novels, and essays. Among the most famous
are Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the
Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and "A Room of One's Own"
(1929). Her 1931 novel The Waves, also very popular, is
considered to be Woolf's most experimental piece of writing. In
her diary, Woolf described the novel as a "play-poem." It
employs a stream-of-consciousness narrative told entirely in
soliloquies. Other major works that followed The Waves were
her essay "Three Guineas" (1938) and the novel Between the
Acts (1941).
By 1940 Woolf was spiraling deeper into depression. During
this time World War II (1939–45) was raging, and fear grew all
over Europe of German occupation. On the night of September
7, 1940, the Germans began bombing London. The event would
become a 57-day raid historically known as the Blitz (1940–41).
As a result of the bombings, the Woolfs' home at Tavistock
Square, which they had moved into in 1924, was destroyed and
the Hogarth Press damaged. Woolf and her husband Leonard,
who was Jewish, had a death pact and had saved enough gas
for asphyxiating themselves in their car should the Nazis win. In
the case she was caught alone, Woolf also carried morphine.
All the while, Woolf drafted what would be her last novel,
The Waves Study Guide
Between the Acts, published after her death in 1941.
Death and Legacy
Woolf's literary success did little to suppress the depression
she had struggled with her entire life. Fearing another mental
breakdown, Woolf committed suicide by drowning on March
28, 1941. In her suicide note, a farewell letter to Leonard, Woolf
affirms her love for him and emphasizes that she decided to
die because she recognized that she would not recover from
another breakdown. Woolf's ashes were scattered beneath a
pair of elm trees on the couple's property at Monk's House in
Rodmell, East Sussex. A stone was also placed, engraved with
the last lines of The Waves: "Against you I will fling myself,
unvanquished and unyielding, O Death! The waves broke on
the shore."
Woolf's novels are important works of modernist literature.
Hogarth Press is still in operation, existing as an imprint of The
Crown Publishing Group. Woolf's essays still exude a powerful
voice for political and social justice. Moreover, Woolf is
considered the foremother of second-wave feminism, the
resurgence of activism on behalf of women's issues in the
1960s and 1970s. Her dedication to the improvement of
women's lives, particularly their education; her concern for the
working class; and her fierce anti-war and anti-patriarchal
activism inspired the late-century feminist activism that
repeated and expanded the demands for women's rights.
Central to contemporary feminism are Woolf's major nonfiction
polemics (harsh criticisms), "A Room of One's Own" (1929) and
"Three Guineas" (1938).
h Characters
Bernard
From an early age, Bernard is obsessed with language. As a
child, he weaves stories and adventurous experiences for his
friends to enjoy. In appearance, he seems disorganized and
usually looks disheveled, yet when it comes to language, he is
anything but disorganized. Bernard keeps notebooks filled with
alphabetized subjects, observations, new words, phrases, and
anything that demonstrates for him the positive and the
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Characters 5
negative sides of an experience. Words separate Bernard from
the reality of authentic experience, and Neville recognizes this
early on: "He tells our story with extreme understanding,
except of what we most feel." Bernard dreams of a great story
that will bring him renown. He comes to understand that he
needs the attention of others to feel whole. His obsession for
phrases and stories have caused him to lose recognition of
himself. He longs for the truth. He marries, has a son, and
experiences the death of friends. These events teach him that
life experiences are sometimes too complex to put into words.
In the end, he does not lose his enthusiasm for life. Holding to
true Bernard fashion, the reader sees him in old age telling his
life story to a stranger.
Susan
At school, Susan is homesick and longs for her life on the farm.
She counts the days until the school term is over. She wishes
to return to the family estate where she can marry, have
children, and manage the farm and the household. When she
returns to the farm, she is content caring for the plants and
animals. She manages to live her dream, which is to repeat her
mother's life. This includes getting married, having children, and
carrying out the duties of a mother and wife. Susan is
frequently associated with a stone or with a hardness in her
body. These associations represent her connection to the
earth as well as her insistence on remaining who she is, who
her family was, despite her education and opportunities. She
comes to recognize that she has been both imprisoned and
loved—protected in her choices.
Rhoda
Rhoda is an outsider. She sees herself as nobody, a person
without a face, moving through the world invisible like a ghost.
She frequently feels herself falling, a feeling she embraces and
welcomes. She enjoys the whiteness of her sheets and her
nightgown and longs for the moment each night when she can
lie in safety deep within herself. She fears human contact and
judgment of herself by others. She has no wishes to be like the
others, yet when she is with them, she copies them to prevent
missteps. She has a brief affair with Louis that ends because
of her inability to be intimate. She travels and commits to
behaving as though she is not afraid. Finally, suicide is her
escape from the suffering that she cannot transcend.
The Waves Study Guide Characters 6

her as he fears the others." Later in the text, he and Rhoda

Neville carry on a brief affair. He is the smartest of the friends and
wishes to become a poet. Because of his lower class, however,
Neville is a talented poet, poor athlete, and lover of the he must work instead of attend college as the others do. He is
masculine form. In Neville's world, all must be neat and orderly. torn between a life of commerce and of art. He becomes
He is forever haunted by several images: a dead man in the enormously successful as a businessman in global trade deals.
gutter with his throat slit, an apple tree, and a stairway upon He is also the poet of the common people, finding solace in an
which he cannot place his foot. The first image clearly attic room and in the signs of life in business.
represents his mortality, which haunts him from an early age.
The second hearkens back to the biblical book of Genesis and
the fable told there of Adam and Eve, who ate from the tree of
knowledge and were expelled from the Garden of Eden. Neville
Percival
understands earlier than his companions that their innocence
Percival never speaks in The Waves. Instead, everything the
has been or will be lost, a knowledge that is intimately
reader knows about him comes from the words of the six
connected with mortality. Finally, the stairway likely represents
friends. Percival's charms are physical, and he is described as
Neville's homosexuality. Stairs for him lead to upper regions,
intuitive rather than intellectual. A handsome, strong athlete, he
where bedrooms are located. He knows that he is attracted to
is the picture of masculinity and is loved by each friend
men and that the homosexual act is illegal in England. Although
differently. For example, he is the object of desire for Neville.
he may be able to have illicit affairs, he will never be able to
He is a hero in Bernard's world. As time passes, the friends
fulfill his desire for a lifelong partner.
separate and become more and more different from each
other. But Percival remains the projection of universal desire.
His perfection lies in his inaccessibility; his death is a reminder
Jinny of ideal beauty. His memory unites the six friends in a lyric
nostalgia, which includes the inevitability of death as part of
Jinny remains committed to the life of the sensual body. She life.
sees herself as a body and nothing more. She meets as many
other bodies as she can. For her the conquest is simple, and
the intimate connection is consistently fulfilling. She is aware of
her beauty to the point that she stands still for a few seconds
to display her assets when she first enters a room. The other
characters are concerned with permanence, making things
that will last forever. Jinny, on the other hand, lives for the
present. She follows her body's sensations at the moment.
Jinny is frequently associated with the unfurling bud. As the
flower opens, it invites pollinators to spread its sexuality so it
can live as diverse a life as possible. Its invitation is rich in
color, shape, and perfume.

Louis
From childhood, Louis, an Australian whose father is a banker,
sees himself as an outsider among his upper-class British
classmates. He prefers to be alone and strategically waits for
his other male friends to speak so that he may copy how they
say words. Being an outsider and an observer, he is much like
Rhoda, whom he shows interest in early on. He "does not fear

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The Waves Study Guide Characters 7

Character Map

Susan
Country girl; longs to
recreate her mother's life
Love
interests Friends

Percival Love Jinny

Handsome athlete interests Sensual, self-centered woman

Hero
figure

Friends

Love Bernard
Friends
interest Talkative, budding novelist

Friends

Friends

Neville Rhoda
Friends
Aloof, gay poet Sensitive, depressed loner

Friends Lovers

Louis
Brilliant man; ashamed
of his social class

Main Character

Other Major Character

Minor Character

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The Waves Study Guide Characters 8

Full Character List Louise

DeSalvo
Louise DeSalvo (1942–2018) was a
Woolf scholar and memoirist.

Character Description Ernest is a kitchen servant in the

children's boarding house. He is having
Ernest
an affair with Florrie, another servant in
Bernard, a male narrator, is a charming,
the house.
Bernard talkative young man who longs to be a
novelist.
Florrie is a laundress in the children's
Florrie boarding house. Susan sees Ernest
Susan, a female narrator, is a nurturer
Susan kiss Florrie by the clothesline outside.
and a lover of nature.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was an

Rhoda, a female narrator, is a loner Sigmund
Australian psychoanalyst and the
Rhoda who can barely tolerate conversation Freud
founder of his practice.
with more than one person at a time.

The girl is the godlike figure of dawn in

Neville, a male narrator, is a gifted poet.
Neville Girl who Chapter 3, described by the narrator as
He is a gay man who keeps to himself.
makes jewels an "enigmatic presence" that shines
down on the waves.
Jinny, a female narrator, is a narcissist
preoccupied with fancy clothes, big
Jinny Henry VIII (1491–1547) was king of
parties, her body, and the bodies of
England from 1509 to 1547. The six
others. King Henry VIII
friends dine in his former home,
Hampton Court.
Louis, a male narrator, is the self-
Louis
conscious son of an Australian banker.
Miss Hudson is a teacher at the
Miss Hudson
children's boarding school.
Percival is the handsome, athletically
endowed hero of the boys' boarding
Miss Lambert is the seductive teacher
Percival school. He is the only character out of
Miss Lambert at the girls' school whom all the
the friends who has no voice in the
students admire.
narrative.

Larpent is an athlete at the boys'

Charles Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) was a
school. In Chapter 7, Larpent is the
Baudelaire French author. Larpent
voice inside Bernard's head imploring
him to begin a new chapter of his life.
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) is
Walter
considered the most important German
Benjamin Hermione Lee wrote the biography
literary critic of the 20th century. Hermione Lee
Virginia Woolf (1996).

Mrs. Constable is an aid at the

Man on the Jinny exchanges glances with the man
Mrs. children's boarding school who,
train on the train and fantasizes about him.
Constable wrapped in a towel, bathes Bernard, to
his great pleasure.
Bernard strikes up a conversation with
Plumber
the plumber on the train.
Dr. Crane, who wears a crucifix on a
Dr. Crane chain, is the headmaster at the boys'
boarding school. Russian Rhoda impersonates a Russian
empress empress in a dream.
Miss Curry is a teacher at the children's
Miss Curry
boarding school.

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The Waves Study Guide
The shop girl works in the lingerie shop
that Rhoda visits following Percival's
The shop girl
death. The shop girl awakens Rhoda to
"envy, hatred, jealousy, and spite."
Writer Lytton Strachey (1880–1932)
Lytton was a bisexual member of the
Strachey Bloomsbury Group. He was likely the
model for Neville in The Waves.
In the final chapter, the stranger lends
Stranger his ear to Bernard, who tells the story
of his life.
Mr. Wickham is the teacher at the boys'
school who extends exclusive
Mr. Wickham
invitations for students to meet in his
office.
k Plot Summary
The novel is divided into nine chapters or sections, each
without numbers or titles. The sections are similar in format but
vary in length. Each section opens with an italicized interlude
that describes the position of the sun, the action of the waves,
and the nature of the light during different points in one full
day. The diction (word choice) and the style of all voices,
including the introductory voice, are alike. Everyone speaks in
the same way, and every character speaks or is spoken about
in each section, except for Percival.
For convenience, the sections are numbered as chapters.
Chapter 1
The novel begins at sunrise and is narrated by six children over
the course of a day. The children live together in a boarding
school in the country. Snatches of their inner monologues
reveal their feelings and impressions about the world, events,
and people around them. All the characters seem to have
excitable natures and to be at the edge of puberty. Their
monologues serve to both distinguish them and establish
connections between them.
The action begins at breakfast, and Rhoda is indoors, setting
the table. The other children are playing in the garden. Louis is
hiding in the garden wishing to be unseen by the others when
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Plot Summary 9
Jinny finds him and kisses him on the nape of his neck. Susan
sees the kiss and runs away in tears. Bernard follows Susan to
comfort her.
As the day proceeds, the children sit in the schoolroom for
their lessons. Rhoda is stuck in math class because she cannot
figure out the answer to an equation. Louis wishes to mask his
Australian accent and his father's work as a banker because
the others are from upper-class British backgrounds.
Bernard invites Jinny to hide in the garden with him. Jinny
reflects that soon Miss Curry will blow her whistle to summon
them all back to class. This causes her to think about the
future. Soon the girls and boys will be divided and sent off to
new schools. What matters now will soon have no significance.
The whistle blows, and Miss Curry takes the class on a brisk
walk. Neville reveals that he is "too delicate" and easily gets
tired and sick, so he is excused from taking a walk with his
peers. He reflects on something he overheard the previous
day, a terrifying conversation among the house staff about a
man who was found with his throat cut. On the way back from
the walk, Susan sees two of the staff kissing while the laundry
is being hung to dry.
As the day ends, the children eat, say prayers, and march
upstairs for baths and bed. Bernard becomes aroused during
his bedtime bath administered by Mrs. Constable. Rhoda has a
disturbing dream of falling, "tumbled by waves" and pursued on
"endless paths" by strangers.
Chapter 2
The sun from the early morning rises even higher, marking
midmorning. The heavy blow of the waves produces "muffled
thuds" on the shore.
The children are preparing to leave school and be separated
into boys' and girls' boarding schools. Bernard feels scared, but
as he works to appear composed, he decides to copy others
and then learns they are copying him as well.
At the new school, Neville is filled with excitement at the
prospect of a classical education, while Bernard makes fun of
the headmaster. The girls, on the other hand, are distressed by
their poorly appointed school. Rhoda rejects the brown serge
uniforms they all must wear. Jinny and Rhoda are most
interested in the dress of their female teachers. Louis revels in
The Waves Study Guide
the quiet order of the procession into the chapel and how the
boys leave their differences at the door. He submits to the
preacher, Dr. Crane's, authority, while Neville scoffs at it and
regards fellow student Percival, whom the other boys notice as
well, as a talented athlete. Neville longs for Percival and
imagines a life with him. Louis comments on Percival's
intellectual weakness.
Susan reveals how much she despises each passing day at the
school. She longs to return to the country life. Jinny fantasizes
about a future with the love of attractive men and vows not to
be pinned down to only one. Rhoda has a strange dream in
which she impersonates a Russian empress.
The school year ends, and the boys and girls prepare to leave
their respective schools. All the children dream about their
adult lives. Neville laments that Percival will have easily
forgotten him. All are happy and a little worried. Even Rhoda,
the most vulnerable of the group, is optimistic.
Returning home, Susan vows never to send her children away
to school or to stay overnight in London again. Jinny quietly
flirts with a man on the train and thinks rapturous thoughts.
Rhoda remembers an embarrassing moment. Louis is sitting in
a third-class car. He rattles off the universities his friends will
attend and reveals that he will go to work instead. Neville, who
hides his teary eyes in a book, regards Bernard's affable nature
and thinks that Bernard views the plumber he has just met the
same as he does Neville and Louis. He concludes that he, their
friends, and the people Bernard meets are "all phrases in
Bernard's story." He remarks that he has no issues with what
others think of him, comparing himself to Louis, who hides his
accent and the fact that his father is a banker.
Chapter 3
The sun has risen with the glorious colors of the seemingly
eternal day. The dawn is represented as a girl who makes
jewels in the colors of the waters. As she watches, the waves
darken and splash the beach. They leave debris as if from the
wreck of a small boat. In the garden, the smell of decay
prevails. As the wind rises, the waves are driven "like turbaned
warriors" with poisoned weapons. They "advance upon the
feeding flocks, the white sheep."
Bernard is at college. He recognizes his divided being, claiming
that he is lively in public and privately secretive. He claims to
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Plot Summary 10
need the stimulus of other people to fulfill his destiny as a
writer. Neville, immersed in a world of sensation, is jubilant. He
loves the beauty of the world and especially the young men he
watches on boats on the river.
Louis faces a mundane life in business. He sees himself as an
outsider. He vows to bring order to his life's disorder by
translating classical poetry. He acknowledges "hatred and
bitterness" for the easy lives of Bernard and Neville, whose
class gives them the privileges he will not have.
Susan is at home on the farm, enjoying her chores and the
sounds of singing birds. She has only a brief nostalgic moment
in which she thinks of her time away at school and her old
friends. As she sews in the evening, she thinks about Jinny
kissing Louis.
Jinny is a night owl and a party girl. She dreams that she
attends glamorous social events among aristocratic, wealthy
people, a crowd to which she belongs. Jinny wears a silk gown;
her hair and makeup are perfect. Rhoda's self-examination
nets a social fantasy. She is at an elegant party and hides
behind a brocade curtain. Hidden, she can address and contain
her fear.
Chapter 4
The sun has completely risen in the sky above the waves. Now
the waves are moving steadily in and out from the sea to the
shore. From its position at this point in the day, the sun
illuminates cornfields, hills, and bodies of water in magnificent
color, and birds in the garden sing in the hot sunshine. Indoors,
the afternoon light casts sharp shadows on the walls, the
furniture, and other objects within the room.
Bernard heads into London to meet his friends at a restaurant.
He is now engaged to be married. While traveling, his mind fills
with ideas about the cycle of human life. He has reached the
point when he will soon have children of his own. He has
thoughts about his mortality.
Neville arrives at the restaurant early and watches from his
place as his friends enter, highly anticipating the arrival of
Percival. He greets Louis, embracing his friend's mix of
insecurity and bravado. Susan's arrival revives Louis's
expectations of his friends: Jinny's sexual frivolity, Rhoda's
terrors, Susan's self-contained nonchalance. Neville notes in
The Waves Study Guide
Bernard's entrance his friend's unselfconscious love of all
mankind.
Waiting for Percival to join them, the assembled group begins
to reminisce. Their talk mirrors the opposing thoughts Bernard
had earlier: expressing thoughts of autonomy versus
dependence. Once Percival arrives, they join in delightful
conversation. They have dinner, pay the bill, and prepare to
leave. They all experience sadness as Percival leaves in a cab,
and they wonder if they will ever experience again a moment
like they have just had.
Chapter 5
The sun is at its highest point. In its relentless glare and heat, it
illuminates every detail on the landscape and causes the rocks
to become hot. The waves fall heavily and release torrents of
spray.
Neville announces that Percival is dead, having fallen from his
horse. Neville is leveled by the news, while Bernard faces an
ultimate ambivalence. His son's birth coincides with Neville's
death. Bernard cannot distinguish joy from sorrow.
Rhoda responds typically to the news, wanting to withdraw into
herself. She buys a bunch of violets and walks the
embankment along the river. Finally, she tosses her violets in
honor of Percival "into the wave that flings its white foam to the
uttermost corners of the earth."
Chapter 6
The sun is no longer high in the sky, and there is a curious
instability in the elements of the landscape. The dragonflies
hang motionless, then shoot across the line of sight. The reeds
that do not stir in the glass-like calm of the river begin to bend
as the water ripples. The dripping tap stops and then drips
some drops again.
The waves crash and the spray leaps high, leaving pools inland
and stranding a fish that lashes its tail as the waves draw back.
All six friends have moved into midlife busyness. Louis is
content, "spreading commerce where there was chaos in the
far parts of the world." Also, Rhoda and Louis become lovers.
Susan, who has a child, has lost her need to be out in nature.
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Plot Summary 11
She wants only to sleep, and in her state of inactivity, she
imagines that Jinny beckons, inviting her to come back to city
life.
Neville acknowledges the importance of homely comforts and,
above all, a partner. He longs for a faithful lover but, lacking
that, observes that he will always seek a partner, for it is the
encounter more than the individual that is crucial to his
happiness.
Chapter 7
The sun is low in the sky and the tide has receded, leaving the
pearl-white sand even and shining. Birds circle and settle to
roost. Only one bird flies off to the marsh and sits alone,
opening and closing its wings. The sun warms the fields and
casts golden auras around everything that moves.
Each character speaks, but they are not together.
Bernard buys a ticket to Rome and sits on a bench musing
over his need to collect people and make up stories. He
wonders if there is one true story.
Susan, in a long lyric passage, describes the life she planned
and lived as full. She sees herself as an "imprisoned reed." Her
prison, however, is a perfect family circle.
Jinny, aging and still perky, stands at a tube (subway) stop in
the heart of London. She is excited by the modernization of
London—the colorful omnibuses, the cars, and the beautifully
dressed people. She enjoys hailing a taxi by raising her arm in a
small gesture that used to bring men to her side. Not without
self-irony, she embraces her life even as she ages.
Neville is detached from all around him and aware of his
choices. He thinks of Rhoda and Louis, neither of whom, he
believes, can be content with "this ordinary scene." Left to his
own devices, he reads and thinks about the past.
Louis is alone, proud of his economic success and still
suffering the class differences that were so painful in his youth.
He thinks about Rhoda and misses her. He believes that if he
were to complete a single poem, he would feel whole.
Rhoda, who has always been alone through a constitutional
necessity, recalls how she attempted to have a life by copying
her girlfriends in dress and habit. She has remained alone
The Waves Study Guide Plot Summary 12

except for her romance with Louis. Rhoda finds pleasure in her
travels. She imagines suicide and then leaves her fantasy to
knock on the door of her inn in Spain.
Chapter 9
The sun has set, and the sea and sky are indistinguishable
once again. Dark shadows are everywhere. The world and its

Chapter 8 inhabitants far and wide were in darkness: streets and people,
the turf, the trees, the snail shells, upland slopes, pinnacles of
the mountain, valleys, and girls sitting on porches.
It is windy and raining as the sun sets, although there is a
"single darting spear of sunshine" still visible. It is autumn, and Bernard finds a new audience, a stranger whom he invites to
the mood is one of loneliness. dine with him. In return for the company, Bernard explains the
meaning of his life. He is thinking about the emotional moments
There is to be a reunion of the group of six at Hampton Court,
of communion in his reunions with his five childhood friends. All
the lavish home of British royalty built in 1530 for King Henry
these "things happen in one second and last forever."
VIII (1491–1547; reigned 1509–47) and currently a tourist
destination. Bernard thinks about the "shock of meeting" as he The understanding that these things, large and small, are
sees the group gathered. He is the last to arrive. different for each of his friends brings on a singular sadness
and, typical of Bernard and his restless mind, immediate relief.
As they settle at the table, Neville baits Susan, talking about
The reunions, as he remembers them, functioned to reestablish
the dull routines of marriage that she must suffer in contrast to
the charmed circle and dependably to break the circle as the
his mornings. "Each day is dangerous," he admits with some
six friends parted.
pleasure. Bernard reenters the conversation, reminding all that
he is a collector and creator of stories. He admits that he does Bernard tells the stories of the novel's preceding eight
not fear death. episodes. He adds details, including Susan's rejection of
Percival and Rhoda's more recent suicide. By the end of his
Louis responds with the notion that the thread he spins is
stories, he identifies himself as very grand, celebrating the
broken. He lists the incidents that break the thread: he begins
importance of the individual. He has done his usual about-face,
by recalling Jinny kissing him on the neck. There is the teasing
accepting the notion of how small the individual is in the larger
he endured and "the shadows of dungeons and the tortures
scheme of things. Briefly, he recognizes that old age is best
and infamies practiced by man upon man." He claims an
defined as the moment when he could still appreciate the
ambivalence made of tenderness coupled with ruthlessness.
pageant of the world of people and the natural world.
Jinny reacts to Louis. As beauty for her lives in the body, in
The presence of his dinner partner revives Bernard. They pay
being touched, she claims to be always tender. Her history is a
the bill and part. The painfully familiar self-consciousness that
story of many men who arrive when she raises her arm. She is
spurs his natural curiosity and keeps him in the world startles
also willing and able to shift identities in response to what
him. Returned to life—and the presence of the mind—he sees
people ask of her. She sees the physical changes in herself
his new challenge versus mortality.
and insists that she is not afraid.

Rhoda confesses that she has not changed, although her

behavior has. She points to her apparent lack of fear in
approaching the reunion and admits it is just that: she has
learned to act as though she is not afraid. She sees herself as
divided between her physical presence and habits and her true
feelings.

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The Waves Study Guide Plot Summary 13

Timeline of Events

At dawn

Six children play in a garden at boarding school.

A short time later

Jinny kisses Louis in the garden.

Immediately after

Susan witnesses the kiss and is distraught.

That afternoon

Neville recalls a story he overheard about a man found

with his throat cut.

That evening

Bernard becomes excited as Mrs. Constable sponge

bathes him.

Some months later

The boys go to a new boarding school, and the girls go

to a lesser school.

Soon after

Percival becomes Neville's object of desire.

A year later

The group reunites for dinner with Percival.

Some time later

They learn that Percival has died in India.

Years later

They are fully immersed in their adult lives.

More time passes

All travel on distinct paths, alone.

A decade later

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The Waves Study Guide Plot Summary 14

The friends hold a reunion at Hampton Court.

Some time later

Rhoda commits suicide.

Soon after that

Bernard explains his life to a stranger.

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The Waves Study Guide
c Chapter Summaries
Each of the nine sections in The Waves begins with an
interlude, italicized text describing the sun's position in the sky
and the movement of the waves at different points in the day,
from sunrise to sunset. For purposes of summary and analysis,
this study guide identifies the sections as chapters.
Chapter 1
Summary
The first chapter opens with a description of the sea and the
sky just before sunrise. An unidentified voice narrates. Creating
light out of darkness, this narrator describes the grandeur of
sunrise. At first the description is all color, texture, and
movement. The narrator's eye takes in a panorama of the sea
and continues to watch as the light increases, making visible
the line separating the sea from the sky.
The narration then shifts to the characters, now the speakers:
Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis. Each
character comments about the sights and sounds they
experience at sunrise. Bernard sees a ring that "quivers and
hangs in a loop of light" above him. Susan sees a slither of
yellow spreading to meet a purple stripe. Rhoda hears the
chirping of birds, while Neville sees "a globe ... hanging down in
a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill." Jinny
describes the sunlight as crimson and "twisted with gold
threads," and Louis observes a shadow bent like an elbow.
Eventually, attention turns to the house, where the kitchen is
becoming alive with the chores involved with preparing
breakfast. Rhoda, a loner, sets the table, and the children soon
retreat into the house for breakfast, except for Louis who
hides in the garden, wishing to be unseen. Jinny encounters
Louis in his hiding place and kisses him on the nape of his
neck. Susan sees, is jealous, and runs away in tears. Sobbing,
she flings herself on the forest floor.
Bernard follows Susan into the woods, attempting to comfort
her. She is so distraught over what she saw that she wishes to
die. Bernard leads Susan to explore and takes her to a wall, the
border of "Elvedon." It is a large white house on a farm at the
other end of the beech woods. They spy on the actions taking
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Chapter Summaries 15
place, noticing a lady sitting and writing and the gardeners
sweeping the lawn. Bernard thinks a gardener has spotted
them. Fearing what the gardener may do to them, Bernard and
Susan flee.
During the children's math lesson, Louis worries about his
accent. He is Australian and waits to hear Bernard speak so
that he can imitate an upper-class British accent. Louis knows
the occupations and social classes of the parents of each of
his friends. He wishes to hide the fact that his father is a
banker in Brisbane. Smart but shy, Louis watches in the
classroom and notes that Rhoda is terrified of numbers. Being
the only student who cannot answer the equation that Miss
Hudson has written on the board, Rhoda must stay after class
until she solves it. Louis sees Rhoda's weakness and is not
afraid of her.
After their math lesson, Bernard invites Jinny to hide with him
in the garden. He fantasizes they are in a jungle. But Jinny's
mind wanders to the future, when soon the friends will split up
to go to different schools. Miss Curry's whistle cuts in, and the
children gather in an orderly line to take their required walk.
Neville is "too delicate" to go on a walk and stays at the house
while the others go. During this time he tries to recover from
the horror he overheard the night before: a man's body was
discovered with his throat slit and his blood gurgling through
the gutter. Neville chooses to call the scene "death among the
apple trees." He concludes that everyone is doomed "by the
apple trees ... which we cannot pass."
At tea, Susan announces that she has witnessed a moment of
passion between the laundress, Florrie, and Ernest, a servant
in the kitchen. Afterward, the children are whisked off to sing
songs and pray; then they troop upstairs to prepare for bed.
Mrs. Constable, draped in a towel, bathes Bernard. He glows
with sensual pleasure as Mrs. Constable squeezes water from
a sponge over his head and it trickles down his spine. Rhoda
happily retreats to bed but is startled awake by a dream of
falling. She is unable to arouse herself from her dream, in
which she continues to fall. She is "tumbled" by waves,
"stretched ... among ... endless paths, with people pursuing,
pursuing."
Analysis
The opening of each section contains a description of the
The Waves Study Guide
sun's position and the movement and sounds of the ocean's
waves as they meet the shore. The novel is about the changes
people experience from youth through old age, both
individually and in conjunction with one another. Each wave is
described as an individual action and as part of not only the
ocean, but the sky and the land as well. Just as waves travel to
shore in patterns reliant on the physics of wind and water,
these characters' successive movements are developmentally
matched.
The interlude to Chapter 1 is all about the setting. The setting is
on the beach at sunrise. Section by section, the interludes
move from dawn to sunset, marking a single day as the
characters age across a lifetime.
Typically, modernist texts often invite the reader to pay as
close attention to the style of the writing as to the narrative. In
The Waves, italicized text describes a movement from the
panorama of sea and sky—all color, texture, and movement—to
a drama accompanied by the sighs of the waves. The dawn is a
metaphor: arranged by the arm of a woman raising a lamp to
reveal the colors of the world. The space contracts as the
poet's eyes move to a domestic space, a house and garden,
and the smaller music of the birds. There is the hint of a human
presence as a blind stirs in a window of the house. As the
scene comes to a close, the "blank melody" of the birds—a
wave of small, repetitious sounds—prepares for human melody,
presumably not blank.
Following the interlude, the children take on the role of
narrator. They speak in the same voice as the third-person
narrator in the interlude—lyric, admiring, and specific—as they
describe what they see and hear in the early-morning sunlight.
The diction of each speaker is the same as that of the
narrator's voice in the introduction in the sense that they
combine all parts of the natural world into one but remain
separated by the speaker's voice.
This part of the chapter develops principally in
movement—waves of vital energy that reveal and emphasize a
relationship between the dawn of the natural world and that of
its human inhabitants. The melody of the six children is not
blank as birdsong is, for they make meaning as they speak.
They don't repeat each other. Each has a concern and an
emphasis. In terms of style, however, it would be difficult to
separate them; they all speak in the same manner. Their
interwoven speeches come in waves. Their separate meanings
derive from close observation and the sensations these sights
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Chapter Summaries 16
stir in the viewer. Rhoda's observation creates a transition from
the activities of nature, which leave traces to human concerns.
She notes that a snail flattens the grass as it moves. An
association to the snail's effect on the grass leads Neville to
observe that the "stones are cold on my feet." Jinny adds that
the back of her hand burns while "the palm is clammy and
damp with dew." Nature acts on each of the speakers in
specific ways, and through cause and effect, the human world
meets up with the natural world.
There is vibrancy to the colors of everything the characters
see and a curious momentum that recalls the rise and fall of
the surf, a repetitive vitality. Everything so carefully observed
comes to life in a rhythmic, nervous energy. The children
themselves exhibit this energy. They are likely preteens. They
are playing in the garden of what seems to be a boarding
school. There is an air of anxiety, erotically charged yet
innocent.
The vulnerability of childhood and unconscious responses to
budding sexuality fill the chapter. There is a demonstration of
each character's particular sensibilities: Jinny surprising Louis
with a kiss, Susan spying the servants' embrace, Rhoda
confessing self-consciousness and envy of the prettier girls,
Neville eavesdropping on a lurid tale of murder, and Bernard's
sensual thoughts during a sponge bath. These events make
significant marks on each child's beings, as they are etched in
the children's memories for a lifetime.
The children's fun in play and the beauties of the garden give
way to Neville's prophecy and Rhoda's nightmare. Neville's
mystical sense that the "immitigable tree which we cannot
pass" dooms all seems to summarize anxiety and impending
disaster that can neither be lessened nor avoided. Rhoda's
nightmare confirms the terror beneath the anxiety.
A scene in the garden, full of the energy of life and beauty of
nature, turns, in the end, toward a developing dread and
recognition of individual vulnerability. The garden, moreover,
recalls the Garden of Eden from the Book of Genesis—a
biblical paradise from which God banished the first humans,
Adam and Eve, after they ate an apple off a forbidden
tree—and the loss of innocence predicted in Neville's fantasy
of the "immitigable" apple tree. All who are in the garden, like
Adam and Eve, will suffer God's wrath. They will lose their
innocence and face their mortality. In this way, the first chapter
tells the whole story. Although the characters are young and at
the start of their lives, the story will end, as all stories do, with
The Waves Study Guide
their deaths.
The power of the section is the creation of setting as
concentric circles, a natural environment that is exquisite even
in its repetitions and the waves surrounding a smaller circle of
human interactions. The unspoken feelings of each character
create an emotional setting. Each character's movements
through the garden and among peers reference these feelings
at the narrative level. The human experience is only a small
part of the achievement here, a feeling of insecurity and
anxiety and a sense of prevailing doom barely masked by daily
events.
The opening menace and beauty of the sea—the guarantee of
the repeating waves as they come and go—would seem to be
an introduction to the human scene, as blank a melody as the
repetitious birdsong. While nature is the model for the
repetitions that resemble human life, the blank melody belongs
to the natural world. Dread, anxiety, and vulnerability activate
the mortal world in Rhoda's nightmare.
Bernard's memory consists of the sensual pleasures of a
sponge bath at the capable hands of Mrs. Constable, herself
wrapped in a towel. Readers learn in the course of the novel
that Bernard is the character most comfortably in the world as
an adult. To recognize the nature of his early moment of being
in which he encounters sensual pleasure without
trepidation—say, in contrast to Louis, who is horrified by Jinny's
kiss on the nape of his neck—is to have a glimpse of Woolf's
method for creating characters whose reality is significantly
more profound than the mere appearance of things.
With these examples, readers can begin to see how the brief
sketches in this first chapter represent a fresh approach to the
creation of character in fiction. Woolf had struggled with
writing biographical text. In writing autobiographical text, she
found a way to approach real life, beginning with the intensity
of feelings, altogether natural, to the vulnerable body and early
life events.
Chapter 2
Summary
At the beginning of Chapter 2, the interlude documents the
colors that the sunrise reveals. Blue and green waves on the
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Chapter Summaries 17
sand leave "shallow pools of light," and the rocks look hard with
red crevices. As the sun touches the garden, sharp, thin
shadows emerge, and the dew on the flowers and leaves
creates a "mosaic of single sparks." The sun on the house
makes magic: a golden thread appears on the white table
linens, and buds open, revealing quivering flowers. Solid things,
like plates and knives, appear to be liquid. The hard blows of
breaking waves fall with soft thuds, like logs dropping on the
shore.
The children are preparing to leave the boarding school and
give up the connections they have forged there. The boys will
go to a new boarding school; the girls will go to a lesser school.
There has been a graduation ceremony. Bernard is frightened
for what the future holds but works to appear composed. He is
afraid he will cry. Bernard sees Neville and Louis in their long
coats. He decides to copy their composed demeanor. At the
same time, Louis determines to follow Bernard, whom he
believes is composed.
The boys arrive at their new school by train. Neville is full of
excitement at the prospect of a classical education. Bernard
makes fun of the headmaster he calls "Old Crane," who has
served too long. According to Bernard, Dr. Crane's speeches
are marked by old ideas. Dr. Crane is further identified by a
cross that he wears.
The girls, on the other hand, remain distressed by their poorly
appointed school. Rhoda rejects the brown serge (strong-
clothed) uniforms that all the girls must wear, claiming the
clothes rob her of her identity. Rhoda vows to find safety in a
friend she can trust among strangers and a secret place in the
woods where she can store her treasures. Jinny and Rhoda
study Miss Lambert's appearance, noting the "amorous light"
reflected on a "black stain on the white page of the prayer
book" from the teacher's purple ring. Jinny, who disapproves of
Miss Lambert's dress, has a fantasy of herself in a red dress,
"thin as a veil," in which she will pirouette as the dress billows
and winds about her body.
Louis rejoices in the order he finds in Dr. Crane's Bible lessons.
Louis, the brightest of the students, has found his place. He
relishes the prospects for fellowship and anonymity at the
school. Neville cringes at all the talk of religious study, recalling
an Easter procession in Rome and the failures of religion. He
turns to sneak a look at Percival, an older student. He imagines
Percival, with his "straight nose" and inexpressive blue eyes, as
a churchwarden. In the image, Percival carries birch to whip
The Waves Study Guide
little boys who misbehave. He admires how Percival flicks his
hand to the back of his neck.
Out in the playing fields, Louis longs to be a hero at cricket and
knows the sport is not his gift. He admires and loathes Percival,
who is a talented athlete and who Louis considers sloppy in
appearance. Neville longs for Percival and imagines a life with
him. He recognizes, as Louis does, Percival's intellectual
weakness. He also knows that Percival has a way of knowing,
of understanding that surpasses the intellectualizing of others.
There is a whiff of gay liaisons (today, sexual harassment of
students) when Louis thinks of knocking on Mr. Wickham's
door.
Susan longs to return to the country life with her father and her
animals, a place of solitude where she can be free. Nightly, she
tears a page from her calendar, crumpling it up and counting
the days until she can go home. Jinny dislikes the night and
wishes for a continuous day. She also fantasizes a future with
the love of attractive men and vows not to be pinned down to
just one man. Rhoda has a strange dream in which she
impersonates a Russian empress. She claims that Miss
Lambert "blows it down." In her dream, she offers her body and
a garland of flowers to an unidentified recipient.
Eventually, the school term ends, and the characters prepare
to depart from their institutions. Bernard thinks it is unlikely
that most of them will meet again. Neville watches Percival
leave and acknowledges that he loves him. As they prepare to
depart, each character's wishes and concerns are revealing.
Neville regrets leaving Percival, whom he loves. Susan vows
never to return to London or to send her children away to
school. She rejects the materialism of the wealthy and the
struggles of the poor. Her life with her father is a subsistence
existence, an idyll of plain folks, farmers, who attend to their
own needs and contribute to the well-being of others.
Jinny dreams of seduction. She exchanges glances with a man
on the train as she heads home and believes they have marked
approval of each other's bodies. She thinks about a "great
society of bodies" to which hers is introduced.
For Rhoda, the beginning of summer marks a drama of
vulnerability. Her metaphor is a gray puddle that, with some
effort, she manages to cross. She knows she will survive by
simple acts of will and physical strength. "This is the life then to
which I am committed," she concludes.
Louis, the brightest dreamer among the boys, will go home to
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Chapter Summaries 18
work in business with his father while his classmates will go on
to prestigious universities. His poetic musing will save him, and
he promises himself no bitterness or envy.
Bernard, carefree and interested in all the people he meets,
loses his transfer ticket to Edinburgh. Confused, he hurries off
to his next adventure.
Neville believes his fate, to his dismay, is to become an
academic and marry a university woman. He has contempt for
the wealthy and already is suffering the loss of his dreams. He
is the last of his friends to leave the train, happy and terrified
with the tumult that is London.
Analysis
In this section the simple narrative unfolds, riding waves of
intense emotion. The characters leave the enchanted garden
and experience a separation of the close bonds of their lives in
paradise. This section of The Waves operates as an emotional
history of the development of the six characters. Striking
metaphors release waves of emotion typical of the intensities
of late adolescence in presentation of the pertinent details of
each young life. At the same time, this particular chapter
captures the vulnerability of early adolescence in an upper-
class Victorian culture: the mix of conceit, dreams, and
extreme vulnerability in the transitions from childhood to adult
life. The emotional sweep of this novel captures what Woolf
called "real life" in a manner never done before.
Matters of identity, particularly concerning gender, combine
with social issues in this chapter. Most interesting are the
academic opportunities the boys' school poses, while the girls,
unhappy in their "brown serge" uniforms, are focused on
clothing and appearance. Jinny complains about the looking
glass in the staircase that limits her view of herself. Rhoda
hides from her face in the mirror by standing behind Susan,
saying: "I am not here. I have no face." Like Louis, Rhoda takes
cues for her behavior by watching others. Rhoda expresses
her emptiness and depression: "I have to bang my hand against
some hard door to call myself back to the body."
Woolf, fascinated by the images in her dreams and wary of the
repetitions in her nightmares, read Freud. By 1939 she had
become fascinated by psychoanalysis. Woolf decided to
undertake what she called a self-analysis. This memory was
crucial to her understanding of the childhood traumas that she
The Waves Study Guide
believed contributed to her breakdowns, especially in the years
in which she lost the protection of her parents. When Woolf
was 13, her mother, Julia Stephen, died; at age 15 her half
sister, Stella Duckworth, who had taken over the maternal
duties in the grieving family, died. After her father Leslie
Stephen's death, George Duckworth took over as head of the
household until the Stephen siblings moved out of 22 Hyde
Park to Bloomsbury.
Woolf's feminism developed from her sense of exclusion as
she and her sisters were homeschooled and her brothers went
off to Cambridge. Moreover, her experience teaching at a
working-class college enabled her to see that intellect and
critical judgment were developments of neither class nor
gender. In her essays and working life, Woolf campaigned for
education for women and equal preparation for roles outside
of the home.
While Susan is happily committed to a life likely modeled by her
mother, her contentment might be viewed as a trope of the
text. That is, her opportunities, in a modern sense, are curtailed
by male expectations. Susan is "imprisoned" by her maternal
role. Her satisfaction is a commentary on the Victorian notion
of the "angel in the house." Woolf resurrected this term to
recall the ideal of the Victorian wife and mother's exhausting
role in service to her husband, children, and the management
of the household.
Jinny, on the other hand, may believe herself to be modern or
liberated in her view of a society of bodies, but she is a parody
of a liberated woman. She has exploited her identity, become a
projection of male desire, an anybody rather than a somebody.
Rhoda, who cannot see herself in the mirror, would seem to
have no options. The terror of what others may think about her
paralyzes Rhoda. She cannot find herself in the stereotypes of
femininity in the culture. She has no choices, no place to stand.
Both Susan and Jinny's abilities to find happiness in their roles
can be read as women subverting the male power structures
to their own ends. Susan enjoys being mistress of her domain
and experiences similar frustrations as Bernard, Louis, and
Neville with the life she has chosen. Jinny enjoys the sexual
power she exerts over men and never reveals any indication
that she is unhappy with her chosen way of life.
Woolf had used her own experience to project the emotional
confusion and trauma underlying the behaviors of the female
characters. Jinny's love of billowing dresses and entry into a
"society of bodies" mirrors Woolf's autobiographical accounts.
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Chapter Summaries 19
In "22 Hyde Park Gate," a speech Woolf gave to the Memoir
Club in 1920 named for the address of the Stephen household
when the family was intact, Woolf recalls her introduction to
society by her half brother, George Duckworth. After the death
of Julia and Leslie Stephen, George appointed himself the
guardian of his half sisters, whom he dressed in beautiful satin
gowns of the sort that Jinny might have chosen. George was
their escort for social occasions. Woolf closes the memoir with
the damning information: George was not just mother and
father and sister and brother to the mourning sisters. He was
their lover. Virginia Woolf was 16 at the time.
Louis and Neville react to the handsome, athletic Percival in
ways that are clearly homosexual, although between the two
only Neville fully embraces this aspect of his nature. At the time
the novel was written, sodomy laws, which had been enacted in
England in 1533 by King Henry VIII, were still in place. Violation
of these laws was punishable by death. The trial and two-year
incarceration of the popular playwright and novelist Oscar
Wilde (1854–1900) in 1895 was a bitter reminder that no one of
any station in life was free from official scrutiny or exempt from
state-inflicted punishment.
The Waves recalls waves of energy demanded when the group
of companions was whole and together. There is here, as there
was in Woolf's past, an underlying menace, a thump like logs
falling. In this first paragraph of the second section, it is the
flower buds that open to sound a silent alarm. They are
defenseless with their "frail clappers against their white walls."
Woolf's choice of setting recalls her family's vacation home at
the shore at St. Ives, at the time a poor fishing village on the
southern coast of England. It was there that Woolf recalled
some of the family's happiest times as well as her most
significant trauma. For many years, Woolf had been alert to the
nightmares that predicted her breakdowns. Billowing gowns,
Jinny's favorite type of skirt, were often echoed in the
nightmares that predicted Woolf's breakdowns and in the
billowing, white-capped waves in the novel. Readers can easily
imagine Woolf's bitterness at being introduced to society, also
an introduction to bodily consciousness. Woolf was a sensitive
and innocent young woman. In this sense, the quivering bud, a
silent bell, and the dull thudding of the waves become
nightmare images. They were unheard calls: the dread of
sexuality and abuse of adolescents in a culture in which
children were to be seen and not heard.
The Waves Study Guide
Chapter 3
Summary
The sun has risen with the glorious colors of the seemingly
eternal day. Dawn appears as a mysterious girl who makes
jewels in the colors of the water. As she watches, the waves
darken and splash the beach, leaving debris as if from the
wreck of a small boat.
The sun shines, but the passage darkens, and the birds sing,
alternately together and alone. The birds startle at the
movements of a black cat, and their song is briefly fearful. They
settle in the trees. From there, the birds descend "into the unlit
world where the leaf rots and the flower has fallen." There,
amidst the natural decay, they feed. This dark place is not
pretty. The smell of decay is prevalent, and the feeding yields
to an unappealingly greedy image. A bird "spiked the soft,
monstrous body of a defenseless worm, pecked again and
again."
As the sun lights the familiar scene, its rays catch the looking
glass through a window that reflects white. A real flower sits
on the windowsill with a phantom flower. Outside, the wind
rises, driving the waves "like turbaned men" with poisoned
weapons who "advance upon the feeding flocks, the white
sheep."
Bernard speaks first. He is at college and observes that the
"complexity of things becomes more close" and "the
excitement of mere living becomes daily more urgent." Bernard
recognizes his divided being, claiming that he is lively in public
yet secretive. He spins out a lengthy description of his design
to perform the various Bernards that make up his character.
He is fascinated by other lives and strives to put himself out for
others. He craves connections with those around him. He
reverses his analysis of the day and admits to being more
integrated than his previous description allows. In a long
narrative of a simple act, writing a letter, he demonstrates his
inability to settle on one role or one means of accomplishing a
task. He claims to need motivation from other people to write
his stories.
Without transition, the narrative becomes Neville's. Immersed
in a world of sensation, he declares, "Oh, I am in love with life!"
The mundane beauty of the natural world and the people he
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Chapter Summaries 20
observes surround him. Nature is glorious on its own, and the
young men he sees in boats on the river are not only beautiful
but leave beauty on everything they touch. "... Their rooms are
full of oars and oleographs (imitation oil paintings), but they
have turned all to beauty." He is emotional, and his eyes tear at
his declaration that he is a poet: "Surely I am a great poet." As
Bernard approaches, Neville complains that something now
leaves him. There is a loss of self when he is with another.
They go to Bernard's room to hide from distraction. Neville
leaves some of his poetry with Bernard. Bernard concludes
that "Neville does not feel." That means his poetry will reach
perfection. By contrast, Bernard seems to accept that, despite
his own wishes to be a writer, he will "leave nothing behind
[him] but perfect phrases littered with sand."
Louis faces a mundane life in business. He dislikes it all and
recognizes that despite his trying to fit into the ordinary world
of commerce, he is different. His outsider's view constructs a
world in flux, disorder, obliteration, and misery. He thinks that if
this is all there is to life, then life is worthless. He immediately
establishes worth as he feels the rhythm of the restaurant
where he sits. The movements of the waitresses, the color of
the food, and the general commotion stir the poet in him. He
sees himself as an outsider. He vows to bring order to life's
disorder by translating classical poetry. He acknowledges
"hatred and bitterness" toward Bernard and Neville because
their status gives them the privilege to live in comfort.
Susan is at home on the farm, a place of beauty and
productivity. Here she is mistress of all she surveys and notes
everything that belongs to her, from "flocks of birds" to the
"faint red in the sky" and "the call of the man fetching cart-
horses from the fields." She claims, "All are mine." Her soliloquy
proceeds. She has only a brief nostalgic moment in which she
thinks of the romance of city life and her old friends.
Jinny is a night owl and a party girl. She attends glamorous
social events among aristocratic, wealthy people, a crowd to
which she belongs. She is in a silk gown; her hair and makeup
are perfect. The most handsome men admire her; she is dizzy
with pleasure and aware that others are watching her. Her
rapturous delight is a performance of which Jinny is well
aware. When "slackness and indifference invade" her ecstasy
with one partner, she merely heads for the next room and new
conquest.
Rhoda's self-examination is a social fantasy that is decidedly
paranoid. She is at an elegant party. She receives faint smiles
The Waves Study Guide
from the guests that she imagines are hiding their cruelty. She
hides behind a brocade (silk) curtain. In society she lies to
protect herself and acknowledges that alone she is fine and in
control. Terrified, she recognizes that in the company of
others, she is in pieces. Her images are of inanimate objects
tossed by the waves—for example, "a cork on a rough sea" and
"a ribbon of weed." She declares herself "the foam that sweeps
and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness." She
concludes: "I am also a girl, here in this room."
Analysis
The opening to the section is a tone-poem, or musical poem
employing subjective, sensory descriptions that reflect the
narrative it introduces. The sun is up, and the world displays
activity. A personification of dawn makes jewels raises her
brow and drives "a straight pathway over the waves." The birds
sing alone and together. The birds sing from the trees
overlooking the beauty of the garden. They feed in a dark
place that stinks of rotting organic matter—a place well within
the natural order of things. Their feeding has a cruelty to it and
a sense of greed, well within the natural order of things.
The presentations of the lives of the six characters in the
mythology of an eternal day mirror natural order like the
phantom flower matches the flower on the windowsill, a paler
version or reflection of itself. The lives of everybody are
imagined in these speeches. It is almost as though the paler,
phantom version—the reflection of the flower—comes first. (It
is a reflection from a mirror on the window glass.) The jewel
maker would seem to be a prediction of the change in women's
roles. She makes beauty that is a reflection of the waves, but
she drives a straight path over them. The waves do not buffet
her or catch her in the patterns left on the beach. She has not
abandoned sight of the constant movements or is caught by
them.
In the narratives to follow, reflections like that of the phantom
flower, not the real thing but a pale image of what comes next,
repeat. Each of the six characters, now young men and
women, prepare to embark on adult pursuits. Their soliloquies
of self-examination demonstrate emerging adult identities. The
young women are caught in their mother's definitions of
women's lives, while the soul-searching of the men recognizes
life in progress. The women have hopes, while the men have
ambitions. The men also demonstrate ambivalence,
uncertainty, or insecurity about what comes next, while the
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Chapter Summaries 21
women project fantasies of women's lives as they can know
them. For the women, the future is a matter of fairly limited,
accessible models, while ambition seems to drive the men.
All three men acknowledge the life of the imagination and vow,
in varying degrees, to pursue the life of the mind. The women
dwell more in the life of the body. Susan wishes to return to the
farm and become both a mother and her mother. Jinny thinks
about the gaiety of the life of privilege and the sensuality of the
life her body offers with many companions. Rhoda finds herself
lost to society; her self-searching would seem to yield a true
self-awareness. Unfortunately, that self-awareness is
unboundedly negative. Unlike either Susan or Jinny, who find
sustaining purpose in their bodies—one with restraint, the other
with freedom—Rhoda feels only alienation. She loves her body
most when she is alone, swathed in white, falling through the
sheets into a dream. She has no outlet, as the men do, in
poetry or language. Thus she is more thoroughly isolated than
any of the others. Through her, Woolf suggests that for Rhoda,
for women, suffering is the catalyst for independence. Rhoda is
the most emotionally fragile of the women, and in that very
sense, potentially free.
Chapter 4
Summary
The sun is now over the water, and the waves are crashing
with a rhythmic thud, tossing their blue-steel and diamond-
tipped spray onto the beach. The waves draw in and out from
the shore as if an engine powers them. Rivers, hills, cornfields,
and birds are lit up by the sun's light and glowing with brilliant
color. Each of the birds sings alone. Despite the beauty of their
feathers, the birds' songs are harsh. Their eyes bulge, and they
sing as if the edge of being were "sharpened and must cut" the
light, earth, and all else that surrounds. They sweep and soar
sharply and twitter shrill notes.
Inside the room, the sun falls in sharp wedges. Objects no
longer have shadows, and their details become more
pronounced: a plate looks like a white lake, a knife resembles a
sharp piece of ice. The grain on the wood and the veins of the
china look more engraved. A jar looks so green that the viewer
cannot withhold their attention to it. As the light increases,
shadows come together in the background.
The Waves Study Guide Chapter Summaries 22

The action of the chapter opens with Bernard aboard a train at his table. Neville thinks that he will not be able to bear it if
entering London. He is struck with awe at the splendor of the Percival does not show up.
city as his train moves from station to station. He notices the
force of the wind created by the train's enormous speed. The Neville sees Louis enter. Louis looks at his reflection in the

wind strikes people and things on the platforms as the train mirror and does not like what he sees. Neville greets Louis,

passes. Bernard is now engaged to be married and says that embracing his friend's mix of insecurity and bravado. Louis

he is happy. But he also feels that he is part of "this speed, this then notices that Susan has arrived and explains that "she has

missile hurled at the city." He thinks about how everyone on the not dressed, because she despises the futility of London." She

train has the same goal: to arrive at the station. However, no approaches the table with alarming certainty. Rhoda arrives,

unity exists among the passengers once the train arrives. making herself unseen. Louis admits that they torture her and

People push off the train to get through the gate first to that Rhoda dreads and despises all of them.

become individual people. Bernard thinks that when they pull

Jinny enters next, and it seems that everyone in the restaurant
up to the station, he will not shove to the door to get off first.
halts. As she nears the table, the behaviors of the friends all

Bernard claims to be fully satisfied, without desire, and thus change. Louis straightens his tie, Neville thumbs the silverware

prepared to submit to an "omnipresent, general life." As he nervously, and Susan hides her unkempt fingernails under the

waits for the lift (elevator), he thinks more about the human table. Bernard is last to arrive, appearing disheveled and happy

need for individuality and all the mundane things people hurry to see his friends.

off to do. Bernard, however, claims that he has no aim or

Every time the door opens and shuts, Neville announces in
ambition. He cannot remember his past, his nose, the color of
misery, "He has not come." Then Percival enters and makes his
his eyes, or what his general opinion of himself is. He only
way to the table. Percival's arrival lifts Neville's spirits; he is
knows that in times of emergency, his body takes over, willing
delighted. Bernard observes how Percival smooths his hair; he
itself to live.
secretly declares that Percival is a hero. Percival takes a seat

Bernard goes on to think about how his life is prolonged next to Susan, whom he loves.

because of his engagement. Someday, he will have children.

As the dinner proceeds, the friends reminisce about their
He then thinks about his lost identity and how he cannot
childhood at the boarding school. Bernard recalls Mrs.
adequately express himself when he has no audience. He
Constable and her bath sponge. Susan thinks about the time
needs to see the light in other people's eyes to know himself.
she caught Florrie and Ernest in an intimate moment by the
He thinks about his friends who recoil from the attention of
clothesline. Neville remembers the man with his throat cut.
others. He thinks about how he can say things to his friends,
who see him in many different ways and who retrieve him from Bernard's memories then shift to adolescence, when the boys
darkness. went to a boarding school and the girls moved on to a lesser
school. Bernard reflects on how the experience of going away
Bernard is meeting with his friends tonight. They have planned
to the schools changed the six friends. Bernard concludes that
a send-off dinner for Percival, who is moving to India. Bernard
the friends are now together because of some common
is pleased to think about how his friends expand his identity as
emotion. He wonders if perhaps it is love that brought them
each sees him differently, but admits that they drum him alive.
together.
His singularity returns as he thinks about dining with friends
and his engagement. "I am Bernard, myself," he concludes. Louis thinks about how he smoothed his hair when he entered
the restaurant, hoping to look like his friends. He understands
Neville arrives early and watches as his friends enter. He
that he cannot be them because already he has lived a
admits he purposely arrived early so that he can "taste every
thousand lives. Louis admires Percival and Susan but despises
moment of anticipation" while watching the door open, hoping
the others. It is because of them that he smooths his hair and
to see Percival. A satisfying feeling of suspense grows within
hides his accent. Still, he believes he is stronger and fiercer
him every time he sees the door open. As he waits, he notices
than they are.
the hostility and indifference of the other diners while he gets
more excited about the idea that soon Percival will be seated The narrative continues. Each character reveals his or her

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The Waves Study Guide
thoughts and feelings about the people they all have become,
and they celebrate the time they are having together. After
dinner, Percival leaves in a taxi. Bernard wonders what is to
come of the friends after Percival departs. Neville is overcome
with pain as Percival leaves, wondering what the friends can do
to keep him. Percival is gone. The friends share a moment in
which their conversation is in sync in a way that gives them all
pleasure.
Analysis
As in the previous chapters, the interlude takes place on the
beach with a view of the water. However, the tone has
changed. The energy of the water is different; the images are
muscular and military. The tide hits the shore with more force,
pushing to shore and pulling back to sea rhythmically. Though
the earth is bathed in sunlight that exposes brilliant colors of all
that inhabits it, the mood becomes darker and more disturbing.
Each bird sings alone loudly and pecks at the decaying matter
on the forest floor. The light strikes the window and enters the
house, as in the earlier sections. The surfaces are hard; objects
have sharp edges. The light makes objects look menacing.
The image of the sun rising from her couch, shedding her
jewels, suggests a start to something serious. The breaking
waves are heavy, with potential violence, reinforced by the
"lances and assegais." The assegai is an iron-tipped, hardwood
lance, most often seen in South Africa.
The allusion to South Africa and the lances of war could
suggest the end of an empire as part of the story. There is a
historical component to this novel of identity. Bernard on the
train, as this section opens, pauses to think about the glories of
London surpassing the glories of Rome. He runs down a list
that illustrates the structures of history and those representing
the modernization of London: "factories, cathedrals, glass
domes, institutions, and theatres." Men foresee death. The
train "is hurled" at London, "like a missile." Hints of war open
the chapter.
As Bernard rides the train at the beginning of the chapter, he
claims to be satisfied with living a normal life, symbolized by his
recent engagement. By joining his life to another, he has left
behind the terrors of childhood and the challenges of choice.
He wallows in a kind of relief that he defines as freedom. He
then describes his friends as drumming him alive, connecting
the "drum" to the "thud" of the waves. Bernard has done his
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Chapter Summaries 23
usual about-face from autonomy to dependence on those
around him. He rejoices in the prospects of conversations,
even with strangers. He is excited by the notion that people
"are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities."
The conversation among the friends is rich and rewarding.
Feeling for and interest in one another seem to revive each
character. Jinny celebrates the group, saying, "How proudly we
sit here ... we who are not yet 25! ... Emerged from the tentative
ways ... the dazzle of youth ... All is real; ... Beauty rides our
brows."
Bernard breaks the spell, announcing his engagement. He
acknowledges the "broken circle" in his movement beyond
their experience, and he heals it with his questions about other
lives assembled in the restaurant. Some of these lives are
connected, and others are solitary. That is, he demonstrates
the potential for other circles as the world turns.
Neville asks for the bill and closes the circle. The dinner bill is
fact; all else is "darkness and conjecture." Louis declares the
circle closed once more as they face the fact and prepare to
part. Jinny begs to hang onto the moment—whether made of
love or hate. She reminds the reader about what makes the
experience whole: Percival, youth and beauty, "and something
so deep sunk within us that we shall perhaps never make this
moment out of one man again."
Bernard concludes that by sitting, eating, and drinking
together, they have proved that they "can add to the treasury
of moments." They are people of will, he rejoices, who can walk
into a world "that our own force can subjugate and make part
of the illumined and everlasting road."
Neville wonders how to preserve the moment—how all of them
standing together in the street might signal for all time that
they all loved Percival.
The differences among the characters are less than what is
shared. "Fanatical existence" admits of life's chaos and the
moments of wholeness, autonomy, and dependence. In her
diaries, Woolf declared The Waves to be personal and generic
in its telling of the phases of life. Woolf also said that the "six
characters were supposed to be one." In this chapter, more so
than any other, the communion among the six characters
demonstrates Woolf's version of the generic: all vacillate within
the same parameters, presented through their unique
personalities. All the characters are, moreover, joined in the
circle of love and hate. It is a circle that generates the
The Waves Study Guide
treasured moment of commonality: the shared fact of death
and the emotional demands of mourning.
The disappointment, confusion, and denial of discomfort that is
taken up by the circle of friendship at the chapter's close
operate as the setting. The quality of realism in the chances
Woolf takes in this work is demonstrated in this unsettling
opening. It is not difficult to relate to the ways people deny in
their daily lives the chaos of the larger world. For Woolf, the
social and political world persists within us. Unacknowledged,
in general, is the dynamic of the larger society in its vital
contributions to daily life, part of the cotton-wool, the texture
of nonbeing.
Chapter 5
Summary
The sun is at its highest point. In its relentless glare and heat, it
illuminates every detail on the landscape, exposing all that its
light touches. The sun levels its stare on dozing passengers on
a steamer as well as women kneeling in the riverbed beating
wrinkled cloth upon stones. "Blades of the grass were run
together into one fluent green blaze," and in the trees, "light ...
dissolved the separate foliation (leaves) into one green
mound."
The birds' sentimental songs are for "one ear only and then
stopped." They bubble and chuckle as they collect twigs and
fly through the branches up to their nests high in the trees. The
house with its pattern of branches against the window emits
"sharp-edged wedges of light" and shows details of pottery,
patterns on the rug, and the "formidable corners" of more
substantial objects such as bookshelves and cabinets inside
the room. Beyond are thick "depths of darkness."
The fall of the waves is heavy and releases torrents of spray.
The narrative begins with heavy news. Neville announces that
Percival is dead, having fallen from his horse. Neville feels like
everything is over. The lights in his world have gone out, and in
front of him stands the tree that he cannot pass. He wants to
crumple up the telegram that brought him the news but figures
there is no purpose of doing that. The fact is that Percival is
dead. He imagines the accident, when Percival fell from his
horse, and Percival's last breath. Neville declares that his past
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Chapter Summaries 24
is cut from him. He imagines Percival's body being taken away
by strangers and thinks about the loneliness and silence that
used to surround him and how Percival often left him.
Neville thinks he will retreat into solitude. He observes how
other people around him do things to stay safe, like holding on
too tightly to the rails on the omnibus. Meanwhile, Percival fell
from a horse and died. He imagines the "immitigable (not
causing less pain) tree" and the man with his throat cut
beneath it. He resolves that all are doomed.
Bernard's son's birth coincides with Percival's death. Besieged
by mixed emotions, Bernard cannot distinguish joy from
sorrow. He requires an hour of solitude to consider what
"death has done" to his world. Bernard recognizes that with
this loss arrives the opportunity to discover "what is of great
importance." Bernard strongly feels that the intensity of
experience does not last more than half an hour. He searches
an exhibition for pictures that make "no reference." There he
believes he can rediscover, in abstracted forms, Percival's
beauty.
Rhoda responds typically to the news, wanting to withdraw into
herself. In Percival's death, she confronts ugliness, danger, and
hostility. Percival, in his death, has given Rhoda this gift,
assurance that she is alone "in this hostile world." She goes
shopping for stockings and finds in the lingerie shop, through
laces and colored ribbons, "shelter under the wing of beauty
from truth." The voice of the shop girl awakens Rhoda to "envy,
hatred, jealousy, and spite."
Rhoda pursues her materialist fantasy among people of means.
Although she is one of them, the wealthy disgust her. In her
fantasy, she goes shopping among poor people. She buys a
penny bunch of violets and walks along the river. She is
emotionally at sea and tosses her violets in honor of Percival
"into the wave that flings its white foam to the uttermost
corners of the earth."
Analysis
In the high-noon setting, the ambivalence of experience that
reflected the poles of autonomy and dependence in the life
currents of the six friends in this section repeats in the natural
world. The brilliant sun reveals the distinct details of all it seeks
out, and also in the glare, blades of grass and leaves on the
trees present as a merged green mass. The light entering the
The Waves Study Guide
house illuminates some detail close-up against a background
of looming corners and dark shadow. A high tide produces
heavy waves and a massive fallout of spray.
As Bernard processes Percival's death, he seeks solace or
sense about the early death of his hero by viewing
nonrepresentational art. This type of art that does not
teach—or preach—but puzzles with its beauty. It is art that
depends upon the viewer as a collaborator. In Woolf's
experience teaching at a working-class college and her
formulation of the "common reader," she had learned and
taught that the ordinary act of reading demands only a willingly
innocent audience. If reading is not a test of intelligence but an
unselfconscious giving of oneself over to the text, then the
writer is free to create at will and the reader will follow. Woolf
was dedicated to not repeating herself, to making each text
new, and The Waves is the most provocative execution of her
drive for novelty.
Bernard finds relief in his brief solitude and finds himself
recalling Percival's attractiveness as he experiences beauty in
the painting he admires. In this recovery, Bernard, through with
this brief exercise in solitude, believes he wants more life
around him.
Rhoda, with her bunch of penny violets, finds her solace. She
also correctly anticipates her friends' mourning and quick
recoveries according to the specifics of their distinct
proclivities. As a worried loner, she is a talented observer of
others. Jinny will pirouette and ask if Percival loved Susan
better than he loved her. Susan, who is set to marry a farmer,
will ferociously tend to her cooking. Neville, at the window, will
see through his tears and cry out, "Who passes the
window?—What lovely boy?'" That is, Neville, a gay man, will
seek out his next romance.
Neville's pain is part of his ordinary life, which likely included
the fear of exposure and criminal charges. Neville's
homosexuality is one example of Woolf's sense that identity
has many, likely equal, components: genes, associates, and
history.
Just as the blades of grass and separate leaves combine to a
familiar green in the opening to this section, so do the
distinctive responses to Percival's sudden and too-early death
come together in the responses of the six friends. The
resolution of individual grief achieves a volume of sadness
foreshadowed by the thudding waves in the opening and the
foam at the close of the chapter to which Rhoda extends her
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Chapter Summaries 25
little penny bunch of violets. The waves of individual grief mix
into a sort of universal mourning, the inevitable crashing of the
waves on an unpopulated shore. In this sad case, readers
might equate numb with grief and unpopulated shore.
Chapter 6
Summary
The sun is no longer high in the sky. The slanted rays strike the
waves like "fiery-feathered darts" shooting "erratically across
the quivering blue." The dragonflies hang motionless, then
shoot across the line of sight. The reeds that do not stir in the
glass-like calm of the river begin to bend as the water ripples.
The tap that had been dripping stops and then drips "one, two,
three, separate drops in succession." The waves crash,
sweeping around the rocks. The spray leaps high, "leaving
pools inland" and stranding a fish that lashes its tail as the
waves draw back.
The section opens with Louis, who loves his life built to the
rhythms of commerce. He is content with the clock and the
calendar, the typewriter and the telephone. He has power in
"spreading commerce where there was chaos in the far parts
of the world." Rhoda visits; they are lovers. His waves are the
"swift rush of the lift and the thud" with which it stops "and the
heavy male tread of responsible feet." He asserts that he can
manage the pain of his earlier life of striving to fit by keeping
his routines.
Susan, who has lost her need to be out in nature, is "all spun to
a fine thread round the cradle, wrapping in a cocoon" made of
her own blood, the delicate limbs of her baby. She wants only
to sleep, noting that she would resort to violence if need be to
protect her baby's sleep. In her lethargy, Susan imagines that
Jinny beckons, inviting her back to the life of the city.
Neville acknowledges the importance of homely comforts and,
above all, a partner. He returns to memories of Percival and
finally declares that what is most important is a faithful lover. If
such love does not last, he will always seek another person,
another chance, for the act of love itself, rather than the lover,
provides the time-stopping experience.
The Waves Study Guide
Analysis
There is an uncertainty to the interlude's setting, an
interruption of the familiar rhythms of the waves that beat the
measures of life and death, perhaps the distilled continuity of
the human world. In each of the characters' adult lives, the
motion of continuity and interruption constitutes reality,
whether acknowledged or not.
In Louis's telling, the routines of work help maintain his balance.
He may briefly fall into the memory of old hurts, such as
effusive behavior as a means to fit in. He balances by taking
hold of his sanity by recognizing his commitments to work.
There he commits to "the letters in the wire basket," and he
signs his name: "I, I, and again I." Despite his ability to balance
despair—"The weight of the world is on my shoulders," he
repeats—Louis announces his sanity in diction that disputes his
wholeness of identity. Three "I's" confront his narrative of
consolidated identity.
Susan declares her natural happiness in her maternal bliss. At
the same time, her only connection with her beloved natural
world is what she sees through the window. Her need to sleep,
repeated and emphasized in her monologue, resonates with
that part of the natural world, night, that celebrates slumber.
Susan's reveling in her "natural happiness" may be self-
deceiving in that she has given up so much of herself, or she
could be content in having repeated her mother's choices and
thus being a throwback to an earlier time. There is nothing
homey and naturally maternal about Susan's scene—at least to
the "new woman" in Edwardian England—in this chapter, in
which she has given over her life's pleasures and interests to
that of her child. She has embraced the Victorian version of
maternity.
Neville's soliloquy accepts the "folly of the human heart," which
includes unfaithful lovers and his own need to have a partner,
to continue to seek the experience of the time-stopping
moment of love between two men.
Chapter 7
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Chapter Summaries 26
Summary
The sun is low in the sky and the tide has receded, leaving the
pearl-white sand "smooth and shining." Birds circle and settle
to roost. Only one bird flies off to the marsh and sits alone,
opening and closing its wings. Leaves blow in the wind, and the
petals of some flowers fall. Others, their heads too heavy,
droop slightly.
The sun bathes the fields in warmth and casts golden colors
around whatever moves. The wind blows through the curtains,
and the sun changes the colors of the furniture inside the
house. For a moment, everything in the room seems to waver
and bend in uncertainty, "as if a great moth sailing through the
room" cast shadows with its floating wings.
After asking himself, "What is lost? What is over?" Bernard
recognizes that he has lost his youth. He buys a ticket to Rome
and sits on a bench, musing over his need to collect people
and make up stories. He wonders if there is one true story.
Acknowledging that he has never found it, he finds a new
question: "Are there stories?"
Looking toward the water, he finds a phrase for what he
observes: "I see far out a waste of water. A fin turns." It is a
"bare visual impression" that will someday have meaning, he
imagines, entering the phrase in his notebook under the letter
F. He imagines seeing a beautiful woman in a restaurant and
thinking, "Look where she comes against a waste of water."
In the paragraph to follow, an unknown speaker addresses
Bernard, introducing him to a new drop, "this unknown, strange,
altogether unidentified and terrifying experience ... which is
about to shape itself. Larpent is that man's name."
In a long lyric passage, Susan describes the life she planned
and lived as full, with sons and daughters and her creativity
concerning the natural world. Of life, she says it "stands round
me like a glass round the imprisoned reed." Her thoughts turn
to Percival, who loved her, and to Rhoda. She concludes that
she is proud of and content with her sons.
Jinny stands at a tube (subway) stop in the heart of London.
She has aged and lost the beauty that brought men to her at a
drop of her scarf. Still, she thrills to the modernization of
London—the colorful omnibuses, the cars, and the beautifully
dressed people. The rhythms of the traffic stop and start "as
regularly as waves of the sea." She has made the appropriate
The Waves Study Guide
adjustments. She enjoys hailing a taxi, liking that her signals
still bring people to her. She entertains lavishly, her home
always ready with flowers and refreshments.
Neville detaches from all around him and is aware of his
choices. He watches a young man at Jinny's door and
recognizes that he could visit if he wished but chooses not to.
He thinks of Rhoda and Louis, who both need reasons or a
plot, who cannot be content with "this ordinary scene." Still, left
to his own devices, he reads and thinks about the past.
Louis is alone, proud of his economic success and still
suffering the class differences that were so painful in his youth.
He thinks about Rhoda and misses her. He thinks that if he
were to complete a single poem, he would feel whole.
Rhoda, who has been alone through a constitutional necessity,
recalls how she attempted to have a life by copying her
girlfriends in dress and habit. She has remained alone except
for her interlude with Louis. She finds pleasure in brief
moments in her travels. She imagines suicide and returns to
earth to knock on the door of her inn in Spain.
Analysis
At one point, Woolf considered calling the novel The Lonely
Mind. This chapter is most representative of that moment in
time, as it shares stories people tell themselves about their
lives. Some people feel a necessity to explain, while others
need resignation or self-acceptance. In this chapter, there is no
advocating for the proper choice. It is merely a summary of
what is happening among a group at a particular place and
moment. Habits are internally governed, and responses,
affirmative and not, are dictates of place and fashion.
In a meaningless phrase about seeing a pretty woman in his
imagination's eye, Bernard knows that for him it represents
something "solemn, slate-coloured, with a fatal sound of ruining
worlds and waters falling to destruction." Woolf, in a decidedly
modernist habit, comments on the text rather than on the
narrative of Bernard in Rome. She seems to turn the reader's
attention toward a method of composition, a creation of
meaning in a metaphor so puzzling that the reader cannot dash
beyond it to keep up with the narrative. Rather, the reader
must acknowledge or test its emotional impact, the particular
valence of the strange term.
Although Susan stops to question the overwhelming fullness of
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Chapter Summaries 27
her busy life, she concludes that she is content, despite
"uneasy cries," which sometimes wake her.
Jinny finds peace in her habits. The continuity pleases her,
even if she has to force the situation to reflect her welcoming
powers. Hailing a taxi is a small version of the remembered
pleasure in her power. She is happy to entertain whoever will
show: old friends, someone new. "Let the silent army of the
dead descend. I march forward." While Bernard struggles with
habit versus something new, Jinny knows what it means to
stand in the heart of London, to hold habit in her heart.
Neville has become an outsider, the modernist hero who
understands culture best because he does not participate
except by watching. There is poetry in the streets for him, for
his amusement.
In Neville's soliloquy, as in Bernard's, the reader finds
instructions for reading a difficult poem, instructions that apply
equally to the novel one reads and the people with whom one
engages. For all his ability to lose himself in a poem, Neville
stops reading to find himself alone in a comfortable room. He is
"swept away" by a familiar hallucination: footsteps to his door,
which make him cry, "Come closer, closer." His nostalgia and
his loneliness organize his aging.
In this passage, Neville explains his life as an outsider. The
figure familiar to modernism is the flaneur, the French term
translated as the stroller, for the solitary and observant
outsider, wealthy and detached, who understands the life of
the city even as he rejects participation. The German
philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) took up the term,
which originated in the work of the French poet Charles
Baudelaire (1821–67).
Rhoda could not adopt the identity of others just as Louis
could not change his social status by copying an upper-class
British accent. With their matching insecurities, they might
have been a perfect match (though unrealistic endings do not
serve this attempt to represent real life). Rhoda remains alone,
a survivor of her trauma and more self-sufficient than she
believes herself to be.
Chapter 8
The Waves Study Guide
Summary
The sun is sinking in the sky with rays of red and gold shooting
through the waves. Without light, the waves appear as "one
long concussion." There is a breeze, and the leaves have lost
their color. Birds rise and sail away. The smoke from chimneys
and trains makes the air feel thick like wool.
Of the harvested corn, only stubble remains. The wind is
roaring, and there appears a bone, "rain-pocked and sun-
washed," on the beach. There is a "single, darting spear of
sunshine" visible. Everything looks dark through the window of
the house and on the beach. The furniture, with its shadows,
looks heavy. The water is dark with foam that is an ashy hue,
and "here and there a white gleam of pearl on the misty sand"
is evident.
There is to be a reunion of the group of six at Hampton Court,
the lavish home of British royalty built in 1530 for King Henry
VIII and currently a tourist destination. Bernard thinks about
the "shock of meeting" as he sees the group gathered. He is
the last to arrive.
As they settle at the table, Neville takes up the challenge. He is
uncomfortable around Susan, and he baits her to talk about the
dull routines of marriage that she must endure in contrast to
his mornings. "Each day is dangerous," Neville admits with
some pleasure. He apologizes for baiting Susan, explaining
how he was only shoring up his own identity, which her
presence always threatens.
Bernard reenters the conversation in his typical way. He
reminds all that he is a collector and creator of stories. Like a
wandering bard, Bernard tells his stories in exchange for room
and board as he travels and visits the homes of friends. Finally,
he admits that he does not fear death: "I shall be brushed like a
bee from a sunflower." He is not like Louis, he concludes, who
has "formed unalterable conclusions upon the true nature of
what is to be known."
Louis responds with the notion that the thread he spins is
broken. He lists the incidents that break the thread: he begins
by recalling Jinny kissing him on the neck. The thread breaks at
moments of peril. There is the teasing he endured, and "the
shadows of dungeons and the tortures and infamies practised
by man upon man." He concludes by describing with some
pleasure his characteristic ambivalence: his "tender, young,
and unprotected soul" and the ruthlessness of which he is
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Chapter Summaries 28
capable.
Jinny reacts to Louis's claim of ruthlessness with her version.
As beauty for her lives in the body, in being touched, she claims
to be always tender. Her history is a story of many men who
arrive when she raises her arm. She also shifts identities in
response to what others ask of her. "I am volatile for one, rigid
for another ... or voluptuous as a candle flame in gold." She
sees the physical changes in herself as she ages and insists
she is not afraid.
Rhoda confesses that she has not changed, although her
behavior has. She points to her apparent lack of fear in
approaching the reunion and admits it is just that she has
learned to act as though she is not afraid. She sees herself as
divided between her physical presence and habits and her true
feelings: "I fear, I hate, I love, I envy and despise you, but I never
join you happily."
Analysis
The scene on the beach is autumnal: dark, cold, and windy.
There are, however, small streaks of brightness that briefly
light a small portion of the landscape.
In this section, autumnal for these middle-aged characters, the
small streaks of brightness, the bit of sunlight, and the shining
bone amidst the darkness foreshadow the brief but intense
connections among the characters. This opening is a tone-
poem that captures the acceptance each character has for the
specific personal rhythms of their solitary lives interspersed
with brightness, the moments of communion that have become
their solace, and their acceptance of death. They find in each
other the privilege of individual choices that have become the
customs and habits of their existence. They recognize, in
contrast to the customs and habits of the working class, their
privileged freedom of choice and their resistance to religion as
gifts of class.
Bernard points to the difficulty in meeting old friends: "It is
uncomfortable too, joining ragged edges, raw edges; only
gradually ... does the meeting become agreeable." Neville
points to griefs—for this group, Percival's death is the
organizing memory, even so many years after the fact.
So the issue of identity among them, as always, is a
vulnerability, at least for starters. They all strive to be as
scrupulously honest as one can be about the self, about what
The Waves Study Guide
one can know about the self.
Louis, in his soliloquy, in response to Bernard's notion that
there is not a single true story, raises the moments that
threatened his identity. His seemingly unbalanced list includes
Jinny's kiss when they were children, the teasing he endured at
college, and man's inhumanity to man. Thus, personal and
public events have an equal effect. There is nothing strained in
the notion that personal trauma looms as large as the horrors
of war in the individual psyche. Louis also acknowledges
surprise at his conclusion, defending the notion that he can link
"these dazzling, these dancing apparitions to one line capable
of linking all in one."
What the characters share in middle age is an acceptance of
who they are. Like their experience in mourning Percival, they
have arrived at another moment in which, as Rhoda describes
it, "The still ... disembodied mood is on us ... and we enjoy this
momentary alleviation ... when the walls of the mind become
transparent."
It is but a moment that the friends want to capture. "Let it blaze
against the yew trees. One life. There. It is over. Gone out."
They walk in pairs, confessing to each other simple truths and
disappointments of their lives and love for each other.
The mood is fleeting. Reality returns, and "all the insanity of
personal existence without which life would fall flat and die,
begins again." They part in sorrow. Bernard points to the
bedroom windows of the homes of small shopkeepers,
rehearsing a world of custom and habit, an order not found in
their privileged lives. As night falls, they entertain the echoes of
their lives as outsiders, individuals.
What they cherish and recognize is the beauty of their coming
together and the loss. It is a fleeting moment when the six
friends join the community of humankind united by death.
Percival's death has brought the communion, and its fleeting
nature returns the friends to the individuality in its loneliness, a
reminder of death. The death of religion is in this passage as
well. Woolf's "moments of being," Louis's version, is the trauma
that opens us to our vulnerability and the acceptance of death.
Chapter 9
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Chapter Summaries 29
Summary
The sun has set, and there is no distinction between the sea
and the sky. Dark shadows are everywhere: in the garden and
inside the house. The darkness moves across the land, water,
and structures as waves "washed round the sides of sunken
ships." The world and its inhabitants far and wide are in
darkness: streets and people, the turf, the trees, the snail
shells, upland slopes, pinnacles of the mountain, valleys, and
girls sitting on verandas. Darkness covers all things, large and
small. It stretches beyond the reach of the earlier sunlight on
the beach, in the garden, and at the window.
Bernard promises to a new audience, a stranger he meets in a
restaurant and invites to dine, an explanation for the meaning
of his life. He mentions the "illusion ... that something adheres
for a moment," something that has "roundness, weight, depth"
and is whole. He is thinking about the lyric moments of
communion in his reunions with his childhood friends.
Bernard begins with the events in the garden at the boarding
school and presents his moments of triumph and humiliation as
he opens the one true story: all these "things happen in one
second and last forever." The understanding that these things,
large and small, are different for each of his friends brings on a
singular sadness and, typical of Bernard and his restless mind,
immediate relief. He asserts that he and the others
experienced terrible suffering as they each became separate
bodies. The reunions, as he remembers, functioned to
reestablish the charmed circle and dependably to break the
circle as the friends parted.
Like the reunion dinners, Bernard's dinner with a stranger lasts
nearly to closing time at the restaurant. He has told all of the
stories of the novel's preceding eight episodes. Bernard adds
details, including Susan's rejection of Percival and Rhoda's
more recent suicide. When dinner is over, he lingers at the
restaurant, reluctant to end the spell. By the end of his stories,
Bernard has experienced himself as very grand, celebrating
the importance of the individual to himself. Immediately after
that, he reverses direction. In his predictable about-face,
Bernard accepts the notion of how tiny the individual is in the
larger scheme of things. Briefly, he recognizes that old age is
best defined as the moment when he could still appreciate the
pageant of the world of people and the natural world. What has
changed, he concludes, is that he could see but is not seen.
Revived by the presence of his dinner partner, Bernard and the
The Waves Study Guide
stranger pay the bill and part. The familiar self-consciousness
that sets off the natural curiosity that keeps him in the world
startles him. Returned to life—and the life of the mind—he sees
his new challenge. "It is death against whom I ride with my
spear couched and my hair flying back." Nothing much has
changed except that he is growing old.
Analysis
The darkness of the opening is total, and the sweeping view
contains both vistas—mountain pinnacle and upland slopes—as
well as close-ups—snail shells and girls sitting on verandas.
Like the waves and the characters, these objects are distinct
and unique while being at the same time part of one great
ongoing whole. Like the darkness that encompasses them all,
Bernard's narrative will now tell everyone's story. Bernard has
always had a gift for storytelling, but never for understanding
or for endings. Thus, it is fitting that he should end a narrative
that has no end, a narrative about people who cannot
understand themselves, let alone one another.
When Bernard refers to the illusion having "roundness" (being
complete), it seems necessary to recall the "closed circle" or
"the globe" that protects the group as they end the usual
struggle with love and hate, defensiveness and sincerity, and
dependence and autonomy in their reunions. The reunions end
with the experience of a closed world, an empathetic
community, and a sense of wholeness in the friends' lives. The
magical globe protecting them breaks, however, when the
gathering ends, and the friends return to their separate lives.
Bernard, who has spent years recording bits of experience in
his notebooks in preparation for writing one true story, seems
to have found the answer. Now it is a matter of how he tells the
story. He longs for "some little language such as lovers use,
broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on
the pavement." The design must be in "accordance with those
moments of humiliation and triumph that come now and then
undeniably." He finishes the vision of clouds he saw while "lying
in a ditch on a stormy day, when it has been raining." He finds
happiness in cloud gazing and in "the confusion, the height, the
indifference and the fury." Finally, he proclaims that given such
circumstances, the story and the design are no longer relevant.
The reader finds the same confusion, indifference, and fury
evoked by the madness of his delight. The reader is diverted by
a set of mixed feelings, abandoning the story for the feelings of
the storyteller.
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Quotes 30
In this declaration of principle, a story that means only as
feeling or impression, Bernard, the failed novelist, becomes
Woolf's mouthpiece. Woolf, always fearful of her failure after
she completed a novel, exercises a bit of verbal irony as she
explains the course of The Waves as understood by a failed
novelist. The description is moreover a guide to reading The
Waves and the signature of Woolf's, in this case, postmodern
invention. The artist is not so much an imposing figure as a
madman, resting in a ditch in a rainstorm. Not much cover
there! He experienced exposure to the elements—humiliation
and triumph—in a place where he could take neither comfort
nor cover.
In one last turn, Bernard, convinced that aging is a kind of
death of the self, parts with the stranger who has listened to
the story offered as the "meaning of his life." He regains his
self-consciousness in the presence of the stranger and his
sense of life's strangeness: "That we who are capable of so
much suffering, should inflict so much suffering." He is tumbled,
as if by a wave, and turned from obscurity. He recovers his
identity in self-consciousness revived by his fear of the
stranger's judgment. At that, he begins a celebration of
solitude, interrupted by the waiter who is attempting to close
the restaurant.
Bernard finds his coat and considers how tired and old he is.
Outside, he finds the appearance of the "usual street," the dark
sky, and the stirring of the birds welcoming. Dawn signals "the
eternal renewal." Energized by the challenge, Bernard finds
himself ready for death—the enemy, against whom he feels
prepared to ride with the energy of a young man, like Percival.
He prepares to begin again.
g Quotes
"I will not conjugate the verb ... I
speak with an Australian accent. I
will wait and copy Bernard."
— Louis, Chapter 1
Louis, whose father is an Australian banker, feels self-
conscious about his colonial, working-class background
compared with the other children, who are from upper-middle-
The Waves Study Guide
class families. Thus, although he is perfectly intelligent, he
holds back, preferring to imitate rather than to be.
"We are doomed ... by the apple
trees, by the immitigable tree
which we cannot pass."
— Neville, Chapter 1
Neville overhears the cook tell about a man found with his
throat slashed. He sees the apple trees "fixed in the sky" and is
stuck obsessing over the scene. Neville's speech activates a
new dimension in the text by introducing the theme of
mortality. In this case, it is preteen terror and vulnerability in
which violence is bonded to the story of the garden—as in the
biblical Eden—and to sexual guilt and punishment.
"I am nobody. I have no face ... All
dressed in brown serge, has
robbed me of my identity."
— Rhoda, Chapter 2
Rhoda detests the uniforms at her new school. One of Woolf's
lifelong causes was to further educational opportunities for
women of all classes. Clearly, the girls' school is inferior to the
boys' school. Uniforms conceal status differences that could
be an advantage in a diverse society. For Rhoda, however, free
choice of clothing allows the wearer to project a desired
image.
"His ... voice is like an unshaven
chin. Now he lurches back to his
seat like a drunken sailor."
— Bernard, Chapter 2
Headmaster Crane, an Anglican minister who wears a crucifix
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Quotes 31
in an unorthodox nod to the Catholic church, has finished
reading a Bible lesson. Bernard likes to make up stories about
those who surround him, and although he admires the
headmaster, the story he tells about him is rather unflattering.
Bernard will forever fight between the truth of what he sees
and experiences and the language in which to express it.
"I slip too large a tip ... and her
scorn ... may not strike ... till I am
past the swing-doors."
— Louis, Chapter 3
Louis's bitterness about the privilege of the upper classes
extends all the way down to the lowest classes of English
social life. He both admires and fears his upper-class friends
and schoolmates, but he simply fears the lower classes. He
feels constantly mocked by them, even as he provides for
them. He feels ashamed of his aspirations in their presence, as
though to have ambition marks him as outside both social sets.
"I shall be like my mother, silent in
a blue apron locking up the
cupboards."
— Susan, Chapter 3
Susan has returned to the farm and fantasizes that she is the
lady of the manor. "The angel in the house," a Victorian term for
appropriate female behavior, was in Woolf's mind when
penning The Waves. It was a social theory designed to keep
women in the private rather than the public sphere. Susan,
despite her education, including a Swiss finishing school, finds
her strength in repeating her mother's past life as a farmer's
wife. She imagines herself as the quintessential earth mother
and as a gracious and prosperous landowner, superior to all
she commands.
"We are for ever mixing ... with
The Waves Study Guide
unknown quantities ... I am
Bernard."
— Bernard, Chapter 4
Keenly aware of his susceptibility to others, Bernard accepts
that fact of life with pleasure. He also understands the
moments in which he is autonomous, his own creation. Bernard
relishes the contrast between self and other. He finds his
identity as a writer in recognizing his dependence on others to
name him and his ability to create and recreate himself.
"[I] feel her laughter ... light up ...
my ... finger-nails, which I ... hide
under the table-cloth."
— Susan, Chapter 4
Jinny, in all her fashionable glory, enters the restaurant, and
Susan, usually self-possessed, has a moment of agony as she
sees herself through Jinny's eyes. The characters shift from
valuing their individuality to doubting themselves when others
are present. A thematic concern of the novel is the vexed
ambivalence of independent and socially defined identities—a
particular concern for Woolf with respect to women's lives.
"My body goes before me ... a
lantern ... bringing one thing after
another out of darkness ... I dazzle
you."
— Jinny, Chapter 4
Jinny's self-serving narcissism defines the limits of her world.
She revels in the attractive body she possesses and presents
to the world. She subverts male power by owning her sexuality
and using it to overpower the men she seduces while never
allowing them to possess her for more than a night.
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Quotes 32
"'Death is woven in with the
violets,' said Louis. 'Death and
again death.'"
— Louis, Chapter 4
Woolf connects violets with death at various points in The
Waves. Violets are often used in literature to symbolize an
untimely death. Here, the image of violets comes up during the
reunion dinner in honor of Percival, perhaps foreshadowing the
news of Percival's death in the next chapter. Violets bloom
throughout the year, so the flower also connects to the idea of
continuity. With the violet, Woolf asserts that death gives life to
something else. In the case of The Waves, it is Percival's death
that gives continued life to the bond between the six friends.
"I do not know which is sorrow,
which joy. My son is born; Percival
is dead."
— Bernard, Chapter 6
Bernard, although not the emotional center of this novel, often
states its key themes succinctly. Here he captures humanity's
essential, ambivalent nature. Anyone who has ever laughed
until they cried can affirm this peculiarity of human emotion,
inexplicable and real.
"'Behold, this is the truth,' and
instantly I perceive a sandy cat
filching a piece of fish."
— Bernard, Chapter 7
Bernard is in Rome, thinking about aging and asking questions
about the stages of life, their beginnings and ends. Here his
modernism is on display in his rejection of religion as a source
of truth. His search for a larger, all-encompassing truth is
forever frustrated by the simple, mundane facts of life.
The Waves Study Guide
"I shall then ... seek another ... let
us abolish the ticking ... clock ...
Come closer."
— Neville, Chapter 7
Neville, not self-deluding about happiness the way his friends
are, remembers Percival, the lover he could not have.
Accepting that truth, he understands that for him, the key to
time-stopping experience is sexual contact. He will always be
in the game, searching for one true love. In the meantime, there
is fleeting happiness in contact with another.
"I read the character of each love;
how each was different."
— Neville, Chapter 8
Neville has asked what each of his old friends has made of life
in middle age. He responds defensively to Susan's stable family
life, reminding her that in the early morning her relation to her
husband is "mute, null, dun-colored," while his at that hour is
"warm and various." In this section, custom or habit poses
against fresh experience in considering the nature of life's later
stages.
"I begin to long for some little
language such as lovers use,
broken words, inarticulate words."
— Bernard, Chapter 9
Bernard, still in search of the one real story, the meaning of his
life, recognizes that the complexity he had gathered in his
years of keeping notebooks does not address the core of
existence. He recognizes the simplicity and truth of children's
diction and the howl or cry that ties language to the heart of
the matter: the intimacy of lovers, the acknowledgment of life's
beauty in life's pain.
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Symbols 33
l Symbols
A Quivering Plant
Chapter 2 opens with the description of buds opening and
"shaking out" flowers. The bud, however, does not simply open
as in a time-lapse video but splits all the way open. The
unexpected image continues, almost a birth image in which
flowers are born—green-veined, new, and quivering—shaking
from the effort. This image is not static; its action suggests the
violence of a natural birth tamed by nature's delicacy.
The contrast between violence and delicacy continues. The
flowers are like bells, and they can peal (ring) "a faint carillon."
Faint is a puzzling description of sound here since a carillon is
an assortment of at least 23 brass bells. The nonsense
continues as readers come to find out that these flower bells
"beat their frail clappers" against the white walls (the insides of
the flower petals).
Though it is difficult to make logical sense of the language in
which Woolf presents the quivering flower, its symbol is of
violence and delicacy. The delicacy is true of flowers. However,
the suppression of the carillon is confusing. The image of the
carillon can symbolize the announcement of a birth.
Alternatively, it can point to sexual entry; these "frail clappers"
would seem to be in a vaginal space. Readers cannot reconcile
these images. However, the fragility and the sexual imagery
that can barely announce itself seem very close to those hints
of erotic life in the preceding chapter and the movement into
the more sexually alert lives of the characters in Chapter 2.
The symbol operates through a sensory impression; in other
words, it does not have meaning. Instead, it creates an
emotional complex that reflects on the internalized events that
announce themselves very quietly in Chapter 2. It does not
happen visually—an observer cannot see inside the bell of the
flower without standing on his or her head. The "frail clappers"
and the "white walls" accomplish the tentative virility and
delicate reception, which seems to characterize the mood of
the chapter.
The section closes with a softly portentous "concussion (heavy
blow) of waves breaking" and falling "with muffled thuds."
The Waves Study Guide
Something hidden, yet potentially broken, falls with muffled
cries. Readers cannot hear the cries but can only imagine they
exist.
If the reader requires further evidence, consider this. Louis,
who has rejected the shock of Jinny's kiss, seems to repeat
the dynamic of the floral event with an aggressively intrusive
version: "Children, our lives have been gongs striking; clamour
... boasting; cries ... ; blows on the nape of the neck." Woolf's
version of childhood is one of terror and violence and, as Woolf
scholar Louise DeSalvo (1942–2018) wrote, "what makes it
worse is that they can never rest from the likelihood that it will
happen again." Louis's dread is physical. The child cannot
verbalize dread but embodies the fear.
Waves
When considering waves as a symbol, the reader must
remember Woolf's feelings about calling an image or an idea a
symbol. Woolf explains, "We have been so often fooled in this
way by words; they have so often proved that they hate being
useful, that it is their nature not to express one simple
statement but a thousand possibilities." In The Waves, the
image of waves crashing to shore cannot be used to symbolize
one thing.
The waves serve as the interlude between each section of the
characters' lives. They represent the passage of time, in
particular the ways in which things change while remaining the
same. The waves also represent the simultaneous individuality
and connectivity of the characters. Finally, they have beauty
and splendor as living things.
A characteristic of any wave—an ocean wave, a sound
wave—is that it repeats in time. Repeating patterns occur
throughout Woolf's text, mimicking the repetition of waves. For
example, in Chapter 3, Louis describes how people continue to
pass the window of the eatery: "They go on passing, they go on
passing." The repeating of language suggests the continuity
and mundanity of life, as everyone moves from one place to
another.
Woolf's organization of the text is a repeating pattern in itself:
Each chapter begins with an interlude that describes the
position of the sun and movement of the waves throughout the
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Symbols 34
day from sunrise to sunset. Each interlude is followed by
soliloquies that correspond to a point in the characters' lives,
from childhood to old age. The waves come to represent the
passage of time and how the individual grows and changes
during a lifetime. In the first interlude, the sun is just rising and
the sea is indistinguishable from the sky, and the voices of the
six characters in the soliloquy that follows are at first
indistinguishable from one another as each child describes
what he or she sees.
From interlude to interlude, the sun rises higher and the waves
crash with more force; at the same time, the characters' voices
become more distinct as each character matures and forms
his or her identity. As the characters enter old age, the image
of the sun setting in the last interlude juxtaposes with
impending death. Here, once again, the line between the sea
and the sky becomes unclear. In this way, the waves are
cyclical, representing the rhythmic rise and fall of people's
lives.
The six characters in The Waves are the narrators, and they
speak to the reader in soliloquies. The characters, however,
are not meant to be heard as separate entities, but rather as
one collective voice. Woolf said that the "six characters were
supposed to be one," and she wrote about the voices: "The
thing is to keep them running homogeneously in and out, like
the waves." Unlike the diverse shapes of individual lives, waves
are uniform as they travel to shore. Woolf's characters are
forever held together by the result of shared memory, the
death of a classmate. The novel's perspective mirrors that of
the lasting friendships of the six characters: the recognition
that the anticipation of death lingers at the edge of
consciousness.
The beauty and splendor of the waves is notable in Woolf's
descriptions. Sometimes the waves are filled with color and
light and appear to be jewels. At other times they rush to shore
like soldiers with upraised swords prepared for slaughter.
Birds
Birds are another dominant image found in the interludes. The
birds supplement the sounds of the waves and bridge the
narrative from the ocean to the sky to the land and ultimately
to the narrators. Like the waves, the birds are described in
The Waves Study Guide
terms of colors and light and movement. They have an
additional dimension of life cycle that further aligns them with
the characters. There's also an element of ferocity or danger
associated with them as they snap apart a snail's shell or dart
menacingly through the garden in search of prey.
m Themes
Women's Lives
Virginia Woolf received a firsthand lesson in the nature of
Victorian marriage, a match dependent on "the angel in the
house." The "angel" dedicated herself to the needs of the
family and the household. She could participate in the social
roles that necessarily included entertaining and participating in
the life of her community. Likely, she did not have a life of her
own, control of her sexuality and the household finances, her
own funds, or privacy. The Married Women's Property Act did
not pass Parliament until 1870. Until then, a married woman
could own nothing, and she could not sign a contract or keep
an inheritance in her name. If she were lucky enough to have
made a love match, she was still in danger of many
pregnancies and complications that could threaten her life as
well as that of the infant. She had no legal access to
contraception.
In The Waves, the female characters seem to suffer various
manifestations of an inherited status from an earlier time. In
her nonfiction works, Woolf boldly depicts the suppression of
women's talents and independence. However, in the novel, the
female characters are bold in their extreme natures but do not
overtly show the second-class situation of women. Rhoda's
suffering is convincing and true to life, while Susan and Jinny's
choices would seem to be parodies of stereotypes: the earth
mother and the seductress sexualized by the male gaze. It is in
the extreme nature of each of these characters and their over-
the-top satisfaction in their choices that Woolf criticizes
women who cannot transcend the demands of patriarchal
culture. Rhoda's suicide points to a historical moment in which
there is no place for an overly sensitive woman to make a self-
serving choice.
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Themes 35
Moments of Being
There is a section in Woolf's autobiographical essay "A Sketch
of the Past" (1939) in which she offers her "own psychology;
even of other peoples." She begins with a distinction between
the unselfconscious flow of ordinary experience, or nonbeing,
and special interruptions of the ordinary by moments of being.
This distinction is key to the lifetime bonds among the
characters in The Waves. Woolf describes this distinction in
terms of her everyday experience along with her wish to make
the essential nature and texture of human experience
foundational to her novels. Her hard-won accomplishment in
The Waves is in isolating and identifying "moments of being" in
distinction from the ordinary, unselfconscious flow of
experience, or nonbeing.
In The Waves, the characters' bond, their need to reunite
despite the inconvenience, their separate lifestyles, and their
growing separation demonstrate the organization of individual
humanity at the core of the text. The establishment of the bond
occurs early in the first chapter in the "shocks" that range from
so subtle as not to be recognized to disturbing moments that
register as memories inspired by childhood terror. For
example, Louis vehemently rejects Jinny's playful kiss; Susan
worriedly retells of the lover's kiss amidst the hanging laundry;
and Neville eavesdrops on the narrative of the man with his
throat cut.
The farewell dinner party for Percival provides the first
experience of a shared moment of being. At first, there seems
to be tension between the reunited friends, who have not seen
each other since their school years. Each quietly notices and
criticizes the others' differences, but when Percival finally
arrives, the tension subsides and the group comes together.
Though Percival has no voice in Woolf's narrative, he exerts a
certain power over the group. The universal friendship he has
among the six childhood friends allows them to put their
differences aside and find enjoyment in each other's company.
Near the end of Chapter 3, as Percival is about to depart in a
cab, Jinny wishes to hold on to the moment when one man
connected them all, fearing that this unity likely will not happen
again. Whatever difficulties their relationships presented in the
past, they savor the moment in which they live together in their
protected world—"the globe whose walls are made of Percival."
It provides a "moment of being," a moment that respects the
The Waves Study Guide
familiarity among the characters—the sense of family they had
constituted in their participation in each other's terrors in their
childhoods.
In the chapter to follow, Neville, Bernard, and Rhoda recognize
that the pain they experience in Percival's death offers the
beauty of a world regained in the face of loss. Rhoda observes
that "Percival, by his death, has made me this gift, let me see
the thing." The gift is the brief unity of the group.
The moment of being involves the acceptance of inevitable
death, and in death's embrace, the clarity of vision. Welcoming
the "sudden shock" opens people to what is "particularly
valuable"— to a community of feeling, an explanation of value,
and a moment in which they are vulnerable and open to one
other.
Childhood and Terror
Woolf dramatizes in The Waves the terrors of childhood. That
is, she records the complex events in the early lives of each of
the novel's six characters that disclose the roots of such
terror. In each case, the terror circles around loss, the
awareness of which comes in many forms. Louis recoils from a
kiss, from love that has no guarantee. Susan reacts to passion,
a fearful and self-annihilating force. Her fate replicates the
unnameable fear she finds in the embrace of the household
help. That is, exhausted by her sense of household and
maternal duties and exhausted by love, Susan struggles for a
bit of her own life. For Neville, the overheard tale of death and
the apple tree is also prophetic, for his is the "love that had no
name"—homosexuality. His desire involved personal loss in the
instability of gay liaisons at a historical moment when such
matches were illegal. The apple tree is the representation of
the inevitability of sin—whether defined by God or state—and
its consequences.
In Chapter 8, each character at the Hampton Court reunion
can fully embrace and celebrate the choices he or she has
made and acknowledge the possibilities left behind in so doing.
This sad novel, in a way, has a happy and realistic ending. The
loss of Percival and the communal mourning that follows
prepare all for loss and its compensations—a recognition of
what is possible in a life well-lived—in contrast to what Woolf
called "Victorian hypocrisy," lives lived out of cultural lies and
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Themes 36
denial. Perhaps, in a culture in which the lives of women and
children seemed to be a matter of chance, denial of death
could indeed preserve the family. Women could suppress their
fear of pregnancy; all could set aside the rate of infant
mortality.
The first chapter in The Waves documents the dread that
belongs to the great unknown, the vulnerability of children in
sensing what they cannot know, whether it arrives as a report
of a violent death or a surprise kiss at the nape of the neck.
The dread of the unknown is trauma. Powerlessness and lack
of control are the symptoms. Each character comes to terms
with dread by constituting an identity that includes death and
the imagination. In Chapter 8, however, the characters
individually give names to their terrors. They also pair off as
they walk and perform lives that might have been, the
possibilities that did not come to fruition.
Chapter 8 is the next-to-last chapter of the novel. It situates
each character with respect to the shocks of childhood and a
life lived in light of those shocks. The recognition of the shared
essentials of death and beauty for Percival enables the lives of
individual choice rather than cultural norms. This would include
Rhoda's suicide as existential freedom, a foreshadowing of
Woolf's choice to end her life in a deliberate immersion in the
River Ouse with rocks in the pockets of her coat.
Self-Reference and Writing
In the modernist novel, the style of writing is equal in
importance to the narrative. It is not an arbitrary notion of the
matching of style and content. The modernist novel strives for
a kind of wholeness in a broken world. If the narrative is not in
itself whole and rounded with a conclusion, a middle, and an
end, and the characters themselves products of a broken
world, then the modern artist may at least create a notion of
possibility, a closing of a circle, the drawing of the world of the
novel as round.
The modernist novel is self-referential; that is, the novel's
language pays attention to itself. There are several reasons
Woolf may have chosen to experiment with language in this
way when writing The Waves. Her experiment demanded that
she not write an autobiography; instead, she would write
anyone's autobiography. Her sense that the terror of childhood
The Waves Study Guide Themes 37

is a universal experience also supports consistency in style.
Additionally, there is the godlike role of the artist, the creator of
a tone-poem to childhood. If humans are all made in God's
image, there is no reason humans should not speak as God
does. Finally, the novel is poetry. Therefore, creating a unified
voice that speaks to a universal audience makes good sense.
For Woolf, who was deeply sensitive to criticism and worried
about the reception of her work, this experiment showed
courage.
The style of the novel is consistent throughout. It is not a work
in which one comes to know the characters by the way they
speak. Everyone and everything speaks in the same way. To a
fault, critics would likely judge the consistency of tone and
diction, or word choice, in a conventional novel in which the
main action consists of six characters who identify themselves
in soliloquies. For Woolf, however, this choice was part of the
grand experiment in writing a novel that was as much poetry as
prose. In a poem, readers might expect a unified voice.
allusion to the interlude for Chapter 3, where readers can
imagine the girl as the creator of gemlike beauty and lively
sparkle. She knows where she is going. She is not interested in
the repetitious waves or the familiar styles of their music. She
is creative, having chosen her singular, inexplicable path. Like
Jesus Christ, the son of God, she walks on water, and not
without some magic.
In The Waves, the jewel maker is an embodiment of dawn—one
who chooses her path, making it beautiful and breathing fire
into her creations. The voice of this creator speaks like the rest
of her creations speak (the six characters in the story). Thus,
the text delivers messages that are entirely accessible to all.
The reader must merely pay attention to the diction in its
interesting departures from ordinary and expected
descriptions of the sea and the act of creation itself. It is the
artist in this sequence who potentially can redeem humanity.

The shared experience of the death of a schoolmate helps

define the vulnerabilities of the characters and the sadness at
the center of the narrative. That is the foundational experience
of the novel that is shared by all readers. Additionally, the
sensation of being both connected and disparate is one that
readers can easily understand.

Overall, the novel's diction is poetic, suggesting something as

lofty as a creation myth as the starting place. In Chapter 1, self-
referentiality in the act of creation manifests in the act of
writing the novel. The disembodied voice, the bringer of light,
the godlike creator who separates dry land from water, could
be a woman novelist. Her characters, like God's creations, are
made in her image. Thus, the act of creation brings the artist to
the same questions with which she endows her creations. In
The Waves, these are questions about a comforting yet
distressing dependence on others versus a lonely and
productive independent existence.

The opening to Chapter 3 offers further compelling evidence

of the novel's poetic diction. The first three sentences obey the
conventions of the sunrise scheme, creating the colors of the
day. The appearance of dawn making jewels along the water
introduces the artist to the text. She drives across the passage
and the landscape to direct the day.

In Chapter 1, Woolf alludes to Christian creation stories told in

the Bible's Book of Genesis, specifically the verse in which the
Creator says, "Let there be light." Readers can apply the

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