A Study Of Virginia Woolf’s Modernistic Features In The Waves

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is an outstanding female writer, critic and literary theorist inhistory of English literature. As a brilliant representative of stream-consciousness novels inthe20th century, she held a very important place in the history of English literature. It tookhalf of her lifetime to write the following five stream-consciousness novels: To the Lighthouse,Mrs. Dalloway, Jacob’s Room, Flush and The Waves. As Woolf’s most representative work,The Waves was published in1931, into which she poured incomparable painstaking effort.The Waves is a classic, highly combined poetics and abstraction. Its uniqueness lies inthat it has no typical characters. The character image is abstract, fuzzy and formal. However,when we discuss the art of The Waves, we will have to touch its characteristics of modernismalong with its other features such as poetic characteristics and techniques of stream ofconsciousness.The thesis consists of five parts. The first part is to introduce the life and the works ofVirginia Woolf, the background of the novel The Waves and literature review and thecreativity and significance of the thesis. Chapter one mainly discusses the aesthetic features ofthe novel. The aesthetic features of this novel exhibit in the following four aspects: rhythm,lyrical language, Impressionist painting and Harmonious Symphony. Chapter two explores thepsychological presentations. In The Waves, the images of the characters are displayed throughinternal monologue and transitory impressions. Internal monologue shows the course of time,life and human life. The book’s six main characters and their monologues are the main body.Six characters have six temperaments and six lives. Their lives are revealed through themonologues, which show the helplessness and escape from the cycle of life. In addition,transitory moment in The Waves is the interpretation of the whole life, and thousands oftransitory impressions make up human’s whole life. Chapter three analyzes the use ofanti-traditional characters’ images and symbols. Woolf seemed to prefer the use of repeatedimages of particular kind to symbolize a certain character. For instance, the lighthouse is thesymbol of Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse; and the sheep’s jawbones is the symbol ofJacob in Jacob’s Room. However, in The Waves, symbol belongs to every character, and accompanies them from their childhood. And the symbol controls the characters’ psychology,thoughts and behavior. Each image of the character is also their symbol. The two aspects areclosely connected and always accompanied by each other. The use of characters’ imagesmakes its characters richer, which constitutes poetic imagery. The Waves is full of symbolsfrom time to characters, which is the focus of this chapter as well as the entire thesis. Theconclusion overall summarizes the modernistic features.