An Elegy Of Empire

As a famous novelist, essayist, biographer, publisher, feminist and critic, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) has long been celebrated as a master of stream-of-consciousness novels along with James Joyce and William Faulkner in the early 20th century. During her lifetime, she is widely recognized as a significant figure in London literature society. Long after her time, her unique literary style embodied in all her works also marks her as an innovative writer.In Woolf's lifetime, she published many novels, essays, letters and criticism, the most famous of which possibly were Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), A Room of One's Own (1929), The Waves (1931) and so forth. The Waves which depicts the lives of six children—Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis through their streams of consciousness is undoubtedly the most formally and thematically experimental and poetical of all Woolf's novels.This thesis, consisting of five chapters, is to analyze The Waves from the perspective of postcolonialism.Chapter One gives a brief introduction to Viginia Woolf and The Waves, literature review of the novel and theoretical basis. The theory applied here is mainly Edward Said's Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. We can clearly perceive his insight into the inequality between the Orient and the Occident and his attack on power politics and cultural superiority.Chapter Two chiefly focuses on the glorious image of British Empire shaped in the novel, which is presented from two aspects—the image of the seventh character Percival and London, the former is believed as representative of empire and the latter showing the center and shape of empire.Chapter Three swifts the attention to British Empire's cultural superiority constructed in the novel. In postcolonial theory, cultural superiority is unavoidable product of colonialism. Prejudice against India is a reflection of cultural superiority. From analysis of imaginary image of India given by main characters, the cultural superiority is exposed. Besides this, in the novel, we can also see something in the contradictory character—Louis. His complicated social roles reveal the cultural superiority, too.Chapter Four turns to analyze from another perspective, to disclose the inevitable fate of British Empire—its decay, by analyzing the death of Percival, the changes of characters'values and the symbolic meaning of the interludes.Chapter Five finally concludes the main results of the research. After reading The Waves from the perspective of postcolonialism, an overall impression of Woolf's conception of empire and a deeper and different understanding of this great and remarkable work can be clear in mind. In terms of postcolomialism, The Waves is an elegy of British Empire.