Freedom of The Waves. 4 May 2024

Virginia Woolf Season IV: Woolf and Freedom. Live online.

Lecture 9. Freedom of The Waves

We know from Virginia Woolf’s diary that she completed her first draft of The Waves with a delicious sense of freedom.  Woolf ‘reeled across the last ten pages […] in a state of glory, & calm, and some tears’. The Waves was published in 1931, at the pinnacle of Woolf’s creative writing career, and it show-cases her form and style at its most innovative. 

The Waves follows the lives of six friends from birth to death. Each chapter is introduced with a lyrical ‘interlude’ that incrementally captures the life-cycle of a single day from one dawn until the following.  As the characters wax and wane so too does this single day, bringing with it a profound sense of freedom.  Death is not final here but rather it is embedded within a monumental process of renewal, just as the waves that saturate this novel roll, break and reform. 

We will explore how Woolf turns the concept and feeling of freedom every which way in The Waves. Identity is at once a source of freedom, and a terrible constraint.  Death is figured as an essential part of the life-cycle, but also as an irresistible dive into oblivion. And yet those final ten pages Woolf wrote with such creative passion insist that death is to be defied and fought in the name of freedom. Woolf’s masterpiece traces the deeply mysterious and thrilling intersections of life, death and freedom.

With Dr Angela Harris, London.

Saturday 4 May 2024
18.00-20.00 British Summer Time
19.00-21.00 Central European Summer Time
Morning/lunchtime in the Americas
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Set Reading

Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931; Oxford World’s Classics, 2015)

Optional Further Reading

Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (Penguin, 2005); Chapter 10: ‘Into Deep Waters’: The Waves (1931)

Hermione Lee, The Novels of Virginia Woolf (Routledge, 1977); Chapter 7: The Waves (1931)

Carrie Rohman, ‘“We Make Life”: Vibration, Aesthetics and the Inhuman in The Waves’, in Virginia Woolf and the Natural World: Selected Papers from the Twentieth International Conference on Virginia Woolf, ed. by Kristin Czarnecki and Carrie Rohman (Clemson University Digital Press, 2011),  pp. 12-23

Price
£32.00 Full price
£27.00 Students, CAMcard holders
£27.00 Members of the VWSGB

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