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Fragmentation and Wholeness in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves
Gioiella Bruni Roccia
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2023.12.001
LUMSA, University of Rome, Rome, Italy
Virginia Woolf’s seventh novel, The Waves, first published by the Hogarth Press in 1931, is widely regarded as her most experimental piece of writing. The complex and elusive structure of the work, the least representational among Woolf’s novels, challenges the reader’s assumptions about the inner and the outer world. In the absence of a substantial story, of a convincing plot and well-defined characters, the reader is called upon to search for a deeper coherence and more profound meanings. Indeed, in The Waves the modernist writer strives for a fresh way of expressing a vision of wholeness in a broken world. The present article attempts to reread Woolf’s self-conscious novel in the double perspective of separation and reunion, of dispersal and recomposition. A close reading of selected passages will show how the poetics of fragmentation and the poetics of wholeness coexist in Woolf’s narrative, pervading the imagery and the symbols of the text. In more than one sense, the dialectic between division and unity, fragmentation and wholeness can be identified as the structuring force of the novel; most tellingly, this textual dynamism is reflected in the oscillatory motion of the waves, continuously breaking and merging.
Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, fragmentation, wholeness, rhythm, circle motif
Journal of Literature and Art Studies, December 2023, Vol. 13, No. 12, 931-940
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