Abstract
In The Waves, Woolf returns to that primal scene of writing which plays its part in the structure of so many of her novels — The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room, and To the Lighthouse, for example. This scene, we remember, surfaces in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ in Woolf’s evocation of the ‘most important’ of her early memories:
It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind. It is of hearing the blind draw its little acorn across the floor as the wind blew the blind out. It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive. (MB, p. 73)
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Notes
J. W. Graham (ed.), The Waves: The Two Holograph Drafts (London; Hogarth Press, 1976), pp. 63–4.
Elizabeth Bronfen, ‘From Omphalos to Phallus: Cultural Representations of Femininity and Death’, Women, 3, 2 (Autumn 1992), 156.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 34–5.
Katherine Mansfield, Collected Stories (London: Constable, 1945, repr. 1976), p. 205.
Françoise Defromont, ‘Impossible Mourning’ in Paillette Michel and Michel Dupuis (eds), The Fine Instrument (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1989).
Mitchell A. Leaska (ed.), The Pargiters by Virginia Woolf: The Novel-Essay Portion of ‘The Years’ (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), p. vii.
Quoted in Patricia Waugh (ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), p. 185.
Alan Wilde, Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism and the Ironic Imagination (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 100.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ (1937) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XXIII (London: Hogarth Press, 1964).
Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’ in Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (eds), The Feminist Reader (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 215.
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© 1994 Clare Hanson
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Hanson, C. (1994). Generation(s) in The Waves and The Years. In: Virginia Woolf. Women Writers. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23381-6_5
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