Singing the World in The Waves: The Ecopoetics of Woolf’s Play-Poem

Abstract

In The Waves, Woolf takes up the ecofeminist critique of the divide between the body and the mind, the human and the nonhuman, “me” and “not me.” She is aware that the world is “one thing,” and seeks to portray it as such:

what I call “reality”: a thing I see before me; something abstract; but residing in the downs or sky; beside which nothing matters; in which I shall rest and continue to exist. Reality I call it. And I fancy sometimes this is the most necessary thing to me: that which I seek. But who knows—once one takes a pen & writes? How difficult not to go making “reality” this & that, whereas it is one thing. (1977–84, III: 196)