Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

5-1989

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

Allen Dunn

Committee Members

Lori Burghardt, Dick Penner, Karen Levy

Abstract

Virginia Woolf wanted to portray reality from a subjective point of view, unlike her nineteenth-century predecessors who presented an objective view of experience. Her narrative method was to use rhythm and metaphor to create not an incomprehensible text of subjective thoughts, but to suggest another, more elemental way of perceiving experience. The Waves is a perfect illustration of her narrative theory because the perspectives of both subject and object (self and other) are manifested through rhythm and graphically demonstrated through repetition and metaphor. The psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and the linguistic theories of Julia Kristeva best elucidate the interaction of these perspectives and the effect this interaction has on the author, the characters, and the reader. Woolf's dilemma of self-objectification, to record "the soliloquy in solitude," becomes the textual dilemma with which the characters and the narrator must struggle and attempt to resolve. The Waves demonstrates the dilemma of the individual subject as he or she tries to objectify the self in language. Because this is a struggle of the consciousness, the reader can, in many ways, identify with the dilemma facing the six characters through the episodes which they describe. However, even more significantly, the reader participates in this dilemma on an unconscious level through the rhythm and metaphor which dominate the discourse. The reader's consciousness which fluctuates, like that of the author and the characters, within the perspectives of subject and object, is thus rhetorically mirrored in the text.

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