"Whose books once influenced mine": the relationship between E.M. Forster's 'Howards End' and Virginia Woolf's 'The Waves.'

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1999 by Michael J. Hoffman, Ann Ter Haar

In fact, the awareness of separateness and difference - the movement out of a prelapsarian oneness - marks the first apprehensions of the characters in The Waves and remains a driving force throughout the narrative: in his final monologue, Bernard remembers that, as children, "We suffered terribly as we became separate bodies" (241). That experience of separateness does not, however, acknowledge separation from the mother, since the family scarcely exists in The Waves. And while Woolf avoids certain inscriptions of traditional family elements, she does include, as the first break in the novel, the British compulsion to separate the sexes during adolescence. The characters' destinies are henceforth marked by gender, and the schools they attend are differently endowed. Authority, history, and fellowship compensate for some of the less positive aspects of the boys' boarding-school experience. By contrast, the boarding school of the three girls is like a holding cell: sterile, confining, regimented. One is reminded of the descriptions in A Room of One's Own of the differences between male and female Oxbridge colleges, particularly their dinner tables. The boys in The Waves are inspired by the speakers at chapel; they become poets on the river banks, lounging in friendship amid the luxury of metaphysical speculations. Woolf clearly envied and idealized the Cambridge experiences of her brothers and their friends, which she felt had been denied to her. Moreover, she grants none of the female characters a destiny she would have desired for herself (although she does write aspects of herself into each): Susan the housemother/earthmother; Rhoda the psychological misfit; Jinny the narcissist. Although Woolf severs her characters from oppressive Victorian/Edwardian family structures, she does not incorporate positive plot options into their adult lives.

This does not mean she treats all characters with strict evenhandedness. Although unhappy, Neville has his poetry, and Louis is one of those powerful men who make the world run. Percival experiences the fate of an athlete dying young, embalmed forever in the amber of Victorian masculinity. And Bernard, whose voice increasingly comes to dominate the novel, completely filling the last 20 percent of it, comes to be a spokesperson for the author. But his ironic, worldly, and somewhat exhausted wisdom seems finally based less on Woolf herself and more on her friend Morgan, in persona, age, and physique, "a rather heavy, elderly man, grey at the temples" (238). (Forster was in his early 50s when The Waves was published.(7)) What does this reliance on Bernard's voice suggest? Is Woolf invoking Forster's voice, consciously or unconsciously, to represent a kind of authority? If so, does she, through this displacement, express envy for the kind of narratorial authority possible only to a male voice of the dominant culture? Or is Woolf trying to show us, through Bernard, the failure of a life lived through the point of view of someone like Forster?