Varieties of mystical experience in the writings of Virginia Woolf

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1995 by Julie Kane

But in The Waves Woolf broaches the subject of the immorality of the soul with great seriousness. The Hindu/Theosophical viewpoint, in which the soul must incarnate through progressive stages of spiritual enlightenment until it escapes the Great Wheel of Being, is represented by Louis: "This is the first day of a new life, another spoke of the rising wheel. . . . I seem already to have lived many thousand years" (41-42). According to Hinduism/Theosophy, the "aggregate of individual Karma" - those right and wrong actions carried out in individuals' past lives - "becomes that of the nation to which those individuals belong, and further . . . the sum total of National Karma is that of the world" (Blavatsky 122). A very spiritually advanced individual, such as Christ, may "redeem" the aggregative negative karma of a nation or even the world:

It is reserved for heroic souls to find out the cause of this unequal pressure of retributive Karma, and by a supreme effort to readjust the balance of power, and save the people from a moral engulfment a thousand times more disastrous and more permanently evil than the like physical catastrophe, in which you seem to see the only possible outlet for this accumulated misery. (124)

It is certainly not stretching the bounds of belief to suggest that the death of Percival, the novel's "hero," in colonial India, functions to redeem the negativity and formlessness of the other six characters' lives. Even critic Jane Marcus, in a post-colonial reading of the novel, asserts that Woolf may have intended Percival as a reincarnation of Shiva, the Hindu god of regeneration and destruction (156).

Marcus finds other Hindu philosophical allusions in Woolf's novel as well. She identifies the poem quoted by Rhoda as Shelley's "Indian Girl's Song," and draws a parallel between Rhoda's death and that of Indian widows who practice suttee, ritual suicide (131). She also suggests that the novel's opening interlude invokes the "Hymn to Dawn" of the sacred Hindu text Rig Veda (155). Dorothea Stephen's book, argues Marcus, stressed the emphasis of Indian philosophy on "astronomy and the randomness of the universe," also a major theme of The Waves (155). She notes that the Vedas are mentioned "as texts Bernard will never read, though Louis, the T. S. Eliot figure and the white colonial returned to the mother country, is familiar with them" (155). And Marcus and others suggest that the overturned cart which figures in the novel may symbolize "the juggernaut, Krishna's car under whose wheels the faithful would throw themselves" (158-59).

Whether or not all these allusions to Indian mystical practices were deliberate on Woolf's part, the novel definitely reflects the shift in her attitude toward mysticism which took place between 1927 and 1931. But Woolf did not "convert" to a mystical view of life from a previous position of skepticism. Rather, as we have seen from her earlier writings, she ceased to deny the world view which she had secretly harbored all along.