Virginia Woolf's 'The Waves': to defer that "appalling moment."

Criticism, Wntr, 1998 by Lisa Marie Lucenti

Rhoda, although seeming to be the absolute other of any system of meaning, including those of language, time, and ego, is not as exterior as she appears to be.(8) Her exclusive orientation towards difference is evident in her repeated desire to be someone else. This desire compels her own dissolution. The other characters place themselves by projecting a certain permanence onto an alien body. Rhoda's self-annihilation is a consequence of taking this process to its logical extreme; imagining the other as essential in and of itself, she can conceive of no place for herself. It is this delusion, rather than any exclusion from the symbolic, which ultimately prevents Rhoda from crossing her puddle (64, 158). That puddle is both the "cadaverous" facelessness of death and the death-like facelessness of her own reflection (64). Her "identity fail[s]" in confrontation with this blankness (64). Yet each of the other characters experiences a similar failure; they are simply more adept at repairing the breach.

While each character can only get to a "self" by taking a detour through some form of otherness, Rhoda imagines that she alone diverges from herself. She repeatedly expresses her conviction that there is an authentic, substantive world of which she is only a sham copy. Looking at Jinny and Susan she thinks, "Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy.... They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it" (43). They seem to have access to a "knowledge" and "assurance" which enables them to form legitimate identities, while Rhoda, lacking this knowledge, can only "lie" and "prevaricate" (106). She consistently describes herself in terms of absence and lack: "I have no face" (33, 43, 130, 223). Rhoda sees herself as a series of hollow masks with no face beneath them. She is convinced that everyone else has a "face" behind the mask, an integrated self that provides a home for identity. Rhoda cannot cross the puddle of time because she cannot reconcile herself to the fact that each moment simultaneously kills and gives birth to new selves.(9) In the face of such inconstant being, Rhoda turns away. She sees her "self' as unwarranted and illicit, but only in relation to some other authentic and unmediated singularity of which she can be only a copy. Again looking at Jinny and Susan, she sees her displacement in terms of "copying what they do" and expresses her "hopeless desire to be Susan, to be Jinny" (43, 27). If she is alone, with no one to imitate, she loses all sense of her own being and experiences total vertigo, a "fall off the edge of the world into nothingness" (44). Believing in "a world immune from change" from which she is excluded, Rhoda describes herself as "not composed enough," "perpetually contradicted," "interrupted," "broken," and "derided" (107).

Rhoda's relationship to language is perhaps not one of total exclusion but of selective delusion. The critical difference between Rhoda and the other characters is her conviction that they have access to the truth which eludes her: "`Like' and `like' and `like'--but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing" (163). Rephrased in terms of her own search for individuality, this question asks, "what is the self beneath my semblance of a self?" The hazard of this question lies in its uncritical assumption that other "selves" have access to this inner truth and can do away with the semblance. In this regard, she is not so different from Neville who believes that the shell of language somehow excludes him from its essence. In contrast, however, Neville is not convinced that anyone else has found the entrance either--certainly not Bernard or Louis. Rhoda is also similar to Neville and to Bernard in her recognition of death, her awareness that "silence closes over our transient passage" (65). Like them, she is also convinced that death could somehow yield up its mysteries--that its silence is voluntary rather than categorical. Percival's death should reveal some inner truth, but it does not. Rather than seeing this silence and her own internal fissures as intrinsic and universal, however, Rhoda reads them as personal limitations or flaws. She cannot deliver herself: "I will gather my flowers and present them--oh! to whom?" (57). Her "flowers" are both inaccessible and ungiveable not because she has somehow failed to reach them, but because they are an attempt to represent the unrepresentable--silence, death, ontological purity. In the end, because she can find no living other to receive this immaterial gift, she gives it to the radical otherness of death, tossing her violets to Percival through the medium of the sea, prefiguring both her own death, and perhaps even the death of her "author."