"Everyone chooses their love after their own fashion": The Waves as a Modernist Symposium

Abstract

Abstract: In A Room of One's Own , when Virginia Woolf urges women writers to expose the "dark spots" in men's psychology, she signals her own intentions for The Waves . In The Waves , Woolf targets men's masculinity, elite educations, brutalized boyhoods (at public schools), and their too-easy belonging to literary traditions as causes of male writers' truncated creativity. Louis, Bernard, and Neville exhibit the writerly disabilities Woolf associates with virility in Room . They are also linked to T.S. Eliot, Desmond MacCarthy, and Lytton Strachey, and to modernist experimentalism, realism, and homosexual Hellenism, respectively. In The Waves , Woolf differentiates her aesthetics not only from the "materialists"—H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and Arnold Bennett—but her Georgian "allies" as well—Eliot, MacCarthy, and Strachey prominent among them.