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

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.