The democratic construction of gender in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

Abstract

I will particularly examine the work of Virginia Woolf, the 20th century novelist and critic, principally because her work exposes a very rich and extensive evidence of her awareness of the dichotomy women/men, putting special emphasis on female psychology. Her conviction was that an artist should never pervade the writing with judgements based upon sex distinctions or opinions full of resentment. Hence, the author’s inclination for the androgynous was used as a writing fashion, which in turn gave room to discussions on the topic of phallocentrism, taking subsequently the form of an embryonic feminist mode. Just as one wave does not really reflect the completeness and beauty of the sea, neither a single person reflects the splendour of mankind. I focus my attention on The Waves, since this novel has plenty of data that encourages an autonomous way of looking at humans, their gender, and the relations between them. The objective of this paper is to associate the author’s considerations about human distinctiveness and gender in The Waves. For this purpose I shall determine the feminist features presented in the novel as well as I shall establish the importance of characterisation and symbolism; these aspects communicate strong ideas concerning the fragmentation of reality with no hierarchic allusions related to gender, which as a result, comes to be a ground-braking conceptual reaction against phallocentrism.