Turned in a few days prior to Christmas ending 2021, this English Master's thesis received an A+. My grade was not exactly a result of groundbreaking academic research--which is supposed to be the goal of all academic capstones. At the same time, I'm not going to indulge my punk rock ego and pretend it's all charismatic garbage, composed by an academic rebel to prove some point about higher education. The truth of the matter is that 25 pages is a lot, and The Waves is a very difficult text. (So difficult--and so relatively less prestigious than at least two other Virginia Woolf works in the Western canon--that I largely chose it for my thesis paper on the basis that my professor might not have read it. That criterion, along with my chosen lens of neuroqueer character study, would give me plenty of runway to make the kind of literary speculations which can at least fill 25 pages and receive lighter professorial scrutiny than, say, a Marxist examination of A Christmas Carol.)
I won't attempt to explain what The Waves is about. All you need to know is it's a narrative prose-poem in which six human beings from early 20th Century England grow up and become people, and that the following excerpt from my paper is, generously, a bit of a stretch:
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[Neville's] neurodivergence manifests in dissociative introversion and increased anxiety in the presence of larger groups. Bernard observes Neville’s socializing interactions: "Louis and Neville both sit silent. Both are absorbed. Both feel the presence of other people as a separating wall.” (Woolf). A comparison is justified with Woolf’s famous A Room of One’s Own. “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” (Woolf). It may be common a century later to overlook that she equates women's economic liberty with simple household privacy. Why is one's own bedroom so dually paramount alongside financial independence and autonomy over one’s time? Fair, in her day it wouldn’t have been to be assumed that women had access to their own space, and writing is certainly done best in a quiet location. But perhaps there is a neurological imperative for Woolf (and her characters) which demands not just privacy in a quiet space, but the freedom to disappear. If Neville is sharing a location with Louis, then the space that makes up Neville ends at the point where Louis begins. One is subject to the other’s observation. But if Neville is contemplating alone in a room with a closed door, then Neville takes up the entire room. Furthermore, if that room has a window with, say, a view of a garden, then those moments of contemplation are respectively expansive. (Neville becomes not just a body and a room but--temporarily--a garden.) Woolf makes this point frequently through her characters with varying directness. The presence of another consciousness, to Woolf, collapses the expanse of selfhood into personal containers. The Waves demonstrates Woolf's necessity to expand and contract. To crash and recede.In displays of nearly dizzying complexity, Woolf pushes the subject/object experiment further. Boundaries of flesh separate two conscious identities observing each other, but if they in turn share in observing others, their unitary subjectivity inflates a new, temporary locus unique to that moment. Further still, Woolf’s movements of adding additional observers to such momentary locusses creates increasingly complex interference patterns, the resulting turbulence of which agitates certain neurodiverse characters and stimulates others. [As Woolf wrote The Waves, Erwin Shrodinger was 700 miles away in Berlin doing the work that would win him the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics for atomic wave equations. Fundamental particles, it turns out, behave similarly to Woolf's neuroqueer characters: probability clouds when unobserved, specific data points when scrutinized.]
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Dave Shay teaches high school English in a large suburban school district in Pennsylvania, where he feigns disinterest in caffeine and nicotine with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
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