The Waves

Louis’s character is marked from the opening of the novel by a fear that he will not fit in. This fear develops in childhood and stays with him throughout his life and creates a fierce desire to feel unequivocally accepted by his society, expressed as professional ambition. Louis is in the same social class as the other characters but his family is not as wealthy as the other boys’, meaning that he cannot go with them to university after public school. This knowledge, and the embarrassment he feels about his Australian accent and parentage, gives Louis an internalized sense of inferiority. It is not clear that others treat Louis as inferior, and his acute sense of difference is arguably assumed by him. Woolf explores this as a paradoxical identity conflict in Louis’s character because his anxiety often gets in the way of his ability to connect with other people, as he is always seeking to prove and assert himself. Thus, in some ways, Louis’s concern that he will be rejected from community becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as he uses his intelligence and seriousness to build up his ego. In his soliloquies, Louis comforts himself that he is more intelligent and therefore has that superiority over others. The other characters express their awareness that Louis can assert himself at others’ expense.

Despite his great professional and financial success, Louis is also drawn to a different style of life and sense of himself. The fact that he escapes from the luxurious life he has built to a rented attic room to write (and conduct a love affair with Rhona), demonstrates a sense of a split in his identity. This aspect of his character helps the novel to explore the nature of identity construction, and the multiple selves and opportunities that life presents. Louis is a poet who appreciates history, philosophy, and the literary arts. Louis therefore nurtures his own poetic self even as the routines of being a businessman keep him boxed inside the identity he has cultivated. His character is also emblematic of the traditional social divide between city “trade” and the established landed gentry of England; in writing, Louis again emulates Bernard and Neville, whose family wealth and position allow them to pursue intellectual and artistic pursuits instead of commerce.

Neville is characterized by his artistic pursuit of beauty and love, his lifelong unrequited love for Percival, and his role as an outsider due to his identity as a gay man.

Neville’s sexual orientation is an essential part of his role in the novel as this creates much of the conflict, sadness, and loss in his life; this is the crux of his character’s particular identity struggle. As noted in the context, support for free sexual expression and self-identification is a recurrent theme in Woolf’s works. In many ways, Neville’s pain at his unrequited love for Percival personally is emblematic in the novel of his painful position as a gay man in a society where gay relationships were criminalized and stigmatized. The novel does not reveal whether Neville has come out to the other characters but, as they do not acknowledge his sexual orientation or his feelings for Percival, the narrative suggests that his feelings of loneliness are compounded by the need for discretion, if not total secrecy. Neville feels judged by Susan, whose inclinations match the traditional path to marriage and children, and this is expressive of his sense that he is excluded from this type of life.

Neville searches for love, something that he seems to simultaneously long for and sabotage through his hopeless idealization of Percival, even after his death. Neville’s deep and passionate love for Percival is the love of his life that defines the way he navigates the world around him for years after Percival’s death. He also seeks order and beauty in life, and his deep connection to the world and his own emotions makes him a good poet. This is a source of both pain and consolation for him. Neville becomes a successful writer and is lauded for his poetry. His character represents the, sometimes painful, pursuit of beauty, art, and love.

Rhoda’s life and consciousness are marked by her sense of deep sadness and lack of belonging. Her narrative voice questions and criticizes herself incessantly, comparing herself negatively to the other characters, particularly the other women. Her sense of a lack of meaning in her life causes her continual unhappiness which. The occurrences of suicide ideation in her narrative foreshadow her death as the reader learns through Bernard’s concluding soliloquy that she has ended her own life. Rhoda’s search for meaning and her discovery that life lacks meaning starts in her childhood. A formative experience in Rhoda’s character development occurs when, as a student, she can’t make any meaning of the figures on the chalkboard. Rhoda has a nearly out-of-body experience that forces her to confront the lack of meaning she sees as inherent to the world around her. As she gets older, Rhoda carefully observes Jinny and Susan and simulates their behavior in an effort to become more like the kind of woman she thinks she should be. In some ways, the harder Rhoda tries to fit in, and the more self-reflective she becomes, the more isolated she feels; she feels she lacks the other characters’ ability to find a contented place for themselves in life and to project identities that help them navigate their lives and relationships. The narratives of the other characters in fact show that all are to a greater or lesser extent tortured at times by similar sadness and existential concerns as Rhoda. Whereas they seem to have a sense that this is the human condition, which all people feel (and internalize) to a certain extent, Rhoda seems to take her friends’ external behavior as a sign of difference between herself and others. Although she herself seems to hide her unhappiness, it seemingly does not occur to her that the others have similar hidden emotions. This sense of isolation exacerbates her sense of unhappiness and anxiety.

Rhoda is characterized by the leitmotif of water. Rhoda has a connection with water that is symbolic because the turbulence of the sea around her and the crash of the waves reflect her internal conflict. Rhoda is often depicted staring out into the ocean, moved only by the ebbs and flows of the water, and her episodes of suicide ideation are in the context of water. In linking Rhoda to the eponymous waves, Woolf is linking her theme of time to the tragic sense Rhoda has of the fleeting insignificance of the individual. Woolf, who experienced episodes of anxiety and depression and who ultimately ended her own life through drowning, may also be exploring the nature, cause, and meaning of these more difficult thoughts and emotions through the character of Rhoda.

Jinny’s character is largely defined by physicality and her role in the book is to explore this aspect of human experience. She experiences the world through physical beauty and pleasure and is motivated by the pursuit of this pleasure. Her beauty enables her to be a part of a society that is similarly motivated by sexuality and physicality and those become an identity-shaping cycle of ratification for her. Jinny’s role as the novel’s figure for physicality and sexuality is introduced early, when she kisses Louis. This act of sexual agency is the first indication that the life path she chooses will be centered around her physical power as a beautiful woman and the pursuit of material beauty, pleasure, and society. She is a pragmatic and positive person whose acknowledgment of her own aging doesn’t stop her from appreciating her life; her rootedness in her own physicality seems to give her a natural sense of contentment and agency beyond the way others see her.

Susan’s character is an exploration of nature, fecundity, and traditional values, especially as they relate to women’s life choices and identity. Susan is defined early on through her communion with nature, specifically her family’s land, the connected strands of nature, fertility, and family connection. Young Susan has a clear sense of her wishes and future hopes, resolving early on to live a country life and raise a family; her life does indeed follow this pattern, a conventional one for women of her class and time, although one that is unusual in her friendship group. Like Bernard, she seems to feel suited for the path that society and tradition assumes for her. The other characters, especially Neville and Rhoda, sometimes resent the ease with which she has found or accepted her place in life, and sometimes accuse her (silently) of dullness or of lacking imagination or courage. Susan is characterized through her contentment and, although she acknowledges that her choices and responsibilities have prevented her from having other adventures, this is expressed more as curiosity than as regret; she seems to understand that life involves choices and to feel that she has made those most suitable for herself.