Description

• Title:
  Vision and Violence in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves
• Creator:
  Otto, Peggy D.
• Contributor:
  Western Kentucky University;
  Peggy Otto is assistant professor of English at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and director of the WKU Writing Project. Her research interests include women‘s literacy and feminist pedagogies. She has previously published on Harriette Arnow‘s The Dollmaker. Currently working on a study of the literacy practices of early twentieth-century women in rural communities, she is researching the role of the county home extension agent as a women‘s literacy sponsor.
• Description:
  Virginia Woolf describes her artistic goal in The Waves as an attempt to create “an abstract mystical eyeless book.” Yet, in creating her eyeless book, one that eschews a single narrative perspective, Woolf amasses abundant visual details. For each of her six characters, visual images mark significant moments of being. In fact, Woolf emphasizes the characters’ capacity for sight as a vulnerability that allows them to be violated and wounded over and over. This article analyzes connections between visual imagery and themes of violence in the novel to demonstrate how they cohere into an extended metaphor for the ways in which acts of looking can elicit powerful emotions that threaten to fragment individual identity in painful ways. While Woolf’s novel has received critical commentary that focuses on the role of vision in the narrative and critics have also noted how violence in the text supports other themes, the explicit relationship between sight and violence has not yet been fully explored. A close examination of the visual imagery in key scenes of the novel demonstrates how Woolf engages the reader to participate in the characters’ deepening sense of fragmentation as they are repeatedly assaulted by experience, as the eyes themselves become symbols of the twin dynamics of desire and destruction.
• Object availability:
  free access
• Rights:
  Uznanie autorstwa-Użycie niekomercyjne-Bez utworów zależnych 3.0 Polska;
  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/pl ;
  Peggy D. Otto
• Date:
  2017.05.29;
  2015
• Type:
  Article
• Language:
  English
• Format:
  application/pdf
• Publisher:
  Department of Studies in Drama and Pre-1800 English Literature, University of Łódź
• Relation:
  Analyses/Rereadings/Theories Journal;2;
  3
• Subject:
  Virginia Woolf;
  The Waves;
  visual imagery;
  violence
• Identifier:
  2353-6098;
  http://hdl.handle.net/11089/21801
• Data provider:
  Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Can I use it?:
  seek permission
• Type:
  image