The merging of reality and fiction in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and her character ‘Rhoda’

Abstract

Knowledge and understanding constitute the dominant discourse that functions according to social rules in order to maintain a certain status quo. Madness can be seen as an attempt to transgress this discourse; a form of rebellion against the dominant order. Following Michel Foucault, who theorized this conflict, this paper analyzes the role of madness in Virginia Woolf’s works. In many of them, the English writer narrates, in between the lines, her psychological transitional passage after suffering a series of traumatic events in her infancy. It has been said that Virginia Woolf lived two lives: one on thereal world and one in her own interior world, the one reflected in her novels. It is our aim to find the connections between these two parallel lives. Her work is interesting precisely because it makes manifest her split self within narrative fiction. This borderline condition is more obvious in her novel The Waves. Thus, the paper will examine the characters’ thoughts, and establish connections with the realityof Woolf’s life and childhood. Alongside Foucault’s cultural analysis, the study employs a psychological perspective based on some basic aspects from Sigmund Freud’s theories. In terms of structure, the paper begins with a brief description of the socio-cultural aspects of the period in which Woolf lived, focusing on the situation of women and on the author’s main life events. This is followed by an in-depth study of Rhoda, one of the six characters of The Waves, who recalls Virginia Woolf’s own life to the point of anticipating her suicide. Underlying the discussion, the paper unveils intergeneric hybridity in 20th-century avant-garde by showing the crossings between autobiography and fiction.