Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: Initial impression of the six alternate personalities, significance of their mutual awareness, and unanswered questions.

(Please search Woolf for prior posts.)

About one third into this novel, two things about the six alternate personalities—Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis—are clear. First, they are all aware of each other. Second, they are not portrayed as being real people, since, for example, Bernard describes himself as having no fixed identity, and Rhoda says that she has no face, and that Susan and Jinny change bodies and faces.

Personalities Aware of Each Other

When you first learn that a person has multiple personality, and start to become acquainted with their alternate personalities, you initially meet a limited number of alternate personalities, who are, more or less, aware of each other. But you soon realize there are things that have gone on in this person’s life that cannot be accounted for by these particular personalities. And in exploring these unaccounted for things, you find a deeper layer of personalities, unknown to the first group. Some persons with multiple personality have two or three layers, some have many.

So the reader of this novel is faced with trying to understand a person when you are only allowed to meet the most superficial layer of who that person is.

Unanswered Questions

Bernard describes himself as being a sort of chameleon, who adapts to people he meets, but does not have much of any existence in private. He says, “Thus my character is in part made of the stimulus which other people provide, and is not mine, as yours are…I am made and remade continually…” (1, pp. 133-134). This reminds me of the character in Henry James’s short story, “The Private Life,” who always knew exactly the right thing to say in social gatherings, but literally ceased to exist in private.

So far, then, Bernard seems to be a “host personality” (search it in this blog), but I wonder if there might be more than one personality using the name Bernard, similar to the way that Doris Lessing described herself as having more than one version of her “hostess” personality (search Lessing). It is one of my unanswered questions.

Meanwhile, Rhoda says that she has “no face,” and also mentions that “Susan and Jinny change bodies and faces” (1, p. 122). In contradiction, Neville says, “Let Rhoda speak, whose face I see reflected mistily in the looking-glass opposite…” (1, p. 138). This brings up the subject of mirrors and multiple personality (search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog).

I am interested to see how much of this is clarified in the rest of the novel.

1. Virginia Woolf. The Waves. New York, Harvest/Harcourt, 1931.