Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (conclusion): Protagonist has alternate personalities, but literary criticism fails to acknowledge multiple personality.

“Now to sum up,” said Bernard. “Now to explain to you the meaning of my life” (p. 238).

“There are many rooms—many Bernards” (p. 260).

“I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am—Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda, or Louis; or how to distinguish my life from theirs” (p. 276).

“For this is not one life; nor do I always know if I am man or woman, Bernard or Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny or Rhoda—so strange is the contact of one with another” (p. 281).

“And now I ask, ‘Who am I?’ I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know” (p. 288).

Unnamed Personality

As I speculated in a previous post, the six mutually-aware personalities were unlikely to be the person’s only personalities. Bernard mentions another, unnamed personality, who has affected his life for many years.

“I spoke to that self who has been with me in many tremendous adventures; the faithful man who sits over the fire when everybody has gone to bed, stirring the cinders with a poker; the man who has been so mysteriously and with sudden accretions of being built up, in a beech wood, sitting by a willow tree on a bank, leaning over a parapet at Hampton Court; the man who has collected himself in moments of emergency and banged his spoon on the table, saying, ‘I will not consent’ ” (pp. 283-284).

Do Bernard and Others Die?

“…he is dead, the man I called ‘Bernard’…” (p. 291).

Who is this speaking in the final seven pages? Is Bernard, psychologically speaking, dead, or does he mean only that he feels depressed, because he seems to have been abandoned by his named and unnamed alternate personalities, and feels empty and at a loss without them? Have those personalities died? Is this narrator, who says Bernard is dead, the unnamed personality mentioned above, or some new narrator, who has taken over?

At the end of this novel, where have all these personalities gone? Have they died? Have they ceased to exist? Not at all. They have simply gone behind the scenes. How do I know? Because it is in the nature of multiple personality that most alternate personalities, most of the time, reside behind the scenes; or, if not behind the scenes, at least incognito.

Unacknowledged Multiple Personality

Although the six “characters” are revealed to be alternate personalities, the text does not call them “personalities” or speak of them in terms of multiple personality. So the author probably knew that she had various selves—which I think she mentions in her diaries—but she probably did not think of them in terms of multiple personality, per se.

Similarly, many literary critics have recognized that this novel features personalities, not characters, but most critics have not made the connection between personalities and multiple personality.

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