The Waves by Virginia Woolf — A Rhizomatic Reading
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | This paper will aim to provide a textual analysis of Virginia Woolf’s novel: The Waves in connection to the concept of the Rhizome developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their seminal work: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. In their work, Deleuze and Guattari declare that all Western reality and thought has been dominated by what we might call arborescent reality. The latter refers to a dendritic understanding of reality in which hierarchical relationships are the main driving force of all representations. The present paper will argue that The Waves by Virginia Woolf is a novel that attempts to escape such an arborescent understanding of storytelling. First, through a dendritic lens of storytelling, a narrative is bound to be genealogical in structure and hence fall into dichotomies and narrative dualities. I will argue that The Waves, a great example of Modernist literature, shows a great force towards anti-genealogy which, it is argued, is one of the main principles of a Rhizomatic structure or narrative. Secondly, the novel will be studied in terms of its non-linear structure; a feature that echoes the interconnectedness or what Deleuze and Guattari might call the relational force of the novel. I will argue that Woolf manages to drive the story forward by highlighting the relationship between different elements and characters in the novel. |
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