ABSTRACT
Virginia Woolf’s engagement with Wagner’s tetralogy was lifelong and ambivalent: despite an apparent break from Wagner before the First World War, and several skeptical allusions to his operas in the novels, Wagner’s work remained a vital stimulus to, model for, and antitype to Woolf’s prose. The Waves has long been perceived as Woolf’s most “musical”—and most Wagnerian—novel. Since the 1960s, studies of Wagner’s literary influence have acknowledged the novel’s thematic and structural affinities to Wagner’s Ring cycle and explored Woolf’s use of the leitmotif. The Waves is made up of the soliloquies of six individuals framed by depersonalized interludes describing the natural world, and the first scene of Das Rheingold is a vital inter-text for the interlude with which Woolf’s work begins. Woolf exploits intermittent allusions to Wagner’s characters further, critiquing Wagner’s sexual politics as the Wagnerian parallels flesh out The Waves’s discreet challenges to heteronormativity.
