ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that Woolf 's exploration of death in her novels is similarly informed by an awareness of language as it conditions representation and subjectivity. The author argues that Woolf 's novels demonstrate a movement toward inhabiting the space of death through the erasure of the meaning human subjectivity imposes upon an indifferent reality, which orientates perception toward objects and natural processes now seen in the light of the absence of signification which is death. Death obtrudes almost immediately from the start of the novel in the figure of Rachel's surrogate mother-figure Helen Ambrose, whom the people first meet grieving the loss of her children. The ironic apostrophizing of death that concludes The Waves aptly marks Woolf’s gradual incorporation of the materiality of language into the scope of narrative, along with the evacuation of subjectivity and its will to impose illusory permanence upon that which will not guarantee stability.
