ABSTRACT
The maternal figure which occupies the forefront of the scene of To the Lighthouse through Mrs Ramsay is curiously neutralized on the surface of The Waves. According to the examples given in 'A Sketch of the Past', it appears that these 'moments of being', which always refer to the past but are 'more real than the present moment', are profoundly traumatic. When Virginia Woolf writes, while finishing The Waves, 'I have netted that fin in the waste of water which appeared to me', she means, of course, that she has succeeded in grasping something of that ungraspable vision, but we can hear there the relief at having succeeded in holding out a net of words above the rip, in sewing a network of voices bridging the gap opened up by the hallucination. The distance between the two superimposed instances in the monologues of The Waves is hardly less than between an omniscient narrator and his character in a traditional novel.
