Department of Studies in Drama and Pre-1800 English Literature, University of Łódź
Abstract
Virginia Woolf describes her artistic goal in The Waves as an attempt to create “an abstract
mystical eyeless book.” Yet, in creating her eyeless book, one that eschews a single narrative
perspective, Woolf amasses abundant visual details. For each of her six characters, visual
images mark significant moments of being. In fact, Woolf emphasizes the characters’ capacity
for sight as a vulnerability that allows them to be violated and wounded over and over. This
article analyzes connections between visual imagery and themes of violence in the novel to
demonstrate how they cohere into an extended metaphor for the ways in which acts of
looking can elicit powerful emotions that threaten to fragment individual identity in painful
ways. While Woolf’s novel has received critical commentary that focuses on the role of vision
in the narrative and critics have also noted how violence in the text supports other themes,
the explicit relationship between sight and violence has not yet been fully explored. A close
examination of the visual imagery in key scenes of the novel demonstrates how Woolf engages
the reader to participate in the characters’ deepening sense of fragmentation as they are
repeatedly assaulted by experience, as the eyes themselves become symbols of the twin
dynamics of desire and destruction