Readers of The Waves
navigate through Virginia Woolf’s book find the characters grappling with the
issues surrounding social space and their role situating themselves as they
grow, adapt and change to fit altered circumstances of age, new relationships
and worldly desires for marriage, career, independence and other dimensions.
For example, Woolf’s character Susan, who is the daughter of
a clergyman, moves through the first portion of The Waves seeking happiness and defining herself in a traditional
role. “I do not want as Jinny wants, to be admired. I do not want people, when
I come in, to look up with admiration. I want to give, to be given, and
solitude in which to unfold my possessions,” Susan states in The Waves. (Woolf, 2006)
For Lefebvre, the spatial practices of individuals expresses
the outcome of social patterns, including emotions, desires and actions. “In reality, social space ‘incorporates’
social actions, the actions of subjects both individual and collective who are
born and who dies, who suffer and who act.” (Lefebvre, 1991)
We find a demarcation of urban and pastoral space resonates
for Susan, who seeks to retreat to the country life to raise her family in a
traditional atmosphere, allowing her to embrace a traditional “mother” role. “I
will not send my children to school nor spend a night all of my life in London.
Here is the vast station everything echoes and booms hollowly. The light is
like the yellow light under an awning. Jinny Lives here….The streets are laced
together with telegraph wires. The houses are all glass, all festoons and
glitter; now all front doors and lace curtains, all pillars and white steps,”
Susan recounts in The Waves. (Woolf, 2006)
An individual’s choice – to live in the city, to live in the
country, to travel abroad, to remain close to home – all represent the
incorporation of value systems into an every changing atmosphere. “The production of Space forms the keystone
of the all-important ‘second phase’ of Lefebvre’s analysis of the urban that
began in 1972. This later phase deals with social space itself as a national
and ‘planetary expression’ of the modes of production….Lefebvre moved his
analysis of ‘space’ from the old
synchronic order of discourses “on” space …. To the manner in which
understandings of geographical space, landscape and property are culturally and
thereby have a history of change.” (Key
Thinkers on Space and Place)
As a passenger on the train heading home, Susan recounts her
departure from the city, and re-entry into the pastoral farm land, allowing her
to re-unite with her father, an emotional moment for her. “Now I will let
myself lean out the wind. The air rushes down my nose and throat – the cold
air, the salt air with the smell of turnip fields in it. And there is my father
with his back turned, talking to a farmer, I tremble. I cry. There is my
father.” (Woolf, 2006)
Sharing her delight of an early-morning walk through the farm,
Susan states, “At this hour, this still early hour, I think I am the field. I
am the barn, I am the trees; mine are the flocks of birds, and this young hare
who leaps, at the last moment when I step up almost on him.” (Woolf, 2006)
Woolf’s character’s, and many fictional characters
throughout literary works, find themselves struggling with questions of space
and place. “But now let me ask myself the final question, as I sit over the
grey fire, with its naked promontories of black coal, which of these people am
I? It depends so much upon the room. When I say to myself, ‘Bernard,’ who
comes? A faithful, sardonic man,
disillusioned, but not embittered. A man of no particular age or calling.
Myself, merely.” (Woolf, 2006)
“Social space thus
remains the space of society, of social life. Man does not live by words alone;
all subjects are situated in a space in which they must either recognize
themselves or lose themselves, as space which they may both enjoy and modify,”
Lefebvre states. (Lefebvre, 1991)
Key Thinkers on Space and Place. (n.d.).
Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space .
Malden: Blackwell.
Woolf, V. (2006). The Waves. Orlando:
Harcourt.
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