‘Effort and the Struggle’: Heroic Cycles in Bernard’s Final Soliloquy in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

If I were to overcome the conventions, I should need the courage of a hero

––Virginia Woolf, address to the National Society for Women’s Service, Jan. 1931

Writing The Waves was the most difficult literary task Virginia Woolf ever undertook. She began writing with “no great impulse; no fever; only a great pressure of difficulty” (A Writer’s Diary 142) but finished the novel in a state of “intensity and intoxication” and declared in her diary: “How physical the sense of triumph and relief is!” (Diary 7 Feb. 1931). Her diaries and letters from July 1929 – July 1931 (the period when the novel was composed and finalized) record numerous intense cycles of creative laboring that move from despair and misgivings to periods of remarkable pertinacity and conviction, from bouts of incapacitating illness to good health and daily walks (Letters xxi). The low points to these cycles, however, were not simply periods of inaction where Woolf’s progress was completely halted; rather, in varying ways the disillusionment, illness, drawing into isolation, or feelings of grief and despair become, as Woolf often attested, the very prerequisites for the clearer understanding, greater sense of effort, and bursting creative powers that followed. This sentiment is expressed in nearly all of Woolf’s writing––in fact few other writers have so valiantly explored abject mental and somatic states as sites of essential self-understanding or creative maturation. Woolf’s attention to illness in On Being Ill is a famous example, but there are many others.

Woolf’s experience composing The Waves involved cycles of effort and struggle leading to affirmation and understanding that, I argue, are articulated in Bernard’s final soliloquy in what I am calling “heroic cycles.” As we could track across Woolf’s oeuvre, it is by passing through the low moments of these cycles that we can gain some kind of insight into our predicament. More than catalysts for self-understanding or creative output, I pay attention to how such cycles ignite a heroic struggle against stifling social conventions, as the epigraph contends. In one entry about the composition of The Waves that records both gloom and confidence, Woolf concluded triumphantly: “I have got my statues against the sky” (Diary 9 April 1930). Such can be said of Bernard’s soliloquy, which certainly secures his place in Woolf’s pantheon of “statues against the sky.”

I

In reading criticism on The Waves, it became apparent to me that Bernard remains an unpopular character, at least among critics. Before turning to my own argument, I thought it necessary to highlight a certain way of reading his final soliloquy (and often The Waves in its entirely), expressed by numerous critics, that leads to his unpopularity. To put it bluntly, I simply disagree with these readings. More than a mere difference in taste, I find that in squashing Bernard, these readings lose hold of Woolf’s investment of her own experiences into his character. Further, such readings stifle the heroic theme that I find most important in Bernard’s soliloquy, and in understanding Woolf’s writings writ large. 

We should first note that the critics I highlight below worked to save Woolf from a very dangerous force in literary canonization: the accusation of apolitical noncommitment and monotonal seriousness. It is admittedly difficult to tell if Woolf indeed ever was at risk of being considered apolitical, or too genteel, or too “high modernist”––one would like to imagine that the mere existence of A Room of One’s Own would discredit this misunderstanding. But to give the following critics due credit, we perhaps owe it to them that we now know Woolf to be a great social satirist and by no means “apolitical.”

Jane Marcus’ 1992 article, “Britannia Rules The Waves”, has become famous for its rescuing of The Waves from macho-male Left-wing critics like Raymond Williams, F. R. Leavis, and Frederic Jameson who took unfavorably to its supposed celebration of upper class genteel British culture. These critics pinned Woolf to her characters and found them both to be genteel. Hence, Marcus’ goal was to separate Woolf and her characters, but this came at the cost of the characters. Marcus read The Waves “as a narrative about culture making” wherein the six characters engage in “production of the figures of hero and poet to consolidate cultural hegemony” and “gain a national identity by mythologizing the hero” (Marcus 67, 74). Percival is “the violent last of the British imperialists” who Bernard, embodying the myth of the Romantic artist, elegizes in a soliloquy that “plot[s] to canonize the physical and verbal brutality, class arrogance, and racial intolerance of Percival” (Marcus 66, 70). Woolf, in Marcus’ account, remains at a distance from her characters; the genteel British culture that Woolf’s characters represent is subject to satire and ridicule. The entire final soliloquy is “comic,” an “exhaustion of the form of soliloquy” to mock the valorization of the individual, and its citations of Romantic poetry as “merciless parody” that “pokes fun at Romantic diction and ideology” (Marcus 66, 69). Percival’s “quixotic” quest and laughable death in India, the melodramatic angst of the upper-class characters, their revulsion towards London’s masses, and fantasies of imperial dominance, all form into an ironic production that dramatizes the sunset of the British Empire. In short, Marcus reads The Waves as a magnificent tragicomedy filled with mockable characters that should be ridiculed. Woolf, newly saved, stands above.

This method of reading The Waves is still quite popular. Gabrielle McIntire’s 2005 assessment also sees a Woolfian subtext writing against Bernard’s soliloquy. Woolf writes Bernard’s soliloquy as an “evocation of linguistic modes of dominance” that is then undermined through “double-edged and ultimately parodic” techniques that stage an attack on this exposed fascistic monologism (McIntire 36, 35). By calling attention to Bernard’s wishes for oneness, order, and narrative control, or his “longing to shut down the presence of otherness, and to insist on subsuming identify under the sameness of a homogenous community,” McIntire’s essay aims to “detect a subtext critical of fascistic impulses” wherein Woolf parodies Bernard to “counter fascism [by] diagnosing its nearness to home” (McIntire 38, 37, 30).

Most recently, Pam Morris’ 2017 chapter on The Waves cleverly drew a phrase from Bernard’s final soliloquy to call the novel a “blasphemy of laughter and criticism.” The novel is characterized as a “‘blasphemous’ rebuttal” to “idealist interiority” through the use of “criticism and ironic laughter” (Morris 111). Morris wants to convince us that the critical blade of The Waves is unleashed upon essentially the same targets that Marcus and McIntire identify, namely, “the idealist glorification of self as cultured interiority and of a Burkean nation as revered tradition and guarantor of civilization” as well as “the myths of individualism, interiority and spirituality” (Morris 111). The “venerated abstractions of nation, culture, civilization, religion, commerce and technology” are subjected to barrages of Woolf’s “mockery and criticism” (Morris 130). While Morris briefly recruits Bernard (the one who actually calls for the use of a “blasphemy of laughter and criticism”) as an agent of “worldly realism” using laughter to antagonize “idealist urge for authority, fixity and conformity” and religious ritual, she primarily distances Woolf the satirist from her mockable characters (Morris 133). Bernard’s soliloquy is among the most mockable narrative sections and serves as a “critical and ironic examination of the pretensions, inequalities and oppressions that result from veneration of false idealist beliefs” (Morris 116).

These method(s) of reading The Waves are unsatisfactory for multiple reasons. First, in imagining that readers are moved to scoff at Bernard, they fail to capture the experience of reading Bernard’s soliloquy, in which I imagine most readers find quite rousing. More importantly, the above method of reading his soliloquy undervalues Woolf’s success at depicting a pattern of experience so absolutely central to her philosophy. For all of the insights into Woolf’s attention to the material world and the social critique in Bernard’s soliloquy, the desire to separate Woolf from her characters by imagining parodic antagonism between the two, also ignores all that Woolf wrote about character in fiction. She prided herself in nothing more than creating characters who are “real, true, and convincing” (Essays III.503). By viciously attacking Bernard, Woolf’s literary achievement gets caught in the crossfire. Some of Woolf’s characters are indeed objects of social satire, but I do not believe that Bernard can receive the same treatment as Charles Tansley, for example. Most importantly, trying to recruit Woolf against Bernard is a dubious project, one that completely ignores that Bernard’s soliloquy, which I will show, is an earnest expression of a philosophy of heroic struggle that Woolf held all her life.

The satirical current present in all of Woolf’s novels may indeed be “consistently overlooked by critics” (Beer 67). And yet I simply do not think that Bernard is an object of satire for Woolf or the reader, nor do I think his “swan song of the single self” (Morris’ term) is meant to lull the reader into a state of complicity only to reveal our own attraction to fascistic monologism, idealist interiority, or Romantic individualism––as I am surprised no one seems to have yet argued. As Molly Hite points out in her reading of Woolf’s edits to those passages of The Waves Marcus and others found to be the most satirical, there is a purposeful “withdrawal of narratorial authority from passages of emotion and evaluation” (Hite 56). Contra irony and parody, Hite sees the missing tonal cues of The Waves as enacting Woolf’s own unease about how her social milieu had been brought up to inherit a certain natural order––one that expected the continuation of social hierarchies, of empire building, and the refilling of the ranks of the ruling class––and yet found themselves in a changing world where such order was threatened or collapsing from internal contradictions. In Hite’s reading, there are no simple answers to how the reader is expected to approach the issues raised by the novel. Our ambivalence to many of Woolf’s characters comes from the fact that they are “similarly strange—and estranging—because they embody social codes as well as the violation of these codes” (Hite 58). Hite cleverly captures much of the experience reading The Waves. Nonetheless, when Hite suggests that “the tone of the conclusion is ambivalent” I think that this also deflates the literary achievement of Bernard’s soliloquy and refuses to lean into the drama of the final passages which were written by Woolf in “moments of such intensity and intoxication” (Diary 7 Feb. 1931). Rather, Bernard’s soliloquy, with its back and forth between despair and rapture, capitulation and battle, becomes a symphony of the emotional intensity that rises above “ambivalence” and “irony” to reach dramatic heights of “intensity and intoxication.” 

Any reading that characterizes the relation between Woolf and Bernard to be solely of author ridiculing her creation seem to me to be incompatible with the fact that Woolf dispersed many of her personal experiences into Bernard’s narrative and the countless diary entries that attest to the seriousness with which she approached this novel and its characters. While I accept many of the insights gained by those critics who find reasons to ridicule Bernard’s attempt to “sum it up,” I think such readings do not comport with the actual experience of reading the final chapter of The Waves. Bernard’s soliloquy is heroic, it dramatizes cycles of human experience that Woolf spent her entire life pursuing in writing and life. This attention to “experience” need not bracket history from our reading of The Waves. Rather, genuine attention to Bernard’s experience and the way he narrates it reveals Woolf’s deep understanding of the ways in which the social class that she and Bernard shared was becoming disillusioned with its inheritance. Bernard’s soliloquy dramatizes the process of dispelling the grip of convention––that force that forges the solders of empire, the inheritors of “civilization,” and that “army of the upright.” To throw off those forces as Woolf and Bernard did is undoubtably heroic. 

II

Bernard, very soon after beginning his attempt to “sum up,” faces and accepts the incompatibility “of story, of design” to life with its manifold “arrows of sensation” (Waves 176–77). Under the storm of arrows, Bernard becomes aware of life as an active struggle against “those enemies”, that will surely be lost if we let ourselves be carried on passively. This enemy operates through agents: first “the Doctor booming, about immortality and quitting ourselves like men” and then “the masters’ wives” who brought “immense dullness” (Waves 179, 181). Fashioned by the British school system, Bernard remembers how children are made to exist “in undifferentiated blobs of matter” and to “sedulously oppose any renegade who sets up a separate existence” (Waves 182). Then, an “observant fellow”––who perhaps represents only an abstract mental experience––directs Bernard to that which is beyond his predicament, which is permanent, and by revealing the “undifferentiated chaos of life” strikes Bernard with a “thunderclap of complete indifference” (Waves 184–5). Out rushes “a bristle of horned suspicions” and then “the return of measureless irresponsible joy” (Waves 185). This forms the first “heroic cycle” in Bernard’s soliloquy. In a pattern characteristic of not only this soliloquy, but Woolf’s novels and writings writ large, Woolf dramatizes the process by which the recollection of negative memories, some psychosomatic pain or illness, or some other shock to the system leads to the dispelling of everyday complacency and reveals the insignificance of so many of our attachments. The conclusion to these patters leads to the release of creative energy, or a newfound will to live, or a reconnection with nature or loved ones, or a greater understanding of one’s social predicament. 

This pattern, these cycles––of sinking into a passive and uncritical acceptance of the so-called natural order, then being ripped from such complacency into moments which lend new insight on the predicament of being and result in the release of self-assertive, what I am calling “heroic” energy––these are the cycles of Bernard’s soliloquy. Deeming the “heroic theme” of The Waves as the theme of effort, personality, and defiance, John Hulcoop also identified “cycles” within The Waves:

In each cycle, Bernard moves from a state of contented unself-consciousness in which ego-identity is taken for granted, through a state of anxiety in which identity is threatened with annihilation, or lost, back to a contented taking-for-granted of the reasserted identity. The threat of identity-loss gives rise to acute anxiety synonymous with the fear of death. Anxiety is followed by the enormous effort necessary to recall and reestablish self, often in an act of self-assertion that may become aggressive. Courage is also called for, since the effort to reactivate self must be made in the full consciousness of the fact that in the biological world individual identity will be annihilated (Hulcoop 476).

While Heideggerian overtones are astounding in this reading, he perhaps need not be cited, as The Waves is a cornucopia of such cycles, each mapped out by Woolf with such emotional charge and precision that her “heroic theme” can stand alone without theoretical-philosophical buttressing. Hulcoop’s mapping of cycles has informed my own, which nonetheless slightly differ. Hulcoop is more attentive to the cycles in terms of Bernard’s sense of “self” and therefore Hulcoop seems to follow a Heideggerian self-unveiling through threat to the ego-identity. I pay more attention to how such cycles ignite a struggle against social conventions and subtly uncover the historical moment The Waves captures. With attention to these cycles, it takes no interpretive acrobatics to connect them to the undoing of fascistic formation of uniform subjects, to the disruption of empire’s reliance on uncritical acceptance of the “civilizing mission,” and to combatting the fragmentation of experience in modern life if no sense of authentic self is grasped. 

In the second heroic cycle of the soliloquy, Bernard, in now looking back on his adult life, recounts his becoming “a certain kind of man”––one who fantasized about taking command of the British Empire (Waves 193) and lived according to the “orderly and military progress” (Waves 189) of civilization, that “illumed and everlasting road” (Waves 106). Like many of his generation and class background, he lived unreflectively according to the “genial pretense … to communicate, to civilize, to share, to cultivate the dessert, educate the native, to work together by day and night to sport” (Essays IV.321). Percival’s death upends this. The world becomes “acquainted with grief” and newly seen “without attachment” as the “make-believe and unreality” dissipate leaving only “this freedom, this immunity, [which] seemed then a conquest, and stirred in me such exaltation” (Waves 195). With new “disillusioned clarity” Bernard becomes “like one admitted behind the scenes” to gaze upon the “the cupidity and complacency” that characterize everyday life in heart of the British empire. This maps directly on Woolf’s own experience in A Room of One’s Own where she recalls the “sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilization,” she becomes “outside of it, alien and critical” (Room 101). As Bernard and Woolf each attest, these moments of sudden clarity split them off from an otherwise unreflective inheritance of the role of maintaining Empire, or “civilization.” 

Percival’s death allows Bernard to make a “contribution of maturity to childhood’s intuitions” as he muses on the Elveden image (Waves 199). “When I was a child,” Bernard narrates, “the presence of an enemy asserted itself; the need for opposition had stung me” (Waves 199). That enemy is “satiety and doom; the sense of what is inescapable in our lot; death; the knowledge of limitations; how life is more obdurate than one had thought it” as well as “lack of reason, aimlessness, the usual” (Waves 199–200). Bernard faces these enemies with words drawn directly from Woolf’s diary:

I jumped up. I said, ‘Fight! Fight!’ I repeated. It is the effort and the struggle, it is the perpetual warfare, it is the shattering and piecing together––this is the daily battle, defeat or victory, the absorbing pursuit (Waves 201).

How I suffer walking up this street, engaged with my anguish, as I was after Thoby died––alone; fighting something alone … Here is something to fight: & when I wake early I say to myself, Fight, fight (Diary 11 Oct. 1929).

It is this heroic struggle against stupor and complacency, against social conformity and unreflective acceptance of the narratives of Empire building, and most importantly against potentially crippling grief and fear of death that characterizes Bernard’s soliloquy. It is also Woolf’s experience with grief which “unveiled and intensified” (“Sketch” 137) experience and ignited a heroic “struggle between what ought to be and what we were” (“Sketch” 95). Simply restating the content of the soliloquy firmly links, in the mind of anyone familiar with Virginia Woolf, Bernard’s experience with the very lifeblood of Woolf’s sense of “reality.” Writing about what Woolf called “reality,” Hussey explains: “The abstract ‘reality’ Woolf records … is intimately related to the effort of overcoming the shock of the present experienced as a passage to inevitable death” (Hussey 105). Further, “The struggle between faith and despair is the heart of Woolf’s thought, the impulse behind her fiction” which explores “the nothingness that human being opposes and yet ultimately succumbs to” (Hussey 107, 109). “Reality” is what is unveiled in shock, struggle, opposition, battle against despair––that this might sound (to some) too macho for Woolf only suggests that we might still be stuck with the image of Woolf as melancholic victim that Quentin Bell’s biography, constructed backwards from the suicide, helped produce. It is of exceptional note that Woolf characterized her experience of writing as “my working fighting mood, which is natural to me … I like the sense of effort” (Diary 18 June 1925). The heroic theme I am identifying in Bernard’s soliloquy is also what guided Woolf’s own sense of effort and struggle.

In the third and final heroic cycle dramatized in his soliloquy, Bernard imagines life where “no fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea”, in other words life where nothing cuts through the stupor of everyday non-being, to be “more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth” (Waves 211). He recalls a kind of ego-death wherein at the bottom of “dispassionate despair” he surveys life, “the dust dance” and a total eclipse of the sun (Waves 211–12). And yet as the light returns to the world, “seen now with this difference”, Bernard “breathes in and out substantial breath” and arrives at the present moment, back at the table talking to the stranger (Waves 213–14). Bernard thanks the stranger for helping him “regain the sense of the complexity and the reality and the struggle” as he summons his forces to “rise and confront the enemy” (Waves 217, 218). Now, in his view of the “usual street” he sees the unveiled beauty of the world and the swelling of some “new desire” to face life anew (Waves 220). And the enemy’s mask is unveiled: death, but more than just death Bernard faces all those forces that stifle life. 

III

In 1926, Woolf wrote in her diary of “my new vision of death; active, positive, exciting; & of great importance as an experience” (Diary 23 Nov. 1926). Through Bernard, Woolf enacts this vision and its “great importance as an experience” shines forth as a rousing dramatization of individual self-reckoning, not in the form of some spiritualized interiority, but in a manner that reconnects self and world, reignites that heroic sense of struggle that enlivens our sense of being, and unveils the wretchedness of those forces that continue to animate Britain’s decaying imperial body. Bernard is less an image of masculine reinforcement of the normal state of affairs than he is its new enemy. As has become evident, his spear is couched against death and all that stifles genuine life. Bernard’s enemies are the horrors of depersonalization in modern urban life, the straightening of upright citizens to serve the empire and the myriad forces that produce complacency and stifle any lust for life. His charge against death links him to Percy Shelley, of whom Woolf about as a hero:

The grasp of convention upon private life is no longer quite so coarse or quite so callous because of Shelley’s successes and failures … a champion riding out against the forces of superstition and brutality with heroic courage; at the same time blind, inconsiderate, obtuse to other persons’ feelings. Rapt in his extraordinary vision, ascending to the very heights of existence (Essays IV.470–1).

Without a doubt, Woolf must have drawn from her depiction of Shelley while writing Bernard’s final lines. Bernard and Shelley seem to almost seamlessly merge; both are disillusioned members of Britain’s ruling class who couch spears against convention and struggle against death in a tidal poetic vision. Marcus thinks that the evocation of Shelley is an ironic recalling of “another historical moment of English fetishization of selfhood and individualism as the struggle against death” (Marcus 63). If we also feel that Woolf parodies Shelley and Bernard’s romantic sense of shock, struggle, and fight, or further, that Woolf should be grouped with these men and is complicit in the continuation of such an ethos, then Marcus’ reading, or one that stamps upon Woolf that horrible label, “complicit,” should stand. And yet, as this essay has I hope shown, such a reading does not comport with Woolf’s clear admiration for Shelley, from which Bernard is drawn, and further, with the extensive investment of her own experiences with effort and struggle into his soliloquy. To further dispel the grip of anti-Romanticism that obscures our understanding of Woolf as very much in a line of inheritance with the Romantic poets, we can invoke Spivak. She comments, “this insistence on a post-Romantic concept of irony no doubt sprang from the imposition of [a] historical and voluntarist constitution within the second wave of US academic feminism as a ‘universal’ model of the ‘natural’ reactions of the female psyche” (Spivak 235). Woolf indeed demonstrates her satiric powers across her oeuvre, but to insist that her allusions to Romantic individualism can only be ironic might say little about Woolf and instead display the limitations of academic feminism’s construction of binary gender oppositions wherein only men can be heroic and serious, and women must be melancholic or satirical. Woolf, here in the poetic power of Bernard’s soliloquy against death, looks very much like an inheritor of English Romanticism. Afterall, she wrote that “real books” were “works of pure imagination” (Essays IV.397). 

Bernard’s soliloquy is the dramatization of the heroic struggle in every life that matches the day to day against something else, something more substantial. We should follow Woolf and take it seriously and know that it might lead to better understandings of Woolf’s experience with the struggle of living, affirming, and writing. This is what she wishes us to see. It is noteworthy that Woolf not infrequently compared the effort of writing and living to a heroic horseback ride: 

I feel as if I could hardly any longer keep back––that my brain is being tortured by always butting against a blank wall. Now, tomorrow, I mean to run it off. And suppose only nonsense comes? The thing is to be venturous, bold, to take every possible fence” (Diary 31 May 1933). 

Here is something to fight: & when I wake early I say to myself, Fight, fight. If I could catch the feeling I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness & silence from the habitable world; the sense that comes to me of being bound on an adventure; of being strangely free now … And this curious steed, life; is genuine” (Diary 11 Oct. 1929).

These diary entries capture in miniature the heroic cycles that can be tracked in Bernard’s soliloquy. Teetering towards some sense of despair, with effort and struggle Woolf attests to how she gathered herself back together and re-seized upon her own life, lived authentically and imagined this experience as a heroic horseback ride. Bernard’s soliloquy is the dramatization of these cycles; Bernard is Woolf’s heroic self-portrait, and his soliloquy is a testament to the creative powers unleashed by these cycles of experience that Woolf knew well. His aria is the “singing of the real world” heard through those precise moments––some as mundane as illness and others as furious as a phantasmagoric horseback charge––that Woolf so masterfully wrought. Reading Woolf as an author of the unique kind of heroism explicated by this paper, which is derived from her own experiences, we might further throw off the picture of Woolf as a melancholic victim and find even greater affective force in a whole host of her characters who represent experiences quite similar to Bernard’s heroic cycles. A special picture of Woolfian heroism might emerge; one that refuses to accede to the picture of heroism that carried soldiers into the fields of the trenches of World War One, or that sent Britons across the globe with illusions of an imperial mission. Instead, a picture of heroism in Woolf’s writings would emphasize overcoming stifling conventions, the assertion of individual agency, and the mastering of grief and the fear of death. Nothing about achieving this heroism is easy, but it is the perpetual effort and struggle towards such heroism that animates so many of Woolf’s greatest literary achievements.