Waves and Fragments

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Waves and Fragments: Linguistic Construction as Subject Formation in

Virginia Woolf

Vandivere, Julie, Twentieth Century Literature

Throughout her work, Virginia Woolf - as a modernist, a feminist, and a

woman writer - is preoccupied with questions about how aesthetic form

impinges upon social structures and how women, especially as artists, are to

conceive of themselves within patriarchal cultures. Woolf addresses these

issues directly, of course, in A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, but

they are no less crucial - in perhaps even more interesting ways - to her

novels. There, the inquiry into women's places in society often appears as aninterrogation of subject formation. While scholars have for some time pointed

out Woolf's concern with subject construction and the construction of the

world, they have not analyzed how this interest appears on grammatical,

rhetorical, syntactic, and figural levels. Accordingly, I want to explore two of

Woolf's late novels, The Waves and Between the Acts, where, I suggest,

Woolf's investigation of subject construction manifests itself primarily in

linguistic terms, leading her to use constructs of language to critique

traditional assumptions about unified selves and patriarchal systems.

The titles of the two novels furnish initial clues about the linguistic nature of

Woolf's query into subjects and society, for they may be read as signaling,

among other things, how Woolf understands language to function both

specifically within the texts and generally in formation and perception. The

Waves takes its name from descriptions of the ocean in the vignettes that

open each chapter. Interpolation of lyric meditations on nature within sections

of narrative is one of Woolf's standard techniques, central to both The Years

and To the Lighthouse. But in The Waves, Woolf instead prefaces each

chapter with such an interlude, each containing four key images: the sun,

birds, waves, and a garden.

Three of these images then find direct corollaries within the chapters

themselves: The sun moves from sunup to sunset and follows the trajectory

of the narrative as it moves from childhood to old age; the garden resembles

the scenic backdrop of the novel; and the birds' actions mimic those of the



characters. The only image in the vignettes that scholars do not discuss as

having an immediate correspondence elsewhere in the novel is the waves

themselves. I would suggest, however, that the waves are also duplicated in

the text - that they recur within the structure of Woolf's prose. There,

linguistic flux and instability often coincide with moments when characters

work to define themselves in language. In other words, "wavering"configurations of language betoken "wavering" ontological constructions,

especially constructions of the self.(1)

As in the case of The Waves, the title of Between the Acts suggests a myriad

of references. Readers have taken the "Between" to refer to the characters'

interaction "between the acts" of Miss La Trobe's play, to the space

"between" the two world wars, to silence, and to Woolf's oblique emphasis on

sentiments hidden "between" the lines of the characters' actual dialogue:

Giles's melancholy agonies, Isa's countless frustrations, Lucy's prolonged soulsearchings.(2) And the title, like "The Waves," also refers to the language in

the novel. In this configuration, each moment of enunciation may be seen as

an act of a play, so that accompanying those enunciations, those "Acts," is

something that lies "Between" them, outside them, giving them shape and

putting pressure on them. That something is not only silence - the absence of

speech - but is also the form, the structure, by which consciousness, and thus

subjectivity, is conceptualized. Such a process of shuttling "Between the

Acts," then, may describe the construction of language. Simply, one of the

primary "betweens" in the novel is the linguistic structure that shapes the

acts of speech.

Woolf's novels then elaborate on the implications of their titles as they

explore how individuals must continually work to form themselves in a world

devoid of linguistic and, by extension, philosophical correspondences. In The

Waves, this concern with the relationship between the grammatical and the

ontological emerges most clearly when Louis claims, "I know my cases and

my genders; I could know everything in the world if I wished" (20). Louis's

optative assertion that knowing cases and genders would enable him to know

the world materializes in several registers, most significantly through puns onthe words gender as both sex and grammatical classification, and case as

both circumstance and grammatical category. Since gender carries this dual

implication, Louis is in part claiming that if he can make sexual distinctions,

he can know the world. Epistemological composition based on gender

dichotomies is that of traditional society; patriarchy is built on the ability to

distinguish between male and female. Yet, as Woolf makes clear with her

second pun, that on case as circumstance or situation, gender is not the sole



marker of social position. By linking gender to case, Louis's statement

suggests that gender distinctions are inseparable from the "cases" in which

they appear, and, consequently, that knowledge of gender must also be

accompanied by knowledge of the circumstance within which that gender

functions: class, education, social status.

Louis's statement (again, "I know my cases and my genders; I could know

everything in the world if I wished") also suggests a more subtle and

interesting reading of the link between the world's grammar and its

construction. It may be taken to imply that neither the world nor language is

a priori: that reality does not mimic grammar, nor grammar, reality. Such a

relationship is instead symbiotic. In making grammatical systems, one makes

the world, and in making the world, one makes grammar.

Following Louis's avowal, we find an even more directly metalinguistic scene,

as Woolf goes on to speculate about relationships between language and

existence:

"Those are white words," said Susan, "like stones one picks up by the

seashore."

"They flick their tails right and left as I speak them," said Bernard. "They wag

their tails; they flick their tails; they move through the air in flocks, now this

way, now that way, moving all together, now dividing, now coming together."

"Those are yellow words, those are fiery words," said Jinny. "I should like a

fiery dress, a yellow dress, a fulvous dress to wear in the evening."

"Each tense," said Neville, "means differently. There is an order in this world,

upon whose verge I step. For this is only a beginning." (Waves 20-21)

This passage relies on grammatical structures to reveal the flux between the

abstract and the concrete in the process of self-definition. The first lines that

follow Louis's claim about knowing the world include Susan's comparison of



words to stones, a simile that gives Louis's words additional weight and

substance. Susan's analogy implies that words are material things that can

mark reality and, more, that they are especially solid and weighty objects -

are stones - and that each is, in fact, a petrus, a rock, an object upon which

patriarchy and its religious systems are ultimately founded.

However, the image of words as quintessentially concrete objects, as stones,

gives way quickly to one of words as fluid, animate, mutable things that "flick

their tails." Thus, Susan's analogy is not followed by a reinforcement of the

stability of words, a move that would substantiate Louis's claim for the

ordering power and strengthen his argument for a concrete reality. Instead,

the discussion moves in free association to Bernard's comparison of words to

capricious flying beings. No longer stones upon which to construct the world,

the words now take on life as they metamorphose into some not-quite-

identifiable beings who demonstrate in movement, ascension, evenethereality ("They flick their tails right and left as I speak them. . . . They

move through the air in flocks, now this way, now that way, moving all

together, now dividing, now coming together."), the words' impossibility, their

unpredictability, their groundlessness, their refusal to establish the base that

Louis is trying to claim. The next line moves even more hopelessly away from

the foundations, as Lewis goes on to describe words in even less-solid terms -

as "yellow" and "fiery." Words ultimately, then, become shimmering

substances of color and heat, elements that could not be more poorly suited

to serve as the building blocks of self or reality.

The grammar of the passage replicates the instability of these "words" as

Woolf couches each assessment of language, as either concrete or abstract,

in language that demonstrates its claim. For instance, in the structure of her

verbs, Woolf plays with implications of the indicative and subjunctive moods.

The indicative, of course, refers to the empirical world of definition and fact

("I speak," "they flick," "they wag," "they move," "I step"), the subjunctive, to

the abstract, the speculative, the nonobjective ("I should like a fiery dress"; "I

could know everything in the world"). The parallels between grammatical

moods and Woolf's construction of reality are straightforward. The indicativesignals the myth of the concrete world wherein one can theoretically

construct a sense of self, while the subjunctive signals a refusal of this myth

and acknowledges that the sense of self is rootless, grounded only in

relationships and transient images.



If the indicative points to the concrete and the subjunctive to its refusal,

Louis's indicative declaration that "I know my cases and genders" asserts,

first, that there is an indicative world and, second, that this world values the

ability to distinguish between classes and genders. But Louis's next

proclamation - "I could know everything in the world if I wished" - does not

assert itself with the same empirical power. Had the statement been "I canknow everything in the world," its grammar would have been consistent with

the indicative case of the first half of the sentence, and would then

simultaneously posit the feasibility of Louis's second claim and augment the

feasibility of his first. However, the phrase reads "I could know," thus pushing

the possibility of knowing into the subjunctive optative: a mood of the wistful,

the speculative, the noumenal. In the contiguity of these two sentences ("I

know my cases and my genders; I could know everything in the world if I

wished"), Louis speculates on the possibility of constructing a factual,

objective world of the indicative from his position in the nonfactual,

nonobjective world of the subjunctive. The linguistic structure points to a

contradiction inherent in Louis's assertion: the claim that one can construct a

reality in the concrete is only ever made from the hypothetical register of the

abstract.

In a way consistent with the replicative play between the subjunctive and

indicative within the novel, several of the passage's claims for the

concreteness of language are couched in a markedly repetitive indicative

structure: "Those are white words. . . . Those are yellow words, those are fiery

words. . . . There is an order in this world. . . . For this is only a beginning."Exact word repetition reinforced with syntactic parallelism (demonstrative

pronouns with subject complements linked by forms of "to be") inscribes

anaphoric constructions at the beginnings of the sentences and incantatory

reiterations at their closes, so that the syntax and diction of the assertions

exhibit extreme, insistent "order."

However, despite the emphasis on dependable, structured, indicative speech

to define a concrete world, this passage is simultaneously laced with its

opposite, so that the grammatical structures also hint at the inescapablymercurial nature of existence. While the first 14 lines of the passage repeat

the grammatical pattern only three times and make only a few essentialized

claims (such as "Those are white words"), Neville uses a form of "to be" four

times in six lines, in each case when he is asserting the solidity of existence.

In other words, the greater the claim to a concrete reality, the more frequent

the repetition of the structure.



This particular repetition invokes a Cartesian faith in the expression of

existence as the most reliable test of existence; the insistence on "to be" is

the insistence on actuality, and is its only necessary proof. But in this

passage, as in Descartes, the reasoning is tautological. The pronouns of thefirst half of the equation ("there," "this") provide no further definition of the

second terms ("order in the world," "distinctions," "differences").

Consequently, neither statement possesses the root it claims in the concrete

but moves pointlessly in circular modification.

Throughout The Waves, the sorts of grammatical and figural complexities that

I have been exploring are a primary manifestation of the text's recurrent

doubts about the stability of any linguistic or ontological assertion. Neville's

statement that "There is an order in this world, upon whose verge I step"points to the impossibility of grounding in either the concrete or the abstract,

the indicative or the subjunctive, the male or the female, and undermines

any assumption that one may make such distinctions. A forging of the world

and of selves within it rests on the thetic contradiction of living, we might

say, enslaved by the ideal of the indicative but perpetually drifting into the

flight of the subjunctive. Ultimately, Woolf's language in The Waves suggests

that there is no choice but to live straddling the aporia between inevitably

opposing constructions embodied within grammatical ambiguities.

In Between the Acts, Woolf's interrogation of conventional subject formation

is less directly gendered than in The Waves but is no less insistent on the

ontological impossibility of formation. Moreover, the interrogation is in this

novel no less grammatically and rhetorically based, for even more than in The

Waves, in Between the Acts Woolf concerns herself with how we are to shape

lives forced as we are to live suspended between any solidities or certainties

from which we would ordinarily expect to construct ourselves. And, as in The

Waves, this concern manifests itself primarily on linguistic levels.(3)

To study language in Between the Acts, one must extend one's perspective

beyond conventional linguistic presuppositions to consider the possibility of

signification devoid of meaning. Woolf signaled as much in her diary when

she described the novel's prose as "quite distinct" (D 5: 105) in that "the

rhythm of the notes is far freer and looser" (D 5: 339) than that. Rather than

as language, with words and meaning, Woolf here figures Between the Acts

as music, with notes and rhythms. Any signification such a language is to



achieve must derive from its sound. In Between the Acts, Woolf links music

with language to explore the aesthetics of language, using music to empty

language of its ability to gesture to something outside of itself and then

correlating this linguistic incapacity with our inability to construct subjectivity.

(4)

Woolf weaves music into the text on a surprising number of levels. Not only is

Miss La Trobe's play accompanied by various melodies, music also serves as a

backdrop for many scenes within the narrative itself. Dance music, for

example, features prominently in at least three moments, piano in two, and

gramophone in one.(5) Even more significantly, there is a rhythm, "a triple

melody" (Acts 134) that runs unrelentingly through the novel. All melodies in

the text contain this triple beat. And all nonhuman sounds are trebled,

whether they are the "ding dong ding" of the church bell (Acts 207), the "tick,

tick, tick" of the clock (Acts 82), or the "ping-ping-ping" of the phone (Acts119). In the same way, objects always appear grouped in threes: apricots

(Acts 52), words (Acts 54), corners on a chair (Acts 50), and the folded mirror

(Acts 13), for example. Finally, the tripartite rhythm extends to speech itself,

as bits of poetry or hushed admonitions also often appear in threes (Acts 51,

71, 73, 126, 148).

On an even more intricate level, Woolf uses musicality to create a language

whose sounds take priority over its meanings:

The nurses after breakfast were trundling the perambulator up and down the

terrace; and as they trundled they were talking - not shaping pellets of

information or handing ideas from one to another, but rolling words, like

sweets on their tongues; which, as they thinned to transparency, gave off

pink, green, and sweetness. This morning that sweetness was: "How cook had

told 'im off about the asparagus; how when she rang I said: how it was a

sweet costume with blouse to match." (Acts 10)

These loose and free verbal notes soothe in much the same way as the music

in Miss La Trobe's play (and Woolf's description of the scene) when "folded in

triple melody, the audience sat gazing; and beheld gently and approvingly

without interrogation" (Acts 134). Woolf's prose in this passage, and in the

narrative about the nurses, falls into an easy rhythm based on repetition,

alliteration, phrasally structured syntax, and progressive tense verbs. Then,



when she represents the nurse's speech directly, Woolf relies on musicality

even more, as the entire speech appears as a series of (again) three clauses

structured in anaphora, falling almost into iambic pentameter. The nurse's

words form a tripart song.

Moreover, in this passage, as in the play, words are not represented as

conventional carriers of meaning: Here, they become sensuous objects,

"sweets on their tongues," signifiers of concupiscence more than of any

denotational, or even connotational, sense. This sensual quality of language

is, like the rhythms I discussed earlier, part of the "Between" of signification -

it is neither silence nor referential speech. Instead, it is part of that which

moves language from silence to referentiality. It communicates through

nuances of feeling inextricable from words, but not contained by them - an

effect that is especially pronounced in this passage because of its

dependence (like the discussion of the words as "white" and so on in TheWaves) on synesthesia, a definitively irrational trope. Convention mandates

that the sensual aspects of language at least be subordinated to the

referential. Yet in this scene, and frequently throughout Between the Acts,

Woolf elevates the subsidiary term to primary position, emphasizing pulses of

rhythm, flavors of sound.

Woolf's reversal of the hierarchy of music and meaning seems at first glance

to do no more than replace one system of signification for another. But the

inversion transports language into a realm where all meanings andharmonies, even those rooted only in their own aesthetic resonance, fail. The

disintegration of music in Miss La Trobe's play echoes how music breaks down

elsewhere in the text: "The tune changed; snapped; broke; jagged. . . . What

a cackle, a cacophony! Nothing ended. So abrupt. And corrupt. Such an

outrage; such an insult." (Acts 187). No longer does the music accomplish

what its primary function in the text has been: to lull. Now the play's rhythms

and musicality (like the syntax describing them) become disjointed, abrupt.

Accordingly, in Between the Acts, although much of the prose shares theharmonic resonance of the passage about the nurses, frequently the

language is unusually "jagged," "abrupt," cacophonous. Instead of concord,

we often find, amid Woolf's traditionally melodic sonorities, passages - and

rhetoric - characterized by a "fecklessness and lack of symmetry" (Acts 23).

In the most pressured of these linguistic moments, figures are emptied of

their power to allude, until it appears that the novel, like its characters, has



"no grasp of metaphor" (Acts 79). At one point, for example, Woolf describes

legs as "skin-coloured" (Acts 72), using an adjective that, when paired with

"legs," does not, as is the purpose of an adjective, qualify or restrict the

meaning - in fact, does not signify at all. Rather, with an adjectival nod

toward modification, in "skin-coloured," Woolf sets up the expectation of

further clarity, and then collapses that expectation by describing the objectonly in terms of itself.

Metaphor becomes similarly garbled when Woolf compares Lucy to a bird with

"a wisp of white hair flying, [and] knobbed shoes as if she had claws cornered

like a canary's," then David goes on to call her "Old Flimsy on the hop" (Acts

27). These tropes become mixed and blurred, even reversed, when Woolf

claims that the sight of Lucy "made David cock his eye and Jessica wink

back," transferring the bird metaphor to those characters who first voiced it.

This instability of literary metaphor suggests at a more fundamental level thefailure of language itself, for language only succeeds because of faith in the

metaphorical power of words, the belief that they refer reliably.

It is in this second arena of metaphor, the linguistic as opposed to the

literary, that instability produces the greatest threat of meaninglessness. In

literary metaphor, although meaning is inevitably deflated, at least words

relate to one another and to what they ostensibly represent. In linguistic

metaphor, syntax fails at a more basic level, as grammar knots and logic

collapses before any attempt at metaphor may be made. Then the melody inthe text altogether gives way to what the narrator calls "mad music" (Acts

156).

For example, Giles, thinking of Lucy's amusement over his going into

business after his marriage, reflects:

A frivolous, a malignant statement hers was of a problem which, for he had

no special gift, no capital, and had been furiously in love with his wife - he

nodded to her across the table - had afflicted him for ten years. (Acts 47)

This passage features inverted syntax in which adjectives precede and figure

more largely than the nouns and pronouns they modify, weak and dislocated

verbs, subordinate clauses within subordinate clauses, and disruptive and



virtually ungrammatical phrasing. The combination spawns a profusion of

disconnected meanings.

In Between the Acts, this breakdown of music is both catalyst and figure for

the disruption of subjectivity formation; the cacophony that had been music

"shiver[s] into splinters the old visions; smash[es] to atoms what was whole"

(Acts 183). "Let's break the rhythm and forget the rime," the text urges, "And

consider ourselves. Ourselves. All you can see of yourselves is scraps, orts,

and fragments" (Acts 187). Breaking the rhythm disrupts the diachronic and

hence teleological aspect of music. Although notes possess no directly

cognitive referentiality, rhythm and melody require by definition a forward

movement, a differentiation that suggests motion and progress. Voiding

music of this last quality cuts the final tie to the dream of a coherent self and

produces a picture of the subject that is only a scrap - a discontiguous piece,

an ort - the smallest bit of food, a fragment, the remnant of what at leastappeared to be whole. What remains of the music, what was at the beginning

of this passage a "tune," is only "a cackle, a rattle, a yaffle" (Acts 183). This

last descriptive, "yaffle," stresses just how hopeless the search for meaning

has become, for while "cackle" and "rattle" describe cacophony, these are at

least words with meaning. But "yaffle" is not even a word, so that "tune,"

melodic order, is now transformed into meaninglessness describing

meaninglessness, in a construct that functions like a black hole, swallowing

any possibility of signification as it doubles back upon itself. Darkly

pessimistic, the view of signification that such a rhetorical progression

suggests allows no hope for coherence or coherent subjectivity, for theillusion of meaning becomes not only a hole but also a hole within a hole.

If the price of assuming an identity is so high, and identity itself so inevitably

flawed, how is life, we might ask, worth living? Though one should, of course,

never presume to suggest any transparent connection, such intense

skepticisms are not incongruent with the tragedy of Woolf's own fate, as she

was to take her life even before this last novel left the press. Metaphysical

and linguistic anxiety also seem especially apt for Woolf's particular historical

moment. Her speculations occur at a unique time: when the world is firstrealistically faced with its own possible destruction. In Between the Acts, war

is hardly mentioned.(6) Yet awareness of the conflict permeates the novel: It

extends perception of life's irrationality to include all humankind.(7) As Woolf

wrote Between the Acts, the overhead planes, the constant threat of

annihilation, the perilous state of human existence, all dominated life at Monk

Hall, where she took refuge from the London bombings.(8) "Who will be killed

tonight?" she asks in her journal, aware that it could be Quentin, or Leonard,



or herself (D 5: 330).

And although both Leonard and Quentin survived the war, Virginia Woolf did

not. In 1941, Malcolm Cowley connects Between the Acts and Woolf's suicide

to the war when he writes:

Virginia Woolf herself would soon become a war casualty, though not in the

simple manner that was suggested by the first accounts of her suicide. It was

the mental strain of writing Between the Acts and not the physical strain of

living under bombardment that caused her death. (25)

What Cowley does not recognize is that the war and Woolf's "mental strain"are conceptually fused. The words she uses to describe Hitler could well

describe her own encroaching mental instability. Hitler represents a force, she

writes, of "vast formless shapes. . . . They aren't substances: but they make

everything else minute" (D 5: 284). Echoing these concerns, Miss La Trobe,

the artist in Between the Acts, realizes that "darkness lies ahead not only for

herself but for the world" (230). This doomsday prophecy does not speak

exclusively of the war or of Woolf's suicide. It instead addresses the proximity

of death, chaos, and abjection to every instant of life. It is in these terms that

the linguistic structures of Between the Acts examine suicide, war, and the

impossibility of human formation and communication as symptoms of the

disarray underlying a superficially imposed order.

Virginia Woolf has always been known for her careful, finely crafted prose.

Separately, Woolf has always been renowned for her feminist consciousness.

Historically, the two have been divorced, as modernists speak of her

aesthetic virtuosity, and feminist scholars praise her social agenda. But

detaching her beautiful writing from her feminism ignores the most radical

aspect of Woolf's effort: the creation of a technically remarkable prose that

would help effect social change.

In a famous passage from A Room of One's Own, Woolf argues for a new

syntax: "The woman writer [must] alter the current 'man's sentence,' which is

unsuited for woman's use" (115). As would later feminist critics, Woolf

wonders what it would mean to create a social upheaval in syntax. We might

ask, then, about the function of socially significant syntax in wedding those



two aspects of Woolf that resist unification: splendid prose and feminist

principles. To read Woolf's linguistic style as a social project - in the way her

speculations about the nature of language would seem to require us to do -

requires close, careful scrutiny of how her irregular phraseology and her

pairing and multiplying of subjects, verbs, tenses, and moods challenge

reality, subjectivity, and hegemony. Within her grammatical constructions,Woolf does not reinscribe epistemology or teleology; neither does she profess

truth. Instead, she suggests on a grammatical level that any reliance on

posited reality will give way, revealing the fragility and despair of inherited

modes of conceptualization, and refuting traditional models of subject

construction through complex grammatical games.

NOTES

1 Karen Kaivola perceives the importance of syntax in The Waves and

Between the Acts. Of The Waves, she writes:

Formally innovative and subversive in the ways it destabilizes and decenters

the individual human subject, The Waves produces an aesthetic strangely at

odds with the subversiveness of its form, and aesthetic intoxicated by the

possibilities of language itself. (39)

Kaivola argues, however, that the prose "obfuscates its political critique." I

posit the opposite - that the prose in The Waves clarifies the political critique.

2 James Naremore suggests, for example, "Two important implications of the

title: we are between wars and between two decisive acts in the lives of an

archetypal male and female" (93). Patricia Ondek Laurence argues that the

"between" is the various ways silence contributes to speech (Silence 170-

214).

3 Traditional readings, like Alex Zwerdling's, see The Waves as a testament to

the essentially isolated nature of the self. In contrast, more recent readings,

like Minowo-Pinkney's, view the novel as an exploration of a dispersed self,

or, like Jane Marcus's, as a statement about the amalgamation of the subject



with social forces such as imperialism and class roles.

4 Nora Eisenberg discusses at length how Woolf uses music in Between the

Acts. She contends that music "supplements a failing language" (254), an

argument opposite from mine.

5 For dance music, see pages 83, 117, 182; for piano, 114, 117; and for

gramophone, 149.

6 Laurence writes of the reality of the war as an undercurrent in Between the

Acts ("Facts" 225-46).

7 At one point, airplanes fly overhead, and at another point, Giles is enraged

that "sixteen men had been shot, others imprisoned, just over there, across

the gulf, in the flat land which divided them from the continent" (Acts 46).

8 Quentin Bell writes that during the last months of her life Woolf would often

take a break from writing Between the Acts: "In the intervals of writing she

took pleasure in observing the landscape; she altered the position of her

table in order to get a new aspect of the very beautiful flat country that lay

between her and Mount Caburn" (460). At times, he recalls, fighting planes

would appear overhead:

[The planes] came very close. We lay under the tree. The sound was like

someone sawing in the air just above us. We lay flat on our faces, hands

behind head. Don't close your teeth, said L. They seemed to be sawing at

something stationary. Bombs shook the windows of my lodge. Will it drop I

asked? If so, we shall be broken together. I thought, I think, of nothingness -

flatness, my mood being flat. (455)

WORKS CITED



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Cowley, Malcolm. "Virginia Woolf's England Under Glass." New Republic 6 Oct.

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Eisenberg, Nora. "Virginia Woolf's Last Words on Words: Between the Acts and

'Anon.'" New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf." Lincoln: U of Nebraska P,

1981. 253-66.

Kaivola, Karen. All Contraries Confounded: The Lyrical Fiction of Virginia

Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Marguerite Duras. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1991.

Laurence, Patricia Ondek. "The Facts and Fugue of War: From Three Guineas

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Mark Hussey. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1991.

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Marcus, Jane. "Britannia Rules The Waves." Decolonizing Tradition: New Views

of Twentieth-Century "British" Literary Canons. Ed. Karen R. Lawrence.

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Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject. New

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-----. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Oliver Bell. 5 vols. New York:

Harcourt, 1984. Vol. 5.

-----. A Room of One's Own. 1929. New York: Harvest-Harcourt, 1989.

-----. The Waves. 1931. New York: Harcourt, 1959.

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Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com

Publication information: Article title: Waves and Fragments: Linguistic

Construction as Subject Formation in Virginia Woolf. Contributors: Vandivere,

Julie - Author. Journal title: Twentieth Century Literature. Volume: 42. Issue: 2

Publication date: Summer 1996. Page number: 221+. © 1999 Hofstra

University. COPYRIGHT 1996 Gale Group.

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