“The Waves” and Moths

The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain

A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own,
When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.
—Byron, “The Sea” (From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage)

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
—Dylan Thomas, “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower”

It is appropriate that Virginia Woolf names her novel of vast rhythms,

consciousness, and futility The Waves. Her title well describes the
thematic contents, the symbols, the range of the text, and it blends
smoothly with the sun-splashed interludes that precede each episode.
Even a cursory reading makes clear that Woolf understood her role and her
success in matching the title with the contents, and (perhaps more
importantly) the simple, two-word appellation indicates what the reader
should remark. Waves of consciousness, eaves of identity, waves of
cadence, waves that lie beneath a rising sun and thudding, strike the
shore. In fact, the title points to so much in the text, one might
wonder how (or whether) a critical reading would differ if, by chance,
the name of the novel were different. Frequently, a poem adopts its
first line as a title, consequently conflating the work with its tag
line. But rarely does one identify the title of a prose piece so closely
with the attached work. Mrs Dalloway, for example, tells the story of
the eponymous Mrs Dalloway. To the Lighthouse describes a families
progress to the Lighthouse. The Waves, however, does not merely denote
one’s traditional, tangible, conception of salty, sea-born waves.
Apparently, Woolf felt free to name the piece on a purely thematic basis,
because (in a departure from other works) she was “not trying to tell a
story” (Holograph, 26). The only waves in the text, notes Makiko Minow-
Pinkney, “serve as metaphor for the life process of the characters”
(Minow-Pinkney, 156). Since Woolf’s title, then, is mostly a thematic
(and not plot-driven) signifier that comments on the lives of the
characters, another title could serve as well, and conceivably, point the
reader in an entirely different direction.
Woolf herself likely realized this crucial role of her title, as is
evidenced in her diaries and her “Holograph” manuscripts of the work that
eventually she named The Waves. Almost the first themes she refers to in
her diary reflect on waves of a sort and something entirely different.
“The idea of some continuous stream, not solely of human thought, but of
the ship, the night, etc., all flowing together: intersected by the
arrival of bright moths” (H, 17-18). Two distinct elements are manifest
in these early notions of a novel. First, the flowing stream of ideas
coupled with a correlative stream of action (the ship’s passage) and
second, the winged insects’ trespass. For the first time, on 18 June
1927 (H, 17), Woolf refers to this budding work with a concrete name:
The Moths. Given that Woolf conceived of the novel under this title, and
used it at least until she started writing, the reader may discover
previously hidden themes and supplement her knowledge of the text by
thinking of The Waves, as though it were The Moths.
Though the speculative science of draft-analysis is far from perfect, and
perhaps less than reliable, it is at minimum interesting to look back on
the process from which an important, innovative novel was developed. On
the cover-page of her initial longhand draft, Woolf offered five possible
titles [sic]:

The Moths? one

or the life of anybody
life in general.
or Moments of Being
or The Waves (H, 1.1)

Interestingly, after reading the book one might believe the first
possibility is the least fitting. To be sure, the other four have much
more to do with the narrative content, even the thematic structure of the
text. But clearly, Woolf was fascinated with the idea of moths and their
short-lived relation to the vastness of their world. Moths continuously
resurface as tropes in the language of the six characters, and as
indicative, Woolf wrote the well-known title essay “The Death of the
Moth” and (either she or her husband) used it as the title essay in a
collection published posthumously in 1942 (Collected Essays, preface).
If one is to gain the most out of the moth as thematic device, it is
perhaps best to relate her essay on the topic to the novel that began
with the insect as its meta-focus. The correlations between the two
works are striking and reward the audience with a renewed depth of
reading.
“Moths that fly by day,” begins “The Death of the Moth” (CE, 359). “An
enormous moth had settled [while] through the open windows came the
sounds of very early dawn,” begins the first Holograph draft of The Moths
/ The Waves (H, 1.13). “The sun had not yet risen....Then she
[pathetically fallacious Nature] raised her lamp higher,” begins the
published edition of The Waves (W, 7). The similarities of the texts’
respective beginnings points the way to a moth-based interpretation of
The Waves, via the ideas set forth in “The Death of the Moth.” Minow-
Pinkney suggests that the moth, as symbol, carries inter-textual baggage
throughout Woolf’s work. This is readily conceivable, especially when
one takes into account Woolf’s use of light, water, and other common
symbols. Moths, though, are somewhat different, in that they do not seem
to share the same inter-authorial archetypes her other symbols do. The
moth is a distinctively, if not exclusively, Woolfian symbol. According
to Minow-Pinkney, the moth “is itself a recurrent Woolfian image,
denoting the ‘uncircumscribed spirit’ that flits briefly into the light
of the narrative consciousness only to veer away again before it can be
definitively grasped” (M-P, 154). Woolf herself hints at the imagistic
importance of her moth when she writes in Draft 1 that the mark the
insect leaves on the wall is “a purple crescent...a mysterious
hieroglyph, always dissolving” (H, 1.3). Woolf’s discussion of a
“hieroglyph” sends the reader to ancient times, when symbols first
developed, but her curious addition that the symbol is “always
dissolving” leads to the conclusion that despite the moth’s possible
history as a symbol, Woolf intends to make it uniquely hers. At the same
time, Woolf is wary of overpowering the novel with her own imagery.
Eventually, she eliminates the opening moth reference from The Waves.
Sue Roe observes, “A whole wealth of imagery was gradually discarded, as
Woolf was forced, at the phrase making stage, to empty her images of
meaning in order to return to the initial stage and let her images re-
emerge informally” (Roe, 27-8). In this “informal” manner, Woolf
eliminates most explicit references to moths, and arguably, adds a wealth
of implicit ones.
Roe goes on to suggest, perhaps in minor contradiction of her postulating
informal images, that the “‘Interludes’ appear to be composed entirely in
the abstract, as though the rhythms of the sea and sky, dawn and dusk,
can provide a backdrop for but do not have any real bearing on the
development of the six lives depicted in the main text” (Roe, 116). In
analyzing the characters’ episodic actions in relation to the sun’s rise
and fall in the Interludes, the reader can see a distinct connection,
arguably a causal one, between the two strongest images in the novel: the
ship (by cosmological and symbolic extension, the sun) and the night, and
the characters follow the sun’s journey over the sea as moths flock to a
streetlight. This is not to suggest that the relationship is necessarily
causal, or that the characters behave as a flock of light-hungry moths,
without thought or separate identities, but the cycles of narrative that
occur immediately after some of the interludes and the characters’ own
occasional references to moths, night, and day do indicate a group
psychology operates among them with regard to light and time on both a
daily and life-long level.
A simple synopsis of the action in each of the interludes and the
episodes offers some insight on this correlation.
Interlude Episode
1. Sun has not yet risen Childhood (“What moves my
heart?”)
2. Sun rose higher School (“The life to which I’m
committed.”)
3. Sun rose College (“Who am I?”)
4. Sun risen Farewell Dinner (“This perhaps
happiness.”)
5. Sun at full height Death of Percival (“His horse
tripped.”)
6. Sun no longer in middle of sky Life (“Time let fall its drop”)
7. Sun now sunk lower Middle Age (“I, and again I...”)
8. Sun was sinking Reunion Dinner (“Sorrow”)
9. Sun had sunk Summing up (“Take it. This is my
life.”)
10. Waves broke on the shore —

The patterns seems to show that the interlude is more than just a
backdrop; the status of each character’s identity is evidently relative
to the position of the sun. As the sun rises, the characters become more
sure of themselves, as it sets, their lives are established, then
completed. “Take it. This is my life,” implores Bernard, the story-
teller (W, 238). The climax of the sun doubles as the climax of the
novel when its silent “conventional hero” (W, 123) dies randomly after
falling from a tripped horse. The rest is sunset, twilight. Percival’s
pivotal death and its repercussions among the other characters best
exemplifies the soundless fury of a Woolfian moth. Consider the insect’s
plight in “The Death of the Moth.”
The “present specimen,” Woolf notes, “...[is] content with life” (CE,
359). Just as Woolf could watch him and “fancy that a thread of vital
light” (CE, 360) emanated from him, so does Louis note that “a wake of
light seems to lie on the grass behind [Percival]” (W, 37). It is set in
a backdrop where “the same energy which inspired the rocks, the
ploughmen, the horses...sent the moth fluttering from side to side
of...the window pane” (359). This language is redolent of Jinny’s
question, “What moved the leaves? What moves my heart, my legs?” (13).
This enigmatic force — the force that drives the green fuse — injects the
moth and the seven characters with a vitality and energy that to Woolf
make “a hard fate” because the moth has only a day to live, from sunrise
to sunset. Woolf points out the life in the moth is the same as that in
nature, in her, and hence, her characters. “The energy that was rolling
in at the open window and driving its way through so many narrow and
intricate corridors in my own brain and in those of other human beings”
(W, 360) seems to her at once at once invigorating and unfortunate. With
so few years, so little time, to spend alive, Woolf shudders to see the
ambitious efforts of men (and moths) laid to waste by the overpowering
hand of fate. She may as well be speaking of Bernard and Percival as the
moth when she writes, “His zest in enjoying his meagre opportunities to
full [were] pathetic” (359). They all are like “furtive girls ignoring
their doom” (114). The struggle to overcome, to survive, is intrinsic in
the moth and the characters of the novel. “He was trying to resume his
dancing, but...he could only flutter to the bottom of the window-pane,”
(CE, 360) corresponds with Rhoda’s early desire to “rise on spring-heeled
boots over the treetops” so she, “turned, tumbled, and stretched” can
“pull [her]self out of these waters” (W, 28). The moth, despite its
highest, most sublime hopes, eventually will succumb to a force stronger
than he, as does Percival.
When Bernard remarks at the Farewell Dinner that they are drawn together
out of “love for Percival” (W, 126), he suggests that drawn together,
they become Percival. The fragmented identity of the six parts becomes
one whole in his presence. Percival’s words (if there are any) are not
recorded because those of the other six constitute, in some form, all or
nearly all of Percival’s being. He is, after all, merely a fabrication
conveyed to the reader by the subjective monologue’s of six characters.
It is probable, given various other Freudian tendencies among the six,
that they merely project their desires about what they want to Percival
to be onto him, beginning the apotheosis that crumbles their lives after
his death. “The multitude cluster around him, regarding him as if he
were — what indeed he is — a God,” (W, 136) foresees Bernard, believing
he is describing the peoples of a far-off land. As the six come
together, they manufacture an individual out of their own traits. They
can be read as component moths of the archetypical moth, the Moth of
Woolf’s essay.
“A fibre very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world had been
thrust into his frail and diminutive body,” says Woolf of her Moth (W,
360). “I am all fibre,” Louis says of himself. “...I am pale; I am
neat” (W, 12-20). Louis, perhaps the most diminutive of the six,
identifies very closely with the moths and related creatures. He is
small and fibrous, a flower. He fears the larger children, and wants to
be a part of their group. His weakness, he hopes will be absorbed into
the larger group, the whole greater than himself. “They salute
simultaneously passing the figure of their general...But they also leave
butterflies trembling with their wings pinched off...they make little
boys sob in dark passages...Yet that is what we wish to be, Neville and
I. I watch them go with envy” (W, 47). Much later he understands the
disheartening mechanism of life. “This is the first day of a new life,”
he observes, but it is just “another spoke in the rising wheel” (66).
Louis is the trembling butterfly, the sobbing little boy.
Neville, like Louis, wishes to be a part of this group, but he seems more
aware of the pointlessness of his “possibilities of pleasure” (CE, 359).
He hopes for something greater while encountering the impossible. He is
haunted by a mysterious “death among the apple trees” that he “cannot
surmount” (W, 24). A nagging pessimism repeatedly checks whatever solace
he might gain from his insistence that “there is an order in this world,”
(W, 21). His hopelessness and sense of doom continues: like the Moth,
“we are doomed, all of us by the apple trees, by the immitigable tree
which we cannot pass” (W, 24-5). Those who overcome, who surmount are
only the mediocre and therefore, do not matter. “They are immortal.
They triumph,” he laments (W, 71). He almost mocks Bernard for saying
“there is always a story,” (W, 38) and for caring enough about
insignificant problems to wonder whether he, Bernard, should “rescue that
fly...[or] let the spider eat it” (W, 49). He further cajoles Bernard
for his “moth-like impetuosity dashing itself against hard glass.” (W,
87). This accusation, of course, describes the case for interpreting
Bernard as another moth. Meanwhile, in the face of the great and
insurmountable struggle to live in his window ledge, Neville himself
feels “insignificant, lost, but exultant” (W, 72). He has reached the
point where he realizes his hapless fate, and can use that perspective to
better understand his life. He, too, merges with a whole greater than
himself. “O, I am in love with life,” he cries. “My sense of self
almost perishes,” (W, 72). Woolf said about the Moth that she was
“caused...to view his simple activities with a kind of pity” (CE, 360).
Similarly and bitterly, Neville notes the futility of loving mankind as
Bernard does (W, 121), the vanity of ambition (W, 136), and laments
finally and moth-like, “I excite pity in the crises of life, not love”
(W, 129).
Bernard, from the outset of the novel, is the story-teller. He crafts a
tale even as Woolf insists she is “not trying to tell a story” (H, 26).
It is he who is most often begins the cycles at each episode, who is most
affected by the progress of the sun. In the first episode, he sees ‘a
ring, hanging above [him]. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light” (W,
9). This ring is probably the sun, the first object mentioned in both
the first interlude and the first sentence of the first episode. It
begins the cycle of the episode, and the cycle of the novel. Bernard
captures it first and last with his narration. Indeed, it is he who
claims the text as his own. “It is my life,” he says (W, 238). He
identifies most strongly with those around him, despite the futility of
his intervention. “Should I free the fly?”, “There is a green
caterpillar on your neck” (W, 15, 23). When the sermon ends at
graduation, Bernard introduces the moth parallel. He, like Louis,
identifies with the brutalized moth. He sees this day as his coming out,
his innocent leap away from school and into the harsher world. “The
sermon ends. He has minced the dance of the white butterfly at the door
to pieces” (36). The thought of minced butterfly carries his mind into
the idea of his novelist’s notebook, where he keeps the tidbits that,
combined, form literature. “Under B, shall come ‘butterfly powder’” (W,
36). It would seem logical that under B would come “Bernard,” but
Bernard’s identity — presumably what he would write under “B” — is yet to
be fully constructed by those around him. “The truth is,” he confesses.
“I need the stimulus of other people” (W, 80). Despite his own lack of
identity, Woolf seems close to identifying Bernard with herself. The
Moth, writes Woolf in her essay, “set on the windowsill in the sun” (CE,
360) where the Moth soon dies. “I describe the sun on the windowsill,
and shall look under ‘B’ and find ‘butterfly powder’” (W, 36). The
extensive and meticulous drafts of The Waves serves as the mode exemplary
of Woolf’s remark, through Bernard, that “I am eternally engaged of
finding some perfect phrase that fits this very moment exactly” (W, 69).
His androgyny complements this issue, and allows to further mirror the
sexually enigmatic Woolf. Bernard’s “future biographer” (literally
Woolf, literarily some unknown) describes him as “joined to the
sensibility of a woman” (W, 76). Bernard crafts himself as a kind of
Byronic figure who as Neville points out, “marks all the passages that
seem to approve of [Bernard’s] character. [Neville find[s] marks against
all those sentences which seem to express a sardonic yet passionate
nature, a moth-like impetuosity” (W, 86). Without doubt, Bernard is
Moth-like in his “futile attempts” (CE, 360) to make something out of his
brief time. He is vulnerable to the larger, insurmountable forces. “We
are only lightly covered in buttoned cloth,” (W, 113) like the “frail and
diminutive body” of the Moth. He destroys his own frailty, however. It
is he who has “tapped with the remorseless and savage egotism of the
young [his] own snail shell till it cracked” (123). Curiously, Woolf
uses this sentence to strengthen the tie between her and Bernard, her
surrogate story-teller. Both interludes three and four describe a “snail
shell” into which birds “plunged their beaks savagely into the sticky
mixture” (W, 74-75). It is a connection that leads to the question of how
Woolf fits into the narrative of The Waves and how she responds to the
various moths.
Woolf is, apparently, the narrator in The Death of the Moth who happens
upon the floundering moth and is captivated. Also, her interest in the
phenomena of moths birthed the idea for The Waves. It is conceivable
that she treated each of her seven thematically significant characters
with the same attention and pity with which she treated the Moth. She
may have written the novel and the essay with the same end in mind.
“Someone had set [the moth] dancing and zigzagging to show us the true
nature of life” (CE, 360) That someone can be interpreted in at least
one and probably both of the cases as Virginia Woolf herself. She as
well can be the woman in the waves who “couched beneath the horizon had
raised a lamp” to illuminate and attract all the moths below. But even
she, as she “stretched out a pencil, meaning to help [the moth] right
himself” (read: “write” himself) could not prevent the unseen,
insurmountable force, the approach of death. “Against you I will fling
myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!” cried one moth.
“O yes...death is stronger than I am,” replied the other (CE, 361).

SOURCES
Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. Virginia Woolf & The Problem of the Subject. (New
Jersey: Rutgers, 1987).
Roe, Sue. Writing and Gender. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990).
Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays. (London: Hogarth Press, 1966).
Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. (New York: HBJ, 1931).
Woolf, Virginia. The Waves: The two holograph drafts. (Toronto:
University of Toronto, 1976).