Strategies of mythmaking in Virginia Woolf's “The waves”: women characters

Virginia Woolf’s use of the myth for creation of female characters in “The Waves” is analysed in the article. The research of V. Woolf’s classic essays shows that she makes an effort to retrace manifestations of female creativity in culture and literature. V. Woolf looking for “а voice answering a voice” turns to the previous generation of women writers. She attempts finding “mothers” of modern women writers among the nineteenth-century British women writers. However, she had to touch on deeper layers of culture in her essays and novels. V. Woolf represents female creativity as a continuous conversation between female voices from the times of the origin of arts and women’s crafts to modern times. “The Waves” is the novel where she investigates the mystical nature of the feminine principle in the universe. V. Woolf makes active use of mythmaking strategies in achieving her artistic aims. “The Waves” contains various allusions to myths and literary plots, demonstrating women’s nonverbal communication: myths of Prochne and Philomela, of the nymph Arethusa, the mythologeme of the natural world elements, the matriarchal creation myth, allusions to Ophelia’s story, to Molly Bloom’s monologue and other responses to a wide variety of texts by her contemporaries. Virginia Woolf discovers new meanings in the well-known myths and stories to propose her own aesthetic theory on female creativity. In “The Waves” woman’s self-actualization and ability to express her creativity are associated with rhythms of nature, life itself, not with professional fulfillment: Rhoda’s poetic imagination is compared with the water and air element, Jinny’s temperament is described as a flame, and Susan’s life is connected with earth and fertility. In the novel Virginia Woolf’s collaboration with her sister Vanessa Bell, a significant modernist artist, is mythologized as well. The water element is interpreted as an organizing principle for the polyphony of myths in the novel. The basis of Virginia Woolf’s aquatic mythmaking in the novel is the “oceanic feeling”. On the one hand, the “oceanic feeling” is a kind of vital energy penetrating and connecting the macrocosm of nature and the microcosm of the character’s consciousness. On the other hand, V. Woolf’s aim to convey “the voice of the sea” in “The Waves” became an important pilgrimage to discovery her personal artistic myth and her own voice in literature.