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The Importance of Birds in Virginia Woolf's The Waves Essay

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The Importance of Birds in Virginia Woolf's The Waves

To emphasize her viewpoint in The Waves, Woolf employs a distinctive style. She interlocks the dramatic monologues of six characters at successive stages in their lives to tell her story; and prefaces each of the sections with a descriptive passage of sun and waves through a single day. In these passages descriptions of the sun, the sea, the plants, and the birds make implicit comparisons with the characters' speeches. The actions of the birds in the descriptive passages most strikingly parallel the developing consciousness of the characters, exemplified by Susan.

The birds' developing singing abilities and early explorations parallel Susan's experiences in childhood …show more content…

About to leave finishing school in Switzerland, Susan declares her hatred of the unfamiliar--"I hate fir trees and mountains." Anticipating her return home, she asserts, "I cannot be divided, or kept apart" (97) and describes the sensuous pleasures of home and country life.

Further into the novel, the birds' behavior corresponds to Susan's early adulthood, her prime, and her middle age. The birds sing alone, "stridently . . . as if the song were urged out of them . . . as if the edge were being sharpened." They [descend] dry-beaked, ruthless, abrupt" (109), soar in high flights, observe, sever upon encountering a rock. Susan, hating London, comes dowdily dressed--"like a creature dazed by the light of a lamp" (119)--to Percival's farewell dinner. At this reunion she learns that Bernard, whom she loves, has become engaged. Susan thinks that "something irrevocable has happened. . . . We shall never flow freely again" (142). The sun rises to its full height; the birds' "passionate songs addressed to one ear only" (149) stop; they build nests. Word arrives that Percival, who has loved Susan, has died in India. Susan, engaged to a farmer, shows momentary anger at the news. The sun no longer stands in the middle of the sky; the birds sit still and pause in their song "as if glutted with sound, as if the fullness of midday had gorged them" (165). Susan sees the seasons

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