The Waves

“I am a child, I love and I hate.”

This declarative statement from Susan (as a child) emphasizes the pure value of the childhood experience. Woolf has Susan make a statement that lacks any adult self-censorship. The grammar here recalls Descartes’s maxim “I think therefore I am”: Susan knows her existence through her feelings. The strength of feeling that Susan expresses here suggests that children are more in touch with their elemental feelings than adults, a transition traced in the narratives of the characters as they age.

“The others are allowed to go. They slam the door. Miss Hudson goes. I am left alone to find an answer. The figures mean nothing now. Meaning has gone.”

This passage is the first moment when Rhoda begins to lose a sense of meaning. In this first instance, “meaning” can be taken literally to signify the meaning of the lesson but it foreshadows Rhoda’s deeper existential despair and her recurrent anxiety about life’s meaning. This passage links Rhoda’s angst to her feeling of isolation: In this first instance, her isolation is literal but through the novel, it will become increasingly metaphorical and internalized.

“But here I am nobody. I have no face. This great company, all dressed in brown serge, has robbed me of my identity. We are all callous, unfriended.”

Rhoda’s identity crisis is emphasized in boarding school because the girls are in uniform, follow the same routine, and match the same expectations. The uniformity of this experience is dehumanizing.