Porous Boundaries in Virginia Woolf's The Waves: Anticipating a Digital Composition and Subjectivity

When turning to determining a subject position for the digital age, one may look beyond the invention of its technologies and instead begin with the development of its aesthetic of networked communities, nodal expression, and collaborative identity. Virginia Woolf's The Waves demonstrates this aesthetic in both form and content. In this paper, I will examine the role of collaboration in the form of interdisciplinary composition, arguing that Woolf's use of musical form and dramatic monologue and dialogue structurally secure an investment in collaborative models of expression. Digital texts taut their inherent multimodality, but such compositions are also evident in pre-digital texts. In addition, I will decipher the subject position Woolf puts forward in The Waves by looking closely at how the characters determine their own identity and existence when they are alone, when they interact with one individual, and when they congregate as a group. These are exemplified more specifically in the representations of Rhoda and Bernard as equally refusing to collaborate between a self-defined identity and a group defined identity; Bernard's channeling of Lord Byron while writing a love letter; and Woolf's use of the red carnation as a repeated image of the intertwined nature of the characters' collaborative identity and mutual dependence on one another.