Escaping Schools: Disobedient Bodies in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

Abstract

Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) embraces culturally unprivileged bodies, which are outside national ideals. The novel’s espousal of such different bodies comes from Woolf’s intention to undermine the athletic and superior bodies produced under the pedagogical terrain. Woolf recognized a range of schools in England as one primary site that caused great confines of male and female bodies. Bent on the destruction of standard bodies formulated in the schools, The Waves shows that both the boys’ school and the girls’ school are designed to tame individual bodies by means of physical education. While describing the pedagogical violence against individual bodies, The Waves also presents some disobedient characters who try to escape the schools. Instead of participating in athletic games supplied by the schools, they involve themselves in aesthetic activities that embody the imagination of bodily equality. To fathom the political aspects of The Waves, this article examines the novel’s representation of the English schools that discipline male and female bodies with a particular emphasis on physical education. Turning to the aesthetic figures, the present discussion, in turn, explores how the characters’ aesthetic performance can expand the possibility of espousing different bodies stigmatized as inferior or insignificant in society.