Meals and Mourning in Woolf's The Waves

Abstract

Food and meals serve as vehicles through which Virginia Woolf considers being and its end, death, and the ritual encounters with death that are themselves heightened moments of consciousness. This essay explores the ways in which Woolf uses meals in The Waves as moments in the mourning process. The six characters in The Waves are confronted with the inevitability of mortality and the difficulties of mourning. They seek to come to terms with grief through ritual moments which bring them together. Meals provide such ritual moments, the ritual spaces, for instances of awareness and community. The taking of food signifies the potentiality of communion and consolation, even as it reminds each individual of the always-present possibility of her own ultimate dissolution, her own end of being.