Abstract

This paper regards traumatized formation of characters’ identities in Virginia Woolf’s (1882-1941) The Waves (1931). Trauma is considered as a devastating phenomenon which has horribly and dreadfully some effects on an individual’s self and identity. The aftereffects of a shocking and traumatic event on one’s sense of self contribute extremely to the collapse of the construction of his or her identity. Undoubtedly, the different sorts of trauma, like individual and historical trauma, have incorporated Woolf’s life. Actually, Woolf’s disoriented self is defined based on the affective representation of her traumatized identity through her painful experiences over her lifetime. This paperfocuses on Cathy Caruth’s (1955-) critical views concerning the concept of trauma. Caruth believes that trauma is a mental wound associated with the latency, referring to the return of the traumatic experiences after a period of delay or deja vuin the form of repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and so forth. In The Waves, the male and female characters like Bernard, Neville, Louis, Rhoda, Jinny, and Susan are traumatized due to a number of traumatic events, so that the construction of their identities can be trapped in some kind of post-traumatic stress disorders as the effects of their traumas. Through presentingthe characters, in the novel, Woolf delineates the traumatized selves and identities involved in some sort of psychic fragmentation and disintegration that haunt inevitably their lives and respondtraumatically to their traumas, pain, and suffering in different ways.

Highlights

  • The Second Common Reader(CR), points out clearly the conflicting feelings of love and hatred: “there is always a demon in us who whispers, I hate, I love, and we cannot silence him. It is precisely because we hate and we love in relation that we find the presence of another person intolerable” (CR, p. 154)

  • In many of Woolf’s works either fictional or non-fictional, one can trace a trajectory from imposing pain, terrors, and scenes that are trauma-related

  • Notwithstanding the fact that, at the time of Woolf, trauma was not known as today it is

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Summary

Introduction

Does not mean that they are the same. Self is what an individual privately experiences of herself or himself. This self has to appear in social relations and acts as an actor playing a part or a role on social stage. Self contributes to the consciousness of one’s own self-definition or identity. Self and identity can be affected through the processes of being established or deployed by various notions like language, gender, sex, racism, ethic, religion, environmental interaction and so on. If one’s identity and self are disorientated by one or some of the above mentioned notions, they cannot control the meanings and attributes which are very necessary to sustain or maintain the sense of self

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