From Fiction to Life: An Analysis of Moments of Justice through Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Love in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

This paper advances the thesis that to love rightly entails a commitment to fostering a just world while renouncing evil. It elucidates this claim through an analysis of Virginia Woolf’s concept of human development, examining four distinct moments of justice in The Waves and engaging with Hannah Arendt’s political-philosophical framework of love. The argument culminates in the contention that Woolf’s concept of human development—rooted in the intersection of self and world—empowered her as a woman writer to embody a form of love that fully encompassed herself and the world. This concept of human development unfolds across four stages—childhood, youth, middle age, and later years—each endowed with a unique conception of justice and that of love. When love during childhood has to be about craving for the everlasting by forgetting the idea of the living self, childhood is about being immersed in moments of flow through one’s talent; guided by known happiness toward the discovery of new joys, one does justice to childhood when one recognizes that children should learn through playful engagement with their natural abilities, rather than through formal lessons alone. When love during youth means craving for the inner God who helps one understand oneself, one does justice to youth by incorporating Percival, the inner God that represents diversity, into one’s own essence for understanding and enjoying oneself. When love during middle age means referring back to one’s own absolute past’s memories of happiness for one’s pursuit of new happiness, one does justice to middle age—a time of encountering loss—by reconstructing the origin of love—or of human eternal existence—through recollection of Percival, the inner God, dreaming of Percival, yearning for him, and engaging in magical thoughts about him after his physical death. When love during the later years means faith, one does justice to later years by maintaining the courage to save others from their sins through believing that God is in others, just as God is in oneself.

• Craving
• Faith
• Hannah Arendt
• Human Development
• Justice
• Love
• Virginia Woolf

1. Introduction

Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is not divided by chapters but by different processes within which the waves, the sea, and the sunlight change throughout a day. There are nine moments of this development or of this overall, large process; each moment is not a second or a minute but a period of time or a mini-process. Each period of time—according to my reading—represents a specific moment of justice where justice is, in the words of the literary critic Walter Benjamin, “a state of the world that redeems all from evil³” ([2])—that is, based on Hannah Arendt’s understanding of Augustine’s concept of love, a right state of love (which is termed caritas). Caritas redeems all from evil by searching for the ultimate good or goods. In addition, while Freud thinks that women are not good at justice ([8]) and the common saying goes that women are instead good at love or have usually mastered emotional intelligence, Woolf believes that great women, just like great men, know how to do justice to life and the world in which they live, despite the fact that women’s approaches to justice are often indirect and circuitous or that they often approach justice via their concepts of love⁴.

Given the limitation of its length, this paper will analyze four of the nine moments of justice in The Waves in light of Arendt’s theoretical understanding of “the right kind of love” (or that of justice). In addition, I also want to challenge Freud’s assumption about the effect of girls’ overwhelming emotion of envy on their ability to do justice to themselves and others. I want to propose that girls’ development and their world are not fundamentally based on penis envy, but also on the knowledge and love of the self, as well as of the right kind of things and persons. That is, this paper argues that Woolf, as a female writer, and her female characters demonstrate the abilities to know and love both themselves and other humans fictionally and realistically. By knowing how to do justice to the self through love, one learns how to do justice to others through love. Moreover, this paper will also briefly show how Woolf’s fiction connects to common life; how it attaches to the author’s experience, her views of life and of the world.

In the end, I want to argue that the demand for justice is a modification of the old definition of love as emotional intelligence into love as craving and love as faith (rather than a modification of envy) and the demand for justice lays down the condition subject to which one can savor love while approaching the act of doing justice to the self and to the world. Justice is, quite simply, to love rightly. What love is depends on what one loves (instead of cliché⁵). That is, love is not merely about emotional intelligence; it can be about loving justice or moving toward the just state of the world and away from evil. For instance, Woolf’s The Waves sheds light on Woolf’s love of—or, how she utters justly—her fictional yet innovative and realistic conception of human development. This conception of human development is based on right love or justice.

2. Literature Review

Previous research studies have shown that The Waves succeeds in (1) utilizing revolutionary language to address the maternal ([15]), (2) using Bernard to show that writing creates friendship between the writer and the readers ([11]), (3) expressing the heroic theme—proposed by Woolf herself—of enormous human effort in challenging death while also offering a vision of life that is both tragic and comic ([10]), (4) emphasizing the equal relation between the book’s search for unities beneath life’s phenomenal diversity—portrayed through ecstatic moments in which the characters feel connected to the vast universe via either loss or a sense of merging—and a personal loneliness or emptiness mediated by the loss of Woolf’s brother Thoby ([12]), and (5) maintaining skepticism about all versions of reality ([12]). Previous research studies have also shown that The Waves, in addition, manages to (1) model fiction-writing on classical music, rewriting human interaction and social organization ([5]), (2) demonstrate a nonhuman world that permeates and interpenetrates human existence ([16]), (3) suggest formal order’s—such as formal education’s—negative influence on elegy writing ([13]), (4) discuss the les, women-centered, mystical experience that reveals hidden patterns (of human behavior) behind human appearance ([6]), (5) invent new linguistic procedures while reconstructing a narrative structure that is a rhythm rather than a plot ([14]), and (6) treat Bernard’s Elvedon as a vision of life that shapes Bernard’s mythic identity and Woolf’s timeless underworld imagination while existing beneath the surface of everyday life ([3]). But previous research has never touched upon The Waves’s contribution to the field of justice. Reading Woolf alongside Hannah Arendt does justice to the concept of human development via the examination of the concept of love, where the former concept is formed by sub-concepts including childhood, youth, middle age and later years, etc.

3. Toys and Formal Education

To begin with, according to Arendt, for Augustine, “to love is indeed nothing else than to crave something for its own sake,” or “love is a kind of craving.” The structure of such craving involves two things: aiming at something and referring back to somebody; this something is a known world and is a kind of goodness or a good, whereas this somebody is a being who “knows the world’s good and evil and seeks to live happily” ([1]). To love is to move towards the good that will make one happy, or in Arendt’s words, “is a human being’s possibility of gaining possession of the good that will make [this human being] happy” ([1]). The opposite of love is one’s possibilities of losing what one has/loves and of being unable to gain what one wants/loves. Those possibilities are termed fear. The fear of losing is the opposite of happiness—although losing what one has/loves and being unable to gain what one wants/loves cause sorrow just as possessing the good causes happiness; sorrow is not the opposite of happiness perhaps because one’s state of sorrow cannot affect one’s state of happiness, but one’s fear of losing affects one’s happiness. In the end, while love moves towards the good, fear moves away from the evil; and, the evil that fear makes one shun (such as death, the loss of all things and persons) may threaten the good that love desires or that will make one happy; i.e., the fear of losing may not only accompany a human being’s love to have but also beset the state of happiness. In order to bypass the evil’s threat, one should desire the good that is everlasting rather than temporary. That is, one should desire the good that one “cannot lose against [one’s] will” ([1]). What is temporary is something that one is going to lose on one’s own way to happiness. What is everlasting, on the other hand, is the moment without mortality that can make us happy, or the present without a future given that the end of every human future is death, the ultimate evil. This moment of everlasting is a time that can be measured by the yardstick, “space”—and that is located within one’s memory. It is a time in memory that remembers the past and holds the expectation of the future; it is, in other words, where past and future meet; it is the Now; it is the time outside time, or the timeless.

Life, or the act of living, is unlike this time outside time. Life comes from the immortal, yet it is mortal. To love living in the present without a future means two things: firstly, what one loves—namely one’s living—is a process of mortality and thus has a changeable state; secondly, but this life at the present without a future holds the immutable tightly, wanting its eternity; the mutable life borrows the immutable from the timeless for self-preservation and for being an object of possession and enjoyment that humans crave. Furthermore, the changeable life in the end turns what it borrows from eternity or the unchangeable into the changeable. Hence, only by forgetting about the idea of the living self or life may one truly possess and enjoy the present without a future (or the absolute future—that is also the absolute present) via loving.

“The right love,” in Arendt’s words, “consists in the right object” and “the right love seeks eternity” ([1]). Namely, only the wrong love seeks the mundane, the earthly, and the vanishing. While the right love is termed caritas (or charity), the wrong love is termed cupiditas (or greed). In Augustine’s words, the “root of all evils is cupiditas, the root of all goods is caritas” ([1]). One should cultivate the right kind of love (namely, caritas) if one wants to be a good-enough and better person. The change of one’s love object from the mundane to the eternal signals the lover’s growth or leap. The change of one’s love object from the unconscious to the conscious is also a lover’s growth. Cultivating more caritas, in addition, is a lover’s growth.

Woolf’s fiction The Waves just specifies Arendt’s moment of immortality.

“Woolf believes that beneath the appearance of change and disorder that marks daily life is a timeless reality that becomes apparent only during pure ‘moments of being,’ when the self is transcended and the individual consciousness becomes an undifferentiated part of a greater whole” ([4]).

In other words, Woolf believes in what Arendt suggests in the first chapter of her dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine: loving a present without a future. Woolf’s pure moments of being are moments of the present without a future, or moments of flow. The concept of flow here refers to a state of creativity and total involvement, of living in harmony with the self, with society, and with the great universe in which there is a feeling of transcendence ([7]). This is a concept developed by the positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It is used to teach people how to enter a state of happiness. It is used to refer to the same thing as Arendt’s concept of the Now; flow is a timeless state. It is, in addition, a state just like Woolf’s pure moments of being in which the changeable self itself is forgotten via transcendence and undifferentiation from the universe.

This moment of immortality in the first section of Woolf’s The Waves is created by the contrast between a time before formal education and a time after formal education. In the first moment of human development, Woolf first describes her six characters’ relationships with their toys and then their relationships with formal education. Toys are what they love via their talents while formal education is an obstacle of evil. Woolf writes about how her six characters’ talents are preserved after encountering the evil that is trying to make everyone learn the same things. She uses the obstacle of formal education to test whether the six characters’ talents are immortal or the right things to love. In addition, the six characters each do something good while loving their toys. Except Rhoda, who is explicitly closest to the eternal, the characters all experience lovers’ growth after they bypass the evil of formal education not because their love-object changes from the mundane to the eternal but because they become more aware of what they love and how to use their love to reach the good. Woolf in a way teaches us what we should love during our childhood. All of her characters’ toys are not merely objects or stuff. These characters’ toys are actually their talents, their means of loving. These characters, except Rhoda, additionally, overcome formal education by their toys, their talents—even when they are all little.

Louis’s toy is his own imagination (of his spirit). Jinny’ toy is her activation of her body’s sensation (after meeting another’s body’s sensation). Susan’s toy is what she sees via human perception and her courage. Bernard’s toys are words and phrases. Rhoda’s toys are the basin and plants such as petals and Sweet Alice and her explicit depiction of or access to the eternal via her story of petals and water in her basin. Neville’s toys are the most realistic; they are wooden boats and a knife that makes such boats via his ability of doing so. When they all play with their toys, they experience moments of flow. Each moment is a present without a future. During the flow, Louis imagines that he lives like a stalk that is all fibre and whose roots go down to the center of the earth; he desires to feel the earth, be part of the earth and be unseen by his five friends, but Jinny discovers him and kisses him to wake him from seeming death. She smells the earth and dances and ripples during her flow. Yet she does not know that her kiss has made Louis feel very shocked and upset⁶. Susan sees that kiss. She feels sorrow, but this does not affect her courage for looking for and grasping happiness; she goes on an adventure together with Bernard, who intends to calm her down, to Elvedon—a fictional place created by Bernard using phrases; they see an image of a woman who is writing there (but they run away because of the woman’s gardener’s discovery of them). This image signifies that writing is able to calm one down; and, a woman who writes is both sacred and scary because such a woman knows the truth of the world. Whereas Bernard has the courage of making things up via language, Susan has the courage of following Bernard’s words into a brand new world. Susan is hunky-dory after this and after her own acts of loving and hating this world in which Jinny kisses Louis (those of her own acts include her cry, her wrapping her agony inside her pocket-handkerchief, and her laying her anguish on the roots under the beech trees [17]). She sees Rhoda, then. Rhoda is playing with her brown basin. She picks white petals from the ground and puts them in the basin filled with water; those white petals become like white ships while water in the basin is like the sea. Her story is that when she rocks the basin making the ships ride the waves, the one that sails alone in the end is her ship. The story is quite heroic yet the means of telling it is imaginary. The sea is the eternal while the ship that is able to travel across the sea after others all sink and fall forms a scene that is part of the eternal. Rhoda is also part of this eternity even while playing because her imagination creates such a scene; she conquers the ocean. Last but not least, Neville in the tool-house is looking for his friend Bernard who was playing with Neville before chasing after Susan. Neville loves order or makes things into order, but his knife is taken away from him by Bernard. Thus, he cannot keep making the boats that he and Bernard were making before Bernard gave up and chased after Susan; so, now Neville is waiting for Bernard, wanting his knife, during his flow. It is Neville that hears the class bell and says that we must drop our toys to enter formal education.

Formal education is evil. This idea can also be seen through the eyes of the characters. Formal education, according to Louis, is what makes him feel that he is inferior to his five friends simply because his father is a banker from Australia and he has an Australian accent. Formal education, according to Jinny, is walking along the large road by getting away from one’s tiny animal nature or tiny animal-or-natural sensations. During formal lessons, she needs to neither remember her body’s senses nor play with her body. Formal education, according to Susan, is what poses another type of violence; namely, she witnesses another kiss done by Florrie and Ernest, two adults who belong to the formal institution. For Bernard, formal education means getting away from the forests and the trees—the world created by both of his phrases and natural scenery. For Rhoda, formal education represents another way of thinking—thinking without meeting the so-termed “obstacle” of the ocean or of the eternal. For Neville, formal education is the result of one’s inability to overcome others’ death or what witnesses such death.

Formal education poses challenges to all of the characters. It seems to extinguish their passion. Encountering formal lessons makes one lose the chances to use one’s talent. The six characters become more aware of what they lose and more conscious of how to use their talents because of their experience of formal education. After and in-between formal lessons, in order to make themselves happy, they start to love their talents by using them to do good. Talents allow one to re-experience flow in the absolute present. However, talents are not immortal; because humans (such as Rhoda in The Waves) can misuse them; and thus, talents can bring humans fear (which is the opposite of love) and unhappiness. Nevertheless, remembering and then using the talents rightly allows one to reenter the state of the eternal or the moments of flow. For instance, firstly, Louis’s imagination of pain and inferiority—both his own and that of others—as well as his vision of overcoming these struggles, transcends his earlier imagination of himself as a mere stalk. Formal education at least unites the six characters. This human togetherness sets Louis’s imagination free and directs it toward other people. Second, after meeting Bernard’s story of them who are like giants that can make forests quiver, Jinny utters that she senses that part of her body—namely, her hand—becomes like a snake’s skin and parts of her body—namely, her knees—are like two pink floating islands. This time Jinny enjoys her activation of her body’s sensation without shocking any of the other people. Third, witnessing the kiss between two adults stimulates Susan to develop the courage to believe that she fears neither the heat of the kiss nor the winter of her heart. Fourth, Bernard reenjoys his story about their secret territory, the woods. Fifth, Neville recalls a realistic scene of a person’s death under the apple tree, yet, for him, his knife is not used for killing someone but for making the boats that ferry someone across the water (e.g., the Styx). In this sense, he already possesses the ability to deal with death and life—simply by seizing the moments through making the boats. Ferrying people (across the Styx) is a civilized event; the tool of ferrying people—the wooden boats—and the maker of the boats are also part of the civilized, or the ordered. All of these can make Neville, who loves order and life, happy. Lastly, when Rhoda is trying to answer Miss Hudson’s written question on numbers, she perceives time and yet she is out of time. She perceives the world and yet she is out of the world. She urgently wants to be saved from being outside the loop of time and the world, hoping that she can solve the problem on the board posed by her formal institution—though she knows that her eternal means of thinking will not help. She is in eternity, but she hates that; hence, she develops the habits of moving away from the eternal by formal education (or by evil).

Ultimately, by misusing her talent for creating eternal stories, by losing control of her talent, or by getting away from eternity, Rhoda’s “petal ship” crashes into the edge of the basin; she experiences the panic of falling and the panic of sinking. At the end of the first section of The Waves on childhood, only Rhoda does not bypass formal education through her talent. She is defeated by formal education given that she makes herself hate eternity, which she is good at depicting. All of the other characters transcend themselves; they experience caritas (or charity) or their pure moments of being, but Rhoda diminishes herself; she represents the disorder and she experiences cupiditas (or greed). Her fear⁷ of losing this whole world, in which formal education is a part of the social, together with her craving for this whole world, makes her turn away from the eternal, or the eternal version of her story. This fear, together with greed, brings her panic (namely, unhappiness). The other five characters do not desire this temporary and changeable world; they do not want to grasp formal education. They instead desire happiness. Guided by their known happiness in searching for new happiness, they do justice to themselves and to this world by believing children should learn to play with their talents rather than merely receive formal lessons.

Virginia Woolf was educated in her father’s library ([4]). She did not experience formal education but observed others—such as those in the Bloomsbury Group, where she met many of her friends—entering or being affected by formal education ([9]). Thus, she was able to imagine formal education in The Waves. She creates a dialectic between formal education and talents—and stresses that women should enter formal education together with men regardless of the outcome. Woolf was aware that if she had been a boy, she would have been educated at Cambridge or Oxford rather than at home. Her desire for equality leads her to create a more just world in her fiction.

In The Waves, formal institution proposes the same questions—“How can one improve oneself?—to different children, each of whom must find their own answer. Jinny finds ways to naturally repress her offensiveness. Susan gains new courage to resolve her feelings of inferiority and sorrow in front of the violent kisses. Rhoda wants to integrate herself with the other people though she fails to do so; she sacrifices her talent by giving up her eternity. Louis develops sympathy while encountering the others. Bernard obsesses over his flowery rhetoric; he uses his flowery language to help the others sense the world around them. Neville remains a rational and realistic maker of the boats; he loves to follow step-by-step order; he reminds the reader of Death which is the end of human future and hard to overcome. All of those characters, both females and males, find their means of approaching this world; they all try to do something good with their talents in their childhood even though formal education can deprive them of their talents and of the chances of using them; they resolve to remember to use their talents during breaks and after formal lessons. In the last place, failure, to the reader, can also teach one how to succeed; Rhoda’s failure to use her talent remains a marker of what she is good at; this gives one hope by making Rhoda healable⁸.

Furthermore, Woolf’s female characters are flexible and adaptable to circumstances. Jinny learns to turn away from Louis, who is upset because Jinny kisses him. Susan learns not to shrink from seeing others’ kisses, given that one of them takes place in the formal institution where she, the observer of the kiss, is observed by all the others. Even Rhoda learns to move herself away from timeless modes of thought since she cannot use them to solve the written problem on the board. Most of Woolf’s female characters, like her male ones, know how to love themselves. Even though Rhoda does not know how to love herself—namely, how to use her talent rightly, she knows how to be brave. Love, whether expressed as Rhoda’s greed or as the charity of the other five, makes one brave. In the end, one should love both the moments of flow and our talents, the former by craving and rightly enjoying them, whereas the latter by rightly using them. For the reader, this entire section becomes a great moment of immorality composed of two sets of moments of flow. Such a moment of immorality may be understood as the innocence of childhood—the state of playing with what one loves in the absolute present (or the absolute future)—or more simply, as learning to love oneself through moments of flow and through doing what one is best at, by playing to our strengths.

4. Percival, the Inner God, I

After college and before the age of twenty-five, the six characters are reunited by Percival, their friend and their God. They dine together in London, to say goodbye to Percival who is going to India. According to the scene of the dinner, Bernard says, “we have come together, at a particular time, to this particular spot. We are drawn into this communion by some deep, some common emotion”—i.e., by “a whole [seven-sided] flower to which every eye [of the seven persons] brings its own contribution” ([17]). In other words, Bernard suggests that Percival brings together with him a globe—this globe is made of common feeling, the thing that we have made (according to Louis), youth and beauty, what is deeply inside us (according to Jinny), the recurring natural scenery in memories (according to Rhoda), what one needs for happiness, such as a book (according to Neville), what hateful symbols point to, namely, the real or the actual (according to Susan), what is to come, the everlasting in the world-to-come that should be created by us (according to Bernard) and the beloved (according to Percival) ([17]). These are the seven persons’ brief contributions to the bloom. More complexly, the six lovers all love the beloved, Percival, whom they regard as an inner God. After Percival is going, after Percival is leaving the dinner for India, the other six characters start to seize the eternal moments of recollecting how Percival makes them feel; they all start to seize the moments of loving.

According to Arendt, people who can achieve happiness are those who crave what is inside the self or the self ([1]). Those who seek what is outside themselves are people in cupiditas (or greed). God can represent a kind of self-sufficiency, since it seems that there is nothing outside God when God creates the world and humankind. However, craving for the (external) God is the same as craving for this world; both would bring one to enslavement because both God and this world are external to human beings. Only craving for the self—or for parts of the self, the unity of the self, or the expected world-to-come—leads one to caritas. Yet one should belong to God (who creates the world and humans) when one is craving for the self. Here, however, God is the inside God who helps the lover know the self. This God is one’s own God; it is the “highest good.” It represents inner eternity (of goodness), the eternal Being, or one’s own essence. In contrast to such an essence—which is unchangeable—the existence of a human being is changeable. This essence points toward the absolute future, or the Now that is free from a worldly future (namely, the present without fear of death).

Through loving the inner God, humans reapproach themselves. This reapproach occurs through self-denial, self-hatred, self-oblivion, and self-transcendence. While searching for the absolutely future self that is separated from one’s present self, a being must love the inner God (that is, his/her/their own essence, which helps the human being understand his/her/their absolutely future self/selves) and forget the current self. Ultimately, by transcending the forgotten self based on one’s understanding of the absolutely future self, one gets and can start to enjoy the absolutely future self, or the self-to-come or the world-to-come in one’s expectations⁹.

The six characters’ moments of loving are different from each other. Three of them (i.e., Bernard, Rhoda, and Neville) feel that they are inferior to Percival, while the other three (i.e., Louis, Susan, and Jinny) feel that they are superior to Percival. No matter whether they are inferior to Percival or not, after meeting Percival, they all become open and honest with each other, and they all start to need and love Percival. The six have two modes of loving. Bernard, Rhoda, and Neville love Percival through self-denial, self-hatred, self-oblivion, and self-transcendence, while the others’ love is mixed with hate, but they (i.e., Louis, Susan, and Jinny) do not hate themselves; they hate Percival, because Percival makes them more aware of themselves. Louis becomes aware that fear and vanity create their differences—the differences which he likes to emphasize—whereas Percival erases those differences by posing the same image of the whirlpool to every one of them. Such an image signals the danger after differences are erased. Love is like the whirlpool that is dangerous yet unites the characters. To Louis, our differences are not dangerous and thus superior to love. While facing the whirlpool, Susan wants to stand on a ledge. This ledge is a symbol of the platform. Susan loves to hate the symbols of things rather than directly the actual things themselves. Though it seems that she abandons those symbols after meeting Percival (because, after Percival, she is talking about the relationship between the furious coal-black stream and a ledge), she still uses a symbol—i.e., the ledge—to describe her feelings of security and another symbol—i.e., the furious stream—to describe her danger—namely, her loving of Percival. Susan has the power of hating the symbols but does not have the power to hate the actual things; so, what is beyond her power is love. Jinny agrees with the image of love as a whirlpool, since she loves and hates Percival because Percival loves Susan, not Jinny herself. In other words, Jinny loves and hates Percival just as she knows that Susan loves and hates Jinny herself, who kissed Louis when she was young and beautiful. These are the inner feelings of Jinny; she thinks that love is dangerous because one cannot separate it from hate. Louis, Susan, and Jinny all believe that they and what they are good at are superior to Percival, and therefore Percival is like the whirlpool or roaring waters or the danger to them; they all love what they have done and amplify or emphasize what they have done through remembrance. They have not done new things via new talents; they are observing “what they have done via using their old talents” from a new angle: Louis observes that he has learned to present human love while stressing human difference. Susan observes that she has learned to use symbols to describe her experience of love. Jinny observes that she has learned to understand Susan’s experience through first understanding her own experience. All in all, because they love and hate Percival, they love themselves more.

Neville does not agree with the image of love as a whirlpool (Percival is Neville’s first love; Neville loves Percival’s keeping the appointment). After meeting Percival, Neville abandons immersing himself in his ordered world in order to see and then show the others their outstanding merits: for example, Louis is good at comparing love with roaring waters while Rhoda is good at describing love more sublimely. Thus, Neville denies his own way of depicting love and lets Rhoda depict love because he knows that Rhoda is good at doing it. To transcend himself, Neville, in addition, starts to imagine and then depict the future for the others (although Bernard rejects the future that Neville proposes because yesterday Bernard became engaged—his future is settled. Bernard says that any one of them could choose to kill him linguistically because of his blunt engagement that prevents them from enjoying their future). Bernard abandons his flowery language and loves Percival, who is like a god, but uses violent language and Western means to solve Eastern problems. Bernard imagines Percival in India bluntly. To transcend himself, Bernard understands that his stories—formed mostly by his flowery language, sometimes by violent and blunt language—are like his toys, but these stories are different from facts or truth; it is easy for one to grasp and then present facts or truth, but it is hard for one to discover stories. Stories must have deeper implications. This is what Bernard understands through loving Percival. Rhoda abandons her image of the ocean to create a series of other images. For instance, she compares Percival to a stone while the six of them are like fish surrounding it. The stone is relatively unchangeable while fish are mortal and changeable. Additionally, Rhoda also embraces the images of “muddy roads, twisted jungle, swarms of men, and the vulture that feeds on some bloated carcass” ([17]) evoked by Percival in India and constructed by Rhoda herself. Those images are of this chaotic, cruel, and slam-bang world. They are changeable but highlight Percival’s god-like or hero-like existence because he is the man riding his mare alone in these scenes. To transcend herself, Rhoda successfully integrates herself with the others through her image of love and, at the same time, through her image of love, she successfully responds to Neville, who sees her talents and addresses her directly. To Rhoda, love is certainly not the whirlpool. Love is what fills the void, what brightens our long nights, what gives purpose to our tests and disguises. Love is not Percival but a moving figure in front of the ocean, which humans—we—cannot reach but to which we can venture to travel. Neville, Bernard, and Rhoda all abandon what they have done in the past through their new talents in order to join the new world-to-come in which Percival exists. They abandon the ordered, the flowery, and the eternal through self-denial, self-hatred, and self-oblivion. Then, they embrace the new, the diverse, through self-transcendence. Because they understand themselves (their absolute future selves) more after encountering Percival, who helps them do so, and they enjoy that, they love Percival, their inner God, more. Neville, who learns to recognize the others’ merits (the others’ places within the civilized world), treats Percival as a lover; Bernard, who learns to value stories more than flowery phrases, treats Percival as an outside god in India, and Rhoda, who learns to create abstract, natural, and poetic imagery about human love, treats Percival as a stone; they are all inferior to the relatively unchangeable Percival while they crave better selves.

In the end, this fourth section in The Waves is immortal since the contribution of each of the seven to the dinner party is either transcendent or resolved. The six characters are either humble or proud. To each of them, Percival is someone existing not only outside of them but also within them; he is a part of their memories; they can retrieve Percival when it is necessary. They have incorporated Percival into their own essence, and this essence helps them understand and enjoy themselves. For Louis, Percival represents the danger of forgetting the distinct self. For Susan, Percival embodies what the symbol of the “furious stream” points to—he is part of her stream of consciousness. For Jinny, Percival is a model of youth and beauty; in other words, he is a model of Jinny herself. For Neville, Percival is someone who encourages him to become a better version of himself. For Bernard, Percival is an aspiring seeker of stories. For Rhoda, Percival represents the inner moment of peace and silence. Percival can always be inside the six characters’ selves, helping them assess or improve themselves. Ultimately, the seven of them are like a seven-sided flower; each can access the others’ contributions to the flower—that is, the others’ talents. Such permission to use shows that love is about openness and candidness while love’s contribution is all about honesty and truthfulness. The seven persons see each other’s veracity as they gather to bid farewell to Percival, who is leaving for India. They learn to love either themselves or the others by first loving their inner Percival.

5. Percival, the Inner God, II

The previously discussed love within the structure of craving touches upon one aspect of the structure, aiming at (e.g., aiming at the present without a worldly future, aiming at the absolutely future self, and aiming at the inner God), but forgetting the other aspect, referring back. This second aspect of craving can be activated before one’s pursuit of happiness, because one should know what happiness is before pursuing it, and one can know what happiness is by referring back to one’s own absolute past’s memories of happiness. Augustine presupposes that we know the origin of human happiness or the origin of human existence or our Creator—that is, the eternal Being—a priori. Humans (or human love) depend(s) on their knowledge of their Creator (or of the inner God). This knowledge of the Creator, of happiness, of the origin of human existence, and of the reason for the creation of humans exists before the human beings, the created, as well as the act of creating humans. By referring back to the origin of human happiness, one finds the meaning of one’s love’s actions involving the meaning of aiming at the absolute future. Through referring back to one’s a priori memories of the inner God (of happiness), one also gains consciousness of what happens to the self¹⁰.

Only by depending on the Creator (or on the a priori memories about happiness) can the created become a happy, true Being. Without the Creator (or without the a priori memories about happiness), the created is nobody and nothing. Such human dependence is rooted in memories and in the act of referring back; it is not about one’s desires, expectations or the act of aiming forward. Among the temporary beings, only human beings are capable of self-reference. That is, only human beings can see their original, true Beings through the eyes of their inner God. Accordingly, humans can also recognize a table’s true Being by seeing the unchangeable concept of a table through the eyes of the inner God.

Percival died in India after the seven persons’ first meeting in London. Before the six persons’ second meeting at Hampton Court, and after they have entered their thirties, four of the six begin to search for new love while referring back to the old. Each reconstructs the origin of love—or of human eternal existence—through recollection of Percival, dreaming of Percival, yearning for him, and engaging in magical thoughts about him. Although Percival has died, their memories of Percival become part of their new life as well as part of their new search for new happiness. Percival is the inner God of their absolute future or their absolute present. Percival is also the inner God of their absolute past.

Lious thinks that Percival’s death reminds him that persons are different from one another, but all deaths are one death, and when those differences emerge in one being, this being should make them into one and then exist here and now instead of being like a snowflake disappearing or being wasted—just like when a vast inheritance of experiences is packed in him, he (who seems to have lived thousands of years) should make those experiences into one. Lious’s past memories of happiness are about those differences and this united oneness. The opposite to the snow or to the wasted is what he is searching for in the absolute future (as well as in his absolute past). Though his future will be as a scrupulous merchant whose business is all over the world while his past was as a good student who gained the highest grades in school, he forever remembers that what gives his life meaning is that once he was reading poetry in a restaurant where some people were moving a piano. Namely, both in his past and in his future, he seeks poetry; thus he is aware that he needs Percival, who is inferior to Lious but who brings Lious poetry.

Second, Susan was a courageous woman who was able to handle life’s claws and its lightning (such as Jinny’s violent kiss of Louis). She became a good wife and mother who loved her kids through small acts such as saying ‘sleep’ after Percival’s death. Susan saw Percival in her wildest dream about the absolute past in which Percival saw her at home, brought her freedom by bringing her to India, and increased her possessions by giving her his prizes and trophies. To Susan, it was as if Percival was still alive whenever she thought of him. Percival was the origin of her love. She referred back to their detailed, private meeting while she chased after her middle-age happiness. It was Percival who reminded Susan that she was not satisfied with her current state of natural happiness because she loved reading and sewing; so, besides putting her kids to sleep, she actually needed more time for reading and stitching. To Susan, in addition, Percival was what existed beyond the symbols (that is, beyond what she usually hated); he was the real of the reals—namely, the truest form of truth. He was also the undead among the dead. As a result, memories of Percival made Susan weary of her adequate life and filled her with a longing for a more courageous one.

Jinny is always a social butterfly or a socialite. She refers back to her embodiment of the now six-sided flower when she talks about love and when she is aiming at the everlasting beauty of things. The flower is not seven-sided because Percival has died. Jinny shows that her body can make her good at anything that the six persons have been good at through practicing using their talents or learning from them what one can learn. This is her demonstration of her love’s origin, which is that flower (and according to Jinny “[this] common fund of experience is very deep” [17]), but she is still limited by her body’s sensations; she cannot love or be good at what her body cannot sense (such as abstract concepts). In comparison with Bernard who thinks that stories rather than facts are his toys, Jinny thinks that facts rather than stories are her toys. Thus, she asks for stories but offers the others facts. For instance, she has many partners; she knows each one through facts, not rumors, not stories. In addition, in comparison with Susan who likes to play with symbols and what she sees through her courage, Jinny is able to playfully decipher the hieroglyphs written on other people’s faces. For Jinny, those incomprehensible symbols can be interpreted as knowledge, anguish, ambition, indifference, despair, etc. Furthermore, Jinny imitates Bernard clumsily through her pride, saying that we are the creators of our life and everything abstract we encounter within it. She becomes like a God when she says so. But since she is an embodiment of the now six-sided flower, she can say so. In comparison with Rhoda who likes to compare herself to a sailor and water in the basin to the sea, Jinny learns to compare her body to a boat and the crowd, or bodies, around her to the ocean. Additionally, Jinny smelled the violet that Rhoda would give to Percival as a present. In comparison with Louis who loves to imagine his spirit as something with freedom, Jinny imagines her body as something with freedom; she awkwardly thinks that her body is freely and happily chased by another into the forest. In comparison with Neville who loves Percival deeply and believes that Percival will live forever, Percival’s death hurts Jinny deeply, for she is left without an explanation for why he does not love her. The contributions of these five persons (i.e., Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Louis and Neville) to the now six-sided flower have made Jinny’s life much richer and more colorful.

Jinny still cares about beauty after thirty. She implicitly compares women to china pots and says that “beauty [of china pots] must be broken daily to remain beautiful” ([17]), which, to Jinny, can mean that one must break up with every wrong person freely in order to remain beautiful. Or: after seeing the broken pots, one can cherish the beauty of the unbroken ones more; after breaking up with the wrong guys, one can cherish the beauty of one’s single self and of one’s remaining friendships more; beauty of the pots and of women’s relationships must all be broken frequently in order for people to think that the unbroken and the remaining are beautiful. Further, beauty of China pots has to be broken in order to be everlasting. One should remember the abstract beauty of the pots instead of merely the beauty of the solid, or of the unbroken. When it comes to people, true beauty is found not in the aging body itself, but in the memory it evokes; in other words, one should see everlasting beauty while referring to the enduring memories of the body rather than merely referring to the body, the physique. Jinny understands the abstract through specific examples such as the example of China pots, the example of the seven-sided flower and the example of Percival. She is aiming at everlasting beauty which finds its origin in Percival, a man who is like a God and who passed away prematurely (at the age of twenty-five), but it seems that Percival must die young in order for his body to remain young—although one can try to remember his beauty abstractly by comparing this beauty of his body to the beauty of the seven-sided flower, or it is worth the effort to call the young Percival to mind in order to celebrate his everlasting, positive effect on Jinny’s and the other five characters’ lives.

Last but not least, Neville uses the pronoun “you” to cherish the memory of Percival and to observe what “I” (here “I” refers to Neville) has done. Neville says, “our mean lives, unsightly as they are, put on splendour and have meaning only under the eyes of love” ([17]). This love is “you”; it has been Percival... Although Neville has climbed to a high position, his life is full of Percival, not work. He imagines a day with Percival: they went out together in the morning and they sat together by the fire in the evening. However, after awakening again to the fact that Percival has died, Neville’s pronoun “you” begins to refer to a larger entity that includes but extends beyond Percival; it also involves other heroes such as Alcibiades, Ajax, and Hector... The pronoun “you” also starts to be about the reader of Neville and the reader also of Percival, Ajax, Alcibiades and Hector. After Percival’s death, Neville uses his memories of Percival to seek and find another “you” who is also his beloved.

All in all, poetry which Percival brings together with him and to Louis allows Louis to enjoy something that humans all can understand. Reading and stitching, of which Percival reminds Susan, allows her to become more like herself and thus braver after she understands that death—the common fate of all civilized humans—is a truth embedded in stories as well as in the very needlework she creates. Moreover, learning others’ talents that they contribute to the seven-sided flower and pondering over what is beauty given Percival’s death allow Jinny to learn to preserve others’ treasure and to understand the fragile yet beautiful qualities of young life. Lastly, enlarging what the pronoun “you” can involve gives Neville chances to get over the sadness of losing Percival, Neville’s lover. Each of their lives becomes more meaningful as they refer back to Percival, their inner God—who, though dead, remains forever alive because of his six friends’ remembrance of him. They know happiness when they encounter Percival. Without this knowledge, they would be unable to see their current lives and make them better. Overall, this sixth section of The Waves is immortal because it not only does justice to a God-like person’s death through remembrance but also does justice to (one’s) middle age—a time of encountering loss—by portraying this section’s characters’ defiant and resilient fight against “the loss of momentum in middle age.” Their strength is shown as stemming from a connection to something eternal in themselves.

6. Death, the Worst Evil

Lastly, people seem to be united by a common faith—which is a kind of love that brings people to the absolute present—but faith isolates each individual from the others and separates individuals from the mundane. Although the society of believers is a community of whole human beings who believe in what God offers—namely, the eternal possibility of being human—common faith is the result of that offering rather than its cause. Believing in the same possibility of being human does not help create a community of the faithful; rather, within such a community, everyone can share the same belief. What makes believers sincerely relate to each other are two historical facts—(1) the sacrificial death of Christ for the salvation of the human-made world, and (2) the common descent from Adam. In other words, it is especially the second fact—the common descent from Adam—rather than people’s similarities, likeness, or common faith, that unites them, forming a society and making Christ and his death historically real and effective. This historical root or kinship “creates an equality neither of traits nor of talents, but of situation” ([1]). In other words, such kinship as a historical origin presupposes humans’ situation of mortality. Such equality of situation underlies human relationships. It allows humans to believe in one another, hoping that one’s own self and the others will prove themselves in our common future. Humans must grasp this equality of situation of mortality in order to be equal to each other. Namely, the situation of mortality should not be understood as a natural situation, according to Arendt, but as an indication of sinfulness.

Sinfulness emerges from isolation from the Creator or one’s origin of existence. This origin is dual. On one side, it is about the eternal Being. On the other side, it is historical and about the common descent from Adam. Firstly, humans are familiar with the world due to their kinship with Adam through generations. They do not feel that they are strangers to the world, or that they come to the world via creation. Secondly, it is another historical fact—God’s revelation in Christ—that connects the created to the Creator, or to the eternal Being. That is, God can save all from mortality or sinfulness through Christ’s eternal death that saves all humans’ lives and their earthly world, through reliving Christ’s Passion in each human being by offering up our daily sufferings and through God’s showing of Himself or God’s ultimate self-disclosure in Christ. Although it is through our past sinfulness that the shared belief becomes our common faith, this faith is that we should love our neighbors not because they are sinful but because God is in them just as God is in us. Both one’s neighbors’ minds/beliefs and one’s own mind/belief are saved by our relationships with the eternal Being. The inner God’s salvation is here to counter this world, together with humans, to counter sinfulness, or death—namely, the unsaved.

Humans share the responsibilities of loving their neighbors or of guiding the neighbors to their inner God. This is termed human togetherness supported by mutual love. Loneliness or solitude, which is the opposite of mutual love, is a kind of sin of depriving the neighbors of chances and guidance for getting rid of their sins. But through the experience of loneliness or solitude, God makes one know the reality and significance of human togetherness. Human togetherness forms the new city of God where a human being lies in the connection of all members in Christ, but it is only in solitude that one can perceive the danger of being forever sinful or mortal. Thus, humans turn to their individual selves instead of all beings in order to love.

Sinfulness is the enemy. Death is the worst evil, but it is something that we have to face. Historically, the death of Christ makes death a bridge to the eternal or a bridge to salvation for good people. Thus, for good people, death can be good. But death can also be eternal death, which refers forever to the sinful past. Thus, for evil people, death is evil.

To Bernard, death is both good and evil. At the end, the author finally reveals that Bernard’s enemy is death. When Bernard is very little, he has already encountered death in Susan’s eyes since Susan is crying sadly after seeing Jinny kissing Louis which makes Susan witness the evil in Jinny, the upset in Louis and the emotion of envy in Susan herself. Bernard notices Susan and Bernard feels a kind of death in her crying—it is the death of Susan’s known world-to-come or the collapse of that known world-to-come; this known world-to-come is that one should not act on an evil impulse by kissing someone who does not love oneself; mutual love should be the basis of any kiss; thus, in order to fight against the evil, or the worldly world in which Jinny kisses Louis and makes Susan unhappy, Bernard uses his talent of making stories through flowery phrases rightly in order to reconnect Susan to her talent of seeing the truth with courage. Such talents both can be used rightly to approach their eternal Beings in order to let them see themselves clearly and understand humans’ sins of corruption. Participating in romantic love and envy are both types of sins, but helping the other overcome her sins is a God-like act of salvation. It shows that one (here Bernard) believes that God is also in the other (namely, Susan).

In addition, reading books and cherishing friendships also enable Bernard to counter death. First, Bernard is able to recognize book characters in real life and has a real thirst for worldly knowledge; he gets so excited learning new things through books and through the application of book knowledge in reality. He also saves books from death by learning to talk about his reflections on books with one of his friends and to share his true insight gained from reading with that friend. The shared reflections and insight allow the Shakespeare (developed after reading books lonelily) within each of them to be better understood. Only by updating one’s understanding of things can one liberate them from the shadow of death that looms over all of those things.

Second, while Bernard is recalling the second meeting of the six friends after Percival’s death, he recalls the shadow of death and the roar of time. In order to fight against this world where their future death becomes their current darkness and time roars, Bernard knocks the table loudly to refuse Death’s knock at the door and to awaken himself and his friends to life; Bernard also uses his phrases to immediately assess the situation and know where they are; then, he uses phrases to bring all six of them outside into nature to refresh their minds. They truly stroll together down the shaded avenue. In front of a tree that has witnessed past death, suddenly, they all awaken to life and become their true, radiant selves. Bernard’s words again inspire and guide himself and the other five to re-approach their inner God, which helps them become friends and brings them together while still allowing their individual personalities to shine. In the end, human togetherness can ward off death.

Moreover, there are moments when Bernard cannot fight against death and when death is the eternal sin. However, Bernard is aware of those moments when he feels that death is coming. It is when Bernard is old, alone, without his books and friends that he becomes inactive. He finds that what is forever sinful is that we are constantly eating dead birds, dead animals, or animal corpses in order to maintain our bodies and our health. This makes Bernard feel disgusted. In the end, it is the waves or streams of his own consciousness that let things all fall apart around him and make him unable to fight against death, but it is also the waves or streams of his own consciousness that allow Bernard to come back to this world and to restart fighting against his worst enemy, death. After successfully defying death, Bernard not only looks years younger but also radiates the very same vitality for which young Percival is known.

In short, during his childhood Bernard perceives Susan’s anguished crying as her expression of her mental death, which saves the other humans from the same kind of crying. This awakens Bernard to the fact that there are enemies within this world: forces that oppose us, or our true Beings. For instance, Louis is the first human that Susan sees in her childhood, but she is unable to be his first girlfriend, as she had hoped. She becomes sorrowful due to her encounter with forces opposed to her; she becomes even more heartbroken when she finds that Louis is as unhappy as she is after Jinny kisses him. Bernard, whose first love is Susan, discovers that as Susan understands that they—herself, Bernard, Louis, and Jinny—are all sinful since they are all trapped in the web of romantic love, Susan begins to love the others—by learning to love her absolutely future self via approaching her inner God—because she has faith that God is also in them: she forgives Jinny and her heart goes out to Louis; she unfolds her own pain and accepts Bernard’s invitation to explore life itself via flowery phrases and brave imagination. Bernard discovers what Susan does. He loves Susan while Susan loves the others. Later on, reading allows Bernard to love himself, while sharing his thoughts on books allows him to love the others. Bernard in the end discovers that not knowing how to use book knowledge to solve worldly problems is a waste of time and of his potential—and thus, a sin—while deepening his understanding of things both in books and in the real world is to find salvation through knowledge—that is, salvation from ignorance and prejudice. Then, the six friends of Bernard are guided by his phrases to their inner God during their second meeting. They offer up their daily sufferings in order to get close to God, who lets their differences shine together with their similarities, which are underlain by the same sinfulness of death. Last, in his old age, Bernard himself seizes the inner God, Percival, in order to force death, the worst evil, to surrender. Overall, the ninth section of The Waves is immortal because it records an individual’s (here, Bernard’s) solitary struggle with death in his later years. It also teaches the reader that one should do justice to one’s later years by maintaining the courage to save others from their sins; however, to do so, one must first conquer one’s own fear of death while defeating death itself.

7. Conclusion

In conclusion, there are nine stages of human development within Woolf’s The Waves. Each corresponds to a moment of justice. Every moment of justice is a moment of immortality, because immortality is about the whole good rather than any of the evil. This paper selects the first, fourth, sixth, and ninth moments of justice/immortality as representative of the nine major moments of human development portrayed in The Waves. Whereas the eternal is what one should love via craving, the historical is what one should love via faith. The historical deals with life—the mortal—while the eternal deals with the immortal. According to Woolf, childhood is immortal when the five characters break free from the shackles of formal education and cultivate their talents for a more fulfilling life; and, when women can have their own special talents rather than merely the so-termed emotional intelligence (in The Waves, none of Susan, Jinny, or Rhoda is good at emotional intelligence), while childhood is historical when Rhoda sacrifices her little spirit to preserve the memory of her time in formal education; Rhoda uses her failure to use her talent correctly to justify the influence of formal education on herself, while Woolf blames Rhoda’s failure to use her talent correctly on the influence of formal education; Woolf points out that women, or humans, should not rely on formal institutions to teach them about their happiness; they should not be afraid to try out their own talents; they should experiment freely with those talents, instead. Youth is immortal when the three characters—Bernard, Rhoda, and Neville (who are inferior to Percival)—put the common good above their own, while Youth is historical when the other three characters—Louis, Susan, and Jinny (who are superior to Percival)—transcend human differences for love, despite its danger. Middle age is immortal when Percival is the central axis of Neville’s life; when Neville’s memories of his love for heroic Percival reactivate Neville’s passion to search for a new beloved, a new life; when recalling what Percival once was helps one remember what one seeks; and, when in talking to you, Neville is really talking to his own spiritual self, while middle age is historical when the lives of Louis, Susan, and Jinny—a merchant, a mother, and a social butterfly—are preserved by the memories and embodiment of Percival. Percival helps Louis, Susan, and Jinny find new hope in their lives. Percival is also the wellspring of their existence and the messiah who achieved salvation for them through death. Later years are immortal when old Bernard is like young Percival defending life to the death, while later years are historical when Bernard loses a contest against death and becomes forever sinful while facing humans’ habit of eating animal corpses.

When love is a kind of craving, to love rightly contains two parts: whereas aiming at the everlasting good (the first part) is equal to redeeming all from evil, referring back to the eternal Being, the highest good, the absolute self, or the absolute world (this second part), is equal to grasping the memorized state of the world-to-come wherein all are atoned for and freed from evil. When love is a kind of faith, to love rightly is underpinned by sinfulness, by having done or experienced something evil, but loving means seeing God’s salvation or human justice inside other people rather than seeing the sinful in them. These are Arendt’s understandings of love explained together with Benjamin’s understanding of human justice. All in all, these understandings of love underlie Benjamin’s understanding of justice.

As a result of all these factors, Freud’s claims regarding the relationship between women and justice are incorrect explicitly because, first, Woolf as a female author is good at doing justice to all stages of human development; second, Arendt as a female political philosopher specifies Benjamin’s claim on justice via her conception of love whereas Woolf specifies Arendt’s guidance on how to love rightly via her fiction The Waves; and, third, Woolf’s female characters Susan and Jinny both give full justice to their individual talents and eternal friend, the hero-like Percival, whereas the other female character Rhoda has a particular talent for rendering all kinds of human love (both greed and charity, both craving and faith) with justice and insight. Rhoda experiences both charity via flow and greed via sinking when she is a child. When she turns twenty-five, she also successfully connects with others through love that is an act of faith, all while desiring the inner God—that is to say, her inner peace. In The Waves, Rhoda thinks that love is not solely about sacrificing the spiritual self but also about respecting and worshipping the spiritual self. To counter Freud and the common sayings: it is not that being good at love prevents a woman (or a male) from being good at justice; it is being good at love that makes a woman (or a male) good at justice because to love rightly means to do justice to what one loves.

In the end, Woolf expertly establishes the connection between fiction and life. Every immortal and historical moment of human development in her fiction attaches to life. First, Woolf views formal education as the evil while personal talents are tools for our salvation. Second, she claims that regardless of who is superior, in life one should learn to love oneself by loving the inner God’s divine authority that assists one in understanding oneself and one’s own talents. Third, she thinks that her dead brother, Thoby Stephen, is the prototype of the hero of the novel, Percival. During her writing of The Waves, Woolf did not consider the work to be a novel, but rather an elegy ([9]). This elegy incorporates poetic and biographical elements, rooted in personal emotion and imbued with a tone of mourning (in memory of her brother, Thoby) while also being interwoven with impersonal observation and inquiry. Woolf is a bi sexual being in the fiction; both Bernard and Rhoda are like herself. Louis is like her husband, Leonard Woolf. Neville is like one of her male friends in the Bloomsbury Group. Jinny is like one of her female friends. Susan is about the women around Woolf including her sister who is a part of the Bloomsbury Group and her mother. Ultimately, whereas Woolf’s six characters treat Percival as an inner God, the prototypes of the six treat Thoby as an inner God. Loving Thoby is just like loving Percival. Specifically, Woolf loves herself and her friends through commemorating Thoby’s accomplishment of assembling them all for the magnificent gathering at the Bloomsbury Group whereas both of her characters, Bernard and Rhoda, celebrate Percival’s cohesion that binds everyone together. Fourth, Woolf believes that art—such as the stories Bernard creates using his flowery rhetoric—could transcend death, allowing part of an individual’s memory and consciousness to endure within the fiction while death is part of our experience, even the climactic experience of life. The death of others—such as the death of Percival—can become a catalyst for one’s contemplation of the meaning of life while the death of one’s own self urges one to cherish life. In brief, no matter the stage of life—be it childhood, youth, middle age, or later years—one should hold dear the timeless and continue on one’s destined journey. “Human development” refers to one’s progressive growth—that is, accomplishing what is essential at each phase and offering the love that is proper to it. Virginia Woolf’s The Waves eventually calls upon its readers to pursue goodness and to eradicate profound evil. It is a call to fully inhabit each distinct stage/moment of human existence.

NOTES

¹[18].

²[8].

³Evils are not violence; violence presents challenges, yet evils destroy the world ([2]).

⁴Here, love should not refer to emotional intelligence but, according to Arendt, to a kind of craving and a kind of faith.

⁵According to cliché, love means emotional intelligence.

⁶But the reader knows that.

⁷“The sign of caritas on earth is fearlessness, whereas the curse of cupiditas is fear” ([1]).

⁸Rhoda can be healed by what she is good at.

⁹Expectations are inside the self.

¹⁰What determines ourselves is not our past experience but the meaning and our consciousness of our experience.

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