Illumine the Mind within: Eva Figes’ Waking and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves
Illumine the Mind within: Eva Figes’ Waking and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

Summary/Abstract: Though most contemporary British women writers follow Woolf’s recommendation “to look within”, Figes seems to stand closest to the great modernist. In her novel Waking she re-creates Woolf’s The Waves in postmodern terms. The paper dwells on some similarities between the two works concerning structure, the idea of universality, the blending of the conscious and unconscious, the significance of “moments of being”, the effects of light, rhythm, verbal poetry, etc. However, unlike Woolf, Figes depicts the life of the body explicitly and presents the subject as fluid and centreless rather than as stable. Thus Figes extends modernism.

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