UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations 1-1-2002 The nightingale sings anew: The appropriation of antiquity in Virginia Woolf's "The Waves" Neta Luree Hoff University of Nevada, Las Vegas Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/rtds Repository Citation Hoff, Neta Luree, "The nightingale sings anew: The appropriation of antiquity in Virginia Woolf's "The Waves"" (2002). UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations. 1427. http://dx.doi.org/10.25669/wgu6-ygq5 This Thesis is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by Digital Scholarship@UNLV with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Thesis in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. This Thesis has been accepted for inclusion in UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Scholarship@UNLV. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE NIGHTINGALE SINGS ANEW: THE APPROPRIATION OF ANTIQUITY IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S THE WAVES by Neta Luree Hoff Bachelor o f Arts University of Nevada, Las Vegas 2000 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment o f the requirements for the Master of Arts Degree Department of English College of Liberal Arts Graduate College University of Nevada, Las Vegas December 2002 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 1413480 UMI UMI Microform 1413480 Copyright 2003 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Copyright by Neta Luree Hoff 2003 All Rights Reserved Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Thesis Approval The Graduate College University of Nevada, Las Vegas 14 November 20®^ The Thesis prepared by Neta Luree Hoff Entitled The Nightingale Sings Anew; The Appropriation of Antiquity In Virginia Woolf's The Waves___________________________________ is approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of ___________________ Master of Arts — English____________ X\k-C- V]oXaW Exariiination Committee CWi Dean of the Graduate College Examination CommitteeA Membÿrf Examination CommitineW Member Gradukte'College Faculty Representative PR/1017-53/1-00 11 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT The Nightingale Sings Anew: The Appropriation of Antiquity in Virginia W oolfs The Waves by Neta Luree Hoff Dr. Beth Rosenberg, Examination Committee Chair Associate Professor of English University of Nevada, Las Vegas This thesis considers the impact of classical antiquity on the literary aesthetic of Virginia Woolf by focusing on the educational and theoretical assumptions that allowed Woolf to create her most experimental work. The Waves. Inspired by her brother Thoby Stephen and her tutor Janet Case, Woolf enjoyed a very strong and fertile relationship with the writers of antiquity, and she continued to return to them throughout her life for both conceptual and structural models. In her essays on the Greeks in particular, Woolf praises the ancients for achieving those things that she so longs to see accomplished in the works of the Modems, especially their tme representation of character and their exploration of the psychological. Her appropriation of Greek drama, Greek and Latin philosophy, and Latin neoteric poetry in The Waves, however, suggests more than mere appreciation. Woolf also clearly valued them as instruments for realizing her own aesthetic vision. Ill Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT......................................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.................................................................................................................. v INTRODUCTION...............................................................................................................................vi CHAPTER I AMBIVALENCE AND ALLUSION; VIRGINIA WOOLF’S CONVERSATIONS ON CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY.....................................1 CHAPTER II MODERNISM, CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY, AND THE AESTHETIC OF VIRGINIA WOOLF........................................................................................18 CHAPTER III BEYOND ALLUSION: THE APPROPRIATION OF CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY IN THE WAVES..........................................................................34 CONCLUSION....................................................................................................................................58 WORKS CITED................................................................................................................................. 60 VITA......................................................................................................................................................64 IV Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to take this opportunity to acknowledge the patience and encouragement of my committee; I have very much appreciated their faith in me, especially that of Dr. Andrew Bell, who introduced me to the ancients and tutored me in both Latin and (briefly) Greek, and Dr. Philip Rusche, who encouraged me to trust my own scholarly instincts. In addition, to myadvisor. Dr. Beth Rosenberg, I owe particular thanks. Without the hours she devoted to both me and this project, I simply cannot imagine how I could have accomplished what I did. It was she furthermore who in large part inspired my work on Virginia Woolf and the classics in the first place. Dr. Evelyn Gajowski and Dr. Mike Stitt deserve my gratitude as well. I am grateful to the former for all the time and effort she invested in trying to make me a better scholar. She, too, made this project possible. The latter I thank for treating me as both a colleague and a friend. I have similarly benefited a great deal from the patient friendliness and advice of Dr. Charles Whitney and Allison Bredlau, the English Department’s Administrative Assistant to the Graduate Program. Thanks also go out to my brother Raymond Young, my good friend Emily Raba, and my children, Vann, Tammra, and Nikoli. Their contribution to this work, although not easily articulated in a few short lines, was nonetheless invaluable. Suffice it to say that they gave me the intellectual space (the room of my own, if you will), the incredible motivation, and—in Vann’s case—even practical suggestions, without which I would have given up long ago. Finally, I dedicate this work to the most intelligent, most self-sacrificing, and most inspiring person I know: my mom, Ruth Alonso. It was no doubt her great love of learning which gave birth to my own; for that, and much more, I thank her with all my heart. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. INTRODUCTION As an admirer of the literature of Greek and Roman antiquity, I began this study as an appreciation of the classical echoes in Virginia W oolfs The Waves. Over the last year or so, however, I have come to recognize Woolf as an author in her own right, whose deep understanding and acceptance of the classics enabled her to experiment with language and form in a way that few authors before the twentieth century had even dreamed of. I now understand that, like many other writers of her generation, Woolf, too, sought to create a new literary aesthetic that would differentiate her works from those of her predecessors and that could answer the visionary needs of the poet or novelist living in the perplexing Modem world. In essays such as “Modem Fiction” and “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” she articulates these needs and suggests what the Modem writer might do to answer them. Essentially, she insists that the Modemists must utterly abandon the tradition of writing handed down to them by the authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of course, despite her insistence on breaking away from the models and methods of the past, Woolf and her peers clearly drew inspiration from an even more traditional source—the literature of the ancients. For Woolf, this acceptance of the ancients came naturally. An education in the classics reaching back into early childhood provided her with an understanding of the basic stmctural and conceptual foundations from which these works had spmng, and the many positive associations this education held for her taught Woolf to embrace rather than to reject them as she had her immediate literary forefathers. In fact, she used them, both through allusion and outright appropriation of content and form, in even the most experimental of her novels not only to help her create the distinctively non-linear narratives that characterize her work but also to establish a point of reference to guide