Exposure and Development:
Re-Imagining Narrative and Nation in the Interludes of The Waves
The Waves, widely regarded as one of Virginia Woolf's most experimental texts, focuses as much on national identity as on textual experimentation. Specifically, the nine interludes of The Waves are deeply concerned with the politics of empire which "resonate through the interludes.... their images replay ruling-class expectations of mastery and fears of turbaned, armed warriors assaulting their shores" (31). In their essential function, the interludes of The Waves show the movement of the sun from rising in the east to setting in the west, fixing and moving the reader's gaze from the east, a site of expansion and empire-making, to the west, the site of the British homeland. Here I refute Jane Marcus' seminal argument that The Waves "emphatically dramatizes the very historical moment in which the sun does set" (155). In fact, the light of empire is not extinguished by any means. Instead, the interludes reveal how, like their ongoing solar and oceanic cycles, the imperial impulse continues - and continues in the homeland....
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