Meals and mourning in Woolf's The Waves.(Essays)(Virginia Woolf )(Critical essay)

In a first draft of The Waves, Virginia Woolf has the character Susan think:

 
  There was pheasant for luncheon? And she felt her teeth meet in the 
  rather solid wing of a pheasant; & her tongue roll its fibres; & then 
  the delicious hotness & scent of pheasant, & the grey dry bread 
  crumbs; & the heaping up of soft bread-sauce, & the pungent, curious 
  taste of Brussels sprouts--& the cold water--that would be very 
  delicious--Her being would subside into that. (Woolf 1976, 190) 

This passage reveals a sensuality surrounding the experience of food; the synaesthetic anticipation of enjoying the pheasant signifies, for Susan, a pure moment of being. Even more so, she anticipates a moment where her own being would disappear into the experience of tasting and eating. What is perhaps most interesting in this passage, and in Woolf's writing about food in general, is that she uses a profoundly physical act, an act where the boundaries of the body are clearly delineated in the taking in and passing out of food, and in the heightened awareness of the senses and the way the physical world acts upon the individual, to explore the nature of being. Being is thus embodied, for Woolf's characters; they work through the mental and emotional processes to come to such a sense of being, but their being is so often always bodily. The taking of food, like other physical acts and sense experiences, functions as a site for Woolf's moments of being: instances of awareness of one's own body and one's own self, what Woolf calls in another context "a knot of consciousness," "composed of visual and sense impressions" (1948a, 3-4).

While the above passage from the holograph draft of The Waves was excised in the final revision, the relationships among being, the self, and food seems to remain a concern for Woolf in the novel. If we look at many pieces of Woolf's oeuvre--and, as many have, at her life punctured by moments of illness and trauma in which food is central--we see that food and being are intimately connected. (1) In some ways, this renders food and meals ideal vehicles for Woolf to consider being and its end, death, and the ritual encounters with death that are themselves heightened moments of consciousness. The six characters in The Waves--Bernard, Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny, Rhoda--are confronted with the inevitability of mortality and the difficulties of mourning. They seek to come to terms with grief through ritual moments which bring them together. Throughout the novel, the characters come together, touch briefly, think of one another, slip away. As they join for meals, however, they are made solid even as the slipping away of the self in death is made visible; a connection is forged and reaffirmed in the face of impending death. Meals provide the ritual moments, the ritual spaces, for these instances of awareness and community. The taking of food signifies the potentiality of communion and consolation, even as it reminds each individual of the always-present possibility of her own ultimate dissolution, her own end of being. In this essay, I will explore the ways in which Woolf uses meals in The Waves as moments in the mourning process. The novel serves as an elegy: characters journey into mourning, through communion, towards consolation. Part of that journey is the performance of ritual moments of bereavement; thus the novel intervenes in the elegiac tradition while creating ritual spaces wherein such a journey may take place. As the characters grieve the loss of their beloved school friend, Percival, they suffer private mourning, separate from each other; yet in the ritual space of the meal, they are able to come together and mourn collectively, communally. Here, I propose to consider how meals act as a sort of series of crests to the waves, moments of heightened sacred sensitivity, and moments of heightened awareness of mortality and the potential to be found in mourning. (2)

Meals are significant for the mechanisms by which they bring people together and through which, in their everydayness, they destabilize everyday life; at the same time, for Woolf, they can be sites of anxiety over the position and reality of the self. Harriet Blodgett has given a comprehensive account of critical and biographical claims about Woolf's attitudes towards food. Blodgett argues that Woolf's use of food forwards her modernist narrative project and aesthetic values: "The concretizing that came to preponderate over discoursing because of her growing phenomenological allegiance to the perceiving consciousness--and that is her distinctive talent--is reflected (among other images) in increased food imagery" (1997, 48). However, in Woolf's life and writing, she seems also to be particularly conscious of the presence of death in everyday life, in secular and social rituals, and the ways those rituals might open the way and give significance to an encounter with mortality. For instance, the luncheon described in A Room of One's Own is haunted by ghosts of the Great War. (3) The food and drink--pheasant, pudding, red and golden wine--the animated, shared conversation, all serve as catalysts to recall the speaker of the essay to a moment of loss. The speaker thinks, "Nothing was changed; nothing was different save only--here I listened with all my ears not entirely to what was being said, but to the murmur or current behind it. Yes, that was it--the change was there. Before the war at a luncheon party like this people would have said precisely the same things but they would have sounded different" (Woolf 1957, 12). What renders the moment different is the reminder of the mass mortality of the war, the unburiable, unmournable dead. In that instance of recognition, the gathering is transformed into a funeral space as the dead are remembered. The speaker, in her awareness of the "change," the "difference," realizes that the dead are always present.

One sees, perhaps, a similar moment in To the Lighthouse, but from a different perspective, one of prolepsis. It has been well-remarked that the dinner party at the end of the first part of the novel, "The Window," is a moment of communion. In a moment of shared food--and shared perception--the characters come together. As Mrs. Ramsay considers the possibility that the dinner is a failure, she thinks, "There was a smell of burning. Could they have let the Boeuf en Daube overboil? ... Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her" (Woolf 1955, 83). This image of merging and flowing will become crucial in the later novel under study here as Woolf uses the symbolism of the waves to show not how people remain apart, but how they come together. Here, though, it rests entirely on the shoulders of Mrs. Ramsay to create a moment wherein the disparate subjects around the table can merge. The moment occurs, as many have noted, when the Boeuf en Daube is brought to the table:

 
  Now all the candles were lit up, and the faces on both sides of the 
  table were brought nearer by the candlelight, and composed, as they 
  had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table.... Some 
  change went through them all, as if this had really happened, and they 
  were conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on an island. 
  (Woolf 1955, 97) 

Again one sees a language of transformation, of change making a moment different. The moment is performed through the body, which is why the taking of food is so crucial to Woolf: the body can enact such transformation beyond language. The moment around the table continues as the members of the party begin eating:

 
  An exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice rose from the great 
  brown dish as Marthe, with a little flourish, took the cover off.... 
  And she [Mrs. Ramsay] peered into the dish, with its shiny walls and 
  its confusion of savoury brown and yellow meats…