Percival in The Waves

Ellie Mitchell, Lecture on Percival in The Waves, 3 April 2021

Blog by Lisa Hutchins

The Waves (1931) is often characterised as Virginia Woolf's most difficult novel, one that cannot be summarised, allows for no definitive reading, and which is both allusive and elusive. It is this quality that provides the scope for Literature Cambridge's multi-faceted examination, through a range of five talks both past and yet to come.

Pages on which Percival appears in The Waves.

In one of the latest lectures, Ellie Mitchell approached the text via the influence of early twentieth-century anthropology on Woolf's work, and via the character of Percival. The result was a lecture of great interest, in which Ellie made explicit several points that I had not previously noticed, or only half-noticed. I look forward to re-reading the text with her insights in mind.

Percival as a character is unusual: he never speaks; we have no access to his inner life, thoughts or feelings; nevertheless his death, revealed at the halfway point, is the defining event of the text. Ellie characterised him as the gravitational centre around which the other characters revolve and as a motif they all share. She told us he appears on average every two pages (after the first 20 pages) and the longest gap without a mention is 15 pages.

Percival is assumed to be a fictionalised portrait of Woolf's brother Thoby Stephen, who died of typhoid aged 24 after travelling to Greece. Woolf's diary records how she considered dedicating the novel to him but dismissed the idea. This ambivalence may have been reluctance to attach a personal element to such a strikingly impersonal text, but Ellie said it pervades most of Woolf's writing about Thoby. Woolf seems to have found him charismatic, ruthless and overwhelming, finding pride and happiness in his achievements (and enjoying arguing with him on intellectual topics) but also mistrusting and resenting him, as a member of the establishment that she went on to attack in Three Guineas (1938). Ellie highlighted his similarities to Percival with his imposing physicality and natural leadership ability. And she also drew attention to his differences, including his passion for Shakespeare (Percival is portrayed as too stupid to read). The fictional Percival can be idle, brutal, surly and lazy, not the archetypal young man that Thoby embodied and Bloomsbury admired.

Portrait of Jane Ellen Harrison

Ellie suggested that Percival functions as an abstraction of several sources, not just as a memorialisation. He is an Arthurian knight, the original hero of the Grail quest, appearing in a late 12th-century work by Chretien de Troyes, in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur and in Wagner’s opera Parsifal. Percival's story is one of spiritual sacrifice and renewal. Ellie turned next to a group of classical scholars who influenced Woolf, known as the Cambridge Ritualists. In particular Jane Ellen Harrison, a suffragist, anthropologist and lecturer at Newnham College, corresponded with Woolf for 10 years and the two women read and commented on each other's work. Harrison argued for the existence of a pre-Classical culture that was communal and matrifocal rather than individualistic and patriarchal. She thought all art derived from the rituals of this culture and was social in origin and function.

Ellie pointed to passages in Woolf's essays that chime with Harrison's world-view, particularly in The Narrow Bridge of Art (1927). The essay examines topics which touch on Harrison's thinking and seems to closely prefigure The Waves:

It will be written in prose, but prose which has many of the characteristics of poetry. It will have something of the exaltation of poetry, but much of the ordinariness of prose. It will be dramatic, and yet not a play. It will be read, not acted.

(The Narrow Bridge of Art, Collected Essays vol. 2)

Ellie also highlighted the extraordinary, incongruous language used during the first restaurant meal, as Percival enters:

('Look, Rhoda,' said Louis, 'they have become nocturnal, rapt. Their eyes are like moths' wings moving so quickly that they do not seem to move at all.'

'Horns and trumpets,' said Rhoda, 'ring out. Leaves unfold; the stags blare in the thicket. There is a dancing and a drumming, like the dancing and the drumming of naked men with assegais.'

'Like the dance of savages,' said Louis, 'round the camp-fire. They are savage; they are ruthless. They dance in a circle, flapping bladders. The flames leap over their painted faces, over the leopard skins and the bleeding limbs which they have torn from the living body.' 

'The flames of the festival rise high,' said Rhoda. 'The great procession passes, flinging green boughs and flowering branches. Their horns spill blue smoke; their skins are dappled red and yellow in the torchlight. They throw violets. They deck the beloved with garlands and with laurel leaves, there on the ring of turf where the steep-backed hills come down. The procession passes. And while it passes, Louis, we are aware of downfalling, we forebode decay. The shadow slants. We who are conspirators, withdrawn together to lean over some cold urn, note how the purple flame flows downwards.'

 'Death is woven in with the violets,' said Louis. 'Death and again death.')

Ellie proposed Percival as a foil to the innovative formal and narrative structures that the other characters exemplify. He represents the traditional values of patriarchy, patriotism and imperialism with no glimpse of his inner life. By contrast, we have constant access to the interiority of the other six, so intertwined as to be arguably six parts of the same entity with speech patterns redolent of classical Greek drama. Not one symbolises a single concept, as Percival does.

Ellie described the text as advancing and retreating like the tide, catching readers unexpectedly, exhilarating and exhausting them. She acknowledged that its elusive quality has given rise to a huge amount of critical material, and permits readers to approach from different angles and draw different conclusions. For her own conclusion, she suggested the cycles of day and year in the waves, combined with the death of Percival the god-figure, open the possibility that human effort and endeavour can change what seem to be immutably fixed rituals.

Further References

• Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur (1485)
• Richard Wagner, Parsifal (1882). Metropolitan Opera’s 2018 production: https://www.metopera.org/season/on-demand/opera/?upc=810004200043 
• Jane Ellen Harrison, Epilegomena (1921)
• Martha C. Carpentier, Ritual, Myth, and the Modernist Text: The Influence of Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot and Woolf (1998)
• Derek Hughes, Culture and Sacrifice: Ritual Death in Literature and Opera (2007)
• Jean Mills, Virginia Woolf, Jane Ellen Harrison, and the Spirit of Modernist Classicism (2014)
• Robert Segal, The Myth and Ritual Theory: An Anthology (1998)
• Barry Stephenson, Ritual: A Very Short Introduction (2015)

Ellie Mitchell has two degrees from Cambridge and was for two years Production Manager of the ADC Theatre. She is currently working on Woolf and Theatre at the University of St Andrews.

Upcoming sessions include Alison Hennegan on Flush: A Biography on Saturday April 10, Karina Jakubowicz on Gardens in The Waves on Sunday April 11, and Gillian Beer on Reading The Waves over a Lifetime on Saturday April 24. Full details and booking information here.

Bookings are now open for sessions in our Second Woolf Season, which begins in October 2021.