The Winged Creatures of The Waves and Virginia Woolf's Figurations of "The One"

When she originally conceived The Waves, Virginia Woolf declared that "It is to be a love story: she is finally to let the last great moth in." The unlikely association of this novel with a "love story" is illuminated only when the text's nonhuman figuration is brought into play. Woolf's consideration of the real-life behaviors of winged creatures, namely moths and birds, facilitates the novel's revision of romantic convention. This revision manifests in the bird sections of the novel's famous interludes, where the depiction of Song Thrush feeding behavior brushes against echoes of nineteenth-century romance poetry. The as-yet unexplored link between the interludes and Woolf's discussion of Christina Rossetti and Alfred Tennyson in A Room of One's Own reveals Woolf's invention of a new approach to the romantic ideal of "the one."