"Whose books once influenced mine": the relationship between E.M. Forster's 'Howards End' and Virginia Woolf's 'The Waves.'

While Woolf's overall narrative conventions show her independence of Forster's genial prescriptions, Bernard's narrative concerns do echo those of Forster. In Aspects, for instance, Forster decried the difficulty of using complex plots without correspondingly intelligent audiences, pointing out that the average reader is interested only in a story that progresses along the lines of a pedestrian, linear chronology, which Forster characterizes with the image of "and then - and then." In the final section of The Waves, Bernard more than once uses a similar figure to describe the passage of life, the equivalent of Forster's "story." "Nevertheless," Bernard says, "life is pleasant, life is tolerable. Tuesday follows Monday; then comes Wednesday" (257). "And then - and then," we clearly hear in echo, just as we clearly hear Bernard trying out, though self-consciously, the prophetic voice that Forster attributes to Dostoyevsky (Aspects 126).

Not only do these novels have themes that converge, they also share other elements: in particular, their language and tropes show how the friends functioned as almost kindred writing spirits. Houses, to which both Woolf and Forster attach extraordinary significance, seem to represent for each writer a permanence, reflected in Helen Schlegel's remark to her sister that "The house has a surer life than we" (237). The house by the sea that dominates the interludes of The Waves recalls the St. Ives holiday home of Virginia's childhood as well as the summer house in To the Lighthouse, which serves as the quasiprotagonist of the "Time Passes" section of that novel. And the empty Howards End, bereft of its tenant, remains the monument if not the mausoleum of Ruth Wilcox. Indeed, when Margaret visits it for the first time, the eerie Miss Avery believes that she is the original Mrs. Wilcox come back from the dead to return her maternal spirit to the empty house. But it is in The Waves that Woolf raises the house to its fullest archetypal dimensions.

In view of Woolf's overwhelming response to the early death of her mother, many critics have tried to locate the "absent mother" in the substrata of Woolf's novels. Certainly the empty house in The Waves broods over the novel in the guise of a departed mother-spirit much as does the house bereft of Mrs. Ramsay in "Time Passes." We should also remember that both Mrs. Ramsay and Mrs. Wilcox die parenthetical, offstage deaths, and the disembodied house of To the Lighthouse recalls the fate of Howards End, which remains unoccupied after Mrs. Wilcox's death until another mother (Helen) and another matriarch (Margaret) arrive to regenerate it.(9)

Yet Woolf allows the house in The Waves to remain disembodied; she does not intend to create the exemplary house of consciousness. Rather, the house by the sea acts more like a human intervention against a transitory nature that also partakes of the eternal, a kind of Ding an sich. The only female character in the novel who distinctly occupies a house is Susan, and the implications of Susan's matriarchy are primarily negative. Her role as house mother destines her to a primitive, almost visceral subsistence, with her emotions suffocated and her personality weighed down by quotidian obligations. Having metonymically associated "house" with "mother" in To the Lighthouse, in The Waves Woolf neutralizes those charged associations by leaving the mother out of the archetypal house entirely. It is an easier move for Forster to repeople Howards End with the Schlegel angels because he has sentimentalized his own childhood in the English countryside; Woolf, on the other hand, abandons her childhood residence through apostasy, after building a fictional crypt to her parents' consciousness. In The Waves Woolf paints the still life of her house in the changing diurnal light as a series of studies not unlike those executed by Monet at Etretat and Rouen.(10)