Chapter 6 - Virginia Woolf’s Passive Revolution

Summary

This chapter reads the formulation of modernism itself as a passive revolution in Virginia Woolf’s experimental prose. The passive revolution she conceives in The Waves, like Gramsci’s rendering of the “revolution without revolution," plays on the paradox of conservative content and radical form. Woolf’s novel illuminates the failures of high modernism to represent the world and performs a kind of self-critique, as well as a critique of the limitations of Western modernism created by a bourgeois class with a pretense for world-making in concert with the British establishment. The Waves advances the idea of global modernism by seeing the world as an invention of language wielded by an ambitious few. Colonial India stands at the center as that misty site of desire and loss against which the communal identity of its six characters is formed. Empire is imagined here as a vacuum, with absence at its center, and formalized in Woolf’s novel as a passive revolution tied to the advancing day.