One, Two, One, Two

Virginia Woolf attempted to enact closure through writing about the sea. For Woolf, sea-writing is inexorably associated with nineteenth-century power structures: the sea is a masculinized emblem of military and economic might, and (relatedly) a conduit of empire. However, this concluding chapter measures two forms of debt to the nineteenth century’s seas against each other in two key novels by Woolf. While The Voyage Out shows Woolf discarding sea styles and stories as chauvinist and imperialist, the sea later enables the productive formal instability upon which The Waves launches its critique of imperial patriarchy. A short coda to the chapter summarizes central arguments and ideas in the book, in particular the relevance of its argument to studies not just of sea-writing but also of literary language more broadly.