Rhoda

Character Analysis

Of the six character narrations, Rhoda's is decidedly the most abstract… and just like you know things are going to be uber-experimental when we say "The Waves is Woolf's most experimental novel," you know Rhoda is going to be uber-abstract when we say "Rhoda is The Waves' most abstract character." It's like saying "a really cute kitten" or "a really terrifying banana spider."

From early on, it is clear that she likes to live almost entirely in her own imagination, processing the outside world in terms of metaphors and similes. Her narration of events is seriously metaphorical.

Rhoda's childhood fondness for placing flower petals in a basin of water and rocking them back and forth is pretty symbolic of her metaphor habit… you could say it's a metaphor for her metaphor addiction.

Her rich imagination turns the basin's water into the sea and the floating petals into ships:

All my ships are white. […] I do not want red petals of hollyhocks or geranium. I want white petals that float when I tip the basin up. I have a fleet now swimming from shore to shore. I will drop a twig in as a raft for a drowning sailor. I will drop a stone in and see bubbles rise from the depths of the sea. (1b.53)

Rhoda seems to filter her entire world through analogies of this kind. It's not totally surprising that Rhoda is extremely timid and reluctant to interact with others: she doesn't so much like reality. Even with her close friends, she finds interaction difficult. For example, when the six narrators and Percival meet up for dinner as adults, she enters the restaurant in stealth mode to delay the drama/trauma of being recognized, noticed, and forced to engage:

You did not see me come. I circled round the chairs to avoid the horror of the spring. I am afraid of you all. I am afraid of the shock of sensation that leaps upon me, because I cannot deal with it as you do—I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me they are all violent, all separate; and if I fall under the shock of the leap of the moment you will be on me, tearing me to pieces. (4b.44)

However, despite being timid as a mouse (or perhaps because of it), Rhoda likes to imagine herself as powerful. She dreams of being an empress, or a fleet commander, when she's alone. We bet Rhoda would have been really into first-person shooters if she had been born a century later.

But it's not just sad navel-gazing and pretending petals are ships for Rhoda. She gets her fair share of sexytimes. Late in the novel, she begins an affair with Louis, who, like her, thinks of himself as an outsider. It's not clear why exactly Rhoda feels so alienated from others; nonetheless, early in the book, she predicts that she is to be "derided" all her life (3b.46).

According to Bernard, Rhoda kills herself at some point in adulthood, though he doesn't say when or how. We only learn of her suicide in the final chapter.