Woolf’s Floating Monkeys and Whirling Women

This chapter considers two of Virginia Woolf’s most experimental texts, her Nurse Lugton story for children and her novel The Waves. The first catalogues an awareness of the way that a writer’s aesthetic powers are profoundly linked to animality. Moreover, the curtain in Woolf’s story should be read as creative materiality itself, its folds participating in the self-varying dynamism of the virtual and actual. In the wake of such recognitions, I outline an affirmative biopoetics at the heart of Woolf’s aesthetic project. In discussing The Waves, I argue that Jinny, contrary to most scholarly views, may be the most creative character in the text, if we understand creativity in a posthumanist sense. Jinny, who often is dismissed as shallow or overly sexualized in Woolf criticism, is better theorized as a dancer figure who harnesses vibrational forces and engages in the becoming-artistic of life itself.