“‘The sea is to be heard all through it’: Woolf’s Dichotomous Voices of Water”

The possibilities Woolf draws from water in literary terms are limitless and fluctuate between the real and the symbolic, generating multiple waterscapes. This paper examines the dichotomous nature of water’s pervasive presence in Woolf’s poetics and writings, while exploring its relation to various forms of boundary crossing. To trace Woolf’s engagement with the semantics of water, I will primarily compare instances of aquatic imaginaries threaded through three short stories and four novels. Although her thalassic aesthetics takes a darker turn, the paper foregrounds a final twist reaffirming the creative potential of liquidity, anticipating modern forms of aesthetic and ontological fluidity.