‘There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star, “Consume me”’: Post-human extinction in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

Abstract

Human beings are now in a period of the Earth’s history during which their extinction seems ever more probable due to extreme climate change, global pandemics, international conflicts, and lack of long-term intergovernmental or transnational cooperation to tackle these threats to life. Concern for the future of humanity is not, however, a uniquely contemporary phenomenon. Several of Virginia Woolf’s late novels suggest an awareness of the potential for human extinction. Where this concern can be found in The Waves (1931), the text does not express nihilism or panic at the prospect. Instead, the idea of a world without humans is seized as the provocation to continue an experiment which runs throughout Woolf’s writing: to reimagine the relationship between the human and the non-human. By exploring this writerly concern in The Waves, this essay argues that Woolf also redefines human death by reconceptualizing the natural world in ways which undo anthropocentric understandings of the potential extinction of the human species. By re-reading Woolf’s seventh novel through ecocritical practices and alongside ideas from contemporary post-humanist critical theory, the analyses proposed herein suggest that The Waves encourages a reassessment of our position in and response to a human-made environmental crisis which threatens the future of existence, human and non-human, in the twenty-first century.