The Waves

by

Virginia Woolf

Rhoda Character Analysis

Rhoda grows up alongside Bernard, Neville, Louis, Susan, and Jinny. Later in life she befriends Percival. Rhoda experiences life in a very different way from her friends. She experiences sensory stimuli in a particularly vivid way and often describes things through unexpected and difficult to interpret metaphors. She’s not a stellar student and is particularly bad at math. She attends Miss Lambert’s school with Susan and Jinny, where she tries to make a way in life by copying their normative behavior. But, left to herself, she lives in a world of fantasy and imagination. Timid and easily overwhelmed, Rhoda often finds herself rendered incapable of movement by odd things, like the figure of a zero on the blackboard or an otherwise regular puddle. After finishing school abroad, she enters society alongside Jinny, although she never enjoys it or thrives there. She briefly becomes Louis’s lover as an adult but, incapable of feeling time or relationships as strings tying one moment (or person) to another, she ultimately leaves him. Rhoda takes her own life by throwing herself into traffic. Scholars tend to associate Rhoda with Virginia Woolf herself.

Rhoda Quotes in The Waves

The The Waves quotes below are all either spoken by Rhoda or refer to Rhoda. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Identity Theme Icon
).
Chapter 2 Quotes

“I see a ring,” said Bernard, “hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.”

“I see a slab of pale yellow,” said Susan, “spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.”

“I hear a sound,” said Rhoda, “cheep, chirp; cheep, chirp; going up and down.”

“I see a globe,” said Neville “hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill.”

“I see a crimson tassel,” said Jinny, “twisted with gold threads.”

“I hear something stamping,” said Louis, “A great beast’s foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps.”

“Look at the spider’s web on the corner of the balcony,” said Bernard. “It has beads of water on it, drops of white light.”

“The leaves are gathered around the window like pointed ears,” said Susan.

[…]

“Islands of light are swimming on the grass,” said Rhoda. “They have fallen through the trees.”

Related Characters: Bernard (speaker), Neville (speaker), Louis (speaker), Rhoda (speaker), Jinny (speaker), Susan (speaker)
Related Symbols: Birds, Light and Dark, Waves
Page Number: 9
Explanation and Analysis:

“I was running,” said Jinny, “after breakfast. I saw the leaves moving in a hold in the hedge. I thought, ‘That is a bird on its nest.’ I parted them and looked; but there was no bird on a nest. The leaves went on moving. I was frightened. I ran past Susan, past Rhoda, and Neville and Bernard in the tool-house talking. I cried as I ran, faster and faster. What moves the leaves? What moves my heart, my legs? And I dashed in here, seeing you green as a bush, like a branch, very still, Louis, with your eyes fixed. ‘Is he dead?’ I thought, and kissed you, with my heart jumping under my pink frock like the leaves, which go on moving though there is nothing to move them.

Related Characters: Jinny (speaker), Bernard, Neville, Louis, Rhoda, Susan
Page Number: 13
Explanation and Analysis:

The figures mean nothing now. Meaning has gone. The clock ticks. The two hands are convoys marching through a desert. The black bars on the clock face are green oases. The long hand has marched ahead to find water. The other painfully stumbles amid hot stones in the desert. It will die in the desert. The kitchen door slams. Wild dogs bark far away. Look, the loop of the figure is beginning to fill with time; it holds the world in it. I begin to draw a figure and the world is looped in it, and I myself am outside the loop; which I now join—so—and seal up, and make entire. The world is entire and I am outside of it, crying ‘Oh, save me, from being blown forever outside the loop of time!’

Related Characters: Rhoda (speaker)
Page Number: 21-22
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

If I could believe […] that I should grow old in pursuit and change, I should be rid of my fear: nothing persists. One moment does not lead to another. The door opens and the tiger leaps. […] 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 […] I do not know how to run minute to minute and hour to hour, solving them by some natural force until they make the whole and indivisible mass you call life. […] And I have no face. […] I am whirled down caverns, and flap like paper against endless corridors and must press my hand against the wall to draw myself back.

Related Characters: Rhoda (speaker), Percival
Page Number: 130-131
Explanation and Analysis:

But I only come into existence when the plumber, or the horse-dealers, or whoever it may be, says something which sets me alight. Then how lovely the smoke of my phrase is, rising and falling, flaunting and falling, upon red lobsters and yellow fruit, wreathing them into one beauty. But observe how meretricious the phrase is—made up of what evasions and old lies. Thus my character is in part made of the stimulus which other people provide, and is not mine, as yours are. There is some fatal streak, some wandering and irregular vein of silver, weakening it. […] I went with the boasting boys with little caps and badges, driving off in big brakes—there are some here tonight, dining together, correctly dressed before they go off in perfect concord to the music hall; I loved them. For they bring me into existence as certainly as you do.

Related Characters: Bernard (speaker), Neville, Louis, Rhoda, Percival
Page Number: 133
Explanation and Analysis:

“By applying the standards of the West, by using the violent language that is natural to him, the bullock-cart is righted in less than five minutes. The Oriental problem is solved. he rides on; the multitude cluster round him, regarding him as if he were—what indeed he is—a God,” [said Bernard.]

“[…] and look—the outermost parts of the earth […] India for instance, rise into our purview. The world that had been shrivelled, rounds itself; remote provinces are fetched up out of darkness; we see muddy roads, twisted jungle, swarms of men, and the vulture that feeds on some bloated carcass as within our scope, part of our proud and splendid province, since Percival […] advances down a solitary path, has his camp pitched among desolate trees, and sits alone, looking at the enormous mountains.”

Related Characters: Bernard (speaker), Rhoda (speaker), Percival
Page Number: 136-137
Explanation and Analysis:

Yes, between your shoulders, over your heads, to a landscape […] to a hollow here many-backed steep hills come down like birds’ wings folded. There, on the short, firm turf, are bushes, dark leaved, and against their darkness, I see a shape, white, but not of stone, moving, perhaps alive. But it is not you, it is not you, it is not you; not Percival, Susan, Jinny, Neville, or Louis. […] It makes no sign, it does not beckon, it does not see us. Behind it roars the sea. It is beyond our reach. Yet there I venture. There I go to replenish my emptiness, to stretch my nights and fill them fuller and fuller with dreams. And for a second now, even here, I reach my object and say, ‘Wander no more. All else is trial and make-believe. Here is the end.’

Related Characters: Rhoda (speaker), Bernard, Neville, Louis, Jinny, Susan, Percival
Related Symbols: Waves
Page Number: 139
Explanation and Analysis:

But what are stories? Toys I twist, bubbles I blow, one ring passing through another. And sometimes I begin to doubt if there are stories. What is my story? What is Rhoda’s? What is Neville’s? There are facts, as, for example: ‘The handsome young man in the grey suit, whose reserve contrasted so strangely with the loquacity of the others, now brushed the crumbs from his waistcoat and, with a characteristic gesture at once commanding and benign, made a sign to the waiter, who came instantly and returned a moment later with the bill discreetly folded upon a plate.’ That is truth; that is the fact, but beyond it all is darkness and conjecture.

Related Characters: Bernard (speaker), Neville, Rhoda, Percival
Page Number: 144-145
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

Percival, by his death, has made me this gift, let me see the thing. There is a square; there is an oblong. The players take the square and place it upon he oblong. They place it very accurately; they make a perfect dwelling-place. Very little is left outside. The structure is now visible; what is inchoate is here stated; we are not so various or mean; we have made oblongs and stood them upon squares. This is our triumph; this is our consolation.

Related Characters: Rhoda (speaker), Percival
Page Number: 163
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

My life is not a moment’s bright spark like that on the surface of a diamond. I go beneath ground torturously, as if a warder carried a lamp from cell to cell. My destiny has been that I remember and must weave together, must plait into one cable the many threads, the thin, the thick, the broken, the enduring of our long history, of our tumultuous and varied day. There is always more to be understood; a discord to be listened for; a falsity to be reprimanded. Broken and soot-stained are these roofs with their chimney cowls, their loose slates, their slinking cats and attic windows. I pick my way over broken glass, among blistered tiles, and see only vile and famished faces.

Related Characters: Louis (speaker), Neville, Rhoda
Page Number: 202
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

“Yet, Louis,” said Rhoda, “how short a time silence lasts. Already they are beginning to smooth their napkins by the side of their plates. ‘Who comes?’ says Jinny; and Neville sighs, remembering that Percival comes no more. Jinny has taken out her looking-glass. Surveying her face like an artist, she draws powder-puff down her nose, and after one moment of deliberation, has given precisely that red to her lips that the lips need. Susan, who feels scorn and fear at the sight of these preparations, fastens the top button of her coat, and unfastens it. What is she making ready for? For something, but something different.”

“They are saying to themselves,” said Louis, “‘it is time. I am still vigorous,’ they are saying, ‘My face shall be cut against the black of infinite space.’ They do not finish their sentence. ‘It is time,’ they keep saying.”

Related Characters: Louis (speaker), Rhoda (speaker), Neville, Jinny, Susan, Percival
Page Number: 226
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 18 Quotes

Life is pleasant; life is good; after Monday comes Tuesday and Wednesday follows Tuesday.

Yes, but after time with a difference. It may be that something in the look of the room one night, in the arrangement of the chairs, suggests it. […] Then it happens that two figures standing with their backs to the window appear against the branches of a spreading tree. With a shock of emotion one feels, ‘There are figures without features robed in beauty, doomed yet eternal.’

Related Characters: Bernard (speaker), Neville, Rhoda, Susan, Percival
Page Number: 271
Explanation and Analysis:

And now I ask, ‘Who am I?’ I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda, and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know. We sat here together. But now Percival is dead, and Rhoda is dead; we are divided; we are not here. Yet I cannot find any obstacle separating us. There is no division between me and them. As I talked, I felt, ‘I am you.’ This difference we make so much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish, was overcome. […] Here on my brow is the low I got when Percival fell. Here on the nape of my neck is the kiss Jinny gave Louis. My eyes fill with Susan’s tears. I see far away, quivering like a gold thread, the pillar Rhoda saw, and fell the rush of the wind of her flight when she leapt.

Related Characters: Bernard (speaker), Neville, Louis, Rhoda, Jinny, Susan
Page Number: 276
Explanation and Analysis:

Again I see before me the usual street. The canopy of civilisation is burnt out. […] But there is a kindling in the sky whether of lamplight or of dawn. There is a stir of some sort—sparrows on plane trees somewhere chirping. There is a sense of the break of day. I will not call it dawn. What is dawn in the city to an elderly man standing in the street looking up rather dizzily at the sky? Dawn is some sort of whitening in the sky; some sort of renewal. […] The stars draw back and are extinguished. The bars deepen themselves between the waves. The film of mist thickens on the fields. A redness gathers on the roses, even on the pale rose that hangs by the bedroom window. A bird chirps. Cottagers light their early candles. Yes, this the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and rise again.

Related Characters: Bernard (speaker), Rhoda
Related Symbols: Birds, Light and Dark, Waves
Page Number: 269-297
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire The Waves LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Waves PDF

Rhoda Quotes in The Waves

The The Waves quotes below are all either spoken by Rhoda or refer to Rhoda. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Identity Theme Icon
).
Chapter 2 Quotes

“I see a ring,” said Bernard, “hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.”

“I see a slab of pale yellow,” said Susan, “spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.”

“I hear a sound,” said Rhoda, “cheep, chirp; cheep, chirp; going up and down.”

“I see a globe,” said Neville “hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill.”

“I see a crimson tassel,” said Jinny, “twisted with gold threads.”

“I hear something stamping,” said Louis, “A great beast’s foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps.”

“Look at the spider’s web on the corner of the balcony,” said Bernard. “It has beads of water on it, drops of white light.”

“The leaves are gathered around the window like pointed ears,” said Susan.

[…]

“Islands of light are swimming on the grass,” said Rhoda. “They have fallen through the trees.”

Related Characters: Bernard (speaker), Neville (speaker), Louis (speaker), Rhoda (speaker), Jinny (speaker), Susan (speaker)
Related Symbols: Birds, Light and Dark, Waves
Page Number: 9
Explanation and Analysis:

“I was running,” said Jinny, “after breakfast. I saw the leaves moving in a hold in the hedge. I thought, ‘That is a bird on its nest.’ I parted them and looked; but there was no bird on a nest. The leaves went on moving. I was frightened. I ran past Susan, past Rhoda, and Neville and Bernard in the tool-house talking. I cried as I ran, faster and faster. What moves the leaves? What moves my heart, my legs? And I dashed in here, seeing you green as a bush, like a branch, very still, Louis, with your eyes fixed. ‘Is he dead?’ I thought, and kissed you, with my heart jumping under my pink frock like the leaves, which go on moving though there is nothing to move them.

Related Characters: Jinny (speaker), Bernard, Neville, Louis, Rhoda, Susan
Page Number: 13
Explanation and Analysis:

The figures mean nothing now. Meaning has gone. The clock ticks. The two hands are convoys marching through a desert. The black bars on the clock face are green oases. The long hand has marched ahead to find water. The other painfully stumbles amid hot stones in the desert. It will die in the desert. The kitchen door slams. Wild dogs bark far away. Look, the loop of the figure is beginning to fill with time; it holds the world in it. I begin to draw a figure and the world is looped in it, and I myself am outside the loop; which I now join—so—and seal up, and make entire. The world is entire and I am outside of it, crying ‘Oh, save me, from being blown forever outside the loop of time!’

Related Characters: Rhoda (speaker)
Page Number: 21-22
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

If I could believe […] that I should grow old in pursuit and change, I should be rid of my fear: nothing persists. One moment does not lead to another. The door opens and the tiger leaps. […] 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 […] I do not know how to run minute to minute and hour to hour, solving them by some natural force until they make the whole and indivisible mass you call life. […] And I have no face. […] I am whirled down caverns, and flap like paper against endless corridors and must press my hand against the wall to draw myself back.

Related Characters: Rhoda (speaker), Percival
Page Number: 130-131
Explanation and Analysis:

But I only come into existence when the plumber, or the horse-dealers, or whoever it may be, says something which sets me alight. Then how lovely the smoke of my phrase is, rising and falling, flaunting and falling, upon red lobsters and yellow fruit, wreathing them into one beauty. But observe how meretricious the phrase is—made up of what evasions and old lies. Thus my character is in part made of the stimulus which other people provide, and is not mine, as yours are. There is some fatal streak, some wandering and irregular vein of silver, weakening it. […] I went with the boasting boys with little caps and badges, driving off in big brakes—there are some here tonight, dining together, correctly dressed before they go off in perfect concord to the music hall; I loved them. For they bring me into existence as certainly as you do.

Related Characters: Bernard (speaker), Neville, Louis, Rhoda, Percival
Page Number: 133
Explanation and Analysis:

“By applying the standards of the West, by using the violent language that is natural to him, the bullock-cart is righted in less than five minutes. The Oriental problem is solved. he rides on; the multitude cluster round him, regarding him as if he were—what indeed he is—a God,” [said Bernard.]

“[…] and look—the outermost parts of the earth […] India for instance, rise into our purview. The world that had been shrivelled, rounds itself; remote provinces are fetched up out of darkness; we see muddy roads, twisted jungle, swarms of men, and the vulture that feeds on some bloated carcass as within our scope, part of our proud and splendid province, since Percival […] advances down a solitary path, has his camp pitched among desolate trees, and sits alone, looking at the enormous mountains.”

Related Characters: Bernard (speaker), Rhoda (speaker), Percival
Page Number: 136-137
Explanation and Analysis:

Yes, between your shoulders, over your heads, to a landscape […] to a hollow here many-backed steep hills come down like birds’ wings folded. There, on the short, firm turf, are bushes, dark leaved, and against their darkness, I see a shape, white, but not of stone, moving, perhaps alive. But it is not you, it is not you, it is not you; not Percival, Susan, Jinny, Neville, or Louis. […] It makes no sign, it does not beckon, it does not see us. Behind it roars the sea. It is beyond our reach. Yet there I venture. There I go to replenish my emptiness, to stretch my nights and fill them fuller and fuller with dreams. And for a second now, even here, I reach my object and say, ‘Wander no more. All else is trial and make-believe. Here is the end.’

Related Characters: Rhoda (speaker), Bernard, Neville, Louis, Jinny, Susan, Percival
Related Symbols: Waves
Page Number: 139
Explanation and Analysis:

But what are stories? Toys I twist, bubbles I blow, one ring passing through another. And sometimes I begin to doubt if there are stories. What is my story? What is Rhoda’s? What is Neville’s? There are facts, as, for example: ‘The handsome young man in the grey suit, whose reserve contrasted so strangely with the loquacity of the others, now brushed the crumbs from his waistcoat and, with a characteristic gesture at once commanding and benign, made a sign to the waiter, who came instantly and returned a moment later with the bill discreetly folded upon a plate.’ That is truth; that is the fact, but beyond it all is darkness and conjecture.

Related Characters: Bernard (speaker), Neville, Rhoda, Percival
Page Number: 144-145
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

Percival, by his death, has made me this gift, let me see the thing. There is a square; there is an oblong. The players take the square and place it upon he oblong. They place it very accurately; they make a perfect dwelling-place. Very little is left outside. The structure is now visible; what is inchoate is here stated; we are not so various or mean; we have made oblongs and stood them upon squares. This is our triumph; this is our consolation.

Related Characters: Rhoda (speaker), Percival
Page Number: 163
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

My life is not a moment’s bright spark like that on the surface of a diamond. I go beneath ground torturously, as if a warder carried a lamp from cell to cell. My destiny has been that I remember and must weave together, must plait into one cable the many threads, the thin, the thick, the broken, the enduring of our long history, of our tumultuous and varied day. There is always more to be understood; a discord to be listened for; a falsity to be reprimanded. Broken and soot-stained are these roofs with their chimney cowls, their loose slates, their slinking cats and attic windows. I pick my way over broken glass, among blistered tiles, and see only vile and famished faces.

Related Characters: Louis (speaker), Neville, Rhoda
Page Number: 202
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

“Yet, Louis,” said Rhoda, “how short a time silence lasts. Already they are beginning to smooth their napkins by the side of their plates. ‘Who comes?’ says Jinny; and Neville sighs, remembering that Percival comes no more. Jinny has taken out her looking-glass. Surveying her face like an artist, she draws powder-puff down her nose, and after one moment of deliberation, has given precisely that red to her lips that the lips need. Susan, who feels scorn and fear at the sight of these preparations, fastens the top button of her coat, and unfastens it. What is she making ready for? For something, but something different.”

“They are saying to themselves,” said Louis, “‘it is time. I am still vigorous,’ they are saying, ‘My face shall be cut against the black of infinite space.’ They do not finish their sentence. ‘It is time,’ they keep saying.”

Related Characters: Louis (speaker), Rhoda (speaker), Neville, Jinny, Susan, Percival
Page Number: 226
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 18 Quotes

Life is pleasant; life is good; after Monday comes Tuesday and Wednesday follows Tuesday.

Yes, but after time with a difference. It may be that something in the look of the room one night, in the arrangement of the chairs, suggests it. […] Then it happens that two figures standing with their backs to the window appear against the branches of a spreading tree. With a shock of emotion one feels, ‘There are figures without features robed in beauty, doomed yet eternal.’

Related Characters: Bernard (speaker), Neville, Rhoda, Susan, Percival
Page Number: 271
Explanation and Analysis:

And now I ask, ‘Who am I?’ I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda, and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know. We sat here together. But now Percival is dead, and Rhoda is dead; we are divided; we are not here. Yet I cannot find any obstacle separating us. There is no division between me and them. As I talked, I felt, ‘I am you.’ This difference we make so much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish, was overcome. […] Here on my brow is the low I got when Percival fell. Here on the nape of my neck is the kiss Jinny gave Louis. My eyes fill with Susan’s tears. I see far away, quivering like a gold thread, the pillar Rhoda saw, and fell the rush of the wind of her flight when she leapt.

Related Characters: Bernard (speaker), Neville, Louis, Rhoda, Jinny, Susan
Page Number: 276
Explanation and Analysis:

Again I see before me the usual street. The canopy of civilisation is burnt out. […] But there is a kindling in the sky whether of lamplight or of dawn. There is a stir of some sort—sparrows on plane trees somewhere chirping. There is a sense of the break of day. I will not call it dawn. What is dawn in the city to an elderly man standing in the street looking up rather dizzily at the sky? Dawn is some sort of whitening in the sky; some sort of renewal. […] The stars draw back and are extinguished. The bars deepen themselves between the waves. The film of mist thickens on the fields. A redness gathers on the roses, even on the pale rose that hangs by the bedroom window. A bird chirps. Cottagers light their early candles. Yes, this the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and rise again.

Related Characters: Bernard (speaker), Rhoda
Related Symbols: Birds, Light and Dark, Waves
Page Number: 269-297
Explanation and Analysis: