Modernism was the period in British Literature
which came immediately after Realism. As it would be expected, it came as a
reaction against the Realists and as a way of allowing for individuals to
express themselves at a time art was supposed to be a true picture of reality.
Chronologically speaking, it starts in the beginning of the 20th
century, after Queen’s Victoria’s death. The Modern Period can be divided into
three major moments:
·
1901-1910 - Edwardian Period
(It corresponds to the period covering the reign of King
Edward VII, 1901 to 1910. Edward was the leader of a fashionable elite that set
a style influenced by the art and fashion of Continental Europe. The Edwardian
period is sometimes extended beyond Edward's death in 1910 to include the years
up to the sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912, the start of World War I
in 1914, the end of hostilities with Germany in 1918, or the signing of the
Treaty of Versailles in 1919.)
·
1910-1914 - Georgian period (George was
a grandson of Queen Victoria and took over after the death of King Edward VII.
He was monarch through the First World War (1914-1918). His reign saw the rise
of socialism, communism, fascism, Irish republicanism, and the movement of the
Indian independence, all of which radically changed the political landscape of
the time.)
·
1914-1945 - Modern period (This period corresponds
to the years after WWI to the end of WW2. It embraces the time of the crash of
the stock market in 1929 and the 10 years of recession which followed, which
included the WW2.)
The beginning of the 20th century was a time of
frightening changes for intellectual Britain. Victoria, who had reigned for
over 60 years, was dead. Sigmund Freud was exposing the workings of individuals’
thoughts and desires. Einstein published his theory of relativity, thus
undermining the Newtonian view of the universe. Painters like Picasso were
pulling the human form apart into geometric shapes. War took over Europe.
Motorcars, gas and electric light, photography,
phonographs, the telephone and the telegraph technology changed the way people
lived and increasingly seemed to depersonalize human existence. Women were setting
themselves free and demanding the right to vote. They were taken to prison and
brutally fed by force when they tried hunger strikes. Finally, the vast British
Empire witnessed its territories on the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia
strike out for their own independence.
In this culture, where it seemed to have been
the domain for individualism and for every man for himself, it seems easy to understand
why this was perceived as an age of isolation where connection with others,
with society, was viewed as almost impossible. The poets, dramatists and
novelists of the period rebelled against Victorian conventions, despised the
middle class reading publicly, made art more deliberately obscure, and
discriminated between highbrow
writing and lowbrow writing.
Characteristics of
Modernism
Stylistic characteristics
Juxtaposition, irony, comparisons and satire
are important elements found in modernist writing. Modernist authors use
impressionism and other devices to emphasize the subjectivity of reality, and
they see omniscient narration and fixed narrative points of view as ways of providing
a false sense of objectivity. They also make use of discontinuous narratives
and fragmented plot structures. Modernist works are also often reflexive and draw
attention to their own role as creators.
Thematic characteristics
For the first-time reader, modernist writing
can seem frustrating and difficult to understand because of the use of a
fragmented style and a lack of conciseness. Furthermore, the plot, characters
and themes of the text are not always presented in a linear way. The goal of
modernist literature was not to focus on one particular audience in a formal
way. Besides that, modernist literature often opposed to, or gave an
alternative opinion on, a social concept. Common concerns of modernism were:
the breaking down of social norms, rejection of standard social ideas,
traditional thoughts and expectations, rejection of religion and anger against
the effects of the World Wars. Modernists had a tendency to reject history,
social systems, and emphasize alienation in modern urban and industrial
societies. This was the context in which the four authors we will study
hereafter were immersed: Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, D.H.Lawrence and James
Joyce. In this first unit, we shall focus our attention
on two important names of modernist literature: Virginia Woolf and Aldous
Huxley.
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf was born on January 25th, 1882 in
Kensington, London. She was raised by free-thinking parents and began writing
when she was still a young girl. Virginia married a left-wing political
journalist, author and editor Leonard Woolf (1880-1969) and they had no
children. She published her first novel, The
Voyage Out, in 1915. Her nonlinear, free form prose style earned her much
praise at the time. Known for her mood swings and bouts of deep depression, she
ended up committing suicide in 1941, at the age of 59. Among her works we can include:
·
The Voyage Out (1915)
·
Night and Day (1919)
·
Jacob’s Room (1920)
·
Mrs Dalloway (1925)
·
To the Lighthouse (1927)
·
Orlando (1928)
·
The waves (1931)
·
Flush: A Biography (1933)
·
The Years (1937)
·
Between the Acts (1941)
In 2005 Mrs
Dalloway was chosen by Time magazine as one of the one hundred best novels
written in English since 1923. Mrs Dalloway also made its way to cinema,
first with an adaptation by the dutch director Marleen Gorris, in 1997 and
later as a central element in the novel, and later film, by Michael Cunningham
entitled The Hours, which was the original title for Woolf's Mrs
Dalloway. The two main groups involved with promoting discussions and
readings of Virginia Woolf's works are the Virginia Woolf Society of Great
Britain (www.virginiawoolfsociety.co.uk) and The International Virginia Woolf Society (www.utoronto.ca/IVWS). The two best known biographies available were
written by Woolf's nephew Quentin Bell in 1972, and by Hermione Lee in 1996.
Virginia Woolf’s Impressionism
Virginia Woolf did not conform to the form of the novel that prevailed
in the first quarter of the XX Century as it seemed to her too obscure or even
unsuitable to define her experience. In her essay Modern Fiction (1921) she stated “that life is not a series of gig
lamps symmetrically arranged” but “a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope
surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end”. According to
her, the task of the novelist, was ‘to convey this varying, this unknown and
uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display...” Woolf
had the courage to discard the orthodox linear narrative of the Edwardians
after her first two novels and used instead a distinctive impressionistic
technique, characterised by lyrical intensity and subtle penetration into the
stream of consciousness.
Other elements in Virginia Woolf’s novels:
1) Lack of an element of
story — Surrendering to inner reality
Virginia Woolf believed that if the novelist could
base his work upon his own feelings and not upon convention, there would be no
plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love-interest or catastrophe in the accepted
style. Thus in most of her novels there was hardly any element of story. Her
formula for the novel was not humanity in action but in a state of infinite
perception. The novel in her hands was a voyage to find out how life was lived,
and how it could be rendered as it was actually lived without any sort of distortion.
She concentrated her attention on the rendering of inner reality and gave
subtle and penetrating inlets into the consciousness of her characters. She
cared very little for narrating dramatic events.
2) The
world of outer reality is not ignored
Although her main purpose as a
novelist was to depict the inner life of human beings, she did not ignore the
world of outside. In her novels we can find that the metaphysical interest was
embodied in purely human and personal terms and that the concrete images that were
the very essence of art were never sacrificed to abstraction.
3) The Interior Monologue: Stream of Consciousness
Technique
To the novelists of the new
school, human consciousness was a chaotic array of sensations and impressions;
it was fleeting, trivial and evanescent. According to Virginia Woolf, the great
task of the novelist should be to reveal the sensations and impressions to
bring the reader closer to the quick of the mind. He should be more concerned
with inner reality rather than with outer. This is what is known as ‘the stream
of consciousness technique’: the reader is introduced into interior life of a
character by means of interior monologue. There is very little intervention in
the way of explanation or commentary from the part of the writer.
4) Woman’s Point of View - Feminisation of English Novel
Virginia Woolf also gave us the
woman’s point of view in her novels. That is why we find her relying more on
intuition than on reason. Besides, we find in her a woman’s dislike for the
world of churches, banks and schools and the political, social and economic movements
of the day that had hardly any attraction to her. As a sheltered female of her
age she had hardly any scope to have any knowledge of the sordid and brutal
aspects of life. For this reason, her picture of life does not include vice,
sordidness or the abject brutality of her time.
5) Limited
Range
The limited range of Woolf’s
characterisation is clearly evident in her works. Her characters are definitely
convincing in their own way, but they are drawn from a very limited range. They
mainly belong to the upper middle class life and to a certain temperament too.
She could paint only certain types of characters who tended to think and feel
alike to engage in one set of sensations. Being a
woman of her times she avoided the theme of passionate love. She could not
write of sex freely and frankly and so avoided it in her novels.
Mrs Dalloway
Mrs Dalloway
was a novel published in 1925 and which details a day in the life of Clarissa
Dalloway, a fictional high-society woman in post-World War I England. Read the
initial lines of the book, in which Clarissa goes around London in the morning,
getting ready for a party she will be hosting that evening.
Mrs. Dalloway
said she would buy the flowers herself.
For Lucy had
her work cut out for her. The doors
would be takenoff their hinges; Rumpelmayer's men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a
morning--fresh as if issued to children on a beach.
What a
lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her,when, with
a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the
French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of
course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of
a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was)
solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something
awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke
winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until
Peter Walsh said, "Musing among the vegetables?"--was that
it?--"I prefer men to cauliflowers"--was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning
when she had gone out on to the terrace--Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these
days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was
his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his
grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished—how strange it
was!--a few sayings like this about cabbages. (Mrs Dalloway, 1925)
The nice day
reminds her of her youth spent in the countryside in Bourton and makes her
wonder about her choice of husband; she married the reliable Richard Dalloway
instead of the enigmatic and demanding Peter Walsh who had reintroduced her
these conflicts by paying a visit that morning.
Septimus
Warren Smith is a veteran of World War I who suffers from traumatic stress and spends his day
in the park with his wife Lucrezia. He has frequent and indecipherable
hallucinations, mostly concerning his dear friend Evans who died in the war.
Later that day, the reader gets to know that after he is prescribed involuntary
commitment to a psychiatric hospital, he commits suicide by jumping out of a
window.
Clarissa's
party in the evening is a slow success. It is attended by most of the
characters she has met in the book, including people from her past. She hears
about Septimus' suicide at the party and gradually starts admiring the act of
this stranger, which she considers an effort to preserve his happiness.
Mrs. Dalloway departs from
conventional form in a few ways. First, the novel is not divided into chapters.
There are some section breaks, but in general the perspective of the story
floats from one character to the next without any divisions. Secondly, just as
the omnipotent narration is constantly shifting to enter the mind of one
character or another, the narration itself is often fragmented and dreamlike.
Woolf uses the stream-of-consciousness style to make the narration sound very
close to the actual thought process that might take place within a person's
head, rather than as a narrator telling a coherent and organized story. Thirdly,
though the novel takes place in "real time" within the course of one
day, the time-line is disjointed and inconsistent. There are frequent flashbacks,
and only the unceasing chiming of Big Ben marks the progress of the hours. Finally,
consistent with other modernist works, the events of the story fall within the
category of the everyday. It is within these un-extraordinary events that
larger insight is gleaned into the human experience.
You
can either download the book Mrs Dalloway
at
or
watch the movie The Hours which was
released in 2002. To watch its trailer go to
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963) was a British writer who
became known to the public mostly for his novels, and especially his fifth one,
Brave New World, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Huxley was born
in Godalming in the Surrey county in southern England. He was the son of the
English schoolteacher and writer Leonard Huxley and of Julia Arnold. More than
literature, however, Huxley was born into a family of renowned scientists, with
two of his three brothers, Julian and Andrew, being eminent biologists and his
grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, being a famous, controversial naturalist in
his time.
Huxley came to be known mostly as a novelist and essayist but he also
wrote some short stories, poetry, travelogues and even film scripts. In his
novels and essays he played the role of a critical observer of accepted
traditions, customs, social norms and ideals. Most importantly, he was
concerned with the potentially harmful applications of the so-called scientific
progress to mankind in his writings. Among his novels we can include:
Crome Yellow (1921)
Those Barren Leaves (1925)
Point Counter Point (1928)
Brave New World (1932)
Eyeless in Gaza (1936)
After Many a Summer (1939)
Time Must Have a Stop (1944)
The Genius and the
Goddess (1955)
Island (1962)
Brave New World
Brave New World was written in 1931 and published the following year;
it is a dystopian —or anti-utopian — novel. In it, the author questions the
values of 1931 London, using satire and irony to portray a futuristic world in
which many of the contemporary trends in British and American society were
taken to extremes. Although he was already a best-selling author, Huxley
achieved international acclaim with this classic novel. Because Brave New
World is a novel of ideas, the characters and plot are secondary, even
simplistic. The novel is best appreciated as an ironic commentary on
contemporary values.
The story is set in a London six
hundred years in the future. People all around the world are part of a
totalitarian state, free from war, hatred, poverty, diseases, and pain. They
enjoy leisure time, material wealth, and physical pleasures. However, in order
to maintain such a smoothly running society, the ten people in charge of the
world, the Controllers, eliminate most forms of freedom and twist around many
traditionally held human values. Standardization and progress are valued above
all else. These Controllers create human beings in factories, using technology
to make ninety-six people from the same fertilized egg and to condition them
for their future lives. Children are raised together and subjected to mind
control through sleep teaching. As adults, people are content to fulfill their
destinies being part of one of the five social classes, from the intelligent
Alphas, who run the factories, to the mentally challenged Epsilons, who do the
most menial jobs. All spend their free time indulging in harmless and mindless
entertainment and sports activities. When the Savage, a man from the
uncontrolled area of the world (an Indian reservation in New Mexico) comes to London,
he questions the society and ultimately has to choose between conformity or
death.
In the very first chapter of Brave New World, during a visit to the
Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center, a production factory for human
beings, a group of students receives a tour of the facilities by the director
and one of the students dare to question the reproduction system:
But one of the students
was fool enough to ask where the advantage lay.
"My good boy!"
The Director wheeled sharply round on him. "Can't you see? Can't you
see?" He raised a hand; his expression was solemn. "Bokanovsky's
Process is one of the major instruments of social stability!"
Major instruments of social stability.
Standard men and women;
in uniform batches. The whole of a small factory staffed with the products of a
single bokanovskified egg.
"Ninety-six
identical twins working ninety-six identical machines!" The voice was
almost tremulous with enthusiasm. "You really know where you are. For the
first time in history." He quoted the planetary motto. "Community,
Identity, Stability." Grand words. "If we could bokanovskify
indefinitely the whole problem would be solved." (Brave New World, Chapter 1)
Besides the use of the theme of technology to control society, two other
themes can be found:
- The Consumer
Society: A society in which
individual happiness is defined as the ability to satisfy needs, and success as
a society is equated with economic growth and prosperity.
- The Dangers of an
All-Powerful State: An anti-society in which an
all-powerful state controls the behaviors and actions of its people in order to
preserve its own stability and power.
You can read the
full text of Brave New World at
http://archive.org/details/ost-english-brave_new_world_aldous_huxley. 
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