Appunti di English literature and culture 1

MRS DALLOWAY AND MODERNISM

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Historical context: beginning of 20 century

• End of Victorian values

• Few years after the First World War (WWI), an event that completely changed the mentality and

the life of people

• Beginning of the dissolution of the Empire, Britain gradually started to lose his power all over the

world

• Freud, Einstein (relativity), Bergson (French philosopher that theorised the concept of time that

influenced modernism: time is not linear, it is relative and subjective) (objective vs. subjective time)

-> these theories that come in other disciplines had a very strong influence in literature, because

they influenced the way artists see human minds and the world

Modernism: 1910

“On or about December 1910, human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one

might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The

change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one

must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910.” Virginia Woolf, Essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs

Brown’ -> so the novel has to change as well, because if we want to use the novel to talk about

human character then the form of the novel must be adequate to this new reality (Victorian novel:

realistic, linear, omniscient narrator, closure and certainty -> these values had collapsed).

- year of the “arrival” of Modernism in England;

- Halley’s comet, very important historical event that contribute to the feeling that a new age was

beginning;

- first post-impressionist exhibition in London (Roger Fry and Clive Bell), even the artistic

movement was being overcome by new movements;

- changes after the death of Edward VII (May 1910), Edwardian age, transition between Victorian

age and modernism -> political instability, victory of the liberal party, crisis of the middle class,

protests of labour movements;

- Freud;

- cubism;

- Bergson (time as duration);

- Feelings of uncertainty and instability (we can’t believe anymore in the Victorian values, these

very strong ad traditional values kept society under control, Britain was living a very rich and stable

period)

Modernism: new ideas

• an international artistic movement (1880s-1945) (UK: since 1910) -> new movements, modernism

spread across the continent

• radical experimentation and rejection of the old order of civilization and 19th century optimism

• a reaction against Realism and Naturalism

• historical discontinuity, a sense of alienation, loss and despair (Angst)

• a loss of confidence that there exists a reliable, knowable ground of value and identity

• new sense of time and space, multiple personalities, different points of view

• Horrors of WWI (1914-1918) -> before the war all of these feelings were present in society

(uncertainty, intellectual, political, economic, social crisis, loss and despair, loss of confidence) but

during the war Europe was devastated and these feelings were more evident (this is the time when

Woolf wrote).

Modernism in literature

• «to make it new» (Ezra Pound), he said that the purpose of modernism was to make it new, to do

something new, to change things, focus on change.

• Focus on introspection, analysis of characters’ consciousness: (ex. Mrs Dalloway, there is not real

plot, everything evolves around Mrs Dalloway introspections and consciousness, it all happens in a

day, she has to organize a party, the plot is not important, what really matters is what is going on

inside characters minds)

• Complexity of space and time: in MD (Mrs Dalloway) on a plot level space and time seems to be

really easy, because all the events take place in one specific day in London. But the complexity is in

the fact that there are a lot of flashbacks and flashforwards -> external objective space and time are

simple, but the subjective time is not linear and simple because character’s minds are in other times

and places, all the things that happened were inside Mrs Dalloway mind.

• The unconscious: manifestation of all the things that cross Mrs Dalloway mind, it is expressed

through a very peculiar style: the interior monologue in which we are inside the character’s mind

and we follow the thoughts.

• Feelings of isolation and alienation of the modern man (ex. Mrs D. walking along the streets of

London that are full of people, yet she feels alone even if she is surrounded by people, everyone is

living their lives and they don’t pay attention to each other)

• Stream of consciousness (a psychic phenomenon – the content) -> all the thoughts and things that

com to our mind as we are doing something

• Interior monologue (verbal expression of the stream of consciousness – the form) -> it is when

you try to express the stream of consciousness that has no structure. In an interior monologue

usually we don’t have chronological order, our thoughts, especially the unconscious ones, are not

rational and ordered -> you get an immediate speech, a fluid representation of her ideas, we don’t

have inverted commas to introduce her thoughts. The narrator is inside her mind, it is not narrated

in first person but we see the words through MD eyes. In MD we have a narrator also in the interior

monologue, someone is telling us what’s going on but still the prospective is very partial, because of

this third person narrator we can’t be sure whether an opinion, idea or comment is MD’s or the

narrator’s -> shifting point of view -> ambiguity

Modernism: main authors

• T. S. Eliot: poems (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land) and essays (Tradition

and Individual Talent)

T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent (1917)

“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is

the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must

set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not

merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-

sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to

all the works of art which preceded it.”

-> no artist can exist in and by himself, the artist can only exist because others have come before

him, the idea that you can’t never judge and evaluate an artist in isolation, because every artist is

connected with tradition, with what have come before him. Whenever a new work of art is created it

is going to change our way of reading all the works of art that have come before it. Relationship

with tradition: - previous writers inevitably influence modern ones – new writers influence our

interpretation of previous ones.

-> The ability of any artist is that of using traditions to make it new

- Modernism as «the tradition of the new» (Harold Rosenburg): modernism is going against

traditions, yet if you want to destroy something you have to refer to it, modernism does not ignore

traditions, the idea is that of starting from tradition to reconstruct it

• Ezra Pound: movement of imagism

• James Joyce: epiphanies (deep insights that might be gained through incidents and circumstances)

- Irish (= Swift, Wilde, Sterne, Stoker, Beckett…)

- Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1918-20), Finnegans

Wake (1939)

- Experimental, language self-consciousness, crisis of representation… (// structuralism)

- History as a nightmare, art should work as an alarm clock (WWI), art should be what wakes

people up from this nightmare and bring them to a new world

- As typical to modernism he is influenced by tradition: influenced by myth, collective unconscious,

archetypes, epic.

- + ordinariness, focus on mass culture

- Comical gap between epic and modern world. His works are a rewriting of ancient epic in an

ordinary, contemporary world. Showing us the futility of modern life, in a pessimistic sense we

have this feeling of alienation, uselessness. Modernism tries to keep the distinction between low and

high culture, it does not want to be a movement for everyone, it is very intellectual.

/modernist writers are aware of the fact that they are writing complex things, they want to be

obscure, difficult to understand, they want to differentiate from average people/

- Epiphanies: something you discover all of a sudden, they are short events in the novels in which a

character gets some deep inside the meaning of live, because of some specific circumstances a

character has a sudden revelation

• Virginia Woolf: moments of being (flashes of awareness that reveal a pattern hidden behind the

cotton wool of daily life)

Main works – fiction: Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), The Waves

(1931), Between the Acts (1941) …

Main works – non-fiction, essays: Modern Fiction (1919), Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1924), A

Room of One’s Own (1929) (she claims that women in order to be artists need to have a room on

their own -> physical place where you can work, you need to be rich enough to be allowed not to

work and not to be worried about the material things of life, so all you have to think about is art.

She married Leonard Woolf, a rich man that allowed her to become an artist. She says women’s

novels should have a room of its own as well, we cannot situate women’s art into the canon of

general literature written by men), Moments of Being (published posthumously, 1976)

- Self-critical snob: she’s snobbish and she know that and she’s self-critical

- She belongs to the elite group Bloomsbury group (Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf, Roger Fry, E.M.

Forster…): that was a snobbish elite movement of the upper-middle class and the aristocracy in

London. vanguard

- Mental illness (probably she suffered from bipolar disorder: for short period of time she was very

happy and extrovert)

- She tried to commit suicide, once before writing MD by trying to jump out of a window, then she

managed to commit suicide by drowning herself in a river. The figure of MD has been seen as VW

(Virginia Woolf) alter-ego and also Septimius is another mirror figure for VW

Woolf and modernism

- She wrote about the inner world of characters, their feelings, memories

- Her works: «The dark places of psychology» -> they’re very introspective, the dark side of every

human being (at this point Freud theories have become famous and had an influence on artists)

- Human mind as a shift of impressions and emotions

- World as fragmented (relativity): the role of art is to impose unity on it (one day, one place: unity

of time and place) -> impose unity on a fragmented world

- Language as unreliable: we can never access the truth, MD is never really able to express herself