Modernism

The Modernist Period in English Literature occupied the years from shortly after the beginning of the twentieth century
through roughly 1965. In broad terms, the period was marked by sudden and unexpected breaks with traditional ways of
viewing and interacting with the world. Experimentation and individualism became virtues, where in the past they were often
heartily discouraged. Modernism was set in motion, in one sense, through a series of cultural shocks. The first of these great
shocks was the Great War, which ravaged Europe from 1914 through 1918, known now as World War One. At the time, this
War to End All Wars was looked upon with such ghastly horror that many people simply could not imagine what the world
seemed to be plunging towards. The first hints of that particular way of thinking called Modernism stretch back into the
nineteenth century. As literary periods go, Modernism displays a relatively strong sense of cohesion and similarity across
genres and locales. Furthermore, writers who adopted the Modern point of view often did so quite deliberately and self-
consciously. Indeed, a central preoccupation of Modernism is with the inner self and consciousness. In contrast to the
Romantic world view, the Modernist cares rather little for Nature, Being, or the overarching structures of history. Instead of
progress and growth, the Modernist intelligentsia sees decay and a growing alienation of the individual. The machinery of
modern society is perceived as impersonal, capitalist, and antagonistic to the artistic impulse. War most certainly had a great
deal of influence on such ways of approaching the world. Two World Wars in the span of a generation effectively shell-
shocked all of Western civilization.
In its genesis, the Modernist Period in English literature was first and foremost a visceral reaction against the Victorian
culture and aesthetic, which had prevailed for most of the nineteenth century. Indeed, a break with traditions is one of the
fundamental constants of the Modernist stance. Intellectuals and artists at the turn of the twentieth century believed the
previous generations way of doing things was a cultural dead end. They could foresee that world events were spiraling into
unknown territory. The stability and quietude of Victorian civilization were rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The
assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria was essentially the triggering event of the First World War, a conflict which
swept away all preconceived notions about the nature of so-called modern warfare.
In the world of art, generally speaking, Modernism was the beginning of the distinction between high art and low art. The
educational reforms of the Victorian Age had led to a rapid increase in literacy rates, and therefore a greater demand for
literature or all sorts. A popular press quickly developed to supply that demand. The sophisticated literati looked upon this
new popular literature with scorn. Writers who refused to bow to the popular tastes found themselves in a state of alienation
from the mainstream of society. To some extent, this alienation fed into the stereotype of the aloof artist, producing nothing
of commercial value for the market. Its worth mentioning that this alienation worked both ways, as the reading public by and
large turned their backs on many elitist artists. The academic world became something of a refuge for disaffected artists,
as they could rub elbows with fellow disenfranchised intellectuals. Still, the most effective poets and novelists did manage to
make profound statements that were absorbed by the whole of society and not just the writers inner circles. In the later
years of the Modernist period, a form of populism returned to the literary mainstream, as regionalism and identity politics
became significant influences on the purpose and direction of artistic endeavor.
The nineteenth century, like the several centuries before it, was a time of privilege for wealthy Caucasian males. Women,
minorities, and the poor were marginalized to the point of utter silence and inconsequence. The twentieth century witnessed
the beginnings of a new paradigm between first the sexes, and later between different cultural groups. Class distinction
remains arguably the most difficult bridge to cross in terms of forming a truly equitable society. Some would argue that class
has become a euphemism for race, but thats another discussion. The point is that as the twentieth century moved forward,
a greater variety of literary voices won the struggle to be heard. What had so recently been inconceivable was steadily
becoming a reality. African-Americans took part in the Harlem Renaissance, with the likes of Langston Hughes at the
forefront of a vibrant new idiom in American poetry. Women like Hilda Doolittle and Amy Lowell became leaders of the
Imagist movement. None of this is to suggest that racism and sexism had been completely left behind in the art world.
Perhaps such blemishes can never be fully erased, but the strides that were taken in the twentieth century were remarkable
by any measure.
In Modernist literature, it was the poets who took fullest advantage of the new spirit of the times, and stretched the
possibilities of their craft to lengths not previously imagined. In general, there was a disdain for most of the literary
production of the last century. The exceptions to this disdain were the French Symbolist poets like Charles Beaudelaire, and
the work of Irishman Gerard Manley Hopkins. The French Symbolists were admired for the sophistication of their imagery. In
comparison to much of what was produced in England and America, the French were ahead of their time. They were
similarly unafraid to delve into subject matter that had usually been taboo for such a refined art form. Hopkins, for his part,
brought a fresh way to look at rhythm and word usage. He more or less invented his own poetic rhythms, just as he coined
his own words for things which had, for him, no suitable descriptor. Hopkins had no formal training in poetry, and he never
published in his lifetime. This model the self-taught artist-hermit who has no desire for public adulation would become
synonymous with the poet in the modern age. This stereotype continues unrivaled to this day, despite the fact that the most
accomplished poets of the Modern period were far from recluses. Even though alienation was a nearly universal experience
for Modernist poets, it was impossible to escape some level of engagement with the world at large. Even if this engagement
was mediated through the poetry, the relationship that poets had with their world was very real, and very much revealing of
the state of things in the early twentieth century.
Leading up to the First World War, Imagist poetry was dominating the scene, and sweeping previous aesthetic points of view
under the rug. The Imagists, among them Ezra Pound, sought to boil language down to its absolute essence. They wanted
poetry to concentrate entirely upon the thing itself, in the words of critic-poet T. E. Hulme. To achieve that effect required
minimalist language, a lessening of structural rules and a kind of directness that Victorian and Romantic poetry seriously
lacked. Dreaminess or Pastoral poetry were utterly abandoned in favor of this new, cold, some might say mechanized
poetics. Imagist poetry was almost always short, unrhymed, and noticeably sparse in terms of adjectives and adverbs. At
some points, the line between poetry and natural language became blurred. This was a sharp departure from the
ornamental, verbose style of the Victorian era. Gone also were the preoccupations with beauty and nature. Potential
subjects for poetry were now limitless, and poets took full advantage of this new freedom.
No Modernist poet has garnered more praise and attention than Thomas Stearns Eliot. Born in Missouri, T. S. Eliot would
eventually settle in England, where he would produce some of the greatest poetry and criticism of the last century. Eliot
picked up where the Imagists left off, while adding some of his own peculiar aesthetics to the mix. His principal contribution
to twentieth century verse was a return to highly intellectual, allusive poetry. He looked backwards for inspiration, but he was
not nostalgic or romantic about the past. Eliots productions were entirely in the modern style, even if his blueprints were
seventeenth century metaphysical poets. One of the distinguishing characteristics of Eliots work is the manner in which he
seamlessly moves from very high, formal verse into a more conversational and easy style. Yet even when his poetic voice
sounds very colloquial, there is a current underneath, which hides secondary meanings. It is this layering of meanings and
contrasting of styles that mark Modernist poetry in general and T. S. Eliot in particular. It is no overstatement to say that Eliot
was the pioneer of the ironic mode in poetry; that is, deceptive appearances hiding difficult truths.
In American Literature, the group of writers and thinkers known as the Lost Generation has become synonymous with
Modernism. In the wake of the First World War, several American artists chose to live abroad as they pursued their creative
impulses. These included the intellectual Gertrude Stein, the novelists Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the
painter Waldo Pierce, among others. The term itself refers to the spiritual and existential hangover left by four years of
unimaginably destructive warfare. The artists of the Lost Generation struggled to find some meaning in the world in the wake
of chaos. As with much of Modernist literature, this was achieved by turning the minds eye inward and attempting to record
the workings of consciousness. For Hemingway, this meant the abandonment of all ornamental language. His novels are
famous for their extremely spare, blunt, simple sentences and emotions that play out right on the surface of things. There is
an irony to this bluntness, however, as his characters often have hidden agendas, hidden sometimes even from themselves,
which serve to guide their actions. The Lost Generation, like other High Modernists, gave up on the idea that anything was
truly knowable. All truth became relative, conditional, and in flux. The War demonstrated that no guiding spirit rules the
events of the world, and that absolute destruction was kept in check by only the tiniest of margins.
The novel was by no means immune from the self-conscious, reflective impulses of the new century. Modernism introduced
a new kind of narration to the novel, one that would fundamentally change the entire essence of novel writing. The
unreliable narrator supplanted the omniscient, trustworthy narrator of preceding centuries, and readers were forced to
question even the most basic assumptions about how the novel should operate. James Joyces Ulysses is the prime
example of a novel whose events are really the happenings of the mind, the goal of which is to translate as well as possible
the strange pathways of human consciousness. A whole new perspective came into being known as stream of
consciousness. Rather than looking out into the world, the great novelists of the early twentieth century surveyed the inner
space of the human mind. At the same time, the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud had come into mainstream
acceptance. These two forces worked together to alter peoples basic understanding of what constituted truth and reality.
Experimentation with genre and form was yet another defining characteristic of Modernist literature. Perhaps the most
representative example of this experimental mode is T. S. Eliots long poem The Waste Land. Literary critics often single
out The Waste Land as the definitive sample of Modernist literature. In it, one is confronted by biblical-sounding verse forms,
quasi-conversational interludes, dense and frequent references which frustrate even the most well-read readers, and
sections that resemble prose more than poetry. At the same time, Eliot fully displays all the conventions which one expects
in Modernist literature. There is the occupation with self and inwardness, the loss of traditional structures to buttress the ego
against shocking realities, and a fluid nature to truth and knowledge.
The cynicism and alienation of the first flowering of Modernist literature could not persist. By mid-century, indeed by the
Second World War, there was already a strong reaction against the pretentions of the Moderns. Artists of this newer
generation pursued a more democratic, pluralistic mode for poetry and the novel. There was optimism for the first time in a
long time. Commercialism, publicity, and the popular audience were finally embraced, not shunned. Alienation became
boring. True, the influence of Modernist literature continues to be quite astonishing. The Modern poet-critics changed the
way people think about artists and creative pursuits. The Modern novelists changed the way many people perceive truth and
reality. These changes are indeed profound, and cannot easily be replaced by new schemas.

What are characteristics of Modernist literature, fiction in particular?

Modernist literature was a predominantly English genre of fiction writing, popular from roughly the
1910s into the 1960s. Modernist literature came into its own due to increasing industrialization and
globalization. New technology and the horrifying events of both World Wars (but specifically World War
I) made many people question the future of humanity: What was becoming of the world?
Writers reacted to this question by turning toward Modernist sentiments. Gone was the
Romantic period that focused on nature and being. Modernist fiction spoke of the inner
self and consciousness. Instead of progress, the Modernist writer saw a decline of
civilization. Instead of new technology, the Modernist writer saw cold machinery and
increased capitalism, which alienated the individual and led to loneliness. (Sounds like
the same arguments you hear about the Internet age, doesn't it?)

To achieve the emotions described above, most Modernist fiction was cast in first
person. Whereas earlier, most literature had a clear beginning, middle, and end (or
introduction, conflict, and resolution), the Modernist story was often more of a stream of
consciousness. Irony, satire, and comparisons were often employed to point out
society's ills. For the first-time Modernist reader, this can all add up to feel like the story
is going nowhere.

A short list of some of famous Modernist writers includes Samuel Beckett, James Joyce,
Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, E.E. Cummings, Sylvia
Plath, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway,
Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and Gertrude Stein.

From the above list, two specific works that epitomize Modernist literature are
Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

Contained within three notebooks, this is the working draft for one of Virginia Woolf's most famous novels, Mrs Dalloway.
Dating from 27 June 1923 and originally titled 'The Hours', it was published two years later as Mrs Dalloway.

Woolf is acclaimed as an innovator of the English language. Here, in her own handwriting, we see her explore a new style of
writing called 'stream of consciousness', in which the imprint of experience and emotion on the inner lives of characters is as
important as the stories they act out.

At the end of each notebook we find notes and drafts for The Common Reader. The essays were published by The Hogarth
Press in 1925.

What is Mrs Dalloway about?

Mrs Dalloway parallels a single day in the lives of two people: the privileged, socially elite Clarissa Dalloway, and Septimus
Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War. As the day begins, Clarissa is buying flowers for a party she
will give that night, while Septimus is in Regent's Park listening to the sparrows, who, he believes, sing to him in Greek.

By featuring their internal feelings, Woolf allows her characters' thoughts to travel back and forth in time, reflecting and
refracting their emotional experiences. This device, often known as 'stream of consciousness, creates complex portraits of
the individuals and their relationships.

Woolf also uses the novel as a vehicle for criticism of the society of her day. The main characters, both aspects of Woolf
herself, raise issues of deep personal concern: in Clarissa, the repressed social and economic position of women, and in
Septimus, the treatment of those driven by depression to the borderlands of sanity.
The character of Mrs Dalloway had already appeared in Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out, as the wife of a Member of
Parliament. By 1923, Woolf had conceived the idea of writing a new story built around her. I want to give life and death,
sanity and insanity, Woolf enthused in her diary, I want to criticise the social system, and show it at work, at its most
intense. Writing the essay Modern Fiction in April 1919, Woolf questioned the proper stuff of fiction. Praising James
Joyces Ulysses, another novel that takes place on a single day, she asked her readers to Examine for a moment an
ordinary mind on an ordinary day and to imagine the possibility of a new fiction that comes closer to reflecting this life.

What is 'stream of consciousness?

'Stream of consciousness is a style of writing evolved by authors in the early 20th century to express the flow of a
character's thoughts and feelings. The technique aims to give readers the impression of being inside the mind of the
character - an internal view that illuminates plot and motivation as well as non-linear time, psychological complexity and the
fragmented experience of living in the modern world. Thoughts spoken aloud are not always the same as those on the floor
of the mind, as Woolf put it.

The term was first used in a literary sense by May Sinclair in her 1918 review of a novel by Dorothy Richardson. Other
authors well known for this style include Katherine Mansfield, William Faulkner and James Joyce.

Capturing the impact of cultural change

Woolf used Clarissa to explore the personal impact of cultural change, from the new technologies of automobiles, airplanes
and movies, to the new openness of marital and sexual relationships and the beginnings of political upheaval. In planning
the novel, Woolf had wished to criticise the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense. [1] Five years have
passed since the Armistice, and Peter Walsh, returning for the first time since the war, is struck by the changes: People
looked different. Newspapers seemed different. There are major changes in English society as well. Alex Zwerdling has
argued that indeed Mrs Dalloway is a sharply critical examination of the governing class at the turning-point of its power. In
1923, there were two Conservative prime ministers Bonar Law, who resigned because of ill health, and Stanley Baldwin,
who succeeded him in May but in January 1924 the party was voted out, and Ramsay MacDonald would become the first
Labour prime minister. Clarissa's class 'is living on borrowed time. Its values are under attack the empire was
crumbling fast. Woolf also wanted to connect the class system and the gender system, linking the subordination of the
working class to the subordination of women. In a famous essay called Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1924), she argued that
since 1920, all human relations have shifted those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and
children. And when human relations change, there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and
literature.[2]Neither character nor these relationships, she maintained, could be sufficiently represented by the literary
conventions of the Edwardians, such as reliance on material evidence and external fact. For us, she dramatically asserts,
those conventions are ruin, those tools are death.

Stream of consciousness

The method she used, the representation of the stream of consciousness, reflected her need to go beyond the clumsiness of
the factual realism in the novels of her Edwardian precursors, such as Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy, and find a more
sensitive, artistic and profound way to represent character, an effort shared with her contemporaries D H Lawrence, Dorothy
Richardson, Katherine Mansfield and Marcel Proust. In the 1920s, psychoanalysis was uncovering a multi-layered self in
which dreams, memories and fantasies were as important as actions and thought. (The Hogarth Press, run by Virginia and
her husband Leonard Woolf, began to publish an English translation of Freud in 1921.) Philosophers were describing the
self as the receiver of a tumult of sensations. Cubist artists combined multiple perspectives on their subjects to add an extra
dimension to each of their paintings. Woolf believed that the omniscient narrator of the 19th-century novel had to be
replaced by a narration from multiple perspectives as well; many points of view and many voices should be included. She
was intrigued by the new medium of film, and her narrative technique is very cinematic, including flashbacks, montage, rapid
cuts and panning between various characters as they respond to an external event, such as the aeroplane overhead. (The
novel is historically accurate in its references; the first skywriter appeared in London in August 1922.) Woolf tunnelled into
the memories and associations of each character to give them depth, and to bring the past into a single-day novel.

Composition

We know a lot about the composition of Mrs Dalloway between 1922 and 1924. Woolfs holograph draft, called The Hours,
is in the British Library, and her working notes are in the New York Public Library. She also treated the themes of the novel
in an early group of short stories, collected as Mrs Dalloways Party, and discussed her writing process in her journal and
letters. One central problem she faced was how to organise the flow of perceptions and memories; she did not want to have
chapters with titles interrupting the illusion of a spontaneous stream of consciousness. She considered having a Greek
chorus speak at intervals to sum everything up; she thought about dividing the text like the acts of a play. Finally, she
decided to mark off sections with a double space; in the British edition published by the Hogarth Press, there are 12 spaces,
like the hours on a clock. The striking of Big Ben further serves to punctuate the narrative. A central motif of the book is the
analogy between the hours of the day and the female life cycle what we would now call the biological clock. Woolf places
Mrs Dalloway in the middle, and surrounds her with female characters ranging from 18 to over 80. As she was working on
the various drafts, Woolf grew confident in her techniques and goals: Theres no doubt in my mind that I have found out how
to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.[3]

Taking steps towards the grave

Although it is never directly stated in the novel, Clarissa, at the age of 52, has gone through menopause, and she has
internalised the medical attitudes which saw the change of life as a hopeless process of decline. Having lost her youthful
beauty, and lacking an occupation or an independent social role, she fears that the drama of her life has ended. Climbing
the stairs to her room for a midday nap, she feels that she is taking the first steps towards the grave: There was an
emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room. Women must put off their rich apparel. At midday they must disrobe
Narrower and narrower her bed would be. In midlife, Clarissa thinks she must divest herself of her sexuality, give up her
physical self, and adjust to solitude, loneliness and the inevitable shrinking of her social space and opportunities. The attic
room and the narrow bed are symbols of death.

Septimus Smith

Mrs Dalloway deals with peoples ability to cope with change ageing, class mobility, war and peace, the change of life.
Woolf contrasts Clarissas crisis with the despair of Septimus Warren Smith, a young veteran suffering from mental
disturbances. His day is juxtaposed to hers, and his paranoid suspicions, vivid hallucinations and distorted perceptions are
in sharp contrast to her orderly ones. In her early notes for the novel, Woolf imagined Septimus as a crazed terrorist plotting
to avenge the generation of young men slaughtered and damaged in the Great War by assassinating the prime minister.
Draft by draft, however, she turned him into a victim of shell shock, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Emotionally numbed
by the war, grieving the death of his dearest friend Evans, angry at the society that seems to collude with destruction, guilt-
ridden at his inability to care for his wife, Septimus becomes vulnerable to a psychotic break much worse than the neurotic
symptoms caused by the traumas of combat. The extremity of his illness reflects the conditions of his society, one in which
the emotional after-effects of the war have been evaded, self-control is worshipped and feelings have been suppressed.

Woolf drew on her own experience of madness to present his delusions, and to condemn the obtuse, even brutal doctors
Holmes and Bradshaw, who fail to understand his terror, and attempt to have him committed to a clinic for a rest cure. The
war seems to have left the governing classes curiously untouched. They continue in their routines of civilised luncheons,
letters to The Times, Academy paintings of sunsets and cows, and professional management. To escape them all, Septimus
commits suicide by leaping from a window.

A life-affirming pageant

Woolf had intended the party which ends the novel to express life in every variety & and full of anticipation; while S. dies.
For Clarissa, it is a happy occasion. Re-meeting the prosperous mother of five who had long ago been the object of her
schoolgirl crush, and talking to Peter Walsh, a restless immature man she might have married, she affirms the choices she
has made. The guests who gather in her bright home come from an upper-class London society that includes the pompous,
the frivolous, the narrow-minded and the snobbish, as well as some lost souls she has included out of kindness. Yet behind
their decorous faades, Woolf shows us their hidden memories and troubled feelings, especially fears of ageing and death;
and Clarissa senses the bravery of their performances. At the height of the party, she abruptly learns from Dr Bradshaw that
one of his patients, a young soldier, had killed himself that afternoon. Shocked at the news, she retreats to a little room to
meditate in solitude on the great unanswerable questions of meaning, mortality and purpose. She emerges with an
understanding of the party as a life-affirming communal pageant. The internal changes Clarissa undergoes during her day
mirror the transformations in her society. Despite its obsession with loneliness and death, Mrs Dalloway is a compassionate
and optimistic novel, ending as it begins, with a tribute to endurance, survival, fellowship and joy.
 Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway: A woman on the edge
Lesson rationale

Virginia Woolfs Mrs Dalloway is one of the most innovative novels in the history of the genre. In these activities, students
will use manuscript drafts, notebooks and essays to study Woolfs experimentation with form and use of language during the
lengthy process of composition. They will also consider the work in the context of post-First World War Britain, making
imaginative links with other aspects of modernism, and producing their own creative writing.

Key questions in this lesson:

o How does Woolf experiment with form and structure in her writing?
o How does Mrs Dalloway reflect the changes in society after the First World War?
o How does Woolfs writing link to other aspects of modernism?

Mrs Dalloway
In her fourth novel, Mrs Dalloway (1925), the English modernist writer Virginia Woolf took on the subject of the English
middle classes in the aftermath of the 191418 war. She noted in her diary that she wanted to give life & death, sanity &
insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense.

The form, as well as the content of the novel is quintessentially modern. Woolfs pioneering stream of consciousness
technique reflected her desire to show the multifaceted nature of consciousness and to capture the impact of the fast-
changing modern world on the psyche. A dream-like narrative carries the reader through a crowded city and into the minds
of different isolated individuals: we particularly focus on Mrs Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society lady and Septimus
Warren Smith, a shell-shocked young demobbed soldier. Like James Joyces Ulysses (1922), the action is primarily confined
to one day; in this case in June 1923.

The novel begins with the line Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself as she spends the day preparing for a
party, and ends with the party taking place in the evening, as she hears in passing of Septimuss suicide. Nevertheless, the
book takes us out of any strict temporal frame by incorporating moments of reminiscence from a number of characters.

From Septimuss past we learn that his social class ruled him out of going to university; he was one of those half-educated,
self-educated men whose education is all learnt from books borrowed from public libraries, and his desire to be a poet
ultimately led him to enlist in the army, as if to defend an idealised Shakespearean England. Woolfs treatment of the
psychiatric care he receives Septimus kills himself when he learns he is being committed to a sanatorium seems to draw
on her own experience of mental illness.

Mrs Dalloways more gentle, upper-class regrets and sense of isolation provide a kind of counter-rhythm. Her daughter,
Elizabeth, is inescapably symbolic of Clarissas own young womanhood, and she is reminded of paths in love and life she
didnt take by her old suitor Peter Walsh, and by Sally Seton, whom she once kissed, but has now married a provincial
businessman.

The novel has become one of Woolfs most famous works and one of the defining texts of literary modernism.

Mrs Dalloway and the First World War

Article by:David Bradshaw
Themes:Capturing and creating the modern, Literature 19001950, Power and conflict
Published:25 May 2016
Mrs Dalloway, which takes place on one day in June 1923, shows how the First World War continued to
affect those who had lived through it, five years after it ended. David Bradshaw explores the novel's
commemoration of the dead and evocations of trauma and mourning.

Set in June 1923, the First World War (191418) still hangs heavy in Mrs Dalloways hot London air, reinforcing how
for Virginia Woolf and her fellow Britons the trauma of the conflict was ongoing, its unprecedented devastation still raw and
ineradicable for the relatives, friends and loved ones of the unreturned. Time and again, the novel reveals how the myriad
anxieties and overwhelming grief of the war were etched into every aspect of post-war life. In its opening pages, for
example, we read that an aeroplane hovering over London creates unease in those beneath it because, even on such a
balmy summer day five years after the conclusion of hostilities, the sound of the plane can still ominously bring to mind the
German planes that had attacked the capital so terrifyingly during the war. [1] Equally, a glimpse of Mrs Foxcroft at the
Embassy last night still eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed (p. 4) in the war, and our knowledge that Miss
Kilman was dismissed from her teaching post during the conflict because of her German-sounding surname, only enrich our
sense of Mrs Dalloways status as, among other things, a war novel of towering importance: This late age of the worlds
experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears (p. 8); in all the hat shops and tailors shops strangers
looked at each other and thought of the dead. As the mysterious grey car glides through St. Jamess, it passes, among
other onlookers, orphans, widows, the War (p. 17).

Falling leaves and national commemoration

While it is obvious, however, that Mrs Dalloway is an eloquent condemnation of militarism and war, Woolf's fourth novel is
also a commemorative text which memorialises the war dead. In fact, at one point or another, every element of the post-war
culture of remembrance is evoked or brought into focus in the novel and, on each occasion, the official sites and rituals of
national mourning are treated with something akin to straightforward veneration, rather than satire or hostility, as if Woolf,
too, is acknowledging, in Hugh Whitbreads words, what we owe to the dead (p. 93). Indeed, there are moments of silent
observance in the text which are almost ceremonial in their reverence and dignity. So while the war dead throng the text and
a victim of shell shock is one of its central characters, more subtly, but just as scrupulously, the novel also commemorates
the fallen (p. 76) in ways which seem either to bring to mind or parallel the various rituals of remembrance which the
government had instituted after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. This is made absolutely clear in the way the boy soldiers,
who have just laid a wreath at the Cenotaph, enter Peter Walsh's consciousness as he walks up Whitehall:

A patter like the patter of leaves in a wood came from behind, and with it a rustling, regular thudding sound, which as it
overtook him drummed his thoughts, strict in step, up Whitehall Boys in uniform, carrying guns, marched with their eyes
ahead of them (p. 4)
Notebook drafts of Virginia
The arrestingly autumnal phrase with which this quotation begins attracts the reader's eye not least because we know
that Mrs Dalloway is set on an unusually hot summers day. Once we recall, however, that falling or fallen leaves are an
ancient literary symbol for the dead, Woolfs intention becomes clear. In effect, the marching boy soldiers are accompanied
by a march past of the war dead whose ranks they are being drilled to fill. In exploiting the fallen leaves topos, then, Woolf
not only problematises the boy soldiers presence in Whitehall by presaging their deaths in battle, but also, like Walsh,
augments their act of remembrance at the Cenotaph. This same topos is deployed a little further on when the crooning
battered woman opposite Regents Park tube station is likened to a wind-beaten tree for ever barren of leaves which lets
the wind run up and down its branches singing ... The old woman laments lost love at both a personal level and in terms of
the nation's collective sense of loss in the early 1920s, after death's enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills (p.
69). Significantly, as Walsh gives the woman a coin, the passing generations ... vanished, like leaves, to be trodden under,
to be soaked and steeped and made mould of ... (p. 70). Similarly, the fallen leaves imagery probably helps to explain why,
sitting in Regents Park, the grief-stricken Septimus Warren Smith becomes ever more convinced that leaves were alive,
trees were alive ... the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body (p. 19), and it also clarifies, no doubt,
why he believes Men must not cut down trees, and why the sparrows of central London sing to him in voices prolonged
and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death (p.
21). There is even a curious pattern like a tree (p. 13) on the blinds of the sumptuous grey car that travels down Bond
Street on its way to Buckingham Palace.[2]

Miss Kilman makes a poignant visit to the tomb of the Unknown Warrior (p. 113) in Westminster Abbey (her brother has
been killed in the war), but the most significant act of observance in the whole novel occurs as the sky-writing aeroplane
circles overhead:
All down the Mall people were standing and looking up into the sky. As they looked the whole world became perfectly silent,
and a flight of gulls crossed the sky, first one gull leading, then another, and in this extraordinary silence and peace, in this
pallor, in this purity, bells struck eleven times, the sound fading up there among the gulls (p. 18).

Mrs Dalloways 11 a.m. silence is surely the fictional counterpart of the annual 11 a.m. Silence, first observed in November
1919, which by 1925, when the novel was first published, had become a key feature of the Remembrance Sunday
ceremony. In the mind of Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, the man who came up with the idea of the Silence, its emphasis was not on
collective mourning, but on social integration, to remind us of the greater things we hold in common, [3] and this is also
Woolfs purpose at this point in a novel which is more generally concerned with exposing divisions, exclusions and
inequalities. A little further on, the novels 11 oclock silence is reprised when Big Ben strikes the half hour and Walsh looks
back to his meeting with Clarissa 30 minutes earlier:

As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; and falls on the mind. Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we
stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame. Where there is nothing, Peter Walsh said
to himself; feeling hollowed out, utterly empty within (p. 42).

As with so many words, phrases and descriptive passages in Mrs Dalloway, this excerpt, which recalls both the official
Silence and the Cenotaph (hollowed out, utterly empty within; the word cenotaph means empty tomb), lends itself to a
commemorative interpretation.

Monuments

The novel also makes its own contributions to the proliferation of war memorials, military statuary and commemorative
monuments that sprang up in the 1920s across the United Kingdom. For example, the description of the giant figure (p. 48)
of the grey nurse in Regents Park is noteworthy is this a ghostly allusion to Edith Cavell, the nurse executed by the
Germans in October 1915 for helping to save the lives of Allied soldiers? She morphs, in Peter Walshs Regents Park
dream, into the equally symbolic figure of an elderly woman who seems to seek a lost son; to search for a rider
destroyed; to be the figure of the mother whose sons have been killed in the battles of the world (p. 49). Likewise, as a
spectral Evans approaches Septimus in Regents Park, with legions of men prostrate behind him (p. 60), Septimus raises
his hand like some colossal figure (p. 59). Doris Kilman also assumes a statue-like monumentality at one point in the novel.
Waiting for Elizabeth Dalloway as they prepare to go to the Army and Navy Stores for tea, Miss Kilman is described as
standing with the power and taciturnity of some prehistoric monster armoured for primeval warfare (p. 106), while, on her
way home from the Strand, the heat gives Elizabeth Dalloways cheeks the pallor of white painted wood; and her fine eyes,
having no eyes to meet, gazed ahead, blank, bright, with the staring, incredible innocence of sculpture (p. 115). Peter Walsh
thinks that old Miss Parry would always stand up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse (p. 138),
whereas Clarissa, on the other hand, is a pale and depleted semi-invalid who spends her solitary nights in a narrow bed with
tight white sheets restricting her movement almost as if she has been trussed up like a battlefield casualty. Clarissa is
almost certainly a victim of the influenza pandemic of 191820, but she is also to be one of the novels lingering wraiths:
Since her illness she had turned almost white (p. 31). Even so, her meeting with Peter Walsh has a suppressed air of
violence about it Peter fingering his penknife and Clarissa armed with her scissors.

The Battle of Vittorio Veneto

Septimus and Evans, who was killed, just before the Armistice, in Italy (p. 73), were almost certainly blown up during the
Battle of Vittorio Veneto, which took place in the mountains of northern Italy and which concluded as late as 4 November
1918 (the Armistice was declared on 11 November). The tragedy of Evanss death and Septimuss torment, therefore, is
only heightened by the readers awareness that this battle was almost wholly pointless, with the outcome of the war already
decided. The mountainous location of this futile engagement also helps to explain why, alone with the sideboard and the
bananas in his Bloomsbury accommodation, Septimus reflects that he is not on a hill-top; not on a crag; [but] on Mrs
Filmers sitting-room sofa ... Where he had once seen mountains ... there was a screen (p. 123). And we can also see that
when Clarissa asks herself, just after thinking her party will be a failure, Why seek pinnacles and stand drenched in fire? (p.
142), her peculiar turn of phrase is drawn directly from the craggy warfare of the Italian Front, and is another of the
numerous thoughts and experiences she shares with Septimus. [4] And an appreciation of the whereabouts of Evanss death
also enriches Rezias recollection of a flag slowly rippling out from a mast when she stayed with her aunt at Venice. Men
killed in battle were thus saluted ... (p. 127).

But is Septimuss distress wholly attributable to the trauma of his experience of war? Possibly, but it is more than likely that
he is also crippled with grief and guilt (homosexuality was only decriminalised in England and Wales in 1967) about his
powerful, homoerotic feelings for Evans, sentiments which saturate his tortured mind in 1923. Moreover, the recurrence of
Greek allusions and references, like the sparrows singing in Greek quoted above, in the passages in which Evans and
Septimus are in focus, offer further evidence that Woolf wished to represent their relationship as having a homoerotic charge
 reminiscent of that between the young Clarissa and Sally Seton (pp. 2730).[5] So although Septimuss anguished repression
is most obviously a symptom of what the eminent neurologist and psychiatrist W H R Rivers called The Repression of War
Experience, and what became more generally known as shell shock, it is also a harrowing legacy of his intimacy with
Evans.

Spectres of war

Finally, we should take note of how so many of the descriptions of day-to-day life in the novel are couched in military
language or language that could be readily applied to military exploits. For example, the verb plunge on the first page of the
novel (see also p. 32, where Clarissa is observed plunging her hand into her wardrobe) is a word that is often collocated
with the wielding of a bayonet or knife, but here it is used to describe an act of defenestration that anticipates Septimuss
suicidal plunge. Similarly, on page 10, we read that Miss Kilmans soul is rusted with that grievance sticking in it, her
dismissal from school during the War, as if her sense of injustice were a lump of battlefield shrapnel, while for Clarissa,
Doris Kilman is one of those spectres with which one battles in the night (p. 10). Elsewhere we read that in the West End of
London the spirit of religion was abroad with her eyes bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide (p. 12), as if it has been
gassed.[6] Richard Dalloway returns to Clarissa from the lunch-party of Lady Bruton (a spectral grenadier (p. 152)) [b]earing
his flowers like a weapon (p. 99) and thinking of the war, and thousands of poor chaps, with all their lives before them,
shovelled together, already half forgotten (p. 98), leaving his hostess to dream of commanding battalions marching to
Canada (p.95), while in the Army and Navy Stores, Elizabeth guides Miss Kilman as if she had been a great child, an
unwieldy battleship (p. 110). As Elizabeth travels home on her bus, the wind blows a thin black veil over the sun and over
the Strand (p.117) like a vast funeral pall. A little further on, Peter Walsh thinks of London thrusting her bayonets (p. 137),
i.e. electric street lights, into the sky, just as earlier in the novel Lucy, Clarissas maid, handles her parasol like a sacred
weapon (p. 25).

Jacobs Room (1922) and To the Lighthouse (1927), the two novels that book-end Mrs Dalloway, are also, to a certain
extent, war novels, but neither is so steeped in the conflict and its grief-stricken aftermath as the novel they enfold. Indeed,
as a fictional account of the impact of the First World War on British society and the way military music (p. 117) still
resounds within Londons streets and messages continue to be transmitted from the Fleet to the Admiralty (p. 6) it is
unmatched.

Footnotes

[1] Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, ed. by David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford Worlds Classics, 2000), p. 17. All subsequent
page references are to this edition.

[2] For more on this aspect of the novel, see David Bradshaw, Vanished, Like Leaves: The Military, Elegy and Italy in Mrs
Dalloway, Woolf Studies Annual, 8 (2002), pp. 10725.

[3] Quoted in Adrian Gregory, The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day 19191946 (Oxford and Providence, Rhode Island:
Berg, 1994), p. 9.

[4] See Mrs Dalloway, pp. xxxivxlii.

[5] See Mrs Dalloway, pp. xxxvxxxviii.

[6] See, for example, this 1919 picture by John Singer Sargent.

Mrs Dalloway: exploring consciousness and the modern

world
Article by:Elaine Showalter
Themes:Literature 19001950, Capturing and creating the modern
Published:25 May 2016
Elaine Showalter describes how, in Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf uses stream of consciousness to
enter the minds of her characters and portray cultural and individual change in the period following the
First World War.
Like James Joyces Ulysses, Virginia Woolfs Mrs Dalloway (1925) is a novel set on a single day in a city in the middle of
June. Woolf, who was re-reading Ulysses when she began to write her own book, chose 13 June 1923, in London; Joyce
had selected 16 June 1904, in Dublin. But in making her central figure an upper-class middle-aged woman, married to a
Conservative MP, Woolf staked out her own fictional ground. Unlike Joyces characters, Clarissa Dalloway is not
mythologised, and the stages of her day are not compared to a classical epic. Indeed, by emphasising her heroines marital
status in the title, Woolf draws our attention to the way Mrs Dalloway is an ordinary woman of her time, defined in terms of
her husband, her identity submerged in his, even her first name erased by her social signature. Clarissa begins her day
shopping for flowers for her party that evening, and thinking 'What a lark!' Its easy to see her as superficial and slight. Yet
following her thoughts, memories, anxieties and epiphanies from morning to night on the day when she is preparing to give a
large party, and entering the minds of the people she passes or meets, we see a broad and deep cross section of London,
five years after the Armistice.

Capturing the impact of cultural change

Woolf used Clarissa to explore the personal impact of cultural change, from the new technologies of automobiles, airplanes
and movies, to the new openness of marital and sexual relationships and the beginnings of political upheaval. In planning
the novel, Woolf had wished to criticise the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense. [1] Five years have
passed since the Armistice, and Peter Walsh, returning for the first time since the war, is struck by the changes: People
looked different. Newspapers seemed different. There are major changes in English society as well. Alex Zwerdling has
argued that indeed Mrs Dalloway is a sharply critical examination of the governing class at the turning-point of its power. In
1923, there were two Conservative prime ministers Bonar Law, who resigned because of ill health, and Stanley Baldwin,
who succeeded him in May but in January 1924 the party was voted out, and Ramsay MacDonald would become the first
Labour prime minister. Clarissa's class 'is living on borrowed time. Its values are under attack the empire was
crumbling fast. Woolf also wanted to connect the class system and the gender system, linking the subordination of the
working class to the subordination of women. In a famous essay called Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1924), she argued that
since 1920, all human relations have shifted those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and
children. And when human relations change, there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and
literature.[2]Neither character nor these relationships, she maintained, could be sufficiently represented by the literary
conventions of the Edwardians, such as reliance on material evidence and external fact. For us, she dramatically asserts,
those conventions are ruin, those tools are death.

Stream of consciousness

The method she used, the representation of the stream of consciousness, reflected her need to go beyond the clumsiness of
the factual realism in the novels of her Edwardian precursors, such as Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy, and find a more
sensitive, artistic and profound way to represent character, an effort shared with her contemporaries D H Lawrence, Dorothy
Richardson, Katherine Mansfield and Marcel Proust. In the 1920s, psychoanalysis was uncovering a multi-layered self in
which dreams, memories and fantasies were as important as actions and thought. (The Hogarth Press, run by Virginia and
her husband Leonard Woolf, began to publish an English translation of Freud in 1921.) Philosophers were describing the
self as the receiver of a tumult of sensations. Cubist artists combined multiple perspectives on their subjects to add an extra
dimension to each of their paintings. Woolf believed that the omniscient narrator of the 19th-century novel had to be
replaced by a narration from multiple perspectives as well; many points of view and many voices should be included. She
was intrigued by the new medium of film, and her narrative technique is very cinematic, including flashbacks, montage, rapid
cuts and panning between various characters as they respond to an external event, such as the aeroplane overhead. (The
novel is historically accurate in its references; the first skywriter appeared in London in August 1922.) Woolf tunnelled into
the memories and associations of each character to give them depth, and to bring the past into a single-day novel.
 Modernism in Literature: Quick Overview
written by: Trent Lorcher edited by: Wendy Finn updated: 3/22/2015

Don't confuse the Modernists movement with the standard dictionary definition of modern. Modernism in Literature is not a chronological designation; rather it
consists of literary work possessing certain loosely defined characteristics.

What is Modernism?

The following are characteristics of Modernism:

Marked by a strong and intentional break with tradition. This break includes a strong reaction against established religious, political, and social views.
Belief that the world is created in the act of perceiving it; that is, the world is what we say it is.
There is no such thing as absolute truth. All things are relative.
No connection with history or institutions. Their experience is that of alienation, loss, and despair.
Championship of the individual and celebration of inner strength.
Life is unordered.
Concerned with the sub-conscious.

British & Irish Modernism

The horrors of World War I (1914-19), with its accompanying atrocities and senselessness became the catalyst for the Modernist movement in literature and art.
Modernist authors felt betrayed by the war, believing the institutions in which they were taught to believe had led the civilized world into a bloody conflict. They no
longer considered these institutions as reliable means to access the meaning of life, and therefore turned within themselves to discover the answers.

Their antipathy towards traditional institutions found its way into their writing, not just in content, but in form. Popular British Modernists include the following:

James Joyce (from Dublin, Ireland) - His most experimental and famous work, Ulysses, completely abandons generally accepted notions of plot, setting, and
characters.
Ford Madox Ford - The Good Soldier examines the negative effects of war.
Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse, as well, strays from conventional forms, focusing on Stream of Consciousness.
Stevie Smith - Novel on Yellow Paper parodies conventionality.
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World protests against the dangers and nature of modern society.
D.H. Lawrence - His novels reflected on the dehumanizing effect of modern society.
T.S. Eliot - Although American, Eliot's The Wasteland is associated with London and emphasizes the emptiness of Industrialism.

American Modernism

The Main Characteristics of Modernist LiLiterature

scholars differ over the years that encompass the Modernist period, however most generally agree that
modernist authors published as early as the 1880s and into the mid-1940s. During this period, society at every
level underwent profound changes. War and industrialization seemed to devalue the individual. Global
communication made the world a smaller place. The pace of change was dizzying. Writers responded to this
new world in a variety of ways.
Individualism
In Modernist literature, the individual is more interesting than society. Specifically, modernist writers were
fascinated with how the individual adapted to the changing world. In some cases, the individual triumphed over
obstacles. For the most part, Modernist literature featured characters who just kept their heads above water.
Writers presented the world or society as a challenge to the integrity of their characters. Ernest Hemingway is
especially remembered for vivid characters who accepted their circumstances at face value and persevered.
Experimentation
Modernist writers broke free of old forms and techniques. Poets abandoned traditional rhyme schemes and
wrote in free verse. Novelists defied all expectations. Writers mixed images from the past with modern
languages and themes, creating a collage of styles. The inner workings of consciousness were a common
subject for modernists. This preoccupation led to a form of narration called stream of consciousness, where the
point of view of the novel meanders in a pattern resembling human thought. Authors James Joyce and Virginia
Woolf, along with poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, are well known for their experimental Modernist works.
Absurdity
The carnage of two World Wars profoundly affected writers of the period. Several great English poets died or
were wounded in WWI. At the same time, global capitalism was reorganizing society at every level. For many
writers, the world was becoming a more absurd place every day. The mysteriousness of life was being lost in
the rush of daily life. The senseless violence of WWII was yet more evidence that humanity had lost its way.
Modernist authors depicted this absurdity in their works. Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," in which a
traveling salesman is transformed into an insect-like creature, is an example of modern absurdism.
Symbolism
The Modernist writers infused objects, people, places and events with significant meanings. They imagined a
reality with multiple layers, many of them hidden or in a sort of code. The idea of a poem as a riddle to be
cracked had its beginnings in the Modernist period. Symbolism was not a new concept in literature, but the
Modernists' particular use of symbols was an innovation. They left much more to the reader's imagination than
earlier writers, leading to open-ended narratives with multiple interpretations. For example, James Joyce's
"Ulysses" incorporates distinctive, open-ended symbols in each chapter.
Formalism
Writers of the Modernist period saw literature more as a craft than a flowering of creativity. They believed that
poems and novels were constructed from smaller parts instead of the organic, internal process that earlier
generations had described. The idea of literature as craft fed the Modernists' desire for creativity and originality.
Modernist poetry often includes foreign languages, dense vocabulary and invented words. The poet e.e.
cummings abandoned all structure and spread his words all across the page.

Modern Novels
he 20th century is divided into two phases of literature--modern literature (1900-1945) and contemporary
literature (1945 to the present), also referred to as postmodern. The characters in modern and contemporary
novels questioned the existence of God, the supremacy of the human reason, and the nature of reality. Novels
from this era reflected great events such as The Great Depression, World War II, Hiroshima, the cold war and
communism. Famous modern novels include "To The Lighthouse" (1927) by English novelist and essayist
Virginia Woolf; "Ulysses" (1921), by Irish novelist and short story writer James Joyce; "All Quiet on the Western
Front" (1929), the most famous World War I anti-war novel by German novelist and journalist Erich Maria
Remarque and "The Sound and the Fury" (1929) by American novelist and short story writer William Faulkner,
which depicts the decline of the South after the Civil War.