Tradition and Innovation in

Modernist English
Literature

Name: Gnga Maria

Year: IIIrd
Group: English Romanian

Most frequently, the philosophical movement named Modernism, i.e. the period between the
late 19th century and the early 20th century, is described as the period that breaks from
traditions, that divorces the past, and frees itself from philosophical, moral, religious, and
artistic traditions. The changes from the late Victorian world occurred at an unprecedented
speed. In the Victorian age, the center of the social system was represented by the monarch
and the court. With the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, followed by the one of King Edward
in 1910, the rupture from the feeling of stability, continuity, and tradition that characterized
the Victorian era was perceived even stronger. this is the end of greatness for Britain, says
one character from the trilogy Forsyte Saga referring to the end of a historical period, of glory
and power. In Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, which can be considered one of the most
influential work of the time, V. Woolf says that human character changed. When this
happens, she says, there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and
literature. With the outbreak of the First World War, the world became even more
fragmented, and religious and moral ideologies were breaking down. War inspired many
artists in the first half of the 20 th century and its effects are reflected in the writings of the
time. What the modernists did was to embrace that fragmentation and transform it into
aesthetic value.
A number of influential works of great personalities had had a very strong impact and had left
their mark on the beliefs and creeds of the era. One of these works was Charles Darwin`s
Origin of Species, in which he introduced the theory of evolution through which he denies the
creationist doctrine, the God-like origin of man. Thus, the supreme authority was no longer
God. People`s view of the world receive another blow with the theory of Freud that says that
the human being is inherently split, has a split personality. Freud divides the psychic into three
layers: ED, EGO, and SUPER-EGO. This trinity replaces the Holy Trinity of the church, and
here again we see the supreme authority somehow put aside. This will become for the
modernist writers the territories they will explore: the most hidden corners of the human
mind, proposing an entirely new approach. Therefore, what distinguishes the modernist
writers from the previous generations is their interest in the dark places of psychology. Other
names must also be taken into consideration, such as Karl Marx, who shows in his writings
that human society is no longer based on harmony, but on competition, rivalry, which created
doubt and tension in the mind of the individual Albert Einstein with his very well-known
theory of relativity, showing that things and phenomena cannot be seen from only one point of

view; the French philosopher, Henri Bergson, defines and theorizes the distinction between
chronologic and subjective time in his Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data
of Consciousness (the modernists were interested in the subjective, personal time which
expresses the never-ending flux of feelings and sensations); Max Planck, the creator of the
quantum theory who says that the universe is actually discontinuous (matter reflected in the
fictional universe of the modern literature: discontinuous, abrupt, with rough edges). D. H.
Lawrence`s fictional universe is an intensely dichotomized one: rural vs. industrial, individual
vs. community, convention vs. realism.
The new setting of the modern fiction changes its emphasis from the rural to the urban
experience. Although some of the characters from the novels of the time were still attached to
their rural roots, having a nostalgic feeling for birthplaces, the awareness that the pastoral was
in some way outmoded reflected stronger. For instance, Clarissa Dalloway, even if she still
feels attached to Bourton, she loves motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling
and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; the triumph and the jingle and the strange high
singing of some airplane overhead. For Peter Walsh, life in London is like the pulse of a
perfect heart, and Septimus Warren sees London as an abstract collage of natural elements,
looking like Van Gogh`s Postimpressionist paintings. The modernist artists tried to embrace
and capture all this chaos and disorder that the city stood for. In Mrs. Dalloway, the
appearance of the plane in the sky symbolizes the technology and progress that can be found
in the city, and that dazes the mind. This new climate was the result of the rapid rhythm of
industrialization and technological progress, which became the setting of modern art. The
same impact of technology upon the characters can be seen in Lawrence`s fictional universe.
A thematic focus of the early 20 th century literature was given to the impact of imperialism.
Writers such as Joyce and Forster saw the imperial situation and colonialism as being central
political facts. In literature, the fall of the empire is reflected through Virginia Woolf`s
character, Percival, from The Waves. He was described by the critics as an absent center
through whom the author wanted to suggest that empires were collapsing. James Joyce tried
to question the authority of the Catholic Church, the political authority of England, and
England`s cultural authority imposed through language. The quarrel with the Catholic Church
appears both in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in Ulysses: Mulligan`s parody of
the Mass and Stephen`s refusal to kneel and pray by his dying mother`s bed.

Another important issue of the time was the status of the woman, i.e. woman`s identity in a
world dominated by the oppressive power of man. Virginia Woolf, being both a modernist and
a feminist, spoke in her essay A Room of One`s Own about the need for emancipation and
freedom of women who were viewed as the passive part in many fields, including culture and
arts, as opposed to men. Woolf highlights the power given to the masculine figure in the scene
from To the Lighthouse in which Mr. Ramsay gazes at his wife and wonders what she was
reading, and exaggerated her ignorance , her simplicity, for he liked to think that she was not
clever, not book-learned at all. He wondered if she understood what she was reading.
Probably not, he thought. This scene reflects very clearly the submissive and inferior
position of the wife in relation to her husband, the intellectual man. Her reading activity is not
taken seriously, what her husband notices is her beauty: She was astonishingly beautiful. Her
beauty seemed to him, if that was possible, to increase. The same undermining of the women
intellect is seen in Mrs. Dalloway: She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely
read a book now, except memoirs in bed. Nevertheless, what these two characters from V.
Woolf`s novels possess is intuition, which surpasses whatever else they may lack. Feminine
intuition is what helps Lily Briscoe, the painter in the novel, realize that the legacy that Mrs.
Ramsay left was the capability of making beautiful moments last. After years of struggling
with the conception that women can`t paint, at the end of the novel she finally has her
vision and completes her painting.
As it was mentioned previously, the war was one of the major sources used in the writings of
the early 20th century, its destructing effects being one of the most important themes. In Mrs.
Dalloway, the victim of war in the character of Septimus stands for the thousands of victims
from WWI. Septimus Warren Smith is a perfect example of the war`s influence upon the
individual, affirming that the world itself is without meaning. This theme also appears in
her second great work, To the Lighthouse, by the use of the second section Time passes which
is described as a corridor that unites the other two sections. This section in which a period
of ten years is compressed is seen as a fissure in the book, just as war is seen in history. The
modernist writers, such as Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence Huxley, T. S. Elliot etc., are characterized
by a sense of loss and alienation due to war and colonialism.
The modern artist appears in the literary universe of the time as an important figure. Joyce
portrays the artist through the words of Stephen Dedalus: like the God of the creation,
remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of
existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails. He embraces a rebellious artistic attitude: I will

not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland or
my church. The artist finds refuge and balance in exile from everything that surrounds him:
family, people that limit his world, religion, obsolete beliefs and so on. Through Stephen,
James Joyce illustrates the epiphany, i.e. the arresting moments of intense experience when
things are revealed in their very essence. Such a moment is for Stephen when he sees the
beautiful girl wading at the beach and decides to let go of religion and what were thought to
be moral values and embrace beauty as an aesthetic value. Other instances of the artist appear
in Bernard, the novelist from The Waves who raises tough questions with which Woolf herself
had to deal, and Philip Quarles, another novelist within the novel Point Counter Point by
Adolf Huxley, who writes in a notebook reflections that the author himself finds difficult to
answer.
Both Joyce and Woolf have in their novels elements from the impressionistic mode. The
emphasis in their novels is no longer put on the things the characters perceive, but on the
process of perception, using an established technique in the period: the stream of
consciousness. The writers are no longer interested in following the traditional cause effect
pattern as concerns the narrative, but they have an accumulation of events in their works.
Joyce went as far as to abandon all punctuation marks in the last part of Ulysses, and let
Molly`s monologue continue on the last forty pages of the novel.
As opposed to the traditional writers, the modernists managed to pull out the readers from
their status of passive participants, and make them participate actively in the reading; the
birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author, says Roland Barthes in
Image-Music-Text.
I think that with all the changes that occurred during the 20 th century literature had entered
Modernism speaking a new kind of language, lively, more dynamic and complex. The readers
do not encounter the omniscient narrator any longer and the external analysis of the
protagonist`s actions, but they have direct access to the character`s mind, fears, feelings, and
thoughts. The stress is no longer put on the what, but on the how, meaning that the subject is
not the important thing, but the way in which the author tells it. Every subject can be valid
and interesting, not only the major events in our lives, but also the trivial through which
people can have access to the character`s consciousness. Thus, the modernist novel is able to
locate the enormous within the everyday. In The Modern Movement, Virginia Woolf says:
Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace

the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident
scores upon the consciousness. For instance, novels like Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses tell us
that even an ordinary day can hide a lifetime of memories. Joyce let the quotidian enter so
deeply in his novel that it stirred scandal and was banned in Britain and in the US. Writers like
E. M. Foster, in his A Passage to India, still focuses on action, presenting the cultural
diversity of two different peoples.

References:
Bdulescu, Dana. Early 20th Century British Fiction
Burlui, Irina. Lectures on the 20th century British Literature
Wikipedia.ro
Scribd.ro
http://biblioteca.regielive.ro/cursuri/engleza/english-modernism-168717.html
http://www.bookblog.ro/articole-speciale/modernismul-intre-divin-si-uman/