Virginia Woolfs Modernist Writing - Essay Example

Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Writing Adeline Virginia Stephen, the woman who would be immortalized as Virginia Woolf the great modernist writer, was born on January 25, 1882 in London to father Leslie Stephen and mother Julia Margaret Cameron. Her father was greatly involved in letters and philanthropy, two issues that would become important to Woolf’s later work. “Virginia was allowed uncensored access to her father’s extensive library, and from an early age determined to be a writer. Her education was sketchy and she never went to school” (Clarke, 2000). She also had eight brothers, sisters, half-brothers and half-sisters, all of whom grew up together in Kensington until Virginia’s mother died in 1895. This death marked the first of many mental collapses Virginia suffered through her life, the next to strike when her father died in 1904. She started her career as a reviewer and later began publishing her own works as well as the works of others through the Hogarth Press, which she started with her husband. In addition, she continued meeting with the Bloomsbury Group, a group of writers brought together by Virginia’s brother Thoby, who died in 1906. To understand how she was instrumental in bringing definition and form to the Modernist literary movement, it is necessary to understand the major events that helped shape the viewpoints of these writers and how they began to communicate these ideas, generally and specifically as it is seen in Woolf’s short works “Mark on the Wall”, “Modern Fiction” and “A Room’s of One’s Own.” The years during which Woolf lived were chaotic times politically and socially. World War I (1914-1918) had shaken the world to its roots, introducing numerous new concepts in social order, technology, modern urban issues and new ways of looking at the world. Nearly all of Europe was devastated during the First World War and spent much of this time trying to regroup, rebuild and move past the destruction. People were experiencing a great deal of alienation and isolation as a result of these issues, but all was not black. New ideas brought forward by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung were changing the way we thought about ourselves while scientific discoveries were busy linking humans to apes through evolution and philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Heidegger were changing the way we thought about thought. Walter Gropius, the German architect, founded the Bauhaus, a group of artisans who were committed to innovative use of materials and celebration of the artistry in the individual (“Timeline”, 2007). With their necessary involvement in the war effort, women finally began realizing how valuable they were as citizens and had begun fighting for individual rights. The wonder of moving pictures was developed and, with the inclusion of sound, became a tremendous means of communication. However, these venues for positive social change or new expression were also tremendous means of influence. Benito Mussolini emerged in Italy in 1922, enforcing total control of the media and fully utilizing propaganda to gain and retain absolute control. Just before Virginia Woolf died, Adolf Hitler was cementing his hold over Germany, using many of the same propagandistic techniques introduced by Mussolini, and was working towards world domination in beginning World War II. All of these conflicting issues and ideas provided fertile grounds for literary exploration in the movement now known as Modernism. Modernists represented a tremendous shift in the way in which the world was viewed primarily in terms of man’s relationship to nature, the source of meaning and the concept of what it truly means to be ‘savage’. In contrast to the Victorian ideals of forcing nature to fall into line with conceptions of gentility and order, the revelations brought forward by Charles Darwin led the Modernists to realize that man was a part of nature as was every other creature on the planet and therefore had a responsibility to protect it rather than subjugate it. In this realization, they also concluded that there was more than one way to look at the world and more complexities than mere classification could account for. “They argued for multiple ways of looking at the world, and blurred the Victorian dichotomies by presenting antiheroes, uncategorizable persons, and anti-art movements like Dada” (Lavender, 2000). The advances of science as well as the devastation of the war led many to believe there was no God, the world was what one perceived it to be. As a natural conclusion of this kind of thinking, it was determined that man was what he chose to make of himself, an idea that was furthered by the failure of many of the noble houses and the rise of a great deal of the middle class as the world rebuilt. Finally, after witnessing the carnage and brutality of the war, the Modernist period is characterized by a general disdain for the concept of the ‘civilized’ as it was applied to those individuals who lived a Western lifestyle. “Modernists presented the Victorian ‘civilized’ as greedy and warmongering, as hypocrites and as enemies of freedom and self-realization. Those that the Victorians had dismissed as ‘savages’ the Modernists saw as being the truly civilized – responsible users of their environments, unselfish and family-oriented, generous, creative, mystical and full of wonder, and egalitarian” (Lavender, 2000). In her story “The Mark on the Wall” (1985), Woolf engages the audience through a semi-structured stream-of-conscious narrative that epitomizes many of these concepts of Modernism. She acknowledges that this is a story as it is seen from a single person’s perspective and tries to bring the reader into that perspective by giving them the impression of being ‘inside’ her mind. This is particularly evident as she continues to allow the ‘train of thought’ to jump the track and work its way through sometimes only tangentially related ideas. Using this technique, she is able to demonstrate not only the subjective nature of the universe, but is also able to explore the natural world as it exists within the mind, allowing a natural wandering that is inspired by nature itself as she contemplates a mark on the wall that might just be a small rose leaf left over from a season or two ago and becomes distracted by a tree branch tapping on her window. She further illustrates the beauty of the natural world as compared to the ugliness of the modern world as she discusses the ways in which the mind works to protect its image of itself. “Suppose the looking-glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people – what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes!” Thus in this one short story about little more than a mysterious mark she observes on her wall one evening, Woolf is able to combine the various hallmarks of Modern writing – the importance of nature to the life of the human, the search for meaning within oneself rather than from some omnipotent higher being and the aggrandizement of the savage above the ugliness of the civilized. In “Modern Fiction” (1985), Woolf is acting more as the critic of her contemporaries rather than a writer of short stories. She seems particularly put out with fellow writers Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett for their preoccupation with the material side of their art and enjoying the fruits that it brought them because it clouds the very essence of what writing should pursue. Reflecting the Modern thinking, she indicated that the entire purpose and goal of writing should be to discover Life and pass along these discoveries to readers. “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” (“Modern Fiction”, 1985). Although she recognizes that writing and life take on a cyclical nature, there are always differences, always different ways of expressing it, always different ways of experiencing it, and it is in these differences that the true brilliance of writing lays. Her criticism of her predecessors thus stems from their seemingly utter disregard for the spirit of what they are doing. “She claims that when they look in the mirror, they see the body and not the spirit” (Karr, 2002). In other words, she claims that these authors write “of unimportant things; that they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring” (“Modern Fiction”, 1985). Throughout the article, then, she outlines those aspects of Victorian writing that are unsatisfactory for the modern world, at the same time emphasizing what writing should be and why it should be that way. This opens up the floor for a variety of literary expressions which are exemplified in her own fictional writing as her characters take on the very complexities, motivations and subjective natures that she highlights within this work. Woolf tackles the subject of the female voice in her essay “A Room of One’s Own” (2000). The basic argument she presents here is not that women write according to a materialistic style or that women necessarily must pursue material possessions if they wish their voices to be heard. Instead, she makes a case that the only way in which women’s voices are going to be heard in literary circles is if they are freed of the daily grind of civilized living through the provision of a living income and a room in which they can work unmolested by children, maids, husbands and others who continually place demands on their time. In addition, she criticizes the female writers that have come before her for placing their own agendas in their works rather than allowing their characters to explore the various sides of the issues presented. She indicates that Charlotte Bronte, for instance, “will write of herself where she should write of her characters” (“A Room”, 2000). The written novel should reflect the ideas that are held, but should do so in keeping with the characters involved, their knowledge and their explorations as they are contrasted with the thoughts, actions and knowledge of the other characters. As she described in “Modern Fiction”, the aim of the novelist is to present the real in all its shifting, unformed, subjective reality. More than simply calling into question the styles of writing of the past, Woolf seems to be indicating that the absence of the female voice in the process, until very recently, has led to an unnatural suppression of what the true goal and aim of writing should be. Recognizing that the modern world cannot be defined in simple terms, she illustrates through her creation of Judith Shakespeare, how the female voice has been suppressed and begins to question what other voices might have been suppressed in the general course of human history, in which only the wealthy white men have had the opportunity and the leisure to say what they wanted to say. Through these three short pieces, the work of Virginia Woolf can be seen to serve as both criticisms and examples of what she felt true writing should be which is exactly in line with the ideals and efforts of many writers of the Modern period. She illustrates how the world is full of subjective opinions and viewpoints and that it should be presented in this way so as to fully explore the spirituality of reality rather than simply the outward trappings. It is recognized that there have been several voices left out of the written canon, particularly those of women and of minorities, both of whom had been subjugated beyond all knowledge even into the Victorian age immediately preceding Woolf’s time. These writings supported and exemplified the ideals of the Modern literary movement in that they focused on the subjective nature of reality, emphasized the importance of nature and inner being and praised the savage who remained firmly attached to his natural ways of doing things over the civilized man who was bent on establishing a single idealized definition on the world whether it was true, harsh, violent or reductive. While all of these concepts can be seen to be the direct result of one of the world’s more difficult periods, they can also be seen to have produced some of the world’s greater advancements in terms of establishing greater variety, acceptability and depth of field. Works Cited Clarke, S.N. “Virginia Woolf (1882-1941): A Short Biography.” Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain. (2000). August 2, 2007 Karr, Jonathan. “A Room of One’s Own and Modern Fiction.” Women Writers. (2002). August 2, 2007 “Timeline: 1882.” KidsWeek. (2007). August 2, 2007 Woolf, Virginia. “A Room of One’s Own.” The Longman Anthology of Women’s Literature. Mary K. DeShazer (Ed.). New York: Longman, 2000, pp. 16-72. Woolf, Virginia. “(The) Mark on the Wall.” The Virginia Woolf Reader. Mitchell A. Leaska (Ed.). New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1985, pp. 251-259. Woolf, Viginia. “Modern Fiction.” The Virginia Woolf Reader. Mitchell A. Leaska (Ed.). New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1985, pp. 284-291. Read More