Virginia Woolfs modernity

- Virginia Woolf has long been celebrated as an innovative novelist and a radical thinker who
broke with the aesthetics of earlier generations and challenged their values; some critics
have even suggested that she anticipated ideas and approaches which emerged long after her
time.

- modern fiction needed to break from previous conventions in order to express modern life
properly; question: what is reality and how to capture it in fiction? How can character and
identity be constructed and how to represent the minds conscious and unconscious depths?

- the traditional representation of a characters social development is renounced for the

expression of his or her individual psychological being, the external description of scene for
the internal revelation of consciousness, and chronological narrative and dramatic plot for
the flux of momentary thoughts and impressions that constitute mental life A focus on the
subjective consciousness of the individual mind has become one of the defining features of
the modernist novel = the stream of consciousness technique (the stream of thought) = a
metaphor used originally to describe the way thoughts flow in the mind, but quickly
appropriated as a term for the literary technique that attempts to translate them into narrative
form = conveying the continuous flow of sense-perceptions, thoughts, feelings, memories

- the stream of consciousness technique has been influenced by the ideas that dominated
psychological and philosophical thought at the beginning of the twentieth century (the
impact of the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and by ideas of the French philosopher
Henri Bergson); Bergsons theory of duration (linked to the concept of memory): dif. bet.
Time as it is perceived by ones consciousness / subjective mind and Clock-time / Calendar-
time (arbitrary/artificially created / standardized); the subjective mind / consciousness
experiences Time as a flow, as a continuum in which past and present intermingle or even
melt into each other = duration. The rational mind can only comprehend time by organizing
it into measurable, standardized units that is spatializing the real time of duration into
clock-time. In other words, time exists only as duration whereas the clock or the calendar
are only convenient means for human beings to refer to it. (ask a bird: What time is it?)
In terms of memory: mirroring the distinction he makes bet. clock-time and real time =
duration, he argues there are two types of memory: habit memory (in which the mind
repeats consciously to itself a scene, an event) and pure memory = contemplation, it is
revealed only in dreams, it is unconscious one can reach it through intuition. (Bergson
claimed that his theories anticipated the works of Albert Einstein, mainly his concept of
relativity)

- V.W. knew about Bergsons theories from her companions in the Bloomsbury group (an
early title for the novel The Hours); she herself drew the distinction bet. time on the
clock and time in the mind. Although the novel takes place during one day in June 1923,
as Clarissa Dalloway prepares for her evening party, it shifts constantly back to the summer
many years before when as a young girl she had been kissed on the lips by her friend Sally
and rejected a proposal of marriage from her ardent suitor Peter Walsh. Transported back to
the past by the freshness of the present morning, Clarissa feels both at one with and
irrevocably separated from her former self, aware that to have accepted Peter would have
smothered her but also sensing that in choosing instead the reliable and undemanding
Richard Dalloway her life, while socially successful, has become internally sterile, the flush
of feeling evoked by Sallys kiss never repeated.
 - Mrs. Dalloway, despite what the title suggests, presents the thoughts and perceptions not of
one consciousness but of several. To do this, W. allows her characters to share the same
spatial or temporal occurrence: the chiming of Big Ben (standardized time) that draws for a
moment the attention of disparate figures in the city streets, the prime ministers car or the
aeroplane drawing an advertisement in the sky by creating common and recurring mental
images and phrases that serve to link even characters who never meet, such as Clarissa and
the shell-shocked Septimus Smith.

Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway (Fragments)

For having lived in Westminsterhow many years now? over twenty, one feels even in the midst
of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an
indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza)
before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.
The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For
Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one,
tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries
sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; cant be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts
of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In peoples eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge;
in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling
and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing
of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the
Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor
House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram
in her hand, John, her favourite, killed; but it was over; thank Heavenover. It was June. The King
and Queen were at the Palace. And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a
stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it;
wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind
them, and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies, whose forefeet just struck the
ground and up they sprung, the whirling young men, and laughing girls in their transparent muslins
who, even now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd woolly dogs for a run; and even
now, at this hour, discreet old dowagers were shooting out in their motor cars on errands of mystery;
and the shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds, their lovely old
sea-green brooches in eighteenth-century settings to tempt Americans (but one must economise, not
buy things rashly for Elizabeth), and she, too, loving it as she did with an absurd and faithful
passion, being part of it, since her people were courtiers once in the time of the Georges, she, too,
was going that very night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party. But how strange, on entering
the Park, the silence; the mist; the hum; the slow-swimming happy ducks; the pouched birds
waddling; and who should be coming along with his back against the Government buildings, most
appropriately, carrying a despatch box stamped with the Royal Arms, who but Hugh Whitbread; her
old friend Hughthe admirable Hugh!

[] The amusing thing about coming back to England, after five years, was the way it made,
anyhow the first days, things stand out as if one had never seen them before; lovers squabbling
under a tree; the domestic family life of the parks. Never had he seen London look so enchanting
the softness of the distances; the richness; the greenness; the civilisation, after India, he thought,
strolling across the grass. ()Those five years1918 to 1923had been, he suspected, somehow
very important. People looked different. Newspapers seemed different. Now for instance there was
a man writing quite openly in one of the respectable weeklies about water-closets. That you couldnt
have done ten years agowritten quite openly about water-closets in a respectable weekly. And
then this taking out a stick of rouge, or a powder-puff and making up in public. On board ship
coming home there were lots of young men and girlsBetty and Bertie he remembered in
particularcarrying on quite openly; the old mother sitting and watching them with her knitting,
cool as a cucumber. The girl would stand still and powder her nose in front of every one. And they
werent engaged; just having a good time; no feelings hurt on either side. As hard as nails she was
Betty Whatshername; but a thorough good sort. She would make a very good wife at thirty
she would marry when it suited her to marry; marry some rich man and live in a large house near
Manchester. ()