Literatura Engleza Anul III Sem I - Tutore L (1) - Hamzea

Ministerul Educaţiei şi Cercetării
Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural
LIMBA ŞI LITERATURA ENGLEZĂ

The nineteenth and twentieth
century british novel
Dana Janeta BĂDULESCU
2005
© 2005 Ministerul Educaţiei şi Cercetării
Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural
Nici o parte a acestei lucrări

nu poate fi reprodusă fără
acordul scris al Ministerului Educaţiei şi Cercetării
The author’s warmest thanks go to Dean Hufstetler, whose most

competent advice improved the quality of this course, and to Anca Cehan,
without whose patience, support and help, work would have been
a lot more hesitant and dull.
ISBN 973-0-04265-9
Contents
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 1
UNIT 1 4
1 What is Victorianism? 4
1.1 Victorianism between Utilitarianism and Idealism 5
1.2 The Victorian Novel 6
1.2.1 Novel Writing and Novel Reading from Charles Dickens (Early 6
Victorianism) to Thomas Hardy (Late Victorianism)
1.3 Charles Dickens’s Contribution to the Victorian Novel 7
1.3.1 Plot in Dickens’s Novel Great Expectations 7
1.3.2 Pattern in Great Expectations 10
1.4 The Brontë Sisters’ Contribution to the Victorian Novel 10
1.4.1 Charlotte Brontë’s Novel Jane Eyre, a Feminine Version of the 10
Story of Initiation and Development
1.4.2 Point of View in Jane Eyre 13
1.5 Emily Brontë’s Gothic in Wuthering Heights 14
1.5.1 Wuthering Heights: A Shocking Novel 14
1.5.2 Wuthering Heights: A Novel of Multiple Points of View 14
1.5.3 Plot in Wuthering Heights 16
1.6 Thomas Hardy’s “Wessex” Novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles 18
1.6.1 Tess of the d’Urbervilles – A Novel of Character and Environment, 19
Pessimism and Fate
1.6.2 Plot in Tess of the d’Urbervilles 19
1.6.3 A Tragic Ending and a Symbolic Setting 20
Summary 21
Key Terms 21
Glossary of Terms and Comments 22
Gallery of Personalities 22
SAA No. 1 23
Answers to SAQs 24
Bibliography 26
UNIT 2 27
Unit Objectives 28
2 Joseph Conrad and Henry James, Two Forerunners of 28
Modernism
2.1 Joseph Conrad’s Tale Heart of Darkness: the Importance of 29
Exotic Setting
2.1.1 Imperialism in Heart of Darkness 30
2.1.2 Plot in Heart of Darkness 30
2.1.3 The Difficulty of the Text 33
2.2 Henry James’s Ghost Story The Turn of the Screw 35
2.2.1 Plot in The Turn of the Screw 35
2.2.2 Can the Governess Be Trusted? 38
2.2.3 Is the Governess a Heroine or a Villain? 28
2.2.4 Who / What Are Miles and Flora? 39
2.2.5 What Are the Ghosts? 40
2.2.6 How Does the Phrase “the Turn of the Screw” Apply to the 41
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Contents
Governess’s Tale?
Summary 41
Key Terms 42
SAA No. 2 43
Answers to SAQs 43
Bibliography 46
UNIT 3 47
Unit Objectives 48
3 Modernist Principles and Aesthetics 48
3.1 Virginia Woolf’s Essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”: A Modernist 48
Manifesto
3.2 Free Expression and Novelty: the Basic Principles of Modernism 51
3.3 Internationalism 52
3.4 Modernist Aesthetics 53
3.4.1 Iconoclasm 54
3.4.2 Impressionism 55
3.4.3 Post-Impressionism 56
3.4.4 Genre-Boundary Breaking 57
3.4.5 “The Death of the Author” and the Birth of the Reader 58
3.4.6 Collage / Montage 58
Summary 59
Key Terms 59
SAA No. 3 62
Answers to SAQs 62
Bibliography 64
UNIT 4 65
Unit Objectives 66
4 Stream of Consciousness One-day City Novels: Virginia Woolf’ 66
Mrs. Dalloway and James Joyce’s Ulysses
4.1 Experiments with Time: One-day Novels 66
4.2 Cinematic Devices: Space and Time Montage 69
4.3 City Novels: Dublin and London 70
4.4 Stream of Consciousness and Subjectivity 73
Summary 77
Key Terms 78
SAA No. 4 80
Answers to SAQs 81
Bibliography 84
UNIT 5 85
Unit Objectives 86
5 Modernist Art Novels 86
5.1 Virginia Woolf’s Art Novel To the Lighthouse 86
5.2 Virginia Woolf’s Art Novel The Waves 90
5.3 James Joyce’s Art Novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 93
ii Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural
Contents
Summary 94
Key Terms 95
SAA No. 5 98
Answers to SAQs 99
Bibliography 101
UNIT 6 102
Unit Objectives 103
6 D. H. Lawrence’s Novel of Sensibility 103
6.1 Taboo Breaking 104
6.2 Free Indirect Style 106
6.3 Antagonism and Oneness in The Rainbow 108
6.4 Symbolism in The Rainbow 112
Summary 114
Key Terms 115
SAA No. 6 116
Answers to SAQs 116
Bibliography 119
UNIT 7 120
Unit Objectives 121
7 Aldous Huxley – A Lover of Science, Literature and the Arts 121
7.1 Huxley’s Characters 121
7.2 Satire and European Models 122
7.3 Continuing a Line of Tradition 124
7.4 Mark Rampion’s Point in Point Counter Point 124
7.5 Philip Quarles, the Novelist In the Novel 125
7.6 The Musicalisation of Fiction 126
7.7 A Novelist’s Novel of Ideas; The Pure Novel 129
Summary 130
Key Terms 131
Glossary and Comments 131
SAA No. 7 133
Answers to SAQs 134
Bibliography 135
UNIT 8 136
8 From Modern to Postmodern 137
Unit Objectives 137
8.1 Postmodernism in Literature and the Arts 138
8.2 Postmodernist Aesthetics 139
8.2.1 Image, Copy, Surface, Spectacle 139
8.3 The Postmodernism of Play 142
8.3.1 Intertextuality, Intertext 143
8.3.2 Metafiction 143
8.3.3 Alternative Worlds; Heterotopia 143
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Contents
8.4 The Postmodernism of Play in John Fowles’s Novels 144
8.4.1 “Godgames” in The Magus 144
8.4.2 Intertextuality in The Magus 147
8.4.3 Metafiction in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman 147
8.4.4 Narrative Double Voice and Double Vision in The French 148
Lieutenant’s Woman
8.4.5 Authorial Intrusions in The French Lieutenant’s Woman 148
8.4.6 Multiple Endings in The French Lieutenant’s Woman 150
8.5 David Lodge’s Campus Novel 151
8.5.1 Campus Plot and Considerate Humour in the Psychological Novel 151
Nice Work
8.5.2 Alternative Worlds and Intertextuality in Nice Work 152
8.5.3 Writing as Communication; Art as Delight 153
Summary 153
Key Concepts 153
SAA No. 8 155
Answers to SAQs 155
Bibliography 158
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 159
iv Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Introduction
INTRODUCTION
This module aims to familiarize long distance learners with

Victorianism, modernism and postmodernism as paradigms of
innovation. By focusing on three distinct literary periods the module
addresses teachers in the rural area, pointing out two novel modes:
a) the Victorian realist novel and b) the modernist novel of the early
20th century as a reaction to the realist Victorian novel.
Postmodernism (c) will be debated as a new paradigm shift and in its
complex relation to modernism. At the same time, the module
introduces distance learners to the theoretical and critical terms and
concepts applicable to their understanding of these periods,
paradigms and keys, enabling them to pass this knowledge on to
their students. Last but not least, distance learners are introduced to
the most outstanding personalities of these periods since novelty in
culture is not a faceless and identityless phenomenon. It certainly
has its origins in personalities who responded to the challenge of
their time in order to make a difference.
Module units
The module falls into eight units. Unit 1 ”Victorianism: an Age of

Extremes” explains Victorianism as an age torn between Utilitarianism
and Idealism, identifies the main aspects of novel writing and novel
reading, and illustrates the major contributions to the Victorian novel
from an early Victorian writer Charles Dickens, through two
outstanding women writers Charlotte and Emily Brontë, to a late
Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy. Unit 2 ”The Dawn of a New Age:
Joseph Conrad and Henry James” explains how two late Victorian
novelists Joseph Conrad and Henry James marked the transition from
Victorianism to modernism in their dark stories Heart of Darkness and
The Turn of the Screw. Unit 3 “Modernist Principles and Aesthetics”
introduces long distance learners to modernism as a paradigm shift,
explains Virginia Woolf’s argument in her modernist manifesto “Mr.
Bennett and Mrs. Brown” and identifies the essential principles and
features and the new aesthetics of modernism. Unit 4 “Major
Contributions to Modernist British Fiction: Experimental Novels” looks
into the innovative character of the experimental novel, identifying its
main elements of novelty and describing its principal features of style
and technique in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and James Joyce’s
Ulysses. Unit 5 ”Modernist Art Novels” identifies the main aspects of
modernist aesthetics and explains the role of the modernist artist in the
three most remarkable art novels of the early 20th century: Virginia
Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and The Waves and James Joyce’s A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Unit 6 ”Free Indirect Style and
Taboo Breaking” assesses D. H. Lawrence’s contribution to the
modernist novel in terms of ”novel of sensibility”, explains the notions
of ”free indirect style” and ”taboo”, identifies the main themes and
points out the importance of symbolism in Lawrence’s novel The
Rainbow. Unit 7 “The Musicalisation of Fiction, the Novel of Ideas”
Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural 1
Introduction
looks into Aldous Huxley’s novel Point Counter Point in terms of the
musicalisation of fiction, novel of ideas and ”pure novel”. Unit 8 ”From
Modernism to Postmodernism” identifies postmodernism as a new
paradigm shift, looks into the main aspects of postmodernist
aesthetics and illustrates them with John Fowles’s novels The Magus
and The French Lieutenant’s Woman and David Lodge’s campus
novel Nice Work.
Learning tasks
Each of these eight units contains a certain number of learning

tasks marked as Stop and Think, Self-Assessed Questions
(SAQs) and one Send-Away Assignment (SAA). The Stop and
Think assignments elicit the students' own opinions with regards to
certain ideas in the unit. Each Stop and Think assignment is
provided with a blank space to be filled out. Where there is no clue
leading to an answer, the Stop and Think tasks ask students to
devise a portfolio to be discussed in the tutorials. The Self
Assessed Questions (SAQs) occur at approximately every two
pages in each unit and anticipate the students' need to build on the
ideas presented. They pose questions which refer the students to
essential aspects treated in the respective unit. The students'
answers, written in the blank spaces of the SAQ boxes, may be
confronted to those given in the Answers to SAQs section at the
end of each unit. There is also a note following each SAQ, pairs or
groups of SAQs, which ask students to revise certain sections in the
unit in case they fail to give proper answers. The Send Away
Assignments (SAAs) elicit the learners’ global understanding and
acquisition of the essential aspects treated in each of the units. The
completed SAAs will be sent to the tutor, at times set in agreement
with the tutor, by regular mail or e-mail.
Appendices
To facilitate the distance learners’ acquisition of the subjects

tackled, a series of appendices have been added to each unit:
Summary, which encapsulates topical ideas; Key Concepts, a list of
the basic concepts; Glossary of Terms and Comments, with
entries to terms, idiomatic expressions and mythological characters
and places; Gallery of Personalities, with entries that sketch the
portraits of the personalities referred to in the unit. Terms, concepts
and names listed in the Key Concepts section or explained in the
Glossary of Terms and Comments and Gallery of Personalities
sections are marked using the ‫ ٭‬symbol.
The assessment methods and instruments consist in essay-
projects for each of the three sections of the module, which is the
equivalent in the distance learning system of continuous assessment
(three projects for 40 % of the final grade). The final test will be an
oral exam counting for 60 % of the final grade. On a 0 to 10 points
yardstick, the evaluation criteria will be the following: 1 base point,
theoretical approach of the topic – 4 points, richness and relevance
of the examples given – 3 points, focused argument of the specificity
of each of the three periods studied – 2 points.
2 Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural
Introduction

Victorianism
UNIT 1
VICTORIANISM: AN AGE OF EXTREMES
Unit Outline
Unit Objectives 4
1 What is Victorianism? 4
1.1 Victorianism between Utilitarianism and Idealism 5
1.2 The Victorian Novel 6
1.2.1 Novel Writing and Novel Reading from Charles 6
Dickens (Early Victorianism) to Thomas Hardy
(Late Victorianism)
1.3 Charles Dickens’s Contribution to the Victorian 7
Novel
1.3.1 Plot in Dickens’s Novel Great Expectations 7
1.3.2 Pattern in Great Expectations 10
1.4 The Brontë Sisters’ Contribution to the Victorian 10
Novel
1.4.1 Charlotte Brontë’s Novel Jane Eyre, a Feminine 10
Version of the Story of Initiation and Development
1.4.2 Point of View in Jane Eyre 13
1.5 Emily Brontë’s Gothic in Wuthering Heights 14
1.5.1 Wuthering Heights: A Shocking Novel 14
1.5.2 Wuthering Heights: A Novel of Multiple Points of 14
View
1.5.3 Plot in Wuthering Heights 16
1.6 Thomas Hardy’s “Wessex” Novel Tess of the 18
d’Urbervilles
1.6.1 Tess of the d’Urbervilles – A Novel of Character 19
and Environment, Pessimism and Fate
1.6.2 Plot in Tess of the d’Urbervilles 19
1.6.3 A Tragic Ending and a Symbolic Setting 20
Summary 21
Key Terms 21
SAA No. 1 23
Answers to SAQs 24
Bibliography 26

Victorianism
By the end of this unit you should be able to:

• Explain what Victorianism is
• Explain Victorianism as an age of extremes between
Utilitarianism and Idealism
• Identify the main aspects of novel writing and novel
reading in the Victorian age
• Explain Charles Dickens’s contribution to the Victorian
novel in terms of plot, pattern and open ending
Unit objectives • Explain Charlotte Brontë’s contribution to the Victorian
novel in terms of feminine writing: first person point of
view, autobiographical novel, self-analysis and happy
ending (a woman’s fulfillment)
• Explain Emily Brontë’s contribution to the Victorian novel
in terms of feminine Gothic, multiple points of view,
bifurcated (ambiguous) ending
• Explain Thomas Hardy’s contribution to the Victorian
novel
• Explain Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles as:
- a Wessex novel
- a modern tragedy
- a novel of character and environment, pessimism
and fate, condemning Victorian hypocrisy
1. What is Victorianism?
For historians, the term “Victorian” is used to describe a period
in history from 1837 to 1901, marked by the reign of Queen Victoria
of England. Queen Victoria had a great influence not only on her
country but also on the world.
This time interval (1837 – 1901) encompasses great changes
in society. The invention of petroleum-powered engines in the 1840s,
along with innovations in steam and coal-powered technologies, led
to the replacement of human labour (assisted by animals) with
machines.
A time of change Society changed under the influence and along with this rapid
and progress process of industrialization. The bourgeoisie, a fresh class full of
energy, came to power. This class was busy investing, working, and
creating their own institutions and rules, which were essentially
modern.
Victorianism was also a time of world travel, exporting and
exploration, and an age of Imperialism.
When historians think of the age, therefore, they think of a
time of change and “progress”.

Victorianism
1.1. Victorianism between Utilitarianism and Idealism
In 1840 British philosopher John Stuart Mill declared that

“every Englishman of the present day is by implication either a
Benthamite or a Coleridgean”. By the “Benthamite” part he referred
to Jeremy Bentham’s‫ ٭‬bringing light, order and system in various
fields that had been formally “chaotic” with his utilitarian doctrines. By
the “Coleridgean” part he referred to the English poet Coleridge‫٭‬
and his romantic idealism.
Mill’s statement expresses the division of the age. His
statement also anticipates what philosopher Carl Gustav Jung‫٭‬
calls the “split consciousness” of the modern individual. The point
these philosophers made is that the modern individual is self divided
between faith and knowledge, between religious and scientific or
rational truth, between thought and feeling, and ultimately between
nature and civilization.
Victorianism was an age when many felt that the problem, or
Things or even the evil, came from the fact that the modern world devoted too
values? much energy to things, as opposed to values, attributing this
distortion of emphasis in large part to the materialistic basis of
science.
However it is seen, the split is fundamental. It is the essential
meaning of the word modern.
Stop and think!

How much of this division is still characteristic of the
contemporary world?
Use your personal experience of the contemporary world and
create a portfolio of such answers to be discussed in the
tutorials. Give your answer in the space provided below.

Victorianism
Thus Victorianism and the Victorians were caught between

Bentham’s utilitarianism and Coleridge’s idealism. A son of the age
of reason (the 18th century), Bentham sought to discover good and
unchangeable laws, while Coleridge, the romantic idealist, expressed
the revolt of the human mind against the philosophy of the 18th
century. It may be argued that while Benthamite philosophy and
attitude to life was the prosaic, Coleridgean philosophy and attitude
was poetic and metaphoric.
1.2. The Victorian Novel

In the Victorian age, the novel‫ ٭‬flourished increasingly with
the rise of the middle classes in power and importance. Of course,
novels had to be written for readers of that class.
On the one hand, the Victorian novel-readers wanted to be
entertained, and on the other they wanted to escape their ever-day
world. However, they mainly wanted to be entertained with a
minimum aesthetic distance.
The best Victorian novels went far beyond the confined

horizon of expectations of the Victorian public. Thus, most of the best
Victorian novels pleased and irritated their readers at the same time
and challenged them by infusing their textures with a symbolism that
reached far deeper than the superficial pattern of social action then
casual readers were prepared to find in them.
1.2.1 Novel Writing and Novel Reading from Charles Dickens

(Early Victorianism) to Thomas Hardy (Late Victorianism)
Until the end of the 19th century, the majority of the Victorians
New fiction
did not purchase their “serious” fiction brand new when it came out in
was expensive! volume form, but borrowed it from circulating libraries.
That must have been one of the reasons why not all novels
appeared first in volume form: some initially emerged as serials. The
self-publishing writer Charles Dickens brought out most of his fictions
in monthly parts, famously creating an urgent demand for each new
number. This explains why Charles Dickens believed that “a story-
teller and a story-reader should establish a mutual understanding as
soon as possible”.
Charles Dickens was symptomatic as a fiction publisher in still
another way. Editing two magazines in which he and other
contemporary writers published their fiction, Dickens influenced
fiction in two ways: one was that he facilitated a mode of publication
which implicitly encouraged the reading of novels alongside other
forms of writing, while another was that serialization affected fiction
writing from many points of view. Thus, novelists had to cope with
some pressures: they had to extend their stories in order to fill
several volumes, or they had to cut and compress in order to meet
the space constraints of a magazine column, or they had to create
suspense in order to pace serial publication and encourage the

Victorianism
purchase of a subsequent issue. In any case, they could never allow
characters to fade too long from sight.
Authors‫ ٭‬entered into various types of dialogue with their

readers, attending to their desires in various ways and trying to
ensure that their potential purposes chose them. This dictated fiction
authors the demand for a happy ending, particularly one based on
romance, which endured throughout the 19th century.
Novels could certainly provide guidance, consolation, wisdom
and patterns to follow. Some commentators encouraged precisely
this mode of reading, suggesting that one should continually be
matching oneself against fictional models.
Novels were There certainly was a taste for moral certitude that can be
models traced across much Victorian fiction. This can be seen in relation to
the intricate yet always resolved plots that one encounters in all the
novels discussed in this unit.
What Victorian readers found in reading novels was an
assertion of one’s claim to be modern.
1.3. Charles Dickens’s Contribution to the Victorian Novel

With Charles Dickens (1812 - 1870), journalism and
melodrama were gathered into the novel to give it new life and a new
and important place in middle-class entertainment.
1.3.1. Plot in Dickens’s Novel Great Expectations

Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (serialized in 1860-
1861) is exemplary for an analysis of plot‫ ٭‬in many respects, not
least of all for its beginning. This is so because what the novel
chooses to present at its outset is precisely the search for a
beginning (see quote 1 in the Reader).
Search for a As in many novels written by Dickens and as in many 19th
beginning century novels, the hero is an orphan. The only thing he knows about
himself in the first passages of the novel is his name, Pip. However,
not even that name is a full name, since Pip is what his “infant
tongue” could make of Philip Pirrip. In those passages, Pip is shown
in front of his parents’ tombs, trying to make sense of his origins.
Lying beyond the grave, those origins are misty and uncertain.
Thus, loss of origin, misreading, and the troubles of identity
will be the themes governing the plot and explored later on. This
An existence beginning establishes Pip’s existence as an existence without a plot.
without plot The opening passages also provide the reader with an
element that will actually grow into the plot: Pip encounters a convict,
whose name is Magwitch. The convict asks Pip for a file to cut his
chains and the loaf of bread in his pocket. From that moment on,
Pip’s life will be intertwined with the convict’s, since Magwitch will be
his benefactor.
The orphan’s fellowship with the convict will remain with him
all his life but in a state of repression on Pip’s part, because he will
have “great expectations”.
Victorianism
His “great expectations” are for him to be a “gentleman”, but in
his attempts to be that, he will misread virtually everybody’s intentions
and relations to himself. This is suggested, also in the opening

passages, by Magwitch’s gesture of turning Pip upside down:
“After darkly looking at his leg and me several times, he came
Turning Pip
closer to my tombstone, took me by both arms, and tilted me back as
upside down
far as he could hold me; so that his eyes looked most powerfully
down into mine, and mine looked most helplessly up into his”.
SAQ 1
What is the significance of this scene in the development of the
plot?
Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the

end of the unit.
The rest of the plot focuses on Pip growing up in the house of

his elder sister and her husband Joe Gargery, out of which he is
taken occasionally to pay visits to Satis House, whose owner, a
strange old spinster Miss Havisham, raises an attractive girl Estella.
It is because he falls in love with Estella, who constantly humiliates
him, that Pip wants to become a “gentleman”.
Victorianism
Satis House is Pip’s daydream in which he pleases himself

with the fantasy of social ascension and gentility. Satis House, the
daydream, is the opposite of Joe Gargery’s forge, a place which Pip
feels stifling. Pip’s repeated visits to Satis House are suggestive of a
plot based on repetitions.
As Magwitch appeared out of the blue, Jaggers, the man of
law also appears out of the blue to tell Pip that there are “great
expectations” in store for him. On the false presumption that his
benefactor is Miss Havisham, Pip goes to London to fulfill his
expectations. As time goes by, he thinks he has become a
“gentleman”, but his notions of gentility prove wrong when his
apparently “gentlemanly” universe is turned upside down again by
Magwitch’s return. He finds out that Magwitch is his benefactor. At
this point, both Pip and the reader surely feel that the wheel has
come full circle: this is another turning point in Dickens’s carefully knit
plot.
Pip’s return By his return, Magwitch lifts the mist from Pip’s eyes. Now Pip
realizes the falseness of his pretense. He helps Magwitch, who is
being pursued by the authorities, to escape. Since they fail to escape,
he attends to Magwitch to his last minute. Then he returns to Joe, who
has always been not only his sister’s husband, but also his best friend.
The last scene of the book shows Pip’s encounter with Estella
after those many years of trouble and confusion:
“I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place;
and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the
forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad
expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of
another parting from her”.
SAQ 2
What is the significance of the ending of Great Expectations?

end of the unit.

Victorianism
1.3.2 Pattern in Great Expectations
Great Expectations is the story of a young man’s

development, a story of initiation. Pip’s development is traced from
the moment of his first self-awareness to that of his mature
acceptance of the human condition.
So natural and universal a theme imposes a carefully handled
but simple pattern‫ ٭‬on the novel. This pattern is defined by the
process of growth, which falls into three stages that clearly display a
dialectic progression.
The first stage shows us the boy in his natural condition in the
country, responding and acting instinctively and therefore virtuously.
The second stage of Pip’s development involves a negation of
his previous simplicity and naturalness. Pip acquires his
“expectations”, renounces his poor rural origins and moves to the
city. It is here that the split begins, although Pip is not aware of it: he
rises in society, acting through calculation rather than through
instinctive charity, but his moral values deteriorate as his social
graces improve. This middle phase of his development culminates in
a sudden fall, the beginning of a suffering, dramatically concluded by
an attack of brain fever leading to a long coma.
In the last stage of his growth, Pip returns to his birthplace,
abandons his false expectations, accepts the limitations of his
condition and achieves a partial synthesis of the virtue of his innocent
youth and the melancholy insight of his later experience.
1.4. The Brontë Sisters’ Contribution to the Victorian Novel

Drawing their inspiration from the bleak moors near their
home, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë left a remarkable literary
legacy of powerful novels, poems and short stories.
1.4.1. Charlotte Brontë’s Novel Jane Eyre, A Feminine Version of

the Story‫ ٭‬of Initiation and Development
Jane Eyre was first published under the pen name of Currer
Bell in October 1847.
The mid-nineteenth century Victorians did not expect women
to manifest their artistic potential outside of the domestic sphere and
therefore did not encourage women to fulfill their talents.
When the twenty-year old Charlotte wrote to Robert Southey,
the poet laureate‫٭‬, for his opinion about writing, his response was
that “literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought
not to be”.
Given this view of women, it is not surprising that the three
sisters adopted pseudonyms to hide their sex when they published
their poems and novels.

Victorianism
Published under pseudonym, Jane Eyre enjoyed success
Charlotte Brontë
when it came out. Like Dickens’s Great Expectations, Jane Eyre is a
story whose protagonist is an orphan. Like Great Expectations,
Charlotte’s novel traces the development of her heroine from

childhood to maturity.
The novel opens with ten-year old Jane Eyre, who lives
unhappily with her wealthy, cruel cousins and aunt at Gateshead.
Jane finds comfort in books, but she is bullied by her cousin John,
who interrupts her reading and says that, since she is orphaned and
thus dependent on his family, she has no right to read their books.
John strikes her with the book and they fight, but because Jane
scares him off, she is punished by being locked in “the red room”, a
“chill”, “silent”, “solemn” room, the room where her aunt’s husband
died. The “red room” gives Jane the shivers because she sees in it
both a tomb and a “jail”.
Locked in the Locked in the red room, Jane feels “like nobody”. She feels
red room unloved and “useless”. Then Jane grows “by degrees cold as a
stone”. Her courage sinks. She starts to think of death, all the deaths
in her family and her own. The red-room becomes a hallucinatory
place, projecting horrible visions from its “dimly gleaming mirror”.
Tormented by these visions, Jane falls unconscious.
SAQ 3
Read quote 2 in the Reader. What is the importance of the red
room episode in the progression of the plot?

end of the unit.

Victorianism
Jane is spared further mistreatment from her aunt’s family

Lowood when she is sent off to school at Lowood, but there she suffers
further privations in the austere environment. Despite that, Jane
excels as a student for six years and as a teacher for two.
Advertising for a job, Jane finds employment as a governess
Thornfield at the estate of Thornfield for a little girl, Adèle. After much waiting,
she finally meets her employer Edward Rochester, who seems to be
a rather moody and strange man.
Mister Rochester is far from being the only oddity at
Thornfield. Jane occasionally hears demonic piles of laughter coming
from the third-story attic. This mystery remains unresolved while
Jane and Mister Rochester feel more and more attracted to each
other. Eventually, Jane accepts his proposal, and they are engaged
to be married. On their wedding day, a visitor who proves to be
Rochester’s brother-in-law, interrupts the ceremony by revealing that
Rochester already has a wife: Bertha Mason, a lunatic who is kept in
the attic in Thornfield.
This event brings Rochester to confess all his past misdeeds
to Jane: in his youth his family had him marry Bertha for money, but
he was unaware of her family’s history of madness. Over time, his
wife became a dangerous part of his life which only imprisonment
could solve. Despite his protests that he loves Jane, she cannot
accept to marry him because of his previous marriage and leaves
Thornfield.
Wandering without food and money and having nowhere to
Moor House go, Jane arrives at the desolate crossroads of Whitcross.
Fortunately, the Rivers siblings (St. John, Diana and Mary), who turn
out to be her cousins, take her into their home at Moor House. Jane
grows very attached to Diana and Mary and learns a lot from St.
John. Eventually, she is happy to be a teacher at his school.
Inheriting a vast fortune from her uncle, Jane divides it among her
new family.
St. John prepares to do missionary work in India and
repeatedly proposes to Jane. Each time he does it, Jane refuses.
She is increasingly drawn to thoughts of Rochester and, one day,
after she hears him calling from a distance, she seeks him out at
Thornfield. She finds out that the estate was burned down by Bertha.
Rochester, who was blinded by the incident, lives nearby. He is
overwhelmed with joy to see her again and tells her that he did call
her one night.
Happy ending The epilogue‫ ٭‬is a happy ending of deep love triumphing.
Both Jane and Rochester are now ready for each other, having been
purified by suffering. They marry and enjoy their life together, love
working wonders on Rochester, who regains sight in one eye.

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1.4.2 Point of View in Jane Eyre
Jane Eyre is a first person narrative told from Jane’s point of

view‫٭‬. This is another aspect that associates Charlotte Brontë’s
novel with Dickens’s Great Expectations.
First person point of view gives authenticity and also urgency
to these two novels of formation.
Both Jane and Pip communicate with the reader, but Jane
seems more inclined than Pip to analyze herself and justify her
reactions to both herself and her readers.
A woman’s story Jane Eyre is also an autobiography‫ ٭‬based on Charlotte
Brontë’s own life. However, it is the fictionalized autobiography of a
woman endowed with a very keen sense of observation. In the
opening lines of Chapter 10, Jane makes it explicit when she says
that “this is not to be a regular autobiography” but an account based
on selective memory, which recalls only those moments, periods and
scenes that “will possess some degree of interest” to the fiction she
writes.
The novel abounds in side speeches marked by “I thought”
and in frequent and long passages in which Jane communicates to
the reader her own feelings, moods and motivations, analyzing them,
or her observations of situations and characters. In the opening lines
of chapter 11, for instance, she confesses, directly addressing the
reader.
SAQ 4
Read quote 3 in the Reader. What is the importance of first
person point of view in Jane Eyre? Relate it to the fact that this is
a woman’s story.

end of the unit.

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The novel is about a woman’s search for her kindred spirits,

for a sense of belonging and love. Her search is constantly urged by
her need for independence and equality with men. This need is
communicated to the reader through the development of plot, but
also frequently reinforced, explained and analyzed (read quote 4 in
the Reader).
1.5. Emily Brontë’s Gothic in Wuthering Heights

The Gothic in literature refers to a genre characterized by
gloom and darkness, often with a supernatural plot unfolding in a
strange location such as a ruined castle, mansion or house.
Wuthering‫ ٭‬Heights is Emily Brontë’s only novel, considered
to be the fullest expression of her deeply individual poetic vision. It
obviously contains many romantic elements that can be summarized
as the passionate consuming love of two characters who are deeply
attached to the natural world.
At the same time, the novel expresses deep criticisms of
social conventions, particularly those surrounding gender issues, in
the sense that the author distributes feminine and masculine
characteristics without regard to sex.
1.5.1. Wuthering Heights: A Shocking Novel

Almost any reader of Wuthering Heights, even today, feels
Emily’s writing profoundly unconventional, disturbing and shocking.
To the conventional Victorian reader, Wuthering Heights must have
come as an unprecedented shock. The Victorian reader surely saw in
Wuthering Heights a novel that no gently-bred Victorian writer (male
or female) could even dream of writing! Although Emily sent it to
publishers under the masculine name of Ellis Bell, it took many tries
before it was finally accepted in 1847.
The reviews of the book were almost entirely negative:
reviewers implied that the author of such a novel must be insane,
obsessed with cruelty and barbaric!
Emily died soon after the novel’s publication, and Charlotte,
her sister, had to disclose the identity of its author, which had been
Emily Brontë so far a mystery. Charlotte also wrote a preface for the novel,
defending her sister’s character. The problem is that Charlotte herself
was uncomfortable with the more disturbing aspects of her sister’s
masterpiece.

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1.5.2. Wuthering Heights: A Novel of Multiple Points of View
Wuthering Heights is a novel told in a series of narratives,

which are themselves told to the narrator, a gentleman named
Lockwood.
Lockwood rents a fine house and park called Thrushcross
Grange in Yorkshire and gradually learns more and more about the
histories of two local families from Ellen (Nelly) Dean, who has been
with one of the two families, the Earnshaws, for all her life. However,
the destinies of the two families are intertwined.
Intertwined Lockwood’s role as a narrator is only to frame the story told by
destinies Nelly Dean. Being a civilized man with little intuition and even less
experience of the strange world he is about to encounter, Lockwood
is unprepared and unequipped to understand strangeness. However,
he finds strangeness on his first night in the form of a nightmare.
SAQ 5
Read quote 5 in the Reader. Why is Lockwood’s experience
strange in the scene quoted? Is the strangeness of the scene
relevant to Lockwood’s status as a narrator? (Bear in mind that
the reader’s comprehension depends on his point of view!)

end of the unit.

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1.5.3. Plot in Wuthering Heights
The story begins with the gentleman-farmer Earnshaw going

on a trip to Liverpool and bringing with him a child, whose name is
Heathcliff. Earnshaw’s daughter Catherine falls in love with
Heathcliff, although he is a strange and silent boy, who seems not to
mind the blows he receives from Hindley, Catherine’s brother.
Catherine and Heathcliff enjoy taking long trips in the
surroundings. Both are deeply attached to nature, and one day they
run down to Thrushcross Grange, a more civilized house where the
Lintons live with their children Edgar and Isabella.
Because Catherine is caught by a bulldog and injured, she is
brought inside and stays for five weeks at the Grange to recover.
When she comes back to Wuthering Heights, she is visibly changed
in the sense that she is dressed and acts as a lady, to the delight of
Hindley and his wife, but to Heathcliff’s sorrow. In the next few years,
Catherine struggles to strike a balance between maintaining her
relationship with Heathcliff and socializing with the elegant and
civilized Linton children.
Hindley’s wife Frances gives birth to a son, Hareton but dies
soon after of tuberculosis. Hindley gives into wild despair and
alcoholism, and the household falls into chaos. Heathcliff is very
harshly treated and grows to hate Hindley more and more.
In the meantime, Edgar Linton falls in love with Catherine, who
is attracted by the civilization he stands for, although she loves
Heathcliff much more deeply. She explains this to Nelly and as she
does so, she refers to Heathcliff’s coarseness. Heathcliff overhears
their discussion and runs away. However, he runs before hearing
Catherine’s confession ‘I am Heathcliff’, which expresses her sense
of identification with him.
Catherine falls ill after looking for Heathcliff all night in a storm,
the storm outside echoing her inner storm. She goes to the Grange
to get better, and she marries Edgar.
Catherine and Edgar live harmoniously together for almost a
year, when Heathcliff returns. He has mysteriously acquired
gentlemanly manners, education and some money. Catherine is
overjoyed to see him, while Edgar somehow feels the danger he
represents. Finally there is a violent quarrel, and Heathcliff leaves the
Grange to avoid being thrown out by Edgar’s servants. Catherine is
angry with both men and shuts herself in her room for several days.
Meanwhile, Heathcliff seduces Edgar’s sister Isabella and
elopes with her. Edgar cannot forgive his sister’s betrayal of him but
does not try to stop the marriage. Catherine becomes extremely ill,
feverish, delirious and nearly dies, although she is carefully looked
after by Edgar.
A few months later, Catherine is still feeble and besides, she
is pregnant. Heathcliff and Isabella have returned to Wuthering
Heights, and Isabella writes to Nelly Dean about how cruel her
savage husband Heathcliff is to her and how much she regrets the
marriage. Nelly goes to Wuthering Heights to visit them and to see if
she could improve Isabella’s situation. She also tells them about
Cathy’s condition.
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A few days later, Heathcliff goes to the Grange while Edgar is
at church. He has a passionate reunion with Catherine, in which they
forgive each other for their mutual betrayals. Catherine faints under
the weight of this intensely felt reunion. Edgar comes back and
Heathcliff leaves. Catherine dies that night after giving birth to a
daughter. Edgar is terribly grieved, while Heathcliff goes wild,
begging Catherine’s ghost to haunt him.
Isabella manages to escape from Wuthering Heights and goes
to live close to London, where she gives birth to a son, Linton.
Hindley dies a few months after his sister Catherine.
Catherine and Edgar’s daughter, Catherine, grows to be a
beloved and charming child. She lives a peaceful life at the Grange,
completely unaware of the existence of Wuthering Heights,
Heathcliff, or her cousin Hareton, whom Heathcliff treats brutally.
Once, she finds the farmhouse while exploring the moors, and is
upset to think that an ignorant rustic such as Hareton could be
related to her. Nelly tells her that she cannot return there.
Isabella dies when Linton is about 12 years old, and Edgar
goes to fetch him at the Grange. That day, however, Heathcliff
arranges for his son to be fetched to Wuthering Heights.
On her sixteenth birthday, Catherine and Nelly stray onto
Heathcliff’s land, and he invites them into Wuthering Heights to see
Linton. Heathcliff is eager to encourage a romance between the two
cousins so as to ensure himself of Edgar’s land when Edgar dies.
Since Edgar forbids Catherine to ever visit Wuthering Heights again,
Catherine begins an exchange of love letters with her cousin Linton.
Nelly finds out and puts an end to it.
Edgar falls ill, and Heathcliff asks Catherine to come back to
Wuthering Heights because Linton is breaking his heart for her.
Catherine agrees and finds Linton a malicious invalid, but not without
charm. Since Nelly is ill as well, she cannot prevent Catherine from
visiting Linton whenever she likes. Catherine feels obliged to help
Linton and despises Hareton for being clumsy and illiterate.
Edgar dies, and after his funeral, Heathcliff fetches Catherine
to Wuthering Heights to take care of Linton, who is dying, and to free
up the Grange so he can rent it out (to Lockwood, in fact). He tells
Nelly that he is still obsessed with his beloved Catherine and that he
went to gaze at her long-dead body when her coffin was uncovered
by the digging of Edgar’s grave.
Catherine has to take care of Linton alone, and after he dies,
she maintains an unfriendly attitude toward the household. As time
passes by, however, she becomes lonely enough to seek Hareton’s
company and begins teaching him to read.
This is around Lockwood’s time at the Grange. Lockwood
leaves the area for several months, and when he returns, he finds
out that while he was gone Heathcliff began to act more and more
strangely and became incapable of concentrating on the world
around him, as though Catherine’s ghost would not let him. He
stopped eating and sleeping, and Nelly finds him dead one morning,
with a queer and savage smile on his face. Heathcliff is buried next to
Catherine, as he wished, and so they are reunited in death.
Hareton mourns him, but he is too happy with the younger
Catherine to be inconsolable. When the novel ends, they plan to
marry and move to the Grange.

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SAQ 6
What is the significance of this bifurcated ending (Heathcliff’s
reunion with Catherine in death at Wuthering Heights, and
Catherine’s planned reunion with Hareton at the Grange)?

end of the unit.
1.6. Thomas Hardy’s “Wessex” Novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a network of
comings and goings. In this respect, it reminds us of Jane Eyre’s
travels. But although every step the heroine takes is along roads, to
or from houses, villages and towns identifiable on the map, the
names these bear are imaginary. Hardy called the region “Wessex”
and used it as a location for other novels, too.

Victorianism
1.6.1. Tess of the d’Urbervilles – A Novel of Character and

Environment, Pessimism and Fate
Tess of the d’Urbervilles, published in 1891, tells the tragic
story of a character that is powerless to fight her adverse fate.
All of Hardy’s fiction reflects his deep pessimism. In the world
he creates, the individual cannot fight against a malign‫ ٭‬fate which
corrupts any possibility of happiness and leads him / her towards
tragedy‫٭‬. Tess, whom Hardy describes as a ‘pure woman’ in the full
title of the novel, is subjected to endless indignities, assaults and
defeats, which get out of her control, until she finally surrenders to
her destiny and dies for her ‘sins’.
Hardy’s tragic vision springs from his conviction that Victorian
society was stuck in hypocrisy. This is especially true for Hardy’s
female characters, whose bleak lives and loveless marriages are
masterfully exposed.
The setting of these novels is “Wessex”, the southwestern
region of England, where Hardy spent most of his life. His
descriptions of the English countryside are far removed from the
idealized version offered by the Romantics. They suggest the
impoverished condition of the English peasants and country gentry
(upper social classes) in an age of ruthless mechanization. The hard
labour of the farmers, their endless and often unrewarded toil‫ ٭‬is
depicted with grim‫ ٭‬realism. The rural settings are generally
described in great detail and often used to help the reader interpret
the characters’ moods and feelings (Read quote 6 in the Reader to
see an example of Hardy’s descriptions).
Hardy’s settings may also be symbolic, charged with historical
and cultural associations, reinforcing themes, echoing the characters’
moods and feelings and their tragic condition.
1.6.2. Plot in Tess of the d’Urbervilles
“She was a fine Tess Durbeyfield, a poor country girl from the village of
and handsome Marlott, learns that she is descended from a noble family, the
girl.” d’Urbervilles. Her family pushes her to visit her rich relatives, and
when she goes to find them, she is seduced by Alec d’Urbervilles
and has a baby who dies in infancy.
Going to work on a dairy farm (Talbothays), she falls in love
with Angel Clare. Talbothays and the season are just the setting for
pure love and fruition. Tess and Angel are engaged to be married.
Although she means to tell Angel about her ‘sinful’ past before the
wedding, Tess always misses the chance. On their wedding night
she eventually reveals the secret of her relationship with Alec. Being
a man of principles and failing to match the ‘image’ of Tess he has in
his mind with this new ‘image’ he gets, Angel cannot forgive her. He
reacts angrily, abandons her and goes to Brazil.

Victorianism
Left alone, without any support, and having to help her family
out, she finds work at Flintcombe Ash. The place is dreary, the
season winter, and the work very hard. Although Tess writes to
Angel, telling him about her miserable condition and her unaltered
love for him, her letters fail to reach him.
Alec traces Tess and insists that they should be together
again. Out of despair and feeling hopeless and helpless, Tess
“I could not eventually accepts Alec’s offer. When she hears that Angel has
bear the loss of returned to England and realizes he has forgiven her, she kills Alec in
you any a fit of anger.
longer.” Tess and Angel run away to escape from human justice, and
they have a few days when they desperately cling to each other.
1.6.3. A Tragic Ending in a Symbolic Setting

On the run from the police, who want to arrest Tess for the
murder of Alec d’Urbervilles, Tess and Angel arrive at a strange
place: Stonehenge‫٭‬.
SAQ 7
Read quote 7 in the Reader. What is the relation between this
tragic ending and the symbolic setting?

end of the unit.

Victorianism
Summary
This unit introduces you to Victorian literature and to the

notion of Victorianism. The evolution of the Victorian novel from its
early to its late stages is illustrated with the most representative
novels written by the most outstanding writers of the period.
The first section of this unit is dedicated to Charles Dickens’s
accomplished novel Great Expectations as a novel of the
protagonist’s formation and development with a well knit plot and
balanced structure.
The second and third sections deal with the contribution of two
women writers to the Victorian novel: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
and her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights. Jane Eyre is presented as
a feminine version of the novel of development, focusing on the
protagonist’s keen sense of self-analysis. Wuthering Heights is
treated as a shocking Victorian novel of consuming passion and also
as a feminine Gothic.
The fourth section treats Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the
d’Urbervilles as a modern tragedy, a novel of character and setting.
Unit 2 will introduce you to late Victorianism, whose main
representatives are Joseph Conrad and Henry James. These two
novelists are also the forerunners of modernism.
Key Terms
• Victorianism
• Utilitarianism and Idealism
• Novel
• Serialization
• Author
• Plot
• Pattern
• Story
• Epilogue
• Autobiography
• Point of view
• Self-analysis
• Gothic
• Wessex
• Tragedy

Victorianism
Glossary of Terms and Comments
• Author is somebody who writes a book or other text, for

example, a literary work or a report
• Autobiography is an account of somebody’s life written by that
person
• Epilogue is a short chapter or section at the end of a literary
work, sometimes detailing the fate of its characters
• Grim means depressing
• Laureate means somebody who has been awarded a prize or
is recognized for outstanding achievement in the arts or sciences
• Malign means harmful or evil in nature, effect or intention
• Menace means possible source of danger
• Novel is an epic genre (See also Unit 5, Glossary of Terms
and Comments). Any fiction in prose over 50,000 words can be
considered a novel.
• Pattern is a plan or model used as a guide for making something
• Plot is story-line in a novel focusing on causality (relation
between cause and effect)
• Point of view refers to the angle of the narrator (the voice
telling the story). It is the perspective on events of the narrator or a
particular character in the story. Usually narrators are characters at
the same time (See Unit 2, Glossary of Terms and Comments for a
definition of “narrator”)
• With regards to Stonehenge, R. J. C. Atkinson, archaeologist
from University College of Cardiff, stated that most of what has been
written about it is nonsense or speculation. The most shocking part of
the archaeologist’s statement is that “no one will ever have a clue
what its significance was”. If scientists are clueless about
Stonehenge, Hardy does not even seem to need clues: he deepens
the mystery and associates it with the human condition, which, in his
vision, is essentially tragic
• Story is a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence.
Please note that any novel tells a story
• Toil means hard work
• Tragedy is a literary work that deals with a tragic theme, often
involving a heroic struggle and the downfall of the main character
• Wuthering is a word used to describe a wind that blows
strongly and makes a loud roaring sound
Gallery of Personalities
• Bentham, Jeremy (1748 - 1832) was a British philosopher,

economist, and jurist, who founded the doctrine of utilitarianism. In
1789 he became well known for his Introduction to the Principles of
Morals and Legislation. In his Introduction, Bentham claimed that the
principle of utility governs what is morally justifiable. According to this
principle, actions are right if they tend to produce the greatest
happiness for the greatest number of people. Happiness is
equivalent to pleasure.
Victorianism
Bentham’s ideas had great influence on the reforms of the latter part
of the 19th century in the administration of the British government, on
criminal law and on procedure in both criminal and civil law.
• Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772 – 1834) was an English poet,
critic, philosopher and leader of the romantic movement. Coleridge
was interested in German philosophy, especially 19th century
idealism. In opposition to Bentham, Coleridge considered that we can
never be made happy by compulsion.
• Jung, Carl Gustav (1875 – 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, who
founded the analytical school of psychology. Jung broadened
Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical approach. He interpreted mental
and emotional disturbances as an attempt to find personal and
spiritual wholeness.
SAA No. 1
Explain the main aspects of the Victorian novel in terms of:
character, plot, story of initiation, formation and development,
point of view (first person, multiple, third person), Gothic
elements, tragic vision.
Note that the protagonists in Great Expectations, Jane Eyre and
Wuthering Heights are orphans, while Tess in Hardy’s novel is a
poor country girl. The plot of all these novels is focused on the
initiation and development of the protagonist. Great Expectations
and Jane Eyre are first person narratives, and these give more
immediacy to their stories. Wuthering Heights uses multiple
points of view, and this, together with the tragic aura and sense
of strangeness, makes the novel unique in Victorian fiction.
Although Tess of the d’Urbervilles is written in the third person, it
is a character-focused novel which deals with the condition of a
19th century woman in a most sensitive way.
Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights use Gothic elements: the red
room episode and the character of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre;
Wuthering Heights as a setting, the characters of Heathcliff and
Catherine, their consuming impossible love and their reunion
after death at Wuthering Heights.
Wuthering Heights and Tess of the d’Urbervilles articulate a

tragic vision. This justified many critics to call them “modern
tragedies”.
Please send your answers to your tutor.

Your paper should not be longer than four pages.
Please note that the quality of your ideas and the coherence of
the essay will be 70 % of your grade, while the accuracy of your
language will count for 30 %.

Victorianism
Answers to SAQs
SAQ 1
The opening passages of Great Expectations set the scene
and atmosphere, announce the main themes and the mood of the
whole novel. This first scene with the boy Pip in the graveyard is one
of the best beginnings in almost all of Dickens’s mature novels and in
the Victorian novel. In less than one page the reader is given a
character, his background and his setting.
With a few more paragraphs, the reader is immersed in a
decisive action, which is already outlined: Pip is an orphan in search
for a father and for his own condition. His sense of identity is vague
and confused, and the encounter with the convict Magwitch in the
graveyard is the germinal scene of the novel. While he is held by the
convict, Pip sees the world upside down, and in the course of
Dickens’s novel the reader is invited to try the same view. This
particular change of point of view is an ancient device of irony, but an
excellent one. Irony essentially points to an incongruity between
appearance and essence. A number of ironic reversals and
ambiguous situations develop out of this first scene and the point of
view it proposes.
SAQ 2
The ending of Great Expectations shows Pip out of the
confusion he has been in, but it is ambiguous enough not to give
readers a clue as to what his future might be like. Indeed, the mists
rise at this point in Pip’s life, but they might fall again, although Pip
sounds optimistic about Estella not parting from him.
It is possible that readers find in Great Expectations a
modernity of attitude which expects the narrative to be open ended.
This implies that readers are supposed to construct their own sense
of how to take it, that the text resists single meaning. The ambiguity
of the ending also comes from the fact that the readers have only
Pip’s text (a form of autobiography) to work upon, and this is certainly
not final or necessarily authoritative.
Please revise section 1.3.1 in case you have failed to give

answers comparable to those given to SAQ 1 and SAQ 2 in this
section.
SAQ 3
The red room has deathly associations (red as the colour of
blood, the room possibly being “haunted” by Jane’s dead uncle, and
Jane has the impression that she sees a ghost in it).
The red room is also a symbol of imprisonment. Playing on
strong notes of strangeness, the scene is Gothic, dramatizing a dark
side that will re-emerge in the story under the form of the mad
woman in the attic (Bertha Mason). Jane will always fight this dark
side. The scene has an anticipatory function as a metaphor of the
prison, because throughout the novel Jane will be “imprisoned” in
many ways, particularly relating to class, gender, and religion. It is
out of this manifold imprisonment that Jane will try to escape.

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an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 3 in this section.
SAQ 4
First-person point of view is the best perspective Charlotte
Brontë could employ in this novel. Jane is a woman whose intellect
and character make her an equal of any Victorian man endowed with
the same qualities. Indeed, Jane proves to be the equal of both
Rochester and St. John Rivers. This is actually the point the book
makes: Jane Eyre is a first person narrative from a woman of
remarkable character and intelligence, who takes the narrative in her
own hands.
Thus the narrative of Jane Eyre can be read as a testimony
that if a woman of that caliber tells a story, she will do it in a style that
will be lucid, self-explorative and entertaining.

SAQ 5
In this scene, we are taken to the centre of the novel’s
‘problem’. The ‘problem’ is too strange for a civilized gentleman like
Lockwood to cope with. It is obvious that Lockwood is a confused
observer of the strange things going on. This scene, which concerns
events that happened many years before, forces itself upon his
confused mind. Lockwood’s problem is also that he is one of the
narrators of this strange story. At this point, the restrained menace‫٭‬
which he could feel floating in the air before, changes into an
atmosphere of unreality and horror.

SAQ 6
An essential question Wuthering Heights leaves open is
whether it ends happily or not and why: is the novel on the side of
Thrushcross Grange and civilization since Catherine and Hareton are
about to move there and Heathcliff dies? It is true that Heathcliff dies,
but can we miss the intensity of the passion associated with Wuthering
Heights, its stormy moors and Heathcliff’s triumph in death? Can we
miss the two lovers’ reunion on the other side of the grave?
It may seem that the Grange wins, but Heathcliff’s version of
reunion is strong and lingering.
This troubling question posed by the ending, brings to the
reader’s memory the first line of the book: Lockwood’s first
impression that Heathcliff is “the solitary neighbour that I shall be
troubled with”. Lockwood’s troubles with Heathcliff are also the
characters’ and the reader’s troubles. One may then wonder: did
Emily add the epilogue of the young couple Catherine and Hareton
moving to Thrushcross Grange because Victorian society would have
refused to accept the book to end with Heathcliff’s reunion with his
Catherine?

Victorianism
Whatever the speculations about this may be, the reader

cannot miss an important aspect of the book: balance. The first
Catherine wished to strike a balance between the Grange and
Wuthering Heights, civilization and nature, but she failed. The
“civilized” ending of the love story between the second Catherine and
Hareton may suggest a final and necessary conclusion to two
generations of unrest.
Catherine and Hareton’s love may thus be interpreted as a
successful version of the marriage that never took place between the
first Catherine and Heathcliff. The balance is struck in this ending,
possibly meaning that in a happy marriage, consuming love enters,
sometimes in the form of generations echoing it.

SAQ 7
Tess of the d’Urbervilles ends tragically with the heroine
brought to the prehistoric temple of Stonehenge. Of course, this
setting contributes to the sense of tragedy Hardy had in mind for the
fate of his heroine. Being a mysterious place, “older than the
centuries”, Stonehenge must have been the setting of many rituals
and sacrifices, and now Tess is driven and drawn to it. She throws
herself on one of its sacrificial stones. This suggests that Tess is one
of the victims of cruel fate brought to the very place that can lift her to
the status of a tragic victim.
As a symbolic setting, Stonehenge is charged with very old
cultural significances. The fact is that Stonehenge is still a mystery:
why it was built is unknown, although it probably was constructed as
a place of worship of some kind. Angel Clare feels and maybe he
also has some clues that it was so.

Bibliography
Brontë, Charlotte, (1847)1994), Jane Eyre, Penguin Books, A
Penguin / Godfrey Cave Edition
Brontë, Emily, (1847)2003), Wuthering Heights, Penguin

Books, Revised Edition
Dickens, Charles, Great Expectations, (1861)2000), Cliffs

Notes, New edition
Hardy, Thomas, (1891)1998), Tess of the d’Urbervilles, edited

by John Paul Riquelme, Boston: Bedford Books / Case Studies in
Contemporary Criticism Series.

The dawn of a new age
UNIT 2
THE DAWN OF A NEW AGE: JOSEPH CONRAD AND HENRY

JAMES
Unit Outline
Unit Objectives 28
2 Joseph Conrad and Henry James, Two 28
Forerunners of Modernism
2.1 Joseph Conrad’s Tale Heart of 29
Darkness: the Importance of Exotic
Setting
2.1.1 Imperialism in Heart of Darkness 30
2.1.2 Plot in Heart of Darkness 30
2.1.3 The Difficulty of the Text 33
2.2 Henry James’s Ghost Story The Turn 35
of the Screw
2.2.1 Plot in The Turn of the Screw 35
2.2.2 Can the Governess Be Trusted? 38
2.2.3 Is the Governess a Heroine or a Villain? 28
2.2.4 Who / What Are Miles and Flora? 39
2.2.5 What Are the Ghosts? 40
2.2.6 How Does the Phrase “the Turn of the 41
Screw” Apply to the Governess’s Tale?
Summary 41
Key Terms 42
SAA No. 2 43
Answers to SAQs 43
Bibliography 46


• Explain how Joseph Conrad and Henry James marked
the transition from Victorianism to early 20th century
literature
• Identify the dark vision in their tales Heart of Darkness
and The Turn of the Screw
• Explain the point of dark vision in the two tales
• Explain the importance of exotic setting in Heart of
Darkness
• Approach Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in terms
of imperialism
• Approach the plot of Conrad’s tale in terms of journey
Unit objectives • Explain why Heart of Darkness is a difficult text
• Explain why Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is a
Gothic tale
• Identify the main stages of plot in James’s tale
• Explain why the narrator of The Turn of the Screw
cannot be trusted
• Explain why the governess in The Turn of the Screw can
be seen either as a heroine or as a villain and the
implications of this dilemma
• Explain who / what are the two children in James’s tale
• Explain what the ghosts are in James’s tale
• Explain the title of James’s tale The Turn of the Screw
2. Joseph Conrad and Henry James, Two Forerunners of

Modernism
Joseph Conrad (an English writer of Polish origin) and Henry
James (an American writer who wrote for both sides of the Atlantic
and who became a British citizen in 1915) are late Victorian writers.
However, their lives and careers spanned the late 19th and early 20th
centuries.
Joseph Conrad’s career as a seaman brought him to such
exotic places as the West Indies, Malaysia and the Congo. The
journey to the Congo was extremely difficult: marked by a severe
illness, Conrad was haunted by its “dark” significances and turned it
into the subject of his nightmarish tale Heart of Darkness.
In all his works, Conrad made extensive use of symbolism and
striking visual imagery. He tried to convey the complexity of
experience by experimenting with narrative technique. He created an
intermediate narrator – Marlow in Youth (1902), Heart of Darkness,
Lord Jim and Chance (1914). This narrator, who, although involved
in the action, sticks to the facts in his storytelling, anticipates the
narrative technique of modernist novels where the narrator totally
disappears (see unit 4).
Henry James travelled to Europe and visited England,
Switzerland, Italy and France. Lacking strong American roots, he
decided in 1875 that his future belonged in Europe.

James’s interest in the ‘consciousness’ of his characters and

his innovative use of limited point of view (which heightens the
suspense in The Turn of the Screw) has made him one of the
forerunners of the stream of consciousness technique, later
developed by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf (see unit 4).
2.1. Joseph Conrad’s Tale Heart of Darkness: The Importance of

Exotic Setting
Heart of Darkness is set in Africa towards the end of the 19th

century, when European countries divided up the continent with the
aims of increasing national prestige and of having access to cheap
natural resources.
Of all of Conrad’s works, Heart of Darkness in particular
provides a bridge between Victorian values and the ideas of
modernism. Like its Victorian predecessors, this tale relies on
traditional ideas of heroism, which are nevertheless under constant
attack in a changing world and in places far from England.
Stop and think!

The exotic‫ ٭‬suggests distant countries and unfamiliar cultures.
How do you expect white Europeans to be affected by this?
(Refer to their capacities of understanding the new and unknown
environment and to their chances to adapt to it). Starting from
this, use your intuition to explain the significance of the title.
Give your answers to these questions in the space provided
below. Please add these answers to the portfolio to be
discussed in the tutorials.

2.1.1 Imperialism in Heart of Darkness

Like much of the best modernist literature produced in the
early decades of the 20th century, Heart of Darkness is as much
about alienation, confusion, and profound doubt, as it is about
imperialism.
Imperialism‫ ٭‬is at the centre of Heart of Darkness. By the
1890s, most of the world’s “dark places” (unknown to the Europeans
before) had been placed under European control. Thus the European
powers made efforts to administer and protect massive empires.
Cracks soon appeared in the system, which gave rise to a sense that
things were falling apart.
Heart of Darkness suggests that this is the natural result when
men are allowed to operate outside a social system of checks and
balances: power inevitably corrupts.
Besides making this point, Heart of Darkness raises a
question: is it possible to call an individual insane or wrong when he
is part of a system that is thoroughly corrupted and corrupting? To
what extent is the individual to blame, in this case?
Thus, Heart of Darkness is a narrative about the difficulty of
understanding the world beyond the self and about the ability of one
man to judge another.
2.1.2 Plot in Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness was serialized in Blackwood’s Magazine in
1899 and published in 1902 in the volume Youth: A Narrative; and
Two Other Stories.
The tale‫ ٭‬centers around Marlow, a sailor endowed with a
keen sense of observation and his journey up the Congo River to
meet Kurtz, reputed to be an idealistic man of great abilities.
Marlow is hired by a Company, a Belgian concern organized
to trade in the Congo. He takes command of a ship and goes there to
collect a cargo of ivory from the colonial stations in the interior.
As Marlow travels deeper and deeper into the jungle, he is
A journey
increasingly sickened by the corruption of the colonial traders and the
ruthless exploitation of the natives. The cruelty of imperial enterprise
contrasts sharply with the impassive and majestic jungle that
surrounds the white men’s settlements, making them appear to be
tiny islands amidst a vast darkness:
“The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed.
You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity
blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove‫ !٭‬I’ve
never seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent
wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as
something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for
the passing away of this fantastic invasion.”

SAQ 1
This quote is taken from the fourth section of Part I. It records
Marlow’s initial impression of the Central Station. What is the
contrast used by Marlow here? To what effects is this contrast
used?
Compare your answers to those given in the “Answers” section at

the end of the unit.
When he arrives at the Central Station, Marlow meets a

general manager, who is a dubious character. He discovers that his
steamship has been sunk and spends several months waiting for
parts to be repaired. His interest in Kurtz grows during this period.
The manager and his favourite, the brickmaker, seem to fear Kurtz
as a threat to their position. Kurtz is rumored to be ill, making the
delays in mending the ship all the more costly. Marlow eventually
gets the parts he needs to repair his ship, and he and the manager
set out with a few agents and a crew of cannibals on a long, difficult
voyage up the river.
On this adventurous voyage, Marlow meets a half-crazed
Russian trader, who claims that Kurtz has enlarged his mind and
cannot be subjected to the same moral judgments as normal people.
Apparently, Kurtz has established himself as a god with the natives
and has gone on brutal raids in the surrounding territory in search of
ivory. The collection of cut off heads adorning the fence posts around
the station attests to his “methods”. Kurtz is brought out of the
station-house on a stretcher, and a large group of native warriors
pour out of the forest and surround them. Kurtz speaks to them, and
the natives disappear into the woods.

Indeed, Kurtz is ill, and despite his resistance and attempt to

escape, Marlow persuades him to join them on the steamer. They set
off down the river the next morning, but Kurtz’s health is failing fast.
Marlow listens to Kurtz talk, at the same time piloting the ship.
“The horror! The Kurtz entrusts Marlow with a packet of personal documents, including
horror!” an eloquent pamphlet on civilizing the savages which ends with a
scrawled message that says, “Exterminate all the brutes!” The
steamer breaks down, and they have to stop for repairs. Kurtz dies,
uttering his last words – “The horror! The horror!” – in the presence of
the confused Marlow.
SAQ 2
What could Kurtz mean by these words? Do they affect our
understanding of the plot?
Compare your answers to those given in the “Answers” section

at the end of the unit.
Marlow falls ill soon after and barely survives. Eventually he

returns to Europe and goes to see Kurtz’s fiancée. She is still in
mourning, even though it has been over a year since Kurtz’s death,
and she praises him as a paragon‫ ٭‬of virtue and achievement. She
asks him what his last words were, but Marlow cannot bring himself
to shatter her illusions with the truth. Instead, he tells her that his last
word was her name.
2.1.3 The Difficulty of the Text
Marlow is a complicated man who anticipates the figures of

modernism while also reflecting his Victorian predecessors. In many
ways, Marlow is a traditional hero: tough, honest, an independent
thinker and a capable man. Yet he is also “broken” or “damaged”, like
characters in modernist literature. His late Victorian experiences,
which involve him in the harsh imperial system, make him weary,
skeptical and cynical. In other words, Marlow develops features that
bring him very close to the modernist figure of the individual who is
defeated by a system which confronts him with “signs” he cannot
understand and interpret.
As both a character and a narrator‫ ٭‬of this text, Marlow has
problems with reading and interpreting. The jungle he explores is
both a literal and a metaphorical one: the “heart of darkness” is the
colony which refuses to make sense to the European white man, and
this difficulty of making sense of it falls on Marlow.
“Do you see Marlow’s story is a narrative that exposes the difficulty of
him? Do you making sense of the Congo jungle. His journey is literally a
see the story? dangerous enterprise, in which Marlow faces threats at every step.
Metaphorically, it is also an insecure journey, which asks of Marlow
to interpret its meanings.
The character of Kurtz adds to this maze. Marlow refers to
Kurtz as “hollow” more than once. This may be taken as a negative
remark, implying that Kurtz is not worthy of admiration. He may not
be the “hero” many say he is. However, the remark may also imply
that in his essential “hollowness”, Kurtz is an enigma. Indeed, Kurtz
is not so much a fully realized individual as a series of images
constructed by others. There are versions of Kurtz but no true Kurtz:
to his cousin, Kurtz was a great musician; to a journalist, a brilliant
politician and a leader; to his fiancée, a great humanitarian and
genius. However, his deeds and enterprises seem to be driven by
vanity and a desire to increase his power, and his last words are
vague. How can Marlow make sense of these contradictions, before
and after he meets Kurtz? In one of the passages of the story, he
wonders:
“He [Kurtz] was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the
name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story?
Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream
– making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey
the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and
bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being
captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams…”

SAQ 3
Marlow is confused about Kurtz. Does his confusion (as a
narrator) have any effects upon the reader?

The whole story is an exploration of hypocrisy, ambiguity,

moral confusion and absurdity. At one station, for instance, Marlow
sees a man trying to carry water in a bucket with a large hole in it. At
the Outer Station, he watches how native labourers keep shooting at
a hillside with no particular goal in mind.
Absurdity is rendered symbolically as contrasting exteriors and
surfaces (the jungle, the river banks, the “images” of Kurtz) and
interiors (the stations, the steamer cabins, the “real” Kurtz). However,
Marlow’s problem is that there is no fixed meaning to anything, and
beyond surfaces and exteriors there may be nothing.
Darkness Darkness and fog are also symbolic of this confusion.
Darkness envelops everything in the book, and Marlow’s condition is
to be always “in the dark” (that is not to know anything for sure).
Africa, England and Brussels (Belgium) are all described as gloomy
and somehow dark, even if the sun is shining brightly.
Metaphorically, darkness is the inability to see and understand (see
again the passage quoted above).
Fog Fog is also a sort of corollary to darkness. Fog not only
obscures but distorts. Marlow’s steamer is literally caught in the fog,
and this means that literally Marlow has no idea where he is going
and no idea whether danger or just open water lies ahead. Of course,
this symbol reinforces the metaphor of Marlow’s condition as a late
Victorian stepping into the 20th century: a condition of utter confusion
(Read quote 8 in the Reader).
2.2. Henry James’s Ghost Story The Turn of the Screw

The ghost‫ ٭‬story was a popular form, especially in England,
where, as the prologue (that is the prefacing story) of The Turn of the
Screw suggests, gathering for the purpose of telling ghost stories
was something of a Christmastide tradition.
According to James’s notebooks and his preface to the 1908
edition, the germ of the story had been a half-remembered anecdote
told to him by the archbishop of Canterbury: a story of small children
haunted by the ghosts of a pair of servants who wish them ill. The
story abounds in Gothic elements: an old mansion, strange
atmosphere, ghosts, mystery and death.
2.2.1 Plot in The Turn of the Screw
“The story’s The Turn of the Screw appeared in Collier’s Weekly in twelve
written. It’s in a installments in 1898.
locked An anonymous narrator recalls a Christmas Eve gathering at
drawer – it has an old house, where guests compete, telling ghost stories to one
not been out for another. A guest named Douglas introduces a story involving two
years.” children, Miles and Flora, and a governess, whose name will never
be disclosed. After sending for the governess’s written record of
events from his home, Douglas provides a few introductory details. A
bachelor persuaded the young woman to take a position as
governess for his niece and nephew in an isolated country home
after the previous governess died. Douglas begins to read from the
written record. At this point the frame‫ ٭‬closes, and the story shifts to
the governess’s point of view as she narrates her strange
experience.
Taking her new job at Bly, a country home in Essex, England,
the governess meets the housekeeper Mrs. Grose and Flora, whom
she finds a charming girl. The next day the governess receives a
letter from her employer, with whom she made arrangements that
she should take the whole responsibility for the children, without
bothering him. According to this agreement, she finds a letter from
Miles’s headmaster enclosed in her employer’s letter. The letter says
that Miles has been expelled but does not explain why. Turning to
Mrs. Grose for possible reasons, she only gets assurance that Miles
might be naughty now and then but not more than any boy of his age
should be. The governess is reassured by this as she meets Miles,
who charms her.
The plot thickens with strange events as the governess sees a
strange man on a tower of the mansion and exchanges an intense
“It was as if all stare with him. Telling Mrs. Grose about it, the governess finds out
the rest of the that the man of her vision is Peter Quint, a former valet who is now
scene had been dead.
stricken with Being more and more convinced that the ghost of Quint seeks
death.” Miles, the governess is scrupulous in her supervision of the children.
Soon after these suspicions, the plot thickens again. One day,
as the governess is at the lake with Flora, she sees a woman
dressed in black and senses that the woman is the ghost of Miss
Jessel, her predecessor. The governess becomes sure that Flora is
aware of the ghost’s presence but deliberately keeps silent.
Questioning Mrs. Grose about it again, the governess finds
out that Quint was “too free” with Miles and Miss Jessel with Flora.
This makes her suspicious of a plot between the two children and the
two ghosts and more assured in her mission of protecting the
children.
After the governess’s repeated encounters with the ghosts,
which are paralleled by an affectionate behaviour of the children
alternating with nasty tricks on their part, Mrs. Grose urges the
governess to appeal to her employer, but the governess declines,
reminding her that the children’s uncle does not want to be bothered.
However, seeing that the situation worsens, the governess writes a
letter to her employer.
In the meantime, the governess finds that Flora is missing and
proceeds to look for her by the lake, together with Mrs. Grose.
Arriving there, the governess finds Flora and sees Miss Jessel’s
ghost across the lake, but Mrs. Grose declares she sees nothing of
the sort. At that point, Flora complains that the governess is too cruel
and that she wants to get away from her. The next day, Mrs. Grose
informs the governess that Flora is sick. They decide that Mrs. Grose
should take Flora away, and the governess remains alone with Miles
at Bly. It is also discovered that the letter the governess wrote to the
children’s uncle has disappeared.
With Flora and Mrs. Grose gone, the governess and Miles talk
after dinner. The governess starts by inquiring about the missing
letter:
“’So what have you done with it?’
‘I’ve burnt it.’
‘Burnt it?’ It was now or never. ‘Is it what you did at school?’
/…/
‘Did I steal?’
‘Was it for that you mightn’t go back?’
‘Did you know I mightn’t go back?’
‘I know everything.’
/…/ ‘Everything?’
‘Everything. Therefore did you - ? But I couldn’t say it again.
Miles could, very simply. ‘No, I didn’t steal.’
/…/
I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure,
and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the
appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant
confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on
earth was I?”

Stop and think!

The plot is now approaching a conclusion. It is obvious that the
governess does not “know” more now than she has known so
far, and Miles refuses to give her explanations. She has
reached a point when she doubts everything, and it is very
significant that she questions her own self and her own position.
Before you learn how the story ends, give your own version of
the ending in the space provided below. Please add this version
to the portfolio to be discussed in the tutorials.
As they continue to talk, the governess sees Quint outside.

She watches Quint in horror and presses Miles to see and
identify him. Miles asks where Quint is, and the governess presses
him harder: ‘There, there!’, but Miles falls into her arms, dead.

2.2.2 Can the Governess be Trusted?
The governess narrates virtually the whole tale in retrospect,

writing it down in a manuscript. She speaks in the first person, as she
puts into writing her account of the strange occurrences she
experienced at Bly. She often invokes her “imagination”, “invention”,
but also her “memory” and “inductions”. She also confesses,
repeatedly, that “whatever I had seen, Miles and Flora saw more –
things terrible and unguessable”, and that by trying to find out more,
she takes plunges “into the hideous obscure”. The strange sense she
has is that the more she learns, the more she is in the dark.
At some point she writes: “I scarce know how to put my story
into words that shall be a credible picture of my state of mind /…/”,
which points to her awareness of the difficulty of her task of writing a
“How can I credible story.
retrace today As a matter of fact, the reader has no other source of
the strange information but the governess. The problem with that is that the
steps of my governess turns out to be a rather dubious source: she is the only
obsession?” person at Bly who sees the ghosts, while everybody else (Miles,
Flora and Mrs. Grose) cannot see them, no matter how hard they are
pressed. Given this serious suspicion raised by the governess, how
can the reader trust her on the strange behaviour of the children? Is it
not rather the other way round: that her behaviour is strange?
2.2.3 Is the Governess a Heroine or a Villain?

The governess thinks that her task of protecting the children is
heroic: “I was in these days literally able to find a joy in the
extraordinary flight of heroism the occasion demanded of me.” At the
same time, with her suspicions of the children, who are virtually
“if he were innocent, but whom she accuses of being bad to the point of being
innocent, “diabolic”, the governess may pass for a villain‫( ٭‬an evil character).
what then on She suspects herself of being something she cannot name in the
earth was I?” closing scene of the tale, but this suspicion does not alter her
heroism. And is it the governess’s heroism that kills Miles, who
cannot let himself go from the grip of the evil, or is it her essentially
evil inclination to project her insane visions onto Miles that kills him?
The readers are offered these two radically different options.
Which one shall they choose? James let the readers become
suspended between these two options, maybe implying that “the
heart of darkness” here is the governess herself.

2.2.4 Who / What Are Miles and Flora?
Miles might be either a cunning plaything of the two ghosts or

just an innocent, unusually well-mannered but sometimes tricky boy.
The governess leaves Miles’s true character in question. The
strangest impression of Miles the reader gets, however, is his
disturbing emptiness, his impersonality and lack of history, as though
he were less than real. Like Miles, Flora might be either angelic or
diabolic.
In this case, the question might be what Miles and Flora are,
and not who they are!
SAQ 4
Try to explain what Miles and Flora are starting from the possibility
that the governess’s state of mind is confused and maybe she
hallucinates.


2.2.5 What Are the Ghosts?
There are many clues in the text that the governess may
actually be in love with her employer, the children’s uncle. Maybe
that is why she wants to push her task of taking care of them beyond
the limit, turning it into an act of heroism that might prove her
exceptional qualities! She might be seduced, wishing to respond to
the spell her employer cast on her by inventing another spell.
In this case, might not Peter Quint be an imaginary “ghostly”
replacement of the children’s uncle? This hypothesis is supported by
the clues the governess gives when she writes about her first
encounter with Quint’s ghost:
“What arrested me on the spot – and with a shock much
greater than any vision had allowed for – was the sense that my
imagination had, in a flash, turned real. He did stand there!”
Why is she invoking her “imagination” and turning “real”? Is it
possible that she was dreaming of her employer, expecting to see
him in fancy, and was “arrested on the spot” because the object of
that fancy became “real”? Maybe that is why she is suspicious of it:
she knows that imagination cannot turn “real”. She insists that the
figure she sees is “as little anyone else I knew as it was the image
that had been in my mind.” Whose image had been in her mind? The
next sentence reads: ”I had not seen it in Harley Street – I had not
seen it anywhere.” Harley Street is her employer’s domicile, and what
the reader guesses is that she was thinking of him, wishing he were
‘She was a
there.
lady.’
Who is Miss Jessel and what would be the point of the
‘And he so
governess’s inventing her? The possibility that Quint might be an
dreadfully
imaginary projection of her employer suggests that the governess
below,’ said
projects herself as the late Miss Jessel, also a governess.
Mrs. Grose.
SAQ 5
Explain this hypothesis. Why does the governess need to
continue her game of imagination and involve the children in it?

2.2.6 How Does the Phrase “the Turn of the Screw” Apply to the
Governess’s Tale?
By titling his tale The Turn of the Screw, James implies that
this phrase is a fitting representation of the tale. The phrase is a
metaphor suggesting that a tale’s effect on its readers is comparable
to a screw boring into a hole. With each turn of the screw, the story’s
point drives readers further and on a deeper level.
James gives “a turn of the screw” with each chapter of the tale
to amplify its ability to penetrate. He also frames the tale told by the
governess in the first person. The frame is an intriguing but
“It is all obscure ambiguous prologue that foreshadows “delicious” dread.
and imperfect, Douglas is the first to turn the screw when he says: “I quite
the picture, the agree – in regard to Griffin’s ghost, or whatever it was – that its
story, but there appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age, adds a particular
is a suggestion touch. But it’s not the first occurrence of its charming kind that I know
of a strangely to have involved a child. If the child gives the effect another turn of
gruesome‫٭‬ the screw, what do you say to two children - ?”
effect in it.” The screw turns again when we understand that the children
of the governess’s tale are not merely victims but participants in the
ghosts’ evil plot.
The screw bores into the planks of reason until those planks
crack and threaten to plunge us into explorations of insanity. As we
go along reading, we grow more and more suspicious of the
governess’s judgments, in fact so suspicious as to consider her the
villain.
Summary
This unit introduces you to the dark stories of two writers of

the end of the 19th century: Joseph Conrad and Henry James. It
makes a point of the fact that the two writers discussed here are two
late Victorians looking anxiously back into a disintegrating world and
forward to an uncertain future.
This unit insists on the two writers’ darkness of vision in order
to demonstrate that this marks a transition from a world in dissolution
(Victorianism) to an age which thoroughly questions the values of
that world (early 20th century).
It is significant that Joseph Conrad and Henry James explored
two major territories: Heart of Darkness takes us into the threatening
colonial possessions of the Empire, while The Turn of the Screw
plunges us into the darkest regions of the mind. These explorations
pose troubling questions about the impossibility of constructing
meaning, leaving the explorers (readers) in a confused state of mind.
The next units will deal with this troubling legacy of
Victorianism, which gave the early 20th century writers a sense that
they should do away with it and create new modes of writing.

Key Terms
• Exotic
• Imperialism
• Ghost story
• Tale
• Narrator
• Ambiguity
• Ambiguity means doubt about meaning

• Exotic means strikingly unusual, and often very colourful
and exciting. It suggests different countries and unfamiliar cultures
• Frame means a structure that surrounds or encloses a
particular space. Here it is used to refer to the story that frames the
governess’s story in The Turn of the Screw. Another term used to
refer to a framing story is “prologue” (that is opening story)
• Ghost is the spirit of somebody who has died, supposed to
appear as a shadowy form or to cause sounds, the movement of
objects or a frightening atmosphere in a place
• Gruesome means horrifying
• Imperialism refers to the political, military, or economic
domination of one country over the other
• Jove is a literary form of “Jupiter”, who was the king of
the gods in Roman mythology. The expression “by Jove” is used to
express surprise or to emphasize a conviction
• Narrator is anyone who recounts a narrative. The narrator
may be in various relations to the events described, ranging from
being their center (the main character / protagonist) through various
degrees of importance (a minor character) to being merely a
witness. A narrator is always present, at least by implication, in any
work of fiction. A narrator may be reliable (credible, trustworthy) or
unreliable (cannot be trusted). If the narrator is reliable, the reader
accepts his / her statements of facts and judgement without serious
question. If the narrator is unreliable, the reader questions or seeks
to qualify his / her statements
• Paragon means an example of excellence: somebody or
something that is the best example of a quality
• Tale is a term that applies to both Heart of Darkness and
The Turn of the Screw. It means a short piece of fiction, usually
longer than a short story but shorter than a novel
• Villain means an evil character

SAA No. 2
Comment upon the significance and implications of the two
writers’ darkness of vision in Heart of Darkness and The Turn of
the Screw.
Take into account the main aspects that inform their vision:
- the imperial system (Heart of Darkness)
- moral and psychological ambiguity‫( ٭‬Heart of Darkness
and The Turn of the Screw)
- class issues (the governess and her socially unacceptable
fondness of the master in The Turn of the Screw)
Send your essay to your tutor. Do not take more than three
pages.
Answers to SAQs
SAQ 1
The word ‘ivory’ has taken on a life of its own for the men who
work with the Company. It is very significant that the white colour of
ivory can be associated with the white European colonizers and their
greed. Thus, ivory to them is no longer the tusk of an elephant (a
natural thing), but a guarantee of economic prosperity (dead matter
turned into an object of trade).
Marlow’s reference to a decaying corpse is both literal and
figurative: both elephants and native Africans die as a result of the
white man’s pursuit of ivory, and the entire enterprise is rotten to the
core.
The strangest thing is that the word ‘ivory’ has lost all
connection to any physical reality and has itself become an object of
worship: the worship of dead matter turned into profit.
In contrast to this rotten ‘language’ of commerce, the jungle is
dark and silent. Marlow is at a loss for meanings here: he does not
know how to take it. Is it evil, or is it truth? His dilemma is suggestive
of the white man’s incapacity to understand the meaning of a world
which threatens him by being unfamiliar and which he in his turn has
threatened by his “fantastic invasion”.

SAQ 2
Kurtz’s words “Exterminate all the brutes” is ambiguous in the
sense that “brutes” may refer to the elephants, to the natives or to
both.
His words “The horror! The horror!” are even more ambiguous.
“The horror” could be almost anything. The most confusing possibility
is, however, that it may mean nothing, in the sense that what it
means may never be known to Marlow, who will thus never be able
to express it in words.
Marlow will ponder Kurtz’s last words and Kurtz’s memory for
the rest of his life. Maybe Kurtz was deliberately ambiguous and
calculated the effects of this ambiguity. It is obvious that he wanted
power and grandeur all his life. His act of leaving ambiguous
messages behind for Marlow to ponder may be indicative of his
desire to turn himself into an enigma and thus ensure his own
immortality.
Of course, this affects the readers’ understanding of plot and
character in this text.

section.
SAQ 3
Kurtz has explored the fascination of horror, and Marlow’s
task, as a man who met him, is to make sense of Kurtz’s character
and Kurtz’s life. It is obvious that Marlow is fascinated by Kurtz’s
fascinations.
The difficulty of Marlow’s task, however, is that he does not
know how to accommodate the different aspects of Kurtz into a story.
Marlow expresses these problems by saying that “he [Kurtz]
was just a word for me”, implying that he cannot go beyond the
surface of the word to the essence of the man.
This device of exploring a character, represented by two or
more different aspects of itself, brings us to the threshold of a time
when character is seen as so complex that no single pair of eyes
(Marlow’s), no single story (Marlow’s) and no single plot can reveal
him completely.
Thus, the narrator’s confusion (Marlow’s) becomes the
reader’s: how can we read the story of a man when the teller of that
story cannot pull the strings of the story together? What is the
“reality” and the “truth” beyond the character whose story we are
reading? This is why Marlow gives us the “dream” alternative: dream
has no logic. Dream is vague and ambiguous, and dream is not real!


SAQ 4
Like Heart of Darkness, with its suggestions of dream, The
Turn of the Screw may read as a nightmare. The governess is
presumably attracted by the children’s tutor, who has hired her for
the job. It is very likely that this should be the reason why she feels
bad. She knows it is not proper for a woman of her condition to fall in
love with her employer, and she starts to unfold her memories by
confessing:
“After rising, in town, to meet his appeal, I had at all events a
couple of very bad days – found myself doubtful again, felt indeed
sure I had made a mistake. In this state of mind I spent the long
hours of bumping, swinging coach that carried me to the stopping-
place at which I was to be met by a vehicle from the house.”
The whole story may be the governess’s bad dream of going
to Bly “in this state of mind”. Everything goes wrong there, of course,
because everything is a projection of this bad state of mind: the
ghosts she encounters are her projections and so is everybody and
everything else.
The children are, very strangely, mirrored projections of the
two ghosts: they are evil, scheming and corrupted, just like the
ghosts.
The strangeness is amplified by the near and far “design”. The
two ghosts are “seen only across, as it were, and beyond – in
strange places and on high places, the top of houses, the outside of
windows, the further edge of pools”, but the governess makes out a
“deep design” (she implies intention) on their part “to shorten the
distance and overcome the obstacle”. Is not the distance “shortened”
by the presence of the two children, who are in the near sphere,
always around? Even when they seem to step across, the governess
finds them in the room and not outside, on her side of the lake, and
not on the other.
Therefore Miles and Flora, who are so elusive, so hard to pin
down, may be the governess’s projections. They are on the near
side, making the “design” complete and the grip of horror tight.
The strange thing is, however, that in a sense, the children are
more “ghostly” than the ghosts: they are now here, now gone, now
good, now bad, now loving and now hateful. They change “faces” in
a manner that may be more dangerous and more horrifying than the
ghosts’, which are always the same.

SAQ 5
The governess may have a nightmare, or she may even
hallucinate. She sleeps very little, and it is scientifically demonstrated
that too little sleep or no sleep at all over a longer period of time has
this effect on people: they start to hallucinate.
That Quint is a replacement of the master, which the
governess’s mind projects, is suggested by a piece of information
provided by Mrs. Grose. Listening to the governess’s description of
the ghost, Mrs. Grose identifies it as Quint’s and tells the governess
that the clothes he wears are the masters’. It seems that when he
was alive, he wore the master’s clothes, taking the master’s
prerogatives together with them. He was no gentleman, though.
However, Miss Jessel was, according to Mrs. Grose, a lady.
Supposedly she and Peter Quint were in love. That was a love
society could not approve, and this may be the reason of Miss
Jessel’s death.
Projecting herself as Miss Jessel, the governess thus
identifies with her as a lady.
Is this scenario a nightmare only because it casts two ghosts
in the main parts? This is only a partial answer. The reason is, in the
first place, that the governess cannot have a nice dream of a relation
which is not sanctioned by social norms. That is why she feels so
bad about taking the job: she takes it from the “wrong” position of a
governess seduced by the master. In her nightmare, she reverses
the ranks, but the nightmare worsens.
Why are the children needed in this scenario? In any nightmare
images proliferate, overlap and change forms. Situations get out of
control, nasty incidents occur again and again, getting worse and
worse. The two children in The Turn of the Screw actually increase the
horror effects: they are presumably innocent, but the governess
hesitates between their innocence and their wickedness. Worse than
that, she grows more and more convinced that they are corrupted and
wicked rather than innocent. Miles and Flora are needed to complete
the design of the nightmare and to increase its effects.
However, the children are also needed for a reason which
relates their presence in the design to language and communication.
Any text needs language to be a text. Any text is also a form of
communication. The governess’s story is fantastic, ambiguous, and
therefore strange to the point of being incommunicable. It is also
threatened by the silence and absence of the two ghosts. If the two
ghosts are silent and strange manifestations of “present absences”,
always appearing across or beyond, the two children are the
palpable presences in the “near” sphere, which the design needs.
Very importantly, they are also the governess’s interlocutors, persons
with whom she can communicate.
It is true that their communication is made difficult by the
children’s (especially Miles’s) silence, but it still is a form of
(problematic) communication that allows the text to be a text. In this
respect, Mrs. Grose is an unsatisfactory interlocutor for a different
reason: she cannot understand what the children seem to “know”.

Bibliography
Conrad, Joseph, (1902)1994) Heart of Darkness, Penguin
Books, A Penguin / Godfrey Cave Edition
James, Henry, (1898)1994) The Turn of the Screw, Penguin

Books, A Penguin / Godfrey Cave Edition

Modernist principles and aesthetics
UNIT 3
MODERNIST PRINCIPLES AND AESTHETICS
Unit Outline
Unit Objectives 48
3 Modernist Principles and Aesthetics 48
3.1 Virginia Woolf’s Essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”: A 48
Modernist Manifesto
3.2 Free Expression and Novelty: the Basic Principles of 51
Modernism
3.3 Internationalism 52
3.4 Modernist Aesthetics 53
3.4.1 Iconoclasm 54
3.4.2 Impressionism 55
3.4.3 Post-Impressionism 56
3.4.4 Genre-Boundary Breaking 57
3.4.5 “The Death of the Author” and the Birth of the Reader 58
Summary 59
Key Terms 59
SAA No. 3 62
Answers to SAQs 62
Bibliography 64

After you have read through this chapter, you should be able to:
• Identify Modernism as a paradigm of novelty
• Explain Virginia Woolf’s argument in the essay “Mr.
Bennett and Mrs. Brown” – a manifesto of literary
modernism
• Identify the essential principles and features of
modernism and explain them in terms of:
- free expression
Unit objectives - novelty
- internationalism
• Identify the new aesthetics of modernism and explain
them in terms of:
- iconoclasm
- Impressionism
- Post-Impressionism
- genre-boundary breaking
- collage / montage
- a new emphasis on the reader’s / viewer’s
perception
3. Modernist Principles and Aesthetics

3.1. Virginia Woolf’s “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”: A Modernist
Manifesto
Virginia Woolf, who was both a writer and a critic, pleaded for
novelty – the main feature of modernism. In her essay “Modern
Fiction” (1919), followed by the essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”
(1924), Woolf firmly delineated the priorities of her generation and
her own priorities as a writer.
“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” can be considered one of the
most influential manifestos of literary modernism. In this essay
Virginia Woolf proclaims that:
“…in or about December 1910 the human character

changed.”

Stop and think!

Stop and take a few minutes to think of Woolf’s statement. How
can “human character change”? What could be the causes and
factors of change?
Give your answers in the space provided below. Please note that
you will find keys to your answers in the following passages.
Woolf’s essay argues with a tradition deemed to be obsolete

and ossified. She identifies the representatives of that ossified
tradition in her immediate predecessors, “the most prominent and
successful novelists in the year 1910… Mr. Wells‫٭‬, Mr. Bennett‫٭‬,
and Mr. Galsworthy‫”٭‬, whom she puts in what she calls “the
Edwardian camp”. She calls these novelists “Edwardian” because
they wrote their novels in the first decade of the 20th century (1901 -
1910) during the reign of King Edward VII. Edward was the son of
Queen Victoria, and her successor to the throne of Great Britain and
Northern Ireland.

The philosophical underpinning of Woolf’s point is the nature

What is reality? of “reality”. Thus, in the same essay she writes:
“But now I must recall what Mr. Arnold Bennett says. He says
that it is only if the characters are real that the novel has any chance
of surviving. Otherwise, die it must. But, I ask myself, what is reality?
And who are the judges of reality? A character may be real to Mr.
Bennett and quite unreal to me.”
SAQ 1
What can Woolf mean by the question “what is reality”? How can
Woolf’s “reality” make a difference from Bennett’s?

The militant, revolutionary and prophetic tone of the whole

essay makes it clear who the more entitled judges of “reality” are:
they are, of course, “the Georgians”, the new wave of writers. These
writers are far better equipped to perceive the “reality” of “that
overwhelming and peculiar impression” given by a character, or
rather the “myriads of irrelevant and incongruous ideas” crowding
“into one’s head” on every occasion when character needs to be
captured. By “the Georgians”, Woolf means the new wave of British
writers who started to make their voices heard in 1910. Woolf calls
them “Georgians” because 1910 was the year when King George V
came to the throne. He ruled from 1910 to 1936.
It is obvious that Woolf’s quarrel with the Edwardian novelists
focuses upon their realist method, which she considers to be faithful
to the perceived, objective world at the expense of the process of
perception itself and the perceiver engaged in it.
To Woolf’s mind, these realists are pitiable “materialists”
engaged in an “enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness
of life, of the story.” Woolf also argues that the Edwardians ”have laid
an enormous stress upon the fabric of things”, that is the palpable,
The solid nature of reality.
“Edwardians” In an argument typical of the quarrel between tradition and
were modernity, using a rhetoric which makes the territory of the text a
“materialists” metaphoric battlefield, Woolf opposes “the Edwardian camp” of
Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy to what she calls “the Georgian
camp”. She mentions, among others, D. H. Lawrence and James
Joyce as “warriors” of the Georgian camp.
If the date of the “change” looks curiously exact, one has to
consider historical facts: King Edward VII had died in May 1910,
being succeeded by King George V. But Woolf also implies the
importance of a major cultural event: the opening of the first Post-
Impressionist exhibition in London in November 1910.
The “Georgian” According to Woolf in this essay, the prevailing sound of the
age was Georgian age is “breaking and falling, crashing and destruction”.
“a season of Signs of these are everywhere apparent in literature, where
failures and “grammar is violated; syntax disintegrated”. In her account, the
fragments” Georgian age is also “a season of failures and fragments”.
What Woolf calls the “spasmodic, the obscure, the
fragmentary, the failure” are inevitably part of this revolutionary
change encapsulated by the prophetic statement which concludes
the essay:
“We are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of
English literature.”
3.2 Free Expression and Novelty: the Basic Principles of

Modernism
The artists’ struggle for freer expression and their commitment
to it was what modernism held most at stake.
Free expression was a principle which had to operate on
various levels, often simultaneously: to various degrees, all the
modernists were taboo‫ ٭‬breakers in sexual, social, political,
aesthetic and stylistic matters.
Being committed to innovation and emancipation, modernist
artists found themselves pursuing one form or another of exile‫٭‬. In
short they acted out one of the impulses of modernism. James
Joyce, an Irishman with a cosmopolitan‫ ٭‬spirit, and D. H. Lawrence,
the only indisputably major English writer of the early 20th century
Exile who came from the working class, actually lived in exile. To Virginia
Woolf, one of “the daughters of educated men” and even to Aldous
Huxley, a “noncongenital”‫ ٭‬novelist, exile translated as a sense of
confinement within the boundaries of their society and culture.
Irrespective of the form of exile they embraced, all these writers –
without any exception - opened themselves up to Continental values,
ideas and ideologies. All of them were spirits who looked for
accomplishment in a free world without frontiers.

3.3 Internationalism
The early 20th century British artists were highly responsive to

various Continental influences. The novelists looked up at Russian
writers like Chekhov‫ ٭‬and Tolstoy‫٭‬. In fact, the Russians were seen
as models by Virginia Woolf in her essay “Modern Novels” (also
known under the title “Modern Fiction”) because “they see further
than we [the British] do and without our gross impediments of vision”.
Virginia Woolf and James Joyce’s tendency to mix the various
Stream of strands of memory, anticipation and present thought into a fluid
consciousness stream of consciousness‫ ٭‬can be – and has been - seen in
association with similar innovations undertaken by their French
contemporary writer Marcel Proust‫٭‬.
Aldous Huxley’s idea of having a novelist within the novel
comment about the problems Huxley himself had to sort out when he
wrote Point Counterpoint has often been discussed in connection
with another French novel, André Gide’s‫ ٭‬The Counterfeiters.
This newly found ideal of artistic internationalism is another
“symptom” of the profound change undergone by the British arts in
the early 20th century.
Trans-culturalism, internationalism or even
cosmopolitanism‫ ٭‬is another aspect typifying the paradigm of
modernism. It marked a shift from the politicized geography of the
glorious British Empire of the Victorian age, through its dissolution in
the Edwardian period, to the de-centralized cultural re-mapping “from
one bohemia‫ ٭‬to another” in a world losing its frontiers and
permeated by a new spirit.
Contemporary British writer and critic Malcolm Bradbury made
Bohemia a very clear point of it when he argued that “the Modern movement
was in essence an international affair, founded on exile, the
movement of the arts, ideas and forms from one bohemia to
another.” By “bohemia”, Bradbury meant a new type of metropolis
characteristic of the early decades of the 20th century. He meant
cities like Paris, Zurich, Vienna, London, where artists on both sides
of the Atlantic (Europe and the U.S.) came and found their spiritual
freedom.

SAQ 2
Why did internationalism animate the writers discussed above?
Look at it as one of the fundamental principles of modernism.
Relate this principle to their pursuit of novelty and free
expression and to their impulse to cross borders and live in exile
both literally and figuratively.

3.4 Modernist Aesthetics

Read the definition of Modernism in the Fontana Dictionary of
Modern Thought:
• “Modernism (or “the modern movement”) has by now
acquired stability as the comprehensive term for an
international tendency, arising in the poetry, fiction, drama,
music, painting, architecture and other arts of the West in the
last years of the 19th century and subsequently affecting the
character of most 20th century art.
• The tendency is usually held to have reached its peak just
before or soon after World War I, and there is some
uncertainty about whether it still persists or a subsequent age
of style has begun…
• As a stylistic term, modernism contains and conceals a wide
variety of different smaller movements… A number of these
movements contain large theoretical differences among
themselves but certain stylistic similarities…
• Modernism had a high aesthetic value and can be seen as a
movement attempting to preserve the aesthetic realm against
intellectual, social and historical forces threatening it…

• Its forms, with their elements of fragmentation, introversion,

and crisis, have sometimes been held to register the collapse
of the entire tradition of the arts in human history…
• The modernist arts require, for their comprehension, criteria
different from those appropriate to earlier art.”
(Quoted by Douglas Hewitt, Introduction to English Fiction of the
Early Modern Period 1890-1940, Longman, London and New
York, 1992, p. 136)
3.4.1. Iconoclasm
Iconoclasm implies a challenge to tradition, namely a
challenge to and the overturning of traditional beliefs, customs and
values.
Woolf’s argument in “Modern Fiction” and “Mr. Bennett and
Mrs. Brown” accounted for the new techniques of capturing “reality”
in a subjective way. Writers shifted their focus from objectivity to
subjectivity through stream of consciousness, interior monologue
and free indirect style. Thus, it may be stated that iconoclasm was an
essential attitude embraced by the early 20th century writers.
Early 20th century writers (the modernists) rejected the
traditional mode of realism and experimented with new modes.
SAQ 3
Read Woolf’s argument in the essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs.
Brown” (3.1) in terms of iconoclasm. You have found a couple of
ideas related to the modernists’ iconoclastic approaches in the
subchapters above.


3.4.2 Impressionism
Impressionism is an essentially modernist style and mode
which started to be practised in France in the latter half of the 19th
century.
Impressionism focuses on recording impressions. Its main
characteristic is the effacement of contours into vibrating
atmosphere.
In music, Impressionism expresses feelings and impressions.
This style of music, of late 19th and early 20th century France, is
characterized by the use of rich harmonies and tones rather than a
Claude Monet‫٭‬ form to express scenes or emotions.
“Rouen Cathedral” Impressionism flourished mainly in the visual arts, although
the painters’ techniques of relying on vibration were borrowed from
Musicalisation of music. Thus it may be argued that the novelty brought about by
the canvas Impressionism was the “musicalisation” of the canvas‫٭‬. This
“musicalised” style in painting also influenced literature.
In her essay “Modern Fiction”, Virginia Woolf makes the point

that “the chief task of the novelist” is “to convey the incessantly
varying spirit” of the reality invading the brain from all sides with “as
little admixture of the alien and external as possible”.
The novelist who serves her as the best example of this
impressionistic way of capturing reality is James Joyce. With this
example in mind, she urges her contemporaries:
“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
Claude Monet incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon
“Rouen Cathedral” the consciousness.”
SAQ 4
How does Woolf’s argument here relate to Impressionism in
painting and music?


Along with Virginia Woolf, James Joyce was one of the

novelists who looked within in order to “record the atoms as they fall
upon the mind”. In Stephen Hero, an unfinished manuscript which lies
at the basis of his first published novel A Portrait of the artist as a
Young Man, Joyce took pains to develop a theory of epiphanies‫٭‬.
SAQ 5
Read quote 9 in the Reader.
Identify some impressionistic elements and aspects in that
passage.

3.4.3 Post-Impressionism
Inevitably the dissatisfaction with their own work that all the
Impressionist painters felt in the 1880s was reflected in the next
generation.
The main characteristic of Post-Impressionism is a newly
found abstractionism which the artists sought in symbolism. Post-
Impressionist designs are angular and abstract.

In modernist literature, like in modernist painting, the

Abstract evanescent‫٭‬, impressionistic modes came to be replaced by a style
symbolism characterized by a higher degree of abstract symbolism.
Thus, Virginia Woolf’s first novel of her most experimental
period Mrs. Dalloway (published in 1925) can be considered an
essentially impressionistic novel. It is stream of consciousness fluid
narrative, which flows from its first lines to the last without any
chapter divisions in a style that translates impressionistic techniques
into the medium of language.
However, Woolf’s next novels To the Lighthouse (published in
1927) and The Waves (1931) are based on abstract design and rich
symbolism. As Woolf grew more and more determined to experiment,
To the Lighthouse dawned on her as “an angular shape” and The
Waves carried her experimental project further into the abstract
Vincent Van
Gogh‫٭‬
pattern of a “play-poem”.
“Still Life: Likewise, Joyce’s volume of short stories Dubliners (published
Japanese Vase in 1914) is basically written in a realist-naturalist mode, while his
with Roses and subsequent novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
Anemones” and Ulysses (1922) are experiments with Impressionism and Post-
Impressionism, narratives which blow up the notions of stable
meaning, deconstructing it in a manner anticipating postmodernism
(see unit 4, which treats the experiments undertaken by Woolf and
Joyce, and unit 8, which deals with postmodernism in the British
novel).
3.4.4. Genre-Boundary Breaking

The impressionist method is related to the breaking of genre
boundaries because both have to do with the effacement of borders
and contours and the breaking of frames.
The modernist writers started to experiment because they had
grown uneasy with the realist novel.
Despite the etymology of the word, the “novel” was no longer
perceived as something new. In “Modern Fiction” and “Mr. Bennett
and Mrs. Brown”, Virginia Woolf argued that in the novels of Bennett,
Wells and Galsworthy literature had reached a dead end where it
was stuck in old modes that failed to capture “reality”.
While writing her most experimental “novels”, Woolf reinforced
Bored by that she was “bored by narrative”. Therefore she wanted to write
narrative “something new” that was not a novel. Indeed, Woolf’s most
experimental books are not exactly novels; a more accurate term to
describe them may be “poetic, musical and pictorial prose”.
In his symbolic-epiphanic “prose”, which borrowed many
techniques from music, painting, poetry and drama, James Joyce
also marked a departure from the novel as a genre.
In the same line of argument, Aldous Huxley’s ambition was to
“musicalise” fiction and thus write a “pure novel” in Point
Counterpoint.
The problems all these writers had with the novel were
linearity, chronology, clock-time, reason and logic. Under the
influence of Freud‫٭‬, Bergson‫٭‬, Einstein‫٭‬, and other scientists,
these novelists sought to shift focus from clock-time to subjective
time, from linear narrative to circularity and reiterative‫ ٭‬patterns,
from history to mythology, from logic and knowledge by reason to
knowledge by intuition and the illogical flow of subconscious thoughts
in dreams.
The modernist writers broke genre boundaries and borrowed
devices from various arts because realism could not provide them
with the “tools” to capture the “unseen” reality lying deep in the self,
while other genres like poetry and drama and other arts like painting
and music could bring prose closer to what they wanted to capture
and express.
3.4.5 “The Death of the Author” and the Birth of the Reader
The daring experiments undertaken by Virginia Woolf, James
Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley in the early 20th century
were underpinned and supported by modernist aesthetics, which
they embraced at the risk of the fragmentary and failure.
One may as well say that these writers’ achievements lie in
their courage to face, challenge and even risk failure. And perhaps
their greatest achievement is the birth of the reader at the expense of
“the death of the author”, whose death was actually a dissipation‫٭‬
into the text.
Readers are the Since the author “disappears”, readers become important in
last destination the sense that they are the last destination of the text.
of the text Modernist texts are difficult because they challenge tradition
and experiment new techniques that ask readers to re-adjust
themselves to novelty. The authors of these texts knew how difficult
re-adjustment was, but they were determined to take this risk.
3.4.6 Collage / Montage

It is because modernist art is the conflictual space of so many
trends, discourses, voices, strands, techniques, styles, devices,
languages and cultures, that its artistic products look fragmentary,
illogical, incomplete and sometimes unfocused. Much of it relies on
the technique of collage / montage.
Woolf’s polyphonic‫ ٭‬effects of the “gigantic conversation”

(the soliloquies‫ )٭‬and the alternation of interludes and episodes in
The Waves, Joyce’s alternation of styles, discourses, voices and
languages, his use of quotations, allusions and references in
Ulysses, all are instances of the use of the technique of collage /
montage in the early 20th century literature.
Collage / montage means to lift “a certain number of elements
from works, objects, preexisting messages, and to integrate them in
a new creation in order to produce an original totality manifesting
ruptures of diverse sorts.”
Thus, after she had finished The Waves, Virginia Woolf wrote,
in a letter to her brother-in-law Clive Bell, that the novel was “too
difficult: too jerky: too inchoate‫ ٭‬altogether”, and to a friend, Ethel
Smith she wrote that it was “fundamentally unreadable”. Joyce is
also said to have affirmed of Ulysses that “I have written something
to keep the professors busy for the next hundred years”.
Who is responsible for reading these pieces of collage /
montage? Who is supposed to put all the pieces together and to
make sense of these collage / montages of modernist art? The only
answer can be this: the reader (or else beholder / listener) is the
destination of any artistic product.
Therefore, the last note in this chapter insists on the
importance of the act of reading, which is the only means of doing
justice to these writers’ art. Their texts were designedly conceived to
be fragmentary, inchoate, puzzling to the point of unreadability: they
were meant to be so in order to make readers participate in the
process of making sense of their worlds and the worlds beyond them.
Summary
This unit introduces you to modernist principles and
aesthetics. The first section looks into Virginia Woolf’s essay “Mr.
Bennett and Mrs. Brown” as a manifesto of modernism.
The second section dwells on principles of modernism:
freedom, novelty, and internationalism, which mapped out a
bohemian Europe.
The last section looks into the modernist aesthetics of
iconoclasm, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, genre-boundary
breaking, the new role of the reader as a participant in meaning
construction and collage / montage.
The next units will show you how these principles work in
some major modernist novels.
Key Terms
• Edwardian
• Georgian
• Internationalism
• Free expression
• Modernism
• Iconoclasm
• Impressionism
• Post-Impressionism
• Genre-boundary breaking
• “The death of the author” and the birth of the reader
• Collage / montage

• Bohemia is a community of artists and other people who live

unconventional lives
• Canvas is a piece of fabric on which a painting is done,
especially in oils
• Cosmopolitanism usually refers to metropolises, which are big
cities composed of or containing people from different countries,
cultural backgrounds, etc.
• Dissipation means disappearance through being scattered or
dispersed
• Evanescent is something that disappears after only a short time
• Inchoate refers to something lacking structure, order or
organization
• Polyphonic is a term borrowed from music. It means two or
more independent melodic lines, parts, or voices that sound
simultaneously. The term is also used to refer to a similar effect in
the novel, when two or more independent “voices” sound
simultaneously.
• Reiterative is an adjective. It comes from the noun
“reiteration”, which means something said and done again and again.
“Reiteration” can be seen as an element that adds to the circularity
and fluidity of the modernist subjective novel.
• Soliloquy (plural “soliloquies”) refers to the act of speaking
while alone, especially when used as a theatrical device that allows a
character’s thoughts and ideas to be conveyed to the audience. (See
Unit 4, 1.4 “Stream of Consciousness and Subjectivity” for a
discussion of Woolf’s use of “dramatic soliloquies” in The Waves).
• The term “stream of consciousness” was first used in
psychology to convey what was taken to be the flow of conscious
experience. The term was introduced in William James’s The
Principles of Psychology (1890) to denote the continuous flow of
thoughts, feelings and impressions, which, to his mind, is what
makes up our inner lives.
• Bennett, Arnold (1867 – 1931) was a British novelist,

playwright and essayist. He is best known for his novels, which are
straightforward yet sympathetic reports on lives of commonplace
people.
• Wells, H. G. (1866 – 1946) was a British author and political
philosopher, most famous for his science-fantasy novels with their
descriptions of the triumph of technology. Wells also wrote novels
devoted to character delineation. Those novels depict members of
the lower middle- class and their aspirations.
• Galsworthy, John (1867 – 1933) was one of the most popular
British novelists and dramatists of the early 20th century. His fiction is
concerned mainly with the English upper middle-class life and
questions of social justice.

• Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich (1860 - 1904) was a Russian

writer, who brought both the short story and the drama to new
prominence in Russia and eventually in the Western world. Chekhov
conveyed the inner lives and feelings of his characters indirectly, by
suggestion rather than statement. His plots are usually simple, and
the endings of his short stories and plays tend toward openness
rather than finality. Woolf must have been most impressed that
Chekhov’s works create the effect of profound experience taking
place beneath the surface in the ordinary lives of people.
• Tolstoy, Leo Nikolayevich (1828 - 1910) was a Russian
writer, author of War and Peace, a novel which reveals both the inner
and the outer lives of his characters through a combination of sharp
physical detail and psychological analysis. He is also the author of
Anna Karenina, a novel posing troubling questions about the
meaning of life, and ending darkly with the protagonist committing
suicide.
• Proust, Marcel (1871 - 1922) was a French writer, creator of
the 16-volume Remembrance of Things Past (1913 - 1927) regarded
as one of the greatest achievements in world literature. The
importance of Proust’s novel lies in the psychological development of
characters and in his philosophical preoccupation with time. Time is
in constant flux, moments of the past and present having equal
reality. Proust also explored the depths of the human psyche,
subconscious motivations and the irrationality of human behaviour.
• Gide, André (1899 - 1951) was a French writer who explored
the theme of moral responsibility. This theme, together with his
experiments with the technique of putting a novelist (Edouard) inside
his novel, The Counterfeiters inspired Huxley to deal with similar
topics and undertake his own experiments in the same line in his
novel Point Counter Point (See Unit 7).
• Freud, Sigmund (1856 - 1939) was an Austrian physician and
founder of psychoanalysis (method of understanding mental life).
He developed many theories central to psychoanalysis, the
psychology of human sexuality and dream interpretation. His works
include The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and Totem and Taboo
(1913). Characters in modernist novels written by Woolf, Joyce,
Lawrence and in Huxley’s Point Counter Point can be analysed in
Freudian terms (see the treatment of Spandrell in Unit 7).
• Bergson, Henri Louis (1859 - 1941) was a French
philosopher. One of his most influential ideas was that creative
energy plays a central role in human development. Bergson’s notion
of subjective time can be applied to the treatment of time in Woolf’s
and Joyce’s novels. His notion of creative energy can be applied to
Mark Rampion and Philip Quarles in Huxley’s Point Counter Point
(See Unit 7).
• Einstein, Albert (1879 - 1955) was a German-born U.S.
physicist. His theory of general relativity revolutionized scientific
thought and served as a theoretical foundation for later exploitation
of atomic energy. Einstein’s theory of relativity is a scientific support of
all the modernists’ distrust in any system of ideas and the fixity of
ideas in general.

• Monet, Claude Oscar (1840 – 1926) was a French painter and

a leading figure in the late 19th century movement called
“Impressionism”. Monet’s paintings captured the changing qualities
of sunlight in nature.
• Gogh, Vincent Willem van (1853 - 1890) was a Dutch
postimpressionist painter. He made his paintings subjective through
the expressive use of colour and line.
SAA No. 3
Explain the main ways in which modernism broke with tradition
and how Virginia Woolf saw this break in her essay “Mr. Bennett
and Mrs. Brown”.
Send your answers to your tutor. Do not take more than

three pages.
Answers to SAQs
SAQ 1
To the realists, “reality” was the totality of real things in the
world, independent of people’s knowledge or perception of them.
Therefore, reality was “objective” in the sense that it consisted of
facts. “Objectivity” is an attitude free of any bias caused by personal
feelings or impressions. Contrary to this, in the early 20th century,
philosophers and scientists developed an interest in “subjectivity”,
that is in the impression “reality” makes upon the mind. Subjective
idealism also played a large role in the development of this new
attitude. Pushing subjectivity to the extreme, it argues that the
external world only exists because it is perceived to exist and does
not have an existence of its own. This interest in subjectivity
underpins Romantic poetry, Henry James’s psychological Gothic in
The Turn of the Screw, Impressionist painting, the techniques of
stream of consciousness, interior monologue and free indirect style in
modernist fiction (the novels of Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence).
Please revise section 3.1 in case you have failed to give


SAQ 2
While the Victorian age had created a centre-located and
centre-oriented culture, a paradigm which was maintained in the
Edwardian period, the Georgian period marked a departure from that
model. Victorian culture (1837-1901) had grown into a model centred
round the British Empire and Edwardian culture (1901-1910). This
only hardened that model.
To the Georgians (1910-1936), who saw the signs of the
Empire already tearing apart and the threats of global catastrophes
ahead, this centre and the model it had created could no longer hold.
To that geographically and culturally located centrality, the
modernist artists preferred a freedom of expression often associated
with border crossing and exile. Internationalism was this new
geographical and cultural remapping of the world, another form by
which the “solidity” and “materialism” of the Empire broke to pieces,
while a “spiritual” model took its place.

SAQ 3
Pointing to the difference “contemporary books” (that is early
th
20 century novels) make from the realist novel in their approach to
character, Woolf states that “there is nothing that people differ about
more than the reality of characters”. To Woolf’s mind, the
Edwardians’ books were “of great value, and indeed of great
necessity”, but “the Edwardians were never interested in character in
itself; or in the book in itself. They were interested in something
outside [i.e. objective reality]”. According to Woolf, the problem is that
the Edwardian writers “have looked very powerfully, searchingly, and
sympathetically out of the window; at factories, at Utopias, even at
the decoration and upholstery of the carriage; but never at her [i.e.
Mrs. Brown, the prototype of character], never at life, never at human
nature.”
Woolf’s attitude to this line of tradition, the realist novel, is
essentially iconoclastic. Therefore, she meant to pull down the idols
of that tradition: interest in objective reality, in the world outside, in its
solidity and boring details. Thus she continues her argument with the
realists to make her point of the necessity that the novel should find
new “tools”:
“And so they [the Edwardians] have developed a technique of
novel-writing which suits their purpose; they have made tools and
established conventions which do their business. But those tools are
not our tools, and that business is not our business. For us those
conventions are ruin, those tools are death.”


SAQ 4
To the Impressionist painters and musicians, the essence of
“life” and “reality” was the way in which it was perceived through the
various impressions coming “from all sides”.
Impressionism conveyed perceptions as “luminous vibration”,

a phrase which borrows the important notion of “vibration” from
music.
In those passages of “Modern Fiction” in which she describes
the mind receiving “a myriad impressions”, the “incessant shower of
innumerable atoms”, “the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the
order in which they fall”, Woolf extrapolates the techniques of
Impressionism in painting to the medium of literature.
In the novels written by Woolf and Joyce, “luminous vibration”
is “translated” as “stream of consciousness” and “epiphany”.
SAQ 5
This passage and the whole discussion on aesthetics in A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is worth reading in conjunction
with Virginia Woolf’s well-known essays on modern fiction and worth
considering too in relation to the aims and achievements of their
contemporary French painting.
What both Joyce and Woolf had in common with French
painting is the impressionistic mode. The essential characteristic of
impressionism is its change of emphasis from the thing perceived to
the process of perception.
James Joyce sought a desolidification of the ‘fabric of things’
through the ‘translation’ of various techniques of painting and music
in the new evanescent ‘fabric’ of his texts. Since early in his literary
career, he theorized epiphany, a radical departure from the solidity
and objectivity which had been the principles of realist fiction.

section.
Bibliography
Bradbury, Malcolm (1993) The Modern British Novel, Secker
and Warburg, London (the chapters dedicated to the early 20th
century novel)
Dowling, David (1985) Bloomsbury Aesthetics and the Novels

of Forster and Woolf, St. Martin’s Press, New York (chapter 6 “Woolf
and Painting”)
Woolf, Virginia (1967) “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” in

Collected Essays, Volume I, New York: Brace & World, Inc.

Major contributions to modernisst british fiction
UNIT 4
MAJOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO MODERNIST BRITISH FICTION

EXPERIMENTAL NOVELS
Unit Outline
Unit Objectives 66
4 Stream of Consciousness One-day City Novels: Virginia W 66
4.1 Experiments with Time: One-day Novels 66
4.2 Cinematic Devices: Space and Time Montage 69
4.3 City Novels: Dublin and London 70
4.4 Stream of Consciousness and Subjectivity 73
Summary 77
Key Terms 78
SAA No. 4 80
Answers to SAQs 81
Bibliography 84

Although the modernists on both sides of the Atlantic never

really saw themselves as a school, they all attempted to ‘invent a
new literature’ different in style and technique from the work of their
predecessors. This ‘new literature’ had to capture the sense of
confusion, loss, despair, anxiety, loneliness and alienation caused by
so many elements of modernity.
Thus, these writers’ main purpose was to experiment with new
forms, styles and techniques. This made the readers and critics of
these novels call them ‘experimental’.
Unit objectives After you have read through this unit, you should be able to:
● explain the innovative character of the experimental
novel
● identify the main elements of novelty in the modernist
novel
● describe the main features of style and technique in
these novels in terms of:
- stream of consciousness
- interior monologue
- flashbacks, space and time montage
- experiments with time
- subjectivity
4 Stream of Consciousness One-day City Novels: Virginia Woolf’s

4.1 Experiments with Time: One-day Novels
The point of the one-day novels is that time rests within a

person’s consciousness, and as such, it varies from person to
person.
Both Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (published in 1925) and
James Joyce’s Ulysses (published in 1922) provide their readers with
polyphonic orchestrations of thinking minds. The characters of these
novels articulate their thoughts and impressions triggered by the
same stimuli and re-play their memories of the past evoked by
present impressions.
Both Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Joyce’s Ulysses are novels
recording their characters’ life impressions occasioned by one day:
one June day in the lives of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren
Smith, the key characters in Mrs. Dalloway and one June day in the
lives of Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and Molly, his wife, in
Ulysses. Clarissa ponders that “it is very, very dangerous to live even
Billingsgate Market,
one day”.
London

SAQ 1
What could Clarissa mean by the remark quoted above? What
does “this moment of June” mean to her? You may wish to read
another passage in order to answer this question. Read quote 10
in the Reader.

In order to show how relative time is and how much it is a

“The clock was matter of personal perception, the clock time measurement of one
striking. The leaden day is deliberately challenged and blurred, losing its “substance”.
circles dissolved in the Consequently, clock-time substance is replaced by the invisible,
air.” relative and unmeasurable “substance” of inner duration (i.e. time, as
it is perceived by a character’s conscience).
Memories are not forgotten. They are only stored and subject
to the whims of perception and recall. Thus, Woolf opens her novel
Mrs. Dalloway with a scene in which Clarissa Dalloway, the main
character, plunges into her past because she receives combined
sensory impressions. In her mind, past and present are mingled.

Stop and think!

To make your understanding of this time perception easier, think
of yourself on the train, for instance, remembering scenes of your
childhood past when you see a house that looks like your
grandmother’s. Are past and present perceived as separate and
linear, or do they merge?
Describe your experience in the space provided below. Please
add this task to your portfolio to be discussed in the tutorials.
Likewise, James Joyce had Molly Bloom, one of the key figures
in Ulysses explode into a series of vital “yeses” while remembering
her past, in a stream of thoughts and impressions unobstructed by
any punctuation marks in the last approximately 30 pages of the
book. In those 30 pages, Molly’s present impressions plunge her into
the past.
SAQ 2
Read quote 11 in the Reader. The passage is the opening of
Mrs. Dalloway. Pay attention to the words in bold. What do they
indicate?

4.2 Cinematic Devices: Space and Time Montage

It is beyond any doubt that Woolf and Joyce aimed to
“translate” cinematic‫ ٭‬devices and effects into the “language” of
their novels. This explains their frequent use of flashbacks‫٭‬, space
and time montage in these one-day novels. Both Ulysses and Mrs.
Dalloway rely on an extensive use of cinematic devices in the way in
which their scenes unfold as if they were frames taken by a camera.
These techniques have the effect of suggesting: a) the simultaneity
of existence in one place, and b) the complexity and richness of
existence at any given moment.
Big Ben
Oil by Jim Dodd

SAQ 3
Read quote 12 in the Reader. What are the effects of space and
time montage in this (and other) passage(s) of Mrs. Dalloway?

4.3 City novels: Dublin and London

Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses are – very significantly – city
novels: Woolf’s one-day novel is set in the London of 1923, while
Joyce’s setting in Ulysses is the Dublin of 1904. Joyce claimed that
although Dublin had been a capital for thousands of years and was
said to be the second city of the British Empire, no writer had yet
‘presented Dublin to the world’. Furthermore, Joyce declared that ‘the
expression “Dubliner” seems to me to have some meaning and I
doubt that the same can be said for such words as “Londoner” and
“Parisian”’. Perhaps Joyce was the first writer to represent Dublin.
Indeed, the London and Dublin of those times are “charted” in
Westminster these novels. However, they also provide their characters with
Bridge 1909 “unchartable”, rather unreadable marks of modernity.
A tram and horse Given the sense of unreadability these two metropolises
traffic. Big Ben in
the distance
suggest, perhaps Woolf was the first to imply that places cannot
really be grasped, and Joyce was the first to show that Dublin is not
actually representable.

The plane writing undecipherable letters on the sky in Mrs.

Dalloway (see quotes 10, 12 and 13 in the Reader) is an excellent
example of the unreadability of the modern city. What makes it so is
technology. Technology assaults the characters’ brains with loads of
messages hurtled onto them, suggesting that their minds can neither
understand nor retain them. Assaulted by the noise, hustle and
bustle and fast tempo of life in the modern city, the characters of
these one-day novels bracket-off public space and plunge into the
inner “space” of their own minds instead. It may be argued that what
Woolf and Joyce managed to do in their one-day city novels was to
focus lenses onto these cities, their streets, buildings and alleys, only
to eventually zoom out‫ ٭‬and blur their objective “reality” (See quote
13 in the Reader).
Therefore, the characters’ minds map these novels out. The
space of Mrs. Dalloway is taken by Clarissa’s virtual journeys
backwards and forwards from Bourton to London, Septimus’s
imaginary flights from France and Italy to London, from present to
past and from Clarissa’s mind to the mind of the shell shocked war
veteran Septimus Warren Smith, another key figure of the novel.
Both time and space are circular, and their circles expand to include
the invisible connections between the two key characters (Clarissa
and Septimus). Clarissa and Septimus share the same fears and
anxieties, the same lines they quote in their heads, the same images
and the same streets they pace. Woolf’s novel also points to the
more visible connections between each of these characters and their
family, friends and acquaintances.
Similarly, the space of Ulysses is taken by Stephen Dedalus (the
son looking for a father) and Leopold Bloom (the father figure) pacing
Nassau Street,
Dublin, circa 1900 the same streets of Dublin. They are connected by the invisible threads
of Stephen’s need for a father and Bloom’s need for a son. Joyce’s
Dublin is also shaped by the key characters of Leopold, Stephen and
Molly, who think their thoughts in stream of consciousness‫( ٭‬see Unit
3, “Glossary of Terms and Comments”) passages and who are
connected by the same geographical and cultural space they inhabit.

SAQ 4
Read quote 14 in the Reader. What is the connection between
the setting (modern Dublin) and the topics debated by Leopold
Bloom and Stephen Dedalus?
How can the characters and their relations be shaped by the
same space (modern Dublin) which they inhabit?
Yes. Carry me along,

taddy..
Watercolour by the
contemporary Irish
artist Roger
Cummiskey


4.4 Stream of Consciousness and Subjectivity
The term “stream of consciousness” was first used in

psychology to convey what was taken to be the flow of conscious
experience. The term was introduced in William James’s The
Principles of Psychology (1890) to denote the continuous flow of
thoughts, feelings and impressions, which, to his mind, is what
makes up our inner lives. William James was aware of the complexity
of this “stream”, which does not consist of a single stream of
consecutive items, but of many items that may coexist. At any given
moment, the stream is divided into: a) things that receive the focus of
attention and b) those which are part of the field of consciousness,
although they are not consciously attended to.
Mr. Bloom
Watercolour by the Contemporary Irish artist
Roger Cummiskey.
Painting from James Joyce’s caricature of
Leopold Bloom, drawn in Myron Nutting’s studio
in the 1920’s.
SAQ 5
Read quote 15 in the Reader. Explain how Bloom’s mind
operates on more than one level at the same time. You may start
from considering the way in which dialogue (the level of
communication between the two characters, which is a form they
choose to exchange impressions and thoughts) alternates with
Bloom’s private thoughts, which he keeps to himself.


Whether Woolf actually deployed stream of consciousness in

Mrs. Dalloway or in any of her most experimental novels, has been a
matter of debate. There are critics who argue that Woolf refrained
herself from going as deep into the human psyche as Joyce
ventured. Critic David Lodge argues that in Mrs. Dalloway, she used
free indirect style. Lodge states that free indirect style is a technique
that “renders thought as reported speech (in the third person, past
tense) but keeps to the kind of vocabulary that is appropriate to the
character, and deletes some of the tags, like “she thought”, “she
wondered”, “she asked herself” etc. that a more formal narrative style
would require”.
Lodge’s argument implies that this technique could be a form
of stream of consciousness. The opening of Mrs. Dalloway (see
quote 11 in the Reader) is an example of how the reader is plunged
“into the middle of an ongoing life”, which “typifies the representation
of consciousness as a “stream”.
In The British Novel Since the Thirties, critic Randall
Stevenson makes a point of the difference between Woolf and
Joyce’s technique in these terms: “Whereas Joyce often presents the
thoughts of his characters ‘without formal obstructions’ or any
intrusion of his own voice, Woolf constantly interpolates phrases
such as ‘she said’, or ‘she thought to herself’”. However, Stevenson
is ready to admit that the distinction between what he calls Woolf’s
interior monologue and Joyce’s stream of consciousness “is a fairly
slight one”.
The form of what some critics call “quoted stream of

consciousness” or “interior monologue” was extensively used by
Joyce in Ulysses. This form employs direct quotation in the first
person of the character’s own thoughts, sometimes without this being
overtly indicated by the use of speech marks. This form represents a
character’s inner life as a flow of inner speech quoted in the first
person, a monologue. Woolf also used this form, which she called
“dramatic soliloquies”‫٭‬, in The Waves, though, to Lodge’s mind,
her deployment of this technique “suffers from artificiality”. Lodge
also considers that “James Joyce was a more resourceful exponent
of that way of rendering stream of consciousness”.
The feeling the readers have while running through such
passages of stream of consciousness is that they can actually hear
the trains of thoughts – often organized by associative memory‫– ٭‬
as they pass through the characters’ minds.
The most celebrated passages of quoted stream of
consciousness are Molly Bloom’s trains of thoughts in the
“Penelope”‫ ٭‬section of Ulysses. The passages are in fact an
uninterrupted flow of 30 pages, running without any indentations‫ ٭‬to
mark a logical sequence of ideas, any punctuation marks and indeed
any overt‫ ٭‬narrative mediation. There is no third person narrative
The Mountain
intervention at all. However, it would be impossible to make sense of
Flower such passages of narrative fluidity if it were not for the broader
Watercolour by
artist Roger
context of Ulysses, where Joyce alternates the interior monologue
Cummiskey with third person narrative point of view.

SAQ 6
Read quote 16 in the Reader. What are the stylistic effects of
Joyce’s “violation of grammar” and “disintegration of syntax” in
those stream of consciousness passages? Note that V. Woolf
made a point of these new stylistic effects in her essay “Mr.
Bennett and Mrs. Brown”.
Gibraltar Remembered
Watercolour by
Roger Cummiskey,
inspired by the last
lines in Ulysses
See Unit 3 for reference and possible connections, and compare
your answers to the “Answers” section at the end of the unit for
some ideas.
These experiments with time, as it is stored, played and

replayed in the human mind invited the readers to interpret texts
which looked, even to their authors, as a form of dispersed and often
illogical textuality. The most difficult task for both the authors and
readers of these experiments in fiction was that often non-verbalised
sensations, images and feelings had to be “translated” into words
and rendered in the form of texts.

SAQ 7
Read quote 17 in the Reader. What is peculiar about this
passage? What kind of experience does it evoke? What would
you call Joyce’s style here? What are the effects of this style?

Therefore, the readers’ interpretive – indeed “re-creative” –
efforts have to rise to a challenge that the authors themselves found
difficult to cope with. The problem with stream of consciousness
(which is circular and often illogical) was that it had to be rendered in
the form of texts.
Another problem was, of course, that the various characters’
streams had to be joined together, and this meant that a narrator or
implied author had to do it. There are no clues whatsoever in Ulysses
and Mrs. Dalloway as to who reports and joins everything together.
This is further complicated by the fact that sometimes the point of
view shifts from one voice to another, and the narrator or implied
author refrains from indicating the source of the voice.
This is to say that readers have to cope with a very difficult
task, namely that of sorting out the puzzle and joining its pieces
together. It is often the case that a voice can be attached to the
character that owns it because it is the image of the respective
character’s frame of mind.

SAQ 8
Read quote 18 in the Reader. Starting from that quoted passage,
characterize Septimus Warren Smith. What is his frame of
mind? What are his problems? Can he cope with them? If he
cannot, why do you think it is so?

Summary
This unit presents the experimental novel. This innovation in

the British fiction of the early 20th century is illustrated by Woolf and
Joyce’s experiments with time in their one-day novels Mrs. Dalloway
and Ulysses.
The first section looks into the way in which Woolf and Joyce
experimented with time by focusing on one day of their characters’
lives in Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses.
The second section dwells on Woolf and Joyce’s use of
cinematic devices (flashbacks, time and space montage) in these
novels, relating this aspect to time and setting.

The third section treats Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses as city

novels, questioning the readability of their settings. It deals with the
two novels in terms of stream of consciousness and subjectivity.
Note that these are the essential aspects of the experimental
novel.
The next section will look into Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and
The Waves and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as
art novels.
Key Terms
• Time and space montage

• Flashback
• Stream of consciousness
• Associative memory
• Subconscious
• Soliloquy
• Andalusia is an autonomous region of southern Spain

bordered by the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. It
contains the historic cities of Seville, Granada and Cadiz and many
examples of Moorish architecture (with ornate curved decoration)
• Associative memory means memory organization in which
stored information is accessed by its content rather than by memory
address. The main characteristic of associative memory is that it
defies logic. The mind recalls scenes, events and situations, which are
triggered by present sensory impressions or thoughts
• Big Ben is the large clock above the Houses of Parliament in
London, or the tower on which it stands
• Celibacy means a state of sexual abstinence for religious
reasons or as a personal choice
• Cinematic is something typical of the style in which films are
made
• Delusion means a persistent false belief held in the face of
strong contradictory evidence, especially as a symptom of a
psychiatric disorder
• Double (noun) refers to somebody (Septimus) that looks very
much like another (Clarissa) in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway
• Duumvirate means either of two people who share a position
of authority equally between them
• Ecclesiastical means “of a church, belonging or involving the
Christian church or clergy”
• Flashback is a scene or event from the past that appears in a
narrative out of chronological order, to fill in information or explain
something in the present

• Freemason, also called “Mason”, is a member of a worldwide
society of men, the Free and Accepted Masons, which is known
particularly for its charitable work and for its secret rites
• Gibraltar is a British dependency on a narrow promontory that
is near the southernmost point of the Iberian Peninsula. It occupies a
strategic position at the western entrance of the Mediterranean Sea
• Hades is the Greek underworld. In Greek mythology, it is the
underworld kingdom inhabited by the souls of the dead. This episode,
like the other chapters of Joyce’s Ulysses, parallels a chapter in
Homer’s Odyssey
• Heliotropism means growth towards sunlight by a plant
• “I am the resurrection and the life” are Jesus Christ’s words,
recorded in John’s gospel. They were uttered by Jesus as a reply to
Martha’s belief in the resurrection of the dead. Martha, Lazarus’s
sister, expressed this belief after Jesus had resurrected her brother
Lazarus, who had already been dead and buried
• Indentation refers to the space left between the margin and
the beginning of a line. Note that indentations facilitate reading, since
they indicate the places where new passages begin
• “In the same boat” refers to two or more persons who are in
the same situation
• Ithaca is an island in western Greece, the traditional site of the
legendary kingdom of Odysseus, also called Ulysses
In Greek mythology, Odysseus is the king of Ithaca and one of the
senior Greeks in the Trojan war. He is the main character in Homer’s
epic poem the Odyssey.
The “Ithaca” chapter in Joyce’s Ulysses is meant to parallel Odysseus’
return to Ithaca after a long period of absence and adventures at sea.
In Joyce’s novel, Ithaca is Leopold Bloom’s home place in Dublin, and
Odysseus’ adventures at sea are paralleled by Leopold Bloom’s
adventures in Dublin
• Jesuit means member of the Roman Catholic religious order: a
member of the society of Jesus, a religious order engaged in
missionary and educational work worldwide. The order was founded
by Saint Ignatius of Loyola in 1534 with the aim of defending
Catholicism against the Reformation
• Maleficent means “harmful” or “evil”; causing harm or doing
evil intentionally, or being capable of such acts
• Ominously refers to something (a sign, a sound, etc.)
suggesting or indicating that something bad is going to happen or be
revealed
• “(To turn) one’s toes to the daisies” is an expression used to
imply that the respective person is dead
• Overt (about meaning) means intended and expressed without
any ambiguities
• Penelope is the wife of Odysseus, who waited for his return
from the Trojan War. She was the mother of his son Telemachus. If in
Joyce’s novel, Leopold Bloom is a modern Odysseus, then Molly
Bloom, his wife, is a modern Penelope. Although Stephen Dedalus is
not their biological son, he plays the role of the son looking for a
father, and he eventually meets Leopold Bloom, identifying him as the
father figure. Therefore, Stephen Dedalus is a modern Telemachus

• Presabbath means “the day before Sabbath”. Sabbath means

Sunday, observed by most Christians as the day of worship and rest
from work
• In Greek mythology, Proteus is a prophetic sea god who could
change his shape at will.
The allusion to Proteus in this chapter implies that Stephen is subject
to changing impressions, moods and states of mind
• Scapegoat refers to somebody who is made to take the blame
for others (see the case of Septimus Warren Smith in Woolf’s Mrs.
Dalloway)
• Subconscious refers to something present in one’s mind
without that person being aware of it
• Subtend (geometry) means to extend from one side to the
other, opposite an angle or side of a geometric figure
• Zoom out means to make an object appear smaller or further
away or to increase the area in view by use of a zoom lens or a
graphic imaging device
• Homer was an 8th century B. C. Greek poet. He is credited as

the author of the great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey
• Haroun al Raschid, Caliph of Baghdad (786-809) was noted
for the participation in the Muslim holy war against the Byzantines
and for the splendour of his court. He is a half-legendary figure and
also a character in the Arabian Nights
SAA No. 4
What are (some of) the difficulties you may encounter when
you read Virginia Woolf and James Joyce’s one-day
novels?
Before answering this question, you may wish to read “The
Death of the Author and Birth of the Reader” section in Unit
3 again and relate it to your argument.
Your paper should not be longer than three pages.
Send your answer to this question to your tutor.
Please note that the quality of your ideas and the coherence
of the essay will be 70 % of your grade, while the accuracy
of your language will count for 30 %.

Answers to SAQs
SAQ 1
Think of one day in your life. A lot of things may happen to
you. Some are routine: you wake up, have breakfast or fail to have it
(as usual!!! and you start to worry about your health, thinking that
something bad may happen to you one day). You are on time or you
are late for work (as usual!!!). You cross streets. You avoid places
you don’t like, look for places you like, teach your classes, cross
streets again and come back home tired, sometimes exhausted, etc.,
etc. But… some unusual things may happen, from the most trivial to
the most unbelievable, from the most pleasant to the nastiest
surprises: you look for your keys and on this very day, when you
have to be there earlier, you cannot find them. You quarrel with your
neighbour. Your cat is run down by a car. A friend whom you haven’t
seen for years pays you a visit. You’re giving a party in the evening,
but… you burn the cake! This one day is the present to you, of
course, like to everybody else, but your friend’s visit plunges you into
the past, and the burnt cake reminds you of your absent-mindedness
a couple of years ago, when you forgot you were having a party in
the evening!
This is what Clarissa means by “it is very, very dangerous to
live even one day”. She also means that “this moment” (this one day)
is very much like a lot of other days and at the same time different,
unrepeatable in the combination of events that makes it this one day
(and not another). What Clarissa means is that one’s life is this one
day, and this one day is one’s life.
SAQ 2
This passage suggests Clarissa’s “plunge” into the past, when
she was 18 and lived at Bourton. Now she is in her fifties and lives in
London. The “squeak of the hinges”, which she hears now, is a noise
she anticipates: the doors of her house in London will be taken off
their hinges because she will give a party in the evening. However,
the squeak, which she anticipates, reminds her of the “little squeak”
of the French doors at Bourton about 30 years before! In this
passage, Mrs. Dalloway has a flashback‫٭‬.

section.
SAQ 3
This passage is one of the most symbolic key episodes in
Mrs. Dalloway. It illustrates a device that brought literature very close
to cinematography. The device is called “space montage”, and it
relies on the characters’ spatial perceptions of the same external
event (such as the prime minister’s car, the sky-writing plane, the
pattern of the clouds in Mrs. Dalloway).

The point of this episode is that although “outer reality” (what

lies outside of the individual, like objects, even persons, situations,
etc.) is the same (a car is a car and not something else), the
individuals’ perceptions of it differ. In Mrs. Dalloway Clarissa,
Septimus and many other passers-by see a car, but nobody really
knows who is in the car, so each person there makes speculations:
“But now mystery had brushed them with her wing; they had heard
the voice of authority; the spirit of religion was abroad with her eyes
bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide. But nobody knew whose
face had been seen. Was it the Prince of Wales’s, the Queen’s, the
Prime Minister’s? Whose face was it? Nobody knew.” When they see
the plane writing letters on the sky, nobody can really make out the
letters, and there are no two persons to see the same letters or make
out the same words.

SAQ 4
These passages suggest that Leopold Bloom and Stephen
Dedalus have been drawn together by the geography of Dublin,
which is carefully charted. It is also significant that Dublin’s streets,
squares and churches provide the two characters with a set of
experiences, which they share.
Ulysses is the novel in which Joyce intended to make a point
of modern Dublin. Indeed, the two key figures Leopold Bloom and
Stephen Dedalus are shaped by Dublin. They are what they are
because they are Dubliners. Their problems, their dissatisfactions,
their frustrations and their interests are with them because they live
in early 20th century Dublin. Most of the topics of their discussions
are related to Ireland, Irishness, Dublin and modernity. That they are
Dubliners is also what brings them together, and, to a very large
extent, it also justifies the solidity of their bond.

SAQ 5
In this chapter, Leopold Bloom attends the funeral of one of
his friends. This explains the association Joyce intended his readers
to make with the Greek Hades‫٭‬. At the funeral, Bloom meets friends
and acquaintances, Mr Kernan being one of them.
Imagine you meet a friend or an acquaintance. Doesn’t the
occasion bring back memories of your past relation with the
respective person, although you may have thought that those
memories are (almost) forgotten? Besides bringing memories back,
this discussion stirs a lot of associations in your head: you think of a
character in a book which reminds you of your friend, but the
association is not flattering to the friend, so you cannot share it with
him / her. Therefore, you let only those ideas and thoughts you know
(or think) he / she will understand or accept out through your lips.

Your friend responds to them, and that is a dialogue. At the same
time, you keep the unflattering association to yourself because you
know (or think) that you may upset your friend, or that he / she
cannot take a joke. That is your private thought, and your friend will
never know it. Our lives are full of such occasions.
This is what Leopold Bloom does here, being aware that “the
language was another thing”. By “language” he means a system of
signs that allows people to communicate. He distinguishes
“language” from the rather disorderly manner in which thoughts run
through his head. You may note that dialogue is neat and logical,
following a pattern of question and answer, while Bloom’s unuttered
thoughts are fragmented and unobservant of neat grammar in this
passage.
SAQ 6
This is actually the last passage in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Molly Bloom, Leopold Bloom’s wife, is in bed, half asleep, and
unfolds memories of her past. These lines are the last of the 30
pages recording her stream of consciousness.
Molly Bloom’s “stream of consciousness” in the “Penelope”‫٭‬
section is extremely fluid. As a matter of fact, it is an outpouring of
impressions triggered by associative memory‫٭‬, constantly
intertwining the past and the present. Its most characteristic effect is
the proliferation of pronouns combined with a joyous recurrence of
“yeses”. The reader’s task is to make sense of this apparently
random organization of thought, which seems to defy logic. The point
is that the reader can make sense of it, and the sense that the whole
“stream” invites, is essentially achieved by the reader’s identification
with Molly’s mind. This identification, if successfully achieved,
provides one of the most exuberant regressive pleasures the book
has to offer: a plunge into memory time, which is a chronological
distortion also achieved by Virginia Woolf. This is also a
transgressive pleasure, since one may see it as the option of a man
(Joyce) to give a woman (Molly) the last word, which is his / her
word.
SAQ 7
This passage is taken from the “Proteus”‫ ٭‬chapter in
Ulysses. “Proteus” focuses on Stephen’s mind, recording his
thoughts, meditations and memories, past and present impressions.
The passage is a sample of “quoted stream of
consciousness”. Stephen Dedalus plunges into his
“subconscious”‫ ٭‬and records the visions in his dreams. From the
point of view of language and style, this may be called a dream
dialect, i.e. a language and a style that differs essentially from the
language and style we use in order to communicate the experiences
of our wakeful conscience. If you compare this passage with Bloom’s
thoughts in “Hades”‫( ٭‬quote 15 in the Reader), you will notice that
grammar here is even more fragmented and disruptive. Logic,
coherence and a sense of completeness given by the presence of all
elements in a sentence are replaced by a disrupted and fragmented
syntax.

SAQ 8
This passage grants access to the mind of Septimus Warren
Smith. All the elements connecting Septimus and Clarissa in the
novel suggest that Septimus Warren Smith is Clarissa Dalloway’s
“double”‫٭‬. If she is a woman nearing death and fearing it, he is a
shell-shocked veteran who experienced death and now fears it.
Although they fear the same thing and have visions that are strikingly
similar, there is a world of difference between their voices and their
minds.
The devastating effect of the war is a poignant theme in
Woolf’s fiction. Septimus Warren Smith is treated as a symbol of the
shell-shocked veteran suffering from delusions‫ ٭‬and developing an
inescapable sense of guilt about crimes he is not responsible for. He
stands for the thousands of war victims of his own kind.
Septimus expresses a sense of futility and alienation when he
thinks to himself that “the world itself is without meaning” or that
Shakespeare, the writer who used to inspire him in his early youth,
actually “loathed humanity.”
Septimus has been changed for ever by his war experience,
and it is significant that now the whole European cultural tradition and
literary heritage are to him as spiteful as modern everyday life. He
thinks to himself that “the secret signal which one generation passes,
under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair.” He finds no
meaning and no consolation in anything, so he creates his own inner
world to withdraw into (the world of his thoughts).
Septimus, who is marked by the most terrible scar of
modernity (the war), may also be seen as the symbol of the modern
individual whose self has fallen to pieces. In the novel he is ”the
eternal scapegoat‫٭‬, the eternal sufferer.”

answers comparable to those given to SAQ 5, SAQ 6, SAQ 7 and
SAQ8 in this section.
Bibliography
Joyce, James (1922)1946) Ulysses, Random House, New

York
Lodge, David (1992) The Art of Fiction, Penguin Books

(chapter 9 “The Stream of Consciousness” and chapter 10 ”Interior
Monologue”)
Stevenson, Randall (1993) The British Novel Since the

Thirties, Institutul European, Iaşi (chapter 1 “The Novel 1900-1930)
Woolf, Virginia (1925)1996) Mrs. Dalloway, Penguin Books

Modernist art novels
UNIT 5
MODERNIST ART NOVELS
Unit Outline
Unit Objectives 86
5 Modernist Art Novels 86
5.1 Virginia Woolf’s Art Novel To the Lighthouse 86
5.2 Virginia Woolf’s Art Novel The Waves 90
5.3 James Joyce’s Art Novel A Portrait of the Artist 93
as a Young Man
Summary 94
Key Terms 95
SAA No. 5 98
Answers to SAQs 99
Bibliography 101

After you have read through this unit you should be able to:
• Identify the main aspects of modernist aesthetics in
Virginia Woolf’s art novels To the Lighthouse and The
Waves
• Explain the role of the artist in To the Lighthouse and The
Waves
Unit objectives
• Explain why To the Lighthouse and The Waves are
modernist art novels
• Identify the main aspects of modernist aesthetics in
James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Explain the significance of Stephen Dedalus’s name in
James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man
• Explain the role of the artist’s formation in A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man
• Identify “mythopoetic” elements in A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man
5 Modernist Art Novels
5.1 Virginia Woolf’s Art Novel To the Lighthouse

As she was writing To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf was
aware that her experiments with form in previous novels had led her
a considerable distance from the genre’s conventions. She wondered
whether the book could really be called a “novel”: “I will invent a new
name for my books to supplant ‘novel’”, she wrote, “A new – by V.
W., but what? Elegy‫ ”?٭‬Leonard Woolf, Virginia’s husband, read the
draft and declared the book a masterpiece, calling it “entirely new”, “a
psychological poem”.
Critic David Dowling sees To the Lighthouse as confirming
Woolf’s success in translating the spatial concerns of painters into
the temporal world of print. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf pushed her
Cornwall Godrevy experiments with point of view to the extreme: in Part I “The Window”
Lighthouse and Part III “The Lighthouse” the reader is bounced from one point of
view to another in a way that may look disconcerting to readers. Part
II “Time Passes” is told by an anonymous narrator, who tells the story
of the ravages of time upon the Ramsays’ house, garden, and their
surroundings, while the human element is bracketed off (actually
mentioned in brackets). The shifting point of view used by Woolf in
To the Lighthouse can be associated with similar techniques in
painting and music. While combining techniques borrowed from other
arts, To the Lighthouse is also highly poetic and dramatic.
The shape of the book was apparent from early in its
development and did not change. In her notebook, Woolf drew “two
blocks joined by a corridor”, a powerfully suggestive figure that holds
together in one image the main themes of the book. This diagram
seems to contain, in one abstract geometry, the varieties of
connection and separation that the novel explores.

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (published in 1927) is

probably the novel in which the writer cared most for design. This is
one of the reasons why it has been considered an ‘art novel’. The
novel falls into three parts (“two blocks joined by a corridor”). The
“she began precariously “two blocks” are: the first part of the novel titled “The Window” and
dipping among the blues the last part titled “The Lighthouse”. The “corridor”, titled “Time
and umbers, moving her Passes” is the second part of the book.
brush hither and thither, Part III “The Lighthouse” is the last block in Woolf’s design. It
but it was now heavier is also a focus, a piece which puts the other two pieces into
and slower, as if it had perspective to eventually reach the vision Lily Briscoe (the artist in
the novel) so desperately searched for.
fallen in with some
Indeed, all the images and symbols converge to this last piece
rhythm which was (Part III), in which Lily-the-artist’s point of view prevails. It is in this
dictated to her” piece that Lily realizes that Mrs. Ramsay (the focus of Part I “The
Window”) was an artist of life, and it is now that she becomes aware
of the value and force of Mrs. Ramsay’s spirit. It is also in this piece
that Lily Briscoe tries to find an answer to the puzzling question
“What is the meaning of life?”, and the answer is:
“miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the
dark”: “What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question;
one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation
had never come. Instead there were little daily miracles,
illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was
one. This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the
breaking wave; Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsay
saying, “Life stand still here”; Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment
something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make
of the moment something permanent) – this was of the nature of a
revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal
passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves
shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs. Ramsay
said. “Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!” she repeated. She owed it all to
her.”
The passage quoted above is taken from Woolf’s novel To the
Lighthouse, Part III. In Part I “The Window” Lily Briscoe, a painter,
spent her holidays with friends and acquaintances at the Ramsays’
house in St. Ives. Part I “The Window” portrays the Ramsays as a
typically Victorian couple. Mrs. Ramsay is the perfect hostess, her
role being to bring people together. Mrs. Ramsay’s death is
mentioned in Part II. At this point in the novel (Part III) Mrs. Ramsay,
though dead, inspires Lily Briscoe with her spiritual presence.

SAQ 1
Why does Lily Briscoe relate her art (painting) to Mrs.
Ramsay? What is the spirit of art?
Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at

the end of the unit. See also the passages below for some
ideas.
This answer to “the meaning of life” points to the epiphanic

nature of what Woolf called “moments of being” (see Unit 3,
subchapter 3.4.2 “Impressionism”).
Like Joyce, Woolf believed in those moments when one’s
mind catches the glowing quality of essential things. In To the
Lighthouse, Lily has an essential revelation: Mrs. Ramsay’s
wonderful simplicity.
Another thing Lily needs to do is to reconcile Mrs. Ramsay’s
generous femininity with Mr. Ramsay’s selfish masculinity, striking a
balance, and thus completing her painting and achieving her vision.

SAQ 2
Read quote 19 in the Reader. Why is it so important that Lily
should reconcile her perceptions of and relations with Mr. and
Mrs. Ramsay, the two opposites?

end of the unit.
Indeed, it seems that Lily is the embodiment of Woolf’s ideal

artist, equipped with an androgynous‫ ٭‬mind, a fusion of male and
female elements, which she theorized in her essay A Room of One’s
Own. Woolf argued that it is only this mind that can reintegrate
human experience within an aesthetic shape. Thus, the closing line
of the novel, Lily’s words “I have had my vision”, is a line of
simultaneous separation and union. This last statement contains in a
nutshell the design of the whole book (the two blocks joined by a
corridor).

5.2 Virginia Woolf’s Art Novel The Waves

Of all the six voices‫ ٭‬in The Waves (published in 1931) it is
surely Bernard’s that expresses Woolf’s own problems with
orchestrating everything in the novel. Like Lily Briscoe in To the
Lighthouse, Bernard may read as an embodiment of the fusion of
male and female principles, the androgynous‫ ٭‬mind envisaged by
Woolf in A Room of One’s Own.
SAQ 3
Read quote 20 in the Reader. What is the relevance of that
passage to the theme of the artist and his / her art? What is the
role of the artist and his / her art here?

end of the unit.
For many readers and critics, Bernard is Woolf’s alter ego‫٭‬.

As a matter of fact, in the final episode, Bernard becomes Woolf with
as little disguise as possible. His perceptions of and struggles with
the nature of his obviously modernist writing may read as a
fictionalized extension of Woolf’s argument about the nature of
“reality” in fiction and what the art of writing should be (see Unit 3,
subchapter 1.1 “Virginia Woolf’s Essay ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’:
A Modernist Manifesto”). It is obvious that, like Woolf herself, Bernard
struggles with words, phrases, and style. He, like Woolf, wants to
write “something new” that should capture the sense of flux and
change, the sense that everything is old and new at the same time.
Bernard, like Woolf, tries to find new techniques of description, which
are in fact the techniques used in the interludes‫٭‬.

SAQ 4
Read quote 21 in the Reader. Why is Bernard, Woolf’s
mouthpiece‫ ٭‬in this novel so dissatisfied with his words and
phrases? What kind of art is he trying to achieve?
See also unit 3, subchapter 3.1 for possible connections between
Bernard’s problems and Woolf’s “quarrel” with the realists in her
essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”.

end of the unit.
The nine interludes may also read as Bernard’s most

accomplished passages. They stand out in italics and provide an
impressive background against which all the other voices just “break”
like the waves on the shore. The interludes probably are the kind of
writing Bernard (and Woolf) always strove to achieve.
“The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable
from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth
had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on
the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the gray cloth became
barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the
surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.”

SAQ 5
This descriptive passage is actually the opening of The Waves.
You may also wish to read quote 22 in the Reader. Such
descriptive passages (the so-called “interludes”) alternate with
the episodes‫٭‬.
What are the stylistic features of this passage? (Is it narrative or
descriptive? Can you find enumerations, repetitions?) How can
you relate it to other literary genres (poetry) and other art forms
(painting, music)? Besides being descriptive of the first phase of
the cycle of the day, does this passage suggest the same phase
of any other cycles?

end of the unit.

5.3 James Joyce’s Art Novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young

Man
The name Stephen Dedalus joins together the first Christian
martyr, St Stephen, stoned to death outside Jerusalem in 34 AD and
the great pagan artificer-artist‫ ٭‬hero, Daedalus‫٭‬.
The recurrent allusions and references to pagan and Christian
mythology make of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (published
in 1916) a book that justified Joyce to leave Ireland and flee to
Europe in a gesture which symbolically suggests the flight of
Daedalus, the archetype of the classical artist, from an incarcerating
place (also an island!).
A statement of Stephen’s determination to leave the
incarcerating Ireland and find his freedom in Europe occurs in
James Joyce Stephen’s discussion with Davin, an Irish nationalist. There Stephen
Watercolour by alludes again to Daedalus and his flight from Crete when he says that:
Roger Cummiskey “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets
flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality,
language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”
SAQ 6
Read the passage above carefully. How can you relate the
stress laid by Stephen upon “the soul of a man” (actually his own
soul) to the title? What kind of “portrait” did Joyce intend to draw
in this book?

end of the unit.
Joyce’s A Portrait is not just a novel that foregrounds the

painful process of a young artist’s formation, but also the kind of art
this young artist strives to create.
By insisting on the epiphanic nature of momentary insight and

on the intensity achieved through transforming experience at the end
of each chapter, Joyce created a new kind of modernist art.
However, Joyce’s strategy of countering each of these epiphanies
and their charged symbolism with constant switches to realistic style
and realistic details, suggests a neck and neck‫ ٭‬battle between old
and new modes of writing in A Portrait.
In the essay “Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man: Styles of Realism and Fantasy”, critic John
Paul Riquelme argues that Joyce relies on the frequent use of
“patterns of contrasts” in A Portrait. Thus, A Portrait contains the
basic ingredients of what was to become Joyce’s mature art in
Ulysses, while at the same time looking back at his earlier works
Stephen Hero and Dubliners. None of these works abandons
realism, and the question is why Joyce was so keen on this mode of
tradition.
The fact is that Joyce valued tradition. Evidence of this is that he
developed a modernist style coloured by an often ironical and
parodic‫ ٭‬use of mythology‫٭‬, a mode of writing which has been called
mythopoetic‫٭‬. He also revived one of the oldest epics‫ ٭‬in European
literature, Homer’s Odyssey, in Ulysses, making that epic appealing to
a modern audience (See Unit 4 for the approaches to Ulysses).
As much as he valued tradition, however, Joyce rejected
conventionalism and its manifestations in the realist novel. By using
realism, he constantly undermined it and highlighted the novelty of
his art at the same time.
Summary
This unit presents three modernist art novels: Virginia Woolf’s
To the Lighthouse and The Waves and James Joyce’s A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man.
The first section looks into Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse,
treating it in terms of modernist aesthetics and focusing upon the
artist figure Lily Briscoe and her “androgynous mind”. The argument
also insists upon Woolf’s interest in shape, pattern and design as
essential aspects of modernist art in this book.
The second section deals with Woolf’s The Waves, continuing
the argument of the “androgynous mind”, which is embodied in the
figure of Bernard, the artist in this novel, and also Woolf’s alter ego.
The Waves is also treated as a departure from the novel as a genre,
a “play-poem” in prose rather than a novel.
The third section dwells on James Joyce’s novel of the artist’s
formation A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It also makes a
point of the stylistic peculiarities of this art novel, which mingles
realism, symbolism, the epiphanic, poetry, music and prose in its
“mythopoetic” formula.
The next section will present D. H. Lawrence’s taboo breaking
novel of free indirect style The Rainbow.

Key Terms
• Androgynous
• Interlude
• Episode
• Mythopoeia
• Alter ego is borrowed from Latin and means a second side to an

individual’s personality, different from the one that most people know
• Androgynous means blending masculine and feminine. It refers
to somebody who is neither male nor female in appearance but having
both conventional masculine and feminine traits and giving an
impression of ambiguous sexual identity
• Artificer is somebody who invents or devises things, an inventor
or skilled worker
• Assegais (plural of “assegai”) are slender hardwood
spears with iron tips, used especially by the Zulu peoples of Southern
Africa
• Daedalus, father of Icarus, fashioned wings for himself and his
son to escape from the Cretan labyrinth he had created to house the
Minotaur, the half-bull, half-man offspring of Queen Pasiphae and an
artificial bull
• “Darkplumaged” means having dark feathers
• Distraught means extremely upset and distressed
• “Dovetailed” means having the shape of a dove tail
• Elegy is a mournful or reflective poem. That Woolf thought of
poetry when she wrote To the Lighthouse tells a lot about her
intentions to bring the novel as close as she could to poetry
• Epic is a lengthy narrative poem in elevated language celebrating
the adventures and achievements of a legendary or traditional hero,
for example, Homer’s Odyssey
• Episode is an incident, description or series of events in a
narrative that is part of the whole but may digress from the main plot.
Woolf’s “episodes” in The Waves consist in the soliloquies of the six
“voices”, which reflect on the stages of their lives from infancy to ripe
maturity and old age
• Interlude is a term borrowed from music. It means a short play,
piece of music or other entertainment performed during the break in
the performance of a long work
• Mouthpiece refers here to a character (Bernard) that expresses
the views of the author (Virginia Woolf)
• Mythology may mean:
a) a group of myths that belong to a particular people or culture
and tell about their ancestors, heroes, gods and other supernatural
beings and history
b) a body of stories, ideas or beliefs that are not necessarily true
about a particular place or individual.
Joyce implied both meanings in his treatment of myth
• Mythopoeia means making of myths
• “Neck and neck” means level in a competition and with an equal
chance of winning
• Parodic refers to a piece of writing or music that deliberately
imitates another work in a comic or satirical way
• “Slate blue” means of a dark bluish-gray colour
• St. Ives is a town and fishing port in Cornwall, southwestern
England. Virginia Woolf and her family used to spend their holidays in
St. Ives, and the writer meant to evoke her memories related to that
place in her novel To the Lighthouse, which is largely autobiographical
• The six “voices” in The Waves are:
* Bernard, the “phrase maker”, i.e. the novelist
* Neville, the poet
* Louis, the banker with a peculiar Australian accent, which
makes him feel like an outcast
* Jinny, the coquette, the city girl, who takes pleasure in
dancing and flirting with men
* Susan, the country girl, who feels attached to nature and
fulfilled in her maternity
* Rhoda, the embodiment of femininity in danger; she feels
“faceless”, and, like Louis, she feels she cannot fit.
There is also a seventh “character”, Percival, who never speaks. He
is only in the minds of his six friends, somehow uniting them.
Many critics preferred to see these six “characters” as “voices”,
because they lack the solidity of characters in fiction. Instead of
acting, they think, reflect, perceive and let themselves become
invaded by impressions.
• Roger Cummiskey is a contemporary Irish artist (a painter,

and more recently, a poet). The artist declares that he specializes “in
watercolour paintings, which take their names and titles from the
wanderings and writings of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and other
Literary and Historical personalities.” Roger Cummiskey has had
paintings representing Ireland in London, Stockholm, New York and
Florence.
(http://www.rogercummiskey.com/about/poetry.htm)

She Weeps Over Rahoon

Watercolour and ink on paper by Roger Cummiskey
Rain on Rahoon falls softly, softly falling,

Where my dark lover lies.
Sad is his voice that calls me, sadly calling,
At grey moonrise.
Love, hear thou
How soft, how sad his voice is ever calling,
Ever unanswered in the dark rain falling,
Then and now.
Dark too our hearts, O love, shall lie and cold
As his sad heart has lain
Under the moongrey nettles, the
black mould
And muttering rain.
Poem by James Joyce

Trieste 1913

SAA No. 5
Read the passage below:
“A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing

out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed
into the likeness of a strange and beautiful sea-bird. Her
long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s and pure
save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself
as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and softhued as
ivory, were bared almost to the hips where the white fringes
of her drawers were like featherings of soft white down. Her
slateblue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and
dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird’s soft and
slight, slight and soft as the breast of some darkplumaged
dove. But her long fair hair was girlish, and touched with the
wonder of mortal beauty, her face.”
This passage is taken from Chapter IV of A Portrait. To
many readers, this and the passages following it may be the
most beautiful ones in the whole book. Stephen’s vision as
he stands by the rivulet in the strand is an epiphany.
You may wish to give the lines of the passage the layout of
a poem. Even if you keep it as it is, you may read it as a
poem. What are the qualities of Joyce’s style here? Would
they justify the association of his prose with poetry? Do
those qualities invite associations with other art forms
(music, painting)? You may wish to use Joyce’s poem
“She Weeps Over Rahoon” illustrated by Roger
Cummiskey (above) to support your argument.
Motivate your answer in an essay.
Send the essay (not longer than three pages) to your

tutor.
Please note that the quality of your ideas and the

coherence of the essay will be 70 % of your grade, while
the accuracy of your language will count for 30 %.

Answers to SAQs
SAQ 1
The artist Lily Briscoe needs to give shape to shapelessness
because art means order. Everyday life is chaotic: experiences,
feelings and impressions are often contradictory. Masculinity and
femininity are also contradictory: while masculinity is abstract and
cold, femininity is warm, simple and concrete. However, art needs to
embrace contradictions and to render chaos in an orderly way. Art
needs pattern, form and design. Art needs to be both abstract and
concrete.
Lily feels that Mrs. Ramsay stands for this spirit of harmony
and reconciliation that her art needs.
SAQ 2
The contrast between selfish masculinity (embodied by Mr.
Ramsay) and generous kind femininity (embodied by his wife, Mrs.
Ramsay) is obvious in this passage. While Mr. Ramsay takes, Mrs.
Ramsay gives; while Mr. Ramsay is always moody, Mrs. Ramsay is
always blissful; while Mr. Ramsay brings chaos into their universe,
Mrs. Ramsay brings order, harmony and gives shape to
formlessness. However, it is also obvious that Lily has to reconcile
this contrast if she wants to fulfill her creative potential and
materialize it in her painting. If she fails to reconcile the two
Opposites, she will not finish her painting, and she will not
have her “vision”.

section.
SAQ 3
Bernard, the novelist in The Waves, feels that he is not exactly
himself, but in a way a self that unites the selves of his friends
(Percival, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, Susan and Louis).
In the last 50 pages of the book, Bernard “sums up”, that is he
unfolds his own life, which is intertwined with the lives of his friends.
He also tries to find words and phrases that might capture their lives.
Like Lily, who is an artist in painting, Bernard, who is an artist in
words and phrases (that is literature), has to give meaning and shape
to the meaninglessness and shapelessness of life. Like Lily, who is
inspired by Mrs. Ramsay (the artist of life), Bernard is aware that art
and his artistic self need to make connections, to join people and
things together, to achieve harmony, and to turn mortality into
eternity through art.
In this passage, Bernard thinks of his own identity, but he finds
himself unable to tell it from the identities of his friends, three of
whom are females and three other males. He feels that he is both
male and female, both himself and the others.

SAQ 4
Woolf projected her own wish to write “something new” onto
the novelist Bernard in The Waves. Bernard stands for the artist who
struggles with novelty. His words and phrases follow no tradition in
literature, and he feels unsafe when he handles them.
The art he wishes to create is in fact the book we read: The
Waves. The nine interludes, and also the alternation of interludes
and episodes follow Woolf’s design, which she put in Bernard’s
hands. His problems with style, technique and design echo Woolf’s
problems with these aspects of novelty in the novel.
SAQ 5
An obvious innovative formal feature of The Waves is the
series of nine interludes in italics. Reading them through, one
realizes the parallelism of form and the effect of gradation in the
pursuit of the cycle of the sun from crack to sunrise, then through
midday and sunset to darkness in their openings. The interludes may
also be seen as a huge canvas, an abstract landscape, against
which the drama of human existence unfolds, which is probably why
Woolf visualized her “characters” as “statues against the sky”. Being
highly descriptive, pictorial, but also musical and poetic, the
interludes are a background radiating many connotations: while they
may read as descriptive of the progression of one day from dawn
until dark, they may also suggest other possible associations
between this cycle, the cycle of seasons and also the stages of
human life, which implies the connection between macro- and micro-
cosmos, especially since the nine poetic landscapes of the interludes
counterpoint the nine episodes. However, the interludes may be
suggestive of a much larger span from genesis until apocalypse.

answers comparable to those given to SAQ 3, SAQ 4 and SAQ 5
in this section.
SAQ 6
Joyce’s intention was to draw a spiritual portrait of his young
artist. Thus, the aspects of Stephen Dedalus’ profile focus upon his
soul. His solitude, his “silence, exile, and cunning” are characteristic
features of the modernist artist as marginalized by society, less
understood but a lot more sensitive, even more heroic, than the
average person. Stephen’s interest in sensory experiences and
received impressions, complemented by a very strong interest in
words and their meanings, complete his artistic profile.
When Stephen takes flight (i.e. when he leaves Ireland), he
leaves behind not only his country but also the nineteenth-century
novel and its realist mode.


Bibliography
Attridge, Derek (ed.) (1999) The Cambridge Companion to

James Joyce, CUP (Chapter 5 ”Stephen Hero, Dubliners , and A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Styles of Realism and Fantasy”
by John Paul Riquelme)
Dowling, David (1985) Bloomsbury Aesthetics and the Novels

of Forster and Woolf, St. Martin’s Press, New York (Chapter 6 ”Woolf
and Painting” and Chapter 7 ”Woolf’s Novels” see subchapters Mrs.
Dalloway and The Waves)
Joyce, James (1916)1993) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young

Man, Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Seamus Deane,
Penguin Books
Woolf, Virginia (1927)1955) To the Lighthouse, Harcourt,

Brace & World, Inc., New York
Woolf, Virginia (1931)1950) The Waves, Harvest Books,

Harvest Edition

Free indirect style and taboo breaking
UNIT 6
FREE INDIRECT STYLE AND TABOO BREAKING
Unit Outline
Unit Objectives 103

6 D. H. Lawrence’s Novel of Sensibility 103
6.1 Taboo Breaking 104
6.2 Free Indirect Style 106
6.3 Antagonism and Oneness in The Rainbow 108
6.4 Symbolism in The Rainbow 112
Summary 114
Key Terms 115
SAA No. 6 116
Answers to SAQs 116
Bibliography 119


• Explain Lawrence’s contribution to the modernist novel
in terms of “novel of sensibility”
• Identify and explain the notions of “free indirect style”
and “taboo”
• Explain the relevance of these notions to any
Unit objectives discussion of Lawrence’s novel
• Explain the importance of “battle of the sexes”,
“antagonism and oneness” in Lawrence’s novel The
Rainbow
• Relate Lawrence’s symbolism to these aspects
• Explain Lawrence’s theme of the “battle of the sexes”
in relation to “free indirect style” and symbolism
• Identify Lawrence’s place alongside James Joyce and
Virginia Woolf and acknowledge Lawrence’s
contribution to the modernist subjective novel
6. D. H. Lawrence’s Novel of Sensibility

D. H. Lawrence has been ranked among the most influential
and controversial writers of the 20th century. In his more than 40
books he celebrated his vision of the natural, whole human being,
thus opposing the artificiality of modern industrial society with its
dehumanization of life and love.
However, Lawrence’s novels came as a shock to his
contemporaries, who misunderstood, attacked, and even suppressed
them because of their frank treatment of sexual matters.
D. H. Lawrence
Stop and think!
What is the significance of Lawrence’s poetic definition of books?

(See the quote on the left hand side). What is your metaphor of a
book? Give your answer in the space provided below. Please add
this answer to your portfolio to be discussed in the tutorials.
“To every man
who struggles
with his own
soul in mystery,
a book that is a
book flowers
once, and seeds,
and is gone.”
D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence expressed an acute sense of his need for a
return from the confusion, over-intellectualism and cold materialism
of modern life to the primitive, unconscious springs of vitality of the
race. Indeed, it can be argued that Lawrence was an essentially
pagan‫ ٭‬spirit that valued what pre-Christian (especially old Anglo-
Saxon‫ )٭‬cultures had offered humanity in terms of unspoiled vitality
and passion.
This strong urge to go back to the old pagan roots of the race
placed him in a line opened by the late Victorian novelist Thomas
Hardy. Lawrence saw Hardy as his chief forerunner in trying to
transpose tragedy from drama to fiction. He described the subject of
Hardy’s novels as “the tragedy of those who, more or less pioneers,
have died in the wilderness whither they had escaped for free action,
after having left the walled security, and the comparative
imprisonment, of the established convention”.
Lawrence’s own contribution to the English novel is the

breaking of established conventions. His numerous novels and short
stories, among which some of the best known are Sons and Lovers
(1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1921), The Plumed
Serpent (1926), Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) are for most part and
to a large extent experimental, though not so daringly innovative from
a technical point of view as Woolf’s or Joyce’s. The obvious
symbolism of Lawrence’s plots and the forceful straightforward
preaching of his message broke the bonds of realism.
Lawrence has unanimously been regarded as a late romantic
spirit, endowed with heaps of vitality and sensitivity, which urged him
to articulate a freer, more natural, and more direct expression of the
writer’s perceptions. As a matter of fact, he transmitted this vitality to
his characters, whom he allowed the same freedom of unrestrained
and unconventional expression. For all these reasons his novels are
known as novels of sensibility.
6.1 Taboo Breaking
Taboo is related to prohibition. The term can be defined as

“a prohibition or rejection of particular types of behaviour or language
because they are considered socially unacceptable”.
Lawrence, the son of a coal miner, born and brought up in the
small mining village of Eastwood, Nottingamshire, contributed to
English culture and literature from a marginalized social and cultural
position, which gave him the go-ahead to challenge the
establishment‫٭‬.
Therefore, Lawrence’s standpoint as a writer was to challenge,
shake and eventually break the taboos imposed by the establishment.
The taboo that mattered most to Lawrence was sex. In his essay “Sex,
Creativity and Biography: The Young D. H. Lawrence”, critic David
Lodge states that “in no modern writer are sexuality and creativity more
deeply and intricately connected than in D. H. Lawrence”.

However, besides creativity and sex, there is class. The issue

of class incompatibility gave rise to another taboo breaking theme
running through Lawernce’s fiction: classlessness. Lawrence liked
to give the impression that while his father was working-class, his
mother was middle-class. This alleged class clash in his own family
led Lawrence to what he saw as an ideal of classlessness, which
also animated his characters in an ardent desire to be both sexually
and socially free.
Lawrence made a strong point of this ideal freedom in
“Derelict”‫٭‬, the last chapter of his novel Sons and Lovers. This
sense of freedom may feel like devastating pain because the
character is left “naked of everything”. In the closing lines of the novel
Paul Morel, a painter and also the key figure feels that:
“The town, as he sat upon the car, stretched away, over the
bay of railway, a level fume of lights. Beyond the town the country,
little smouldering spots for more towns – the sea – the night – on and
on! And he had no place in it. Whatever spot he stood on, there he
stood
alone. /…/ The people hurrying along the streets offered no
obstruction to the void in which he found himself. They were small
shadows whose footsteps and voices could be heard, but in each of
them, the same night, the same silence. /…/ There was no Time,
only Space. /…/ Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching
out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went
spinning round for terror and holding each other in embrace, there in
a darkness that outpassed them all and left them tiny and daunted.
So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core a nothingness, and
yet not nothing.”
SAQ 1
Read the passage above carefully. What are Paul’s feelings?
How can you relate them to taboo breaking?


6.2 Free Indirect Style
In his greatest novels The Rainbow and Women in Love

“You mustn’t Lawrence increasingly turned away from the diminished possibilities
look in my novel of the wider world, which had provided the realists with its material, to
for the old stable examine the potential of fulfillment through personal relationships.
ego of the Envisaging sex as an integral and essential part of such
character.” relationships, Lawrence presented his characters’ sexuality with a
frankness, urgency and explicitness that was largely new to the
novel. No wonder that his contemporary readers, used to the notions
of propriety imposed by the establishment, found Lawrence’s
treatment of sex shocking! The readers’ reaction led Lawrence, like
Joyce, into trouble with censorship.
In terms of plot and narrative structure, Lawrence’s novels

may seem conventional. What makes them look disturbingly
unconventional is Lawrence’s choice of subject matter. However, this
impression fails to do justice to Lawrence’s technical and stylistic
innovations.
It can be argued that if sex is an essentially intimate matter,
Lawrence’s manner of handling it also suggests a plunge into the
characters’ intimacy. Thus, there are critics ready to acknowledge
that Lawrence’s style was as innovative as his subject matter. Critic
Randall Stevenson states that “the intensity of Lawrence’s interest in
‘the psychology of the free human individual’, and in the effect upon
his characters of the ebb and flow, wonder and disillusion of powerful
emotions released in their relationships, also led him to develop new
fictional styles for presenting subjectivity”.
Indeed, Lawrence developed a strategy of directing his
readers’ attention upon individual consciousness and a style that
went with it. This may be seen, for instance, in the following passage
from The Rainbow, which traces the thoughts of Lawrence’s heroine
Ursula Brangwen as she walks out one spring morning:
“Again she felt Jesus in the countryside. Ah, he would lift up
the lambs in his arms! Ah, and she was the lamb. Again, in the
morning, going down the lane, she heard the ewe call, and the lambs
came running… stooping, nuzzling, groping to the udder… Oh and
the bliss, the bliss! She could scarcely tear herself away to go to
school.”

SAQ 2
Read the passage above carefully. Can you draw a “portrait” of
Ursula’s soul starting from this passage? How deep into the
character’s intimacy did Lawrence go in such passages?
Compare your answers with those given in the “Answers” section

Actual experiences and dialogues in Lawrence’s novels are

often followed by several paragraphs or even pages focusing upon a
minute examination of his characters’ reflections and emotions (see
the passage above). The intimacy, depth and intensity with which
Lawrence sought to present this inner experience often led him to a
distinctive intermingling of characters’ inner voices with his own more
objective authorial tone.
This technique of presenting a character’s thoughts, feelings,
emotions articulated in words that are never uttered aloud and partly
mediated through the voice of the author is called “free indirect style
or discourse”. This technique is not Lawrence’s discovery, but it
certainly was so largely used by him that it became a mark of his
style. Randall Stevenson argued that a free indirect style “is a
distinctive extension of the novelist’s means of ‘looking within’ and
examining the mind”.
Although Lawrence refrained himself from employing more
direct entries into the mental experience of his characters offered by
stream of consciousness, his formula of free indirect discourse
clearly associates him with modernist writers such as Woolf and
Joyce.

6.3 Antagonism and Oneness in The Rainbow
With Lydia and Tom Brangwen, the parental couple in The

Rainbow, the antagonism of the sexes unfolds a story that – through
its fierce re-enactment in the couple of Anna and Will Brangwen –
reaches the New Woman Ursula.
With Lydia and Tom, the inevitable antagonism is tempered
and eventually toned down – to become a relatively “happy” marriage
– by Lydia’s foreignness. Her foreignness has very large and
ambivalent connotations in the novel. Lydia’s rather mysterious
Polishness both attracts and repels Tom. It attracts him as a sign of
complementariness, and it repels him as a sign of cultural, sexual
and even class incongruity. However, the couple Lydia and Tom
Brangwen manage to achieve a relative equilibrium that supports
Lawrence’s motif of oneness:
“They did not take much notice of each other, consciously.
‘I’m betimes,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she answered.
He turned to the dogs, or to the child if she were there. The
little Anna played about the farm, flitting constantly in to call
something to her mother, to fling her arms round her mother’s skirts,
to be noticed, perhaps caressed, then, forgetting, to slip out again.
Then Brangewn, talking to the child, or to the dog between his
knees, would be aware of his wife, as, in her tight, dark bodice and
her lace fichu, she was reaching up to the corner cupboard. He
realized that he lived by her. Did he own her? Was she here for
ever? Or might she go away? She was not really his, it was not a real
marriage, this marriage between them. She might go away. He did
not feel like a master, husband, father of her children. She belonged
elsewhere. Any moment, she might be gone. And he was ever drawn
to her, drawn after her, with ever-raging, ever-unsatisfied desire. He
must always turn home, wherever his steps were taking him, always
to her, and he could never quite reach her, he could never quite be
satisfied, never be at peace, because she might go away.”

SAQ 3
Read the passage above carefully. How can you relate this
relation between husband and wife to the themes of antagonism/
difference - oneness and attraction - repulsion?

Anna Brangwen, Lydia’s daughter by her (now dead) Polish

husband, replays this antagonistic game with her husband Will. The
point is that the game becomes more and more dangerous since old
rules of mastership can no longer apply to the modern couple. Like
Gertrude, the mother in Sons and Lovers, like Winifred in the short
story “England, My England”, Anna imposes her power and
domination after a “battle”. Will’s problem is that he runs “after his
dark-souled desires” and does the most foolish thing: he claims “the
old position of master of the house”.

SAQ 4
Read quote 23 in the Reader. How and why do couple
relationships deteriorate in this new Brangwen generation?

Eventually victory is on Anna’s side because she is the

embodiment of feminine fertility. She embarks on an apparently
ceaseless child-bearing mission in which she revels with an
unstoppable joy. However, with Anna we still have to do with a
feminine “power” of a very old matriarchal order. So Lawrence’s
novel urges the readers on to her daughter Ursula.
The daughter, Ursula, who inherits her father’s “darkness” and
her mother’s strength, is Lawrence’s New Woman. Her antagonistic
attitude to the opposite sex, which makes her relationship with Anton
so sexually intense and yet so impossible, is no longer accountable
on social or cultural background incompatibility. It is now a matter of
Ursula, the New Woman, being aware of her new femininity. Ursula
asserts her economic independence when she takes a teaching job
in “the men’s world”. Then she manages to make her way through it
by adopting typically masculine belligerent methods of herding the
pupils into a soulless mechanical system. With a half-sense of failure
and half-sense of success, she goes to a further education college,
which bitterly disappoints her again.
The relationship with Anton Skrebensky, which she feels as “a
truce” concluded by two “enemies” in “The Bitterness of Ecstasy”
chapter, proves to be an utter failure. The failure is grounded in the
difference between the male’s view and commitments on the one the
hand, and the female’s view and commitments, on the other, which
sum up Ursula and Anton’s antagonistic souls. It is precisely in the light
of Ursula’s New Woman standpoint that we are supposed to make
sense of her intriguing anti-democratic convictions, articulated with so
much force, bitterness and passion in “The Bitterness of Ecstasy”:

“I shall be glad to leave England. Everything is so meagre and

paltry, it is so unspiritual – I hate democracy.” /…/
/…/ It was as if she were attacking him.
“What do you mean?” he asked her, hostile. “Why do you hate
democracy?”
“/…/ Only degenerate races are democratic.”
“What do you want then – an aristocracy?” /.../
“I do want an aristocracy.” She cried. “And I’d far rather have
an aristocracy of birth than of money. Who are the aristocrats now –
who are chosen as the best to rule? Those who have money and the
brains for money. It doesn’t matter what else they have: but they
must have money-brains, because they are ruling in the name of
money”.
SAQ 5
Read the passage above carefully. Why is the antagonism
between Ursula and Anton so fierce?
Compare your answers with those given in the “Answers”

section at the end of the unit.
Anton will leave for India to marry there, while Ursula will
remain in England to build a spiritual rainbow, “the earth’s new
architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept
away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-
arching heaven.” Accustomed to so many antagonistic couples who
eventually concluded a “truce” of lasting marriage, the reader finds
something radical in the conflict between Ursula and Anton, an
antagonism which can by no means be solved by a “truce”. It is
Ursula-the New Woman that makes the antagonism so unbridgeable
by marriage. The bridge promised by the title is the image-symbol of
the rainbow that concludes the novel transcendentally: it unites the
generations in the novel and elsewhere, and it mystically unites the
earth (society, culture and civilization, so broken and fragmented by
a sense of crisis, tension, changes and shifts) with heaven; it also
unites body and spirit, “arched” as it is “in their blood” and “quivering
to life” (Read quote 24 in the Reader).

6.4. Symbolism in The Rainbow
Lawrence’s use of a very rich texture of symbols is another

aspect which compensates for what the modernist novel loses in
terms of realist conventions. Thus in his treatment of the degradation
of relationships in the modern couple from Lydia and Tom through
Anna and Will to Ursula and Anton in The Rainbow, Lawrence
deployed a tone and imagery that compels the readers to find
analogies to the Biblical Fall. Lawrence’s point in focusing upon this
symbolism of the Fall implies that this is the course taken by
humanity since the moment when the first couple was forced to
depart from the Garden of Eden. This course is one of repeated falls,
each new fall worsening the situation and deepening the antagonism.
However, Lawrence also made a point of the couple’s longing for the
lost unity with a highly dramatic force, often touching pathetic and
even prophetic notes.
For Anna and Will, their honeymoon feels blissful as the
couple rejoices on their sense of oneness:
“As they lay close together, complete and beyond the touch of
time or change, it was as if they were at the very centre of all the
slow wheeling of space and the rapid agitation of life, deep, deep
inside them all, at the centre where there is utter radiance, and
eternal being, and the silence absorbed in praise: the steady core of
all movements, the unawakened sleep of all wakefulness. They
found themselves there, and they lay still, in each other’s arms; for
their moment they were at the heart of eternity, whilst time roared far
off, forever far off, towards the rim.
Then gradually they were passed away from the supreme
centre, down the circles of praise and joy and gladness, further and
further out, towards the noise and the friction. But their hearts had
burned and were tempered by the inner reality, they were unalterably
glad.”

SAQ 6
Read the passage above carefully. How can you relate it to the
motif of the original bliss and the Fall?

It is worth noticing that Lawrence’s antagonistic couples find

themselves drawn (and sometimes ironically and symbolically
drowned) in floods with mythological implications, like Tom in The
Rainbow, into a dangerous war of the sexes.
Tom Brangwen finds himself tugged between a strong desire
to be satisfied and an equally strong sense that he will always be
dissatisfied. The war is waged within himself in the first place, and
this is agony. Of course, this split, which always feels like devastating
pain, is also a condition of the fallen nature of man. Tom dies, drunk
as Noah‫ ٭‬to forget the wearying puzzles of his middle age, drowned
in the flood of rain, and his women mourn for him:
“They cleared and washed the body, and laid it on the bed.
There, it looked still and grand. He was perfectly calm in
death, and, now he was laid in line, inviolable, unapproachable. To
Anna, he was the majesty of the inaccessible male, the majesty of
death. It made her still and awe-stricken, almost glad.

Lydia Brangwen, the mother, also came and saw the

impressive, inviolable body of the dead man. She went pale, seeing
death. He was beyond change or knowledge, absolute, laid in line
with the infinite. What had she to do with him? He was a majestic
Abstraction, made visible now for a moment, inviolate, absolute. And
who could lay claim to him, who could speak of him, of the him who
was revealed in the stripped moment of transit from life into death?
Neither the living nor the dead could claim him, he was both the one
and the other, inviolable, inaccessibly himself.”
SAQ 7
Read the passage above carefully. How can you relate this
description of Tom’s dead body to the biblical symbol of the
Flood?

Summary
This unit presents D. H. Lawrence’s contribution to the
modernist English novel in relation to both a forerunner such as
Thomas Hardy and to his contemporary writers Virginia Woolf and
James Joyce, who opted for apparently more daring techniques of
capturing subjectivity in their stream of consciousness experimental
novels.
However, Lawrence’s innovations concern both subject matter
and techniques. In terms of subject matter, his novels are daring,
even shocking explorations of sex, and the techniques deployed can
be regarded as a version of the subjective novel, a formula also
developed by Woolf and Joyce.

Thus, Lawrence’s taboo breaking topic of sex has to be seen

in close connection to the major themes of the battle of the sexes,
antagonism and oneness, and also with the deployment of free
indirect style / discourse and charged symbolism. All these aspects
led Lawrence miles away from the realist novel and came together in
a unique formula of the subjective novel.
The next unit will deal with Aldous Huxley’s novel of ideas
Point Counter Point, in which D. H. Lawrence is fictionalized as Mark
Rampion.
Key Terms
• Novel of sensibility
• Subjective novel
• Taboo and taboo breaking
• Free indirect style or discourse
• Antagonism and oneness
• Symbols:
- the rainbow
- the Garden of Eden
- the Fall
- the Flood
• Anglo-Saxon refers to the West Germanic peoples who settled

in Britain from the fifth century AD and were dominant until 1066
• Archetype is a typical, ideal or classic example of something or
somebody
• Derelict means somebody who has no home, employment or
family care
• Establishment means a class or group of people who hold
power in a society and dominate its institutions
• Everyman refers to somebody, usually a man, considered to be
typical or representative of all human beings
• Noah was a biblical patriarch. At God’s command, Noah built an
ark and saved himself and a pair of every kind of animal from the
Flood
• Pagan means a follower of an ancient, pre-Christian religion
• Paterfamilias (from Latin) means father of a family, a man in the
role of father and head of a household
• Patriarch is, in the Bible, a figure considered as the ancestor of
the whole human race, for example, Adam or Noah
• Phallocentrism means a system centered on men, or showing a
preference for traditionally masculine qualities

SAA 6
Explain the couples’ explorations of love, hate, sex, life and
death along the three Brangwen generations in The
Rainbow. What are the main elements and aspects of
modernity that make these explorations so dramatic in the
novel?
Send the answers to these questions to your tutor. Do

not take longer than three pages.
of the essay will be 70 % of your grade, while the accuracy of
your language will count for 30 %.
Answers to SAQs
SAQ 1
Sons and Lovers ends with Paul a derelict in the “drift toward
death”, which Lawrence thought of in more general terms as the
disease syndrome of his time and of the Europe of his time. But the
death drift and death worship are for Lawrence hideous distortions of
the natural relationship of death to life. The whole passage is
dominated by the dramatic tension between light and darkness,
which is symbolic of the tension between life and death internalized
by Paul. Eventually Paul decides to head towards the lights of the
city, overcoming his “death drift”. It is very significant that he does it
from this position of a person who is now, at the end and in the end,
free of and from everything and everybody: he has no religion, no
class to fit in, no family, no ties, no country, no prejudices and no firm
holds. This “nakedness of everything” and this homelessness are
symbolic of the character’s freedom from all conventions and
constrictions, which can no longer affect him. Paul’s mood and final
decision imply that he has transgressed all conventions and norms,
breaking all the taboos imposed by the system.

SAQ 2
It is clear that the voice which says ‘ah’ and ‘Oh… the bliss!’ is
not wholly Lawrence’s or the narrator’s own, but really a partial
transcription of Ursula’s, though this is not conventionally marked for
the reader by such phrases as ‘she said’ or ‘she thought’. What these
very intimate thoughts and feelings suggest is that Ursula’s is of a

highly sensitive nature. She craves for purity, which she sees
everywhere around her in nature. The problem is that this craving is
too intimate and too unconventional to be communicated aloud to a

world governed by conventions. The passage makes it very clear in
the last line, which sets the contrast between the genuineness of
Ursula’s unconventional nature and the obligations imposed by social
conventions: “She could scarcely tear herself away to go to school.”

SAQ 3
Tom Brangwen’s apprehensions are not, after all, just the
timeless worries of husbands but unprecedented seismic shocks
brought about by the “modernization” of his world. Throughout his
life, from all points of view, Tom is forced to live with the radical
changes of modernity brought about by the pressures of
industrialization upon the natural life on the farm. Thomas Hardy had
thematized this devastating effect of an increasingly mechanized
society upon the individual before Lawrence. Lawrence was born
later only to see that those effects were turning the farmers’ life into
hell (Tom’s restlessness is a translation of hell).
The point Lawrence made is that these changes also affect
the life of the couple. Husbands feel marriage turn into a relationship
on the edge, dominated by contradictory feelings of attraction and
repulsion. Tom feels it to be so and relates it to the fact that nature is
less and less part of the couple’s life. That is why he constantly looks
for comfort by talking “to the child, or to the dog between his knees”
(unspoiled creatures). However, pressures never release him. He
feels the pressures of antagonism in his wife’s foreignness, which
represents the distance between all people and especially between
the sexes. Tom’s apprehensions are, in other words, that distance
and foreignness may grow so sharp as to become unbridgeable
antagonism, radical estrangement and irrecoverable separation: “She
belonged elsewhere. Any moment, she might be gone.”
SAQ 4
To many readers and critics Anna and Will epitomize the first
modern couple. They seem to lose all ties with nature and tradition
that Tom and Lydia (the first couple in the book) still managed to
preserve. The tensions in this couple become so fierce that no
equilibrium can eventually be restored. In their couple antagonism
prevails. The man, having lost his inherited mastery, comes to
depend on satisfactions of sexuality as on a drug, while the woman
comes to resent what she will eventually regard as his infantile male
weakness. Anna and Will can never reclaim their honeymoon
fulfillment of passion, nor can they reconcile passion and sensuality.
So their lives dwindle away in disorganization and in minor
consummations and complaints. As the passage suggests, Will is a
fool, while Anna is his fierce opponent in the name of a newly gained
womanly power, which is a consequence of his loss of inherited
manly mastery.

SAQ 5
This fiery attack engenders an approach to the crisis of the
age, which had its roots (as Woolf pointed out in her essays and also
implied in her novels) in Victorian phallocentrism‫ ٭‬and Edwardian
“materialism”. The markedly feminine note brought about in the
English fiction of the early 20th century by Woolf is struck here by
Lawrence’s character Ursula. It is not that Anton would not be
anaristocrat. We are reminded in the same passage that “he always
felt that by rights he belonged to the ruling aristocracy”. The fact is
that he is nonetheless committed to the system attacked so
vehemently by Ursula. He is committed to “the equality of dirt”, that is
money and moreover to Rule Britannia (the British Empire and its
domination). It is this patriarchal‫ ٭‬imperial domination and
arrogance that Ursula so irrevocably rejects, flinging her embittered
disapproval of it in Anton’s stunned face.

in this section.
SAQ 6
In this passage, Anna and Will are “complete and beyond the
touch of time or change”, which is a state of atemporal and aspatial
perfection. Indeed, they look as if they were the first couple. To them
this moment feels like eternity, a timelessness enjoyed by Adam and
Eve in the Garden of Eden. However, the subsequent passages
plunge them “gradually” into time, change, exterior space and friction.
SAQ 7
In these passages, Tom Brangwen is essentially an
archetype‫٭‬: in death he is no longer the turn of the century-early 20th
century troubled man, but Everyman‫٭‬, not at all the conventional
individualist hero of English fiction. In death he has reached a state
of beyondness. He has transcended his own physicality and all the
torments that go with it.
Tom is the patriarch‫٭‬, paterfamilias‫ ٭‬of the novel, like
Noah‫٭‬. The generations that follow Tom: Anna (his daughter), Will
(Anna’s husband and Tom’s nephew), and Ursula (Tom’s
granddaughter) have their origin in him. Dying in the Flood, he gives
them the chance to people the earth after his death. This, and also
the fact that he has transcended sufferance, must be what makes
Anna “almost glad”.

section.

Bibliography
Lawrence, D. H. (1915)1971) The Rainbow (1915); rpt.

Harmondsworth: Penguin
Lodge, David (1996) The Practice of Writing. Essays,

Lectures, Reviews and a Diary, Secker and Warburg, London
(Chapter ”Sex and Creativity in the Young D. H. Lawrence”)
Spilka, Mark (ed.) (1963) D. H. Lawrence, A Collection of

Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N. J. (”The
Originality of The Rainbow” by Marvin Mudrick)
Stevenson, Randall (1993) The British Novel Since the

Thirties, Institutul European , Iaşi (Chapter 1 ”The Novel, 1900-
1930”)

The musicalisation of fiction
Unit 7
THE MUSICALISATION OF FICTION, THE NOVEL OF IDEAS
Unit Outline
Unit objectives 121
7 Aldous Huxley – A Lover of Science, 121
Literature and the Arts
7.1 Huxley’s Characters 121
7.2 Satire and European Models 122
7.3 Continuing a Line of Tradition 124
7.4 Mark Rampion’s Point in Point Counter Point 124
7.5 Philip Quarles, the Novelist In the Novel 125
7.6 The Musicalisation of Fiction 126
7.7 A Novelist’s Novel of Ideas; The Pure Novel 129
Summary 130
Key Terms 131
Glossary and Comments 131
SAA No. 7 133
Answers to SAQs 134
Bibliography 135


• explain the unique place held by Aldous Huxley in
English literature
• identify the category in which Huxley’s characters belong
• explain the relevance of Huxley’s focus on this particular
category
Unit objectives • identify the formula of Huxley’s novel
• identify the main ingredients and influences in Huxley’s
novel
• explain Huxley’s point of putting a novelist in the novel
and of having him comment on his problems with writing
it
• explain Huxley’s point of the “congenital” versus
“noncongenital” novelist
• explain Point Counter Point in terms of:
- musicalisation of fiction
- novel of ideas
- “pure novel”
7. Aldous Huxley - A Lover of Science, Literature and the Arts

Aldous Huxley’s place in English literature is, according to T.
S. Eliot, “unique and certainly established”.
Huxley’s keen interest in science, scientific theories and ideas
was doubled by his effort to penetrate the intimate essence of
phenomena in order to give them artistic form in his novels.
Indeed, Huxley was one of the few writers of the 20th century
who realized the overwhelming importance of science. He became,
like his contemporary Marcel Proust, highly knowledgeable of
theoretical sciences, assimilating them and putting them to use in his
Aldous Huxley
novels.
Of course, Huxley’s cultural background also heavily relied on
literature and the arts: he had an intimate knowledge of the English
classics and romantics, and a strong inclination to the French
symbolists, the Italian Renaissance and Spanish painting.
All these influences came together in what one may call the
formula of a vast humanism, which was nevertheless coloured by
notes of skepticism‫٭‬, biting irony or even Luciferic‫ ٭‬appetites.
7.1 Huxley’s Characters

Even in his early pieces of writing, Huxley focused on the
social and professional category of the intellectuals, as he himself
was one of them. In one of his attempts to define this category,
Huxley stated that “an intellectual is a person who has discovered
something more interesting than sex”.

Stop and think!

Take a few minutes to think of Huxleys's statement. Give your
own definition of an intellectual in the space provided below.
Please add your answer to the portfolio to be discussed in the
tutorials.
However, he examined this category from all possible angles,

almost through a microscopic lens. Huxley was keen on noticing and
observing a world of appearance and pretence, tormented by the
fever of vanity, by passions, vices and ambitions. This world
attracted him like an absurd show, in which human beings (his
characters) lost their real features, replacing them with the fashions
and fetishes‫ ٭‬of modern civilization.
If Huxley may be accused, as he has often been, of lack of
variety in terms of the social investigation implied in his novels, this
drawback can be seen in relation to an obvious gain, which is the
quality and depth of his observations.
The point is that Huxley meant to be honest with himself when
he applied his creative skills to this particular social and professional
group: the intellectuals. Thus, he took pains to render, as honestly as
he could, in a realistic, grotesque or fantastic key, his own group.
7.2. Satire and European Models

Many critics have seen in Huxley’s fiction the formula of the
satiric‫ ٭‬novel, with its subtle, exciting and unpredictable dialogues,
which enabled the writer to debate important topics of his own time.
Huxley’s dialogues are polemics‫ ٭‬informed by irony‫٭‬, lucidity,
sarcasm‫ ٭‬and cynicism‫٭‬. This is the case of the polemics between
various characters in his novel Point Counter Point (published in
1928).

Sometimes the characters’ discussions in Point Counter Point
are just disclosures of their frames of mind, since they do not show
any desire to let themselves influenced by their interlocutors’ points
of view.
SAQ 1
Read quote 15 in the Reader. This is an argument made by Mark
Rampion, one of the characters in Point Counter Point. Does
Rampion’s argument bear any relevance to the world you live in?
Compare your answers with those in the “Answers” section at the

end of the unit.
New and complex influences of the most recent scientific

theories of his time from Freud‫ ٭‬to Bergson‫٭‬, from Pavlov‫ ٭‬to
Einstein‫٭‬, the innovations in philosophy and literature from
Nietzsche‫ ٭‬to Anatole France‫٭‬, André Gide‫ ٭‬or Luigi Pirandello‫٭‬,
and also the avant-gardes in painting or drama inspired Huxley, who
used them in the dialogues of his books. (See Unit 3, Gallery of
Personalities for Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, Albert Einstein and
André Gide). A lot of these dialogues are debates pro and against
those theories and ideas. Indeed, Huxley’s satire is directed mainly
towards the ideologies of his time, be those communist or capitalist,
or ideas that revolutionized biology, psychology and philosophy. It is
precisely this polemic note that gives Huxley’s novels that cynical
and highbrow‫ ٭‬air.

7.3. Continuing a Line of Tradition

However, despite their novelty and modern spirit, the tone of
these novels can be traced in a line of tradition, which Huxley
continued. There are notes in Huxley’s novels which remind us of
Oscar Wilde‫ ٭‬or G. B. Shaw’s‫ ٭‬irony‫ ٭‬and witticism‫٭‬. Their satiric
note continues a line in the English novel which goes as far back as
Richardson‫٭‬, Fielding‫٭‬, Jane Austen‫ ٭‬and Victorian writers such
as George Eliot‫ ٭‬and Charles Dickens.
It can be argued that Huxley’s intentions when he conceived
his characters and devised some patterns of their behaviour were
also didactic. Didacticism, rather than being some alien, indigestible
element imported by Huxley into the novel, becomes an important
feature which he borrowed from the greatest of his predecessors.
7.4. Mark Rampion’s Point in Point Counter Point

Point Counter Point belongs to a period in Huxley’s creation
when the writer met and made friends with D. H. Lawrence. The real-
life Lawrence becomes the fictitious Mark Rampion in Point Counter
Point.
Although Huxley and Lawrence were fundamentally different
in terms of temperament, preoccupations, philosophical convictions,
literary tastes, etc., what drew them together was this very contrast.
Since opposites attract, Huxley grew fascinated by the overwhelming
and rather unusual personality of his friend, by the lyrical
exuberance, spontaneity and messianic‫ ٭‬spirit of his rebellious, non-
conformist nature, which was sometimes so absurd and obstinate
that it looked bizarre.
However, what recommended Lawrence to Huxley’s tastes
was that he could never be but authentic, sincere and honest. Having
his early background in the infernal coal pits, being a self-taught
person, suffering from tuberculosis, though never really caring about
it, Lawrence (alias Mark Rampion in Point Counter Point) was the
advocate of human nature against sexual hypocrisy, Puritan
conceptions, or any other forms of tyranny which would stop or
hinder the free development of the individual.
Mark Rampion is, indeed, the only character in Point Counter
Point giving substance to the book, in the sense that he seems to be
the only one who makes sense in a senseless world, a world which,
in his own words, is “an asylum of perverts”. Rampion is practically
the only character in Huxley’s novel whose life can be seen as the
product of balance between mind and instinct, between intellect and
emotion. Amid all the partial, unbalanced, incomplete lives of the
people who surround him, he stands for wholeness and harmony, for
living the whole life to the full, not part of it to excess. (Read quote 16
in the Reader to get an image of what sort of character Mark
Rampion is).

SAQ 2
Read quote 17 in the Reader. That is a discussion between Mark
Rampion and Philip Quarles, the novelist in the novel. Does
Rampion actually mean what he says? Compare his point in this
discussion with his notion of “balance”. If he does not mean it,
how can you explain the contradiction of these two points made
by the same character?

end of the unit.
7.5. Philip Quarles, the Novelist in the Novel
If Rampion is the advocate of equilibrium in Point Counter

Point, Philip Quarles is there not only as one of Rampion’s opposites
and opponents, but also as the novelist’s own mouthpiece.
Philip Quarles is Mark Rampion’s opposite because he
represents the extreme of cold intellectualism: he lacks human
warmth, and lacking it, he can neither give it nor respond to it. His
frame of mind is bent on abstractions, and the image the reader is
likely to get of this character is that of the modern abstract writer.
Philip’s glosses on art, the modern novel, and the novelist’s
experiments with new techniques and devices echo Huxley’s own
struggles with the book we read: Point Counter Point. An essential
issue in Philip’s notebook is the technique of putting a novelist into
the novel, which is exactly what Huxley did in Point Counter Point:
“Put a novelist into a novel. He justifies the aesthetic
generalizations, which may be interesting – at least to me. He also
justifies experiment. Specimens of his work may illustrate other
possible or impossible ways of telling a story. And if you have him
telling parts of the same story, you can make a variation on the
theme. But why draw a line at one novelist inside your novel? Why
not a second inside his? And a third inside the second novel? And so
on to infinity, like those advertisements of Quaker Oats where there’s
a Quaker holding a box of oats on which is a picture of another
Quaker holding another box of oats, etc., etc. At about the tenth
remove you might have a novelist telling your story in algebraic
symbols or in terms of variation in blood pressure, pulse, secretion of
ductless glands, and reaction time.”

SAQ 3
What is Philip Quarles’s point of “putting a novelist into a novel”
and the effects of multiplying the novelists inside the novel?

end of the unit.
7.6. Musicalisation of Fiction

Point Counterpoint is the novel in which Huxley best
expressed the sense of disillusionment and hopelessness of the
period after World War I.
This novel is composed in such a way that the events of the
plot form a contrapuntal pattern, which is a radical departure from the
straightforward storytelling technique of the realistic novel.
All the major aspects of the novel are based on the technique
of counterpoint, a term borrowed from music, which is suggestively
reflected in its title.
Contrast is the key principle of counterpoint‫٭‬. Thus, in
Huxley’s novel themes and characters are counter-pointed, i.e. they
are set in sharp contrast with one another. For instance, in the couple
Elinor and Philip Quarles, the emotional Elinor is contrasted with the
cerebral Philip. In the circle of the intellectuals depicted in the novel,
the scientific Lord Edward is contrasted with the impulsive and
political Webley, the heartless modern Lucy with the romantic Walter,
the cockney Illidge with the upper-class group at Tantamount House,
the religious hypocrite Burlap with the essentially honest Mark
Rampion. The list of such contrasts in Point Counter Point can be
expanded.

The guiding hypothesis of Point Counter Point is counterpoint

on all levels. As a matter of fact, this is what justifies Huxley to use
the technique of counterpoint, thus implying that the modern world is
governed by grinding contrasts. This novel sets idea against idea,
head against heart, body against mind, spirit against matter, art
against life, husband against wife, parent against child.
Counterpoint is Huxley’s structural technique. Point Counter
Point is governed, thematically and structurally, by it. Counterpoint
gives musical dimension to philosophical dilemmas arising from the
modern era’s foremost scientific theory: relativity and the consequent
accumulation of contradictory, diverse truths. The thoughts of the
atypical minority with ideas to express (the intellectuals) resist
rewarding synthesis by a would-be orchestrating intelligence.
Quarles’s narrative techniques fail to produce a triumphant positive
overview yet prove satirically appropriate to reveal the constantly
proliferating diversity of modern life.
Point Counter Point is a novel in which strategically placed
discussion scenes support the counterpoint technique. One of the
most illustrative contrapuntal confrontations is the discussion
between Mark Rampion and Spandrell. The grinding opposition
between Rampion and Spandrell lies in their respective
temperaments, frames of mind and attitudes to life in the first place.
Spandrell, a “pervert” in Rampion’s sense of the word and in the
every-day sense, a Satanist, a death-worshipper, is the only
Viking Eggeling character in the book who can effectively stand up to Rampion. This
“Diagonal-
is so because Spandrell essentially stands for evil and destruction,
Symphonie”
while Rampion’s ideal is harmony in life.
Spandrell’s last argument with Rampion is occasioned by a
demonstration he wants to make of Beethoven’s A Minor Quartet.
Spandrell’s point is to demonstrate God’s existence by playing the
Quartet to Rampion. To Spandrell, who fights for his very life in this
scene, God’s abstract existence and the rather abstract purity of
music can bring no equilibrium: he can neither find God in his heart,
nor reconcile the abstract art of music with any human warmth.
Rampion, who is a pagan spirit, asks: “Where’s the famous
proof of God’s existence and the superiority of Jesus’s morality?”
Spandrell responds by continuing to play his record. Rampion’s reply
is that music is the “art of a man who’s lost his body”. By continuing
to play the record, Spandrell makes his point, and Rampion admits:
“It is heaven, it is the life of the soul”, but he insists that this life of the
soul is diseased, a cancerous growth consuming the life of the body.
Spandrell makes Rampion listen to the last and best part of the
piece, and Rampion confesses: “Almost thou persuadest me”.
Spandrell is literally finished, he commits suicide soon after this, but
Rampion and his point are not triumphant in this scene either. On the
contrary, Rampion has been diminished in the process.

SAQ 4
What is the counterpoint technique used by Huxley in this
discussion? What is the meaning of Rampion’s comments?

end of the unit.

7.7. A Novelist’s Novel of Ideas; The Pure Novel

In his notebook Philip Quarles writes:
“Novel of ideas. The character of each personage must be
implied, as far as possible, in the ideas of which he is the
mouthpiece. In so far as theories are rationalizations of sentiments,
instincts, dispositions of soul, this is feasible. The chief defect of the
novel of ideas is that you must write about people who have ideas to
express – which excludes all but about .01 per cent of the human
race. Hence the real, the congenital‫ ٭‬novelists don’t write such
books. But then I never pretended to be a congenital novelist.”
SAQ 5
How are characters conceived in the novel of ideas?
Compare your answers with those in the “Answers” section at

The irony in this passage actually invites the keen reader to

read between the lines Philip’s (and Huxley’s) conviction that the
novelist of ideas is the mind of his age. His mission is to keep the
world safe for intelligence.
Philip also implies that he is a “noncongenital” novelist, that is
a rather atypical specimen. Unlike the congenital novelist, the
“noncongenital” one uses aspects of the novel such as character,
story and plot to make a point of ideas. In other words, his characters
are embodiments of ideas.

However, characters in Quarles’s projected novel and

Huxley’s completed one are tormented by feelings or lack of feelings
and long for relationships. The problem is that their author is
skeptical both of feelings, relationships and of the viability of ideas. In
a soulless world it is hard, if not impossible, to grow a soul. Without a
soul, it is hard, if not impossible, to have relationships. In an age of
proliferating ideas, it is hard, if not impossible, to prove the viability of
the sciences generating those ideas, or to prove the validity of any
idea. Even Rampion’s attractive philosophy of life fails to offer a
solution to this skeptical mood and frame of mind which turns the rest
Filomena de of the characters into “perverts”.
Andrade Booth Huxley’s point in Point Counter Point is to question both
“Counterpoint”
tradition and novelty, both the formula of the traditional novel and the
formula of his own novel of ideas.
Thus, Huxley’s novel of ideas deliberately fails to resolve itself.
It remains stuck in inextricability‫٭‬. Point Counter Point thrusts the
reader into modernity, a world of mutually exclusive choices, none of
which seems totally satisfying. Huxley discredits everybody and
everybody’s point. Thus the only “balance” lies in the “counterpoint”,
which is a rather precarious equilibrium anyway.
Point Counterpoint renders Huxley’s conception of “symphonic
literature”, i.e. a narrative work based on a plurality of themes and
planes, a “pure novel”. It is “pure” in the sense that it aspires to the
abstract purity of ideas. Its purity also lies in its musical effects, the
novel being Huxley’s “translation” of counterpoint in music into
counterpoint in the novel. Thus, music lends its abstract purity to an
art (literature), whose medium is language, and to a genre (the
novel), whose worn-out traditional aspects needed to be refined.
Instead of being a narrative based on plot, Point Counter Point
is a vast orchestration of counter-pointed points which remain
unresolved in paradox‫٭‬. It is significant that even Rampion, the only
character in whose uncorrupted wisdom the reader feels tempted to
find a foothold, voices a paradox. “Nobody asks you to be anything
else but a man”, he says, “neither angel nor daemon”, and the only
absolute thing that the human being will ever know is the absolute of
the perfect equilibrium, the absolute of the perfect relativity, which,
intellectually speaking, is a contradiction of terms, a paradox.
What Huxley gives us in Point Counter Point is, in fact, a
sense and a taste of this paradox in a pure novel, whose message
lies in between optimism and pessimism.
Summary
This unit presents Aldous Huxley’s contribution to the

modernist English novel. This contribution is the novel of ideas,
which Huxley saw as a formula enabling him to experiment with the
musicalisation of fiction. The formula Huxley envisaged was
“symphonic literature”, a “pure novel”.
This unit introduces you to Huxley’s background, which relied
on sciences, literature and the arts. As he himself was a refined
intellectual, his characters belong to this category.
Huxley’s novel of ideas is also a satire, continuing a line of

tradition and containing modernist innovative elements.
Huxley’s novel Point Counter Point relies on the technique of
the counterpoint. Thus, a balanced character like Mark Rampion is
counter-pointed by a cold intellectual like Philip Quarles or by the
diabolic Spandrell.
Point Counter Point puts a novelist, Philip Quarles inside the
novel. His role is to explain Huxley’s own ideas about the novel of
ideas, the musicalisation of fiction and about the “noncongenital”
novelist.
Huxley’s novel is a contribution to modernism looking forward
to techniques and devices used by postmodernist writers such as
John Fowles and David Lodge (see unit 8).
Key Terms
• Satire
• Irony
• Counterpoint:
• Musicalisation of fiction
• Noncongenital novelist
• Novel of ideas
• Paradox
• Congenital means here firmly established as part of somebody’s

character or beliefs
• Counterpoint:
1. In music, counterpoint means the sounding together of two or
more melodic lines, each of which displays an individual and
differentiated melodic contour and rhythmic profile
2. In any of the other arts, counterpoint refers to a theme or element
that forms a contrast with another
• Cynicism is a synonym of “sarcasm”
• Don Juanesque is an adjective which derives from Don Juan
Tenorio, a legendary Spanish nobleman known for his seduction of
women. The name itself has expanded its meaning, so it refers to a
man casually sexual with many women
• Fetish means something artificial and false
• Highbrow means dealing with serious, especially cultural
subjects, in an intellectual way
• Inextricability is the impossibility to get free from something
• Irony is a type of humour based on using words to suggest the
opposite of their literal meaning. Irony also points to an incongruity
between what actually happens and what might be expected to
happen, especially when this incongruity seems absurd or laughable
• Luciferic is an adjective which comes from Lucifer, a rebellious
archangel who is held to be the same as Satan.
• Messianic means here showing great enthusiasm and devotion

• Oedipus complex: according to the psychoanalytic theory of
Sigmund Freud, feelings or desires originating when a child,
especially a son, unconsciously seeks sexual fulfillment with the
parent of the opposite sex
• Paradox is a statement, proposition or situation that seems to be
absurd or contradictory but in fact is or may be true
• Polemic is a passionate, and often controversial argument
against or, less often, in favour of something or somebody
• Sarcasm is cutting language. It uses remarks that mean the
opposite of what they seem to say and are intended to mock.
Sarcasm is closely related to irony
• Satire attacks the vices and follies of humankind
• Skepticism is an attitude marked by a tendency to doubt what
others accept to be true
In philosophy it is a doctrine that holds that true knowledge is not
possible.
• Witticism means clever remark
• Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich (1849-1936) was a Russian physiologist.

He became famous for his studies on conditioned reflexes with dogs.
The implications of his studies were extrapolated to humans.
Huxley was anxiously concerned with the implications of Pavlov’s
findings, worrying that they may be applied to humans with disastrous
effects leading to their transformation into obedient subjects.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1844-1900) was a German
philosopher, author of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885) and one
of the most influential thinkers of the 19th, 20th centuries and ever. He
founded his philosophy on the will-to-power and rejected religion.
Nietzsche’s attitude and inflamed tone, and also the spirit of his
philosophy are highly relevant to any approach to Mark Rampion in
Point Counter Point.
• France, Anatole (1844-1924) was a French writer who
produced a large body of writings, including novels, drama, verse,
critical and philosophical essays, and historical works.
The humanist spirit of Anatole France was a European formula which
Huxley found most worth adapting to the context of British culture in
the early decades of the 20th century.
• Pirandello, Luigi (1867-1936) was an Italian playwright. His
works, such as Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), which
explore the human condition with grim humour, were models for
Huxley.
• Wilde, Oscar (1854-1900) was an Irish writer. His legendary
wit made him a leading figure in society and an inspiring spirit for the
literati (writers, critics, etc.) of the late 19th and early 20th century.
• Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950) was an Irish playwright.
His witty and often cynical style was another model for Huxley, who
developed an affinity to such spirits.

• Richardson, Samuel (1689-1761) was a British writer whose

novels Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-1748), and other novels in
epistolary (letter) form, had a major influence on the development of
the English novel.
• Fielding, Henry (1707-1754) was a British novelist and
dramatist. He is considered to be a founder of the English novel, with
Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749).
• Austen, Jane (1775-1817) was a British novelist, writer of
elegant, satirical fiction, including Pride and Prejudice (1813) and
Emma (1816).
• Eliot, George (1819-1880) was one of the greatest British
novelists, whose naturalistic and humanistic books include Adam
Bede (1859) and Middlemarch (1871-1872).
• Eggeling, Viking (1880-1925) was a painter who made an
international career. Since 1897 he worked as a book dealer in
Germany, later as an independent artist in Paris. During World War I
he taught drawing and sports in Zurich, where he was introduced to a
circle of avant-garde artists and created his first sketches for image
rolls and musical painting. The interest taken by Eggeling and avant-
garde artists in adapting musical techniques to the visual arts can be
seen in relation to the interest modernist experimental writers such
as Joyce, Huxley and Woolf took in achieving this new form of art
dialogue and inter-connection in literature. Indeed, it may be argued
that the early 20th century arts developed this very strong tendency of
musicalisation.
• Booth, Filomena de Andrade is a contemporary American
painter. She describes herself as “primarily an abstract expressionist
artist” although from time to time she “may paint in a more realistic or
impressionistic style”. Her “Counterpoint” may be a good illustration
of Huxley’s technique of fractured reflections in Point Counter Point.
This technique is what Huxley applies throughout the book by having
his characters partially or relatively reflect on the same “reality”. The
effect suggested both by Huxley in his novel and by Filomena de
Andrade Booth in her painting is that reflections look like images in a
mirror, which varies its focus. Thus, some reflections look smaller or
bigger if compared to one another, while at the same time their
partial and relative status is suggested by cracks in the mirror.
SAA 7
What is Huxley’s major contribution to modernism? In your
opinion, is it also an essential contribution to English fiction?
Send the answers to these questions to your tutor. Do not

take more than three pages.

Answers to SAQs
SAQ 1
Rampion finds himself surrounded by people who are less
than fully human. To his mind, those who deny their humanity are
“perverts”. In the context of Point Counter Point, Rampion’s remark is
justifiable, all the more so as the audience to whom he makes his
point are Burlap, Quarles, and Spandrell, who are perverts.
At the same time, Rampion’s point here can be seen as a
critique of the novel of ideas, related as it is to the sterility of
modernity and of modern ideas in particular.

SAQ 2
Rampion’s point here leads to the novel Brave New World.
There is an incongruity between his remark of living “dualistically” as
robots at work, on the one hand, and as human beings for the rest of
the time, on the other. This point actually expresses the opposite of
Rampion’s ideal of the perfect harmony the individuals should
achieve within and without in order to maintain their human status.
Why does Rampion make this point to Quarles? The answer
may be that Rampion objects to any form of dehumanization, and
that he considers Quarles’s cold and abstract intellectualism to be
one of these forms leading to “robotism”.

SAQ 3
Philip’s point of putting a novelist into a novel reflects on
Huxley’s own technique of doing the same thing in Point Counter
Point. He puts Philip into Point Counter Point, just as Philip (the
novelist inside the novel) plans to do in his projected novel. The fact
is that Philip’s point is to multiply the novelists he puts into his
projected novel, which creates a special effect. This implies going as
deep and as far as possible until you create an effect of the so-called
Chinese boxes (box within box within box within box within box, etc.,
with virtually no end or limits).
The implications are manifold: just one novelist (that is one
reflective mind) cannot do justice to the complexity of reality;
subjectivities and scientific backgrounds differ, but at the same time
subjectivities are limited to one field, and findings are partial. “Truths”
cannot be fixed. That is why the novel needs many points of view
(novelists) which can multiply the approaches and perspectives.
Philip’s point of multiplying the novelists inside his novel is also
self-ironical and critical in that it exposes the relativity of truth and the
fragility of story-telling with which the novel so painfully struggles.

SAQ 4
Spandrell is a distinctly Freudian conception. First, plainly,
there is his Oedipus complex‫٭‬. Very significantly, he is also driven
by death instincts. According to Freud, death instincts further the
most universal endeavour of all living substance – namely to return to
a state of inactivity. In this confrontation between Spandrell and
Rampion, music provides Spandrell with an abstraction.
On the other hand, Rampion is a pagan, natural spirit, a
worshipper of life. To him, abstraction (here the non-physical
abstraction of music) is dangerous.
It is obvious that Mark Rampion and Spandrell are the
opposite of each other. So are their ideas and attitudes to life. The
argument between the two is the dramatization of a debate within
Huxley himself. A part of the author that desires life (Rampion’s
point) is checked by another part that aspires to a heaven of inactivity
(Spandrell’s point supported by Beethoven’s Quartet). Thus Point
Counter Point represents Huxley’s own crisis.

SAQ 5
The chief characteristic of the novel of ideas is that its
characters are embodiments of ideas. Indeed, throughout Point
Counter Point the reader gets the feeling that characters are
validated by their ideas.
However, since the ideas of all characters clash, it is impossible
to locate the novelist’s own philosophy in a single character.
To fail to be “a born novelist” does not mean to fail to be a
novelist at all. The difference is that while the born or congenital
novelist is an incessant spinner of tales largely for their own sake,
the noncongenital novelist or modern satirical novelist of ideas is an
intellectually superior being. The noncongenital novelist successfully
simulates the behaviour of a novelist to dramatize his themes and
thus gain an audience. Anyway, the audience targeted by this kind of
novel can only be an intellectual elite.

Bibliography
Ferns, C.S. (1980) Aldous Huxley: Novelist, The Athlone
Press, London (Chapter 4 ”Point Counter Point and Eyeless in Gaza)
Huxley, Aldous (1994) Point Counter Point, Penguin Books
Meckier, Jerome (ed.) (1995) Critical Essays on Aldous
Huxley, E. G. K. Hall & Co., New York (Introduction: Aldous Huxley
and the Congenital Novelists: New Ideas about the Novel of Ideas by
Jerome Meckier and ”Accepting the Universe: The Rampion
Hypothesis in Point Counter Point and Island” by Keith May)
From modernism to postmodernism
UNIT 8
FROM MODERNISM TO POSTMODERNISM
Unit Outline
8 From Modern to Postmodern 137

Unit Objectives 137
8.1 Postmodernism in Literature and the Arts 138
8.2 Postmodernist Aesthetics 139
8.2.1 Image, Copy, Surface, Spectacle 139
8.3 The Postmodernism of Play 142
8.3.1 Intertextuality, Intertext 143
8.3.2 Metafiction 143
8.3.3 Alternative Worlds; Heterotopia 143
8.4 The Postmodernism of Play in John Fowles’s 144
Novels
8.4.1 “Godgames” in The Magus 144
8.4.2 Intertextuality in The Magus 147
8.4.3 Metafiction in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s 147
Woman
8.4.4 Narrative Double Voice and Double Vision in The 148
French Lieutenant’s Woman
8.4.5 Authorial Intrusions in The French Lieutenant’s Woman 148
8.4.6 Multiple Endings in The French Lieutenant’s Woman 150
8.5 David Lodge’s Campus Novel 151
8.5.1 Campus Plot and Considerate Humour in the 151
Psychological Novel Nice Work
8.5.2 Alternative Worlds and Intertextuality in Nice Work 152
8.5.3 Writing as Communication; Art as Delight 153
Summary 153
Key Concepts 153
SAA No. 8 155
Answers to SAQs 155
Bibliography 157

After you have completed the study of this unit you should be
able to:
• Identify postmodernism as a change and a new mode
• Identify the main aspects of postmodernist aesthetics:
- image, copy, surface, spectacle
- collage / montage
• Explain the notion of postmodernism of play
• Identify intertext, metafiction, alternative worlds and
Unit objectives heterotopia as main aspects of postmodernism of
play
• Explain how these aspects work in John Fowles’s The
French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Magus and in
David Lodge’s Nice Work
• Identify “godgames” and indefinite ending in John
Foweles’s novel The Magus
• Explain the effects of these strategies in The Magus
• Identify authorial tricks and multiple endings in The
French Lieutenant’s Woman
• Explain the effects of these strategies
• Explain why David Lodge’s Nice Work can be
considered a “campus novel”
• Identify the refined intelligent humour and irony in David
Lodge’s Nice Work
• Explain Lodge’s point of “writing as essentially
communication” and “art as delight”
8. From Modern to Postmodern

In “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924), the most important
manifesto of British literary modernism, Virginia Woolf stated that
“We are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English
literature.” That age was, of course, modernism, and Woolf sensed it
as a change.
Approximately sixty years later, the theorist David Harvey was
wrestling with the concept of postmodernism, arguing that “the
culture of the advanced capitalist societies has undergone a
profound shift in the structure of feeling”.
It is interesting to notice that the tone of Woolf’s discourse,
when she argued the change brought about by the Georgians (see
unit 3 for “Georgians”) in 1924, strikingly resembles the tone of the
theorists of postmodernism. What these discourses have in common
is an awareness of the fact that the respective changes are obvious
and undeniable, on the one hand, yet hard to pin down and
disputable, on the other.
The dominant mode of literature between 1960 and 1990 was
postmodernist writing. A few events have been considered to
underpin the period: basically, the beginning of the postmodern as a
period was marked by the assassination of John F. Kennedy; its
historic landmarks are the erection and demolition of the Berlin Wall.
At some point in the late 1970s, postmodernism, which seems to

have originated in America, migrated to Europe via Paris and
Frankfurt.
As the dates and locations suggest, postmodernism is a
phenomenon with deep roots in the U.S. However, the connections
with Europe cannot be denied. Since the contemporary world can no
longer be seen as a network of distinct geopolitical and cultural
locations, postmodernism is an international phenomenon.
8.1. Postmodernism in Literature and the Arts

Harvey argues that postmodernism is not simply a version of
modernism, although its name may suggest either that it is, or that
the two modes are different or rather both alternatives.
In order to sort out this complicated and complex issue,
Harvey argues that “real revolutions in sensibility can occur when
latent and dominant ideas in one period become explicit and
dominant in another”.
Stop and Think!

What does Harvey mean by the remark quoted above? Do you
agree to it?
Make your point in the space provided below. You will find some
keys to this answer in the paragraphs below.
‘Postmodernism’ was first used emphatically in the 1960s by

literary critics who held divergent views of what a postmodern
literature was.
It was only during the early and mid – 70s that the term gained
a much wider currency, encompassing first architecture, then dance,
theatre, painting, film and music. While the postmodern break with a
“classical” modernism (also called “high modernism”) was fairly
visible in architecture and the visual arts, the notion of a postmodern
rupture in literature was much harder to ascertain.

By the early 1980s, postmodernity in social theory and

postmodernism in the arts was firmly opposed to modernity in social
theory and modernism in the arts. Around that date, this opposition
had become one of the most debated issues in the intellectual life of
Western societies.
8.2. Postmodernist Aesthetics

Most theorists of postmodernism agree that its most startling
characteristic is its total acceptance of the ephemerality‫٭‬,
fragmentation, discontinuity, and the chaotic that formed one half of
Baudelaire’s‫ ٭‬conception of modernity.
While it is true that this is essentially what modernism and
postmodernism have in common, it is also true that postmodernism
assumes and responds to those aspects in a very particular way.
Unlike modernism, which did its best to give shape and neat design
to chaos, postmodernism does not try to go beyond or counteract it.
On the contrary, as Harvey shows in The Condition of Postmodernity,
“postmodernism swims, even wallows, in the fragmentary and the
chaotic currents of change, as if that is all there is”.
8.2.1. Image, Copy, Surface, Spectacle

Postmodernism and its theories and aesthetics imply that the
image, the appearance and the spectacle can be experienced only as
pure and unrelated presents in time. History is no longer a series of
events.
The postmodern has developed strategies of flattening history.
TV makes it possible for the viewer to consume images of ancient,
modern and contemporary history (very often in a jumbled “order”)
while watching a programme, film or show that lasts from half an
hour to two hours and a half, the longest.
What the TV viewer experiences is, therefore, a journey
through history, which is no longer a gradual accumulation of events.
History becomes, in a TV feature, a flat surface. It loses its depth and
threatens to become a rush of images without density. History also
becomes a spectacle.

Stop and think!

Think of your most recent and / or most challenging experience
when you watched a feature on “Discovery” channel or “Tele
Enciclopedia”. Could you relate the notions of image, “flattened
history”, spectacle and spectatorship to this experience? Describe
your experience of “flattened history”, image and spectacle in the
space provided below. Please add your answer to the portfolio to
be discussed in the tutorials.
Such a breakdown of the temporal order of things gives rise to

a particular treatment of the past. Thus postmodernism abandons all
sense of historical continuity in a way which differs both from the
traditional perception of time and from modernist strategies of
handling time. Through the media technologies, postmodernism
develops an incredible ability to flatten history and absorb whatever it
finds there as some aspect of the present. It turns everything into a
spectacle to be consumed here and now.
The development of the media and such technologies as copy
machines has influenced the arts and their aesthetics. Thus
postmodernist visual artists and writers simply reproduce images.
The modernist ‘aura’ of the artist as creator disappears. The
postmodernist arts resort to frank confiscation, quotation,
excerption‫٭‬, accumulation and repetition of already existing images.
8.2.2. Collage / Montage

Postmodernism draws on modernist collage / montage
techniques. Obviously modernism deployed them as a means of
figuring fragmentariness, bits and pieces of various materials and
sources, discourses and voices, which only art could piece together
(See Unit 3, section 3.4.6 for the use of collage / montage in
modernist art and literature).

Postmodernism picked on the collage / montage technique out

of a desire to figure this inherited fragmentariness, without going
beyond it. What postmodernists found appealing in the collage /
montage technique was also its own principle of frank confiscation,
which was alien to modernism.
The effect of postmodernist collage / montage is to break or
else deconstruct the power of the author to suggest meanings or
offer a continuous narrative.
What postmodernist collage / montage stimulates in both
“producers” and “consumers” is a sense of popular participation. The
authority of the cultural producers is reduced to a minimum because
images and icons are not their own. This justifies the notion of “frank
confiscation”. As the phrase “frank confiscation” suggests, existing
images, icons, messages are used by the postmodernists just to
create new effects with old bits and pieces. In their turn, consumers
are given the opportunity to democratically participate in the
production of signification, since they are supposed to put the bits
and pieces together and make sense of the whole.
David Salle “Tight as Houses”

SAQ 1
Examine David Salle’s “Tight as Houses” (1980), which is an
illustration of collage (see picture above). What elements of
collage can you distinguish there?

end of the unit.
8.3 The Postmodernism of Play

Theorists of postmodernism oppose the use of play, a
characteristic of postmodernism, to purpose, a characteristic of
modernism. Indeed, since purpose and fixity are not relevant for
postmodernists, play is the name of the game with writers such as
John Fowles or David Lodge.
Of course, the term play is closely related to process‫ ٭‬/
performance‫ ٭‬/ happening‫ ٭‬and participation‫٭‬.
The postmodernists see history as a story. This is why
postmodernism is intertextual. We are invited to contemplate not
what the past was or seems to be like, but how it has been
represented by other texts.
We have the impression that there is no world outside the text
/ stage: Shakespeare’s metaphor of the world as a stage and every
one of us as actors is pushed beyond the limit. Theatricality seems to
be the only certainty offered by the work of art.

8.3.1. Intertextuality; Intertext

Intertextuality is a much broader term than influence (the
direct effect, conscious or unconscious, of one author on another).
Intertextuality is the general condition by which it is possible for a text
to be a text: the whole network of relations, conventions and
expectations by which the text is defined.
Many recent theorists and critics argue that all texts are
necessarily related by language, and that there is no such thing as
an absolute text.
Intertextuality and intertext are terms used to refer to the
relationship between the text under discussion and other texts, which
may be literary or non-literary works. In other words, the notion of
intertextuality lays emphasis on the fact that any given text is a
connection or link of other literary and non-literary texts related by
language.
8.3.2. Metafiction
Metafiction is a mode of writing that comments on its own
activities. This implies that metafiction is a self-reflexive mode.
Literature is said to be self-reflexive when the author
deliberately draws attention to the fictional nature of the work.
This mode is by no means new. It was used by Shakespeare
in his play Hamlet, when Prince Hamlet comments upon the actors’
tendency to overact in the play within a play he has arranged.
Metafictional techniques were less frequently employed in the
later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but have returned to be
self-consciously and insistently used in many recent novels. John
Fowles’s The Magus, The French Lieutenant’s Woman and David
Lodge’s Nice Work, to be discussed in the next subchapters, are
examples of the metafictional mode in contemporary British fiction.
8.3.3. Alternative Worlds; Heterotopia
Being so pluralistic and indeterminate, postmodernism also

“plays” with the idea of alternative worlds. This is precisely what the
concept of heterotopia means: the coexistence of a large number of
fragmentary possible worlds.
Since they are caught in this heterotopic space, characters no
longer contemplate how they can unmask a central mystery. Instead
they are forced to ask, ‘Which world is this? Where am I? What is to
be done in the world I inhabit now?’

8.4. The Postmodernism of Play in John Fowles’s Novels

John Fowles is a contemporary English novelist and essayist,
a master of layered story-telling, illusionism and ambiguous endings.
Among Fowles’s best novels are The Magus, originally
published in 1965 and reissued in a revised version twelve years
later and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, published in 1969.
Both novels have been adapted into the screen and have
gained almost a cult status.
Fowles’s protagonists must often confront their past, self
delusions‫ ٭‬and illusions, in order to gain their personal freedom or
peace of mind.
8.4.1. “Godgames” in The Magus

John Fowles’s draft title for this novel was originally “The
Godgame”.
The Magus is told from the point of view of Nicholas Urfe, a
young man bored with life, who decides to take a position as the
English teacher at the Lord Byron School in Greece, on the island of
Phraxos.
The mysteries begin as Nicholas goes swimming, and
someone leaves a book of poems on the beach, obviously meant for
him to find. As he looks in the woods nearby, he finds a gate to a villa
with a sign Salle D’Attente, French for “waiting room”. One of his
colleagues at the school explains that the villa is owned by a rich
man named Maurice Conchis.
When Urfe accepts Conchis’s invitation at the villa, the
mysteries begin to proliferate. Conchis starts playing a series of
“godgames” with Urfe. From now on, Urfe will never be able to tell
which world he inhabits.
That night, as Nicholas is going to sleep, he hears voices
singing a war song and smells a foul stench. The next day, Conchis
encourages Nicholas to read a pamphlet written by a man waiting to
be hanged in 1677. Nicholas takes the pamphlet with him on a walk,
falls asleep and awakes to see a man in 17th century dress staring at
him from across a ravine! The man disappears before Nicholas can
reach him.

SAQ 2
Are there alternative worlds in The Magus? Relate this concept to
Conchis’s “godgame”.

end of the unit.
At dinner that night, Conchis tells of his own wartime pretense

to be on leave so that he could return to England to visit Lily, a girl he
was in love with. As Nicholas retires, he hears a harpsichord‫٭‬
accompanied by a recorder and investigates, to find Conchis with a
beautiful girl in Edwardian clothes, but he refrains himself from
interrupting them.
The next weekend, “Lily” joins them after dinner and speaks
the language of the early 1900s. Their conversation is interrupted
when a horn sounds, a spot illuminates a nymph‫ ٭‬who runs by,
pursued by a satyr‫٭‬, and another woman seems to shoot the satyr
with an arrow. Nicholas is bewildered but decides that Conchis must
be recreating masques for his own amusement. Lily refuses to
explain, and Conchis talks in parables.

SAQ 3
What are the elements of play, process, performance, happening
and participation used by Fowles in The Magus?

end of the unit.
The maze‫ ٭‬continues and the plot thickens. With a mixture of

bewilderment and horror, curiosity and pleasure, Nicholas gets
himself caught in it. Conchis tells him things only to deny them
afterwards. At some point, Conchis explains to Nicholas that he is
experimenting with a new form of theatre, without audience, in which
everyone is an actor. As a matter of fact, readers are invited to make
a connection between themselves, their own quest, the maze they
are in as readers of this novel and Nicholas’s story of initiation. The
‘theatre’ Conchis talks about is a form of postmodernist performance
with happening and participation.
After a new series of baffling experiences, which are as many
acts in the ‘theatre’ staged by Conchis, Nicholas is still looking for
clues, but those clues get him nowhere.
In the last part of the book, Nicholas begins to appreciate what
has happened and even declines to discuss it with his immediate
predecessor at the Lord Byron School. Finally, Alison, the girlfriend
he had left in London for this adventure in Greece, appears when he
least expects her. They have a confrontation in Regent’s Park, where
he at first suspects that they are being watched. Nicholas gives her
an ultimatum – “them or me”, since he suspects that Alison plots
against him with Conchis and his “actors”. She rejects the ultimatum,
and Nicholas walks away from her. When she follows him, he slaps
her without understanding why. Then he realizes that they are
unobserved and asks forgiveness. The novel ends at that point, with
their future relationship uncertain.

SAQ 4
Why does this unresolved ending of The Magus leave readers
undecided?

end of the unit.
8.4.2. Intertextuality in The Magus

In The Magus Fowles used elements from Shakespeare’s play
The Tempest (1623). Prospero, the “make-believer” in The Tempest
is “played” by Conchis in The Magus.
However, the novel weaves not only the thick maze of the plot
but also a thick maze of intertextual allusions and references.
Shakespeare’s The Tempest is not the only intertextual model of The
Magus. Besides it, Fowles’s novel interweaves in the story Greek
myths (see subchapter 2.1 above), psychoanalysis, remote and
modern historical references (like Nazis), etc.
Fowles himself acknowledged the influence of psychologist
Carl Gustav Jung‫( ٭‬see Unit 3, Gallery) and such literary models as
Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and Charles Dickens’s Great
Expectations. Intertextuality makes Conchis’s “godgame” appealing,
culturally dense and challenging.
8.4.3. Metafiction in The French Lieutenant’s Woman
The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a novel that grew out of a

dream the author had of a woman standing at the edge of a quay,
looking out to sea (see quote 28 in the Reader).
The novel is set largely in Lyme Regis‫ ٭‬in the 1860s and
recreates, indeed revisits the Victorian romance and the world of
Thomas Hardy.

Among the metafictional techniques employed by Fowles in
The French Liutenant’s Woman are:
• examining fictional systems
• incorporating elements of both literary theory and criticism in
his fiction
• using intertextuality
Fowles, like many other authors of metafiction, violates
narrative levels by:
• intruding to comment on writing
• involving himself with fictional characters
• directly addressing the reader
• openly questioning how narrative assumptions and
conventions transform and filter reality, trying to ultimately
prove that no singular truths or meanings exist
Embracing the metafictional mode, Fowles employs
unconventional and experimental techniques by:
• rejecting conventional plot
• refusing the attempt to make the novel “an illusion of reality”
• subverting conventions to transform ‘reality’ into a suspect
concept
• displaying self-reflexivity (a function which enables the
readers to understand the process by which they read the
world as a text).
8.4.4. Narrative Double Voice and Double Vision in The French

Lieutenant’s Woman
The first chapter of The French Lieutenant’s Woman describes

Lyme Regis, the main setting of the novel, and its Cobb, a harbour
quay on which three characters are standing: Charles Smithson,
Ernestina Freeman and Sarah Woodruff.
The describing narrator has a distinctive voice, all- knowing
yet intimate, with a wide-ranging vocabulary and vast knowledge of
political and geographical history. The strange effect of this voice is
that it knows the 19th century very intimately, while at the same time
implies that it belongs to a “present” which is not the 19th century. As
a matter of fact, the narrator’s double vision and double voice make
this individual as important as the characters in this novel.
8.4.5. Authorial Intrusions in The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Charles is a middle-aged bachelor and an amateur scientist

engaged to Ernestina, who is portrayed as a pretty but boringly
conventional 19th century girl. Realizing Ernestina’s limitations,
Charles grows more and more attracted to Sarah, a mysterious
outcast with a mysterious past of romance which she seems to have
invented for herself.
Chapter 12 in the book ends with the questions: “Who is
Sarah? Out of what shadows does she come?”

Chapter 13 (a very significant number!) begins “I do not know”,

and the narrator proceeds to discuss the difficulty of writing a story
when characters behave independently rather than as he would like
them to behave. Charles, he complains, did not return to Lyme as the
narrator had intended but went down to the Dairy to ask about Sarah.
But, the narrator continues, times have changed, and the traditional
novel is out of fashion, according to some.
It is very significant, in terms of metafictional techniques used
in this novel, that there are substantial interventions of what appears
to be the author himself in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
Thus, In “Notes on an Unfinished Novel”, which is a record of
the way in which the novelist grew this novel, Fowles wrote:
“…the ‘I’ who will make first person commentaries here and
there in my story, and who will finally even enter it, will not be my real
‘I’ in 1967; but much more just another character, though in another
category from the purely fictional ones.”
SAQ 5
Now that you have read the “Metafiction” subchapter (8.3.2),
answer the following question: which of the metafictional
techniques listed there did Fowles use in the passage quoted
above? What is the effect of this technique?

end of the unit.

There are two occasions in The French Lieutenant’s Woman

when the novelist himself actually enters his own fiction, “massively
bearded … a man of forty or so.”
For the last two interchangeable endings of the novel to exist,
the “author” turns back his watch 15 minutes. For the first ending to
be denied, the narrator intervenes in chapter 45 to tell us that the two
previous chapters did not “really” happen, but were Charles’s
indulgence in a habit we all have of “writing fictional futures for
ourselves.”
There is much playfulness and freedom here on the part of the
author, who wants us to take our own liberty of making what sense
we can of these fragmented strains of the book (see quote 29 in the
Reader).
8.4.6. Multiple Endings in The French Lieutenant’s Woman

This metafictional experimental novel has three different
endings: one heart-warming, another shocking, and still another
doing justice to the Victorian morals.
Thus, the readers are given the freedom to choose which
ending suits them or to juggle with possibilities: Charles breaks up
with Ernestina and is legally sanctioned for his ungentlemanly
behaviour, or Charles breaks up with Ernestina and eventually
reunites with Sarah, or he breaks up with Ernestina but he and Sarah
will never be together.
SAQ 6
How do the multiple endings in The French Lieutenant’s Woman
engage the reader? Relate Fowles’s multiple endings with
postmodernist indeterminacy and refusal of fixity.

end of the unit.

8.5. David Lodge’s Campus Novel

Nice Work (1988) is the last of the novels in the campus trilogy
which began with Changing Places (1975) and was followed by
Small World (1984).
They are called “campus novels” because they are actually set
in academic campuses and deal with academic life.
Romanian critic Lidia Vianu interviewed contemporary English
writer and critic David Lodge and asked him about the campus theme
in his novels:
“You are not very fond of the academic world, and use it to
create humorous patterns which support your plots. The basic idea is
that academics get themselves into situations which are hilarious,
and even when you are not directly mocking at them, when the novel
is more or less in earnest (see Nice Work), you cannot help creating
ironical parallelisms”.
Lodge’s answer to this was:
“I was a university teacher from 1960 to 1987 (part-time in the
last three years), then I took early retirement to write full-time. I
enjoyed my work as an academic, especially the first two decades,
and took it seriously, as both teacher and scholar. /…/ I never felt any
creative or intellectual tension between these two activities: they
complemented each other. But on the social-psychological level, it
was a kind of schizophrenic existence. I did not operate in the
university as a novelist – I did not read my work on campus or
discuss it with my students or teach creative writing (at Birmingham –
I did elsewhere). I operated as a serious, committed academic. The
novels, which often satirised or carnivalised‫ ٭‬the academic world,
belonged to a separate compartment of my life”.
8.5.1. Campus Plot and Considerate Humour in Nice Work

Being considerate, deep and minutely psychological, Nice
Work breaks with the previous comic approach of Changing Places
and Small World. It does so without losing the very necessary sense
of humour.
Nice Work is set in the same Rummidge, “an imaginary city,
with imaginary universities and imaginary factories, inhabited by
imaginary people, which occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the
space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real
world”.
The two protagonists of the novel Vic (Victor) Wilcox (the
managing director of an engineering firm) and Robyn Penrose (a
feminist leftist academic who teaches English literature, more
precisely the English Industrial Novel of the 19th century) are brought
together by “The Industry Year Shadow Scheme”, meaning that, on
the occasion of 1986 being designated “Industry Year by the
Government”, “each faculty should nominate a member of staff to
‘shadow’ some person employed at senior management level in local
manufacturing industry /…/ in the course of the winter term”.
In an ironical way, Robyn is faced with the real colours of

contemporary industry, and she realizes how deeply disgusted and
scared she is by it.
What the novel dramatises, thematises and puts in an ironical
light is that Vic and Robyn are a whole universe apart, in spite of
Robyn’s expertise on the industrial novel.
8.5.2. Alternative Worlds and Intertextuality in Nice Work

David Lodge deliberately creates an intersection of alternative
worlds (19th century fictions intersecting Lodge’s own 20th century
fiction intersecting the reader’s own fictitious (?) “reality”) in the
manner stated by John Fowles: “fiction is woven into all”.
Thus, the postmodernist fictions of Fowles and Lodge
challenge the readers’ assumption that there are clear-cut
borderlines between “reality” and “fiction”.
In Nice Work, the words of the motto taken from Charlotte
Brontë’s Prelude to her novel Shirley “something real, cool and solid
lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning” are a
perfect introduction to Vic Wilcox’s 20th century world, which begins
with: “Monday January 13th, 1986. Victor Wilcox lies awake, in the
dark bedroom, waiting for his quartz alarm clock to bleep.”
Each of the six parts of Nice Work is prefaced by a 19th
century motto. The 19th century novels, providing Lodge with those
mottos, are the subject of lectures held by Robyn Penrose, an
“authority” in the field. If a motto from Charlotte Brontë’s Prelude to
Shirley prefaced the first part of Lodge’s 20th century novel, another
motto from the same 19th century fiction prefaces the last, its
meaning perfectly matching Lodge’s point:
“The story is told. I think I now see the judicious reader putting
on his spectacles to look for the moral. It would be an insult to his
sagacity‫ ٭‬to offer directions. I only say, God speed him in the quest!”
SAQ 7
What is the effect of these two framing mottos?

end of the unit.

8.5.3. Writing as Communication; Art as Delight

Nice Work insists not only upon the tricky borderline between
life /reality and fiction / imagination, making it feel suspect, but also
foregrounds the power of imagination / fiction. Two people, Vic and
Robyn, unlikely to meet otherwise, are brought together and forced to
communicate. The novel also shows that communication between
them is not easy: their worlds are fundamentally different. Despite all
this, a level of communication still exists: there is communication
between Robyn the academic and Vic the managing director,
between Robyn’s fictitious “life” and the fictions she teaches,
between 19th and 20th century fiction and between the world of the
text and the reader’s world.
In Nice Work, Lodge was determined to explore this
dimension of writing because to him, writing is “essentially
communication”. Lodge also believes that “in the highest sense, art
must entertain, or give delight”.
How can art do it in our (post)postmodern world? It seems that
art can “entertain” or “give delight” by being playful and intertextual,
by breaking borderlines with its self-conscious and self-reflexive
metafictional techniques.
Summary
This unit introduces you to postmodernism and its aesthetics,
pointing both to what connects postmodernism to modernism and
what separates the two modes.
The postmodernism of play is a version of postmodernism that
uses a lot of elements characteristic of this contemporary mode of
writing. Thus, intertextuality and metafiction emphasize the
playfulness of postmodernist texts.
Postmodernism of play is illustrated by novels acknowledged
to be representative of their kind: John Fowles’s The Magus and The
French Lieutenant’s Woman and David Lodge’s Nice Work.
By exploring the ways in which these contemporary British
writers make use of intertextuality and metafiction in their novels, this
unit traces the trends in late 20th century fiction, which reshaped this
genre and gave it the “looks” it has today.
Key Terms
• Image, copy, surface, spectacle
• Frank confiscation
• Spectacle and spectatorship
• Collage / montage
• Postmodernism of play
• Intertextuality
• Metafiction
• Self-reflexive and self-conscious fiction

• Theatricality and “godgame”
• Carnival and carnivalesque
• Alternative worlds and heterotopia
• Campus novel

• Carnivalise means the use of “carnivalesque” elements. These
are borrowed in fiction from “carnival”, a public festive occasion or
period, often with street processions, costumes, music and dancing.
In fiction, the term “carnivalesque” is used as a means of giving
authors, characters and readers the freedom to play
• Collage refers to a combination of different things. This technique
is used in architecture and the visual arts but also in literature
• Ephemerality means lasting for only a short period of time
• Fragmentariness is related to excerption, which means a
section or passage taken from a longer work, for example, a book,
film, musical composition, or document. Excerption can also be
related to collage / montage
• Happening is an improvised or informal performance or
demonstration, often dramatic in form and using the participation of
the audience
• Harpsichord is a keyboard instrument replaced by the piano in
the 19th century
• Lyme Regis is a seaside resort in Dorset, Southern England
• Maze means puzzle and confusion
• Montage is the creation of image from collected pieces
• Nymph is a minor goddess or spirit of nature in mythology,
traditionally regarded as a beautiful young woman
• Palimpsest means a manuscript written over a partly erased older
manuscript in such a way that the old words can be read beneath the
new
• Participation is the act of taking part in an activity
• Performance is related to process, theatricality and happening. In
the theories of postmodernism, performance is an unconventional
presentation of an artistic work in front of an audience that usually
participates in it
• Process emphasizes the unfinished nature of a series of actions
● Sagacity means wisdom (profound knowledge and
understanding)
• Satyr is a wood-dwelling creature in Greek mythology, with the
head and body of a man and the ears, horns and legs of a goat
• Ventriloquism is the art or skill of producing vocal sounds that
seem to come from something other than the speaker
Note that here the term refers to writing and not to speaking

• Baudelaire, Charles (1821 - 1867) was a French critic and

poet. As an art critic, Baudelaire was particularly interested in the
artistic productions of the most innovative painters of his time. His
remarks are acute. He gave valuable insights and contributions to an
analysis of modernity.
SAA No. 8
Comment upon the playfulness of John Fowles’s The Magus,
French Lieutenant’s Woman and David Lodge’s Nice Work in
the light of the remark given below:
“The commentary provided by self-conscious fiction carries

the more or less explicit message: ‘this is make-believe’ or
‘this is a play’”.
(From Patricia Waugh, Metafiction. The Theory and Practice

of Self-Conscious Fiction)
Send your essay (not longer than four pages) to your

tutor.
of the essay will be 70 % of your grade, while the accuracy of
your language will count for 30 %.
Answers to SAQs
SAQ 1
The technique used by David Salle in this collage is that of
colliding and superimposing images. Thus, the viewer’s eyes are
invited to trace a pattern out of superimposed and even colliding
patterns. What the eyes can discern is not visible at first sight. The
eyes need some re-adjustment to this superimposition and collision
of a naked woman lying in what seems to be a deliberately darker
background and the suggestion of a silhouette in white standing in
the foreground. There is actually a web of traces in the foreground
that suggests that the “silhouette” may be not just something else but
other things as well.


SAQ 2
It is obvious that Conchis plays with Urfe a “godgame” in
which he performs the role of “God” (actually a puppeteer and an
illusionist), and Urfe the role of a pawn on his chess board or else an
“actor” in his “theatre” or even a “puppet” in Conchis’s hands.
Conchis is also the director of this “theatre” or “performance”,
which is essentially postmodernist in the sense that it plays with
Urfe’s need to distinguish between “reality” and “illusion”. Conchis’s
“godgame” aims to blur this distinction. The development of the plot
in The Magus so far reaches a point at which Urfe, a 20th century
man, finds himself in the 17th century without knowing how and when
he got there. The shock both he and the readers are given at this
point is that nothing is certain or fixed, the world we inhabit even less
so.
SAQ 3
Conchis continues to play his “godgame” with Urfe. Besides
blurring the distinction between “reality” and “illusion”, his “godgame”
also blurs the distinction between the actors’ active performance and
the spectators’ passive watching. In Conchis’s “godgame”, which
seems to be a series of playful improvisations (“happenings”), both
actors and spectators are performers.
Thus, Conchis’s “godgame” implies a high degree of
participation both on the part of his “hired” actors (though Urfe and
the readers find out that they are actors only later, and not even that
is certain!) and on the part of Urfe and even the readers. Readers
“participate” mainly in the sense that they tend to identify with Urfe in
this strange “scenario” of initiation.
SAQ 4
The ending of The Magus is an excellent example of
postmodernist indeterminacy. The indeterminacy of the ending only
reinforces the playfulness of the whole text. In other words, a
postmodernist like Fowles could not have made a point of
indeterminacy if he had provided the readers with a determinate
ending. This would have spoiled the whole point of the “godgame”
and Urfe’s appreciation of it.

in this section.
SAQ 5
Authorial intrusion is a metafictional element. Thus, Fowles’s
postmodernist novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman implies,
reminds us, and then reinforces that “authors” do not simply “invent”
novels. “Authors” work through linguistic, artistic and cultural
conventions. Therefore, they are themselves “invented” by readers
who thus become “authors” working through linguistic, artistic and
cultural conventions.


SAQ 6
Metafictional novelists such as Fowles make the readers
explicitly aware of their role as players. The reader of The French
Lieutenant’s Woman, having to choose an ending, becomes a player
in the game.
The multiple endings in The French Lieutenant’s Woman also
reinforce the postmodernist indeterminacy and refusal of fixity, which
opposes the traditional realist view of clear resolution (one ending,
which is the “solution” of plot, no matter how intricate plot may be).

SAQ 7
Lodge submits himself to a kind of literary ventriloquism‫٭‬, in
which he lets Brontë’s pen underwrite his text, provide or fail to
provide the clues and give the reader as much liberty to travel
through borderless worlds as one may take. The author himself takes
the liberty to write his text as an intertext or palimpsest‫ ٭‬of
intersecting layers of writing.
Intertextuality, an essential aspect of metafiction, reinforces
the idea that literary fiction is an intersection of multiple alternative
worlds. Literary fiction is, in other words, a game of imagination.

Bibliography
Fowles, John (1969) The French Lieutenant’s Woman,
London, Cape
Fowles, John (1977) The Magus, London, Cape
Harvey, David (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity, An

Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Cambridge MA & Oxford
UK: Blackwell
Lodge, David (1990) Nice Work, Penguin Books
Waugh, Patricia (1984) Metafiction: The Theory and Practice

of Self-conscious Fiction, London, Methuen (Chapters ”Worlds of
Words: the “Fantastic as an Alternative World”, ”Fictionality and
Context: from Role-playing to Language Games”)
http://lidiavianu.scriptmania.com/david_lodge.htm

SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Burlui, Irina, Lectures in 20th Century British Literature,
Editura Universităţii “Al. I. Cuza”, Iaşi, 1980
2. Călinescu, Matei, Cele cinci feţe ale modernităţii.

Modernism, Avangardă, Decadenţă, Kitsch, Postmodernism, Editura
Univers, Bucureşti, 1995
3. Cuţitaru, Codrin Liviu, The Victorian Novel. A Course in the

th
19 Century English Novel. A Critical Approach, Al. I. Cuza
University Press, Iaşi, 2004
4. Ford, Boris (ed.), The New Pelican Guide to English

Literature, vol. 7, From James to Eliot, Penguin Books, 1990 (see
Part I, “The Social and Intellectual Background”, “Virginia Woolf: The
Theory and Practice of Fiction”, “E. M. Forster’s Good Influence”,
“The Consistency of James Joyce”, “D. H. Lawrence and Women in
Love”)
5. Galea, Ileana, Victorianism and Literature, Editura Dacia,

Cluj-Napoca, 1996
6. Miroiu, Mihai, Virginia Woolf, Editura Univers, Bucureşti,

1997
7. Vereş, Grigore, Charles Dickens, Editura Albatros,

Bucureşti, 1984

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Novel. A Reader
The Nineteenth and Twentieth Century

British Novel.
A Reader
160 Proiectul pentru Învǎţǎmântul Rural

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY VICTORIAN NOVEL
UNIT 1
VICTORIANISM: AN AGE OF EXTREMES
Quote 1
“My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name

Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or
more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called
Pip.
I give Pirrip as my father’s family name, on the authority of his
tombstone and my sister – Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the
blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw
any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the
days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like,
were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the
letters on my father’s, gave me an odd idea that he was a square,
stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of
the inscription, “Also Georgiana Wife of the Above”, I drew a childish
conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone
lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in
a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five
little brothers of mine – who gave up trying to get a living,
exceedingly early in that universal struggle – I am indebted for a
belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their
backs with their hands in their trouser-pockets, and had never taken
them out in this state of existence.
Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the
river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad
impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained
on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I
found out for certain that this big place overgrown with nettles was
the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also
Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that
Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant
children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the
dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes
and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the
marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond, was the river; and
that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the
sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and
beginning to cry, was Pip.”
(Charles Dickens, Great Expectations)
Proiectul pentru Învǎţǎmântul Rural 161

Quote 2
“Daylight began to forsake the red room; it was past four

o’clock, and the beclouded afternoon was tending to drear twilight. I
heard the rain still beating continuously on the staircase window, and
the wind howling in the grove behind the hall; I grew by degrees cold
as a stone, and then my courage sank. My habitual mood of
humiliation, self-doubt, forlorn depression, fell damp on the embers
of my decaying ire. All said I was wicked, and perhaps I might be so:
what thought had I been but just conceiving of starving myself to
death? That certainly was a crime: and was I fit to die? Or was the
vault under the chancel of Gateshead Church an inviting bourne? In
such vault I had been told did Mr Reed lie buried; and led by this
thought to recall his idea, I dwelt on it with gathering dread. I could
not remember him, but I knew that he was my own uncle – my
mother’s brother – that he had taken me while a parentless infant to
his house; and that in his last moments he had required a promise of
Mrs Reed that she would rear and maintain me as one of her own
children. Mrs Reed had probably considered that she had kept this
promise; and so she had, I dare say, as well as her nature would
permit her: but how could she really like an interloper, not of her
race, and unconnected with her, after her husband’s death, by any
tie? It must have been most irksome to find herself bound by a hard-
wrung pledge to stand in the stead of a parent to a strange child she
could not love, and to see an uncongenial alien permanently
intruded on her own family group.
A singular notion dawned upon me. I doubted not – never
doubted – that if Mr Reed had been alive he would have treated me
kindly; and now, as I sat looking at the white bed and overshadowed
walls – occasionally also turning a fascinated eye towards the dimly
gleaming mirror – I began to recall what I had heard of dead men,
troubled in their graves by the violation of their last wishes, revisiting
the earth to punish the perjured and avenge the oppressed; and I
thought Mr Reed’s spirit, harassed by the wrongs of his sister’s child,
might quit its abode – whether in the church vault or in the unknown
world of the departed – and rise before me in this chamber. I wiped
my tears and hushed my sobs, fearful lest any sign of violent grief
might waken a preternatural voice to comfort me, or elicit from the
gloom some haloed face, bending over me with strange pity. This
idea, consolatory in theory, I felt would be terrible if realized: with all
my might I endeavoured to stifle it – I endeavoured to be firm.
Shaking my hair from my eyes, I lifted my head and tried to look
boldly round the dark room; at this moment a light gleamed on the
wall. Was it, I asked myself, a ray from the moon penetrating some
aperture in the blind? No; moonlight was still, and this stirred; while I
gazed, it glided up to the ceiling and quivered over my head. I can
now conjecture readily that this streak of light was, in all likelihood, a
gleam from a lantern carried by some one across the lawn; but then,
prepared as my mind was for horror, shaken as my nerves were by
agitation, I thought the swift-darting beam was a herald of some
coming vision from another world. My heart beat thick, my head grew

hot; a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings;
something seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated: endurance
broke down; I rushed to the door and shook the lock in desperate
effort. Steps came running along the outer passage; the key turned,
Bessie and Abbot entered.”
(Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre)
Quote 3
“Reader, though I look perfectly accommodated, I am not very

tranquil in my mind. I thought when the coach stopped here there
would be some one to meet me; I looked anxiously round as I
descended the wooden steps the ‘boots’ placed for my convenience,
expecting to hear my name pronounced and to see some description
of carriage waiting to convey me to Thornfield. Nothing of the sort
was visible; and when I asked a waiter if anyone had been to inquire
after a Miss Jane Eyre, I was answered in the negative /…/.
It is a very strange sensation to unexperienced youth to feel
itself quite alone in the world, cut adrift from any connexion,
uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and
prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has
quitted.”
Quote 4
“Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women

feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a
field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from
too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men
would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-
creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making
puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and
embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, if they seek to
do more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.”

Quote 5
“This time, I remembered I was lying in the oak closet, and I

heard distinctly the gusty wind, and the driving of the snow; I heard,
also, the fir bough repeat its teasing sound, and described it to the
right cause: but it annoyed me so much, that I resolved to silence it,
if possible; and, I thought, I rose and endeavoured to unhasp the
casement. The hook was soldered into the staple: a circumstance
observed by me when awake, but forgotten. ‘I must stop it,
nevertheless!’ I muttered, knocking my knuckles through the glass,
and stretching an arm out to seize the importunate branch; instead
of which, my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand!
The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back
my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice
sobbed, ‘Let me in – let me in!’ ‘Who are you?’ I asked, struggling,
meanwhile, to disengage myself. ‘Catherine Linton,’ it replied,
shiveringly…”
(Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights)
Quote 6
“This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields

are never brown and the springs never dry, is bounded on the south
by the bold chalk ridge that embraces the prominences of
Hambledon Hill, Bulbarrow, Nettlecombe-Tout, Dogbury, High Stoy,
and Bubb Down. The traveller from the coast, who, after plodding
northward for a score of miles over calcareous downs and corn-
lands, suddenly reaches the verge of one of these escarpments, is
surprised and delighted to behold, extended like a map beneath him,
a country differing absolutely from that which he has passed
through. Behind him the hills are open, the sun blazes down upon
fields so large as to give an unenclosed character to the landscape,
the lanes are white, the hedges low and plashed, the atmosphere
colourless. Here, in the valley, the world seems to be constructed
upon a smaller and more delicate scale; the fields are mere
paddocks, so reduced that from this height their hedgerows appear a
network of dark green threads overspreading the paler green of the
grass. The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with
azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that
hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine. Arable
lands are few and limited; with but slight exceptions the prospect is a
broad rich mass of grass and trees, mantling minor hills and dales
within the major. Such is the Vale of Blackmoor.”
(Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles)

Quote 7
“They had proceeded thus gropingly two or three miles further

when on a sudden Clare became conscious of some vast erection
close in his front, rising sheer from the grass. They had almost struck
themselves against it.
‘What monstrous place is this?’ said Angel.
‘It hums,’ said she.’Hearken!’
He listened. The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a
booming tune, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed harp. No
other sound came from it, and lifting his hand and advancing a step
or two, Clare felt the vertical surface of the structure. It seemed to be
of solid stone, without joint or moulding. Carrying his fingers onward
he found that what he had come in contact with was a colossal
rectangular pillar; by stretching out his left hand he could feel a
similar one adjoining. At an indefinite height overhead something
made the black sky blacker, which had the semblance of a vast
architrave uniting the pillars horizontally. They carefully entered
beneath and between; the surfaces echoed their soft rustle; but they
seemed to be still out of doors. The place was roofless. Tess drew
her breath fearfully, and Angel, perplexed, said ‘What can it be?’
/…/
‘It is Stonehenge!’ said Clare.
‘The heathen temple, you mean?’
‘Yes, older than the centuries; older than the d’Urbervilles!
Well, what shall we do, darling? We may find shelter further on.’ But
Tess, really tired by this time, flung herself upon a slab that lay close
at hand, and was sheltered from the wind by a pillar. /…/
‘I don’t want to go any further, Angel,’ she said stretching out
her hand for his. /…/
In the far north-east sky he could see between the pillars a
level streak of light. /…/
‘Did they sacrifice to God here?’ asked she.
‘No,’ said he.
‘Who to?’
‘I believe to the sun.’ /…/
In a minute or two her breathing became more regular, her

clasp of his hand relaxed, and she fell asleep. /…/ The eastward
pillars and their architraves stood up blackly against the light, and
the great flame-shaped Sun-stone beyond them; and the stone of
sacrifice midway. Presently the night died out, and the quivering little
pools in the cup-like hollows of the stones lay still. At the same time
something seemed to move on the verge of the dip eastward – a
mere dot. It was the head of a man approaching them from the
hollow beyond the Sun-stone. Clare wished they had gone onward,
but in the circumstances decided to remain quiet. The figure came
straight towards the circle of pillars in which they were.

/…/
The dawn shone full on the front of the man westward, and
Clare could discern from this that he was tall, and walked as if
trained. They all closed in with evident purpose. Her story then was
true! Springing to his feet, he looked around for a weapon, loose
stone, means of escape, anything. By this time the nearest man was
upon him.
‘It is no use, sir,’ he said. ‘There are sixteen of us on the Plain,
and the whole country is reared.’
‘Let her finish her sleep!’ he implored in a whisper of the men
as they gathered round.
/…/
‘What is it, Angel?’ she said, starting up. ‘Have they come for
me?’
‘Yes, dearest,’ he said. ‘They have come.’
‘It is as it should be,’ she murmured. ’Angel, I am almost glad
– yes, glad! This happiness could not have lasted. It was too much. I
have had enough; and now I shall not live for you to despise me!’
She stood up, shook herself, and went forward, neither of the men
having moved. ’I am ready’, she said quietly.”
(Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles)

UNIT 2
THE DAWN OF A NEW AGE: JOSEPH CONRAD AND HENRY

JAMES
Quote 8
“About three in the morning some large fish leaped, and the
loud splash made me jump as though a gun had been fired. When
the sun rose there was a white fog, very warm and clammy, and
more blinding than the night. It did not shift or drive; it was just there,
standing all round you like something solid. At eight or nine,
perhaps, it lifted as a shutter lifts. We had a glimpse of the towering
multitude of trees, of the immense matted jungle, with the blazing
little ball of the sun hanging over it – all perfectly still – and then the
white shutter came down again, smoothly, as if sliding in greased
grooves. I ordered the chain, which had begun to heave in, to be
paid out again. Before it stopped running with a muffled rattle, a cry,
a very loud cry, as if of infinited desolation, soared slowly in the
opaque air. It ceased. A complaining clamour, modulated in savage
Misty sea cliffs at discords, filled our ears. The sheer unexpectedness of it made my
sunrise Sao hair stir under my cap. It don’t know how it struck the others; to me it
Lourenco seemed as though the mist itself had screamed, so suddenly, and
(Madeira, Atlantic apparently from all sides at once, did this tumultuous and mournful
Ocean) uproar arise. It culminated in a hurried outbreak of almost intolerably
excessive shrieking, which stopped short, leaving us stiffened in a
variety of silly attitudes, and obstinately listening to the nearly as
appalling and excessive silence. “Good God! What is the meaning –
“ stammered at my elbow one of the pilgrims, - a little fat man, with
sandy hair and red whiskers, who wore side-spring boots, and pink
pyjamas tucked into his socks. Two others remained open-mouthed
a whole minute, then dashed into the little cabin, to rush out
incontinently and stand darting scared glances, with Winchesters at
“ready” in their hands. What we could see was just the steamer we
were on, her outlines blurred as though she had been on the point of
dissolving, and a misty strip of water, perhaps two feet broad, around
her – and that was all. The rest of the world was nowhere, as far as
our eyes and ears were concerned. Just nowhere. Gone,
disappeared; swept off without leaving a whisper or a shadow
behind.”
(Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness)

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY MODERNIST NOVEL
UNIT 3
MODERNIST PRINCIPLES AND AESTHETICS
Quote 9
“By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation,

whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable
phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters
to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they
themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He
told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an
epiphany. Cranly questioned the inscrutable dial of the Ballast Office
with his no less inscrutable countenance.
‘Yes,’ said Stephen, ‘I will pass it time after time, allude to it,
refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of
Dublin’s street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once
what it is: epiphany.’
‘What?’
A Flower Given to My ‘Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a
Daughter spiritual eye which seek to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The
Watercolour by Roger moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised. It is just in
Cummiskey this epiphany I find the third, the supreme quality of beauty.’”
(James Joyce, Stephen Hero)

UNIT 4
MAJOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO MODERNIST BRITISH FICTION
Quote 10
“In people’s 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.”
(Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway)
Quote 11
“And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning – fresh

as if issued to children on a beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to
her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear
now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at
Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, like the flap of a
wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of
eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing
there at the open window, that something awful was about to
happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding
off them and the rooks rising, falling…”
Quote 12
“Suddenly Mrs. Coates looked up into the sky. The sound of

an aeroplane bored ominously into the ears of the crowd. There it
was coming over the trees, letting out white smoke from behind,
which curled and twisted, actually writing something! making letters
in the sky! Everyone looked up.”

Quote 13
“The clouds to which the letters E, G, or L had attached

themselves moved freely, as if destined to cross from West to East
on a mission of the greatest importance which would never be
revealed, and yet certainly so it was – a mission of the greatest
importance. Then suddenly, as a train comes out of a tunnel, the
aeroplane rushed out of the clouds again, the sound boring into the
ears of all people in the Mall, in the Green Park, in Piccadilly, in
Regent Street, in Regent’s Park, and the bar of smoke curved
behind and it dropped down, and it soared up and wrote one letter
after another – but what word was it writing?”
Quote 14
“What parallel course did Bloom and Stephen follow

returning? Staring united both at normal walking pace they followed
in the order named Lower and Middle Gardiner streets and Mountjoy
square, west: then, at reduced pace, each bearing left, Gardiner’s
place by an inadvertence as far as the corner of Temple street,
north: then at reduced pace with interruptions of halt, bearing right,
Temple street, north, as far as Hardwicke place. Approaching,
disparate, at relaxed
walking pace they crossed both the circus before George’s church
diametrically, the chord in any circle being less than the arc which it
subtends.
Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary?
Pot Pourri of Joycean Music, literature, Ireland, Dublin, Paris, friendship, woman,
Images prostitution, diet, the influence of gaslight or the light of arc and
by Roger glowlamps on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic trees, exposed
Cummiskey corporation emergency dustbuckets, the Roman catholic church,
ecclesiastical celibacy, the Irish nation, jesuit education, careers, the
study of medicine, the past day, the maleficent influence of
presabbath, Stephen’s collapse.”
(James Joyce, Ulysses)
Quote 15
“- Sad occasions, Mr Kernan began politely.

Mr Bloom closed his eyes and sadly twice bowed his head.
The others are putting on their hats, Mr Kernan said. I
suppose we can do so too. We are the last. This cemetery is a
treacherous place.
They covered their heads.
- The reverend gentleman read the service too quickly, don’t
you think? Mr Kernan said with reproof.
Mr Bloom nodded gravely, looking in the quick bloodshot
eyes. Secret eyes, secret searching eyes. Mason, I think: not sure.
Beside him again. We are the last. In the same boat. Hope he’ll say
something else.

Mr Kerman added:
- The service of the Irish church, used in Mount Jerome, is
simpler, more impressive, I must say.
Mr Bloom gave prudent assent. The language of course was
another thing.
Mr Kernan said with solemnity:
- I am the resurrection and the life. That touches a man’s
inmost heart.
- It does, Mr Bloom said.
Bloomsday Re- Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by
two with his toes to the daisies? No touching that. Seat of the
enacted affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of
Watercolour by
Roger Cummiskey
gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up and there
you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old
rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life.
Once you are dead you are dead.”
Quote 16
“Yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my
breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are
flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his
life and the sun shines for you today yes”
“…and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain

yes when I put a rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall
I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I
thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my
eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes
my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew
him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his
heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
Bella Watercolour (James Joyce, Ulysses)
by Roger
Cummiskey
Quote 17
“After he woke me up last night same dream or was it? Wait.

Open hallway. Street of harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am
almosting it. That man led me, spoke. I was not afraid. The melon he
had he held against my face. Smiled: creamfruit smell. That was the
rule, said. In. Come. Red carpet spread. You will see who.”

Quote 18
“Men must not cut down trees. There is a God. (He noted
such revelations on the backs of envelopes.) Change the world. No
one kills from hatred. Make it known (he wrote it down). He waited.
He listened. A sparrow perched on the railing opposite chirped
Septimus, Septimus, four or five times over and went on, drawing its
notes out, to sing freshly and piercingly in Greek words how there is
no crime and, joined by another sparrow, they sang 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.”
Wheat Field with

Cypresses
by Vincent Van (Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway)
Gogh

UNIT 5
MODERNIST ART NOVELS
Quote 19
“But with Mr. Ramsay bearing down on her, she could do

nothing. Every time he approached – he was walking up and down
the terrace – ruin approached, chaos approached. She could not
paint. She stopped, she turned; she took up this rag; she squeezed
that tube. But all she did was to ward him off a moment. He made it
impossible for her to do anything.”
“You shan’t touch your canvas, he seemed to say, bearing

down on her, till you’ve given me what I want of you. Here he was,
close upon her again, greedy, distraught. Well, thought Lily in despair,
letting her right hand fall at her side, it would be simpler then to have
it over. Surely, she could imitate from recollection the glow, the
rhapsody, the self-surrender, she had seen on so many women’s
faces (on Mrs. Ramsay’s, for instance) when on some occasion like
this they blazed up – she could remember the look on Mrs.
Ramsay’s face – into a rupture of sympathy, of delight in the
reward they had, which, though the reason of it escaped her,
evidently conferred on them the most supreme bliss of which
human nature was capable. Here he was, stopped by her side. She
would give him what she could.”
(Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse)
Quote 20
“And now I ask, “Who am I?” I have been talking of Bernard,

Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one
and distinct? I do not know. We sat here together. But now Percival
is dead; and Rhoda is dead; we are divided; we are not here. Yet I
cannot find any obstacle separating us. There is no division
between me and them. As I talked I felt “I am you”. This difference
we make so much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish, was
overcome. […]Here on my brow is the blow I got when Percival fell.
Here on the nape on my neck is the kiss Jinny gave Louis. My eyes
fill with Susan’s tears. I see far away, quivering like a gold thread,
the pillar Rhoda saw, and feel the rush of the wind of her flight when
she leapt.”
(Virginia Woolf, The Waves)

Quote 21
“A phrase. An imperfect phrase. And what are phrases?

They have left me very little to lay on the table, beside Susan’s
hand; to take from my pocket, with Neville’s credentials. I am not an
authority on law, or medicine, or finance. I am wrapped round with
phrases, like damp straw; I glow, phosphorescent. And each of you
feels when I speak, “I am lit up, I am glowing.” The little boys used to
feel “That’s a good one, that’s a good one”, as the phrases bubbled
up from my lips under the elm trees in the playing- fields. They too
bubbled up; they also escaped with my phrases.”
“The wind rose. The “Dullness and doom. And what to explore? The leaves and
waves drummed on the the wood concealed nothing. If a bird rose I should no longer make a
poem – I should repeat what I had seen before. […] The trees,
shore, like turbaned scattered, put on order; the thick green of the leaves thinned itself to
warriors, like turbaned a dancing light. I netted them under with a sudden phrase. I
men with poisoned retrieved them from formlessness with words.”
assegais who, whirling
their arms on high, “But how describe the world seen without a self? There
advance upon the are no words. Blue, red – even they distract, even they hide with
feeding flocks, the thickness instead of letting the light through. How describe or say
anything in articulate words again?- save that it fades, save that it
white sheep.” undergoes a gradual transformation, becomes, even in the course of
V. Woolf, The
Waves
one short walk, habitual – this scene also.”
(Virginia Woolf, The Waves)

UNIT 6
FREE INDIRECT STYLE AND TABOO BREAKING
Quote 23
“You’ve a right to do as I want,” he cried.

“Fool!” she answered. “Fool!”
“I’ll let you know who’s master,” he cried.
“Fool!” she answered. “Fool! I’ve known my own father, who
could put a dozen of you in his pipe and push them down with his
finger-end. Don’t I know what a fool you are!”
(D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow)
Quote 24
“And I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all

flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there
any more be a flood to destroy the earth.
[12] And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I
make between me and you and every living creature that is with you,
for perpetual generations:
[13] I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of
a covenant between me and the earth.
[14] And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the
earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud:
[15] And I will remember my covenant, which is between me
and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no
more become a flood to destroy all flesh.
[16] And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it,
that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and
every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.
[17] And God said unto Noah, This is the token of the
covenant, which I have established between me and all flesh that is
upon the earth.”
(Book of Genesis, Chapter 9, King James version)
“In everything she saw she grasped and groped to find the
creation of the living God, instead of the old, hard barren form of
bygone living. Sometimes great terror possessed her. Sometimes
she lost touch, she lost her feeling, she could only know the old
horror of the husk which bound in her and all mankind. They were all
in prison, they were all going mad.
She saw the stiffened bodies of the colliers, which seemed
already enclosed in a coffin, she saw their unchanging eyes, the
eyes of those who are buried alive: she saw the hard, cutting edges
of the new houses, which seemed to spread over the hillside in their
insentient triumph, the triumphs of horrible, amorphous angles and
straight lines, the expression of corruption triumphant and
unopposed, corruption so pure that it is hard and brittle: she saw the
dun atmosphere over the blackened hills opposite, the dark blotches
of houses, slate roofed and amorphous, brittle, hard edged new

houses advancing from Beldover to meet the corrupt new houses
from Lethley, the houses of Lethley advancing to mix with the
houses of Hainor, a dry, brittle, terrible corruption spreading over the
face of the land, and she was sick with a nausea so deep that she
perished as she sat. And then, in the blowing clouds, she saw a
band of faint iridescence colouring in faint colours a portion of the
hill. And forgetting, startled, she looked for the hovering colour and
saw a rainbow forming itself. In one place it gleamed fiercely, and,
her heart anguished with hope, she sought the shadow of iris where
the bow should be. Steadily the colour gathered, mysteriously, from
nowhere, it took presence upon itself, there was a faint, vast
rainbow. The arc bended and strengthened itself till it arched
indomitable, making great architecture of light and colour and the
Rainbow of Wishes space of heaven, its pedestals luminous in the corruption of new
By Yakovlev houses on the low hill, its arch the top of heaven.
Alexander And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid
people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the
world’s corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in
their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast
off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked
bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to
the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the
rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of
houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric
of truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.“
(D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow)

UNIT 7
THE MUSICALISATION OF FICTION, THE NOVEL OF IDEAS
Quote 25
“…And all perverted in the same way – by trying to be non-

human. Non-humanly religious, non-humanly moral, non-humanly
intellectual and scientific, non-humanly specialized and efficient,
non-humanly the business man, non-humanly avaricious and
property-loving, non-humanly lascivious and Don Juanesque, non-
humanly the conscious individual even in love. All perverts.
Perverted towards goodness or badness, towards spirit or flesh but
always away from the central norm, always away from humanity.
The world’s an asylum of perverts.”
(Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point)
Quote 26
“…a creature on a tight rope, walking delicately, equilibrated,

with mind and consciousness and spirit at one end of the balancing
pole, and body and instinct and all that’s unconscious and earthy
and mysterious at the other. Balanced.”
Quote 27
“The root of the evil’s in the individual psychology; so it’s there

… you’d have to begin. The first step would be to make people live
dualistically, in two compartments. In one compartment as
industrialized workers, in the other as human beings. As idiots and
machines for eight hours out of every twenty-four and real human
beings for the rest.”

THE POSTMODERNIST NOVEL
UNIT 8
FROM MODERNISM TO POSTMODERNISM
Quote 28
“It started four or five months ago as a visual image. A woman

stands at the end of a deserted quay and stares out to sea.
/…/
It was obviously mysterious. It was vaguely romantic. It also
seemed, perhaps because of the latter quality, not to belong to today.
The woman obstinately refused to stare out of the window of an
airport lounge; it had to be this ancient quay /…/. The woman had no
face, no particular degree of sexuality. But she was Victorian; since I
always saw her in the same static long shot, with her back turned, she
represented a reproach on the Victorian Age. An outcast. /…/ I began
to fall in love with her. Or with her stance. I didn’t know which.”
(John Fowles, “Notes on an Unfinished Novel”, in Malcolm
Bradbury, The Novel Today. Contemporary Writers on Modern
Fiction, Fontana Press)
Quote 29
“There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that

allows other freedoms to exist. And I must conform to that definition.
The novelist is still a god, since he creates /…/; what has changed is
that we are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient
and decreeing; but in the new theological image with freedom our
first principle, not authority.”
(John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman)
John Fowles

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Ministerul Educaţiei şi Cercetării

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

LIMBA ŞI LITERATURA ENGLEZĂ

Dana Janeta BĂDULESCU

Nici o parte a acestei lucrări

The author’s warmest thanks go to Dean Hufstetler, whose most

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 159

iv Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

This module aims to familiarize long distance learners with

The module falls into eight units. Unit 1 ”Victorianism: an Age of

Each of these eight units contains a certain number of learning

To facilitate the distance learners’ acquisition of the subjects

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural 3

VICTORIANISM: AN AGE OF EXTREMES

4 Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

By the end of this unit you should be able to:

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural 5

1.1. Victorianism between Utilitarianism and Idealism

In 1840 British philosopher John Stuart Mill declared that

Stop and think!

6 Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Thus Victorianism and the Victorians were caught between

1.2. The Victorian Novel

The best Victorian novels went far beyond the confined

1.2.1 Novel Writing and Novel Reading from Charles Dickens

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural 7

Authors‫ ٭‬entered into various types of dialogue with their

1.3. Charles Dickens’s Contribution to the Victorian Novel

1.3.1. Plot in Dickens’s Novel Great Expectations

and relations to himself. This is suggested, also in the opening

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the

The rest of the plot focuses on Pip growing up in the house of

Satis House is Pip’s daydream in which he pleases himself

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the

10 Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

1.3.2 Pattern in Great Expectations

Great Expectations is the story of a young man’s

1.4. The Brontë Sisters’ Contribution to the Victorian Novel

1.4.1. Charlotte Brontë’s Novel Jane Eyre, A Feminine Version of

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural 11

Charlotte’s novel traces the development of her heroine from

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the

12 Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Jane is spared further mistreatment from her aunt’s family

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural 13

1.4.2 Point of View in Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is a first person narrative told from Jane’s point of

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the

14 Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

The novel is about a woman’s search for her kindred spirits,

1.5. Emily Brontë’s Gothic in Wuthering Heights

1.5.1. Wuthering Heights: A Shocking Novel

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural 15

1.5.2. Wuthering Heights: A Novel of Multiple Points of View

Wuthering Heights is a novel told in a series of narratives,

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the

16 Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

1.5.3. Plot in Wuthering Heights

The story begins with the gentleman-farmer Earnshaw going

18 Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the

1.6. Thomas Hardy’s “Wessex” Novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles