modern novel and Mrs. Dalloway

1. MODERN NOVEL

2. THE MODERN NOVEL
• The modern novel is the novel written in the modern times-the twentieth century
and the end of the nineteenth century. It necessarily reflects the aspirations,
concerns, fears, ways of thinking, as well as the artistic and literary taste of the
modern era. The modern scientific discoveries, the new technologies, the social
and political ideologies, the ideas and the beliefs, and people’s different
conceptions about themselves and about the universe at large find their way into
the modern novels.

3. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MODERN NOVEL
• The modern novel breaks away with many of the literary conventions of the novel
written in the preceding period.
• The modern novel is realistic. It attempts at a presenting a frank image of the
world and all aspects of the human experience. But the modern novel abandons
the realism of the nineteenth century, in which only the sordid aspects of life are
depicted.
• The modern novel is more subjective, presenting the world from the perspective
of the individual character, reflecting his or her biases or distorted vision. A
relativistic perception of reality replaces the objective views of the whole
community.

4. • The modern novel is psychological. Under the influence of the modern theories of
Sigmund Freud, the modern novel tends to reveal the hidden inner motives behind
people’s actions.
• The technique of the stream of consciousness reflects the character’s jumbled flow of
perceptions, memories and feelings.
• A break with the linear, developmental, cause and-effect presentation of the 'reality‘ and
with the chronological order of the plot mark a large number of modern novels.
• The impact of the two world wars has left its mark on modern art and literature. A deep
sense of pessimism has replaced the nineteenth century optimism.

5. • The first major novelist of the modern period is
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), whose best works include Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Far from
the Madding Crowd, and Jude the Obscure.
D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) wrote with understanding about the social life of the lower and
middle classes. His best works include Sons and Lovers (1913) and The Rainbow (1915).
James Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which Joyce utilizes the
stream of consciousness technique.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an influential feminist and associated with the stream-of-
consciousness technique. Her novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927).

6. MRS DALLOWAY (1925),
• In Clarissa Dalloway’s preparations to host a party that evening Virginia Woolf records all her
thoughts, remembrances and impressions, as well as the thoughts of other characters. There is no
actual story, no plots or sub-plots, no action in the traditional sense, nothing actually ”happens” in
this novel, apart from the “myriad of impressions” created by Virginia Woolf’s new style of writing,
as opposed to the traditional one. “Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day”,
she says in her essay, Modern Fiction.
• “The mind receives a myriad impressions-trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpest
of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, and as they fall, as
they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of
old…Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged, life is a luminous halo, a semi-
transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end”

7. MRS DALLOWAY (1925),
• A literary element that emerged during this time period is the presence of social evils in novels. Social
evils could be a variety of things, from war to poverty, and “modernist novels also reflect a frank
awareness of societal ills and of man’s capacity for cruelty”.
• Woolf acknowledges this in Mrs. Dalloway, discussing the end of the war and the impact the war had on
some of those around Clarissa. She notes that, “the War was over, except for some one like Mrs.
Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the
nice Manor House must go to a cousin” (Woolf 5). In one sentence, Woolf recognizes the horror of the
war, and the amount of casualties involved, as well as the callousness of Mrs. Foxcroft by discussing her
concern for the Manor, and not the boy.

8. • Another element of literature that emerged during this time was stream-of-consciousness writing.
This style is defined as viewing the plot of a story through the consciousness of a character or
characters.
• This element is at play in Mrs. Dalloway, as our view of the novel’s action is through Clarissa’s eyes.
Clarissa’s perspective bounces from topic to topic with little warning or explanation. A prime example of
this is where the novel rapidly transitions from Clarissa’s thoughts on Peter to the sentence, “June had
drawn out every leaf on the trees” (Woolf 7).
• By moving from idea to idea with no transition, Woolf allows the reader to see Clarissa’s thought process
at work. In the next section, the point of view will be Peter’s.
• By using this stream of consciousness technique with multiple characters in the same novel,
Woolf allows us as readers to access more information about the plot than either of the
characters have access to individually.
• This technique allows the war to have an even more haunting presence in the novel in the form of
Septimus. Septimus’s personal experience with the war brings the war closer to the center plotline
than would have been possible had Clarissa been the only point of view offered.

9. MRS DALLOWAY (1925),
• The novel takes us to London in 1923, where the war has ended. Woolf reminds us about the horror
of the war by introducing Septimus as the second main character, a forgotten piece left from the war.
• On the other hand, Clarissa Dalloway began her day by buying flowers for her party, taking a stroll
through Bond Street, giving us a glimpse of fresh post-war London.
• Clarissa represents beauty and joy, while Septimus represents the horror from the war. Two things
that conflicts with each other, yet fate wouldn’t allow them to meet.

10. MRS DALLOWAY (1925),
• The constant use of flashbacks and memory are the techniques by which Virginia Woolf creates interior
time. The image of Big Ben at the beginning of a new chapter signals the presence of external reality.
The image of the city is not static or lifeless, it is full of cars, buses and crowds of people living their lives
simultaneously
• Identity, a constant preoccupation of modernists is cast in a different light. In Virginia Woolf’s view the
self depends on the other but it is separated from it. Ephemeral, elusive and intangible, true identity is
impossible to capture.

11. MRS DALLOWAY (1925),
• As narration is reflected in the mind of one character or another, it is often dreamlike and fragmented.
There is no narrator to tell a coherent and organized story and the narration sounds very close to the
actual thought process taking place in an individual’s head. In spite of the fact that there are two
significant events occurring in the story(Septimus’s suicide and Peter Walsh’s return), there is no real plot
and the events can be included in the category of the everyday or the un-extraordinary.
• Characters are revealed from different view-points , the technique of multiple narrative points of view
being another characteristic of modernist literature. Finally, it is the reader who reconstructs the final
picture of these characters and he or she is involved in this dynamic presentation instead of being a
mere spectator. The distinction between direct and indirect speech is blurred and Virginia Woolf
alternates her presentation between omniscient description, indirect interior monologue and soliloquy.