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MODERNISM
Historical context In the XX century we start to see a deep psychological analysis of people’s minds in literature. This new interest was clearly helped and fuelled by the recent studies of Freud and, more in general, the discoveries of psychoanalysis. The only way to be aware of something hidden in the subconscious is therapy; the authors therefore start to write more difficult and intricate novels, where the internal monologue and stream of consciousness are the main techniques used. Consequently, we can say that in this time there is a kind of revolution: if the author wants to be sincere and show the true nature of their characters, they have to study them and make the reader understand their psychology through these newfound techniques. We can indicate this time in literature with the label MODERNISM. Below are some of the most iconic writers of the time:
Virginia Woolf
Biography Virginia Woolf (born Virginia Stephen) was born in London in 1882 into an upper-class family and grew up in a well-adjusted and intellectual environment thanks to her father, who was part of a group of writers and other men of letters. However, Virginia’s life was also marked by tragedy, starting from the sudden death of her mother, which triggered her first nervous breakdown around 1925; her death was followed, in the next few years, by her father’s, the one of her stepsister and brother; it is also known that Virginia was sexually abused by a stepbrother during her youth. Ultimately, she faced extended periods of severe depression for her whole life, leading to her suicide by drowning in 1941. In the early 1900s she started working as a reviewer for a magazine and her work was very praised by the public. She later married Leonard Woolf, whom she became very dependent on because of her illness. But Virginia also had a lover, the writer Vita Sackville-West, who would be a great inspiration for some of her novels, such as Orlando; their relationship is also an example of Virginia’s “unconventional” tendencies, desire for freedom and distance from traditionalisms. Her first novels were published in the early 1910s and showed an experimental and innovative style which would later be recognized as her trademark; she thought that modern writers should free themselves from the rules of tradition, which restrict one’s creativity. She concentrated on the analysis of the human psyche, which is particularly visible in her 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, but also the waves (1931) and the lighthouse (1927). Woolf was also a feminist and a pacifist and published some works that depict the obstacles and the conditions that women had to face at her time.
Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
Mrs. Dalloway (original title: the hours ) is one of the most recognized novels by Virginia Woolf and it depicts a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a high-society woman in post-1st world war England. The novel describes in detail Clarissa's preparations for a party she will host in the evening, and the ensuing party. With an interior perspective (which changes from one character to the other), the story
travels back and forward in time and in and out of the characters' minds to construct an image of Clarissa's life and the social structures of the time. The novel has no storyline. It opens with Clarissa Dalloway, the central character, going out to buy flowers for the party she is going to give in the evening and closes with the end of the party. Apart from brief descriptions from a third-person narrator, events are seen through the point of view of the various characters. The novel is not divided into chapters, though there are spaces between paragraphs at certain points in the book. The striking of time, however, serves as a sort of framework, as does the setting. Style: In Mrs. Dalloway , all of the action, aside from the flashbacks, takes place on a day in "the middle of June" of 1923. It is an example of stream of consciousness storytelling: every scene closely tracks the momentary thoughts of a particular character. Woolf blurs the distinction between direct and indirect speech throughout the novel. Themes: The novel has two main narrative lines involving two separate characters, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith; within each narrative there is a particular time and place in the past that the main characters keep returning to in their minds. For Clarissa, it’s the happy and nostalgic time of her youth at Bourton, while for Septimus, it is his time as a soldier during the war, which brings him violent flashbacks.
- Time is in fact one of the principal themes of the story. The overwhelming presence of the passing of time and the impending fate of death for each of the characters is felt throughout the novel. For Septimus, the notion of death constantly floats in his mind as he continues to see his dead friend Evans; on the other hand, the constant stream of consciousness of Clarissa serves as a distraction from the passage of time and the ultimate march towards death. The idea that there can be meaning in every detail of life is emphasized by the constant connection of characters to memories and to simple ideas and things. - Mental illness , which is very evident in Septimus’ character suffering from shellshock; his character, and the way he is treated by others (ignoring his illness) underlines a big problem in the society of the time. This theme is also strictly connected to the existential issues that the two main character experience; as a matter of fact, Clarissa also feels kind of unsatisfied of her life and often appears worried or nervous. Summary In the morning Clarissa Dalloway goes around London, getting ready to host a party that evening and meets a lot of characters that are not fully described/introduced; there are many thoughts but no full explanations, just like it happens in one’s mind. The nice day reminds her of her youth spent in the countryside and makes her wonder about her choice of husband; she had married the reliable Richard Dalloway instead of the more enigmatic Peter Walsh, and she "had not the option" to be with a female romantic interest, Sally Seton. However, later in the morning, the reappearance of Peter, who’s just got back from spending 5 years in India, destabilizes Clarissa and reintroduces these relationship conflicts. After their conversation, which was interrupted by Clarissa’s daughter (Elizabeth), Peter goes out in the park to think. In the park, he observes Septimus Warren Smith, a First World War veteran suffering from PTSD, spending his day with his wife Lucrezia. Septimus is visited by frequent hallucinations, mostly concerning his dear friend Evans who died in the war. We discover that later that day, after he is prescribed an obligatory stay at a psychiatric hospital, he commits suicide by jumping out of a window.
James Joyce
Biography Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, in a well-adjusted family; however, their economic situation drastically changed after his father was dismissed from his job (he worked with a politician who was the protagonist of a scandal). The critical situations in which they had to live during this period influenced Joyce for the rest of his life. He later managed to attend a college in Dublin and participate in the nationalist movement, even though he considered the mentality of most participants to be too narrow-minded and conservative – he believed that Ireland should let artists be free and reduce the power of the church. He then chose to leave Ireland (which was seen as a betrayal by his compatriots) because he felt that he wasn’t accepted in literary circles and saw Dublin as a place of paralysis and repression → the social atmosphere was stagnant, people wanted independence from England in order to maintain their own traditions, but these ideas often resulted in traditionalist and restrictive behaviours, without ever changing nor progressing. In this period, he also started to write and publish his first works (essays and poems). In 1904 he met his future life-long partner, Nora Barnacle, and the day of their meeting would later become the inspiration for the one-day setting of the Ulysses. In the same year he started to write the Dubliners, a collection of short stories. The couple also travelled and lived abroad in Italy, where, in Trieste, Joyce met Italo Svevo to teach him English; the two would also become friends and Joyce had a fundamental part in Svevo’s international success. in 1914, after many years of rejection by publishing companies (the book was considered too intricate and hard to read) the Dubliners finally reached the public; the same did Ulysses in 1920, initially as a series of instalments in a literary journal, and then as a proper book thanks to sylvia Bach, the owner of the ‘Shakespeare company’ bookshop in Paris (they moved there after the war evacuation from Trieste), who decided to publish it; the book soon became a classic modernist text, influencing entire future generations of writers. After the German declaration of war to France, Joyce and his family moved to Zurich, where he died in 1941.
Dubliners (1914)
Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories, first published in 1914. It presents a naturalistic depiction of the Irish middle-class life in Dublin in the early years of the 20th century. The stories were written when Irish nationalism and the search for a national Irish identity were at their peak, Joyce therefore experienced various influences cultural and historical at the time. One of the main themes of the novel is paralysis – Joyce felt Irish nationalism stagnated cultural progression and placed Dublin at the heart of this regressive movement. Another theme is the one of epiphany - a moment where a character experiences a life-changing self- understanding / illumination. The first three stories in the collection are narrated by child protagonists, while the subsequent stories are written in the third person and deal with the lives of progressively older people. Many of the characters in Dubliners later appeared in minor roles in Joyce's novel Ulysses.
Eveline
pag. 328- This short story depicts a young woman weighing her decision to flee Ireland with a sailor. In the very first scene we see Eveline sitting by her window, looking tired and waiting to leave home; we understand that the atmosphere of this story isn’t a happy one. The girl is remembering her childhood and reflecting on her choice to leave her country, weighing the positive and negative aspects, wondering if it is a wise choice: Ireland is her home, where the people she loves are, and where she has a job; however, she also loves the man with whom she plans to run away and get married, and this marriage would grant her more respect from the people around her. Furthermore, her mother and one of her brothers have died, and she fears that her father will get drunk and beat her just as he used to do with her brothers, since she had no protection from any other member of the family (her remaining older brother is always away from home because of his job). The situation that Joyce presents here can be considered an example of a typical familial dynamics at that time in Ireland). Eveline is now also the ‘adult’ of the family, the person who has to take care of everyone, which is a lot of hard work – she therefore develops an idea of escape, change and progress opposed to the stagnation and immobility of her life in Dublin. However, in her head she admits that, now that she’s just about to leave, she doesn’t see this present life as totally undesirable – she’s conflicted. Eveline is supposed to leave with her lover, a sailor named Frank, who promised to take her with him to Buenos Aires, here they would start a new life together. We also understand that she’s leaving in secret, because her father doesn’t approve of her engagement. Before leaving to meet Frank, still reflecting about the positive aspects of her family which she’d ignored until now, she hears a street organ playing outside, which reminds her of a melody that played on the day her mother died and the promise she made to her to look take care of their home and keep the family together as long as she could, a promise which she’s now clearly breaking by leaving the country she’s torn between the responsibilities she has as a woman and a daughter and her true wish. This is the moment of epiphany! after this she apparently decides to follow through with her decision to leave. There is a spatial/temporal leap, and we see Eveline already at the dock where she and Frank are ready to embark on a ship together. Eveline is now again deeply conflicted, feeling distressed and even physically sick, begging God to guide her. The bell of the ship rings and Frank takes her hand to start their journey, but she suddenly becomes rigid, and her mind is telling her that this isn’t right. She finally makes the painful decision not to leave with him, staying on the dock and getting surpassed by the crowd, showing no emotion at all, ‘looking passive like and helpless animal’ and not even biding a sign of farewell to her lover - human emotions and psychology are hard to explain and represent, the reader can interpret her choice however they want. We can say that in the end she’s chosen to adapt to people’s expectations of her and succumb to Ireland’s stagnating environment. Like other tales in Dubliners , Eveline features a circular journey, where a character decides to go back to where their journey began and where the result of their journey is disappointment and reluctance to travel; here there are no heroes, just common people struggling to live their lives in early XX century Ireland. In this short story we are inside Eveline’s mind, but her train of thought still follows the rules of grammar and synthase, it is not a pure stream of consciousness.
While he’s becoming sadder and sadder about their relationships, she can’t stop talking because she’s not just telling a story, but reliving her past (past and present get mixed in the mind, they aren’t easy to distinguish) → it’s as if they were speaking different languages, they can’t communicate and each one is in their bubble. They’re together but alone. At the end of the episode Gabriel starts imagining the shapes of dead people in the darkness outside their window; his own identity is dissolving, and he feels a sense of community with the dead, they’re all equal and united in their destiny. In the meantime, it has begun to snow again, and the snow helps to dissolve the edges between life and afterlife; the snow falls slowly, and Gabriel has an epiphany through the slight sound that it produces: the snow covers everything, living and dead, representing a bridge between the two worlds; he’s accepted that he can’t know everything about the people around him and the mysteries of life.
Ulysses (1922)
Ulysses is a modernist novel first serialized in a magazine between 1918-20 and then published in its entirety in Paris (thanks to Sylvia Beach) in 1922. It is considered one of the most important works of modernist literature. It narrates the mundane experiences and encounters of Leopold Bloom, a Dubliner, over the course of an ordinary day, 16 June 1904. The title is a clear reference to classic literature; Joyce’s novel does in fact parallel, so to say, the odyssey: the protagonist is a wandering man, who experiences various encounters and finally comes home to his wife; furthermore, almost every character in the novel ‘mirrors’, is a stand-in (sostituto, controfigura) for one the odyssey’s characters:
- Leopold Bloom as Ulysses
- Molly , Leopold’s wife, as Penelope
- Stephen Dedalus , a young intellectual, as Telemachus, a sort of son figure for Leopold, who doesn’t have a child of his own On the other hand, some characters present very different characteristics compared to their respective in the odyssey; Molly, for example, cheats on her husband, whilst Penelope is one of the most iconic examples of loyalty and devoted love, and Leopold bloom isn’t a heroic figure at all, just an ordinary man Summary Over the course of one day, we see Leopold Bloom wander through the streets of Dublin, attending a funeral, do business, have lunch and thinking + getting anxious over his wife’s infidelity, and then he casually meets Stephen Bloom; Stephen is drunk and Leopold acts as his protector. The two begin to hallucinate – Leopold from fatigue and Stephen because of the alcohol, and in this state of semi- consciousness their personalities and the intricacies of their minds begin to come to the surface (psychological analysis typical of modernism). Leopold takes Stephen to his house, offering him a meal, but Stephen decides to leave. In the end Leopold goes back to bed very late, finding his wife awake, thinking about her own life and experiences. The text is divided into 18 episodes (but they don’t have chapter headings or titles) that can be linked to some particular passages of the Odyssey. The language is very particular, it presents refined words as well as common and vernacular ones and neologisms, but most importantly it completely breaks the rules of grammar and syntax, using only the free form of the stream of consciousness.
Episode 14 – pag. 337 (da quello che ho capito guardando online perchè non si capisce niente tra prosa e tagli vari) This episode is set in the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin, where we can deduce a woman has just given birth after a long and difficult labour; the woman and her husband rejoice in their new parenthood. In contrast, Leopold, who’s visiting the hospital per chissà che cazzo di ragione, is reminded of how his wife wasn’t able to give him a child, since their only one died 11 days after birth, and becomes very sad. Episode 18 – pag. 338 In this chapter the focus is on Marion ‘Molly’ Bloom, the protagonist’s wife. The chapter is made up of eight continuous and unpunctuated sentences which form a stream-of-consciousness narrative, ending the book in a way that doesn’t clear up anything that has happened before, but is just a testament to the novel’s impenetrability. Molly is in bed reflecting over her life in a very confusing way, jumping from one thought to the other through word associations (certain words make her recall particular memories); this kind of narration is probably also fuelled by the fact that the woman is about to fall asleep, a state in which everyone’s mind is generally messier. Molly’s internal monologue begins with her annoyance and surprise at the fact that Leopold has asked her to serve him breakfast in bed. She notes that her husband “never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed” (lines 1-2). Something has changed; whether Bloom has decided, because of Molly’s cheating, that the time has come to assert himself and demonstrate his power over her, or whether he’s asking just because he’s tired, the request demands Molly’s attention. She can only recall Bloom making a similar request years ago when he pretended to be ill while they lived in the City Arms hotel, where a certain Mrs. Riordan also lived. Bloom apparently tried to make himself liked by Mrs. Riordan in hopes of receiving something in return, but those efforts came to nothing. Molly defines a sharp contrast between Mrs. Riordan’s sort of woman (“too much old chat in her about politics,” “down on bathingsuits and lownecks,” and “pious” (lines 7-11) – essentially too conservative) and her own attitude, freer and younger. However, she also admires a few of Leopold’s positive attributes: “polite to old women like that and waiters and beggars too hes not proud” (lines 16-17). But she suddenly seems to change her mind and judge her husband, imagining that he would flirt with a nurse if he happened to get sick and have to spend time in a hospital. She also generalizes about men as she says, “theyre so weak and puling when theyre sick they want a woman to get well” (line 23); she accuses Leopold specifically of being a bit dramatic: “if his nose bleeds youd think it was O tragic and that dyinglooking” (line 24). Further into her monologue ( pdf classroom ) she begins to analyse all the extra-marital relationships that she’s had, and the men involved in those.
