Francisco Jesús González Gálvez

Virginia Woolf’s modernism as depicted in “Modern Fiction” and “A room for one’s own”

This essay is aimed to analyze the features that make that Virginia Woolf can be considered as
Modernist writer. The two works we are going to focus on will be: “Modern Fiction” and “A
room for one’s own”. Although themes like feminism in English literature had been developed
by former writers, such as Mary Astell or Mary Wollstonecraft, Woolf deals with them in a
different way. Maybe this new way of approaching feminist themes in literature is the key to
understand Woolf as a modernist writer. However, this author does not only write about
feminism, in “Modern Fiction” we can see how she criticizes the way some authors that were
contemporary to her wrote.

Starting with “Modern Fiction”, we can see a wide range of features she includes in her writing,
making her a modernist writer. In this work, she criticizes how “materialist” writers can be; she
makes reference to authors like Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennet or Mr. Galsworthy. The main topic of
this work is how writers have become slaves who do not have free will to write. She laments
how materialist society has become. Writers do not write for pleasure no more, but they will
write according to what editors and critics demand. Woolf also depicts the way writers waste
their writing skills with works that deals with unimportant things. Life is not made up by
literary conventions or coherence rules, instead of this life is full of experiences and feelings.
Woolf also seems to dislike the role that editors and book managers play in literature. She calls
them tyrants, people who are demanding for plots and stories, in order to sell them to society
and enrich themselves with the decaying of the proper literature.

“The writer seems constrained, not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous
tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide a comedy, tragedy, love interest, and
an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his figures were to come to
life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coast in the fashion of
the hour.” (Woolf, “Modern Fiction”)

This excerpt confirms and supports the opinion I have given. Writers do not have the capacity
of write freely, but they have to obey the person in charge of the editorial, in order to see their
works published. Therefore, if they wanted to succeed in literature, they had to fit in
conventions and rules, not having the capacity of being free.

In her work, Woolf counts with the Russian literature influence. Writers such as Anton Tchekov
influence her writings with the freedom these Russian writers have in their respective
literature. Therefore, Woolf is advocating for a deep look inside human condition, she wants
that literature faces with human feelings and emotions, not with conventions or rules. So as a
small conclusion of this point, we can claim that what she is conveying by her thoughts is the
apparition of a “Modern Aestheticism”, that is, to recover the values that Aestheticism brought
to literature in the Industrial Revolution times and make the literature be made up of feelings
and impressions.
Now, focusing on “A room for one’s own”, we can find how Woolf faces with the theme of
feminism. Basing herself on the imaginary figure of the sister of William Shakespeare, she uses
this figure to distinguish how her life would have been. With this figure she creates, she wants
to defend the idea that to be a woman and to want to be a writer was an impossible
combination. She calls his sister Judith, as the daughter of him. Through her description, she
manages to comment and to criticize how unfair was women’s life in that time. But, she does
not only focus on this period of time, but she advances chronologically showing that the only
women that have been relevant in history are those who belonged to a wealthy family. For a
woman belonging to a middle class, it was almost impossible to write.

We could say that the central essay of Woolf’s paper is the assumption that a bishop made
about women and writing. He asserted that no woman was capable to write like Shakespeare,
that no woman was capable of having the genius this acclaimed play-writer had. Woolf thinks
that history also has played against women. Through history, we can see how a little amount
of women had access to power, only women like Queens. From these two main features, she
develops her critic and she creates the unreal character of Shakespeare’s sister, in order to
compare the way she would have lived. According to Woolf, the sister of Shakespeare, having
the same genius that his brother had, she would not have got the same access to success as his
brother had, only for being a woman.

At the end of her paper, she directs openly to all women. She asserts that the spirit of this
unknown sister is in every soul of every woman, so, in order to revert history and bring an
influential role to woman, they have to invoke and to appeal to the spirit of this woman. At the
end, she seems to be encouraging all women to take advantage of all the improvements they
have achieved and become an influential part of the society, to gain the importance they
deserve.

As a conclusion, and referring now to the modernist features she develops in her writings, I do
believe that the way she treats feminism and themes like the development of fiction, gives her
writings hard features that refers to the Modernist movement. She uses themes that were
treated in the past, but the way she conceals a new form of writing give her that touch of
modernist.

April 19th,2013