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The Need to Make it New:
English Literature
and Thought in the First Half
of the 20 th Century
ANA I. ZAMORANO
MARIA M. GARCIA LORENZO
UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE EDUCACION A DISTANCIA

THE NEED TO MAKE IT NEW: ENGLISH LITERATURE AND THOUGHT IN THE FIRST
HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY
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© Universidad National de Education a Distancia

Madrid, 2011
Libreria UNED: Bravo Murillo, 38 - 28015 Madrid

Tel.: 91 398 75 60
e-mail: libreria@adm. uned.es
© Ana Zamorano y Maiia M. Garcia Lorenzo.

© Ilustracibn de cubierta: Alberto Rojo Casado
ISBN: 978-84-362-6298-88
Depbsito legal: M. 37.032-2011
Primera edition: octubre de 2011

Octava reimpresion: noviembre de 2021
Impreso en Espana - Printed in Spain

Impresibn y encuademacibn: Innovacibn y Cualificacibn, S. L. - Podiprint
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface......................................................................................................... 11
1. How To Use This Book.................................................................... 13
2. Presentation ..................................................................................... 17
Unit 1. The Discourse Between or the Need to «Make It New»:

Literature in an Ever-changing World .................................... 21.
1. Presentation: What Is New in the Modern Era?................................ 23.
1.1. The Crisis of Victorian Positivism .............................................. 25
1.2. The Interpretation of an Ever-changing World ......................... 36
1.3. The New Woman Enters the Stage ............................................ 48
2. Text Analysis: Oscar Wilde's Earnestness to Break Free ................... 57
2.1 . Approaching Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest .............. 60
3. Activities ................................................................................................ 66
3.1. Test yourself.................................................................................. 66
3.2. Overview questions ...................................................................... 66
3.3. Explore ......................................................................................... 67
3.4. Key terms...................................................................................... 68
4. Bibliography ......................................................................................... 69
Unit 2. «The White Man’s Burden»: Different Approaches to

Imperialism in Literature ............................................................ 71
1. Presentation: 'Dr Livingstone, I Presume’? ........................................ 73
2. Text Analysis ......................................................................................... 77
2.1. An Act of Self Discovering: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
and the Congo Experience........................................................... 78
2.2. E.M. Forster’s Web of Misunderstandings: A Passage to India. 98
7
The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20™ Century
3. Activities ................................................................................................ 113

3.1. Test yourself.................................................................................. 113
3.2. Overview questions ............................................................ ...... 113
3.3. Explore ......................................................................................... 113
3.4. Key terms...................................................................................... 114
4. Bibliography ......................................................................................... 115
Unit 3. Literature and War: «Disillusion as Never Told in the Old

Days»............................................................................................. 119
1. Presentation: 'The War that Ends all Wars’ ....................................... 121
2. Text Analysis ......................................................................................... 131
2.1. «The Poetry is in the Pity:» Georgian Poets Experiencing War ... 131
2.2. « Let's We Forget:» Women Writing the War .............................. 150
3. Activities................................................................................................ 168
3.1. Test yourself.................................................................................. 168
3.2. Overview questions...................................................................... 168
3.3. Explore ......................................................................................... 169
3.4. Key terms...................................................................................... 169
4. Bibliography ......................................................................................... 170
Unit 4. «Life is a Luminous Halo»: The Novel in the Twentieth

Century, sons and lovers ............................................................ 173
1. Presentation: Social Consciousness Narrated: D.H. Lawrence’s
New Other in Context........................................................................... 175
2. Text Analysis ......................................................................................... 182
2.1. Reality is in the Word: The Poetics of Narrative ....................... 182
2.2. Discovering Newness and Otherness: D.H. Lawrence’s Sons
and Lovers ..................................................................................... 194
3. Activities................................................................................................ 208
3.1. Test yourself.................................................................................. 208
3.3. Explore ......................................................................................... 208
3.4. Key terms...................................................................................... 209
4. Bibliography ......................................................................................... 209
8
Table of contents S
Unit 5. Tales of the City: Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Geographies

of the Mind .................................................................................. 211
1. Presentation: Women and Modernism ............................................... 213
1.1. Introduction to Virginia Woolf ....................................... ........... 218
1.2. The Bloomsbury Group and Bloomsbury Aesthetics ............... 223
2. Texts Analysis ........................................................................................ 228
2.1. A Room of One's Own and Other Essays .................................... 228
2.2. Mrs. Dalloway and the Woman’s Sentence ................................ 243
3. Activities................................................................................................. 254
3.1. Test yourself.................................................................................. 254
3.3. Explore ......................................................................................... 255
3.4. Key terms...................................................................................... 256
4. Bibliography ......................................................................................... 256
General Bibliography ................................................................................. 259
9
PREFACE
1. HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
The Need to Make It New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half
of the 20th Century has been written taking into account the contents of the
third-year subject Literatura inglesa III: Pensamiento y creation literaria
inglesa en la primera mitad del siglo XX that conforms part of the teaching
portfolio of Grado en Estudios Ingleses: Lengua, literatura y culture offered
by the Departamento de Filologias Extranjeras y sus Linguisticas of the
UNED. It has also been though to cover the special needs of distant learning-
education and is directed to students whose mother tongue is not English,
although it can also be used in general for courses dealing with the first half
of the twentieth century.
The book is divided into five Units their watershed being the specific
theme each Unit deals with: newness, empire, war, sex and sexuality, gender
and modernism.
These Units follow a general structure that has been designed to help
students to achieve the knowledge required for the course; this structure
each Unit presents is:
• Particular program that is going to be dealt with and the learning
outcomes expected to achieve.
• Contents per se divided into different sections that vary in relation to
the specific subject covered by the Unit.
• Activities consisting on a battery of exercises and a glossary of key
terms related to the contents of the Unit.
• Bibliography and web pages of particular relevance for the Unit.
13
The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20’" Century Y
Although the book has been design trying to keep a balance in the
contents of the Units, the length of each Unit might vary slightly depending
on the requirements of the subject covered.
Within the contents students will find two differentiated parts; one deals
with theoretical questions and the other, entitled Text Analysis, deals with
the compulsory readings of the course.
There are three types of 'attention boxes' to be found in this book:
i i iy The contents found within this box a relevant and your a kindly
require to pay attention to them and think about them while carrying
on with your study.
Q The contents that appear circumscribed here are of particular

importance and you should note them, write them down and bear ‘
them in mind in your study and reading.
UJ Within this box you shall find information relevant to the text
analysis. You should pay attention to the question propounded here,
think about it, and ponder it while reading the Unit and the literary
work.
The activities that conclude each Unit are divided into four sections:
• The ‘Test yourself’ exercises have been designed to directly test the
knowledge acquired in the Unit, and therefore, they can be answered
using the material in the Unit.
• The 'Overview questions’ require information that, although also
found in the contents of the Unit, has to be thought about and worked
out by the student, o provide an answer.
14
Preface E
• The ‘Explore’ questions are relational and analytical exacting from

students to solve a riddle rather than to answer a question. In this
sense students might required to go beyond the contents of the Unit
and to do some extra reading or other research.
In this section students will find questions for discussion, relational
questions, essay writing questions, among others, where students can put
into practice their literary insights. In general the aim of these questions is
to get students to think and to participate in the literary arguments pertinent
to the Unit.
This is not to say that students should constrain their answers to the
general theme of the Unit, quite the opposite, students are encouraged to
bring to the fore the general literary background acquired in previous years
as well as any other literary background they consider relevant for their
answers.
It is pertinent to stress here that this book has been conceived to promote
or to carry forward the love for literature and the love for reading. In the end
literature is very much a question of personal choice and personal taste.
Although the book is devised to promote the discovery of new literary
universes and the acquisition of a general knowledge of the period covered
is one of the main aims of this volume, it is not expected that students should
answer every single question found in the book. It is hoped that they will
chose those questions that interest them in particular, furthering the
attraction felt and helping them to understand, among other things, the
reasons behind a particular liking or disliking.
The answers to the questions are published in a separate booklet. These
answers are there to guide students with their own answers and to provide
an example of the lines that should be followed when approaching the
questions.
Yet, for better or worse, literature, particularly the literary period covered
in this course-book, is not a straightforward matter but quite the opposite.
It is made up of fundamentally ambiguous and indeterminate literary texts.
In view of the nature of literature, the answers provided will be suggestions
intended to make students think about the literary texts. These answers are
by no means the last word to be said with regard to a particular text.
15
T h e Need to M a k e it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half o f the 2 0 t h Century Y
This idea applies to the contents of the book as well. Students should
notice that the arguments provided in the different sections of a Unit have
been developed taking into account the general theme of the Unit.
One goal of this book is to provide an understanding of the connections
between literature and thought in the period covered by the course. This is
not to say that the readings provided here are the only ones possible or those
other feasible readings are erroneous. In fact, a literary text has as many
readings as the infinite number of readers who approach it.
9 ¥ M I For this reason it is essential that students read carefully

the primary source texts that have prompted the discussion in the first
place.
Regarding this last matter and in order to be able to form our own informed
and academic opinion one should consult the Norton Anthology of English
Literature: Volume II (2000) where they will find a more general background
that goes beyond the scope of this book.
A general approach to the time-span covered in this course is found in
Chapters 8 and 9 of The Short Oxford History of English Literature, 2nd
Edition (2000), a text familiar to students from previous years. It is also
worthwhile and encouraging to read from Modernism: An Anthology of
Sources and Documents (2000) edited by Vassiliki Kolocotroni et al. This
anthology is a good source of primary material on the thought and theoretical
approaches to literature of the period.
Finally before we start our literary adventure a last word has to be said.
The main aim of this book is to encourage students to read and to engage
with literature. In this sense, the authors of this book would like to call
attention to the importance of the personal commitment to literature.
16
2 . PRESENTATION
The question of the relation between literary and biographical time is

complicated by the fact that historical and literary periods are not always,
although they may be, the same thing. Critics sometimes talk, for example,
about Victorian writers, and in doing so they assume that the reign of Queen
Victoria (1837-1901) supposes a self-contained period which is significant
enough to see in its historical details a reflection of the literary activity that
was taking place at the time.
In fact, the reigns of monarchs are often used as a literary descriptive
method. That is the case, for instance, in the use of Elizabethan or Jacobean
lyric to denote the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth
centuries. The student will, in fact, notice that Unit 1 refers extensively to
the Victorian period which in itself responds to the practical needs to frame
the first half of the twentieth century in the larger context of the previous
century.
This later period is perhaps especially difficult to frame within itself.
There is no particular monarch that may be used as a frame of historical
reference. There is first Edward VII, who reigned for nine years (1901-10),
then George V (1910-1936), the second son of Edward VII and Queen
Alexander, and then George VI (1936-1952), who took over after his older
brother Edward VIII abdicated in order to marry the American divorcee
Mrs Simpson. Although these kings may be used as historical reference, as
it is the case in Unit 3, they are not all encompassing even if Edward VII
start-date and George VI end-date are quite fitting as boundaries for the
first half of the twentieth century.
Yet, the role of the monarchy decreased just as democracy expanded and
a new social order developed, no longer based on the elite that dictated
culture. The historical period we are concerned with is known for other
17 '
The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20™ Century Y
crucial events such as the First World War, the Irish Question, the Great
Depression, the rise of Fascism and Communism in Europe, or the Spanish
Civil War.
As stated above, this book proposes a course in English literature around
a historical period. As shown in the title, it is the first half of the twentieth
century. If one takes this time-span literally then it is understood to be from
1900 to 1950. However, if you look quickly at the Table of Contents in this
course-book you will notice, for example, the names of Oscar Wilde or
Joseph Conrad in Units 1 and 2. Wilde was born in 1854 and died in 1900,
while Conrad was born a little later, in 1857, and he died in 1924. One may
query the extent to which these authors may be said to belong to the first
half of the twentieth century for, even though Conrad lived for a longer time '
in the twentieth century than did Wilde, both authors died as the century
started (particularly Oscar Wilde). The reason for them to be considered as
authors of the first half of the last century rests upon the newness of their
literary production which made them avant garde writers to be recognize in
the era of the compulsion to get it new, i.e. the first half the twentieth century.
Equally, authors live and create for longer than this course-book will
apparently give them credit. T. S. Eliot, for example, is known for works of
literature and criticism mainly between 1917 and his death in 1965, when
he is mentioned here we mainly refer to the years between 1917 and 1922.
This is because, given the period this course covers, we take these to be
Eliots most representative years.
The student must not forget that a literary approach is inevitably relative
to the intentions of the writers, and just as this is true of this course-book, it
is a point that the student must remember whenever she/he considers the
literary writers here anthologised.
This is not to say that we must find out what the author’s intentions are
when s/he writes, but that when an author chooses to write something,
sometimes it is more significant what s/he chooses to ignore. This literary
reductionism will naturally find compensation in the historical emphasis of
this course, which places authors alongside others with whom they share a
historical moment at different stages of their life.
Thus the student will sometimes come across authors outside the context
of the Units especially devoted to them. This occurrence will help to open
18
Preface E
alternative perspectives on the authors, and thus expand the reductive

nature that a book of these characteristics must live with.
By talking about a period of fifty years rather than set out a definite
historical theme for this period, this course encourages the student to be
aware of the historical events in dynamic interaction with the literature that
was written therein.
Furthermore, the literary historicism this course proposes about those
years opens up an important dimension about literature: that literature is
not the only important written document in history. One must be aware that
literary writers were also reading science, philosophy and social criticism,
which affected, directly or indirectly, their writings. Hence the title: English
Literature and Thought.
Nonetheless, perhaps the most important objective that this course
proposes is not only to encourage a contextualisation in historical thought,
but also to attempt to bypass the literary overcompensations that this period
encourages, especially the 1910s and 1920s. These two decades are normally
equated with what is referred to as Modernism. This is not to say that it is
not important to know about this period in its own right. To some extent the
Units in this course-book consider authors in terms of the development of
Modernism as well as key Modernist authors in themselves (Virginia Woolf
mainly but also T.S. Eliot and James Joyce). On the whole, this course book
attempts to attenuate the static overarching role that the Myth of Modernism
l
has achieved in literary studies.
The Need to Make It New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half
of the Twentieth Century has been written bearing in mind that the best it
could achieve is to help students to concretise and to articulate their personal
responses to primary literary texts. However, it can never be a substitute for
these personal responses. If this is achieved then the effort will have been
worthwhile.
19
Unit 1
THE DISCOURSE BETWEEN OR THE

NEED TO «MAKE IT NEW»: LITERATURE IN
AN EVER-CHANGING WORLD
K Program
\
1. Presentation: What Is New in the Modern Era?
1.1. The Crisis of Victorian Positivism
1.2. The Interpretation of an Ever-changing World
1.3. The New Woman Enters the Stage
2. Text Analysis: Oscar Wilde’s Earnestness to Break Free
2.1. Approaching Wildes The Importance of Being Earnest
3. ActivitiesES
4. Bibliography HY
Learning outcomes
— To analyze the causes that gave birth to the "Modern Period” and its
avant-garde outcomes.
— To examine The Importance of Being Earnest as representative text of
this specific time and spirit.
— To understand and become aware that that literature and literary
creativity form part of the social and political concerns of the period.
V J
1. PRESENTATION: WHAT IS NEW IN THE MODERN ERA?
The chosen title for this Presentation, «What is New i n the ‘Modern
Era’» deserves some attention for, i n literary terms a n d [ strictly speaking,
the modern period i n literature is considered to be that which runs from
the sixteenth century onwards. The word ‘modern’ according to the Oxford
English Dictionary stems from the Latin modo which means «just now»,
and the most immediate definition provided reads: «Of or pertaining to
the present and recent times as opposed to the remote past» (OED). For
instance, in the fifth century, modo, or better still modernus, referred to
the Christian present as opposed to the Roman past. In this way, by
labelling the period we are studying as 'the modern era’ the intention is
one of the perspective from which to approach the subject. Referring to
the 'modern era’ in relation to the Victorian past works as a means to
involve the reader i n the period rather than her/his looking at it from a
distance.
23
The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought i n the First Half of the 20™ Century Y
In any case, it is always risky and not devoid of controversy to refer

under a single heading to the period covered in this course: the fin de
siecle, the Edwardian period and the Georgian period. It is important to
notice that this textbook does not deal solely with Modernism (a term that
has itself been and still is subject of debate) as the word 'modern’ may
imply, but it also explores other forms of writing and avant-garde
movements present on the artistic scene between the 1880s and the Second
World War.
9 The best way to approach the contents of this Unit is by trying to

enter into the frame of mind of the ordinary citizen of the period. In
this manner, students should analyse their own responses to the
different topics explored. It is a good idea to write down these
impressions and to draw imaginatively a general picture of the many
,7
changes that the people of the era went through. The questions at the
end of the Unit will help students to pin down the most important
ideas and help them to understand the relationship between these and
the literature of the time. '
If one single noun could summarise the period, it would be 'change'.

This change was brought about by a compulsion felt in all fields of knowledge
to «make it new», to use Ezra Pound's words. The question to bear in mind
is to ask what was happening that made individuals so prone to seeking new
forms of looking at the world and to approaching life. In general terms, the
most immediate answer is that there was a need, after the industrialisation
and the mechanisation of the nation, to challenge Victorian values and
Victorian morals. Although some voices had previously spoken out against
the apparent stability, welfare and security of the Victorian system, it was
around the 1880s when confidence in society’s institutions and authority
faltered and Victorian positivism was questioned, bringing about a crisis in
the power and ideals of Victorianism. The following section will explore the
reasons behind the crisis that turned deeply held beliefs and morals upside-
down.
4
24
The Discourse Between or the Need to «Make It New»: Literature in an Ever-changing World
_ 9 Perhaps the most immediate issue that will be encountered when

studying this chapter is that the student will confront fields of
knowledge such as political and philosophical thought, psychology
and psychoanalysis, anthropology, and scientific or medical discoveries
that may seem unfamiliar and off-putting. It has to be said that
although this Unit is dealing with complex issues, it is not expected
that the student should have a profound knowledge of these subjects.
Yet it is important to become familiar with the social and intellectual
background that surrounds the literary scene of the first half of the
twentieth century.
Ideally, the best way to understand the many issues raised here is to
go to the sources and read some of the treatises and manifestos
mentioned. In so doing the student will realise that, apart from the
struggle to understand the theoretical and critical ideas presented in- -
these writings, there is also pleasure to be gained by reading them. In
many cases, as for example in the cases of the works of Darwin or Freud — —
works, the narratorial component of these writings helps to demystify
the complexity of later explanations. It is too challenging to try to collate
- the multiple sources that would be needed to approach this subject. The
Norton Anthology provides a selection of texts dealing with some of the
issues discussed here. A good source of background material not only
for this Unit but for the course at large is Modernisms: An Anthology of
Sources and Documents (2000) edited by Vassiliki Kolocotroni et al..
1.1. The Crisis of Victorian Positivism
The 1851 Great Exhibition at the brilliant, impressive and magnificent

Crystal Palace in London served to display the progress of a nation that had
achieved a leading role in the international sphere. Crystal Palace became
the temple of the machine where those visiting could appreciate the
importance of the national effort in modernising the country. There, one
could find breathtaking works of engineering, the most amazing technical
discoveries, and the wonders of industrial enterprise, as well as the most
innovative works of art that were meant to show that Romanticism had
been overcome. In short, the Exhibition loudly proclaimed that Great
25
The Need to M a k e it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20™ Century Y
Britain was indeed great and that its people’s confidence in the greatness
and the power of the nation would remain. The following three decades of
that century have been seen by most historians as the zenith of what has
come to be termed «Victorianism».
Yet Victorian values were in decline. Two very dissimilar politicians,
Gladstone and Disraeli, dominated late Victorian politics. Gladstone was
liberal, humanitarian and dutiful, and it is reported that Queen Victoria
found him boring. Disraeli, on the other hand, was imperialist, nationalistic
and charming and, apparently, the Queen enjoyed his company, for he could
make her laugh.
The Liberals had been on the rise from 1830 to 1886. In 1868-74, after
the second Reform Act, Gladstone was Prime Minister of the reforming
government. From 1874 to 1880 we see a Tory majority government under
Disraeli, seen as a reforming government working largely under the policies
established by Gladstone. Gladstone governed again between 1880 and 1886
in what it were his second and third terms, but he was brought down by the
Irish issue. The turn of the century (1886-1906) saw the Tories, now known
as the 'Unionists', in power. This is also the period of the advent of Marxism;
Britain entered into industrial competition with other countries, Germany
and United States most prominently.
A need was felt for social and political reform. The policies of Liberal
thinking that appeared during the second half of the nineteenth century
were promoted by the so-called 'old Whigs’ (the aristocracy, landlords and
members of the House of Lords), by free traders and industrialists, and by
social reformers entrenched in all walks of life. These policies of Liberal
thinking included concern with issues such as: the notion of Utilitarianism
(put forward by Jeremy Bentham who advocated that 'morals and legislation’
should aim at achieving 'the greatest good for the greatest number’); the
notions of liberty and individualism (as expressed by John Stuart Mill in On
Liberty); and a proposal for social reform (suggested by Edwin Chadwick)
that entailed economical policies of ‘retrenchment’, that is, minimal state
expense, and with efficiency in government finances. Regarding economics,
the policies were those of free trade, anti-protection or laissez-faire. They
followed Adam Smith's theories promoted in his study Wealth of Nations
(1776): Consumption is the sole end and purpose of production; and the
interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be
26
necessary for promoting that of the consumer. » There was also a drastic
movement from an economy based on land ownership to what we now
know as a modern urban economy, based on trade and on manufacturing.
We shall see more on this in the section about industrialisation.
Some of the most important political reforms are connected with the
Peoples Charter. For example, the Acts for the Representation of the People
were debated at the turn of the century and gave, in 1918, the right to vote
to men over twenty-one and limited female suffrage to some women over
thirty (universal suffrage for both sexes was achieved in 1928, and the age
was lowered to eighteen in 1969). Other important measures were
parliamentary reform (the Ballot Act of 1872 made voting a private affair for
the first time) and reforms to increase education and to improve working
conditions and health. Legal reform proceeded slowly. At this time the most
common form of entertainment was reading aloud. Writers such as Dickens,
Tennyson, or Trollope were widely read and discussed. The advent of
universal compulsory education after 1870 meant that there was now a
much larger audience for literature. The emergence of an unsophisticated
reading public meant that literature was divided between 'high art’ and ‘low
art', the latter meeting the demands of much of this new readership.
This was also the age of the ‘Irish Question’ a complex issue still with us
today. The question was whether or not the Irish should be allowed to rule
themselves. Discussions on whether Ireland was an 'internal colonised zone’
began to emphasise its economic inequality and its cultural differences with
England; the Irish found solidarity amongst themselves. The cultural
renaissance which took place in Ireland around the turn of the century was
led by a group of Anglo Irish writers including W.B. Yeats, Lady Augusta
Gregory and J.M. Synge. Although they wrote in English, their writings
were based on an awareness of Irish nationalism, myth and legend. Whether
writing poetry, prose or drama, the men and women of the literary revival
showed their love for Ireland in their work. Groups such as the Pan-Celtic
Society and the Irish National Literary Society were set up and involved W.
B. Yeats, Douglas Hyde and Maude Gonne. Yeats, together with Lady
Gregory and Edward Martyn, founded the Irish Literary Theatre in 1898
with the intention of using theatre to spread the ideals of the literary revival.
As the Irish Literary Theatre had no venue for its productions, the Abbey
Theatre was set up in 1904. Plays such as On Baile's Strand by W.B. Yeats,
27
The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20”' Century Y
Spreading the News by Lady Gregory and Riders to the Sea by J.M. Synge
were all performed at the Abbey.
The Irish Literary Revival was responsible for the production of an
exceptionally strong body of work, which not only stimulated Irish nationalism
but also gave Ireland a place on the international stage. The writers of the
revival were responsible for developing and articulating a new national
consciousness. The philosophy of the Gaelic League and the cultural activities
of the Irish Literary Revival had a major influence on already existing political
groups —such as the IRB— as well as new groups, including the labour
movement and Sinn Fein. Sinn Fein, meaning 'ourselves alone', was the most
important political movement to emerge from the cultural renaissance. It
was founded in 1905 by Arthur Griffith, a Dublin printer who had established
a nationalist paper called the United Irishman in 1899. Griffith was convinced
that the 1800 Act of Union was at the root of most of Ireland’s problems. As
did the members of the Home Rule Party, he believed that the 1800 Act of
Union was illegal. However, unlike the parliamentary members, he was in
favour of the withdrawal of all Irish MPs from Westminster to form an
independent assembly in Dublin. He proposed a system of dual monarchy,
similar to the system that had given Hungary independence. Sinn Fein won
several seats at local elections but got little support from Home Rule
advocates. Although there was a close connection between Sinn Fein and the
IRB, the major difference was that Sinn Fein did not advocate violence as a
method of setting up an Irish republic. Although the IRB was ready to take
action in 1913, it lacked the means to carry out a revolution.
Land reform in Ireland had been taking place since the 1870s, but this
had little impact on conditions in the towns and cities. Unemployment and
low wages meant that severe poverty was widespread. There was little
industry in southern Ireland and the majority of the labour force was
unskilled. Living conditions were worst in Dublin where the people were
poorly paid, frequently underfed, and lived in condemned tenement flats.
By 1913 a series of strikes had taken place in Dublin. Police brutality was
common and James Connolly set up the Irish Citizen Army to protect the
strikers in November 1913. The strikers were supported by many of the Irish
literary and artistic community, including W.B. Yeats and George Bernard
Shaw, as well as militant nationalists such as Patrick Pearse and Thomas
MacDonagh. Many of the workers were forced to return to their jobs by the
28
end of January 1914, having been starved into submission. Although the
struggle ended in failure, revolution was in the air. Notwithstanding the
setbacks of the 1 890s, the Irish Parliamentary Party believed that there was
hope of achieving Home Rule as the Liberals returned to office in 1906. The
Irish party, reunited and revitalised under John Redmond since 1900, held
the balance of power after the 1910 general election. Home Rule seemed to
be within reach. In 1912 the House of Commons passed the Home Rule Bill
and, despite opposition in the House of Lords, it was due to become law in 1914.
T h e Ulster Unionists began a campaign against H o m e Rule during
1912-13 that led to the founding of the Ulster Volunteer Force in September 1913,
with the Orange Order fighting to keep the Union i n place and Ireland as
part of the United Kingdom.
The Ulster Volunteer Force acted as a model for the establishment of a
similar voluntary army in southern Ireland in 1914. Eoin MacNeill, one of
the founders of the Gaelic League, proposed setting up a civil defence force;
it became the Irish Volunteers. The Volunteers intended to safeguard the
rights of the Irish people, which they considered to be threatened by Unionist
actions. The Volunteers appealed to a large cross-section of the Irish people,
including many men already involved in groups such as the Gaelic League.
Although the Irish Volunteers had over 100,000 members by 1914, the
authorities in Dublin did not see them as a real threat. Unlike the Ulster
Volunteer Force, the Irish Volunteers had little money and few arms. O n 2 6
July 1914 a group of Anglo-Irish nationalists including Roger Casement and
Erskine Childers imported guns and ammunition to Ireland in what became
known as the Howth Gun-Running. Although the arms consignment was
not large, this event was responsible for the further spread of Irish militant
nationalism and there was a corresponding increase in the number of
recruits joining the volunteers.
The First World War broke out on 4 August 1914, just a week after the
Howth Gun-Running. Although Home Rule was due to become law that
September, the Prime Minister decided to suspend the Act until the end of
the war. Believing that the war would be over within a few months and
Home Rule would be granted the following year, a group of Volunteers
joined the British Army. These became known as the National Volunteers
while the rest, including the more extreme elements of the movement,
retained the name of Irish Volunteers. By the end of 1914 the Irish
29 .
The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in t h e First Half of the 20"' Century Y
Volunteers had its own military council. The most outspoken and
charismatic member of the Irish Volunteers’ military council was Patrick
Pearse.
As the war dragged on, the possibility of the granting of Home Rule
became unlikely. The British War Cabinet included two of the staunchest
opponents of Home Rule —Edward Carson and Bonar Law, and, in 1916,
there was a threat of conscription being extended to Ireland. As a result
belief in military action as the best way forward was growing. The IRB
leaders saw England's difficulties as Ireland’s opportunity. A military council
was set up in May 1915 with five members: Patrick Pearse, fiamonn Ceannt,
Joseph Plunkett, Thomas Clarke and Sean MacDiarmada. In December the
military council decided on Easter 1916 as the date for the rebellion. Despite
setbacks such as the sinking of a German ship carrying arms for the rising,
the IRB's military council decided that the rebellion should take place on
Easter Sunday. After a series of obstacles, the military council decided to go
ahead with the rising on Easter Monday even though they realised that they
were unlikely to succeed, or even survive, but were prepared to make this
‘blood sacrifice' for the sake of Ireland's freedom. Pearse was appointed
President of the Provisional Government and Commander-in-chief of the
army. He proclaimed the Irish Republic from the steps of the captured
General Post Office (GPO) in Dublin. Although initially taken by surprise,
the British authorities reacted quickly and suppressed the rising within a
few days. Pearse surrendered on Saturday 29 April. Over 3,000 people were
arrested in the wake of the 1916 Rebellion and over half were interned in
Britain. The leaders of the rebellion were tried and condemned to death.
Over a ten-day period at the beginning of May, fifteen of them were executed.
There was a public outcry about these executions and the Irish Parliamentary
Party was seen as ineffective. Sinn Fein, which inherited the glory and
prestige from the martyrs of Easter week, came to be considered the most
important Irish political organisation. In December 1918 there was a general
election which resulted in a landslide victory for Sinn Fein. The parliamentary
party was left with only six seats and it was obvious that constitutional
nationalism had failed. Sinn Fein stated that its elected members would not
sit in Westminster and set about establishing in Dublin’s Mansion House an
independent government which the British Government refused to recognise.
This led to a bitter Anglo-Irish conflict which became known as the War of
Independence.
30
On 21 January 1919, some members of the south Tipperary Brigade of

the Irish Volunteers attacked and killed two Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC)
constables in Soloheadbeg, County Tipperary. This new ruthlessness was
the first expression of physical force from a group of the Volunteers who
wanted to act independently of Sinn Fein, the political wing. In August 1919
the Volunteers changed their name to the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The
IRA had the support of much of the population, particularly in rural areas.
By the end of 1919 it was obvious that the British authorities were determined
to use force to suppress the rebels. The English government sent the first of
a series of of ex-service-men task-forces to Ireland in March 1920. On 21
November 1920, a date which became known as Bloody Sunday, eleven
British intelligence officers were shot in Dublin by Michael Collins’s gunmen.
Crown forces reacted by shooting into the crowd at a GAA march in Croke
Park that afternoon, killing twelve people and wounding sixty. Martial Law
was declared in Cork, Kerry, Limerick and Tipperary on 10 December 1920;
the following day a group of Auxiliaries went on the rampage in Cork city,
burning down a substantial part of the city centre. Eventually, Lloyd George,
the British Prime Minister realised that he had to seek a truce with Sinn
Fein. It was agreed that all military activity was to cease at noon on 11 July
1921. After a series of negotiations a Treaty was signed on 6 December 1921.
British rule in Ireland was at an end: Ireland had Dominion status and the
twenty-six counties were to be called the Irish Free State. Britain retained
three Irish ports, which became known as the Treaty Ports, for defence
purposes: Berehaven, Queenstown (Cobh) and Lough Swilly. Ulster was
partitioned, but the delegation believed that this was only a temporary
situation. Although they had not been able to bring about a republic, the
delegates did manage to break the ground for future constitutional freedom.
Despite voices strongly opposing the Treaty, a provisional government
was set up under Michael Collins to oversee the handing over of Ireland to
the Irish, and a formal transfer of power took place on 16 January 1922.
British troops in southern Ireland were evacuated and the Black and Tans,
Auxiliaries and the RIC were disbanded. The Treaty divided the Irish into
two opposing groups. This political split was paralleled in the IRA, which
was divided into anti-Treaty Irregulars or Republicans and the pro-Treaty
Army or Regulars. The division led to a Civil War. The general election in
June 1922 resulted in victory for the pro-Treaty Sinn Fein candidates, but
this meant only that the militant Republicans became more closely focused
31
1
The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20 " Century Y
on rebellious action. A special powers resolution, allowing the army to hold

military courts and to enforce the death penalty for offences including the
possession of arms, came into effect on 15 October. It was not until 6
November 1922 that the Irish Free State became a reality.
By April 1923 almost 80 Republicans had been tried, convicted and
executed, greatly weakening the movement. The Civil War ended on 24 May.
The Civil War had more of an impact on the country than the War of
Independence. It divided political parties, movements and families and
wasted the lives of many men. Sinn Fein never recovered from the divisions
of the Civil War years. New political parties developed in its place such as
the pro-Treaty Cumann na nGaedheal and Fianna Fail who were anti-Treaty.
WJ Oscar Wildes The Importance of Being Earnest (Norton 2000:

1761-1805) constitutes the compulsory reading for this Unit. Wilde
was an Irish ‘outsider’. While reading the play bear in mind the events
related above and ponder over the possible connections between
Wildes innovative way of writing drama and the social and political
events taking place in his homeland. Why do we include Wilde in a
course about English literature? Was he influenced by the works of the
cultural Irish renaissance such as Bernard Shaw’s or Yeat’s?
During this time, much of the attention of the country was also focused
on the Empire. Britain took control of key ports and islands around world,
for example, St Helena, Malacca, St Lucia and Singapore. These ports and
islands became the bases for later expansion into the rest of the territory
(for example, in Malaysia). The British Empire was still expanding well into
the twentieth century through protectorates (as in the Lebanon or Palestine).
Unit 2 will be entirely devoted to exploring the literary consequences of
the conduct of the British in relation to the Empire, paying particular
attention to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and E. M. Forster's A Passage
to India. For this reason, it suffices to say here that, fuelled by the official
propaganda and the dominant discourse, the prevailing attitude in Britain
regarding colonialism was that expansion of British control around the
globe was good for everyone and, around the turn of the century, the colonies
evolved into the 'dominions' of the Commonwealth. Of course, as shall be
.
32
argued in Unit 2, the debates around the Empire and the impact they had in
literature and other fields of knowledge are much more intricate than this
general approach might imply. This is so to the point that the particular and
complex questions raised by colonialism are still present nowadays and
form a full and independent body of research into the matter by the so-
called Colonial and Post-Colonial Studies.
The need for raw materials, gained through colonial expansion and
exploitation, is one of the consequences of the so-called Industrial Revolution.
There are several reasons for the Industrial Revolution: first, the technological
innovations in the production of textiles, iron and coal of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Secondly, a previous agricultural revolution had made
Britain able to feed a larger population, in turn creating a greater demand
for manufactured goods. Thirdly, the innovations in transport (canals,
railways, and shiping) helped spread economic development to more remote
regions. Soon, Britain realised the advantages of the rapid transportation of
foodstuffs, for example, fish, vegetables and dairy products, and people.
This gave rise to the notion of ‘leisure’ (the country felt smaller and more
manageable) and encouraged the creation of ‘seaside resorts’. For example,
a journey from London to York was reduced from one-and-a-half days to
eight hours, allowing for the possibility of contemplating the journey as
leisure. As the Industrial Revolution progressed, working hours decreased,
and the introduction of Bank Holidays meant that workers had the time to
take trips away from the cities to the seaside. The seaside resorts introduced
the amusement pier to entertain visitors (some of the more famous resorts
were —and still are— at Blackpool and Brighton).
As has been said above, there was in this period an economic movement
from landownership to a modern urban economy, based on trade and on
manufacturing. This accelerated the migration of the population from the
countryside to the cities. There were several results of this migration. On the
one hand, there was a stimulus towards the development of ‘city’ professions
such as law, accountancy and management. On the other hand, the result of
this movement was the growth of horrifying slums and cramped terraced
housing in the overcrowded cities. By 1900, eighty per cent of the population
lived in cities, ‘organised’ into geographical zones based on social class: the
poor in the inner city, the better-off living away from the city centre, giving way
to a growth of middle-class suburbs. This was made possible by the expansion
of suburban rail transport. Some suburban rail companies were required by
33 -
law to provide cheap trains for commuters to travel into the city centre. The
very notion of ‘time’, because of the expansion of the railway, changed: it was
standardised in order to create a timetable based on London's time.
The role of technological developments such as printing presses is worth
noting, for they helped to spread literacy: more newspapers were published
and read, more letters were written as they were delivered faster, and
political ideas were spread faster through the newspapers and political
campaigns. Parallel changes occurred in culture and art, such as photography;
in transport and communication, such as steam power, the telegraph or the
intercontinental cable; and in health, such as the discovery of anaesthetics.
The Industrial Revolution also meant that the balance of power shifted from
the aristocracy, whose position and wealth was based on land, to the newly
rich business leaders. The new aristocracy became one of wealth, not land,
although titles, then as now, remained socially important in British society.
Artists felt alienated from the ruling culture and expressed their disdain
for what they saw as a ‘philistine’ public and moral tastes. Wilde followed
the Art for Art’s Sake doctrine: pursue fleeting beauty and pleasure as ends
in themselves. Polished, impressionistic images that appealed to the senses
and also a desire to shock and challenge Victorian values dominated the
arts. At this time the figure of the dandy and the effeminate man appear.
Although for many the Aesthetes descended into an excess of hedonism,
emotional debauchery, degeneration and decadence, the movement served
to disengage art from any purposeful meaning in society. It has to be
remembered that the Industrial Revolution brought into society a sense of
practicality that affected all the different expressions of the whole of society.
Yet from the 1880s to the start of the First World War, the Aesthetic movement
liberated art from pragmatism.
Art was an end in itself almost to the point of a pseudo-religious belief.
Born in France with advocates such as poets Charles Baudelaire and
Theophile Gautier, the Aesthetic movement was inspired by the philosophical
views of Immanuel Kant in relation to the aesthetics and the pleasure
obtained from viewing a work of art. In this sense, Kant in Critique of
Aesthetic Judgement argued that a pure aesthetic experience is the
contemplation of an object that provokes pleasure for its own sake, with no
other materialistic or utilitarian purposes. In other words, and this is a
phrase that will accompany the movement, art is useless and therefore it
34
should be contemplated for its value in terms of pleasure only. Hence, the
Art for Art’s Sake motto will lead to the artistic production of the Aesthetes.
The views of French Aesthetics were introduced into Victorian England by
Walter Pater, who in the conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance
(1873) [Norton 2000: 1642-1644], exposed the need to crown one’s life with
the most delicate and exquisite sensations in order to appreciate the supreme
value of beauty and the pleasure obtained from the 'love of art for its own
sake’. The moral and artistic views of Aestheticism were expressed by the
poet A.C. Swinburne and in the 1890s, as well as Oscar Wilde, by other
writers such as Arthur Symons or Lionel Johnson.
Aesthetic values lived to the full brought about a different movement
intrinsically linked to the aforementioned: the Decadent Movement. More
than an artistic movement as such, the Decadents followed a way of life based
on the ideas of the Aesthetic movement. These were mainly the view that art
is totally opposed to ‘nature’ understood both in the biological sense of the
word and in the ‘natural’ norms of morality and sexual behaviour. Therefore,
the art of the Decadents was artificial and the decadence in their personal
lives —it is worth noting that ‘decadence’ was considered a positive adjective
by the members of the group— was expressed in the search for strange
‘unnatural’ sensations which in many cases involved the use of drugs and
experimental sexual behaviour. Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891) and the play Salome (1893) are representative literary productions of
Decadent literature. This sophistication and artificiality of the Decadents will
reappear, with multiple variations, in the 1950s with the ‘Beat’ poets. The
independence and self-sufficiency of art stressed by the Aesthetes and
Decadents, as well as the concept of a poem or a novel as an end in itself, will
strongly influence the writers of the inter-war period such as T.S. Eliot, T.E.
Hulme, W.B. Yeats and Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.
■f At the turn of the century artists, writers and playwrights were

highly critical of Victorian achievements and beliefs. They mocked
and challenged middle-class values, such as convention, respectability
and the very notion of art. A most telling example is Oscar Wilde's play
The Importance of Being Earnest.
35
1.2. The Interpretation of an Ever-changing World
The belief that species were immutable had been questioned by

naturalists since the late eighteenth century, and the proposition that plants
and animals transformed themselves gradually was finding more and more
support. In 1859 The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was
published. The book was the result of the appointment of Charles Darwin
(1809-1882) as naturalist on HMS Beagle on a scientific expedition to survey
the South American seas (1831-36). On this expedition he visited places
such as Tenerife, Brazil, Buenos Aires, Chile, the Galapagos Islands, Tahiti
and New Zealand. By 1844 the conclusions of his observations made during
the journey started to formulate the touchstone of his evolution theory: the
principle of evolution by natural selection.
Darwin was not the first to expound a belief in evolution. The scientific
observations of Lamarck, Goethe and Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin's
grandfather), among others, pointed out the possibility that the morphology
of animals and plants that could then be observed was the result of past
changes in the respective environments in which they had developed, leading
to mutations or to spontaneous transformations. On the other hand, as
Darwin himself points out in his autobiography, he was influenced by the
theories of the political economist Thomas Malthus. In Essay on the
Principle of Population (1798), Malthus first observed that in nature plants
and animals produce a far greater number of offspring than can survive. He
then extrapolated this observation to the growth in population that was
taking place in England in this period and observed that the human species
could also overproduce if left unchecked. Malthus concluded that unless
family size were regulated, famine would become a global epidemic and,
eventually, destroy the species. Malthus maintained that poverty and famine
were natural outcomes of population growth but, instead of looking for the
reasons in natural terms, he resorted to God as the explanation for these
natural outcomes. He believed that these outcomes were God’s way of
preventing laziness. Not only Darwin but also Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-
1913) arrived at the same conclusions about natural selection after reading
Malthus. The most important difference in views was that the two naturalists
framed this principle in purely natural terms both in outcome and ultimate
reason. This allowed Darwin to take a step further. He suggested that the
production of more offspring than can survive implies competition among
36
siblings, and that variations in the siblings would produce certain individuals
with a greater chance of survival. These would be the fittest.
Darwin called this mechanism ‘natural selection', by which he meant
that nature chooses the best individuals of each generation and that they,
according to the laws governing inheritance, transmit their favourable
characteristics to their descendants. This is how the 'survival of the fittest’,
an expression that Darwin borrowed from the philosopher Herbert Spencer
(1820-1903), works. This means the individuals perpetuating the species are
those more able to adapt to the environment, since adaptation to the
environment is the most important factor for the survival of the species. It
is important to note that even though it is commonly accepted that in The
Origin of Species Darwin postulated his theory of an ancestor to the human
species, only twelve years later, in 1871, did Darwin address this issue in his
book The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. The hypothesis
of a gradual transformation of species was abhorrent to a Victorian mentality
that proudly sustained the belief that Adam was created in God’s image. It
was also contrary to Christian belief as written in the book of Genesis. That
is, Darwin's argument implied that humans were closer to animals than they
were to God and that nature was not static but evolving.
The fact that Darwin waited for so long to publish his theories, and that
he did so only because Wallace was about to publish a work with very similar
conclusions, was because of the strong opposition that he foresaw in the
scientific community. The results of Darwin's investigations were discussed
in the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in
1860. The heated debate provoked by Darwin’s views prevented him from
attending the meeting. There was no middle ground in this subject. Defenders
of Darwin’s theories included Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95), nicknamed
‘Darwin's bulldog' for his passionate arguments in favour of Darwin’s point
of view. Richard Owen (1804-92) and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (1805-73)
head those totally against Darwin's theories. The following anecdote is well
known and serves to show the passion of the debates: when in one of the
meetings Bishop Wilberforce asked Huxley if it was from his grandfather or
his grandmother that he claimed his rights to descent from the ape the
scientist responded: «I would rather be an evolved ape than a degenerated
Adam». Anecdotes apart, the important idea to bear in mind in relation to
Darwin’s theory is that it provided a scientifically proven past that, at the
same time, explained the present. It is not surprising that among the many
37
detours taken by Darwins theories, one that fascinated theorists was the
possibility of predicting the future based on present evidence.
Darwinism did not remain a purely scientific discourse. Very soon it
spread, and permeated other spheres of knowledge such as the social
sciences or anthropology. Reproduction and the survival of the fittest, not
rational thought or spiritual belief, became recognised as the forces behind
human endeavour. In this order of things sciences such as eugenics found
the perfect ground to spread. Led by Darwins cousin Francis Galton (1822-
1911), eugenics propounded the need for selective breeding in the delineation
of racial qualities. A nation should ensure that its able of members had
dominance in fertility if it wanted to survive. Failure to do so would mean
the disappearance of the nation. It is also important to take into account
that if Darwinism implies an assault on the traditional beliefs concerning
God, the universe and humanity's relationship with both, Darwinism could
also be applied in giving scientific value to those Victorian ideals that it was
apparently diminishing. The word 'degeneration' used by Huxley was going
to be a key term in relation to the social changes taking place at the time.
Terms such as ‘evolution’ and 'degeneration' started to be manifold in
meaning and were used by theorists and critics to serve their own respective
purposes. 'Evolution' served the establishment to justify empire and
colonialism. Since apes were considered to be under-evolved relations of
humans, non-European societies were thus seen as underdeveloped
civilisations. It was therefore the duty of the civilised, progressive white
male European to educate, civilise and improve the conditions of what he
regarded as the primitive societies, such as those in Africa or India. In 1895,
Max Nordau’s Degeneration was translated into English. In this work,
Nordau, using Darwin’s theories, established that the end of civilisation
could be foretold by observing licentious contemporary forms of art, such
as Naturalism, and the Decadents, such as Oscar Wilde. The rise of the New
Woman and the suffrage movement were also seen as precipitants of this
apocalyptic future. In England there were already works reflecting the
decline of the European white civilization. For example, Edwin Ray
Lankester (1847-1929) speculated on the decline of the white race that
would become socially parasitical in Degeneration: A Chapter on Darwinism
(1880). H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) is one text to take the mood of
these ongoing discussions about end-points and envision the end both of
humanity and of the world.
38
The Discourse Between or the Need to « M a k e It New»: Literature in an Ever-changing World
In turn, «degeneracy» referring to the phenomenon that the social status

quo was under threat from the freer values of the younger generation
sceptical about the traditional values of morality, customs and proprieties,
particularly in relation to sex, meant a liberating and scientifically based
escape from those very values. At the same time it unsettled the assumed
stability of Victorian society, bringing to the fore fears over chastity,
homosexuality, same-sex love, perversity, masturbation, morbidity and
syphilis that had up to then 'officially' been non-existent. Yet these very fears
provoked a levelling of sin and disease that meant that any deviation from
conventional morality was as much a sign of madness as it was of depravity.
Many of the current issues of human development, degeneration and
depravity were present in the popular literature produced in the late 1880s
and 1890s. Among these Bram Stokers Dracula (1897), Oscar Wilde’s The
Picture of Dorian Gray and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
could all be read partly as cautions against the rise of promiscuity and its
associated evils such as prostitution, syphilis and adultery. These works also
pointed accusingly to many of the pillars of Victorian society, so deeply
ingrained in what has come to be termed as 'Victorian hypocrisy’ especially
with regard to sexual matters. Notions of evolution, progress and reform led
to a fascination with regression, atavism and decline. 'Degeneration' stood
out as the byword for modern Western civilisation. It was taken as the break
from traditional forms of expression and was present in the new tendencies
in the arts.
As a consequence of the debates moving from the intellectual sphere to
ordinary society, many individuals found that they had lost their belief in
external authorities and experienced increasing insecurity not only in
relation to the universe but also within themselves. The term ‘agnostic’
was coined in the 1870s, meaning the impossibility for the empirical mind
to either believe or not to believe. The impact of the godless society is
found in any individual who becomes unsure of the taken-for-granted
certainties of the Victorian age. This crisis of the individual led D.H.
Lawrence (1885-1930) to affirm in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1923)
that there is «only one clue to the universe. And that is the individual soul
within the individual being». That is, the world was as varied as the
individuals observing it. This view, of course, will contrast with the
principle of Realism, which presupposed a perception of the world shared
by all members of society.
39
The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 2 0 t " Century Y
The theological search for God had been replaced by a epistemological

quest for self-knowledge. In philosophy this quest found expression in the
work of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) who, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
A Book for Everyone and No One (1883-85), categorically stated that «God
is dead.» With this pronouncement Nietzsche was the first philosopher to
consider extensively human responsibility and freedom in a universe
without God. In his first publication, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), he
divided experience between Apollonian (rational) and Dionysian (aesthetic
pleasure) forces. The era in which he was living, he argued, was dominated
by a rational Apollonian mentality to the detriment of the creative aesthetic
of the dream and chaos of the Dionysian spirit. It resulted in a total loss of
connection with the tragic myth and sensual intuitive truth found in Greek
tragedy. The most interesting aspect in this respect lies in Nietzsche's
insights into myth and myth-making. It is also worth noting that in an
added preface to his 1886 edition of The Birth of Tragedy, entitled ‘Essay in
Self-Criticism', the philosopher devolves upon art and not on morality the
responsibility of interpreting the significance of existence. The importance
of myth applied to literature and the importance given to the aesthetic in
Nietzsche’s thought implied that, for many writers, the duty of the artist in
the disordered and fragmented modern world was to «create what culture
could no longer produce: symbol and meaning in the dimension of art,
brought into being through the agency of language® (Friedman 1981: 98).
In other words, myth stood out as the ordering power lost by the culture
and society of the modern materialist world. Writers such as Eliot, Joyce,
Woolf and Yeats would incorporate into their literature myth and classical
models destined to give meaning to the alienated modern individual for
whom Christian religion had ceased to be the answer. In the process new
myths were created as in, for example, Marcel Proust’s (1871-1922) A la
recherche du temps perdu (1913-27). Another book that greatly influenced
authors of the period, particularly modernist authors, was James Frazer’s
(1854-1941) The Golden Bough, a hugely extensive anthropological work
published in twelve volumes between 1890 and 1915. In this work Frazer
charts the connections between pagan rites and Christian religion. T.S.
Eliot in his work The Waste Land is one of those authors influenced by
Frazer.
Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy of 'the will’, in line with Plato and
Immanuel Kant, propounded that the world was the physical manifestation
40
of an underlying cosmic reality. In this sense Schopenhauer had a pessimistic

view of the universe in that the will, by its own nature, can never be totally
satisfied: it leads meaninglessly to all forms of suffering. Nietzsche's theory
would depart from Schopenhauer’s predicament but invert the pessimistic
view of the latter into an optimistic celebration of the positive forces of the
will. Nietzsche felt that modern society was sick because it failed to
acknowledge to its positive forces but instead was led by frivolity and
morbidity. This point of view would greatly attract writers such as Yeats,
who would agree with the philosopher that the will was a physiological
complex of drives and impulses. In The Will to Power (1901), Nietzsche
identified universal will with the relation of a power between forces, that in
turn constitutes the driving energy of human life. Nietzsche lyes emphasis
on the field of forces, and not on power per se. Life should be led, according
to Nietzsche, as an endeavour fully to satisfy the will for power. Nietzsches
perspective could, strictly speaking justify dictatorial regimes, asceticism,
self-punishment, or sadism. In fact, Nietzsche's theory has been used by
Fascism to justify philosophically its extreme ideological apparatus.
Particularly interesting was his theory of the superman (Ubermensch). By
Ubermensch Nietzsche was referring to a new, creative being who would
transcend religion, morality and ordinary society and would satisfy his own
will. The motto of the Ubermensch would be «be what you are» and
humanity’s greatest goal should point towards becoming an Ubermensch.
An interesting aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy in this respect is that it offers
a philosophical insight into the dynamics of the master/slave dichotomy
that has been very influential in contemporary thinkers such as Foucault,
Derrida, and Lyotard.
Perhaps more interesting, from our literary point of view, is Nietzsche’s
insistence on the necessity to approach all values from a new, different
perspective that would allow for the contradictions and paradoxes of a new
aesthetic based on Dionysian forces. The present, he insists, is already part
of the past and therefore everything is necessarily new. Nietzsche is also the
theorist of nihilism, a term coined by Ivan Turgenev in Fathers and Sons
(1862). Nietzsche explains that the term 'nihilism' is ambiguous. It could
refer to active nihilism or ‘increased power of the spirit’ (marked by violent
destruction) or to passive nihilism (in which case the power of the spirit
would be recessive and in decline implying futility, resignation and cynicism).
As will be seen in the following Units, both meanings can be observed in the
41
T h e Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought i n the First Half of the 20"' Century Y
different approaches of Modernism towards literature. «We moderns» said

Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), «we half-barbarians. We are in
the midst of our bliss when we are more in danger. » Here, he was referring
to the duty of the modern individual to create a future of new values, an
endeavour implying an act of destructive genesis and a total break with the
past.
Nietzsches concept of ‘eternal recurrence' is very intriguing in relation
to literature; while encompassing the idea that experience is eternally
repeated, it also considers a positive aspect to this eternal recurrence in that
the individual should live each moment as if it would be repeated eternally.
Through 'eternal recurrence’, linear time is thus questioned and undermined.
Linear progression is itself less important than the fact of constant repetition
of a particular action. The concept of 'eternal recurrence’ brings two very
interesting dimensions of time, namely cyclical time and eternal time.
Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922)
which, at a basic level and perhaps more graphically starts and finishes with
the same letter, both contain a circular structure that breaks the linear
progression of the narrative. In 'eternal recurrence' the concept of cyclical
time is present in the idea of repetition or recurrence, and that of eternal
time in the very fact that that repetition will happen for ever. The alluring
aspect of this theory is that its direction is inwards, towards the individual,
rather than outwards, towards the outside world. The individual should live
as she/he would like to live eternally. The need is for the individual to
experience life to the full and to accept responsibility for present actions.
This aspect of ‘eternal recurrence' clarifies, in part, Nietzsche’s Ubermensch
in that, in essence, what is at stake here is becoming what one is and
experiencing life as if one wanted each moment to come back again. This is
why repetition is significant in modern literature.
Furthermore, repetition obeys a need to render linear, chronological
time as insufficient in explaining human reality and the universe. Think for
instance of the very different perceptions that an hour might contain. We
have all experienced instances when an hour passes as if it had been a
second, whereas in different circumstances an hour may be perceived as a
decade. This experience of time leads to the key concept of ‘relativity’ which
immediately brings to mind the persona of Albert Einstein (1879-1955) and
his nowadays popular and famous theory that, in the case of objects
42
travelling at a speed near to that of light, matter transforms into energy.

The importance of Einstein's theories (1905 and 1916) is that by pointing
out the possibility of a change in matter the principle of permanence
implicit in Newtonian physics crumbles. A Newtonian universe found
expression in the realist novel, where a reliable narrator can render the
observations of a world that responds to consistent and empirical laws and
which progresses according to a chronological pattern of linear time; by
contast, the transforming and mutable world of 'relativity' can be rendered
only through a narrative that changes its perspective. We find in modern
narratives flashbacks, time arcs, jumps, repetitions and, most important in
their novelty, leaps and swerves. These are all narrative devices allowing for
the representation of the subjective perception of time and the instability
of space boundaries as these transpire from the theory of relativity. The
infinite instance of time in which matter is transformed into energy, or in
terms of aesthetics, the moment in which the individual reaches the sublime
point of recognition of an emotion, the Woolfian 'Moment of Being’ or the
Joycean 'Epiphany' become the most precious 'goal' a work of art can
achieve. In order to transmit these moments the 'image', defined by Pound
defines as an 'intellectual and emotional complex', seems the most readily
available tool. In this sense the plot and the structure not only of narrative
but also of poetry are manipulated in order to provide the image of a
particular emotion. Literature becomes introspective, fallible, andintensely
subjective through a writing that requires a very dangerous exercise on the
part of the writer. Pushing language to the limit, the writer places him/
herself dangerously close to neurotic discourse, risking in the process his/
her own sanity.
"v The ambiguity and flexibility implied by this theory allowed the
expression of the ambiguity and flexibility intuitively felt in language.
Modern writing thus constantly plays with the suspicion that language
can never be fixed and that meaning, to see it from Jacques Derrida’s
viewpoint, is always deferred. Therefore, through the repetition of a
word the multiple and, in theory, infinite meaning is always somewhere
else. This implies that language, and not the story, is the most important
feature in literature.
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The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20"' Century Y
In talking about language a reference to Ferdinand Saussure (1857-1913)

and the Course in General Linguistics (1916), a work edited and completed
from lecture notes by his students after his death, is unavoidable. He was
the first linguist to question the goal of the study of linguistics. He moved
from the study of the genealogy of the changes in word and grammar over
time to the exploration of language as a social phenomenon. He distinguishes
‘langue’, that is, language as a particular structured system, from ‘parole’,
which refers to a specific utterance or speech act. Furthermore, he formulates
the principle that there are no positive signs in language. This principle will
be crucial for the development of structuralism and post-structuralism. The
literature produced before Saussure used language as a tool that would
enable the writer to portray reality as it could be physically observed. To use
a metaphor, language was a window on to the world. According to Saussure,
however, this can never be the case because language is made up of signs
owing their signification not to the world but to the difference to each other
in a network of signs that is the signifying system. For example in the traffic
system the sign red means ‘stop’ as opposed to green, meaning ‘go.’ Yet in a
different system, for example in banking, red means ‘debit’ whereas green
means ‘credit’. As can be observed from this example, the meaning of a sign
is not fixed, but depends on its oppositions within a particular system. In
other words, language is not divinely designed or naturally given; it is
socially constructed and therefore subject to changes in meaning. The
emphasis in Saussuran studies is not so much on the development of
language over time but on how language functions when used by people and
how people are made to function by language. His interests therefore
focused on finding the rules and structure of language governing speech
and writing.
There were others interested in the problem posed by a new view of
language. For instance, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) formulated the
idea that human reasoning was not so much an engagement with reality
and truth as a language game. Wittgenstein’s ambitious Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus (1922) set out to provide a solution to all the philosophical
problems. He tried to establish a clear demarcation between logic, on the
one hand, and empirical knowledge on the other, and to discern between
logical and empirical truths. In doing so he confronted the problem of
formulating a global conceptualisation about the relationship between
language and thought, and language and reality.
44
It is important to note that Wittgenstein, as were other philosophers of

language such as Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), was not as interested in a
linguistic approach to language as in a philosophical one. In this sense, his
insights into the nature of language were prompted by a dissatisfaction felt
and shared by Russell and the members of the Vienna Circle with the
imperfection of language. The fact that language disguises and misrepresents
thought and reality implies that a search within language for a logic that
goes beyond the superficial logic of its external structure is of paramount
importance. This hidden structure is, according to the Tractatus, logical.
That is, it is constituted by elements that have a direct connection with
reality. According to Wittgenstein, language has limitations marked by the
logical rules governing the combinations of signs. There is therefore a
distinction between what can be said with coherence and what cannot;
Wittgenstein thus attempts to establish what are genuine philosophical
problems and what are not. We can arrive at doubt only if a question can be
formulated, and a question can be posed only if there is an answer that can
be provided only if something can be said. Hence human knowledge and
experience are constrained by language: «The limits of the universe are the
limits of my languages
The importance of Wittgenstein is that he considered language not as a
mere system of representation of the world and of our knowledge of it, but
as social and communicative reality. His work was highly influential on the
logical positivism and philosophy of science of the Vienna Circle which at
their meeting discussed the Tractatus. Both Bertrand Russell and G.E.
Moore (1873-1958) often argued with Wittgenstein, whose work
fundamentally inspired the works of both. G.E. Moores insights into the
aesthetic constituted the basis for the formulation of the aesthetics of the
Bloomsbury group. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), whose main concern
was ontology or the study of being, placed an emphasis on language as the
vehicle through which the question of being could be explored. He was
particularly interested in poetry. In Being and Time (1927) he affirmed that
individuals do not speak through language, but that language speaks through
them. The impact of Heidegger, however, goes beyond the scope of this
course. His thinking has contributed to such different fields as existentialism
(Sartre, Ortega y Gassett) and post-structuralism (Derrida) among many
others. In literature his strongest impact can be traced in from the second
half of the twentieth century to the present day.
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The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20'" Century Y
T As can be seen in the preceeding paragraphs, language stops being - i

a transparent, reliable tool and becomes an issue in itself. Language is
mutable, ambiguous and unfixed in meaning; the suspicion that
language cannot be trusted in the search for truth and knowledge led
many writers to incorporate language itself into their writings, to
explore language and to analyse its implication in the subjectivity of
i the individual.
A subjectivity made up of language participates in the very nature of

language and, therefore, such a subjectivity ceases to be perceived as a
unitary normative self and, rather, becomes a fluid, discontinuous and
fragmented self. The psychological studies of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939),
leading to the foundation of the new science of psychoanalysis, corroborated
this view of the self as evolving and fragmented. Freud’s work is not isolated,
it should be understood as part of the general enquiry into the workings of
the mind found in the studies of among others Carl Jung (1875-1961), Henri
Bergson (1859-1941), and Williams James (1842-1910). James, brother of
the novelist Henry James, coined the term 'stream of consciousness’.
In Time and Freewill (1889), the French philosopher Henri Bergson
discusses the mind’s particular understanding of time. He opposes linear
time against what he calls ‘duration’, which refers to the way the mind
perceives the length of an experience according to the respective subjective
factors of appreciation of that experience in each individual. Bergson
considers that chronological time is the time of history and it is also the
time that marks our bodies in so far as we are living organisms. However,
the time of the mind is completely detached from chronological time.
‘Duration’ refers to those times in the life of an individual that are significant
for the individual. These times are not necessarily chronologically ordered
and they are, by their own definition, different for each individual. Such a
distinction will influence the representation of time in literature. The
implication of the time of the mind is that past and future co-exist in the
present; as Eliot argues in The Waste Land (1922) mental time is composed
of ‘desire’ and 'memory'. Bergson’s ideas were deeply influential on Wyndham
Lewis’s Time and Western Man (1927), which, also influenced by Nietzsche,
postulated the idea that continuity in time was impossible, seeing as it did
46
time as fragmented and people inhabiting time only in memory and

projection. These new perspectives on time explain some of the different
techniques in art —and in the novel in particular, such as an open-ended
finale or an abrupt beginning at any ordinary moment in the life of a
character, as is seen, for instance, in Joyce’s Ulysses.
¥ Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, which, significantly, was going to

be called «The Hours, » is a good example of what has just been
explained in relation to time. It contains pages of an experience being
considered by a character while only a second has elapsed in the
chronological time marked by the chimes of Big Ben. The importance
of the time of the mind and its influence on the representation of
reality is provided visually in this same novel by an image of an
aeroplane writing in the sky and observed by the different characters
in the novel. This event will last different lengths of subjective time for
different characters, in so much as the experience of looking at the
aeroplane has different connotations for each one.
Because ‘reality’ is shaped according to a mind's perception of time,

Bergson believed that facts and matter should be scrutinised by intuition in
order to achieve a complete vision of reality, since these facts and matter are
only the outer expression of reality. If Bergson was concerned with the way
in which the mind understands time, Freud was concerned with the mind’s
awareness of its own working. Freud started cooperating with Joseph Breuer
(1842-1905) on cases of hysteria. Based on Jean Charcot’s studies and on
practical cases that Freud witnessed during the time he spent in Paris, they
treated hysteria, allowing patients to disclose their memories under
hypnosis. Later on, hypnosis was somewhat discredited as a practical tool,
and the idea of 'free association’ for recovering memories was introduced
into their work. Psychoanalysis, a term coined in 1896, was born. In 1897
Freud broke his association with Breuer; he developed further his views on
psychoanalysis and the importance of infantile sexuality for the development
of the psyche. In 1910 he founded with Carl Jung the International
Psychoanalytical Association. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) Freud
argued that dreams are the expression of repressed desires and that the
47
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The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20 " Century Y
realm of repressed desires is the unconscious. Together with the conscious

it forms the totality of the psychic reality. Freud will be explored in some
depth in the following section, yet it is important to point out here the
significance of the discovery of the unconscious, which is the part of the
psyche unknown to the subject that, however, and according to Freud, is no
less operative in the psyche's reality than is consciousness. The unconscious
is full of memories and ideas from early childhood. These are 'repressed'
and made unconscious for various reasons, among them because they have
been forbidden. The existence of the unconscious is evidenced in dreams,
slips of the tongue, sudden and uncanny realisations of an event, etc.
Moreover, because of these unconscious drives the subject can no longer
be perceived as being a unitary normative self. The subject, after Freud, is
made up of multiple selves that could emerge depending on which part of
the unconscious becomes conscious. In other words, one can never be
totally sure of what one is because the unconscious implies that one could
be somebody else. This idea is echoed in the new literary interest to show
the drives, obsessions and compulsions motivating the actions of ordinary
people. After Freud, it is no longer satisfactory to present the outside
personalities of the characters and the surface expressions of their thoughts,
as was the case with realist fiction. Instead, the writer needs to address what
Henry James called 'psychological realism'; that is, to explore the hidden
drives and desires of the characters.
•f The main idea to take into account is that the unconscious implies
a part of the mind that, by its own nature, can never be totally known
by the subject. Therefore, the idea that the individual is totally in
control of his/her actions has to be abandoned since there is a part of
‘ the mind that, because it is not conscious, cannot be controlled by the
subject. '
1.3. The New Woman Enters the Stage
This period also witnessed developments in concepts of femininity

centred around discussions of the 'New Woman’. Although feminist thought
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T h e Discourse Between o r t h e Need to «Make It N e w » : Literature i n an Ever-changing World
had its origins in the Enlightenment, from the 1890s onwards it entered the
public imagination. Cartoons in Punch magazine, for example, featured
powerful and athletic women cycling or playing cricket and bullying
effeminate men at dinner parties, in contrast to the prevailing image of the
Victorian middle-class woman as a fragile figure in need of male protection
and uninvolved with public life. Mainly starting in the second half of the
nineteenth century and prompted by the public rise of the women's
movement, a vortex of discourses focused on women’s sexuality, on the so-
called 'Woman Question and on those forms of sexual behaviour that deviated
from the norm. Broadly speaking, this new interest on the part of scientific,
legal, moral and political discourses has at its source the women's movement,
the rise of the New Woman and the figures of the decadent and the dandy,
which challenged the monolithic ideological certainties regarding sexual
difference of mid-Victorian Britain.
The turn of the century was a time when, as Karl Miller points out, «Men
became women. Women became men. Gender and country were put in
doubt: the single life was found to harbour two sexes and two nations®
(Miller 1985: 209). The anxiety to restore patriarchal order in a godless
society provoked the appearance of the scientific 'expert' on sex, gender and
sexuality and his intervention in social, political and legal reform. Confronted
with the increasing blurring of sexual roles, scientists started to investigate
the differences between men and women in order to assert, through an
empirical observation that supposedly validated the objectivity of their
scientific conclusions, the very differences on which their studies were
based. Thus, through social science and anthropological discourses
emerging from Darwinism, such as, for example, in the works of Henry
Maine, John McLennan, Herbert Spencer, Lewis Henry Morgan, John
Lubbock, and J.J. Bachofen, patriarchy and its organisation of social
structures and gender roles were justified historically and evolutionarily by
means of re-examining the idea of the timeless role of women in society.
A much more optimistic point of view comes from a New Woman. Jane
Ellen Harrison (1850-1928) was a famous British Classicist and social
anthropologist who wrote influential works on the shift from matriarchy to
patriarchy in Asia Minor and Greece. She contributed to the matriarchal
discourse initiated by Bachofen in the 1860s. Harrison is inquisitive as to
the power structures between the sexes as they are exposed in myths and
49
she places particular emphasis in the «social shift from matrilineal to

patrilinear [sic] conditions)* (Harrison 1924: 68). In 1903 she published her
Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religions. Here, she argues for the
existence of a matriarchal origin in Greek religions and claims that the
ancient cult to the female figure has been forgotten and replaced by an
obsession with the patriarchal figure. She suggests that patriarchy sought to
destroy matrilineal families in order to introduce patriarchal laws of
marriage and narrowing concepts of femininity. She proposes that since
patriarchal mythology was the tool used to impose patriarchal structures,
research into matriarchal myths would help subvert patriarchy. Harrison
reinforces the thesis of the existence of a matriarchal culture by adding
further evidences to it; she also offers alternative modes of femininity and
masculinity:
The relation of these early matriarchal, husbandless goddesses... to the

male figures that accompany them is one altogether noble and womanly,
though perhaps not what the modern mind holds to be feminine. It seems to
halt somewhere half-way between Mother and Lover, with a touch of the
patron saint. Aloof from achievement themselves, they chose a local hero for
their own to inspire and protect. They ask of him, not that he should love or
adore, but that he should do great deeds... And as their glory is in the hero’s
high deeds, so their grace is his guerdon. With the coming of patriarchal
conditions this high companionship ends. (Harrison 1922: 273)
In this passage Harrison offers alternative concepts of gendered

subjectivity. She was certain that the power of the figure of the Great Mother
was just biding her time and that She would return triumphant. In Ancient
Art and Ritual, where she describes religious rites and Greek drama,
Harrison suggests that art develops from ritual: ritual is «swiftly and
completely transmuted into art» (Harrison 1913: 14) and that «they do not
seek to copy a fact but to reproduce, to re-enact an emotion» (Harrison
1913: 47). Harrison's work owed much to that of Freud. In the Preface to
Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1921) she presents Freud as a
background authority and acknowledges a debt to his work. In turn, Freud
grew interested in Harrison’s studies on the myth of the Great Mother and
in the theories she developed on totemistic ceremonies and groups. He
explored them in ‘Totem and Taboo' (1913). By the 1920s and 1930s
Bachofen’s and Harrison s arguments were very popular and of many artists
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including Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Andre Breton and the Surrealists
in Paris explored in their writings the figure of the Great Mother.
The question of gender roles and the Woman Question reached different
fields of knowledge. In biology and medical science works such as The
Evolution of Sex (1889) by Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson concluded,
along the lines of Spencer and Darwin, that the female human was a case of
arrested development. Gendering his study of the cell’s metabolic process,
Geddes argued that the position of women in society was not the result of
acquired social behaviour, but, on the contrary, that «it merely reflected the
economy of cell metabolism and its parallel psychic differentiation between
the sexes» (Conway 1973: 146). Basing his view on his scientific studies
Geddes affirmed that: «What was decided among the prehistory Protozoa
cannot be annulled by Act of Parliament» (Geddes 1901: 286), invalidating
in this manner women’s struggle for emancipation.
Freud in 1925 published a paper entitled 'Some Psychological
Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes’ in which,
for the first time, he distinguished between the respective psychological
developments in boys and girls. Up to that point he had studied girls'
development as analogous to boys’. Female sexuality is for Freud linked to
male sexuality and the concept of ‘penis envy.’ In this sense, the denouement
of the ‘castration complex' for women leads to the acknowledgement of «the
fact of her castration, and with it, too, the superiority of the male and her
own inferiority® (Freud 1991: 376). Rebellion against this situation causes
an abnormal development in woman whose 'penis envy’ leads her to a
‘masculine complex’ connected in Freud to female homosexuality. Because
«anatomy is destiny® Freud also thought the feminist struggle to be pointless:
We must not allow ourselves to be deflected from such conclusions by
the denials of the feminists, who are anxious to force us to regard the two
sexes as completely equal in position and worth.. (Freud 1991: 342)
Freud's biased perspective is expressed in the above statement, which
seems to imply that women are less valuable than and thus inferior to men.
Women, according to Freud’s point of view, were pursuing an impossible
quest, for lies in the biology of the sexes that the superego of men predisposes
them to undertake the most challenging tasks. Women, on the other hand,
because of their less strongly formed superego, are capricious and unreliable
51.
The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 2 0 th Century Y
«social beings» (Freud 1991: 377). A few years later he published ‘Female
Sexuality’ (1931) which expanded on the ideas expressed in the earlier paper.
Maybe because of his later realisation of a possibly different psychological
development, Freuds point of view on the subject of female sexuality
remains hesitant and dubious, and he never did come to a clear conclusion
on the subject. Moreover, as Freud himself remarks, «pure masculinity and
femininity remain theoretical constructions of uncertain content» (Freud
1991: 342). Therefore, the respective outcomes of neither the Oedipus
complex nor the castration complex are ever totally resolved. The primal
bisexual disposition remains in the unconscious of both girls and boys.
Bisexuality, stronger in girls than in boys due to the girls’ lack of an
inmediately visible organ of recognition, remains in adulthood and, Freud
argues, should be balanced in the individual towards the characteristics of
the ideal woman. Therefore, if biology dooms women to an inferior position,
the primitive bisexual disposition opens a door to the convergence of the
sexes.
By perpetuating stereotypes of masculinity and femininity in his theory

of the Oedipus complex, Freud created a debate. His 'feminist' colleagues,
Karen Horney and Helene Deutsch, among others, while not denying the
value of psychoanalytical theory, challenged Freud’s characterisation of
femininity. In particular, Horney, in 1924, opened what came to be known as
the Freud-Jones debate. She argued that masculine narcissism «was
responsible for the assumption that the female feels her genital to be
inferior® (Roith 1992: 161). In response to her, Freud wrote ‘Femininity’
(1933), where he comes to the definition of femininity as a single unique
position for ‘normal’ sexuality in women and he establishes homosexuality
in women as a ‘masculine complex'. The importance of Freud's sexual
discourse during the interwar period lies in the fact that he left most
questions about female sexuality unanswered; for example, ‘pure femininity'
remains a 'theoretical construction'.
Perhaps the field of knowledge that assumed special relevance in relation

to sex, gender, and sexuality was the new science of sexology. Sexual scandals
and an epidemic of syphilis caused the questioning of the validity of Victorian
morals and values, while provoking in people anxiety and fear. This resulted
in emphasis on the importance of the family as a safeguard against sexual
decadence, and in a craving for legislative restrictions. Thus, the discourse
52
on sexuality was transferred from the public arena to the household. Oscar
Wilde’s trial and conviction in 1895, for example, focused public attention
on the emerging homosexuality while provoking its medicalisation. With
the purpose of establishing the borderline between acceptable and abhorrent
behaviour, science and civil order allied.
The literature of sexology of the period displays this anxiety. Although
for many years the nineteenth-century theorists had denied women any
sexual tendencies, paradoxically, the only approach that scientific discourse
was able to undertake was precisely solely related to her sex, to such an
extent that as Susan Kingsley Kent has argued society came to regard
women as «the Sex» (Kent 1990: 32). Words such as 'feminism' and
'homosexuality’ were used now for the first time.
The term ‘New Woman’ was born in 1894 after many attempts to name
the second generation of feminist women:
Two novelists, the feminist Sara Grand and the anti-feminist Ouida,
acted as godmothers, while Punch played the role of officiating clergyman
and performed the ceremony within its pages. (Jordan 1983: 19)
'New Woman’ refers to those middle-upper class women who «had
profited from the educational and vocational opportunities won by the
pioneer feminists of the sixties [1860s]» (Jordan 1983: 19). The most
prominent change, then, was their increased presence in the public arena.
Whereas the lives of most nineteenth-century women, especially middle-
class women, tended to revolve around home life, modern women ventured
into jobs, politics and culture outside the domestic realm. By the 1920s
educated women wanted access not only to the so-called male professions
but also demanded «access to the broader world of male opportunity »
(Newton 1984: 564) and night life. Activities seen as proper to the masculine
world such as drinki ng or smoking became symbols of women's emancipation.
. ' These women «rejected traditional feminine clothing» (Newton 1984: 564)
indicating with this gesture a resoluteness to break free from traditional
codes of gender behaviour.
The New Woman was far from being a category stable and free of
contradictions and was often, even among the suffragette circles, viewed with
suspicion and fear because her presence threatened and challenged patriarchy.
A powerful and attractive figure, frighteningly in the ascendant, the New
53
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Woman attempted a re-conceptualisation of womanhood and produced a

discourse on female sexuality contradicting the prevailing idea of femininity.
Patriarchy’s adverse reaction can be observed even in liberal treatises such as
Edward Carpenters The Intermediate Sex (1914) which opens with a reference
to the New Woman and the suggestion that the masculinisation of women
was the result of the attitude of these independent women:
In late years (and since the arrival of the New Woman amongst us) many
things in the relation of men and women to each other have altered, or at
any rate become clearer... If the modern woman is a little more masculine in
some ways than her predecessor, the modern man (it is to be hoped), while
by no means effeminate, is a little more sensitive in temperament and artistic
in feeling than the original John Bull. (Carpenter 1914: 114)
Furthermore, Carpenters passage links the New Woman with
homosexuality. This connection, present in Freud, was also used in some
reactionary literature questioning the morality as well as the physical and
psychic health of these women. The correlation between masculinisation,
homosexuality and the New Woman aimed to counterbalance the increasing
popularity the New Woman was gaining, especially among middle and
upper class women. By making the New Woman an androgynous figure,
dominant discourse was attempting to portray her as a pitiful, unsatisfied
and asexual woman. In fact, this misogynist discourse provided the basis for
feminist and lesbian discourses that, at the beginning of the twentieth
century, used her image as a code to make relative and, therefore, challenge
and defy patriarchal gender roles. Significantly, the characteristics of the
New Woman are used in the fiction of the turn of the century and interwar
period, such as Virginia Woolf's Night and Day (1919), as codified signs for
providing extra information about strong female characters.
In Woman and Her Place in a Free Society (1894) Carpenter denounced
the objectification of women by patriarchy. He equated private property
with the submission of women to men: «Man's craze for property and
individual ownership... culminated perhaps not unnaturally in woman —
his most precious and beloved object» (Carpenter 1894: 10). Following
Havelock Ellis’s 'angel-idiot' theory which argued that woman had been
trapped in the intersection between an angel and an idiot, Carpenter argued
that the construction of femininity was something completely alien to
women. The objectification of woman caused, according to Carpenter, a
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The Discourse Between or the Need to «Make It News: Literature in an Ever-changing World
lack of understanding between the sexes. His consideration of female

sexuality as a male construct and the need for understanding between the
sexes was shared by many feminists of the period. Olive Schreiner's point of
view, for instance, was that man and woman were bound together and that
it was a mistake to conceptualise the advance of the one without the other
(Schreiner 1993: 308-317).
Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) was born in South Africa. She travelled to
Britain with the objective of becoming a doctor, and began attending lectures
at medical school in London. Olive also began going to socialist meetings.
During this time she became friends with leading radicals such as Edward
Carpenter, Eleanor Marx and Bruce Glasier. Her novel Story of an African
Fann was published in 1883: the book was praised by feminists who
approved of the strong heroine who controls her own destiny. Soon after the
novel was published Schreiner developed an intimate relationship with the
sexologist Havelock Ellis. They shared the same views on sexuality, free
love, marriage, the emancipation of women, sexual equality, and birth
control. Although they often lived a long way apart, they wrote letters to
each other for the next thirty-six years. She also wrote two collections of
short stories, Dreams (1891) and Dream Life and Real Life (1893) but the two
novels she was working on at the time, From Man to Man and Undine, were
not published until after her death.
In 1889 Schreiner returned to South Africa, where she married Samuel
Cronwright in 1894. Her only child died sixteen hours after birth. Schreiner
continued to write and her next book, Trooper Peter Halkett of Mashonaland
(1897) was a strong attack on imperialism and British racism in South
Africa. However, as a pacifist, Schreiner was unwilling to give her full
support to the armed rising that led to the Boer War in 1899. Woman and
Labour was published in 1911: it was immediately acclaimed as an important
statement on feminis, and had a major influence on a large number of young
women. A strong supporter of universal suffrage, Schreiner argued that the
vote was «a weapon, by which the weak may be able to defend themselves
against the strong, the poor against the weak». On the outbreak of the First
World War Schreiner moved back to Britain. Over the next four years she
was active in the peace movement and worked closely with organisations
such as the Union of Democratic Control and the Non-Conscription
Fellowship. In September 1920 Olive Schreiner returned to South Africa,
where she died in December that same year.
55
Another writer of the period, Victoria Cross, provided in 'Theodora: A

Fragment' (1895) an image of the two protagonists, a man and a woman,
together entering a room: «We were then face to face with a door which she
opened, and we both passed over the threshold together® (Cross 1993: 14).
The fact that it is the woman who opens the door suggests the importance of
the New Woman and gives full meaning to Carpenters words: «since the
arrival of the New Woman among us», 'She' is opening the door to a new
world in which both will be «as two men-friends or two women-friends might
be, open and equal comrades in the great battle of life® (Carpenter 1894: 27).
The New Woman defied patriarchy by looking for new narratives that
would escape from the tragic endings of the Victorian novel written by
women. Their narratives «represent female desire as a creative force in
artistic imagination as well as in biological reproduction® (Showalter 1993:
xi). As Carpenter put it, sex in woman «may more properly be termed a
constructive instinct® (Carpenter 1894: 32). In order to make use of this
creative force advantageously woman should free herself from the
impositions of patriarchal stereotypes: «The 'lady', the household drudge,
and the prostitute® (Carpenter 1894: 12). For this reason, the female
protagonist in Shreiner’s short story ‘Life’s Gifts’ «laugh[s] in her sleep®
(Schreiner 1993: 317), having renounced the gift of love in favour of the gift
of freedom.
If the outbreak of the First World War supposed a massive incorporation
of women into the labour force, its aftermath brought about an impasse in
the women's struggle. Propaganda launched by the government was aimed
at bringing women back to their homes, their families and their husbands.
Yet, in apparent paradox, the scientific discourse on sexuality reached the
general public in the 1920s. Sexology and psychology started to be available
to the general public through the publication of manuals such as Marie
Stopes’s Married Love (1918) or Helena Wright's The Sex Factor in Marriage
(1930). Marie Stopes (1880-1958) always intended that sexual ecstasy should
be restricted to marital union, but despite her intentions she invited
controversy because of her explicit approach to the anatomy of sexual
relations and her frank advocacy of the practice of birth control. Her studies
as a botanist and palaeontologist took her to London and Munich, then on
to Manchester where she became the first female member of the science
faculty at the university. But it was her married life that inspired her devotion
56
to sexual education. Stopes’s first marriage was unconsummated so it was

then annulled in 1916, and she found herself researching the subject. This
fascination led to her first book Mamed Love, published in the year she
married Humphrey Verdon Roe. A second book called Wise Parenthood
closely followed Married Love and she became an overnight success,
swamped with requests for birth control advice. With her career established,
she wrote more books and edited the journal Birth Control News.
The impact of the publication of Married Love and The Sex Factor in
Marriage was twofold. On the one hand, by stressing the importance of sex
for the couple, by proving information on family planning and by being a
source of information concerning contraceptive methods, these works were
breaking the taboo around sex, a taboo inherited from the Victorians. On
the other hand, popularising the works of Richard Krafft-Ebing, Havelock
Ellis and Freud among others, these works established the differences
between ‘normal’ and 'abnormal' sexual behaviour.
k Feminism in the period between the wars engaged in learning the

meaning of citizenship and in handling the scientific discoveries and ‘
technical advances that so greatly affected women's lives.
IIUJ Oscar Wilde's play deals with some of these issues raised in
relation to what was called «the woman questions. In fact, his
conviction and imprisonment was very much based on several studies
on sex and sexuality considered of importance in his lifetime. While
reading the text, could your identify these new ideas either implicitly
or explicitly present in The Importance of Being Ernest ?
2. TEXT ANALYSIS: OSCAR WILDE’S EARNESTNESS TO BREAK

FREE
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) grew up in Dublin, where his parents, Sir

William and Lady Jane Francesca Wilde, were celebrities. William Wilde
57
was a prominent eye and ear surgeon who wrote on his speciality numerous
volumes that became textbooks for succeeding decades. He also wrote travel
guides, histories and poems. He was a talented conversationalist, and led a
busy and active social life in the midst of Dublin's elite. Lady Wilde was a
noteworthy agitator for Irish independence (the 'Green Movement'), a
revolutionary poet, critic and early advocate of women’s liberation. She was
a self-proclaimed genius and a witty talker. Lady Wilde preferred waking in
the afternoon, affected an aversion to the sun, had a passion for classical
verse, and entertained the literati by exaggerating truth and myth to produce
remarkable and endless stories. Yeats said: «When one listens to [Lady
Wilde] and remembers that Sir William Wilde was in his day a famous
raconteur, one finds it in no way wonderful that Oscar Wilde should be the
most finished talker of our time» (Coakley 1995: 75).
After Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated in classics, Oscar Wilde

attended Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied with Ruskin and
Pater. As a disciple of Walter Pater, he founded the Aesthetic movement,
which advocated 'art for art’s sake’, as has already been mentioned. Yeats, in
his reminiscence of Wilde, recalls him speaking of Pater’s Studies in the
History of the Renaissance. Yeats overheard Wilde talking with another man,
and in a slow, carefully modulated voice, Wilde was saying:
It is my golden book; I never travel anywhere without it; but it is the very
flower of decadence, the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it
was written. (Norton 2000: 2129)
During his imprisonment, Wilde referred to The History of the Renaissance

(in De Profundis, 1905) as «that book which had such a strange influence
over my life». He was by then already characterised by his aesthetic
idiosyncrasies such as wearing his hair long, dressing colourfully, and
carrying flowers while lecturing, qualities that Gilbert and Sullivan parodied
in the operetta Patience (1881).
In 1882, Wilde, short of funds, embarked on a lecture tour of the United

States. At each stop, he preached the gospel of Aestheticism, the ‘Cult of the
Artificial’, which rejected the social conception of the natural. Fully playing
the role of the Aesthete, dressed as a dandy, he entered America with one of
his famous aphorisms. When, queried by Customs officials he said: «I have
58
nothing to declare ... except my genius. » Back in England and after his
marriage to Constance Lloyd in 1884, Wilde became the editor of the
magazine Woman’s World. In 1888 he published The Happy Prince and Other
Tales, a collection of original fairy tales. After five years he left the magazine
and started publishing provocative essays largely dealing with the self-
explanatory Art for Art’s Sake. His book Intentions, 1891) contained essays
titled 'The Decay of Lying'; ‘The Critic as Artist’; ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison'; and
‘The Truth of Masks’. They were written in the form of dialogues between a
new Plato and his young disciples, an intellectual exercise that the author
soon began to live out. The next years saw the height of his fame as he
published and produced witty and scandalous plays such as Lady
Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893) and An Ideal
Husband (1895). Wilde took the London stage by storm with his witty,
epigrammatic style, insolent ease of utterance and suave urbanity. Wilde
described Lady Windermere’s Fan as «one of those modern drawing-room
plays with pink lampshades. » Its combination of polished social drama and
coruscating witty dialogue was repeated in 1895 in the two hits he had
simultaneously on the London stage, An Ideal Husband and The Importance
of Being Earnest.
In 1891, shortly after publication of his only novel, The Picture of Dorian
Gray, he had fallen in love with a young aristocrat named Lord Alfred
Douglas (Wilde at this time had two sons from his marriage). The charming
but temperamental Douglas (whom he called ‘Bosie’) was at the time an
undergraduate at Oxford. Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry,
publicly accused Wilde of homosexuality by leaving a card at Wilde’s club
addressed: «To Oscar Wilde posing as a Somdomite» (it was a spelling error,
he meant ‘sodomite.’). Wilde, understanding that the Marquess of
Queensberry meant 'sodomite,' sued for libel. Wilde lost and left himself
open to criminal prosecution. His successful career ended in criminal
prosecution for sodomy, in what was called the trial of the century. The
Picture of Dorian Gray was used as evidence against him, and after a series
of trials he received a sentence of two years. He was sent to Wandsworth
Prison in November 1895 and was subsequently transferred to Reading
Gaol. The prison conditions were truly severe. One of Britain’s periodic
prison reform initiatives was launched just after his two-year sentence
ended. Of his time as a prisoner he wrote in The Ballad of Reading Gaol
(1898):
59
I never saw a man who looked

With such a wistful eye
Under the little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky.
All that we know who lie in gaol
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.
(Web: oscar_wilde, the ballad of reading gaol)
On leaving prison, bankrupt and ruined in health, he went to Paris,

where he settled, bitter and broken. He lived for three more years, mostly
under the assumed name of ‘Sebastian Melmoth', (the name of his favourite
martyr from Melmoth the Wanderer, a novel written by his great-uncle,
Charles Maturin, in 1820), depending on others for support. His family had
abandoned him and his wife changed her name and that of their sons to
Holland. On 30 November 1900, at the age of forty-six, Wilde died of cerebral
meningitis at the Hotel D’Alsace. He was buried at Bagneaux. He is now
buried in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
2.1. Approaching Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) is Oscar Wildes most lasting

play, a masterpiece of modern comedy. More than a century later, it still
strikes a wonderful balance between being a respected and studied piece of
literature and a favourite with audiences. Although Wilde liked critical
success, he preferred financial success since he was always short of money
because of his extravagant behaviour. It appears from his letters that he
wrote The Importance of Being Earnest for money, as the following extract
from a letter to his producer, George Alexander, testifies:
I think an amusing thing with lots of fun and wit might be made. If you
think so too... do let me know and send me £150. If when the play is finished,
you think it too slight, you have the £150 back. In the meantime, I am so
pressed for money that I don’t know what to do. Of course I am extravagant.
You have always been a good wise friend to me, so think what you can do.
(Wilde, Letters 359)
60
He wrote the play in three weeks, and sent it to George Alexander, who
did not like it and opted not to produce it. But the terrible failure of Henry
James’s play Guy Domville shortly after Wilde sent him The. Importance of
Being Earnest convinced Alexander that they needed another play to fill the
gap. Wildes play was put on at the St James’s and it was a spectacular
success. Indeed, as Andrew Sanders acknowledges: «the play has been
accorded an unchallenged canonical status which is witnessed by its
probably being the most quoted play in the English language after Hamlet. »
(Sanders 1994: 477-8).
The play consists of a tension between truth and falsehood, which are
given equal value and appear, in the end, to be mere rhetorical strategies.
The play also contains plays on language and meaning. Many critics have
noted the extraordinarily verbal nature of this play. Wilde subordinated
every other dramatic element to dialogue for its own sake and create a verbal
universe in which the characters are determined by the kind of things they
say, with the plot nothing but a succession of opportunities to say them. It
is remarkable for Wilde's use of aphorisms (a sentence containing a wise or
witty comment): «In married life three is company and two none»; «All
women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s
his».
Filled with wit and wisdom, The Importance of Being Earnest tells the
tale of Jack Worthing (a respectable provincial Justice of the Peace) and
Algernon Moncrieff. Both young men have taken to bending the truth in
order to add a dash of excitement to their lives. Jack has invented an
imaginary brother, Ernest, whom he uses as an excuse to escape from his
dull home in the country and to justify his frequent trips to his bachelor
rooms up in London. Algernon uses a similar technique, only in reverse.
His imaginary friend, Bunbury, provides a convenient and frequent excuse
for taking excursions in the country. Since the reader/audience finds no
description of the Dramatis personae at the beginning of the play, the
reader/audience has to accept the disguises. However, Jack’s and Algernon’s
deceptions eventually cross paths, resulting in a series of crises that
threaten to spoil their romantic pursuits: Jack of his love Gwendolen
Fairfax and Algernon of his sweetheart Cecily Cardew. The play, as are
most farces, is constructed on a series of secrets; the action arises from
disclosure or the fear of disclosure. Unlike most farces, however, deception
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The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20’" Century
and deceit in The. Importance of Being Earnest are given relatively light
moral value. The lies Jack and Algernon tell at the beginning, which the
reader /audience thinks are faintly immoral, actually turn out to be the real
truth of the situation.
im You can know whether you have read a play attentively when you
are able to define each main character. Can you provide three defining
characteristics for the protagonists of the play? Can you say which
scenes in the play led you to your opinion of these characters?
The play was subtitled A Trivial Comedy for Serious People and in this
context it is remarkable that the word 'serious' appears seventeen times,
whereas the word 'trivial' appears only three times (including twice as
'triviality'): «one must be serious about something, if one wants to have any
amusement in life ... You [Jack] have such an absolutely trivial nature».
This makes the audience wonder whether this means that the play is more
'serious' than 'trivial'. Famous aphorisms are, for example, «The General
was essentially a man of peace, except in his domestic life,» (Act III) and
«Divorces are made in Heaven» (Act III). Wilde is relying upon his audience’s
familiarity with Restoration comedy (1660-1700) and later comedy of
manners (social habits and customs), especially those of the upper classes
(Congreve and Sheridan, or Austen in the novel). The picaresque Jack says
he was 'found' which is a reference to Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel History of
Tom Jones, a Foundling and is confirmed later on in the play by Lady
Bracknell who wonders whether Jack will be 'another Tom'. This is why,
referring both to An Ideal Husband and to The Importance of Being Earnest,
Sanders explains:
The real achievement of these plays lies neither in their temporary
notoriety, nor really in their polished and anti-sentimental surfaces, but in
their undercurrents of boredom, disillusion, alienation and, occasionally,
real feeling. In both, despite their delightful evocations of flippancy and
snobbery and despite their abrupt shifts in attitudes and judgments, Wilde
triumphed in capturing a fluid, intensely funny, mood of ‘irresponsibility’
which challenges all pretension except that of the artifice of the plays
themselves. (Sanders 1994: 477-8)
62
The stage at the time presented what was called 'Society Drama,’ that
is, plays of modern life set in the rarefied world of the upper classes. These
plays could be witty and frivolous light comedies; or they could be
ponderous dramatic treatises on difficult social issues, most often the
, sexual 'double standard’ and the ‘problem’ of the 'fallen woman.’ We hear
: a parodic echo of such plays when Jack Worthing (played by Alexander),
. in the final act of The Importance of Being Earnest, says of Miss Prism
i (who he mistakenly believes to be his long-lost and unmarried mother),
«who has the right to cast a stone against one who has suffered? Cannot
repentance wipe out an act of folly? Why should there be one law for men
and another for women?» (Act III). Of course, Wilde pokes fun at the
institution of marriage, which he saw as a practice surrounded by hypocrisy
and absurdity.
Although the play ends happily, The Importance of Being Earnest

nevertheless leaves the audience under the impression that marriage and
social values are often tied together in destructive ways. Ultimately, the
aristocracy does not see marriage as an organ of love, but rather as a tool for
achieving or sustaining social stature. While Lady Bracknell is interviewing
Jack in Act III, she asks him what his income is:
Jack: Between seven and eight thousand a year.

Lady Bracknell: (makes a note in her book) In land, or in investments?
Jack: In investments, chiefly.
Lady Bracknell: That is satisfactory. What between the duties expected
of one during one’s lifetime and the duties exacted from one after one’s
death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position
and prevents one from keeping it up. That’s all that can be said about land.
(Act III)
i
Lady Bracknell is as opposed to the ownership of large stretches of
private property as is the most ardent socialist, but this does not mean that
she is against the class system. Quite the contrary: she is devoted to
preserving the privileges enjoyed by the upper classes, and rejects Jack
because of his possible lower-class origins without feeling any pangs of
conscience. This is the major theme of the play.
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The Need to M a k e it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20"‘ Century Y
IWJ Gender roles are then exposed as seriously threatened at the same
time as consumerist values seem to redefine and resettle the patriarchal
system
Wilde’s aim in writing The Importance of Being Earnest was anti-morality, a

revision of Victorian priorities: «that we should treat all the trivial things of life
seriously and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.»
His inversion of priorities is delightful as an antidote to Victorian sincerity and
earnestness, but ultimately is limited by its very sense of opposition: not an
alternative morality, but rather anti-morality. This power to subvert is the
feature that Robert Barnard has praised in his Short History of English Literature-.
On the surface the play is drawing-room comedy raised to the point of
fantasy: Wilde takes certain literary conventions (babies mixed up at birth,
girls with impossibly romantic dreams about the man they will many,
people with double identities and so on) and he pushes them into the realm
of absurdity. But always, even at its most preposterous, there is an undertow
of reality, a tang of wildly unorthodox social comment and above all a desire
to shoot down Victorian morality. (Barnard 1984: 186-7)
Among the comic techniques Wilde employs we should highlight his use
of incongruity (that is, there exists a great distance between what the
audience expects to happen and what actually happens) and timing (timing
achieved both through the characters’ use of pauses and also through Wilde’s
finding of the right moment to insert a comic motif).
Wilde also uses flippant wit (although sometimes, his wit is not really
flippant yet has a purpose) such as, for example, Algernon’s line «All women
become like their mothers». One of the ways Wilde's wit manifests itself is
in puns (plays on words), like the one in the title, for running throughout
the entire play is the double meaning behind the word earnest, which
functions homonymously both as a male name and as an adjective describing
seriousness.
CECILY: You must not laugh at me, darling, but it had always been a
girlish dream of mine to love some one whose name was Ernest... There is
something in that name that seems to inspire absolute confidence. I pity any
poor married woman whose husband is not called Ernest (Act III)
64
T h e Discourse Between or the Need to «Make It N e w » : Literature i n an Ever-changing World
tU The play has often been described as a brilliant satire (satire uses
comedy not as an end in itself but as a weapon to deride) and praised
for its use of parody based on aphorisms, often to do with marriage
(Algernons line that 'Divorces are made in Heaven’). These aphorisms,
also called epigrams, mock our own preconceived ideas about
marriage, which is generally viewed as a sacrosanct institution.
The clearest example of parody occurs when Gwendolen states that the
‘ home is «the proper sphere for the man,» which is of course a reversal of
one of the most striking maxims of the time. There is also irony in Jack
saying that telling the truth is a «terrible thing» and in Lady Bracknell telling
Jack to «acquire some relations as soon as possible, » not knowing that one
of them will be herself. Role-playing and reversal of roles, as well as intrigue,
have traditionally been an aid to comedy.
One final technique Wilde employs in this comedy is the absurd, as when
Algernon states «one cannot forget that one is married». Overall, The
Importance of Being Earnest has many goals. It pokes fun at the aristocracy,
the literary world, marriage, English manners and customs, women, men,
‘ love, religion, and all sorts of other staples of modern society. Furthermore,
it does so in a lighthearted fashion. But the comic in its most brilliant aspect
uses laughter as an end in itself and the comic in Wilde's play uses laughter
often merely as an end in itself. The audience often finds that the play's
reason for being is not located outside the play but inside since it is often
self-referential —which is what makes Wilde a precursor of Beckett
(Endgame, Waiting for Godot and Watt) and Stoppard (The Real Inspector
I Hound).
IbU Wilde’s careful use of dialogue contributes to atmosphere and

moves action forward. In this play most of the archetypical in
characters and in situations is build up through language rather than
stage directions, could you think of instances where stage directions
overtake the cascade of words that constitute the dialogues in the
play?
65
Gender roles are then exposed as seriously threatened at the same time
as consumerist values seem to redefine and resettle the patriarchal system.
3. ACTIVITIES
3.1. Test yourself
1. Briefly explain the immediate consequences of Darwin's theories.

2. Briefly explain Nietzsches concept of eternal recurrence and its
relation to literary changes.
3. What is the main consequence of the new approach to language
started by Saussure?
4. Briefly explain the importance of Freuds theory of the unconscious
and the literary changes this discovery brought about.
5. What is meant by the term 'New Woman'?
6. Find examples from the play for each of the techniques of comedy
(that appear at the end of the section on Wilde) that are said to be
used in The Importance of Being Earnest.
7. Define satire. What/who can be the objects (called 'butts’) of satire?
What do you think Wilde satirises?
8. How are women categorized in the play? In other words, what moral
or physical features serve to perceive them as characters embodying
different values?
9. Given that characterisation in this play is not performed by a narrator,
how does Wilde create his characters? How are they fleshed out?
Analyse two or three characters and show how Wilde provides insights
into their personalities.
3.2. Overview questions
1. Is The Importance of Being Earnest a play about 'earnestness' or

‘dishonesty’?
66
2. Why is Oscar Wildes play a key text to explain the changes taking
place in England at the turn of the last century?
‘ 3.3. Explore
1. The Importance of Being Earnest explores the dynamics confronting

an agonizing social system based on the aristocratic landownership
and the new and emergent middle class and its capitalistic views.
Discuss.
2. Read the following extract from Oliver Schreiners short story 'Three
Dreams in a Desert’ and answer the questions below:
And I awoke: and all about me was the yellow afternoon light, the sinking
sun lit up the fingers of the milk bushes; and my horse stood by me quietly
feeding. And I turned on my side and I watched the ants run by thousands
in the red sand. I thought I would go on my way now —the afternoon was
cooler. Then a drowsiness crept over me again and I laid back my head and
fell asleep.
And I dreamed a dream.
I dreamed I saw a land. And on the hills walked brave women and brave
men, hand in hand. And they looked into each other’s eyes and they were not
afraid.
And I saw the women also hold each other's hands.
And I said to him beside me, 'What place is this?’
And he said, ‘This is heaven’.
And I said, 'Where is it?’
And he answered, 'On earth’.
And I said, 'When shall these things be?’
And he answered, 'IN THE FUTURE.’
And I awoke and all about me was the sunset light; and on the low hills
the sun lay and a delicious coolness had crept over everything; and the ants
were going slowly home. And I walked towards my horse, who stood quietly
feeding. Then the sun passed down behind the hills; but I knew that the next
day he would rise again.
(Shreiner in Smith 1992: 280-1)) '
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The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of t h e 20"‘ Century
a) Why is the narrative talking about a dream?

b) What are the implications brought about by the image of men and
women hand in hand walking together? '
c) Why is heaven placed in the future?
d) Would you say that this short story is politically biased?
e) The extract is the third dream of the number referred to in the title.
From the evidence of this dream and what has been studied in the
Unit, could you explain the symbolism of the title?
f) Would you say that any woman character in Wildes play could have
had this dream?
g) Is this text dated?
3.4. Key terms
— Absurd
— Ambiguity
— Avant garde
— City
— Comedy
— Darwinism
— Drama
— Incongruity
— Machine
— Modern
— New Woman
— Parody
— Play
— Pun
— Real reality
— Time
— Unconscious
68
4 . BIBLIOGRAPHY
General bibliography
Q Abrams, M.H., ed. 1993. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th Edition, Vol..
II. New York: W.W. Norton.
0'
Barnard, Robert. 1984. Short History of English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge
' University Press.
Childs, Peter. 2001. Modernism. London: Routledge.
, Ellman, Richard. 1988. Oscar Wilde. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Ledger, Sally and Roger Luckhurst (eds.): The Fin de Siecle: A Reader in Cultural
History c. 1880-1900. Oxford: O.U.P., 2000.
Raby, Peter. 1995. The Importance of Being Earnest: A Reader’s Companion. New
York: Twayne Publishers.
Richardson, Lee Anne M.: The New Woman and Colonial Adventure Fiction in
Victorian Britain: Gender, Genre and Empire. Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 2006.
‘ Showalter, Elaine: Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle. London:
Bloomsbury, 1991.
, Web Sites
— Kipling, ‘The White Man’s Burden’ and British (and US) Imperialism:
http://www.boondocksnet.com/kipling7index.html
‘- — Oscar Wilde, the ballad of reading gaol:
http://www.classicbookshelf.com/library/oscar_wilde/the_ballad_of_reading_
gaol/0/
, — The Importance of Being Earnest:
http://www.pgileirdata.org/html/pgil_library/classics/Wilde, Oscar/Earnest03.
. htm
5 -— Fin de Siecle: The 1890s: :
' http://1890s.com
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The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20”' Century Y
Oscar Wilde
Ellmann, Richard: Oscar Wilde. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988.

Gagnier, Regenia: Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986.
Raby, Peter: Oscar Wilde. Cambridge: C.U.P., 1988.
Raby, Peter (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. Cambridge: C.U.P.,
1997.
Sandulescu, C. George (ed.): Rediscovering Oscar Wilde. Gerrards Cross: Colin
Smythe, 1994.
Sloan, John: Oscar Wilde. Oxford: O.U.P., 2003.
Wilde, Oscar. 1959. The Importance of Being Earnest. Great Neck, New York: Barron's
Educational Series.
— 1989. Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. New York: Harper. .
— 1995. The Picture of Dorian Gray. New York: Barnes and Noble,
Worth, Katherine: Oscar Wilde. New York: Grove Press, 1984.
Web Sites
— Oscar Wilde (general aspects):

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/wilde/wildeov.html
— The Official Homepage of Oscar Wilde (compiled by his grandson, Merlin
Holland):
http://www.cmgworlwide.com/historic/wilde/
— Oscar Wilde: Bibliography and Works:
http://online-literature.com/wilde/
— The Importance of Being Earnest:
http://www.pgileirdata.org/html/pgil_library/classics/Wilde,Oscar/Earnest03.
htm
70
Unit 2
«THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN»: DIFFERENT

APPROACHES TO IMPERIALISM IN LITERATURE
F Program
\
1. Presentation: 'Dr Livingstone, I Presume?’
2. Text Analysis IS
2.1. An Act of Self Discovering: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and
the Congo Experience ,
2.2. E.M. Forster’s Web of Misunderstandings: A Passage to India
3. Activities IES
4. Bibliography PHY
Learning outcomes
— To analyze the relationship between empire and literature.

—■ To discern the way in which narratives written in England have shaped,
supported or undermined the concept of British imperialism.
— To read with a critical and open mind, allowing for the experience of
'the other’ to take place in oneself.
— To examine Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and E.M. Forster’s A
Passage to India as representative texts of this specific time and
spirit.
k j
1. PRESENTATION: 'DR LIVINGSTONE, I PRESUME’?
This Unit sets out to explore the relationship between empire and
literature, elaborating on the question of Empire in relation to narratives
written in England which have shaped, supported or undermined the
concept of British imperialism.
To do so two different accounts of British imperial experience will be
explored. Written in different moments in time and focusing on different
locations, Africa and India, both narratives show concerns surrounding
notions of home, nation, race, identity, and belonging. In doing so, other
objectives brought up by topics related to fiction, such as language and
form, will come to the fore, as will nationality, subjectivity, history, sexuality,
gender, and social class.
73
In dealing with Empire and colonial issues it is always important to

acknowledge the engrossing contribution made by the so-called Colonial
and Post-Colonial Studies, particularly, but not necessarily exclusively, by
thinkers such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Stuart Hall, who have
intensively criticised European and American imperialism. There are many
others, such as Frantz Fanon or Kuan-Hsing Chen, who, instead of looking
at outside powers of colonialism, have focused on individuals and on
language to detect the particular and complex questions raised by colonialism
and post-colonialism as well as culture.
‘ (p Whereas the contribution of these authors and many others is

acknowledged and generally supports the main line of the argument
presented here, it is impossible in a course such as this to deal in depth
- with the difficult and complex sets of ideas each presents. Therefore
those interested in specific subjects should use the bibliography to
find further information.
After centuries of neglect, Europeans began to expand their influence

into Africa. During the nineteenth century there was a full-grown land
seizure in Africa by the European powers. Africa became a primary source
of trade after 1880. This came to be called 'the scramble for Africa.'
There are many reasons why this occurred. According to Muriel Evelyn
Chamberlain, the scramble for Africa was fuelled not so much by conditions
in Africa, but by the economic, social and political conditions in Europe
during the second half of the nineteenth century.
The scramble had become fierce by 1884, as France, Britain, Germany
and Portugal had all staked claims on African territory within the previous
five years. From 15 November 1884 to 20 January 1885, the Berlin _
Conference, under the chairmanship of Bismark, was convened to set up
the rules of the rush to colonise. On 26 February 1885, these decisions had
been made:
• Any sovereign power which wanted to claim any territory should
inform the other powers 'in order to... make good any claim of their
own.’
74
«The White Man’s Burdens; Different Approaches to Imperialism in Literature E
• Any such annexation should be validated by effective occupation.

• Treaties with African rulers were to be considered a valid title to
sovereignty.
• The powers were free to navigate the Congo and Niger Rivers.
There was no precedent in world history to justify one continents boldly
" talking about the distribution and occupation of the territory of another
continent. The European explorers of Africa:
Seldom had men of their own race with them, and they often found their
African hosts strange and unpredictable, and feared their hostility. In this
situation they created their own image of themselves. They must be wise
—sometimes they even resorted to fireworks, musical boxes or electric
batteries to overawe surprised tribes and establish their reputations as near
magicians. They must be strong, always keeping their word and never
showing physical weakness. They must maintain that British tradition of
the 'stiff upper lip’ and never show emotion (Chamberlain 1974: 28-9).
It is worthwhile mentioning at this point Rudyard Kipling's poem, 'The
White Man’s Burden’ (Kipling, 1895). Published in McClure's Magazine in
February 1899, the poem appeared at a critical moment in the debate about
imperialism. Although Kipling’s text mixed exhortation to empire with sober
warnings of the costs involved, imperialists appropriated the phrase 'white
man’s burden’ as a euphemism for imperialism, one that seemed to justify
the policy as a noble enterprise. Anti-imperialists quickly responded with
parodies of the poem. The poem was not quickly forgotten. The following
are the first two stanzas:
Take up the White Man’s burden
Send forth the best ye breed
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
Take up the White Man’s burden
In patience to abide,
75
To veil the threat of terror

And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
A hundred times made plain,
To seek another’s profit
And work another’s gain.
(Web site: Kipling, ‘The White Man’s Burden' and British —and U.S.— —
Imperialism)
The popularized image of the ‘white man’s burden’ that the Empire
created became the epitome of the Victorian adventurer. Sometimes it
involved trivialities, like Harry Johnstons insistence on dressing for dinner
in the jungle, but the concept of a ‘gentleman’, whose word was his bond
and who was chivalrous to those weaker than himself, especially towards
women, was a very meaningful one to many Victorians. A new sense of ‘
racial superiority had emerged, of which the Europeans’ perception that
they had the right to do what they liked with Africa was only one manifestation.
This may well be the explanation of H. M. Stanley's allegedly strange greeting
to David Livingstone when, having been sent in search of the latter, he finally
found him living in a village on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in 1871: «Dr
Livingstone, I presume. » Whether true or a fabrication, the celerity with
which these words became a popular quotation provides evidence as to the
general perception held at the time on the matter.
$/ Stanley’s account of death and destruction in Africa and

particularly in the Congo region, which he also explored, and his
legacy of detail descriptions of atrocities infringed upon the natives
have been considered an inspiration to Joseph Conrad's Heart of
Darkness (Sherry, 1980: 119).
The concept of British Empire started in the late 15 th and early 16 th

century was constantly expanded reaching its peak from the second half of
the nineteenth century until 1947 when the independence of India was
declared. India, known for its riches as 'the Jewel in the Crown', was
thoroughly exploited: the British East India Company controlled trade
76
«The White Man’s Burden»: Different Approaches to Imperialism in Literature E
interests from 1600 until the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857 when its rule was
transferred to the crown. The British-Indian Empire was established under
direct rule by the Queen in 1858. Through a ‘Royal Title Act', in 1876, Queen
Victoria was declared Empress of India.
After the rebellion of 1857 the British became more circumspect. Much
thought was devoted to the causes of the rebellion, and from it three main
_ lessons were drawn. At a more practical level, it was felt that there needed
to be more communication and camaraderie between the British and
Indians —not just between British army officers and their Indian staff but
in civilian life as well. It was now felt that traditions and customs in India
were too strong and too rigid to be changed easily; consequently, no more
British social interventions were made, especially in matters dealing with
religion, even when the British felt very strongly about the issue (as in the
instance of the remarriage of Hindu child widows).
9 It is precisely this change on attitudes towards the colony that

E.M. Forsters A Passage to India explores. '
All in all, the prevailing attitude in Britain regarding colonialism was

that expansion of British control around the globe was good for everyone
and, around the turn of the century, the colonies evolved into the 'dominions’
of the Commonwealth.
2 . TEXT ANALYSIS
In the following sections we shall read and study two texts that interact
with the main tenets briefly exposed up to here. Perhaps one of the main
challenges in this Unit is the need to overcome ourselves so we can fully
understand the issues related to empire and colonialism in relation to
literature. Accepting that each of us, whether as individuals or in groups, is
always an ‘other’ to ‘others’ might be the first step in the right direction. In
doing so, from the experience gained when reading these texts, we shall, it
is hoped, engage in the difficult and discomfiting act of living differently by
living difference.
77
2.1. An Act of Self Discovering: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

and the Congo Experience
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) was born near Berdichef, in the Polish

Ukraine, as Josef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski on 3 December. He
was an only child. His father was a man of letters and a poet as well as one
of the best translators of Shakespeare into Polish. His mother was a
fascinating and learned woman with rather fragile health. Both parents held
strong sympathies with the Polish insurrectionists and there were often
revolutionary meetings at the family household. Suspected of political
activism and plotting against the Russian government, the Konrads were
deported to Vologda, about 300 miles north-east of Moscow. The hardship
of the journey and the extreme conditions in Vologda proved too much for
Conrads mother, who died three years later in 1865 after the family was
allowed to move south to Kiev.
9 The political involvement and secretive life led by his family made
Joseph Conrad a lonely and reserved boy. He had no friends of his own
age and became increasingly self-absorbed. Most importantly, from a
very early age he was engrossed in books and by literature as a way of
escaping the rather claustrophobic society that surrounded him.
Joseph Conrad was a voracious reader. Through the books he read

(including those by authors such as Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens,
William M. Thackeray and James Fennimore Cooper) he could imagine
countries and distant lands where it was possible to speak freely and to act
according to one’s views. Yet it was not in a country but at sea that he, when
a grown-up, experienced the liberty he had yearned for during his childhood.
After his mother’s death Conrad lived with his father who was allowed to
leave Vologda and finally settle in Krakow where he died four years later.
Conrad then went to live with his maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowsky, who
would remain a loving and supporting family member for Conrad. Conrad
found the education given to him by his uncle not interesting enough and,
after a trip through the north of Italy and Switzerland, he decided not to
78
return to Poland. During this trip he saw the sea for the first time and,
against all odds, decided that he wanted to be a sailor.
Conrad went to sea when he was seventeen and continued to sail for
almost twenty years. During two years at Marseille he signed on with
different ships and had for the first time, contact with the British empire
when he sailed to Martinique first and then India. In 1878, when he was
twenty, joined the crew of an English ship, the Mavis, where he heard his
first words of English. He arrived in England on 18 June, and started his
career as a sailor in the British Merchant Service. He was promoted several
times in the next few years. In 1885, when on board the Tikhurst, he received
official notice of his British citizenship. Two years later, as first officer on
the Highland Forest, he was injured when a mast collapsed. As a result of
the injuries suffered he was hospitalised in Singapore. He recounted this
experience in Lord Jim. The title of this novel was inspired by a man Conrad
met four years later while he was aboard the Vidar. Jim Lingard, nicknamed
‘Lord Jim’ by his fellow sailors, was the man who would become the model
for the novel’s main character.
Q The sea was an important source of inspiration for Joseph Conrad’s

writings. Many of his novels and short stories have the sea or a boat as
a background to the action. Indeed, the sea is often an image for and
symbol of his characters’ inner turbulences.
In 1886 at about the time Conrad became a British citizen he wrote his first
short story, ‘The Black Mate’, which he entered in a literary competition but
with no success. This first failure did not deter Conrad from writing; during
the next three years he began his first novel Almayer’s Folly. In 1894 he gave up
his career as a sailor and sent his novel to T. Fisher Unwin for publication.
In 1890 Conrad was transferred to the Belgian Societe anonyme pour le-
commerce du Haut-Congo to take command of one of the company’s Congo
river steamers. This experience would eventually become one of the basis
for Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s health was severely weakened in Africa and
he returned to England to recover his strength. Afterwards, he signed on
with the Adowa sailing the London-Rouen-London route.
79
T h e Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20™ Century Y
In 1894, as already seen, he left the sea. He married Jessie George, a

woman seventeen years younger than he. The Conrads had two sons and
apart from the financial difficulties that always followed them, their
marriage was a fairly happy one, even though Jessie had to cope with
Conrad’s difficult temperament. Conrad took his literary career as seriously
as he had taken being a sailor and, even though it was far less profitable, he
continued to write intensely and carefully.
Heart of Darkness was first serialised between 1898 and 1899 in
'Blackwood’s Magazine.’ Lord Jim ran serially in the same Magazine
between 1899 and 1900. In 1902 the volume Youth and Other Stories was
published. It included Heart of Darkness and The End of Tether, and it was ‘
well received. During these years he met many literary icons who became
friends. They included H.G. Wells, Henry James and the American
journalist Stephen Crane. Among his friends was the writer, Ford Madox
Ford, with whom he collaborated from 1898 until 1905. Part of this
collaboration, The Nature of Crime, was published posthumously in 1924.
After the first publication of his work he devoted himself totally to (
literature, producing a wide range of both fictional and non-fictional
works. To mention but a few, in 1906 his autobiography The Mirror of the
Sea was published, followed by The Secret Agent during the following year.
Other works included Nostromo, Typhoon, Under Western Eyes and Victory.
In 1913 his great critical and popular success Chance, was published. The
number of works Conrad wrote was due to his financial needs more than
to anything else.
•f Conrad was actually a rather slow writer pressurised by the need

of money to maintain his family. Although by 1900 he was quite
famous, literature failed to provide him with an adequate income. He
was lucky enough to meet George Bernard Shaw and John Galsworthy,
who both helped him by lending him money and by recommending
' , him to publishers and critics.
Conrad had settled in England in 1883 because he was an Anglophile

who thought that Britain respected individual liberty. English was to become
his third language, and, in an apparent paradox, the language he chose for
80
his writing. The later years of his life were shadowed by ill health and
rheumatism. He was offered, but declined, honorary degrees from five
universities. Not long before his death i n 1924, he also declined a knighthood
offered by King George V. Conrad died of a heart attack and was buried i n
Canterbury.
Heart of Darkness is perhaps Conrad’s finest exploration of evil and

otherness. Several stories i n the novel are linked to the main theme of
iimperialism and imperial attitudes. It is now well known that many of
Conrad’s writings were, to an extent, autobiographical. Heart of Darkness
iis no exception. Conrad used his journal and the notes he took when he
was working in the Congo as the starting point of his novel. To that he
added the impressions of explores such as H . M . Stanley’s, as has been said
above.
ILU Conrad’s intention i n writing the novel was to make his readers
aware of the situation he found in the Congo. What was this reality?
How is it portrayed i n the narrative?
By 1890, when Conrad went to the Congo, it was an independent

. country, Etat Independent du Congo. Yet, the reality was very different. A
. small number of Europeans owned most of the land. Leopold II, King of
the Belgians, was one of the biggest landowners. Leopold's only interest in
the Congo was in exploiting its riches and making, as he did, a fortune out
; of it. The situation Conrad saw when he arrived in Africa shocked him
‘ greatly and made him question the right of Europeans to exploit their
colonies. The colonisation of the Congo was, as Conrad later pointed out,
«the vilest scramble of loot that ever disfigured the history of human
conscience» and this view is transmitted throughout Heart of Darkness.
' Nonetheless, it is important to bear i n mind that Conrad is neither a
politician or a reformer with a political agenda to promote nor is he a
historian recording facts in an objective manner. Conrad is, above all, an
artist trying to understand his personal experience by rendering it into a
polyphonic narrative: for this reason, there are no answers i n Conrad’s
I
I
Heart of Darkness .
I
811
lt=ld In the novel the reader will find a constant questioning of the
apparent and the obvious that has the intention of revealing the reality
behind the facade. For this reason, as readers, we should be constantly
aware of the ambivalent quality of the language used in the narrative
and the multiple meanings of words.
Colonialism, civilisation and progress are, then, the elements introduced

into the narrative. These elements are tensional forces constantly being
challenged and questioned. Regardless of the setting of the story and the fact
that in the Congo exploitation was particularly cruel and savage, many of the
concerns explored in the novel applied to Britain and the British colonies.
As has been pointed out, the question of the Empire and the colonial
issues related to it was, by the 1890s, a subject of public debate in Britain.
From the late fifteenth century onwards Britain's foreign policy had been
one of territorial expansion. The supporters of imperialism, as discussed
already, did not see the acquisition of overseas territories as domination or
exploitation. Quite the opposite (and the degree of cynicism here depends
on the personal profits obtained): it was considered a means of liberating
peoples from tyrannical rule and of bringing the blessing of the Christian
religion and, above all, the advantages of a superior civilisation to the
colonised. In the novel this debate is made explicit when Marlow recounts
his conversation with his aunt on visiting her to say goodbye before sailing
to the Congo:
It appeared, however, I was also one of the Workers, with a capital —you
know. Something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of
apostle. There has been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just about
that time, and the excellent woman, living right in the rush of all that
humbug, got carried off her feet. She talked about 'weaning those ignorant
millions from their horrid ways,’ till, upon my word, she made me quite
uncomfortable.
(Norton 2000: 1965)
For all High Victorianism strongly believed in the moral duty due to the
colonies the truth is that, by the end of the nineteenth century, a certain
82
disillusionment prevailed as a result of the discrepancy between humanitarian

ideals and the reality of colonial exploitation: «I ventured to hint that the
Company was run for profit» (Norton 2000: 1965), says Marlow. Nonetheless,
the character symbolising this discrepancy in the novel is Kurtz and the
result, a self-tortured corrupted idealist, is not very appealing although
Kurtz appears to be the person one longs to meet in the story.
At the beginning of the novel Marlow, however, seems to follow the
argument for the need of superior civilised peoples to colonise those who
are less developed and so he starts talking about the 'darkness' of past,
l
uncivilised European ages and the salvation of the efficiency of those who
were more advanced: «And this also... has been one of the dark places of the
earth» (Norton 2000: 1959). At this early point in the narrative, Marlow
seems to define civilisation and progress as the taming of darkness. The
trading company he and Kurtz work for symbolises progress. Yet, already in
the opening pages of the story he advances a little of what he actually
encountered during his close contact with real colonisation:
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from
those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves,
is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the
idea only.
l
l (Norton 2000: 1961)
l
I
I
The opposition civilised / savage is brought into question by introducing
the savage element within the civilised world at the moment Marlow is
remembering the fact that in the past London was a savage territory
colonised by the Romans: «I was thinking of very old times, when the
Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago —the other day... Light
came out of this river since» (Norton 2000: 1960). The overlapping of
narratorial time that occurs when Rome and the Romans are brought into
the text, so long ago yet so near, 'the other day', 'yesterday', implies that, in
l
fact, those who believe themselves to be civilised and progressed people
could also be seen as savages by other people: «But darkness was here
: yesterday. Imagine the feelings of a commander... Sandbanks, marshes,
1 forests, savages — precious little to eat fit for a civilised man, nothing but
5 Thames water to drink» (Norton 2000: 1960). Indeed Marlow’s description
|
j of the Roman conquest of the British fits exactly with what he has found
l
l
l
I
83
T h e Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20"' Century Y
and we are going to find in the Congo. This paradox of really being savages
when thinking that we are civilised is carried further in one of the most
overtly autobiographical instances of the novel:
I had then, as you remember, just returned to London after a lot of
Indian Ocean, Pacific, China Seas —a regular dose of the East— six years or
so, and I was loafing about, hindering you fellows in your work and invading
your homes, just as though I had got a heavenly mission to civilise you.
(Norton 2000: 1961)
Furthermore, developed and civilised cities such as Brussels are seen in
the text as a «whited sepulchre» (Norton 2000: 1963) inhabited by hypocrites,
hollow, greedy people. The wilderness of the Congo, on the other hand, is at
times sublimated as the only surroundings where the noble and the true will
rise to the surface and break free from the world of appearances.
Joseph Conrad’s difference from and, one could say, advantage over his
English contemporaries in relation to the originality of his literary production
is because British culture was foreign to him. He was able to bring into the
novel a truer cosmopolitanism than many other authors, probably because
as a foreigner he was in a better position to question Englishness. As has
been already mentioned, Conrad became a British citizen and England
became his home to the extent that Englishmen became his friends and the
English language his mode of literary expression. Still, his different
upbringing allowed him not to be limited in outlook or sympathy by race,
class or national consciousness. Poland and England meant a lot to him, but
it was his experience at sea that gave him the perspective lacking in most of
his contemporaries. The multiple characters he encountered when on board
of different ships and in the many ports where his ships called, as well as the
very different cultural experiences he confronted in different lands during
his years as a sailor, meant that he became a man of no country in particular,
a citizen of the world.
England was the country where he could exercise his freedom of speech
and because of this he chose to live there. Yet, in the characters that populate
his fiction one can observe that Conrad's life experience allowed him to
cross the barrier of the apparent difference and go beneath the surface to
present people whose differences and similarities have nothing to do with
their origins, although as we shall discuss, there have been different opinions
84
in relation to this point. In this way we find in the novels Malaysians and
Borneans, Swedes and English, Germans and Dutch who, it seems to be
Conrads intention, are all alike in their human happiness or misery. What
appears as superficial difference is no obstacle, in Conrad's view, to grasping
the fundamental resemblance among the inhabitants of the world who are
all stirred by common human passions such as love or hate, for example.
T Conrad's characters are in general heroic people struggling out of

extreme situations. Both the universality of the characters (in so far as
they are built up within the framework of certain general and basic
human experiences) and their foreign status (brought about by the
constant displacement to which Conrad submits them) are
distinguishing characteristics of the men and women populating his
work. .
Dealing with Conrad’s characters as a group seems to contradict his own

principle, for Conrad's main preoccupation was the essential isolation of a
person’s nature, regardless of nationalities. It is safe to argue that Conrad’s
characters are lonely figures facing moral problems. Perhaps a good example
’ appears in Heart of Darkness where Marlow states: «We live, as we dream
’ —alone» (Norton 2000: 1977). One might add, as we die, alone. The isolation
confronted by Conrad’s characters was also a major preoccupation of the
'Modernist' literature produced after the First World War and for this reason,
f among others, he has been regarded as a proto-Modernist.
T Conrad's main concern in this respect is with man in isolation

fighting against whatever is outside him and, as a consequence, the
need for a personal code of behaviour and a capacity for moral
discrimination as opposed to the submission to the public moral codes
and behavioural manners that, too often, proves inadequate.
This is not to say that Conrad's characters are cut out of or detached
from society, quite the opposite; to a great extent the problems and courses
85
The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20 th Century Y
they set out to overcome are determined by the particular society in which
they live. For this reason Conrad, writing in between Victorian and post-war
values, is not purely a psychological writer but also a moralist still concerned
about the effect of the individual’s moral dilemmas upon society. The well-
being of society at large seems compared to the good running of a ship
where even though the individual cannot escape his own isolation, he knows
that his behaviour is fundamental to the safety of the voyage.
Given the amount of people he encountered throughout his different
voyages, for Conrad one thing appears certain; namely, that human nature
is not a simple or straightforward collection of facts. On the contrary: it is
the complex set of experiences and sensations that need to find expression
in writing in order for the writer to try to untangle the mystery of life.
mi In Heart of Darkness he uses a romantic Realism close to the

mystery of the Gothic that stands as a metaphor for the creative / non-
creative quality of his writing. What elements in the novel introduce
an unsettling, mysterious and disturbing atmosphere?
In a sense it can be argued that he was a Realist given that his creative
genius, considered against his experience, sought certain actuality as the
starting point of his story, in that it is based on autobiographical data and
others account of experience. He hardly ever invented plots; the raw material
for his narratives in general and Heart of Darkness in particular is found on
his research and on his own life experience. Where he innovates is in that he
submits these experiences to a creative process enabling both the blurring
of the line between fiction and reality, and the exploration of a truth found
beyond the world of appearances that surrounds us. The transforming
process of Conrad’s lively imagination makes possible the transmutation of
actual facts into facts wrapped in romantic glamour and adventurous
exaltation.
Even though elements of the traditional novel can be seen and the
presence of the omniscient voice of the author can be heard in Conrad’s first
publications such as Almayer’s Folly (1895), An Outcast of the Island (1896)
and The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897), the truth is that Conrad was not
86
«The White Man's Burden»: Different Approaches to Imperialism in Literature E
happy with this form of writing and it is precisely in the Preface to the last
of these three books, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (Norton 2000: 1954-6),
that we find an honest declaration of method. Conrad was not to follow the
conventions of the English novel but experimented boldly with form and
language. In his view, story-telling was secondary to the real task of the
writer who «by the power of the written word» should be able to make the
reader «hear,» «feel,» and, above all, «see» (Norton 2000: 1955). It is the task
of fiction to awaken «that feeling of unavoidable solidarity... which binds
men to each other and all mankind to the visible worlds (Norton 2000:
1956).
“ For Conrad, the novel ceases to be a form devoted merely to story-

telling, with an escapist end and an entertaining purpose. As did Henry
James, Conrad regarded novel writing as a definite form of art
, alongside painting or music (Norton 2000: 1955).
This unifying purpose is central to the writing of Conrad who, not

surprisingly given his background, had always expressed his conviction that
there should be a commitment to fidelity in human relationships, that the
‘ artist should speak to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation —and
t to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the
l loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in
sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each
‘ other, which binds together all humanity— the dead to the living and the
; living to the unborn (Norton 2000: 1954).
. His different view of the task of the writer implies that Conrad will be in
g a constant search for a fictional form that allows him to achieve what he
believes should be the aim of the artist:
To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the
earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for
a moment at the surrounding vision of form and colour, of sunshine and
shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sight, for a smile —such is the
aim, difficult and evanescent, and reserved only for a very few to achieve.
(Norton 2000: 1956)
87
His frequently-used method of indirect narration causes discomfort in

many readers who find his writing tiresome because it fails to force progress
' in the story. In Conrad's work a story-within-a-story and a dislocation of
time that impedes the 'normal' progression expected in story-telling are
often found. Conrad’s technical device is because of his particular vision of
the narrative as an art that would allow the reader to see and therefore, by
delaying the deliverance of the story, by superimposing other possible
narratives, Conrad tries as far as possible, to provide, a clear revelation of
the truth underlying the particular human problem that has attracted his
attention. In this sense, for Conrad, the story is just a means of exploration
and not an end in itself. In order to do so, he introduces a number of
characters that will allow different perspectives, different points of view, of
the same problem. The different angles from which the subject matter is
told imply that the narrative is composed of multiple postponements.
¥ This narratorial voice detaches the reader from the story,

preventing the reader from identifying too closely with any character
in particular, and, more importantly, puts the reader on guard not to
take everything said or seen for granted, as he/she has been induced to
- do with the traditional narrator.
This questioning of the narratorial voice, the fact that the narrator may
not be as trustworthy as the nineteenth-century English novel had thought
him/her to be, brings about a rather more discomfiting discovery, namely,
that 'reality' might not be as reliable as it seems to be and that, therefore, it
may be questioned, too. In this order of things, what late Victorian England
offers in relation to thinking, moral and social behaviour is neither sufficient
nor valid in situations other than in Victorian England and, therefore,
Conrad introduces what he considers to be universal topics able to address
human problems while disregarding the nationality of the individual.
lUJ In this sense, and generally speaking, Conrad's main topics of

interest presented in Heart of Darkness are: evil, man’s moral reality,
fidelity, and individual responsibility, in the last case with particular
reference to the Empire.
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In Heart of Darkness he takes the narrative to its extreme both in form

and content as a means of exploring the theme that ultimately appears as
his obsession in relation to the Empire: man against himself in a natural
environment. The other themes that can be traced in Conrad’s work seem to
be additional to this main preoccupation. He explores themes such as the
subconscious, honour, guilt, moral alienation, and expiation. The theme of
brotherhood and fidelity will come as a result of this responsibility.
In Heart of Darkness Conrad is not interested in his characters’

progress in life, but in the moral responsibility of the individual
towards himself.
Reality, for Conrad, is an entity completely different from appearance.

Whereas one might be able to explain apparent reality, that is, the reality readily
available under the umbrella of common-sense, there seems to be an inability
on the part of the human being to understand experience to its fullest. In other
words, Conrad is looking for the means to express those unknown realities that
are beyond our perceptive capacity. For example, if one is listening to a piece
of music, anything one may enjoy from classical music to ‘heavy-metal’ rock,
one might be able to explain it to someone else if asked to do so, and even, if
our musical literacy allows us to, to transcribe into graphic signs the different
sentences of the musical piece to which we are listening. Nevertheless, no
' matter how detailed our transcription might be, this explanation of this reality,
in particular, does not account for the sudden and overwhelming feeling that
overcomes us while listening, which is precisely why we like that piece of
music; nor does it account for the different experiences the same piece of music
provokes in different people. The Victorian illusion that the mind can understand
[ and control matter, that the human being can create a permanent civilised
order, should be questioned and challenged, leaving to the scientists and the
thinkers the task of understanding the tangible reality:
And their words are heard with reverence, for their concern is with
weighty matters: with the cultivation of our minds and the proper care of
our bodies, with the attainment of our ambitions, with the perfection of the
means and the glorification of our precious aims.
It is otherwise with the artist.
(Norton 2000: 1954)
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The Need to M a k e it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 2 0 t h Century Y
Furthermore, through this multiplicity of perspectives of experience, the

impossibility of knowing reality to the full and, therefore, the impossibility
of achieving an ultimate truth are revealed. The eventual consequence of '
this discovery is that there can be no ending to the story and it is necessarily
left open as the true meaning cannot be resolved.
IUJ Fracturing the time scheme, implementing multiple points of

view, including stories-within-stories are all techniques ensuring that
no coherent interpretation based on appearances can be imposed on
the novel.
What happens in Conrad’s texts in general, but in particularly in Heart of

Darkness, is that the end is a never-ending story comprised of an unlimited
number of possible conclusions impinging upon the narrative the tensional
contradiction brought about by conscious ambiguity. A very good example
in this respect is that Marlow’s body posture as a Buddha when he starts his
story (Norton 2000: 1961) is exactly the same as his posture when he has
apparently finished talking (Norton 2000: 2016). Because Marlow is seen in
exactly the same physical position at the beginning and at the end,
hypothetically speaking, he could be starting to recount his story at the
moment that he has apparently finished relating it. In fact, the last words of
the novel indicate that the awaited ebb has occurred. Waiting for the ebb
prompted Marlow to talk because by the end of his story it is gone. There is
again time for waiting and therefore time for the story:
Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a
meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. 'We have lost the first of the
ebb,' said the Director suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by
a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost
ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky —seemed to lead into
the heart of an immense darkness.
(Norton 2000: 2017)
Heart of Darkness, a proto-Modern work produced at the end of the
nineteenth century, is one of the most important, shocking and predictive
novels of the twentieth century. The suggestive quality of the novel, and
90
suggestion is the nearest to an answer that we can obtain from the narrative,
is already hinted at in a title that reverberates with the same ambiguity that
impregnates the narrative. The striking impression of the title is the apparent
contradiction of the two terms, 'heart' and 'darkness'. ‘Heart’ implies life, the
very organ that makes human life possible. 'Darkness' seems to imply the
converse, death. The tensional force of the narrative is already present in
the title, because here one realises for the first time the impossibility of
acquiring ultimate knowledge. The impossibility of achieving the ‘heart of
darkness' dawns in the sudden realisation, abhorrent to the individual, that
while living we are dying or, to put it in another way, that we die as we live.
This unsettling contradiction is also posited in the sentence that opens the
narrative. Here is how the story begins: «The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung
to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest» (Norton, 2000:
1958). In this first sentence the contrast between 'cruising' and ‘rest’ has the
same tensional force of the title. The image of the vessel created in the
sentence is simultaneously in movement (cruising) and still (at rest).
tM Such a combination in a single sentence will be present all along

the narrative and signals the ambiguity ingrained in the discourse on
the Empire at the time and will be the key to understanding the
narrative.
Heart of Darkness might also suggest the sense of trying to gain access to
the core of something very deep, something unknown, mysterious and
possibly, because it is unknown, also dangerous, and here is where the
Gothic elements of the novel are found. The structure of the whole narrative
is sustained by polarities that uncannily converge in meaning: life and death,
coloniser and colonised, Africa and Europe, inland and offshore. The setting
of the novel, the Belgian Congo in Africa, adds to the sense of loss dissipated
through the apparent tranquillity of the beginning of the novel. Travelling
into the wilderness of the Dark Continent is related, in the text, to discovering
the darkness of the heart. As O’Prey argues in the introduction to the Penguin
edition «the darkness is many things: it is the unknown, it is the subconscious,
it is also moral darkness, it is evil which swallows up Kurtz and it is the
spiritual emptiness he sees at the centre of existence; but above all it is
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The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought i n the First Half of the 20”' Century Y
mystery itself, the mysteriousness of man’s spiritual life, and to convey all
this a certain amount of ambiguity is essential».
Ambiguity, as has already been suggested, is crucial to the story and this
is so because, if it is agreed that reality is different from appearances and
that there are unknown to reality dark sides constituting as much part of
reality as the visible, then language stops being self-referential and
informative, as it is in traditional fictional form. Conrad is suspicious of
language because language is no longer a reliable tool with which to express
life experience. In Heart of Darkness language is poetical and condensed,
with ambiguity, symbolism and diffuseness as its main linguistic features.
For example, although telling of his experiences, Marlow is not eager to
relate his story but tries to extract some meaning with his words. The readers
and listeners are thus implicitly invited to share Marlow's experiences as if
alongside him: «We knew we were fated, before the ebb began to run, to
hear about one of Marlows inconclusive experiences » (Norton 2000: 1961,
emphasis added). His words are weary because they are made up of the
conventions his voyage left behind; his experiences in the wilderness escape
classification, systematic order and logic.
Nonetheless, even if there is a great disparity between language and
reality, and as much as language should be under suspicion, it is only
through language that experience can be observed and analysed. For this
reason and in order to extract some level of meaning, the experience is
repeated through words such as 'darkness,’ ‘inscrutable,’ ‘mysterious,’ and
‘incomprehensible’ throughout the text in the hope that a new meaning
might emerge. Conrad is determined to draw attention to the total
imprecision of language precisely because he needs language to
comprehend the world. His search is that of his characters and his readers
for a language whose meaning encompasses reality as a whole. It is an
impossible task, for death can never be recounted by the subject. There is,
therefore, always a part of reality necessarily unknown. The awareness, as
our awareness should be, is Marlow’s understanding that reality is beyond
the immediate appreciation of an event, and that no images taken directly
from the senses will help us to grasp it. As the anonymous narrator tells us
of Marlow:
...to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but
outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a
.4
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«The White Man’s Burden»: Different Approaches to Imperialism in Literature
haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made
visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.
(Norton 2000: 1960)
. The narratorial perspective of the novel shifts constantly. This constitutes
one of Conrad’s most modern features. Far from the understanding,
controlling and knowledge-providing omniscient narrator of traditional
novels, the voices that tell the story do not intend to give us a finished,
meaningful and coherent account of facts. The structure of the novel is
made up of multiple narratorial voices. In an apparent paradox, the multiple
narrator works against the process of communication as much as it helps it.
The narratorial frame is not built upon the most obvious voices, those of
Marlow and the unknown, global narrator. Each person who informs
Marlow and talks to him also becomes a narrator, adding to the story. This
complex use of the narratorial voice provides, on the one hand, immediacy
to the story since the different narrators are first-person narrators and, on
the other hand, provides the narration with vagueness, mystery and
meaninglessness by never getting to the heart of the matter. Despite the fact
that they appear to create distance between the narration and the reader,
the multiple narratorial voices make of the reader a participant in the story,
journeying alongside Marlow in his attempt to 'see', which is, as was said
above, Conrad's long-term preoccupation.
Of all the narratorial voices Marlows is the most prominent since he is
also the protagonist. The most shocking aspect of his voice, although not
surprising given what has already been discussed, is his inadequacy as a
traditional narrator. The reasons for this failure to fulfil what is expected of
a narrator are found in his inability to distinguish and comprehend, and
therefore to reproduce, ‘real’ reality, that is, the reality that exists beyond
appearances. There is a clear example in the text when Marlow says about
Kurtz: «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» (Norton 2000: 1977). A little later we find a kind of
allegorical declaration of what a traditional narrator can never do: «Your
own reality —for yourself, not for others— what no other man can ever
know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really
means» (Norton 2000: 1978). Marlow’s awareness of his limitations as a
narrator, his difficulty in fully transcribing into words his dream-like
93
experience, represents the unreliability of an assumed, external, conventional

reality that is taken for granted and readily available for articulation. Even
Marlow, constantly assuming a weary attitude towards the taken-for-granted
knowledge, is tricked into making assumptions that prove to be inaccurate
when he thinks that his listeners can see him. But the irony of the hour
makes him a mere shadow to the others, just a voice. This is most important
in the context in which he is bitterly complaining about the impossibility of
his own task as a narrator. He does not know he is wrong and only the
reader and the unknown narrator recognise Marlows mistake. The
untrustworthy nature of appearances is emphasised:
‘Of course in this you fellows see more than I could then. You see me,
whom you know...’
It had become so pitch dark that we listeners could hardly see one
another. For a long time already he, sitting apart, had been no more to us
than a voice.
(Norton 2000: 1977)
Marlow’s meeting with Kurtz, the potential beholder of the ultimate
truth, is constantly deferred. The great expectations aroused by Kurtz’s
magnetic and mysterious personality are channelled through Marlow who
is, if a choice must be made, the main character of the story. As Marlow
penetrates further into the unknown, his capacity for self-control and his
strength are constantly tested. His real trial, however, takes place when he
realises that he has been transported into the «lightless region of subtle
horrors» (Norton 2000: 2001) inhabited by Kurtz. In the text, Kurtz acts as
a kind of double to Marlow. When Marlow declares that Kurtz is a
«remarkable man» (Norton 2000: 2004), as he does on several occasions,
they are textually identified since Marlow, at the beginning of the story, is
also said by the unknown narrator to be remarkable: «But Marlow was not
typical» (Norton 2000: 1960). Marlow cannot achieve the complete self-
knowledge Kurtz gains at the moment of death simply because this ultimate
truth cannot be shared; its possessor ceases to be and therefore cannot
relate that truth. Yet, through Kurtz’s death, Marlow is able to glimpse
knowledge although he declares rather ambiguously that it has come «too
late» (Norton 2000: 2011), at the moment of death. The ambiguity posed by
this rather eclectic sentence makes it impossible to decide whether it is too
late for him to understand Kurtz or whether it is too late because truth can
94
be grasped only at the moment of one’s own death. Indeed, Marlow feels
that he is as near to truth as it is possible when he witnesses Kurtzs death;
then Marlow is able to gain a certain awareness of being which can explain
Marlows affirmation that Kurtz’s cry is «a moral victory» (Norton 2000:
2011).
The physical journey in Heart of Darkness as recounted by Marlow is
parallel to the emotional development of his character. Again we find a
complex web of journeys happening and enhancing ambiguity. While the
Nellie ‘was at rest’ Marlow’s account takes us on a voyage to the Congo.
Story-telling is intended to help Marlow fully to understand his experience
and, therefore, the actual journey being recounted is in fact a metaphor for
the journey of the self. Although the Marlow who is now telling the story has
already undergone the changes brought about by his African experience, the
Marlow who is about to tell the story, in his effort to understand his
experience, is going to ‘re-start’ with his audience the journey anew. Thus,
he is able to travel once more from idealism to disillusionment, to acquire
in the process greater understanding. He attempts to comprehend the
ultimate truth that Kurtz, at the time of his death, revealed to him. The
journey, right from the beginning, is imbued with a quality of warning. In
Brussels, Marlow starts feeling uneasily that his trip into Africa will be an
extraordinary one; that, as the doctor says, going into the 'Central Station'
changes a man inside and, for this reason, nobody ever comes back: «'And
when they come back too?’ I asked. ‘Oh, I never see them,’ he remarked;
‘and, moreover, the changes take place inside, you know'» (Norton 2000:
1964).
' It can be argued that the novel is divided into two different parts. Part
one is about preparing for starting the journey. Part two has Marlow
painfully going deeper into the darkness and towards Kurtz. The narrative
techniques making possible Marlow’s progress rest upon his capacity to sort
out problems. The difficulties of his quest determine that he starts to
question the superficial aspect of reality: he discovers, for example, how
certainties, references, and moral codes are useless in facing danger, hunger,
darkness or unexpected attacks. In other words, Marlow starts his journey
with a set of values and only through his capacity to question those very
values is he able to continue his journey. In order to convey the difficulty of
this journey, the language of the text conveys the difficulty of Marlow’s
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T h e Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First H a l f of the 20™ Century Y
enterprise symbolised in a prose that is rather dense and difficult to read.

Furthermore, this use of language makes the text subjective. It has to be
clear that Marlow has been cut off from his original background and faces
a strange environment. Perhaps what makes him different from other white
Europeans is his awareness that his moral being is under test and this
knowledge makes him willing to attempt to understand the significance of
his experience. Having been the epitome of the civilised man, only through
the telling of his experience is this identity questioned.
tM The voyage towards the outside world of Africa becomes a voyage

of self-discovery that unavoidably brings some inner knowledge or
vital truth to the traveller.
Perhaps the most surprising element in the novel is the nature of this
vital truth. At the beginning of the story Marlow refers to the adventure as
«the culminating point of my experience. It seemed somehow to throw a
kind of light on everything about me —and into my thoughts» (Norton 2000:
1961). The darkness to be illuminated by the 'light’ is going to disclose a
truth that is far from being comforting or beautiful. In fact, the moment of
the most intense discomfort comes with Kurtz’s death and his last words
«'The horror! The horror!'» (Norton 2000: 2010). The horror is physical and
political in relation to the European attitudes in Africa, but it is also non-
material and metaphysical. It is not only a question of governments’ being
abusive and dehumanised, or individual people’s being malevolent; rather,
for Conrad, the horror lies in humanity’s very nature. In accordance with
the spirit of the narrative, it is properly left unexplained so that readers and
listeners become participants in the experience, not simply spectators, and
they, too, will consider the experience and assume whatever truth there is to
be assumed.
For this reason, the narrative cannot conclude. The circularity of the
narrative, its open-ended finale, is symbolised, as has already been pointed
out, in Marlow’s body position. Both at the beginning of the narrative and at
the end Marlow appears as a sort of Buddhist possessor of some inner
knowledge he is about to provide and from which the listeners, including
the reader, will be able to learn. However, this image is only the reflection of
96
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«The White Man's Burden®: Different Approaches to Imperialism in Literature E
an apparent reality for, in fact, the circularity of the narrative signalled by

Marlow’s body position indicates that Marlow is not a provider of knowledge;
on the contrary, he is in search of it. Marlow’s compulsion to repeat his
experience is informed by Freud's death drive; confronted with death, and
intuitively grasping its definitiveness, Marlow is both trying to understand
and postponing the moment of his own death. Indeed, the knowledge he has
acquired is not as authoritative and precise as that given by Kurtz on his
own death-bed.
The changes Marlow has undergone point towards his awareness that
conventional values and assumptions are relative and are conditioned by
different circumstances, among them the social. These conventions and
values that constitute reality are no longer valid for him. The 'real’ reality is
far beyond them and it is his inescapable duty to look for the real to be
found within oneself. The victory, even if partial, is to be found in the
realisation and assertion of oneself. The perspective of having nothing
inside, of accommodating conventions, is the real defeat shown in the novel.
Whether we agree or disagree, this may be a reason why Marlow feels unable
or unwilling to judge Kurtz’s activities. In a sense, the text seems to imply,
Marlow is part of the situation that has made possible the existence of
someone like Kurtz and, therefore, Marlow himself is not entirely without
blame. This is precisely the difference that forbids the identification of
Kurtz with Marlow because Kurtz has pronounced a judgement and has
acted accordingly, exercising his will for power over an artificial and
hypocritical situation.
As an emissary of science and progress, a combination of values of
European culture, Kurtz travelled to Africa to campaign for the ideal. Once
confronted with the wilderness he is liberated from the set of values, either
good or evil, prevailing in the society he comes from and, therefore, is free
to exercise his own will. It is interesting to note that even if knowing the
ultimate truth is very much a bodily activity (the body dies), Kurtz’s character
’is hardly a flesh-and-bone one but a name talked about, to the point that
critic Lionel Trilling has argued that Kurtz is a hero of the spirit against the
spiritless Europeans. To Marlow the fact that Kurtz could utter this cry at
the point of death, while Marlow himself, when death threatens him, can
‘ know it only as a weary greyness, marks the difference between the ordinary
‘ man and the hero of the spirit.
97
feJJ Kurtz can be a source of enlightenment even though he is capable

of dreadful deeds. He stands as a symbolic figure of the discovery of
the real self that comes out only when one is pushed to the limit.
It is remarkable the influence Kurtz leaves on the people he encounters,

and quite shocking the way people go to Kurtz, as if he were a deity, to extract
some mysterious knowledge or truth: «You don’t talk with that man —you
listen to him» (Norton 2000: 1997). The Russian recalls that Kurtz made him
see things, like an apparition. Even Marlow once he has seen, metaphorically
speaking, «Kurtz for the first time» (Norton 2000: 1981) penetrates «deeper
and deeper into the heart of darkness» (Norton 2000: 1983) forgetting about
the station and going «towards Kurtz» (Norton 2000: 1983). His journey
makes Marlow aware now that past and present overlap in a prehistory that
he feels he cannot understand: «We could not understand because we were
too far and could not remember, because we were travelling in the night of
first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign —and no
memories® (Norton 2000: 1984). A few lines afterwards, however, Marlow
assures his audience: «The mind of man is capable of anything — because
everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future® (Norton 2000: 1984).
The novel as a whole proposes a reconsideration of the traditional notion of
reality. Its most remarkable originality is that this call for reconsideration
applies both to fiction and to real life. Marlows most certain assumptions in
relation to places, time and people start dissolving and disappearing when he
approaches the nightmarish wilderness of the Congo. The dream-like experience
becomes more real to him than the European baggage he carries along with
him. The real reference to darkness seems to shift in the novel from Africa to
Europe. The latter becomes, as we advance in the story, ghostly and frighteningly
referred to as sepulchre’, ‘dead silence’, ‘marble’, ‘sarcophagus’, and ‘halo’,
resembling a lifeless world built up to protect rottenness and spiritual death.
2.2. E.M. Forster’s Web of Misunderstandings: A Passage to India
Edward Morgan Forster was born in London in 1879. His father died of
consumption soon after he was born, and his mother and a paternal great-
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«The White Man's B u r d e n » : Different Approaches to Imperialism i n Literature E
aunt raised the child. His mother was from a more liberal background than
the paternal side of the family and Forster’s family life was never devoid of
tensions. He grew up at Rooksnest, the house that inspired Forsters first
major success, Howard’s End (1910), and was educated at Tonbridge
School, in Kent. He would never forget his experience at this school and
some argue that this is to be held responsible for a good deal of his later
criticism of the English public school system. Forster attended Kings
College, Cambridge, which greatly expanded his intellectual interests and
gave him his first exposure to Mediterranean culture. After he graduated
from Cambridge, he went to Italy and his experiences there provided the
background for two of his early novels Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905)
and The Longest Journey (1907). These novels established Forster’s early
conviction that men and women should keep in contact with nature to
cultivate their imaginations. In 1908, he published A Room With a View.
This humorous novel deals with the experience of a young British woman,
Lucy Honeychurch, in Italy.
9 These early novels, written quite effectively with moments of high

comedy, are concerned with the cultural barrier between English and
Italians in the same way that one of the main preoccupations found in
A Passage to India (1924) is the impossibility of finding a means of
mutual understanding between Indians and British Europeans.
During these years E.M. Forster was part of the so-called Bloomsbury
Group, a group of intellectuals that included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard
Keynes, Dora Carrington, Lytton Strachey and T.S. Eliot among many
others. Although Forster had published considerably before the First World
War, only after the conflict did he gain a significant reputation as a writer.
In ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs Brown' Virginia Woolf considered Forster alongside
Joyce and Lawrence as those writers who were reacting against the novel,
as it had been understood by the Edwardians. In spite of Woolf’s efforts to
include Forster among those she considered avant-garde writers, the truth
is that his four pre-war novels did nothing to break free from the mode of
writing of Victorian and Edwardian fiction. Plots are melodramatic and
improbable; an omniscient narrator has full control over the characters,
99
interpreting their motives and actions, introducing moral judgements and

generally guiding the reader to like or dislike particular characters. From
all the novels he produced, it is perhaps only A Passage to India that can be
said to definitively break with narrative convention both in form and in
content.
Forster spent three years in Alexandria during the First World War,
working as a civilian officer, and visited India twice. After he returned to
England, he wrote A Passage to India, inspired by his experience. The
novel concerns current preoccupations on the colonial occupation of
India by the British in a narrative where the political and the personal
intermix.
T The main tenement of the novel, much in the line —although

taking just the opposite direction— of contemporary discussions on
the matter after the Mutiny of 1857, is the exploration of the
misunderstandings created by the different cultural backgrounds of
the protagonists.
Misunderstandings are seen as the ultimate reason for the lack of

communication among the characters. This novel was the last published by
Forster during his lifetime. In 1971, a year after Forsters death, Maurice, a
novel written around 1914 and with an overt homosexual theme, was
published.
Although Forster published no novels after A Passage to India, he
continued writing short stories and essays until his death. He published
several anthologies, including The Celestial Omnibus (1911) and The Eternal
Moment (1928), two collections of short stories; Abinger Harvest (1936), a
collection of poetry, essays and fiction; and several non-fiction works.
Forster also wrote the libretto to the Benjamin Brittens opera Billy Budd.
Forsters essays as well as his frequent lectures on political topics established
his reputation as a liberal thinker and as a strong advocate of democracy.
Forster was awarded membership of the Order of Companions of Honour
in 1953 and received the Order of Merit from Queen Elizabeth in 1969. He
died in June 1970 after a series of strokes.
100
A Passage to India differs from Forster’s other major works in its clear
political content, as opposed to the lighter tone and more subdued political
subtext contained in works such as Howard’s End and A Room 'With a View.
The novel deals with the political occupation of India by the British, a
colonial domination that ended in 1947, after the publication of Forster’s
text. The colonial occupation of India is significant in terms of the
background to the novel. Britain occupied an important place in political
affairs in India from 1760, but did not secure control over India for nearly a
century. In August 1858, during a period of violent revolt by the Indians
against Britain’s colonisation of India, the British Parliament approved the
Government of India Act, transferring political power from the East India
Company to the Crown. This established the bureaucratic colonial system
in India headed by the Council of India consisting initially of fifteen British
politicians. Although Parliament and Queen Victoria maintained support
for local princes, Victoria added the title of Empress of India to her crown
in 1876. The typical attitude of the British in India was that they were
undertaking the «white man’s burden, » as put by Rudyard Kipling. This was
a system of aloof, condescending sovereignty in which the English
bureaucracy did not associate with the people they were ruling, and finds its
expression in characters such as Ronny Heaslop and Mr McBryde in A
Passage to India.
Indian nationalism began to take shape around 1885 with the first
meeting of the Indian National Congress. At the beginning of the twentieth
century the nationalistic views within the Indian Muslim community were
unstoppable. With the victory of the Liberal Party in 1906 the British
government introduced several reforms in India’s political system
culminating in the Indian Councils Act of 1909, but nationalism continued
to rise. India took part in the First World War alongside the British army
as a way of obtaining political concessions, but even with the promise
after the war that Indians would play an increased role in their own
government, relations between the British and Indians did not improve:
after the war the differences between India and Great Britain not only
continued but worsened. In 1919, three hundred and seventy-nine unarmed
Indians were massacred at Amritsar's Jallianwala Bagh, a public park,
during a protest.
101.
$/ Around this time Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi became a

distinguished voice in Indian politics, and also around this time
Forster wrote A Passage to India. More than twenty years later, after a
’ long struggle, Parliament passed the Indian Independence Act in 1947,
ordering the separation of India and Pakistan and granting both
nations their sovereignty.
It is very tempting to assume that A Passage to India was connected with

the British withdrawing from India. In this assumption there is the belief
that literature is not a mere exploration of human reality but is one of the
infinite discourses that confirms this reality. In this sense critics such as
Nirad C. Chaudhuri have argued «A Passage To India has possibly been an
even greater influence in British imperial politics than in English literature. »
(Draper, Chaudhuri 201). This rather radical and somehow superficial
statement seems to spring from the earlier approaches to the novel which,
in the vast majority, concentrated on the political side of the work. However,
it is true that the novel’s unkind portrayal of the relationship between the
Indians and the Anglo-Indians, the way in which the latter at best completely
ignored and at worst mistreated the former, had a strong impact on general
public opinion who now perceived the Empire as a taken for granted and,
thus, helping to change an attitude that was utterly indifferent towards the
Empire and its colonies. In the political arena, the novel's themes of
misunderstandings and disharmony between the cultures, the harm that an
imposed relationship did to each of the parties involved, were used as
arguments by anti-imperialists who wanted to remove Britain from India. A
good example in this respect is to be found in Ronny Heaslop who confronted
by his mother, Mrs Moore, accusation that he «never used to judge people
like this at home» retorts, «India isn’t home» (Forster 1979: 54). It is also the
case of Mahmoud Ali who, as Ronny, has lost his humanistic approach to
life and is capable of harm against the British, for example by withholding
about Fielding’s wedding vital information that could have saved much
trouble for Dr Aziz.
The novel, as happens with Heart of Darkness, provides no answers. The
only way to resolve the problem seems to be the withdrawal of the British
from India. It is important to note that, as Chaudhuri has pointed out, this
102
way out «is not a solution of the problem but only its elimination)) (Draper,
Chaudhuri 202). Therefore, while from a political perspective the end of
British occupation would be the outcome that would satisfactory to those in
conflict, within the realm of the novel, and in view of human relations in
general, the conciliation of cultures is a negation of the problem rather than
its solution, for there are always relationships between individuals belonging
to different cultures. The question stands as to whether it is a failure on
Forsters part not to provide a solution, even if partial and subjective, to the
problem.
•f The effectiveness of Forsters novel as a political influence is found

in his dramatisation of a great imperial system at its worst. He depicts
both the British and Indians as petty and snobbish to such an extent
that in different moments of the narrative the reader has constantly to
shift her/his likes and dislikes of the main characters, Mrs. Moore
being perhaps the exception.
However, it is perhaps, far beyond the political surface of the novel for
which Forster is unwilling or unable to provide a solution, where the interest
of the novel resides. The interaction of the individuals populating A Passage
to India seems to be the main preoccupation explored in the novel. In this
sense, Forster, escaping the easy stereotypical portrayal of the characters,
presents human beings carrying with them the good and evil of their cultural
and life experiences.
T Notice how, as we studied in the reading of Heart of Darkness, the

blurring of the frontier between good and evil seems to be the only
possible artistic positioning in relation to the very dichotomised
discourse of the Empire. ‘
The title of the novel is taken from Walt Whitmans poem of the same
me included in Leaves of Grass (1900). In a sense, Forster’s text carries
ther the American poet’s apparently exuberant and optim istic commentary
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The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought i n t h e First Half of the 20’" Century Y
on the nineteenth-century belief in a world unified by technical progress.

Whitman envisions that the true unification will come when the 'Poet',
whom he calls the 'Son of God’, will be the one to make sense of the secrets
of the human soul and the sufferings of humankind:
Finally shall come the Poet, worthy that name;
The true Son of God shall come, singing his songs.
Then, not your deeds only, O voyagers, O scientists and inventors,
[shall be justified,
All these hearts, as of fretted children, shall be sooth'd,
All affection shall be fully responded to —the secret shall be told;
All these separations and gaps shall be taken up, and hook’d and
[link'd together;
The passage to India was made more easily possible by the construction
of the Suez Canal connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. The canal
was finished in 1869 by Ferdinand de Lesseps, who was granted by Khedive
Said of Egypt ownership of the Canal for ninety-nine years after it was
completed. M. Lesseps sold shares mainly to the French gentry but also to
the Khedive to form the Suez Canal Company. When Disraeli was elected as
Prime Minister in 1874 he saw the opportunity for Britain to obtain control
over the Canal after being informed by his friend, the banker Lionel
Rothschild, that the Khedive, whose number of shares was enough to control
the Company, was in need of ready money. The French also knew of the
Khedives financial difficulties but, thinking they were the only ones in
possession of this information, were waiting for the price to go down. The
Russians and the Turkish were also interested in participating in the running
of the Canal. In the end, the British were the first in offering the amount
required and they thus obtained control of the Canal. This brief sketch of
the complex history of the Suez Canal is intended to show that despite
appearances and the pompous ceremony of its opening, the Canal has
always been a place of confrontation and controversy. It has to be remembered
that it has been the site of three wars: the 1956 Suez Crisis, the 1967 Six Day
War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Therefore, when Whitman, hopeful of <
better future, proclaimed that «Nature and Man shall be disjoin'd an
diffused no more,/ The true Son of God shall absolutely fuse them,» many <
his contemporaries were much more reluctant to celebrate the achieveme
of the enterprise or of technical achievements in general.
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«The White Man’s B u r d e n s : Different Approaches to Imperialism in Literature E
Forster was among those less optimistic. As has been mentioned above,
E.M. Forster was not as daring in his experiments with language and form
as were Lawrence or Joyce, yet it is important to note that his attitude
towards life was modern. As a consequence the reader should be wary when
approaching Forster’s texts, particularly A Passage to India, for the rational
surface present is deceptive and beneath that surface there is an undercurrent
text that needs to be explored.
T In Forsters view, India, as he shows in the novel, is not so much a

mystery as a 'muddle', a labyrinth very similar to the riddle of life
itself.
In this respect it should be noted that the 'muddle' that forms much of
the turning point of the novel, what happens at the Marabar Caves, is left
unresolved. Indeed, Forster was aware of the criticism that leaving open to
speculation the Marabar Caves episode might bring. As he states in a letter
answering what has happened in the Marabar Caves:
In the cave it is either a man, or the supernatural, or an illusion. If I say,
it becomes whatever the answer a different book. And even if I knew! My
writing mind therefore is a blur here —i.e. I will it to remain a blur, and to
be uncertain, as I am of many facts in daily life. This isn’t a philosophy of
aesthetics. It’s a particular trick I felt justified in trying because my theme
was India... Without the trick I doubt whether I could have got the spiritual
reverberation going.
(Quoted in Stallybrass 1979: 26)
Therefore, as Oliver Stallybrass has pointed out in his introduction to
the Penguin edition, we are confronted with a novel that combines «realism
and symbolism ... the personal and the cosmic» (Stallybrass 1979: 27).
Certainly, here, the poetic exploration of the passage to India detours from
te interesting and overt, yet from a literary perspective rather superficial,
ditical insight found in the novel.
Whitman's view of the world as unified by the fusion of man and nature
idopted by the liberal Cyril Fielding, who believes that the world «is a
105
globe of men who are trying to reach one another and can best do so by the
help of good will plus culture and intelligence®. This creed, Forster claims,
is «ill suited to Chandrapore» meaning that it is irrelevant in the context of
the riddle of India. The whole first chapter of the novel is a description of
Chandrapore. Forster establishes Chandrapore as a prototypical Indian
town, neither distinguished nor exceptionally troubled. This town can,
therefore, be taken as symbolic of the rest of India rather than as an
exceptional case: «Chandrapore was never large or beautiful, but two
hundred years ago it lay on the road between Upper India, then Imperial,
and the sea» (Forster 1979: 31). Chandrapore has also been a passage to
India, in past times that coincided with those when India was an empire.
Note here how the memory of past empires in Forster coincides with those
in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
In A Passage to India, however, the process is reversed in the sense that if
Conrads narrative refers to the times when European people were colonised
by other empires, Forster's empire is placed at the very heart of the British
colony. It should be pointed out that, although subordinated to London, India
was in fact an Empire in itself, ruling the modern states of India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, Burma, and Sri Lanka. Therefore, while substantiating the idea
of the circularity of time present in Heart of Darkness, Forsters image of the
Empire serves also to dignify India and contrast its past with the treatment
dispensed by the British. Having said this, in both cases, the introduction of
the memory of former empires serves to delineate the temporal boundaries of
the actual situation lived by the characters in the texts.
mi Hence, this memory introduces an element of conflict to the

apparent durability of the concept of Empire and its grandeur. Once
this element has been questioned, what remains are the individual and
the conflicts within.
A Passage to India addresses complex questions about human relation?

The tragedy of the novel lies in the breakdown of communication bot
between races and between individuals. The book is divided into three ma
sections entitled 'Mosque', 'Caves’ and 'Temple' in that order, which mig
correspond to the three seasons of the Indian year and stand as a symbol
1
106 .
l
how individual relationships are weathered by a lack of communication and

misunderstanding.
From a Christian European perspective, the three in one recalls the
mystery of the Holy Trinity, whose resolution is an act of faith and not of
reason. Furthermore, the religious imagery serves to explore different
aspects of the human being. In 'Mosque' Forster uses Aziz who expresses
emotional nature through Islam: "Aziz liked to hear his religion praised. It
soothed the surface of his mind, and allowed beautiful images to form
beneath” (Forster 1979: 105). Godbole represents Hinduism in 'Temple'.
During the birth of Shri Krishna love, as a faculty, is exercised. In this
manner emotional nature and the capacity for love are explored in these
two sections. Religion is of little assistance when confronting the intellect.
Thus, Adela and Fielding, by expressing their Western views, become a
textual symbol of the part entitled ‘Caves’. They lack the emotional and
mystical insight into life, and depend on their reason and academic
background to understand human relationships.
These different aspects of human nature in isolation are of no help in
fully understanding the riddle of life; among all the characters only Mrs.
Moore is capable of crossing religious and intellectual boundaries, which
implies that she is indeed capable of fully understanding the meaning of the
echo she experiences at the Marabar Caves. Mrs. Moore is able to grasp the
truth of human existence because she becomes a conduct for cultures and
religions. The physical death of this character is a metaphor for the ultimate
knowledge she has acquired at the Marabar Caves, in her understanding of
an echo that seems to say "Pathos, piety, courage —they exist but are
identical, and so is filth. Everything exits, nothing has value” (Forster 1979:),
indicating that each individual is alone in a rather hostile universe. As has
Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, she has confronted good and evil at the same
time and this experience has changed her for ever: "Her Christian tenderness
had gone, or had developed into a hardness, a just irritation against the
human race” (Forster 1979: 204).
' IbMI As does

Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Mrs. Moore becomes a kind
of a goddess, a Vishnu, seen by others as provider of truth and
knowledge.
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T h e Need to Make it N e w : English Literature and Thought in the First Half of t h e 20™ Century Y
It comes as no surprise that at the ceremony of Krishna’s birth Godbole,

the other character who has been at the caves but is unable to describe
them, in a trance-like state very close to his comprehension of God, brings
to the text the memory of Mrs. Moore. Indeed, at the time of the trial the
belief among the Indians that Mrs. Moore has been sent back to England by
her son so that she cannot testify and give evidence to support Aziz's
innocence helps to widen her popularity.
On the other hand, Ronny fears that his mother might cause trouble if
she remains in India. Yet nobody, neither the British, nor the Indians (nor
the reader), can be sure that Mrs. Moore knows what actually happened in
the Marabar Caves. When Adela comments to her: "I thought you said ‘Aziz
is an innocent man’ but it was Mr. Fielding's letter” her answer is “Of course
he is innocent” (Forster 1979: 209). When pressured by her son on the point,
she simply replies “One knows people's characters, as you call them” which,
as is explicitly acknowledged in the text, proves nothing conclusive but is a
subjective point of view.
C3 The main difference between Kurtz and Mrs. Moore is that the
reader is able to witness, although may not understand, Mrs. Moore’s
transformation.
Mrs. Moore comes to India in the company of Miss Quested who, by the
way, has a similar experience but is not yet ready to understand the real
significance of the echo. She says to Mrs. Moore: "There is this echo I keep
on hearing... I can’t get rid of it” to which Mrs. Moore answers: "I suppose
you never will”. After a while Adela insists: "what is this echo?” Finally, Mrs.
Moore ends the conversation with a truth that is mistakenly understood as
a stubborn uncooperative attitude by Ronny and Adela: "If you don’t know,
you don't know; I can't tell you” (Forster 1979: 205). The Marabar Caves are
introduced right from the beginning of the novel as the only distinguishable
item in Chandrapore's landscape:
Only in the south, where a group of fists and fingers are thrust u
through the soil, is the endless expanse interrupted. These fists and finge
are the Marabar Hills, containing the extraordinary caves.
(Forster 1979: 32
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At the beginning of the novel, the caves are already imbued with a
mysterious aura foreshadowing the future events that constitute a turning
point in A Passage to India. Although they overlook and are often contemplated
from Chandrapore, nobody in the novel is really able to describe them. The
caves reflect everything as does a mirror. They have no feature that makes
them remarkable save the echo. They are similar to a labyrinth and, in that,
it is impossible to distinguish one from another. The caves represent
everything in life. They stand for all the possible emotional, intellectual and
mystical views. They are intangible because no one is capable of experiencing
life in an absolute way. The symbolism of the Marabar Caves lies precisely
in the echo they produce, presented throughout the narrative as a
representation of a timelessness that knows no narrative but which
nevertheless exists and forms part of life and reality: « What dwelt in the first
of the caves? Something very old and very small. Before time, it was before
space also» (Forster 1979: 212). An echo that, as Mrs. Moore painfully
understands is impossible to articulate.
UJ Mrs. Moore, after the visit to the caves, becomes the bearer of their
echo and this might be the reason why she now repeats words almost
every time she speaks: ‘say, say, say', ‘bad, bad, bad’, ‘love, love, love’.
Interestingly enough these repetitions of words come always in a set of

three, resembling the tripartite structure of the novel as a whole. In fact,
these repetitions work at trying to expel the evil she has encountered at the
caves: “She has come to a state where the horror of the universe and its
smallness are both visible at the same time” (Forster 1979: 212). Not evil
itself as much as the nature of evil is at stake in the novel. As Mrs. Moore
points out, "There are different ways of evil” (Forster 1979: 210).
Much of the symbolism Forster develops in the novel is taken from
Hindu scripture and philosophy. The caves elude all explanation, as does the
onception of Hindu deity: it implies that to understand deity is to limit it.
indu deity extends universally, comprehending all that exists, both good
d evil as Godbole explains in the novel:
Good and evil are different things as their names imply. But, in my own
humble opinion, they are both aspects of my Lord. He is present in the one,
109
absent in the other, and the difference between presence and absence is
great, as great as my feeble mind can grasp. Yet absence implies presence,
absence is not non-existence, and we are therefore entitled to repeat ‘Come,
come, come, come’.
(Forster 1979: 186)
In Hindu philosophy, Brahman, also called ‘soul of the world’, represents
‘All that exists’. All the other gods represent the various parts of Brahman
like a tree with its many branches. They are separated by the veil of illusion.
When mystical release comes, the veil is lifted, and the two appear to be one.
Forster gives the echo a characteristic sound of “bourn”. There is little
difference between its phonetic pronunciation, and the Hindu syllable Ohm.
When one meditates with that syllable, one can reach Brahman, expel evil,
and “learn to see the all —pervading, the Highest Person” (Draper: 208).
Forster used this symbolism to a great extent in conveying his message.
The echo taunts Adela until she withdraws her accusation against Aziz. She
has to recognise the common being of humanity. Until then, the evil stays
with her in the echo (Draper: 210). Also, when Mrs. Moore had her vision at
the caves, their essential meaning was revealed to her. As was Godbole who
could not describe the caves, she could not describe their meaning, because
it surpassed the principle of individualisation. However, she understood it,
when she compared it to Christianity: “poor little talkative Christianity, and
she knew that all its divine words from ‘Let there be light’ to ‘It is finished’
only amounted to ‘bourn’” (Draper, Allen 211). It is not surprising that the
revelation, beyond her intellect, to realise that the beginning and the end,
the alpha and omega of human existence, amount to nothing more nor less
than ‘bourn’ frightened her beyond what words can express. Her repetition
of words is a symbol representing the calling of the presence of Brahman
when confronted with the sudden realisation of the absence.
IIUJ The technique of repeating events with slight variations in different

contexts is used as a way to explore the meaningless but disturbing
echo, which is, as the novel implies, the heart of human existence.
The echo of the caves provides the novel with a rhythm to be found in t’
use of repetition. An important example of this rhythm lies in the similar
no
between the accident involving the unknown animal and Adela’s entrance to
the cave. In the scene with the accident, Adela is concerned with her marriage
to Ronny. The car crashes into an animal and the people are confused over
what the animal was. Then they all return in Miss Dereks car, Adela and
Ronny who were about to break up realising that they do not want to marry
each other. In the cave scene Adela again questions her love for Ronny:
But as she toiled over a rock that resembled an inverted saucer, she
thought, 'What about love?’The rock was nicked by a double row of footholds,
and somehow the question was suggested by them. Where had she seen
footholds before? Oh yes, they were the pattern traced in the dust by the
Nawab Bahadurs car. She and Ronny —no, they did not love each other.
(Forster 1979: 162)
This sudden realisation, that she does not love Ronny, makes her ask
Aziz the offensive question which will precipitate the following course of
events: «Have you one wife, or more than one?» (Forster 1979: 164). Aziz,
offended by the question, stops taking good care of her and apparently she
disappears out of his sight. Only later do we learn that she has entered a
cave, thinks she has been attacked, and races down the Kawa Doi to Miss
Dereks car. The accident scene is mentioned to imply similarities to this
incident. Who is to be blamed for the car accident? Who is to blame for
what occurred in the Marabar Caves? Indeed, did anything actually happen?
Forsters use of rhythm is the only possible way to allow for this connection.
The introduction of this apparently feeble, muddled mystery plot, this
unsatisfactorily unresolved 'whodunit,' serves in the narrative to introduce
a feeling of deception and uneasiness since the question finds no satisfactory
answer. This fact, no doubt, pinpoints and highlights the idea that there is
no readily available answer to the riddle of life. The best one can do is to
count on fellow human beings to ease the pain of this tragedy.
. IfcJJ If Conrad’s experience on board had taught him that fidelity was
the only anchor a human being could have against the evil of the
universe, Forster seems to think that affection is the key to the matter:
«Why can’t we be friends now? said the other holding hi m affectionately » -
(Forster 1979: 316)
ill
Affection, the power that would unite people, nevertheless seems to be

an elusive quality of the human being. The non-event of Aziz’s trial with all
charges dropped brings to the surface the insurmountable confrontation
between people; at first sight between British and Indians, but also among
the British themselves since Fielding, on account of his views on the court
case, becomes suspicious of the Anglo-Indians. In the same way, later on in
the narrative, after she confesses to Aziz’s innocence, Miss Quested is
rejected by the British community. There is also division among the Indians,
between Muslims and Hindus; Professor Godbole refuses to aid Dr Aziz.
A Passage to India seems to be an essentially pessimistic book where
more connections are severed than made between people. Even strong
friendships, like that of Fielding and Aziz, break down under the pressure
exerted on both sides. Within the framework of the narrative, the hopeful
passage to India of Whitman’s poem turns out to be an impossible bridge, as
symbolised in the Bridge Party.
Even Mrs. Moore’s vision is only a part of Forster’s theme. It was never
complete, as his resolution of the story is never completed, and as life itself
never completes, only expands. Forster could never have a single character
convey the entire message of his novel, nor convey the message by resolving
the dramatic conflict.
Most of the names of the characters are symbolic of their respective
personalities and attitudes to life. Mrs. Moore is the everlasting presence of
the novel. She comes to India looking for more than is readily available and
in finding it she becomes greater than life. Miss Quested, as does Mrs.
Moore, comes to India in search for further knowledge. She wants to know
'the real India’ and in doing so she tests herself and questions herself, hence
the past participle of her name. Fielding is the Promised Land, lacking any
prejudices he is the theoretical enabler of affection across cultures and
individuals, yet he fails because for all his good intentions he has not yet
understood the importance of communication. Aziz, as friendly as he is, is
a victim of this inefficiency to communicate clearly. He is ofter
misunderstood, and misunderstands just as frequently when speaking t
people who do not share his culture. 'Bole’ according to the Oxford Englk
Dictionary means ''main stem or trunk of a tree,” thus the name 'Godbo
seems to be a synonym for Brahman, the one connected with God. Howev
because God cannot be explained, Godbole is lacking in communicatii
J
112
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« T h e White Man's Burden»: Different Approaches to Imperialism i n Literature E
for all his spirituality seems to be a way out of the claustrophobic web of
misunderstandings and miscommunications present in the novel. At the
end of the novel the reader is left with the same feeling of uneasiness
provoked by the unsolved crime. This is so because the novel attempts, but
necessarily fails, to grasp the whole meaning of life, because A Passage to
India raises questions about reality and life that cannot be answered. The
best we can do, as does Marlow in Heart of Darkness, is to repeat the
experience through words in the hope that some new meaning will break
through allowing us to grasp some knowledge beyond the appearances of
the readily available world.
3. ACTIVITIES
3.1. Test yourself
1. Briefly explain the implications of the title Heart of Darkness.

2. Is there any autobiographical element in A Passage to India?
3. Explain the significance of the characters’ names in Forster’s novel.
4. Why is Marlow telling his story?
1. Analyse how the texts studied in this Unit are representative of

contemporary discussions on the Empire.
2. Compare and contrast Kurtz and Mrs. Moore as characters epitomising
the paradoxes and contradictions held by prevailing attitudes towards
the Empire.
3. Explore
1. There has been serious criticism regarding the racism and gender bias
of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Read the following extract from Chinua
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The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20"' Century
Achebe’s «An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness*

and discuss Achebe’s opinion in relation to the text (450 words):
Students of Heart of Darkness will often tell you that Conrad is concerned
not so much with Africa as with the deterioration of one European m i n d
caused by solitude and sickness. They will point out to you that Conrad is, if
anything, less charitable to the Europeans in the story than he is to the
natives, that the point of the story is to ridicule Europe’s civilizing mission
in Africa. A Conrad student informed me in Scotland that Africa is merely a
setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr Kurtz.
Which is partly the point. Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates
the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all
recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril.
Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa
to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? But that is not
even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans
which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to forster in the world.
And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which
depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art.
(Norton 2000: 2040)
2. There has been criticism in relation to racism and Forster’s A Passage
to India. For example, Chaudhuri feels he has unjustly portrayed the
Indians: «The Indians were a people who had established a great
modern culture that could stand up with names such as Erasmus and
Holberg, but at the introduction of the British were slighted and
cheated. Some were assaulted, and none could compare or even hold
a relationship with anyone in the new ruling community» (Chaudhuri:
203). Discuss this opinion taking into account the different Indian
characters present in Forster’s novel. (450 words).
3. Write an essay of 450 words on the similarities and differences
between Heart of Darkness and A Passage to India in their involvement
with the theme of Empire.
3.4. Key terms

— Affection
— Africa 1
114
— Ambiguity
— Appearances
— Britain
— Colony
— Composite characters
— Culture
— Empire
— Fidelity
— Imperialism
— Misunderstanding
— Paradox
— Story within story
— Unreliable narrator
— White man’s burden
5 . BIBLIOGRAPHY
Joseph Conrad (selected bibliography)
Batchelor, John. 1993. The Life of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography. Blackwell
Publishers.
Bloom, Harold. 1992. Marlow, Major Literary Characters. Chelsea House Public
_ Library.
igwilt, Christopher L. 1995. The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the
Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire. Stanford University Press.
lpham, Geoffrey. 1996. One of Us: The Mastery of Joseph Conrad. University of
Chicago Press.
115
1
The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20 " Century
Said, Edward W. 1993. Two Visions in Heart of Darkness. Culture and Imperialism.
New York: Vintage.
Sherry, Norman. 1980. Conrad's Western World. Cambridge University
E. M. Forster (selected bibliography)
Bradbury, Malcolm, ed. 1966. Forster: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood

Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall.
Bristow, J., ed. 2002. E.M. Forster. Longman Higher Education.
Singh, Aviar. 1996. The Novels of E.M. Forster. Atlantic Publishers & Distributors.
Tambling, Jeremy, ed. 1995. E.M. Forster: Contemporary Critical Essays. St. Martins
Press.
Historical Context(selected bibliography)
Eldridge, C.C. 1996. The Imperial Experience: From Carlyle to Forster. New York,
Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Specific texts
- Allen, Glen, O. 1968. «Structure, Symbol, and Theme in E.M. Forsters A Passage To
India* in V. A. Shahane (ed) Perspectives in E.M. Forster’s A Passage To India: A
Collection of Critical Essays. Barnes & Noble.
Chaudhuri, Nirad, C. 1968. «Passages To and From India» in V. A. Shahane (ed)

Perspectives in E.M. Forster’s A Passage To India: A Collection of Critical Essays.
Barnes & Noble.
Davies, Tony and Nigel Wood, eds. 1994. A Passage to India. Milton Keynes: T1
Open University Press.
Jay, Betty, ed. 1998. Icon Critical Guide: E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. Ic
Books. '
1»
116 1
1
Web Sites
— The Joseph Conrad Society (UK):

http://users.bathspa.ac.uli/conrad/ /
— ‘Only Connect’: The Unofficial E.M. Forster Site
http://www.musicandmeaning.com/forster/
— For a brief overview on the history of the British Empire:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire
117
Unit 3
LITERATURE AND WAR: « DISILLUSION AS
NEVER TOLD IN THE OLD DAYS»
K Program
W
1. Presentation: ‘The War That Ends All Wars’
2. Text Analysis: IS:
2.1. "The Poetry is in the Pity:» Georgian Poets Experiencing War.
2.2. «Let’s We Forget:» Women Writing the War
3. Activities IES
4. Bibliography HY
Learning outcomes
— To analyze the relationship between war and literature.
— To discern the strategies through which contemporary poets and writers
developed original techniques and learnt from their predecessors to
convey their experiences of war.
— To be aware of the interaction between poetic discourses and other
social or political discourses pondering whether literature is an active
participant in the construction of the world.
— To consider both aesthetic and ethical questions such us the poetic
attempt to transform atrocity into art.
— Through the comparison of texts, students will heighten their awareness
of the complex and controversial debates surrounding the genre of war
writing itself.
— To consider the relationship between women writers and war.
\ J‘
1. PRESENTATION:‘THE WAR THAT ENDS ALL WARS'
The main aim of this Unit is to study the relationship between war and
literature. Given the period of literature covered in the course the Unit will
concentrate (albeit not exclusively) on the First World War. This was the
tajor event that changed European civilisation as it had been known up to
is conflict. The Unit will also deal mainly with poetry, although some
ose relating to war will also be considered. The general objective of the
it is to chart the strategies through which poets and writers in general
eloped original techniques and learnt from their predecessors to convey
r experiences of war. In doing so we shall explore the ethical considerations
121
The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20 th Century
underlying war poetry as it attempts to transform atrocity into art. Therefore,

this Unit will consider both aesthetic and ethical questions such us: for
whom does the poet speak, and for what purpose? How might the poet write
about violence without exploiting or cheapening it? Does the combatant-
poet have rights that are denied to civilian poets? What should the emotional
stance of the poet be? How and in what detail must the horror of war be
described?
We will see that these and similar questions are always posed implicitly,
and often directly, by war poets. In the process, debates about war writing
as experiential or non-experiential writing will be examined, as will the
relation between history and the imagination; war and Empire; gender in
war writing; war poetry and popular culture; and identity and nationality in
war literature. Through the comparison of texts, students will heighten their
awareness of the complex and controversial debates surrounding the genre
of war writing itself, and examine the extent to which the production and
interpretation of war poetry is conditioned by cultural, social and political
factors. The relationship between women writers and war is also an
important objective of this Unit.
The writers studied in this Unit are by no means the only ones who could
be studied in relation to war and literature. Choosing these writers in
preference to other authors means not that they are better writers but that
they provide an adequate amount of insight into the subject as to give an
accurate idea of the main aim and objectives described here.
The second part of the title of this Unit has been taken from Ezra Pound’s
poem 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ (1920, emphasis added):
These fought in any case,
and some believing,
pro domo, in any case...
Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later...
some in fear, learning love of slaughter; *
Died some, pro patria,
122
Literature and War: «Disillusion as Never Told in the Old Days»
non ‘dulce’ non 'et decor’ ...

walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.
Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
fair cheeks, and fine bodies;
fortitude as never before
frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.
This title deserves some explanation as it may seem paradoxical that
a writer to support Fascism d u r i n g the Second World War, broadcasting
Fascist propaganda by radio to the United States, is taken as paradigmatic
of the literature produced as a reaction to the Great War. Precisely the
paradox conveyed i n Pound’s book of poems as a whole a n d i n this poem
in particular i n relation to its author, is intentional. The Great War can
be approached reasonably only by undertaking an attitude of paradoxical
wonder at a conflict that was to b e 'the war that ends all wars’. In fact,
the First World War was one of the m o s t meaningless wars ever fought,
at the cost of the highest number of casualties ever (8,538,315 died in
conflict).
In the first section of Ezra Pounds 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,’ the speaker,
Mauberley, who could be seen as Pound’s poetic voice, reveals the reasons
vhy he fails to elevate poetry by describing his efforts to write a poem that
;
s society will find as beautiful as he finds classical works. As Mauberley
'Is us, how to «resuscitate the dead art of poetry» is what has occupied his
nd for the last three years. In his search, however, he is confronted with
- absolute ugliness of the Great War, which he compares to Horace's
:um i n his Odes by negating the heroic attributes of dying for one’s
ntry «'non dulce’ non 'et decor.’» ..
123
§ Horace is also recalled in the title of Wilfred Owen’s poem 'Dulce

et Decorum Est' written in 1918 and published for the first time in
1920. Owen, as we shall see, by actually experiencing the cruelty and
desolation of life in the trenches became one of those giving voice to
'disillusions as never told in the old days.' Why is Horace so recurrent
in the war literature of the period?
The way in which the lives of millions were wasted on the battlefield was
neither sweet nor decorous. This poem surprises the reader for it is one of
the few instances in which Pound shows a sense of humanity. Despite his
latter alliances, and despite his mania for good art and impatience with
public stupidity, in this poem Ezra Pound provides an intelligent and clear
outline of what the Great War meant for those who directly experienced it.
Pressed to ponder the similarities between human life and art, he seems
inclined to concede, at least in this poem, that art becomes meaningless
when confronted with the nothingness found in the pointless cruelty of the
First World War. Yet, it was to art that people turned when trying to make
sense of the atrocities of this War. As Catharine Reilly has pointed out in the
Introduction to her engrossing Scars upon My Heart (1981) the amount of
people that took to poetry writing during the War and its aftermath is
absolutely exorbitant, counting to 2225 combats and non-combats (of whom
532 are women).
Among these voices are included, albeit not exclusively, Charles Hamilton
Sorley, Edward Thomas, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Vera Brittain,
Rose Macaulay, Jessie Pope or Robert Graves. Other poets such as Rupert
Brooke died too soon to be able later to counterbalance what he felt on the
break out of World War I.
The reactions to the War seemed as varied as the people who inhabited
Britain and the British Empire at that moment. Before approaching thes
reactions it seems necessary to give a succinct historical overview.
When War was declared in 1914, few people had any idea of t
struggle that lay ahead. Some even welcomed it. They failed to real
that modern weapons would lead to a terrible loss of life. Taking Pour
poem as a vivid description of what happened on the different front 1
124 ' l
Literature and War: « Disillusion as Never Told in the Old Days»
the War, we shall concentrate here on what has come to be termed the
Home Front. In London, as in other capital cities, crowds cheered and
sang. Soldiers in the Reserves joined their regiments, expecting that the
conflict would soon finish. It was commonly thought that ‘it will all be
over by Christmas'. Most people in Britain believed that the combined
strengths of the French Army and the British Navy would quickly settle
things favourably.
The first men to volunteer for the war were filled with ideas of patriotism.
They imagined that they were going on a crusade, ‘to teach the Hun a lesson'.
To those civilians at home, they were 'brave boys’ fighting for right against
wrong. The feelings of those early days are shown in the poem Tn Flanders
Fields’ published in Punch Magazine in 1915 and written by Canadian poet
John McCrae, a medical officer in both the Boer War and the First World
War. This poem is the only one by which he would be remembered. The
significance of the poem is that to this day, the red poppy is the symbol of
Remembrance Day:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place: and in the sky
Thelarks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch: be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields. 1
(John McCrae In Flanders Fields: web)

The call for volunteers came from Lord Kitchener, Secretary for War. He
was a greatly respected figure. The next extract comes from Lloyds Weekly
News. It was inserted on 1 November 1914::
125
YOUR KING AND COUNTRY NEED ANOTHER 100,000 MEN

In the present grave national emergency another 100,000 men are
needed at once to rally round the Flag and add to the ranks of our New
Armies.
Terms of Service.
4. (Extension of Age Limit)

Age on enlistment 19 to 38. Ex-soldiers up to 45. Minimum height 5ft. 4
ins., except for ex-soldiers and those units for which special standards are
authorized. Must be medically fit. General Service for the War. (bbc web
site).
Women took over men’s jobs. The Suffragettes were able to prove their
equality in an active way. War munitions were needed, so thousands of
women went to work in factories. They often had to bring up their families
alone while their husbands were away fighting. Some discovered
independence and reasonable wages for the first time. Here is an account
written by one of them:
The country was asking all women who could to go and help the War
effort. I heard of a firm in the Tower Bridge Road wanting girls in their
factory. It was a pleasant factory compared with some. Hours were 8 a.m. to
6 p.m. and I often worked an hour’s overtime till 7. On Saturdays it was 8 till
12. We had ten minutes break in the morning and an hour for dinner. Wages
were 10/7d a week at the age of 16.
Young married women came flocking in, glad to earn extra money
besides their allowance from the Army. They were allowed to stay away for
ten days when their husbands came on leave from France. The grannies and
aunts looked after the children. Women looked upon this new found freedom
and also extra money as a blessing. The work in the factory was arduous.
You had to be clocked in and at your bench at eight o'clock and ready to
start work directly the hooters went. You were not supposed to speak to one
another and if caught when the boss or manager came looking at your work
around the factory, it meant instant dismissal, or else you were threatened
with it the very next time. We made petrol cans, the big machines in the
men’s shop cutting out and the women, standing up all day, soldering seams
and handles and necks.
Miss G. Lovegrove (bbc web site)
126
Civilians volunteered for the services in their thousands. By the spring of

1916 more than 2,500,000 had joined up, of their own free will, to serve
Britain. After this, conscription was introduced and thousands more were
forced to enlist. Anyone who was of German origin or name, or had friends
in that country, became unpopular. German-owned shops were attacked. A
campaign of hate was launched against ‘The Hun’. Stories were told of
German atrocities against civilians in other countries. These stories were
almost always untrue, but they were used to create bitterness towards the
enemy.
■f This campaign against anything German greatly affected poet

Charles Hamilton Sorley who was actually in Germany when the War
" broke out. Sorley, as we shall study later on, was also one of those who
volunteered for the army and died in the front.
By the end of 1916 it had become obvious that the Prime Minister, H.H.
Asquith, was not the best War leader for Britain. David Lloyd George, who
had been Minister of Munitions and then War Secretary, replaced him. In
1915 there had been a shortage of ammunition for the British Army. Lloyd
George, by great efforts, reorganised the production of shells. His work was
vital to the conduct of the War. In the years just before 1914 there had been
some violent strikes and a great deal of labour trouble in industry. During
the War, this decreased considerably. Men and women felt that they must
. not let down the servicemen fighting the enemy at close quarters.
War and death were carried to civilians in Britain. This came as a shock
to a people who had, for centuries, used the sea as a shield. On a few
occasions German ships bombarded towns on the east coast. A more
dreaded weapon was an air attack. German Zeppelins appeared in the
skies over several cities and dropped bombs, killing many. The terror of
War became very real. The air attacks on Britain alarmed the population.
The amount of casualties was not high compared with those of later wars,
but an enemy who made Zeppelin flights even over London, the capital of
the Empire, disrupted work and sleep. Here is an account of one of those
air raids:
‘
127
Peculiar conditions in the upper air muffled the sound of L.45’s engines
and also deadened the crash of her sighting shots on the outskirts of the
capital. Consequently people were moving about when Kolle’s first
660-pounder descended near Piccadilly Circus. It blew in the glass fronts of
many fashionable stores and tore a hole in the road 5 feet deep and 10 feet
across. Seven people were killed and eighteen injured.
Kolle's next bomb fell across the river. In Camberwell the second
660-pounder struck a party wall between two houses and utterly destroyed
them, at the cost of twelve lives. The last of the «big ones» demolished four
houses in Hither Green, while twenty-six neighbouring villas were damaged
by the blast.
(Robinson 1962: 237) )V
The fear of air attack caused many people to leave their homes at
night; it also affected factory production. In many places, the blackout
was introduced as a defensive measure against possible attacks from the
air.
As the conflict dragged on, the early enthusiasm was lost. Casualty lists
were too long and thousands of families suffered the loss of a husband, son
or a brother. When soldiers returned from the front line with stories of the
horrors experienced there, civilians in Britain grew numbed by the War, but
were determined to see it through.
‘\
_ R T The contrast between the life-and-death problems of war time and

, the trivia of civilian life was a recurring theme in women's narratives
at the time. A ‘ ‘i ' ‘
Soldiers on leave, for their part, did not find the support that they thought
they deserved and often found that their friends and relations viewed the
front as something terrible over there, so far away that it was nothing to do
with them. Confronted with a horror that they could not possibly experience
for themselves, many choose ignorance as a defence mechanism. They did
not really want to know, and this was the case even in those parts that
happened to have escaped the first-hand effects of War.
1288-.
In 1917 the food shortages increased. Certain areas of Britain had few
shortages of food during the war; in some towns and cities, however, it
became very difficult to obtain such things as sugar, margarine, tea and
meat. People had to queue for them. By 1918 there were limited supplies of
other foods such as preserves:
Jam, marmalade, syrup, treacle and honey will be rationed as from
November 3rd, on the red coupons on leaf 5 marked «spare». You can buy
jam and marmalade on these coupons only from the retailer with whom you
are registered. You can buy syrup, treacle and honey on these coupons from
any retailer who can supply you.
Persons who will be between the ages of 6 and 18 at midnight on the 31st
December next can obtain a supplementary ration of jam.
a (Ministry of Food, Food Rationing Order, 1918))
Surprisingly, and probably due to the official propaganda, although
some grasped the full horror of the War, for many across the Channel it was
viewed as nothing more profound than casualty lists, relevant to everyday
life only if these tragedies became personal ones. What mattered to most
middle-class people in England were 'the universal topic, maids and ration
cards’, as Vera Brittain found in 1918:
From a world in which life or death, victory or defeat, national survival
or national extinction, had been the sole issues, I returned to a society where
no one discussed anything but the price of butter and the incompetence of
the latest 'temporary' matters which, in the eyes of Kensington and of
various acquaintances who dropped in to tea, seemingly far out-weighed in
importance the operations at Zeebrugge, or even such topical controversies
as those which raged round Major General Maurices letter to The Times,
and the Pemberton-Billing case. Keyed up as I had been by the month-long
strain of daily rushing to and fro in attendance on the dying, and nightly
waiting for the death which hovered darkly in the sky overhead, I found it
excruciating to maintain even an appearance of interest and sympathy.
Probably I did not succeed, for the triviality of everything drove me to
despair.
(Brittain, 1994: 123)
The German boat campaign became more ruthless. Thousands of tons of
supplies were destroyed as ships were torpedoed and there were many fears
O
129
The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 2 0t " Century Y
that people would face starvation. Some rationing was introduced. Outside
food shops were lines of patient, tired women waiting. As we have seen,
World War I was not just the war to end wars, a holy crusade fought to make
the world safe for democracy; it was also the war of wars, a paradigm of
technological warfare:
In some sense, The Great War created all subsequent battles in its own
bleak image. Indeed, with its trenches and zeppelins, its gases and mines,
this conflict has become a diabolical summary of the idea of modern warfare
—western science bent to the service of western imperialism (...). Even the
name modern historians have given it, World War I, defines the event as
merely the first in a series of global apocalypses, while the phrase by which .
it was known to contemporaries, the Great War, with its ambiguous
muddling of size and value, seems also to describe a crucial (though slightly
different) millennial occurrence.
(Gilbert and Gubar 1989: 259)
By the time that victory came, at the end of 1918, the meaning of total
war had been brought home to civilians as well as to soldiers. All were
exhausted by the fighting and bloodshed. In Britain the armistice was
greeted with great relief and people went wild with joy knowing that the
‘boys' would now be returning home and there would be an end to concern.
People at home were ready to explode with happiness. Singing, dancing
and parties went on for hours. The unusual celebratory behaviour
witnessed by those in London at the time are symptomatic of the sense of
relief felt by all who had survived the massacre the First World War came
to be.
I
. T The Great War changed the lives of Europeans for ever and, once
the party was over, what remained in its aftermath was a bitter
insecurity, translated into a total rejection of the positive humanistic
traditional values held before the War, and a sense of total alienation
of the individual that, in literature, would produce works such as
Pound’s ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ or T.S. Eliots The Waste Land
(1922). ' ' I - - . '
130
Literature and War: «Disillusion as Never Told in the Old Days» »
2. TEXT ANALYSIS
2.1. “The Poetry is in the Pity:» Georgian Poets Experiencing War
As we did in the previous section, we should start here by thinking about

the implications of the title of this section. The currency of the term
'Georgian’ began in 1912 with the publication by Edward Marsh (1872-
1953) of an anthology of Georgian Verse. 'Georgian’ as a name given to a
generation of poets is clearer-cut than other terms such as ‘Romanticism’ or
‘Modernism’ in that it refers simply to the period of the reign of George V,
from 1910 to 1936, in the same way as ‘Elizabethan’ refers to the reign of
Elizabeth I. As all periods, ‘Modernism’ and ‘Romanticism’ also have a time
span, for example, British Romanticism begins around 1785 and ends in
1830. These terms, however, allow for later writers to ascribe to the
movement. For example, this is the case of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the
Volcano (1947), a novel that Lowry started writing in 1940 when the heyday
of the Modernist movement was already in decline. As Graham Martin has
observed, these terms are such that a young writer today might think of her/
himself as ‘Modernist’. This is not the case of ‘Georgian’, a term very closely
linked with the historical period to which it refers. This is not to say that
Georgian poets were directly linked with the King or, by implication,
conservative in their form and style; quite the opposite. As Angus Calder
argues, the intention in choosing the name was to highlight the newness of
the poetry being produced at the time. Since the King had come to the
throne only two years before the publication of the anthology «Marsh’s
choice of the title signified ‘innovation’® (Calder 1991: 20).
- The anthology was followed by a number of Georgian anthologies, the
last published in 1922 and, altogether, forty writers were included. Many of
the young members of the generation were considered at the time, as C.K.
Stead has argued, «dangerous literary revolutionaries® (Stead 1967: 58). For
example, Stead comments on the literary vandalism perpetrated by Brooke
when he wrote vividly about seasickness in 'Channel Crossing'. Also
revolutionary was the overt sexual content of the free verse of D.H. Lawrence.
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) was never included in any of Marsh’s anthologies
but, as he exultantly wrote to his mother in 1917, he felt very closely related
to the movement: «I am held peer to the Georgians, I’m held a poet’s poet®
(Owen 1967: 521).
131
In the introduction to the volume Georgian Poetry (1911-12) Edward

Marsh, using terms such as 'strength' and ‘beauty’, proclaims that a new
poetic, comparable to landmark poetic movements of the past, was born.
This is perhaps too expansive a statement for a generation caught up
between criticism from the previous generation for being too innovative, on
the one hand, and criticism from the following generation for being
unadventurous in theme and style on the other. It is significant in this sense
that the last anthology was published in 1922, the same year as Modernist
. icons such as T.S. Eliots The Waste Land, James Joyces Ulysses or Virginia
Woolfs third novel, Jacob’s Room, were published. This has provoked
different approaches to the poetry produced by the Georgian poets. Looking
at the first half of the twentieth century as a whole, although there were
many interesting innovations, the poetry produced by the members of this
generation did not signify as clear a break with previous generations as did
Modernist poetry. '
9 The names of the writers included already point to the heterogeneity '
of the generation: D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), Rupert Brooke (1887-
1915), Robert Graves (1895-1985), Edward Thomas (1878-1917),
_ Andrew Young (1885-1971), W.H. Davies (1871-1940) and Vita
' . Sackville-West (1892-1962) among others. -
. As for their literary influences, they paid tribute to the living Thomas
Hardy; they were inspired by the Romantics, Wordsworth in particular, and “
had strong roots in Victorians such as Mathew Arnold and Robert Louis
Stevenson. Rudyard Kiplings poems, as these are related to the English
theme, can also be traced as an inspiration. There is some influence from
A.E. Housman (1859-1936) as well.
The Georgians were interested in expressing everyday life experience
and looking at the world with fresh eyes. This went against the current
tendency towards imperialistic and patriotic verse produced by, among
others, Alfred Noyes, Rudyard Kipling (when he dealt with themes other
than the English one), and Henry Newbolt. In general, Georgian poetry
consists of a complacent and meditative lyrical vision of certain aspects of
life and nature. C.K. Stead has commented that Wilfred Owen, who
132
paradoxically, as said before, was never included in any of Marshs

anthologies, represents the prototypical Georgian poet in his «attempt to
come to terms with immediate experience, sensuous or imaginative, in a
language close to common speech» (Stead 1967: 89).
The revolt caused by the Georgian poets held a great appeal for the
general public and, in a sense, their poetry was param ount in the construction
of an 'Englishness’, white, rural and in many ways romantic, that pervaded
the perception of England for most of the twentieth century. For example,
in Vita Sackville- West’s The Land (1926), the Georgian view of the beauty of
the English countryside and its relationship with the lives of those inhabiting
it is clearly reflected:
The country habit has me by the heart,
For he’s bewitched for ever who has seen,
Not with his eyes but with his vision,
Spring
" 3 Flow down the woods and stipple leaves
‘ \ with sun.
(‘Winter’ from The Land, 1926)
The time-span constituting the period when Georgian poetry was at its
most productive, around 1912 to 1930, bears witness to the First World War
and its aftermath.
[1‘ ' •f The neo-Romantic poetry of the Georgians was one of the losses
of the War as it changed for many, particularly for those who fought in
it, their attitude towards poetry.
As a result of the literary examination of the War provided by many

Georgian poets, some are now better known as ‘The War Poets’. Since the
main topic of this Unit is the relationship between literature and war, we
shall now concentrate on the poetry produced by these poets. However, it is
important to bear in mind that many of these poets wrote very fine poetry
prior to the Great War and that this work, as it is the case of Rupert Brooke,
I may constitute a better example of their poetic skills than does the poetry
inspired by the First World War.
133
It has frequently been suggested that the First World War came as a
surprise to everybody including those at the time in office. The fact is that
when on 3 August the First World War broke out, it was the result of a crisis
hidden behind the apparent security of a political and economic system
established in the nineteenth century. The War was to destroy a social and
cultural structure in place in England since the Renaissance. England
entered the War and immediately sent its troops by sea and by land to fight
against the Germans and their allies. Some of the men forming part of these
troops were poets. For some of them, and especially at the beginning of the
conflict, war represented a way to break free from what they saw as a
materialist and undignified milieu surrounding them. This is clearly
expressed, for example, in Rupert Brookes sonnet 'Peace':
Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, I
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary, '
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move, ‘.
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary, ,,/"
And all the little emptiness of love! ’

Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there,-
Where there’s no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,
Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;
Nothing to shake the laughing hearts long peace there
But only agony, and that has ending;
And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.
' (Oxford Virtual Seminars: Web)
They felt an emotional and patriotic duty to defend their beloved
England and join forces against an enemy whom, in this early stage of the
War, they considered brutal. The current feeling that the cause for war was
justified and legitimate stimulated an idealisation, rooted in the tradition
of the hero, of those who were willing to sacrifice their lives for a just
cause. This is true of Rupert Brooke, but, in those early stages of the War,
it is also true of Wilfred Owen; in a stanza drafted in 1914, to be part of a
poem called 'The Ballad of Peace and War' that was never to be finished,
he wrote:
134
Literature and War: ((Disillusion as Never Told in the Old Days»
O meet it is and passing sweet

To live in peace with others,
But sweeter still and far more meet,
To die in war for brothers.
(Norton 2000: 2050)
i
■f Notice the clear reference to Horace in these lines. Owen’s

experiences in the trenches of the Western Front will make his war
poetry sharper, showing his growing disenchantment, and will reshape
the heroic vision of the warrior provided by this stanza.
Rupert Brooke had no time fully to experience the War since he died of
blood poisoning on 23 April, Easter Sunday, 1915. He enrolled in the Royal
Naval Division but his only encounter with military action was one day with
the HMS Hood while Antwerp was being evacuated. Therefore, Brooke did
not really experience the savagery and hardship of the war. For this reason
Robert Means claims that:
One of the many ironies of the war is that Rupert Brooke is remembered
as a war poet at all, because he is actually not a war poet —not in the same
sense that Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen are war
poets. Rupert Brooke is rather a pre-war poet.
,/ ’ (Oxford Virtual Seminars: Web)

_ The irony seems to go further in the myth constructed around him and
his death. Dean Inge, as part of his Easter Sunday sermon, read Rupert
Brookes poem ‘The Soldier’ in St Paul's Cathedral. The sermon was published
in The Times the following day. The poem and the poet mythically entered
into the public imagination. Indeed, Rupert Brooke had all the qualities of
a national hero. He was, as W.B. Yeats commented, ‘the handsomest young
man in England,’ he was young, cultivated, agreeable, courageous, and a
poet. Similarly to the way Philip Sidney was seen by the Elizabethans,
Rupert Brooke became, at this stage of the War, the icon of a country
enthusiastically confident in its final triumph. He came to represent the
sublimation of the sacrifice the nation had been pushed to make. His sonnet
J
135
sequence entitled '1914’ consisted of five numbered sonnets, preceded by an

unnumbered sonnet: 'The Treasure', ‘I Peace', 'II Safety’, Til The Dead’, ‘IV
The Dead', ‘V The Soldier’. They were first published in the periodical New
Numbers in January 1915. They later appeared in the Collected Poems in
1918. These sonnets contain the romantic patriotism of the first months of
the War before the battle of the Somme proved its actual, brutal nature.
From them, the most famous and quoted is 'The Soldier’, particularly the
opening lines:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some comer of a foreign field
That is for ever England.
(Norton 2000: 2050)
r & The prophecy of these words is uncanny, for they may have
; constituted his epitaph. Brooke died on the Aegean Sea on his way to
the battle at Gallipoli and was buried on the island of Skyros.
The poem follows the form of the English sonnet introduced by Wyatt
and Sidney: fourteen lines of iambic pentameter divided into an octave and
a sestet. There is, however, a disruption of the form in that the octave is
rhymed after the Shakespearean form (ababcdcd) whereas the sestet follows
the Italian rhyme (efgefg). In this manner, the poem also disrupts thematically
the sonnet form in that there is no predicament/resolution division,
traditionally placed in the octave and the sestet respectively. Nonetheless, as I"
a whole, it is effective in showing the blissful state of the fallen soldier and
the immortality of the English heritage he carries as cultural baggage.
Being the last one of the series, it is considered the culmination of the
emotional tension built up by the previous ones. It sums up the themes
present in the previous sonnets: spiritual liberation from old ideas, the
permanence of the memories of the dead, and the hero’s immortal legacy.
However, now he relates these to the idea of Englishness and a personal
loyalty to English heritage. The sonnet does not, in any way, insinuate an
apology for England’s imperial policy, yet, it seems to be informed by the
imperialistic idea that England is wherever her sons are.
136
It was never Brooke’s intention to write propaganda poetry and yet, ‘The
Soldier’ in particular and the ‘1914’ sonnets, have together aged in the same
way as propaganda does. Associated with the idealistic attitudes of 1914, the
endurance of ‘The Soldier’ is constrained by changing attitudes towards the
War. However, there is more to the ageing of this poem than the mere
, suggestion that it was appropriated by the establishment to stimulate in the
population a feeling of necessary sacrifice. The poem, as Martin Stephen
has pointed out, sums up: «admirably a mood that was felt by many people
when war broke out.» This seems to be precisely the issue with ‘The Soldier':
it seems a poem that could have been written by a poet Laureate for an
occasion. No doubt there is some personal emotion in the poem, but this
emotion is shared with public emotion and does not attempt any very new,
intense, personal insights of a surprising quality. In the light of history, it
seems unacceptably idealistic.
Furthermore, the whole imagery of the poem on the submission of the
fallen soldier dates it as rather naive. It seems as if nothing up until then had
happened to Rupert Brooke, as a man or as a poet, to prepare him adequately
to meet the challenge of the War and all that it implied. It is too weak to
claim that he did not meet the horrors of war, for other poets such as Charles
Hamilton Sorley (1895-1915) were capable of envisioning the futility of the
war that had just started, yet with the same lack of experience and at an
even younger age. Charles Hamilton Sorley was only twenty when he was
killed in France, just a few months before Brooke died at twenty-seven. As
Charles Hamilton Sorley expressed in his sonnet 'When You See Millions of
the Mouthless Dead’::
I
When you see millions of the mouthless dead

Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you’ll remember. For you need not so.
Both Brooke and Sorley were university educated, Cambridge and
Oxford respectively, and had a background that allowed them to travel.
Both of them had parents involved with these universities and in both
cases they understood at an early stage of their lives that they could
become poets. In both cases they were among the first to enlist, believing
war to be a necessary evil. The only difference between them is that
Sorley knew Germany and the Germans; in fact, he was visiting Germany
J
137
when the war broke out, so was arrested and deported. The quality lacking
in Brooke’s sonnets is that although his sonnet affected the emotions of
the public at large, he seems to have been unable, as a poet, to see the
human soul with an insight that would be eternal, a quality expected
from poetry.
Sorley’s sonnet, at this early stage, seems already aware of the yet
unexpected fatalism the War would bring to the people. Perhaps his
experience of Germany and the Germans gave him a more mature attitude
. I}?
to war than that shown by most of the early poets. He accepted war as a
necessary evil, but saw no glory in war or in dying for his country (as Horace
dictum goes). He also knew that when the War ended, the former enemies .
would shake hands and the sacrifice of ‘millions of the mouthless dead' "
would be for nothing.
When it is peace, then we may view again
With new-won eyes each others truer form /
And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm
We’ll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain
When it is peace. But until peace, the storm
The darkness and the thunder and the rain.
This is not to say that Rupert Brooke was a weak poet. Other poems such
as ‘Success’, 'The Hili', ‘Menelaus and Helen’ or ‘Song’ show of his poetic
qualities. They are distant from convention, with a poetic tone reminiscent
of Thomas Hardy or A.E. Housman. His death ended, unfortunately, an
inspiration that would have found, probably and naturally, through
experience, a way to raise and make modern his poetry. "
l'
' ‘f What dates 'The Soldier’ is the gap between the poetic sensibility
it displays and the truth about the war that, partly as a result of our
experience of poetry such as Sorley's but particularly Owen’s, we have ,
learnt to recognise.
Wilfred Owen was born in Oswestry, Shropshire, on 18 March 1893. His

early experiments in poetry began when he was seventeen years old. After
being rejected a place at London University he spent a year as lay assistant
138
Literature and War: ((Disillusion as Never Told in the Old Days» .
to the Reverend Herbert Wigan before leaving for Bordeaux, France, where
he was appointed as English teacher at the Berlitz School.
The Owen who left for France to become an English teacher had Keats
and Shelley as his literary inspirations, but in France he met Laurent
Tailhade, a French Decadent poet. Tailhade’s guidance was informed by the
- Decadent motto 'art for art’s sake’ as seen in Unit 1. He introduced Owen to
Verlaine's poetry, Flaubert’s novels and other nineteenth-century French
writers who were shocking and shaking the beliefs of bourgeois society. An
example of this period of French influence is Owen’s 'Maundy Thursday.’
The title refers to The Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples as recorded in
the New Testament. It is also a clear reference to William Blake’s ‘Holy
Thursday, » first published in Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794). If
Blake uses this religious image to question social and moral injustice,
Owen’s reference to Holy Thursday and the Catholic ceremony on this
particular day of Easter is questioning the very ritual itself as he sees in it a
superficial act of veneration of the gesture rather than of faith. The sonnet
shows how, in Owen’s opinion, the rite is carried out by habit not conviction.
Even those of the congregation who show real Faith (women) end up in a
monotonous and superficial worship for they have to submit to the Church’s
dogma. The ending of the poem is extremely critical and surprising in that
it posits a scandalous ambiguity (not devoid of sexual connotations):
Then I, too, knelt before that acolyte,
Above the crucifix I bent my head:
The Christ was thin, and cold, and very dead:
“' -- And yet I bowed, yea, kissed -my lips did cling.
" (I kissed the warm live hand that held the thing.)
(Stallworthy 1994: xxxi)
‘
Owen, seeing the growing scale of the War, returned to England in
September 1915 and, a month later, signed up in the Artists’ Rifles. By now
he had also read the English Decadents, particularly Wilde and Swinburne.
He met in 1915 Harold Monro, who saw some of his poems. As Owen wrote
in a letter to his mother, he appreciated very much the sincerity of Monro's
comments: «he told me what was fresh and clever, and what was second
hand and banal; and what was Keatsian, and what ‘modern’» (quoted in
Stallworthy 1994: xxxi). Monro also introduced him to Edward Marsh and
his Georgian Poets anthology.
139
The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20™ Century "
In June 1916 Owen was commissioned in the Manchester Regiment and

spent the rest of the year training in England. In January of the following
year he was posted to France. There he confronted the hardships of the front.
He and his men held out for fifty hours in a flooded trench in no-man's-land
under heavy bombardment (see Norton 2000: 2072-2073). In March he was
injured but returned to the front in April. In May he was caught in an
explosion and as a result in June he was diagnosed with shell-shock. .
Evacuated to England, on 26 June Owen arrived at Craiglockhart War
Hospital near Edinburgh. This was a turning point in his life for it was here
that he met Siegfried Sassoon, who had also been diagnosed with shell-
shock after writing his famous declaration against the war (see Norton 2000:
2055). Sassoon already had a reputation as a poet and was known by Oweri i
from having been included in the anthology of Georgian poetry. ’
At first reluctant, Sassoon finally agreed to see Owen’s poems. After
reading them Sassoon not only encouraged Owen to carry on his poetic
pursuit but also introduced him to his friend Robert Graves who, in turn,
after his release from hospital, made it possible for Owen to mix up with
literary figures such as Arnold Bennett and H.G. Wells. In June 1918 Owen
rejoined his regiment and in August he was sent to France again. He died on
4 November, the news of his death reaching his family on 11 November
1918, the very same day as the Armistice. .
The poems that had so impressed Sassoon were influenced by the French
literature Owen encountered at Bordeaux. This literature made it possible
Owen as a war poet, as Stallworthy suggests in his introduction: «The neo-
Romanticism of Owen’s early years gave way to a modern poet.» Siegfried "
Sassoon, according to Stallworthy, helped Owen to «find a language for his
experience® (Stallworthy 1994: xxxi). 1).
' :9 This is not to suggest that Owen, had he lived, would have become
a Modernist. Of course, this point has to be left but to speculation, yet,
. - apart from incorporating poetic innovations contemporary to him,
1 Owen was hardly an experimental poet himself in form or language in
- his lifetime. His poetry was modern in that it was innovative, in the
_ sense of ‘make it new' discussed in Unit 1.
140
What Sassoon taught him he had learnt for himself from Thomas Hardy s.
poetic originality. Through reading Sassoons poems, Owen clearly
understood the need to abandon traditional poetic diction and syntax and to
use the direct speech introduced by Hardy. Owen would have read poems
such as 'They’ and would have been able to see the bitter irony that transforms
. horror into satirical laughter through the masterful use of the direct speech
technique in Sassoon's poetry:
’4'? The Bishop tells us: ‘When the boys come back
They will not be the same; for they'll have fought
In a just cause: they lead the last attack
On Anti-Christ; their comrades’ blood has bought
New right to breed a honourable race,
They have challenged Death and dared him face to face.’
'We’re none of us the same!’ the boys reply.
\ 'For George lost both his legs; and Bill's stone blind;
’ ‘5' Poor Jim's shot through the lungs and like to die;
‘ And Bert’s gone syphilitic: you'll not find
A chap who’s served that hasn't found some change.’
And the Bishop said: ‘The ways of God are strange!’
(Norton 2000: 2055)5)
In this manner, Owen was able to find his own dramatic poetical voice
charged with the immediacy of trench warfare. He was also able to sum up
all the influences and write a poetry shocking not only for its theme but for
its newness in that it is a collage of tradition and innovation.
T Owen mastered the use of contrastive and powerful images aimed

at creating a strong emotional impact.
This is the case, for example, with ‘Greater Love’, a poem with a mixture
of insights. As Stallworthy has rightly pointed out, the poem is a response to
Swinburne’s ‘Before the Mirror'; it is inspired by Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s
Aurora Leigh (1857) and Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1893). Shakespeare’s sonnet
130 'My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’ is an obvious source of the
poem in the negative structure of the first line («Red lips are not so red»). In
a
1411
'Greater Love’ the red lips, the glaring eyes, the elegant posture, the soft
voice, and the beating heart of the beloved merge with the blood, the blinded
eyes, the severed limbs, and the silenced mouths of the dead, and the bullet-
ridden broken hearts of the men. The first two stanzas of the poem give a
clear example of what is meant by this:
Red lips are not so red
As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
Kindness of wooed and wooer
Seems shame to their love pure.
O Love, your eyes lose lure
When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!
Your slender attitude
Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed,
Rolling and rolling there ,_
Where God seems not to care;
Till the fierce Love they bear
Cramps them in death’s extreme decrepitude.
/
(Stallworthy 1994: 53)
The poem does not stop at this effective contrast of images. If it is read
aloud, it will be noticed how the sequence of words in each line produces an
effect that creates a war atmosphere. For example, in the line «As the stained
stones kissed by the English dead», the repetition of [s], [z] and [f] produces,
through alliteration, the whistle of bullets. This sound carried forward to
the next line in 'Kindness' is abruptly stopped by the gutturals in 'wooed and "
wooer’ as it abruptly ceases to be heard by the person who dies who would,
probably, be producing a similar guttural sound when hit.
This device works at positioning the beloved in the battlefield. The
beloved merge the alliterative hissing bullets since, within the line, both are
equally present even if one of them is not actually mentioned. In this third
line, for instance, any explicit reference to war is absent except in the
significance of the phonetic power of the words.
The juxtaposition of such different experiences as love and war fails, it
might seem at first sight, to sublimate the love of the soldier for his country.
In fact, it is quite the opposite. The ‘Greater Love' of the title carries with it
ambivalence never fully resolved in the poem. If it seems to imply in the first
142
instance that there is no greater love than that felt by a soldier capable of
giving his life to war for the sake of a just peace, it could also be argued that
when a soldier is faced with horror and death, the love felt towards the
beloved is magnified since there is a clear possibility of losing it for ever.
The ambiguous game proposed by the poem goes further with the
' absurdity of the comparison that in effect signals the absurdity of the war
and the waste in the losses it brings. The superimposition of these images
brings to the poem the flimsy workings of the human mind that very often,
when pushed into extreme situations, freely wanders in random thoughts,
irrelevant and often inappropriate for the situation. In this case they are
about love, but they could be on any other subject such as home, a landscape
or even the most banal everyday experience. It is a wonder that, in the
middle of warfare, the soldier can think of anything other than war itself. In
this sense, 'Greater Love’ whilst signalling the immense sacrifice men are
undertaking for their country, is actually pointing out the absurdity of such
a gift. This constant deferral of meaning results in a reminder of how
irrational and meaningless effort the war has become; a foolishness actually
voiced loud and clear in ‘Strange Meeting’, where the poet imagines an
impossible meeting in a dream-like world between a soldier and the enemy
he has just killed. The ludicrousness of the war is carried forward through
the use of the direct speech of the impossible dialogue between them:
'Strange friend,' I said, ‘here is no cause to mourn.'
‘None,’ said that other, 'save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also’
' (Norton 2000: 2070)
The dead enemy carries on relating what will no longer be, until he says
that in spite of it all what really worries him is that he will never be able to
tell the truth about the war:
‘Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled,
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.'
(Norton 2000: 2070) 0).
143
The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20 t " Century
This is the real essence of Owen’s war poems: to tell the truth about the
War. This objective changed completely his view on poetry. The ‘art for art's
sake' of his beginnings is transformed into a total lack of interest in the art
per se, but into a need for this art to become a vehicle to express the truth
about war. As Owen wrote in a draft Preface for a publication of some of
these war poems that he hoped would appear in 1919:
This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of
'J‘r
them.
Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might,
majesty, dominion, or power, except War.
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.
(Stallworthy 1994: 98)
This statement explicitly expresses Owen’s concern with the writing of
his war poetry and contains the essence of what makes his poetry modern
although by no means Modernist. A Modernist would never say, «Above all
I am not concerned with Poetry », for Modernists were very much concerned
with it. This is not to say that Owen’s words should be taken literally. Poetry
was a very great concern to him, since it was through poetry that he chose
to articulate his subject matter: «War, and the pity of War». As Arnold Kettle
argues: «Owen, whose concern with poetry is manifest, is warning against
an aestheticism which has too limited a view of beauty, rather than against
the poet’s being conscious that his job is to produce art» (Kettle 1975: 60).
kU It is precisely the subject matter of Wilfred Owen's poetry that

makes it new, since in order to portray war he has to bend poetic
tradition to his own means. Is this the first time that poetry deals with
war? How does Owen achieve his aim?
A very good example of this argument is his poem ‘Dulce et Decorum

Est’ (Norton 2000: 2069-70). The Latin tag that serves as the title of the
poem, as has been already pointed out, is taken from the work of the Latin
poet, Horace, who lived towards the end of the first century BC. The phrase
144
translates as 'It is sweet and proper to die for ones country’ and the whole
stanza reads:
It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country
and death pursues even the man who flees
nor spares the hamstrings or cowardly
backs of battle-shy youths.
(Horace, Odes, 3. 2., 13-16)
In a letter to his mother on 16 October 1917 Owen was pondering the
full meaning of Horace's words and he wrote: «it is sweet and meet to die for
one's country. Sweet! And decorous!» The word 'meet' used by Owen in 'The
Ballad of Peace and War’ is an archaic voice. While meaning 'proper', it
carries a stronger sense of duty which in the English context is connected to
the Anglican Communion service as a response to the clergyman’s call 'Let
us praise the Lord’, 'It is meet and just so to do'. A question that should be
considered is why Owen has chosen in this later poem to render the tag in
Latin, instead of the English he had used earlier in the first line of the ballad.
By using Latin instead of English he is answering a poetic tradition that,
from Horace onwards, has made sublime the sacrifice of one’s life for one’s
country.
ffl The Owen who wrote the ballad, as has been discussed earlier, is
an Owen who, very much in the line of Rupert Brooke's war sonnets,
had an idealistic view of war and justice, and the importance of its
aims. The Owen who is writing ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ is voicing his
feeling of 'disillusions as never told in the old days'. By bringing Horace
into 'Dulce et Decorum Est’ he is not only answering external voices
but also his own.
It has also been a widespread view that the poem is undermining the
views expressed in the poetry of Jessie Pope, to whom in the first instance
he dedicated the poem, later withdrawing the dedication following the
advice of Siegfried Sassoon. Jessie Pope was a writer of children’s books and
a poet. She was writing her war poems with strong patriotic overtones from
the home front and they were being published in the newspapers, for
145
example ‘The Call’ and 'War Girls'. This patriotic tone was used by many
contemporary voices at home who were misled by the censored news
reaching them through the papers. At home it was still thought that, indeed,
it was ‘dulce et decorum pro patria mori’. In the case of women in particular,
as will be discussed in the next section, one of the side effects of War was,
paradoxically, the entry of women into the work force en masse; a fact that
in many women provoked a feeling of exulted liberation that in turn
produced poems such as Pope's 'War Girls’:
'There’s the girl who clips your ticket for the train,
And the girl who speeds the lift from floor to floor,
There’s the girl who does a milk round in the rain,
And the girl who calls for orders at your door.
Strong, sensible, and fit,
They're out to show their grit,
And tackle jobs with energy and knack.
No longer caged and penned up,
They’re going to keep their end up
'Til the khaki soldier boys come marching back.
There's the motor girl who drives a heavy van.
There’s the butcher girl who brings your joint of meat,
There’s the girl who calls 'All fares please!’ like a man,
And the girl who whistles taxi’s up the street.
Beneath each uniform
Beats a heart that’s soft and warm,
Though of canny mother wit they show no lack;
But a solemn statement this is,
They've no time for love and kisses
‘Till the khaki soldier boys come marching back.
(Oxford Virtual Seminars: Web)
Without any doubt, the most frustrating factor in reading poems of this
sort was the total lack of knowledge or understanding of what was actually
happening on the different fronts in the war. The light tone of Pope’s poem
summarised in the way the ‘boys' are brought into the text «‘Til the khaki
soldier boys come marching back», probably in triumph, is bitterly
contrasted with the realisation, as has been shown above, that the actual
experience of the trenches brought about the revelation that there were to
146
Literature and War: «Disillusion as Never Told in the Old Days» .
be neither victorious nor defeated parties in this War. Owen's poem tries to
right the situation; in this manner he shows a commitment in his poetical
voice to attempting to change the reader’s attitude. Owen also recalled in the
poem the «children» who were the readers of much of Pope’s literature, in
that rather angry and patronising «My friend» of his final stanza.
Going back to the idea of the newness of the poetry written by Wilfred
Owen, it has to be said that the commitment of Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum
Est’ is not in itself something new. Most Victorian poets moralised in their
poems. On the other hand, in showing his commitment, Owen's poem could
be accused of being a ‘propaganda poem’ in the same way as Brooke's poems
were, even if it was not intended as such.
IIMJ What was shocking and disturbing, hence new, about Owen’s
poem was that it was an anti-establishment poem, a kind of 'protest
poem.’ What elements in the poem target this subversive quality?
Within the context of The Great War, talking a truth that ought not to be
told was received with coldness and, often, disgust. If other writers such as
Percy B. Shelley and Oscar Wilde, for example, had already written responses
to war driven by an indignation provoked by the absurdity of the situation,
the new commitment provided by Owen’s poem rests in a desire to break up
the social order within the context in which it was produced. This
commitment, in turn, brings about a new view on poetry in the subject
matter that it conveys. It was unthinkable at the time that such themes as a
gas attack could be the subject of poetry.
Lt,lJ What is new in this case is the view that any topic at all can be the
subject of a poem, a view unimaginable for many of his contemporaries.
It is the style of the poem and the poetic devices used that makes
possible its innovative newness. Put differently, the poem would have
been a different poem. How does Owen poetic language work?
'Dulce et Decorum Est’ begins with a simile in the first line of the first
stanza: «Bent double, like old beggars under sacks» which conveys a myriad
147
of multiple images hidden in the ambiguity of the simile itself. It recalls the
image of soldiers heavily loaded and the ruined state of their uniforms
which are, in fact, the rags worn by beggars: «Many had lost their boots».
The paradoxical 'bent double’ brings to the text the image of the soldiers as
they try to advance through the trenches bent for protection beneath the
sacks that are piled to make a defensive wall, and also bent under the weight
of their own sacks.
Metaphorically speaking, the soldiers are bent double under the weight
of their own emotions and tiredness: as said a few lines later, these soldiers
are on their way to the again ambiguous «distant rest». This ‘distant rest’
alludes figuratively to a camp away from the front line where exhausted
soldiers might rest for a few days, or more. Yet ‘distant rest’ already puts the
reader on guard about the perils to be found on the way, because resting is
yet out of hand. The image of these ruined men who advance «Knock-kneed,
coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge» comes with the surprising
use of the pronoun ‘we’ implying that the men are still capable of action,
even if it is only to curse, when in fact the image given is that of men 'cursed'
by the depth of the mud weakening them, doomed by events.
Moreover, it brings the poet into the text and includes the reader through
the use of ‘we’. Certainly the first stanza of the poem is poetry telling about
‘the pity of War’. The image here is of men ‘lame’ and 'blind' walking ‘asleep’,
so tired that they are metaphorically said to be «Drunk with fatigue». Even
if, on a superficial level, the first stanza is a mere description of the state in
which the overworked soldiers find themselves before their rest, implying in
this sense the hardships they have gone through.
kM There are throughout the stanza signals warning of their probable

fate. The soldiers themselves are unaware of them (for they cannot see
or hear properly). The reader has by now been directed to be witness
to the event. What is our response as readers?
The irony portrayed here is that it is not necessary to be actually in the

front line, hearing the hissing of the bullets, to be in danger in the war. On their
1 way back from the front line they are attacked and one man is going to die.
148 .
Literature and War: «Disillusion as Never Told in t h e Old Days»
The powerful use of direct speech condenses in short sentences, made

up of monosyllables, the surprise of the attack. It also suggests the strong-
- pulse of the action: «'Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!’ —An ecstasy of fumbling.»
The dash dividing the line creates a pause, not long enough for the soldiers
to be able to properly respond to the attack thus producing a frantic
I mishandling of the only weapon they have, a defensive one, to counteract
the aggression.
‘Ecstasy’ is used paradoxically; it shows the speed and panic of the men
' as they know how important it is to get their helmets on and yet their fingers
fail them. The poet tricks the reader by saying «Fitting the clumsy helmets
just in time», giving us the impression that each soldier has his helmet on;
I this is not true. ‘Clumsy helmets’ is a transferred epithet: the helmets
themselves are not ‘clumsy’ but the soldiers are clumsily trying to fit on the
heavy helmets amid the chaos.
Efl It is ironic that the ‘clumsiness’ of one of the men is going to cost
his life. What is the poet’s response to this?
The third stanza provides the horror of witnessing a man dying without
being able to help him. The next few lines talk about the terror and pain the
man experiences as the gas enters his body. The simile «flound'ring like a
man in fire» is used to provide an image of the panic growing in the man as
he knows he is going to die. This is made more poignant by the fact that no
one can do anything to help. It has to be noted that Owen was an officer and
as such he thought it his duty to see to the well-being of his men. The
clumsiness of this man is transferred to Owen’s own clumsiness at not being
able to help.
lUJ In this respect, the third stanza is purposely short so as to convey

the desolation and lack of words of one man witnessing another dying.
Notice the change of pronoun from ‘we’ to 'I'. Owen makes this verse
short so that it stands out from the rest. Why does he do so?
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The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in t h e First H a l f of t h e 20”' Century
The poem shows that Owen still has nightmares about the event. Even
i n his sleep, he cannot escape the torture and suffering of the man, so he,
too, i s a victim of the gas attack. He uses the word 'my' to illustrate this. In
Owen's dreams the man pleads with the poet to help him, yet he cannot do
anything. The last three words end in -ing, ‘guttering, choking, drowning’
evoke the sounds of the dying man as well as making u s aware of the length
of the suffering before he dies. In fact, i n the last stanza, it is not clear at
all whether the man placed i n the wagon is alive or dead. «Behind the
wagon that we flung him in,» makes us wonder if the man is actually dead
or still 'floundering', as recalled by the use of 'flung'. In the last verse Owen
uses 'you' frequently, as he is now talking to us. This makes the last verse
unique: throughout, the poem is otherwise written i n the third and first
person. 'Cancer' is used to tell u s that the pain of the man is hidden: the
man is dying from inside out, the gas cannot be seen as a wound could be.
Moreover, his death, the poem implies, is hidden from those, as Jessie
Pope, who cannot or will not acknowledge the horror, the pity and pointless
nature of war.
Ibid The message lies at the end of the poem, «The old lie: dulce et
decorum est pro patria mori». The dignity of death is precisely i n the
knowing and the telling of the war, not in dying for one’s country.
Doing so ‘disillusions as never told before’ are brought back from the
front.
2.2. «Let’s We Forget:» Women Writing the War
It seems appropriate to start this section by considering theoretical

issues concerning the interrelationship between war and gender in
twentieth-century Britain. Many historians argue that the First World War
was a watershed for women in Britain. In reality, the development of
women’s political and economic rights between 1914 and 1918 was more
complicated than such arguments allow. Some writers indeed contend
that the impact of the Great War on women's emancipation has been vastly
overstated.
150 0.
T On the eve of the War, the position of women in British society

was largely unfavourable. In the workplace, 'women's work’, most __ _
- commonly, domestic service, was poorly paid and considered separate
from, and inferior to, 'men's work'. Women were still expected to give
up work once they were married, to revert to their 'natural' roles of
wife, mother and housekeeper. How does War change this lack of
egalitarian rights for women?
Despite or because of this situation, Britain was home to the most active
. feminist movement in Western Europe: the Women’s Social and Political
1 Union (WSPU), founded in 1903 by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst
and better known as the Suffragettes. However, many politicians, including
Prime Minister H.H. Asquith, remained actively reluctant to support
women's suffrage, providing examples of the WSPU’s violent methods in
justifying their position.
The response of women to the outbreak of War in August 1914 was
mixed. A small number, such as writer Margaret Cole, adopted a staunch
anti-war position and later worked with the conscientious objectors'
movement. A much larger minority threw their patriotic weight behind the
_' Allied cause. The Pankhursts reined in the WSPU’s militant campaign,
I
i
arguing that a military triumph of a 'male nation’ such as Germany would
I
|I be 'a disastrous blow to the women’s movement'.
T Government propaganda made great play of patriotic women who

pushed their 'cowardly' men to enlist in the armed forces. The majority
of British women, however, fell somewhere between these two
extremes, viewing the War as an inevitability for which they now had
to make sacrifices. '
The Pankhursts rightly saw that the War, paradoxically, would provide
new employment opportunities for women. The Great War did offer women
increased opportunities in the paid labour market. At least one million
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The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20’" Century -
women were formally added to the British workforce between 1914 and
1918 and an estimated two million women replaced men in employment.
This resulted in an increase in the proportion of women in total employment
from 24 per cent in July 1914 to 37 per cent by November 1918. Just 2,000
had been employed in government dockyards, factories and arsenals in July
1914 but, by November 1918, this figure had risen to 247,000. By 1911,
between 1 1 and 13 per cent of the female population in England and Wales
were domestic servants. By 1931, this figure had dropped to lower than 8
per cent. For the middle classes, the decline of domestic servants was
facilitated by the increased use of domestic appliances, such as cookers,
electric irons and vacuum cleaners.
The popularity of ‘labour saving devices' does not, however, explain the
dramatic drop in the servant population. Middle-class women continued to
clamour for servants, but working women who might previously have been
enticed into service were being drawn away by alternative employments
that were opening up to satisfy the demands of War. Thus, nearly half of the
first recruits to the London General Omnibus Company in 1916 were former
domestic servants. In other areas such as agriculture there were smaller, but
still noticeable, increases. Clerical work, banking and the civil service were
other opportunities: the number of women in the civil service increased
from 33,000 in 1911 to 102,000 by 1921. The advantages of these alternative
employments over domestic service were obvious: wages were higher,
conditions better and independence enhanced.
T The War opened up a wider range of occupations to female

workers and hastened the collapse of traditional womens employment, _
particularly domestic service.
Although they wrote from different perspectives, a range of women who

commented on the conflict nevertheless agreed on this point. The
Englishwoman Iris Barry, for instance, in 1934 wrote a candid and ironic
memoir entitled 'We Enjoyed the War’ in which she noted that:
Girls older than myself were breaking away from home in the most
alluringly novel manner, joining organizations called the Womans Volunteer
152
Reserve which had its own uniform, training as nurses, getting curiously
well-paid government jobs. It was not merely that instead of staying at home
they were allowed to take jobs, but that having work of this kind made them
feel very important, patriotic, and highly meritorious ... We were all getting
rich, or richer.... Wages were rising steadily.
(Quoted in Gilbert and Gubar 1989: 272-3)
Virginia Woolf, in a crucial passage in Three Guineas (1938), provides an

explanation for what might appear otherwise as the morbid exploitation of
a dreadful situation:
How... can we explain that amazing outburst in August 1914, when the
daughters of educated men... rushed into hospitals... drove lorries, worked
in fields and munitions factories, and used all their immense stores of
charm... to persuade young men that to fight was heroic...? So profound was
[womans] unconscious loathing for the education of the private house that
she would undertake any task however menial, exercise any fascination
however fatal that enabled her to escape. Thus consciously she desired 'our
splendid Empire’; unconsciously she desired our splendid war.
(Woolf 1991: 45-46)
The very fact that Woolf felt the need to explain womens paradoxical
situation in the First World War is very telling within a context of a pacifist
essay. However, even in areas where they were employed in large numbers,
such as munitions and transport, women were often treated as inferior,
stop-gap replacements for enlisted men. Moreover, womens wages, routinely
portrayed as 'high’ in the wartime press, remained significantly lower than
those of their male counterparts.
k Throughout the War, both the Government and the press tended,
for propaganda reasons, to exaggerate the extent to which women
. took over men’s jobs. Real female dentists, barbers and architects, all
of whom were featured on War savings postcards, were extremely
rare. Most male-dominated professions remained closed to women.
Did the First World War actually improve women's lives in Britain?
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The Need to Make it N e w : English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 2 0 t " Century
Many women did find their wartime labour experiences in some way
'liberating’, if only because these freed them from woefully paid jobs in
domestic service. At the time many people believed that the War had helped
advance women politically and economically. Mrs Millicent Fawcett, a
leading feminist, the founder of Newnham College in Cambridge and
President of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies from 1897 to
1918, said in 1918: «The war revolutionised the industrial position of women
—it found them serving and left them free’. However, this comment should
be read today with caution.
Sylvia Pankhurst, was a talented writer as much as a feminist activist
and pacifist. In 1911 her book The History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement
was published. She produced a weekly magazine for working-class women,
The Women’s Dreadnought. The outbreak of the First World War caused a
serious conflict between Sylvia and the WSPU as she was a pacifist and
disagreed with the WSPU’s strong support for the War:
When I read in the newspapers that Emmeline Pankhurst and Christabel
were returning to England for a recruiting campaign, I wept. To me this
seemed a tragic betrayal of the great movement to bring the mother-half of
the race into the councils of the nation.
We set up a League of Rights for Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Wives and
Relatives to strive for better pensions and allowances. We also campaigned
for pay equal to that of men. Votes for Women were never permitted to fall
into the background. We worked continuously for peace, in face of the
bitterest opposition from old enemies and sometimes, unhappily, from old
friends.
(Quoted in Gilbert and Gubar 1989: 265)
Sylvia Pankhurst joined with Charlotte Despard to form the Women’s
Peace Army, an organisation demanding a negotiated peace. The Women’s
Dreadnought continued to campaign against the War and gave strong
support to organisations such as the Non-Conscription Fellowship. The
newspaper also published Siegfried Sassoon's famous anti-war statement in
July 1917.
During the War Sylvia Pankhurst worked with Dr Barbara Tchaykovsky
to open four mother-and-baby clinics in London. Tchaykovsky saw the
need to open up these clinics since she noticed and pointed out that
154
during the first year of the War 75,000 British soldiers (2.2 per cent of the
combatants) had been killed. During the same period, however, over
100,000 babies in Britain (12.2 per cent of those born) had died. In 1915
. nearly 1,000 mothers and their babies were seen at these clinics.
Confronted to these numbers, politicians such as George Lansbury helped
' to raise funds for the organisation. Its milk bill alone was over £1,000 a
year.
The First World War also forced unions to deal with the issue of womens
work. Trade unionism proved to be a second legacy of the War. Female
workers had been less widely unionised than their male counterparts. This
was because they tended to do part-time work and to work in smaller firms.
Also, existing unions were often hostile to female workers. The scale of
women's employment could no longer be denied and the higher number of
unmarried or widowed women at the end of the war forced the established
unions to consider the status of women in the workplace. In addition,
pressure on established unions and the formation of separate women’s
unions threatened to destabilise men-only organisations.
9 The increase in female Trade Union membership from only

357,000 in 1914 to 1,086,000 by 1918 represented an increase in the
number of unionised women of 200 per cent. This compares with an
increase in male union membership of only 44 per cent.
The Representation of the People Act (February 1918) was widely

portrayed as a 'reward' for the contribution of female labour to the War
effort. However, while the Act granted the vote to all men over twenty-one
(subject to a six months' residency qualification), only women over the age
of thirty were given the same privilege. Some historians still believe that the
War was a key element in the granting of the vote to women over the age of
thirty who held property in 1918. However, gratitude for women's war work
cannot explain why only women over thirty got the vote while it was younger
women who had done the work. Rather, it is more convincing to argue that
the lobbying of the feminist movement and the commitment of the Labour
Party to a wider franchise were crucial factors.
155
Further proof of the limits of the wartime march towards sexual equality
was provided by the post-war backlash against womens employment and,
in particular, against the continued employment of married women. Women
themselves were divided with single and widowed women claiming a prior
right to employment over married women.
9 For instance, Isobel M. Pazzey of Woolwich reflected a widely

held view when she wrote to the Daily Herald in October 1919 declaring
«No decent man would allow his wife to work, and no decent woman
would do it if she knew the harm she was doing to the widows and
single girls who are looking for work.» She directed: «Put the married
women out, send them home to clean their houses and look after the
man they married and give a mothers care to their children. Give the
single women and widows the work.» Is this division among women
due to the fragility of the newly gained rights?
In some occupations single women insisted on excluding their married

sisters. For example, in 1921, female civil servants passed a resolution asking
for married women to be banned from working in the service. The resulting
ban was enforced until 1946.
As soon as the conflict ended the number of women working in munitions
factories and transport fell away rapidly. Ex-servicemen reclaimed the jobs
that had been performed by women during the previous four years. Moreover,
even in longstanding bastions of female employment such as the laundry
industry, women now found themselves in competition with disabled ex-
servicemen. The War did not inflate women’s wages. Employers circumvented
wartime equal pay regulations by employing several women to replace one
man or by dividing skilled tasks into several less skilled stages. In this
manner, women were employed at a lower wage and could not be said to be
directly 'replacing’ men. By 1931, a working woman’s average weekly wage
had returned to the pre-war situation of being half the male rate in most
industries.
As in France, the idea of women returning to their ‘rightful’ domestic
place was a prominent theme in post-war Britain:
156
The literature of the post-war years was marked by an ‘anti-feminism’

which, in the words of Rebecca West, was ‘strikingly the correct fashion...
among... the intellectuals’
Many of their undoubted advances between 1914 and 1918 were thus
only partial or temporary. In this respect, Winifred Holtby wrote in the
journal Time and Tide (6 August 1926):
Hitherto, society has drawn one prime division between two sections of
people, the line of sex-differentiation, with men above and women below.
The Old Feminists believe that the conception of this line, and the attempt
to preserve it by political and economic laws and social traditions not only
checks the development of the woman's personality, but prevents her from
making that contribution to the common good which is the privilege and the
obligation of every human being.
While the inequality exists, while injustice is done and opportunities
denied to the great majority of women, I shall have to be a feminist, and an
Old Feminist, with the motto Equality First. And I shan’t be happy till I get
it.
(Brittain 1940: 134)
Furthermore, anxiety for their fellow men at War, the pressures of

employment combined with the need to perform housework in straitened
circumstances and the inadequacy of social services, exacted a heavy toll. It
also made the withdrawal of women back into their homes after the War
less surprising. This return to full-time domesticity was not, however, wholly
voluntary:
As David Mitchell observed when ‘the time came for demobilisation,’
many women 'wept at the ending of what they now saw as the happiest and
most purposeful days of their lives.’ For despite the massive tragedy that the
war constituted for an entire generation of young men —and for their
grieving wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters, it also represented the first
rupture with a socio-economic history that had heretofore denied most
women chances at first-class jobs— and first-class pay.
(Gilbert and Gubar 1989: 276))-
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The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 2 0 th Century
In many instances contracts of employment during the First World War

had been based on collective agreements between trade unions and
employers that decreed that women would only be employed ‘for the
duration of the War’. Employed mothers were stung by the closure of day
nurseries that had been vastly extended during the War years. Reinforcing
these pressures were the recriminatory voices of returning servicemen. As
unemployment levels soared immediately after the War, anger towards
women 'taking' jobs from men exploded. There were other setbacks. During
the First World War, hospitals had accepted female medical students: in the
1920s, women were rejected by the hospitals on the grounds of modesty.
Other areas such as education were also affected by this post-war attitude.
The National Association of Schoolmasters campaigned against the
employment of female teachers. In 1924, the London County Council made
its policy explicit when it changed the phrase 'shall resign on marriage’ to
‘the contract shall end on marriage':
Many women, however, blamed themselves for the loss of the ground
they had gained between 1914 and 1918. Repressed by what was still, after
all, a male-dominated community and reproached by their own consciences,
a number retreated into self-doubt or guilt-stricken domesticity.
In an article for Good Housekeeping in 1935, Winifred Holtby described
the impact that the First World War had on young women:
There are today in England —and in France and Germany and Austria
and Italy, one imagines— women peacefully married to men whom they
respect, for whom they feel deep affection and whose children they have
borne, who will yet turn heartsick and lose colour at the sight of a khaki-clad
figure, a lean ghost from a lost age, a word, a memory. These are they whose
youth was violently severed by war and death; a word on the telephone, a
scribbled line on paper, and their future ceased. They have built up their
lives again, but their safety is not absolute, their fortress not impregnable.
(Brittain 1940: 52)
One response to the trauma of the First World War to have an enormous
impact on women’s lives was the re-making of the present and future in the
image of the past. The question of the ‘benefits' of the War for women, as
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Literature and War: «Disillusion as Never Told i n the Old Days»
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar claim, in that it precipitated the shattering
of 'patrimony' and provided women, for the first time, with ‘first class jobs
‘ —and first-class pay,' is highly contentious:
Through a paradox that is at first almost incomprehensible, this war
which has traditionally been defined as an apocalypse of masculinism seems
here to have led to an apotheosis of femaleness, a triumph of women who
feed on wounds and are fertilized by blood. If we reflect upon this point,
however, we must inevitably ask a set of questions about the relations
between the sexes during this war of wars. What part, after all, did women
play in the Great War? How did men perceive that role? More specifically,
what connections might there be between the wartime activities of women
and the sense of sexual wounding that haunts so many male modernist
texts? Most importantly, did women themselves experience the wound of the
war in the same way that their sons and lovers did?
Pay scales are not, understandably, the issue at the forefront of women’s
novels written during or immediately after the War. Of these, one might
single out Rebecca West’s fine novel, The Return of the Soldier (1918), with
its depiction of the psychic damage caused by War. In the novel, a solider
returns from the front to the three women who love him. His wife, Kitty,
with her cold, moonlight beauty, and his devoted cousin, Jenny, wait in their
exquisite home on the crest of the Harrow-Weald. Margaret Allington, his
first and long-forgotten love, is nearby in the dreary suburb of Wealdstone.
But the soldier is shell-shocked and can only remember the Margaret he
loved fifteen years before when he was a young man and she an innkeeper’s
daughter. His cousin he remembers only as a childhood playmate; his wife
he remembers not at all. The women have a choice: to leave him where he
wishes to be, or to cure him. It is Margaret who reveals a love so great that
she can make the final sacrifice: the amnesiac hero is restored to health by
Margaret who gathers his 'soul' into 'her soul' and keeping it warm so that
his body can rest quiet for a little time, she brings him to life and his actual
wife.
Cicely Hamilton’s William —An Englishman (1919) presents a rather
grim image of War. The eponymous hero, William, and his wife, Griselda,
are passionate but unquestioning supporters of women’s suffrage and
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The Need to M a k e it N e w : English Literature and Thought i n the First Half of the 20™ Century Y
pacifism. However, after Griselda dies as a consequence of being raped by a

German soldier in Belgium at the beginning of the War, William becomes
pro-war. In this novel Cicely Hamilton denounces what she perceives as an
unreliable opinion based merely on the personal experience of war as
portrayed in her novel, where she attacks the character's narrowness and
lack of independent judgement. At times her contempt for her characters is
a barrier to the reader, particularly when Cicely Hamilton’s own involvement
with the suffrage campaign comes to mind. William's behaviour, however, is
credible as that of a man who, singled out of the herd, followed it once ,
tragedy made him face the reality of War. In her later Theodore Savage
(1922), civilisation has been destroyed by total scientific warfare; mankind
becomes concerned only with survival, and all moral restraints disappear.
Later, as communities form, people try to understand their lives. A dread of
science and learning develops as these are seen as the source of all
destruction. In this powerful and apocalyptic book, Cicely Mary Hamilton
expresses a cyclical view of history in which mankind endlessly refines the
tools of its own destruction and emerges from the ruins to repeat the process,
mythologizing the past in the process.
A foretaste of the insularity that was to be a part of the 1914-18 War is
given in May Sinclair’s The Tree of Heaven (1917). Dorothea is told by her
lover as he departs for Mons in 1914: «it’s your War, too —it’s the biggest
fight for freedom. » When he is killed one of her chief regrets is all the time
that they wasted: «A11 those years —like a fool— over that silly suffrage. »
Her brother, Nicky, finds that it is «'absolute happiness' to go over the top:
'And the charge is —well, it’s simply heaven. It’s as if you’d never really lived
till then; I certainly hadn't, not up to the top-notch'».
In this novel Sinclair suggests that feminism fades into insignificance in
comparison with the greater cause, a view with which, in various forms,
women have become very familiar throughout the century. Militant feminism
certainly declined in the 1920s, although the reasons for this are complex.
Olive Banks argues in her Faces of Feminism (1981) that it was replaced by
'welfare feminism’, concerned with economic and social issues. The novels
of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby, in particular, reflect these concerns.
Winifred Holtby, the daughter of David Holtby, a prosperous Yorkshire
farmer, was born in 1898. Her mother, Alice Holtby, was the first Aiderwoman
in Yorkshire. Winifred Holtby was educated at home by a governess and
160
then at boarding school. She passed the entrance exam for Somerville
College, Oxford, but left in early 1918 to join the Women’s Auxiliary Army
‘ Corps. Winifred Holtby wrote down in her diary why she decided to join the
Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps:
a) The desire to suffer and to die —especially when suffering is associated
with glory.
b) Fear of immunity from danger when our friends are suffering.
(Brittain 1940: 62)
After the war, Holtby explained, in a letter to her friend Vera Brittain,
why she became a member of the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps:
It always seemed to me then that I yielded to desire to join the W.A.A.C.,
a desire that my poorer contemporaries, who had to hurry through with
their preparations to earn livings, could not afford to indulge in. I had been
so infinitely happier both nursing and in the W.A.A.C. than I had been in
that ghastly year at Oxford in 1917, that it never occurred to me that Army
life was anything but a fortunate privilege.
(Brittain 1940: 63)
Winifred Holtby s boyfriend, Harry Pearson, was fighting on the Western
Front when he was shot in the shoulder in 1916. While he was recovering
from his injuries he told Holtby about his experiences:
He told me about all the enormities he had seen at the front —the
mouthless mangled faces, the human ribs whence rats would steal, the
frenzied tortured horses, with leg or quarter rent away, still living; the rotted
farms, the dazed and hopeless peasants; his innumerable suffering comrades;
the desert of no-man's-land; and all the thunder and moaning of war; and
the reek and freezing of war; and the driving— the callous, perpetual driving
by some great force which shovelled warm human hearts and bodies, warm
human hopes, by the million into the furnace.
(Brittain 1940: 53)
Soon after she arrived in France, the First World War came to an end. In
1919 she returned to Somerville College where she met Vera Brittain. The
two women graduated together and, in 1921, they moved to London where
they hoped to establish themselves as writers. Brittain’s first two novels, The
161
Dark Tide (1923) and Not 'Without Honour (1925) sold badly and were
ignored by the critics. Holtby had more success with Anderby Wold (1923),
The Crowded Street (1924) and The Land of Green Ginger (1927). She was
also in great demand as a journalist and, over the next twenty years, wrote
for more than twenty newspapers and magazines. They included Time and
Tide, The Manchester Guardian and a regular weekly article for a trade union
magazine, The Schoolmistress . Books published during this period included
a critical study of Virginia Woolf, the first of many to come, and a volume of
short stories, Truth is Not Sober.
As was her companion, Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby was a pacifist and
lectured extensively for the League of Nations Union. Gradually she became
more critical of the class system and inherited privileges and by the late
1920s was active in the Independent Labour Party. In 1931 Winifred Holtby
began to suffer with high blood pressure, recurrent headaches and bouts of
lassitude. She was eventually diagnosed as suffering from sclerosis of the
kidneys. Her doctor told her that she only had two years to live. Aware that
she was dying, she put all her remaining energy into what became her most
important book, South Riding. Winifred Holtby died on 29 September 1935.
South Riding was published the following year and was highly praised by
the critics. Vera Brittain subsequently wrote about their relationship in her
book, Testament of Friendship (1940).
Very few women gave their lives in the First World War, but this was the
last war in which this was to be the case. Modern air warfare kills men and
women indiscriminately. When Vera Brittain wrote Testament of Youth
(1933) she was remembering a war whose impact was uneven between both
class and sex. The major impact was, of course, against the ‘Tommy’,
although popular myth would have us believe that the officer class suffered
the greater losses. In 1914, Vera Brittain was eighteen, and when War was
declared she was about to go up to Oxford. Four years later her life, and the
life of her whole generation, had changed in a way unimaginable in the
apparent tranquillity of the pre-war years. Testament of Youth, one of the
most famous autobiographies of the First World War, is her account of how
she survived it, how she lost the man she loved, how she nursed the wounded
and how she emerged into an altered world. This passionate record of a lost
generation women and men made Vera Brittain one of the best-loved writers
of her time. Nicola Beauman writes regarding Brittain's Testament of Youth:
162
The impact on women was more enduring: often their lives were
irrevocably warped. No one can read Testament of Youth without tears and
it is a great tribute to Vera Brittain’s prose style that she holds the reader
enthralled through nearly seven hundred pages. She describes her childhood
in provincial Buxton, her brief spell at Oxford, her growing love for Roland
Leighton and her four years of nursing. Yet the relentless dramas of the war
years leave her emotionally numbed, and although she finally finds a new
love she makes no pretence that it will be anything but a very good second-
best to the dead Roland, who embodies so much tragedy and so much
heroism. For this is one of the most haunting themes of the few novels
written by women whose lovers were killed in the war: they may find
someone else but they will never replace what they have lost.
(Beaumann 1983: 35)
A number of women writers, including Sylvia Townsend Warner and

Storm Jameson, played an important part in the culture of the British left in
the 1930s and 1940s. They used their writing, which includes poetry as well
as prose, to explore womens roles in society and the tensions between social
expectations and women's desires:
Even women who were not specifically recording anxieties about female
survival seem sometimes to have been infected by the post-war misogyny that
was so ‘strikingly the correct fashion.’ Certainly war-wounded male artists, non-
combatant survivors as well as those who had lived through combat, could, and
frequently did, inflict severe pain on women of letters who were close to them.
Warner is particularly interesting in this context. The diversity of her

writing and her experiments with different forms of expression are a part of
. her concern with the relationship between art and politics, including the
question of whether Modernist or Realist writing is the more appropriate
vehicle for political literature.
tU The First World War created an ambivalent attitude in many

women writers towards a War they deplored for its destructiveness
but the need for which they felt inhibited from criticising since they
were not considered active participants in the conflict.
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The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of t h e 20’" Century
Although it has not been as deeply studied as other literary forms, poetry
played its part in the early twentieth-century womens movement and
women’s experience of War. The suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst’s poems about
her experiences in prison were published in her Writ on Cold Slate (1922).
Charlotte Mew’s poetic responses to the Great War have been included in an .
anthology of World War I women's poetry, Scars upon My Heart (1981).
Charlotte Mew's poem 'The Cenotaph' (September 1919) speaks of the
loneliness, the heartache and the sorrow women felt in 1918. Yet it also
speaks of a spirit dedicated to the renewal of life painfully won for the Allies
on the fields of France:
Not yet will those measureless fields be green again
Where only yesterday the wild sweet blood of wonderful youth was
[shed;
There is a grave whose earth must hold too long, too deep a stain,
Though for ever over it we may speak as proudly as we may tread.
But, here, where the watchers by lonely hearths from the thrust of
an inward sword have more slowly bled,
We shall build the Cenotaph: Victory, winged, with Peace,
winged too, at the columns head.
Only, when all is done and said,

God is not mocked and neither are the dead.
(Reilly 1981: 71))
The poem suggests that women’s deep, anguished grief must take solace
in the Christian virtues of forgiveness and reconciliation, and that they must
find the courage to live on without their loved ones. Scars upon My Heart
took its title from a poem by Vera Brittain written to her beloved brother,
Captain E.H. Brittain. The manuscript was written four days before his
death in action in the Austrian offensive on the Italian Front (15 June 1918):
TO MY BROTHER (In Memory of July 1st, 1916)
Your battle-wounds are scars upon my heart,
Received when in that grand and tragic 'show'
You played your part
Two years ago,
And silver in the summer morning sun
164
I see the symbol of your courage glow —

That Cross you won
Two years ago.
Though now again you watch the shrapnel fly,
And hear the guns that daily louder grow,
As in July
Two years ago,
May you endure to lead the Last Advance
And with your men pursue the flying foe
As once in France
Two years ago.
(Reilly 1981: 15)
As shown above, Brittain would later have to endure the death of her
fiance in 1918. The anthology Scars upon My Heart reveals the extent to
which women became involved with the 'pity of war’, a fact that prior to the
publication of this anthology had been largely ignored in literary histories.
The First World War had traditionally been considered as an exclusively
male preserve in literary criticism. Critic Jan Montefiore, in her Feminism
and Poetry (1987), has pointed out that the entrapment of women ‘war poets’
in history is, at times, paralleled by their use of traditional Victorian and
Georgian poetic forms, and a 'masculinist' symbolic language and imagery
of war. Nevertheless, a number of women poets of this period escaped such
literary and ideological traps, or at least worked well within their confines.
This is the case, for example, of Rose Macaulay’s ‘Picnic’, written in July
1917:
We lay and ate sweet hurt-berries
In the bracken of Hurt Wood.
Like a quire of singers singing low
The dark pines stood.
Behind us climbed the Surrey hills,
Wild, wild in greenery;
At our feet the downs of Sussex broke
To an unseen sea.
And life was bound in a still ring,
Drowsy, and quiet, and sweet...
When heavily up the south-east wind
165
The great guns beat.

We did not wince, we did not weep,
We did not curse or pray;
We drowsily heard, and someone said,
‘They sound clear today’.
We did not shake with pity and pain,
Or sicken and blanch white.
We said, ‘If the wind’s from over there
There'll be rain tonight’.
Once pity we knew, and rage we knew,
And pain we knew, too well,
As we stared and peered dizzily
Through the gates of hell.
But now hell's gates are an old tale;
Remote the anguish seems;
The guns are muffled and far away,
Dreams within dreams.
And far and far are Flanders muds,
And the pain of Picardy
And the blood that runs there runs beyond
The wide waste sea.
We are shut about by guarding walls:
(We have built them lest we run
Mad from dreaming of naked fear
And of black things done).
We are ringed all round by guarding walls,
So high, they shut the view.
Not all the guns that shatter the world
Can quite break through.
Oh, guns of France, oh, guns of France,
Be still, you crash in vain...
Heavily up the south wind throb
Dull dreams of pain,...
Be still, be still, south wind, lest your
Blowing should bring the rain...
We’ll lie very quiet on Hurt Hill,
And sleep once again.
Oh, we’ll lie quite still, nor listen nor look,
166
While the earths bounds reel and shake,

Lest, battered too long, our walls and we
Should break ... should break...
(Reilly 1981: 66-67)
. Joan Montgomery Byles’s analysis of the poem seems very appropriate
' in illustrating the point made in the previous paragraph:
At the beginning of the war, early in 1915, Rose Macaulay wrote
painfully and exactly about the imagined barriers that cut women off from
the front line experience of war. In 'Picnic' she expresses the frustration,
anguish and guilt at staying home (...) The women are still part of the ethos
that seeks to protect them from the obscenity of war, although this exclusion
from witnessing the actual battle scenes cannot shield them, especially the
poets among them, from the anxiety of imaging and dreaming of these
scenes (...) Some of the most powerful images of trench warfare were the
mud, the rats and blood. In 'Picnic' Macaulay goes on to use another image
of war which women writers of World War I mention more often than the
men: pain. In some respects it was no doubt easier for the men bravely to
suffer pain than for their women folk to endure helplessly the thought of
their suffering. The images of pastoral England, of gentleness, fertility, and
growth, change into images of rage and pain as Macaulay thinks of the
anguish of the men lying in their own blood in the mud of Flanders (...)
Another recurring feminine image of the trenches is rain; when it rains in
England it suggests more blood-soaked mud in the fields of Flanders (...)
the poet's words, ‘be still,’ 'lie very quiet,’ 'sleep,' suggest a desire almost for
suspended life —a need not to disturb the universe any more than necessary;
or any more than it is already shocked and ‘hurt.’ There is a need not to
'listen' or 'look' at the catastrophe going on so geographically close to the
women of England that they can feel the earth shaking under them from
the same explosions that rock the men in their trenches. The word 'battered'
in the penultimate line suggests yet another identification with the soldiers
at the front: not only the implacable destructiveness of the guns, which
could be heard especially clearly in southern England when a south wind
was blowing, but also the battering that women’s hearts and minds were
experiencing. Finally, the poem ends with the perception that the walls,
real and imaginary, that have heretofore protected women from the hideous
knowledge of war, can no longer hold up. There is the suggestion, perhaps,
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The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 2 0 t " Century
that women no longer want to wait cringing behind safe walls whilst their
men folk die in ditches.
(Montgomery Byles 1995: 45-48)
Poetry written by Alice Meynell and Elizabeth Daryush is also illustrative
of many of these points. Mary Borden, whose 1914-18 poems and sketches
were first collected in The Forbidden Zone (1929), and Sylvia Townsend
Warner, in the later Opus 7 (1931) provided more devastating and formally
experimental critiques of war.
UJ The label 'war poet’ pinned on a woman poet seems, still today, an
elusive one. It is in some ways a misleading one for it is charged with
the prevailing attitude towards women during the War time. Contrary
to what happens to male poets, women poets are still denied the
diversity of their experiences of War. This diversity can be observed,
for instance, comparing Jessie Pope’s and Rose Macaulay’s poems.
Would you say that both responses to The Great War are similar?
3 . ACTIVITIES
3.1. Test yourself
1 . Was it Rupert Brooke’s intention to write propaganda poetry? Discuss

your answer.
2. What is meant by Owen’s statement ‘Poetry is in the War’?
3. Was the gaining of the vote for women a direct result of the role they
played during the Great War? Discuss your answer.
1. Discuss the literary differences encountered among those who wrote

from the trenches and those who wrote from the home front.
168.
2. What makes Wilfred Owen’s poetry original?

3. Compare and contrast R. Brooke’s and Sorley’s war poetry.
4. Analize women’s literary responses to the First World War.
. 3.3. Explore
1. John McCrae's ‘In Flanders Fields’ has been used to provide an

example of the mood of the first years of the War. In fact, the
interpretation of the poem has changed from being read by people
during the War as pro-war poetry, along the lines of Brooke's war
sonnets, to being read as anti-war poetry similar to Owen’s. Read
McCrae’s poem provided in the Unit and answer the following
questions:
a) Compare the mood in the first two stanzas of the sonnet with that
in the third. Can you explain the changes in the appreciation of
this poem?
b) Has the poetical form of the poem, a sonnet, anything to do with
the first vision of the poem as a pro-war one?
c) Who is the speaker in this poem?
d) What does the speaker want his listeners to do?
e) Taking the readings of Brooke's and Owen's poems as a guideline,
could you provide a comparative critical analysis of this sonnet?
2. Explain in your own words the analysis made by Joan Montgomery
Byles of Rose Macaulay’s ‘Picnic’, providing your own examples from
the poem. Would you agree, in general, with her view on women
writers' response to the First World War?
3.4. Key terms
— Death
— Disillusion
169
— Direct Speech
— Georgian poetry
— Home Front
— Literary changes
— New poetics
— Propaganda
— Shell shock
— Simile
— Trenches
— War poetry
— Women and war writing
4 . BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beauman, Nicola. 1983. A Veiy Great Profession: The Woman's Novel 1914-1939.
London: Virago.
Brittain, Vera. 1994. Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years
1900-1925. London: Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics.
Calder, Angua, Roger DAY and Graham Martin. 1991. Literature in the Modern—
World: Englishness. Milton Keynes: The Open University Press.
Cardinal, Agnes, Dorothy Goldman and Judith Hattaway, eds. 1995. Women Writers
and the Great War. New York: Twayne Publishers.
—1999. Women's Writing on the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Day, Gary and Brian Docherty, eds. 1995. British Poetry 1 900-50: Aspects of Tradition .
London: St. Martins Press.
Furnbank, P.N. and Arnold Kettle. 1975. 'Modernism and its Origins. Units 4-5'
Milton Keynes: The Open University Press.
Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. 1988. No Man's Land. The War of the Words..
Volume 1: Sexchanges. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
170
—1989 No Man’s Land. Volume 2: Letters from the Front. New Haven and London:
Yale University Press.
—1997. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English.

New York and London: Norton.
Hart-Davis, Rupert. 1983. Siegfried Sassoon. The War Poems. London: Faber &
Faber.
Marlow, Joyce, ed. 1999. The Virago Book of Women and the Great War. London:
Virago.
Reilly, C. (ed.) 1982. Scars upon my Heart: Women's Poetry and Verse of the First
World War. London: Virago.
Smith, Angela K. ed. 2000. Women’s Writing of the First World War. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Stallworthy, John. Ed. 1994. Wilfred Owen: The War Poems. London: Chatto &
Windus.
Stead, C. K. 1967. The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Tylee, Claire. 1990. The Great War and Women's Consciousness: Images of Militarism
and Womanhood in Women’s Writings, 1914-64. New York: Macmillan.
Woolf, Virginia. 1991. Three Guineas. London: The Hogarth Press.
Web Sites
— Rupert Brooke:
http://www.english.emory.edu/LostPoets/Brooke.html
— The Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive:
http://www.hcu .ox.ac. uk/jtap/
— The Wilfred Owen Association:
http://www.wilfredowen.org.uk/home
— John McCrae In Flanders Fields:
http://www. wsu.edu :8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/
mccrae.html
171
— Introduction to First World War Poetry:

http://www.oucs.ex.ac.uk/ltg/projects/jatp/tutorials/intro/
— Oxford virtual seminars:
http://info.ox.ac.ulc/jtap/
— Voice of the Shuttle: «The rest is silence»: Lost Poets of the Great War.
http://vos.ucsb.edu/browse.asp?id=19
— BBC resources:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/search/?q=wwl
— The Great War National archives:
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/greatwar/
172
Unit 4
«LIFE IS A LUMINOUS HALO»: THE NOVEL IN

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, SONS AND LOVERS
f Program
N
1. Presentation: Social Consciousness Narrated: D.H. Lawrences New
Other in Context
2. Text Analysis:S:
2.1. Reality is in the Word: The Poetics of Narrative
2.2. Discovering Newness and Otherness: D.H. Lawrence's Sons and
Lovers
3. Activities S
4. BibliographyHY
Learning outcomes
— To analyze changing concepts in the relationship between the sexes.
— To discern the strategies through which contemporary literature dealt
with social issues such as class (working class in particular) or sexuality.
— To pay attention to the influence of morality and the popular literary
market on the development of the novel form
— To be aware of the interaction between censorship and literature.
— To ponder the importance of psychoanalysis in narrative construction
and character building.
— To examine Sons and Lovers as representative text of this specific time
and spirit.
V JJ
1. PRESENTATION: SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS NARRATED: D.H.
LAWRENCE’S NEW OTHER IN CONTEXT
Of all the writers of the twentieth century, D.H. Lawrence was the
m o s t impassioned and persistent i n seeking to diagnose some of the
psychic dangers besetting his society and the potential sources of strength
with which to combat them. Thus, his position within the literary scene
may be plotted easily enough. Besides this crucial aspect, we can perceive,
in the work of D.H. Lawrence, the evolution of another trait: his novels
flee from material realism. They do so not in order to convey consciousness
or intensity, as is the case with Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, but to
explore the poverty of reality and the enormous power of art, of
175
perspectivism, and of form. In the following extract D.H. Lawrence

criticises material realism, and exposes what novels s h o u l d explore,
namely, misery:
I hate Bennetts resignation. Tragedy ought really to be a great kick at

misery. But Anna of the Five Towns seems like an acceptance —so does all
the modern stuff since Flaubert.
(Letter to A.W. McLeod, 6 October 1912)
This is proof of Lawrence’s revulsion of the French Realist tradition.

Although he also criticises the Realism of the Russian novelists, his
indebtedness to their more spiritual Realism is shown in a letter to Catherine
Carswell of 2 December 1916:
... don’t think I would belittle the Russians. They have meant an enormous
amount to me; Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoievski — mattered almost more than
anything, and I thought them the greatest writers of all time.
For Lawrence, then, the literary ideal to be pursued is not material

realism, but a psychic ideal. By that, he m e a n s an inner, intangible,
relaxed but strong integrity and unity. As early as 1914, D.H. Lawrence
protested against «the old-fashioned human elements and declared:
I don’t so much care about what the woman feels -—in the ordinary usage
of the word. That presumes an ego to feel with. I only care about what the
woman is —what she IS— inhumanly, physiologically, materially...
(in Aldous Huxley 1932: 198)
Notions such as the 'old stable ego' of character disappear and so does
the traditional unity and linearity of the plot. Lawrence was thus calling
into question the belief i n the ego’s stability. In this respect he continued
h i s letter in the following terms: «Tell Arnold Bennett that all rules of
construction hold good only for novels which are copies of other novels. »
Thus, i n what is probably one of his best works, Women i n Love (1920),
the characters are caught i n all their disjointed wholeness; and the
indecisive episodic movement, the abrupt shifts in the story present the
novel itself as achieving the same kind of disjointed unity as do the
characters.
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«Life is a Luminous Halo»: The Novel in the Twentieth Century, Sons and Lovers
¥ Both characterisation and the novel’s structure seem to reveal '

Lawrences personal style, yet it is more than that. The abrupt
transitions in the plot, the calculated disjointedness of plot and
character, and the organic kind of unity are common to much writing
of the period, and have an affinity with the modes of organisation of
.
‘ T.S. Eliots Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock or of James Joyces Ulysses.
However, if Joyce was a European writer, heir to both the French

Naturalists and the Symbolists, Lawrence was very English, much closer in
spirit and in his view of the novel to a George Eliot than to a Flaubert. As
much as are Henry Fielding or George Eliot, he is the novelist as moralist,
or the moralist as novelist. The question of morality and the novel should
not be underestimated. The nineteenth-century role of the novel took over
the eighteenth-century, one which saw in the novel mainly a vehicle for
moral instruction, as social allegory, along with all the variations that this
role implied. The eighteenth was the century of the novel of sensibility,
where sensibility stood mainly for social manners and ethics. Among the
greatest examples of the eighteenth century novel stand Samuel Richardsons
novels, combining the then much imitated graphic realism of its epistolary
form with a strong moral message. Richardson (1689-1761) is in some ways
the father of the British novel, along with Daniel Defoe (1660-1731),
Laurence Sterne (1713-68) and Henry Fielding (1707-1754). Both Henry
James and Thomas Hardy, who represent a turning point into modernism,
are separated from this first wave of British novelists by the Romantic
period in literature, which dominated the end of the eighteenth and the
beginning of the nineteenth centuries with the Gothic novel. Perhaps the
most famous of this novelistic genre is Mary Shelleys Frankenstein (1818).
This period moves away from the social realism of Richardson’s novels
of 'sensibility' and towards a psychological 'sensationalism’, where the social
psyche turns inwards and projects itself on to a Gothic landscape to find its
expression. This change is partly due to an increasing disillusion with the
Enlightenment or Age of Reason, that had failed to produce the goods it
promised, as evidenced by the French and American revolutions at the end
of the eighteenth century. The Gothic novel offers, equally, a form of literary
escapism from social disillusion and the idea of literature as entertainment,
177
the latter still prevails and is perhaps better understood in twenty-first-

century terms as the Hollywood film industry, from which we mostly expect
little more than a thrill. Yet there is something very important about the
Gothic novel and Romanticism in general: it legitimised the individual as
the subject of literature —it could be said to pre-empt psychoanalysis— and
pushed the boundaries of the novelistic form. The Gothic novel would not
last long into the nineteenth century. Even if it did not produce great works
of literature, the Gothic novel would begin to redefine what we understand
reality to be by questioning the relationship between the individual and the
world. It opened the doors for new ways of writing, and, more importantly,
it did so because the public demanded it. Despite the literary —even moral—
revolution the publishers claw was still firmly on the writers pen.
The rights of individual fancy, taste, opinion and belief to go each its
own way and pursue each its own subjective course of development had
prevailed [so far], with readers of novels, so far as to allow their heroes and
heroines the prerogative of an interest enhanced by the very fact of their
isolation. The effects of this and other cognate characteristics of the
romanticism which had long held the field had begun to show themselves
in imaginative literature at large by an increased monotony, by occasional
self-satire, by the weakening of poetic forms and by the predominance of
lyric over dramatic or epic treatment of literacy themes (Ward and Trent
2000a: 3).
Jane Austen s first novel Northanger Abbey (written in 1798, but published
in 1817) is a very good example of the terminus at which the Gothic novel
had arrived, as well as a new point of departure for the novel in the nineteenth
century. She writes a farce of the Gothic novel by making fun of its literary
conventions: a naive heroine prone to romantic fantasies, a castle, a mystery.
Yet, Austen turns the farce into the serious purpose of character development
and moral catharsis, as the heroine’s self-deception gradually turns into
revelation and comic resolution —i.e. a happy ending. Hers are generally
comedies of manners that revert to the social sensibility of the eighteenth-
century novel while using the psychological complexities which Romanticism
had made available. Yet we must not forget that Austens novels had to sell,
and their goal was the entertainment of a still socially narrow literary circle:
the increasingly leisured middle classes who were interested mostly in
themselves.
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« Life is a Luminous Halo»: The Novel in the Twentieth Century, Sons and Lovers
Considering the development of the novel as an artistic literary genre in

its own right at the turn of the twentieth century, D.H. Lawrence has also a
clear literary continuity with Hardy’s less systematised and more poetic
conception of the novel; Lawrence shares the deep sense pervading Hardy’s
work of man's life as one with its environment in nature. However, while
Hardy was preoccupied with a rural world in decline, Lawrence was pre-
occupied by the industrial and urban modern world, and how it was
transforming the human condition. As will be shown below, this runs
steadily through his novel The Rainbow (1915). Little by little, the main
characters of this novel move out from a life bounded by the rhythms of the
traditional farmers year into more modern worlds: they attend the local
high school, then they go to London 'into a big shop' or to study art, to a
working-class town school, later to a teachers' training college, and finally
to a fairly large house in the new, red-brick part of Beldover («a villa built by
the widow of the late colliery managers): «Out into the world meant out into
the world. »
T In Lawrence’s fiction, the main character almost always originates

from a partial or mechanical existence and arrives at an organic
wholeness; thus, for Lawrence, the novel appears as a religious art '
form in which he can speak of and to the whole man.
This movement in the main character’s search for the subconscious

powers of mankind is original to Lawrence. The quality of Lawrence’s
interest in life and in the powers of mankind justifies his claim: «Primarily
I am a passionately religious man». With the clarity of the great artist he
goes straight on, in the same sentence, to make clear how a struggle against
difficulties, a struggle indeed to overcome weakness, is integral to his work:
My novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.

That I must keep to because I can only work like that. And my Cockneyism
and commonness are only when the deep feeling doesn’t find its way out,
and a sort of jeer comes instead, and sentimentality, and purplism.
(Letter to Edward Garnett, 22 April 1914)
179
Lawrence was much else besides a moralist: we think of him mainly as

a novelist, but he is equally influential (if not as highly regarded) as a poet
and a writer of novellas and short stories. As a poet it can be observed
how:
traditional inspiration gives place, even before 1941, to a progressively freer
verse style, to the new, looser kinds of transition and unity . . . and to a related
overriding concern for the essential, individual reality of living things... The
Preface which Lawrence wrote for the 1927 edition of his poems shows him
clearly as one who, from the point of view of the period, should be seen in
relation to Bergson, to Imagism (although it is an Imagism taken to new and
transforming depths), and in general to the new sense, both of life and of
technique, which had entered English poetry.
(Holloway 1983: 96-7)
He was also a writer of brilliant travel books and a literary critic, and his
superb Studies in Classic American Literature (1924) is particularly
noteworthy. His eight plays have never received much attention at all,
however, and three were published only in the 1960s. Lawrence had this to
say on the subject: «I always say, my motto is, 'Art for my sake’», meaning
that he would become a master through the struggle to become master of
himself. He was, in this sense, self-absorbed, as shown in a letter he wrote
regarding the effects of the First World War in England and Europe, which
he inevitably turns towards himself:
I will not live any more in this time... as far as I possibly can, I will stand
outside this time, I will live my life, and if possible, be happy, though the
whole world slides in horror down into the bottomless pit...What does it
matter about that seething scrimmage of mankind in Europe?
(Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 7 February 1916)
Lawrence believed that industrialised Western culture was dehumanising
because it emphasised intellectual attributes to the exclusion of natural or
physical instincts. He thought, however, that this culture was in decline and
that humanity would soon evolve into a new awareness of itself as being a
part of nature. In this respect he wrote:
It is our being cut off that is our ailment, and out of this ailment
everything bad arises. I wish I saw a little clearer how you get over this cut-
180
offness... Myself: I suffer badly from being so cut off. But what is one to do?..
One has no real human relations —that is so devastating.
(Letter to T. Burrow, 3 August 1927)
Above all, it is necessary to recognise that Lawrences deep sense of how
modern man may become cut off from the proper springs of his vitality is
not a calm and magisterial diagnosis of weakness in others, but a brave and
persevering response to the challenge of his own predicament:
We’re rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong... So I
am making up my mind to return to England during the course of the
summer. I really think that the most living clue to life is in us Englishmen in
England, and the great mistake we make is not uniting together in the
strength of this real living clue —religious in the most vital sense.
(Letter to R.P. Barlow, 30 March 1922)
Q One aspect of this 'blood consciousness’ would be an acceptance

of the need for sexual fulfilment: «We can go wrong in our minds, » he
wrote, «but what the blood feels, and believes, and says, is always
true». His three great novels, Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow
(1915) and Women in Love (1921) concern the consequences of trying
to deny humanity’s union with nature and instead emphasise the
power of sexuality.
David Herbert Lawrence was born at Eastwood in Nottinghamshire, in

1885, the fourth of five children of coal miner Arthur Lawrence and his wife
Lydia Beardsail. His parents’ marriage was unhappy and the children were
brought up to see exclusively their mothers point of view: this struggle
between his father and his mother lies at the heart of Sons and Lovers. His
father was practically illiterate, and often drunk, but possessed an
extraordinarily vivid comprehension of natural life and living; his mother, of
a somewhat higher social class, was intellectually and spiritually refined,
high-minded, 'cut out’, as Lawrence was to write years later, «to play a
superior role in the god-damned bourgeoisie ». The unhappiness of their
marriage killed something in the father. The children were caught up in the
clash between their parents.
181
UJ In Sons and Lovers, Lawrence is, apparently, on the mother’s side.

Later in life, Lawrence felt he had treated his father too harshly in this
novel. In his later novels, he went on to depict men like his father as
heroic figures. He made them symbols of the dark, instinctual, but
potent side of life that opposes the dry intellectualism and industrial
mechanisation of modern life. Is this later acknowledged view on the
father figure interwoven in the narrative fabric of Sons and Lovers?
Delicate health meant that D.H. Lawrence stayed close to his mother. He
was often ill and absent from school, bullied by other boys for his delicacy.
He won a scholarship to Nottingham High School and in 1901. When he left
school at the age of fifteen he found work as a clerk at Haywood’s Surgical
Garments factory in Nottingham. He hated the work, not getting on with his
fellow workers, and whilst working there he suffered his first major bout of
pneumonia.
During his convalescence he met Jessie Chambers who became a close
friend and mentor. By 1906 he had saved the £20 fee to enable him to take
up a teacher-training scholarship at Nottingham University. In 1908, he
became an assistant master at Davidson Road Elementary School in Croydon
at a salary of £95 a year, but he was lonely and unhappy there. The following
year Jessie Chambers sent Lawrence’s poetry to the editor of the English
Review, Ford Madox Hueffer, who began publishing Lawrence’s work and
gave him the opportunity to meet other young writers such as Ezra Pound.
Ford Madox Hueffer also helped Lawrence to have his first novel, The White
Peacock (1911), published. After the death of Lawrence’s mother in 1910, he
became ill and was advised to give up teaching. The next year marked
Lawrence's break with Jessie Chambers.
2. TEXT ANALYSIS
2.1. Reality is in the Word: The Poetics of Narrative
It is useful to look at Lawrence’s fiction by dividing it into three different

moments or phases. The first phase could be termed the ‘personal’ phase
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and it covers roughly the period from the year he started writing (1909)
until 1912. The White Peacock inaugurates the modern novel of creative
autobiography, and in it Lawrence first presents the theme that will dominate
his later works: the mechanisms at work in the relationship between men
and women. This novel was followed by The Trespasser (1912) and Sons and
Lovers.
Regarding the male-female interaction Lawrence believed, almost to the
end of his life, a woman in love is a negative influence on the man she loves,
destroying his personality, and absorbing his being into her own. He believed
this conflict came from civilised women having become the desperate
antagonist of men, drawing from them their greatest possession, masculinity,
and in turn feminising them and bringing them under the control of her
will. The following quote illustrates this vision and is a sentence from his
novel Aaron’s Rod ( 1922): «Women are the very hottest hell once they get the
start of you: There’s nothing they won't do to you. Especially if they love
you.»
Another theme that appears in Lawrence’s writings is the contest between
a super-civilised man and an inarticulate down-to-earth man, to win the
love of a woman. In this respect it must be said that Lawrence deplored the
dualism of the modern person: the setting up of dividing barriers between
mind and body, and brain and blood; he protested against what he considered
the grey idea of making the body prisoner of the mind: «I have always
inferred that sex meant blood-sympathy and blood-contact. Technically this
is so. But as a matter of fact, nearly all modern sex is a pure matter of
nerves, cold and bloodless».
As Sons and Lovers shows, another topic is a determined antagonism
towards the figure of the ‘father’ and against any imposed authority. This is
probably brought to the surface by his need to overcome his working-class
background and also shows his knowledge of psychoanalysis. His father
represented, quite literally, his working-class background. Lawrence suffered
greatly for his social background which made him afraid of rejection in the
literary circles of the time. The rejection of the father in terms of favouring
his mother (from a somehow middle class) could be read in these terms.
A final theme, linked to the previous one, is the degradation of the man
who abhors his own potentialities. Lawrence was not an advocate of
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animalism, he did not idealise the morals of the farmyard, but his aim was
to return to the primal energy of Eden before human consciousness became
stained by the sense of sin, and before man became 'womanised': hence his
religion of the body, his worship of life in itself and in all its aspects. He
wrote:
For man, as for flower, beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be
most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may
know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh.
The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now
of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time.
(Apocalypse, 1931)
Beneath all these themes lies the dark subterranean world of the
subconscious battling with the modern world, its fellows and itself. Sons
and Lovers is, together with Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916), the most notable autobiographical fiction and one of the most
famous English novels of the twentieth century. Published in 1913, it tells
the story of the Morel family and, in particular, of Paul Morel. Gertrude and
her husband Walter Morel live in a village in the north of England. Gertrude
is clever and competent. Walter, an uneducated coal miner, drinks his money
away and is often violent. Divided by class, the two do not understand each
other, and both Gertrude and Walter are bitterly unhappy. Gertrude pours
all her love and ambition into her four children and, in particular, her eldest
child, William. William prepares to marry a very superficial girl, against his
mothers wishes. Then tragedy occurs; William falls ill and dies. With William
gone, Gertrude’s love and hopes are pinned on Paul, who is talented and
artistic:
'The tailor can make it right,' she said, smoothing her hand over his
shoulder. 'It's beautiful stuff. I never could find in my heart to let your father
wear the trousers, and very glad I am now.' And as she smoothed her hand
over the silk collar she thought of her eldest son. But this son was living
enough inside the clothes. She passed her hand down his back to feel him.
He was alive and hers. The other was dead.
He went out to dinner several times in his evening suit that had been
William’s. Each time his mother’s heart was firm with pride and joy. He was
started now. The studs she and the children had bought for William were in
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«Life is a Luminous Halo»: The Novel i n the Twentieth Century, Sons and Lovers
his shirt front; he wore one of William’s dress shirts. But he had an elegant
figure. His face was rough, but warm-looking and rather pleasing. He did
not look particularly a gentleman, but she thought he looked quite a man.
(Sons and Lovers,1913 [1995]: 255)
At fourteen Paul finds a job in nearby Nottingham. He makes friends
with a high-minded girl called Miriam. From now on the story concerns
Paul’s conflict between his love for his mother and his need to grow up and
gain sexual experience. Gertrude is jealous of Miriam; a kind of war starts
for Paul's love. Time passes. He longs to leave home but feels he cannot leave
his mother. Eventually he sleeps with Miriam, but the relationship is
unsuccessful. Paul embarks on another relationship with an earthier woman
called Clara. With her he discovers «the enormous power of passion». But
Paul realises that Clara is not his soul mate. Meanwhile, Gertrude dies of
cancer. With his mother gone, Paul, now twenty-three, is grief-stricken. He
feels a strong pull towards death. The life urge in him proves stronger,
though, and he sets off towards the «golden lights of the city», to begin life
anew.
Sons and Lovers can be classified in the literary genre of the
Bildungsroman, a German word meaning ‘development novel’. Narratives
such as James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Sons and
Lovers are Bildungsroman, that is, novels that trace the development and
growth of the main character. Much of the time, the main character of such
a tale, like Paul in Sons and Lovers, will grow up to be an artist, and the story
reveals all of the psychological and social developments that prepare the
hero or heroine for his or her life’s calling.
Bildungsroman heroes are often overly sensitive and melancholy. Paul
certainly has these traits, but he also expresses a sincere liking for living.
«It is morning again, and she is still here...» wrote D.H. Lawrence of his
mortally ill mother to a friend. «I look at my mother and think '0 Heaven
—is this what life brings us to?’ You see mother has had a devilish married
life, for nearly forty years —and this is the conclusion — no relief. » At the
time, Lawrence was in the painful process of writing Sons and Lovers, not
exactly an autobiography but a Bildungsroman type of novel where
Lawrence fictionalized part of himself as Paul Morel and his mother,
Gertrude Morel.
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His main character, Paul, is caught in the lawrencian man-woman

labyrinth which in this case takes the form of a pseudo Oedipal situation
and, as a son-lover, he cannot bring fulfilment to himself and risk to lose his
masculinity for love of his mother. In striving for relationships with women,
Paul is a split being, seeking spiritual attachment in Miriam and physical
attachment in Clara. This inability to function as an integrated man is, as
has been said above, seen by Lawrence as the sterility of today’s industrialised
society.
T Frustration seems the keynote of this personal phase. In the next

literary period Lawrence will seek a solution to his disappointment.
In 1912, Lawrence met Frieda Weekley, nee von Richthofen, the wife of
a professor who had taught him. She was six years older than Lawrence and
had three children. She found her marriage dull and had had several affairs.
She and Lawrence eloped and were married in 1914.
At this time the mood in Lawrence’s fiction changes, it evolves and we
can distinguish now the beginning of a second literary moment. It could be
called «Emotional adjustment to the modern era» and that covers, roughly,
the years 1913-20. Lawrence’s and Frieda’s marriage was stormy and the
War years were very unhappy for them.
Lawrence, opposed to the War, was twice called up for military service
but declared unfit because it was discovered that he had tuberculosis.
Frieda’s German nationality and Lawrence’s outspoken criticisms of the
War led to their being suspected as spies by their neighbours. At the outbreak
of the First World War the authorities, too, became concerned that Frieda
was a spy. The couple settled at Zennor, in Cornwall, and local people
reported that the Lawrences were using the clothes on their washing line to
send coded messages to German U-boats. After searching their cottage, the
authorities forced them to leave the area within three days. Their situation
was not helped by the fact that Lawrence began to have ideas that appeared
close to Fascism (after the First World War Lawrence began to believe that
society needed to be reorganised under one superhuman leader) and he was
also anti-Semitic. The novels containing this theme, Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo
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(1923) and The Plumed Serpent (1926), are all nowadays considered failures.
He caught influenza during the pandemic in November 1918, and once
again nearly died. It was not until a year later that he was fit enough to leave
England.
D.H. Lawrence was a very confused rebel. He felt that society made
people lifeless and unreal, and that the class system was pernicious.
Lawrence believed in the ‘life force’, in nature, its beauty and its power. He
also believed passionately in man’s natural instincts; he believed that sexual
feeling between a man and woman was natural and should be celebrated.
‘ T D.H. Lawrence was the first novelist in Western culture to attempt

to explore sexuality seriously and frankly. Sexuality, already present in .
the writings of what we have called his first period, is the theme
dominating this second phase of his writing.
The Rainbow (1915) comprises the first half of a story that will be carried
on in the other half Women in Love ( 1920). The Rainbow is a family chronicle,
abounding in superb passages of broad realism in the nineteenth-century
English tradition of the novel, Thomas Hardy’s novels. However, its story
traces essentially the changing patterns of psychic relationships, as England
is evolving from the rural to the urban.
•f D.H. Lawrence’s is the first novel to trace the influence of the

social revolution of the past hundred years on the passionate life of
individuals.
Regarding human relationships, Lawrence ignores the set of rules of the

late nineteenth-century English novel, and offers a series of novels where
basic sexual relationships are examined. Of course, at the time, explicit
allusion to sex or sexual intercourse was considered obscene and literary
works were scrutinised by the censor. The very year it was published, 1915,
The Rainbow was seized by the police and declared obscene. Later attempts
1877
to explore in fiction the complexities of human sexual behaviour were to

follow the same fate. This was the case, for instance, of Radclyffe Hall’s
lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (1928).
The Rainbow is Lawrences version of a social saga, spanning three
generations of the Brangwen family. The women characters in this novel
remain memorable as they strive to express their feelings. The most
important character in The Rainbow is Ursula, who represents the modern
woman as imagined by Lawrence. Ursula is utterly dispossessed of spirit
and totally exploratory in the flesh. Her search becomes momentarily
homosexual in her adoration of Winifred Ingred, a mannish New Woman
(see Unit 1) and later she becomes pregnant by Skrebensky, a Polish officer
in the British Army. Skrebensky is presented in the novel as the weak man,
lacking in values, indicative of the time. Ursula loses her baby, but during
convalescence she sees the rainbow in the sky; it stands as a promise of a
possible re-adjustment of human values to wholeness. The story concludes
with the struggle of the two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, to liberate themselves
from the stifling pressures of Edwardian English society. This is how The
Rainbow has been seen by critic John Holloway:
Thus The Rainbow registers how a wider, looser, more complex, more
ambitious pattern of life came in; and recognizes also that the archaic
springs of strength could no longer meet its needs. Most of what Lawrence
was to write after The Rainbow conducts the search, in fictional terms, for a
new source of vitality. What Lawrence, in fact, saw himself as discovering
was that in any individual there is a unique and inexpugnable source of
vitality lying deep in the psyche; and his concern with the intimacies of sex
is best seen as a derivative from this belief, a conviction simply that in sex
the central psychic forces can most abundantly flow and most easily and
naturally assume their uninsistent yet powerful kind of control. Much of his
outstanding later work may be seen as an exploring of the essential difference
between the sham strength of those who lack this kind of integration, and
the essential reality of those who have it. Particularly is this true of the short
stories: for example, St Mawr, The Captains Doll, The Fox, Sun, The Virgin
and the Gipsy.
(Holloway 1983: 96)
Women in Love seeks the fulfilment of the promise foreseen by Ursula in
the rainbow. The novel begins where The Rainbow leaves off and features
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the Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, as they try to forge new types of
liberated personal relationships. Because the men they choose are trying to
do the same thing, the results are problematic and often disturbing.
Many critics and readers regard this as Lawrence’s finest novel, where
his ideas are matched with passages of superb writing. The locations
combine urban Bohemia with a symbolic climax i n the icy snow caps of
l the Alps. I n the five years that have elapsed between The Rainbow and
Women in Love, Lawrences conception of Ursula has been altered by the
personality his wife Frieda. In Women in Love Ursula and her sister Gudrun
are now emancipated women. Ursula becomes involved with Rupert
Birking, a young inspector of schools, and Gudrun with Gerald Crich, a
wealthy m a n . Ursula and Rupert find fulfilment in marriage but Gudrun
and Gerald break further and further apart until, in the Alps, he disappears
skiing away only to d i e from exposure. Gerald Crich represents the epitome
of the industrial tycoon who glorifies the machine, and the machine-god
fails him. His strength is mechanical, lacking the emotional depth
necessary for genuine human relationships. Thus, his death symbolises
the suicidal path that the modern mechanical man is following. In the
following excerpt a disapproval of the modern world, seen as too
mechanical, can be read:
The men were satisfied to belong to the great and wonderful machine,
even whilst it destroyed them. It was what they wanted. It was the highest
that man had produced, the most wonderful and superhuman. They were
exalted by belonging to this great and superhuman system which was
beyond feeling or reason, something really godlike. Their hearts died within
them, but their souls were satisfied. It was what they wanted. Otherwise
Gerald could never have done what he did. He was just ahead of them in
giving them what they wanted, this participation in a great and perfect
system that subjected life to pure mathematical principles. It was a sort of
freedom, the sort they really wanted. It was the first great step in undoing,
the first great phase of chaos, the substitution of the mechanical principle
for the organic, the destruction of the organic purpose, the organic unity,
and the subordination of every organic unit to the great mechanical purpose.
It was pure organic disintegration and pure mechanical organisation. This
is the first and finest state of chaos.
(Women in Love, 1920)
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Rupert Birkin, on the other hand, stands as Lawrence's alter ego. Rupert
feels a deep repulsion against the entire mechanical folly of modern society.
Rupert and Ursulas successful marriage is achieved only after Ursula
relinquishes her advanced views; after a monumental opposition she realises
that she must capitulate her modern womanhood in order to come to terms
with the great male god in Rupert Birkin. Women in Love could not find a
publisher in America or Britain, and did not do so until 1920 and 1921
respectively. When it was finally published it was perceived as obscene and
one critic in particular reviewed it under the headline ‘A Book the Police
Should Burn’.
tM Many critics and readers regard these as Lawrence's finest novels,

where his ideas are matched with passages of superb writing. D.H.
Lawrence became an icon of the sexual liberation movement started
in the 1960s. Yet, from the 1970s onwards the feminist movement
became very wary as to the actual sexual emancipation Lawrence's
Women in Love, a cult, brought for women. Feminism came to the
conclusion that Lawrence’s liberal approach to sex was only apparent
for in reality these supposedly liberated women were, in fact,
submitting to the male desire. This viewpoint created an interesting
on going literary debate which, from what has been said up to now,
seems pertinent to be considered here: Should our appreciation of
literature as art be subjected to its author political, social, moral, etc,
perspective?
From this moment (around 1920) until Lawrence's death in 1930 a

third literary phase can be identified. It is time for the ‘mystic prophet'.
After all the hardships they had gone through during the Great War, finally,
in 1919, Frieda and Lawrence left for Italy. They were always on the move
around the world and always short of money. Lawrence felt alienated from
his own country: «the thought of England is entirely repugnant» he wrote
in 1921.
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IP He never really abandoned this position and never returned except

as a fleeting and dissatisfied visitor. Apart from the difficulties A
experienced during the War years his working class background played
an important role in this decision for he always felt alienated from a
strongly hierarchical social system such as the British one.
Lawrence felt that reality provoked in him dissatisfaction, exasperation

and disgust, and his feelings are echoed by the words of the Lawrentian
hero, Mellors, of his novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928):
When I feel the human world is doomed, has doomed itself by its own
mingy beastliness, then I feel the colonies aren’t afar enough. The moon
wouldn't be far enough, because even there you could look back and see the
earth, dirty, beastly, unsavoury among all the stars: made foul by men. Then
I feel I’ve swallowed gall, and it's eating my inside out, and nowhere’s far
enough away. But when I get a turn, I forget it all again.
(Lady Chatterley's Lover, 1928)
Other novels such as Aaron's Rod appeared with a new subject matter
influenced by Nietzsche’s theories (see Unit 1). A year later, his Australian
novel, Kangaroo, was published. Frieda and Lawrence travelled to Ceylon,
Australia, the United States and also to Mexico where he wrote The Plumed
Serpent (1926) along with many short stories and poems.
In 1923, Frieda returned to England and Lawrence joined her later. He
was miserable in England so, in 1 924, they returned to Mexico where Lawrence
hoped to set up his ideal commune, the Rananim commune. The idea did not
work. Lawrence fell ill, so they returned to Italy, finally settling near Florence.
Lawrence had become interested in painting and, in 1929, an exhibition of his
work was held in London, which Frieda attended alone as he was too ill to
travel. The police confiscated thirteen of the pictures as obscene.
Lawrences writing was revolutionary in that it stressed the importance
of feelings. The plot was important for the light that it threw on the inner
events in a character. The individual, according to Lawrence, has been
divided in his completeness by the use of the mind to compel nature to his
own purposes. Lawrence’s travels were a feverish attempt to find in more
primitive men the wholeness and balance lost by civilisation.
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T Lawrence's narrative style is often highly poetic. The intensity he

uses in portraying the god he worshipped, ‘life itself,' has led some
critics to perceive him along the mystic literary tradition. Lawrence's
preoccupation for portraying his passion for life, ‘natural’ life, led to,
most of his novels being banned for a time. This force is genuine and
original in English literature and Lawrence’s new approach to what
should be told in a novel seems to be behind his literary appeal and the
reason why he became such an icon in the 1960s.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned for over thirty years in England and
in America. The novel tries to offer a solution to the burdens and constrictions
of modern life. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is Lawrence’s most controversial
novel, and perhaps the first serious work of literature to explore human
sexuality in explicit detail. When it was finally published in Britain in 1960,
the British publishers of the novel, Penguin, were prosecuted by the Home
Office for obscenity. The prosecuting counsel posed the notorious question
to the jury: «Is it a book you would wish your wife or your servants to read?»
Penguin won and publication was resumed. Lady Chatterley's Lover features
some of Lawrence's most lyrical and poetic prose style alongside the theme
of class conflict: the story of an English noblewoman, Constance Chatterley,
who finds love and sexual fulfilment with her husband's gamekeeper,
Mellors.
Some feminist critics now claim this and other novels and short stories
by Lawrence to be deeply misogynistic; part of their argument is that
Lawrence suggests women will reach true fulfilment only by submitting
themselves to men. Lawrence exposes the self-assertive determination of
one human being to dominate another (particularly men as dominating
women), and even his life-long companion Frieda complained of this:
Frieda says I am antediluvian in my positive attitude. I do think a woman
must yield some sort of precedence to a man... I do think men must go
ahead absolutely in front of their women, without turning round to ask for
permission or approval from their women. Consequently the women must
follow as it were unquestioningly.
(Letter to Katherine Mansfield, December 1918)
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Lawrence wanted sex to be the source of the pure central fire of life.
Clifford, Lord Chatterley and Constance's husband, is impotent; his
impotence is symbolic of modern mechanical man, and his growing concern
with business is a lust for power, while his wife is expanding her nature
through the warmth and tenderness of sensual love. In a familiar Lawrentian
symbolism, Mellors, the gamekeeper, is the dark, sensual, full man set
against the blond, sterile, incomplete Clifford.
Life, for Lawrence, was essentially a mystery, and was not to be
comprehended or explained in terms of reason and logic, for that was the
way to kill it. It could be experienced only by direct intuition, transmitted
only by touch; and the value of people, for Lawrence, consisted in the extent
to which mystery resided in them, how far they were conscious of mystery
both in themselves and in others, and to what lengths they were prepared to
go to fulfil their passions. Since the mystery is killed by the analysing,
scientific intellect, it obviously flourishes most strongly where the analysing,
scientific intellect is least powerful (in Mellors, gamekeeper in the forest), at
the instinctual levels of life, in sexual relationships, in the experience of
death, and in the impulsive, non-rational existence of animals and nature.
In general, Lawrence detested every appearance of professionalism and
as a writer he endeavoured to retain the mark of the amateur. He thus
preferred a basic dynamic style, passionate and energetic, to a sophisticated
and elaborate one.
k The characteristic of his fiction can be summarised as follows:

while the formal attributes of his novels are not unusual, except for
their lyricism and symbolism, the experimental quality lies in an
unprecedented search not for the outward manifestations but for the
inner reality, the poetical quality of ‘felt experience’. Lawrence's
endeavour was above all how to express emotion and feelings, as they
exist far below the surface of gesture and are always linked to bodily
sensations. Lawrence was primarily interested not in the social man, -
but in that part of man that is submerged and never seen, the
unconscious, subjected to consciousness. This accounts for the
difficulty readers may experience on first reading Lawrence: they have
to deduce emotion from gesture.
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If Lawrence is one of the greatest English writers of the century it is

largely because art feeds upon the tensions in the artist as well as on their
resolution; and the tensions hinted at by the above quotations are what help
to give Lawrences characters their rich and flexible complexity and their
astonishing vitality. Aside from this, there is a recurrent tendency for the
action of the books to become progressively divorced from what is most
seriously at issue in them, and to degenerate into a kind of slow moving and
wooden intrigue (Holloway 1983: 99).
In 1929 Lawrence, who by then was dying, moved to the south of France.
There he wrote a commentary on the Book of Revelation, Apocalypse. It was
his final religious statement. After his death Aldous Huxley wrote one of the
best essays on D.H. Lawrence:
To be with Lawrence was a kind of adventure, a voyage of discovery into
newness and otherness ... He looked at things with the eyes, so it seemed, of
a man who had been on the brink of death and to whom, as he emerges from
the darkness, the world reveals itself as unfathomably beautiful and
mysterious... A walk with him in the country was a walk through that
marvellously rich and significant landscape which is at once the background
and the principal personage of all his novels. He seemed to know, by personal
experience, what it was like to be a tree or a daisy or a breaking wave or even
the mysterious moon itself. He could get inside the skin of an animal and tell
I you in the most convincing detail how it felt and how, dimly, inhumanly, it
thought.
(Introduction to The Letters of D.H. Lawrence,1932))
Lawrence died of tuberculosis France, in March 1930. He was buried
there and later, in 1935, his ashes were removed to Taos, New Mexico. The
obituaries were largely hostile.
2.2. Discovering Newness and Otherness: D.H. Lawrence’s Sons

and Lovers
It is useful to start this section by reading how Lawrence himself

described his novel. What follows is part of a letter written by Lawrence to
his friend and patron Edward Garnett on 14 November 1912:
194
A woman of character and refinement goes into the lower class and
has no satisfaction in her own life ... As her sons grow up, she selects
them as lovers —first the eldest, then the second... But when they come to
manhood, they can't love, because their mother is the strongest power in
their lives, and holds them... As soon as the young men come into contact
with women there is a split. William gives himself to a superficial woman
and his mother holds his soul. But the split kills him because he doesn't
know where he is. (Paul) gets a woman who fights for his soul (Miriam)
—fights his mother. The son loves the mother —all the sons hate and are
jealous of the father... The son decides to leave his soul in his mother’s
hands, and like his elder brother, go for passion (Clara). Then the split
begins to tell again. But almost unconsciously, the mother realises what is
the matter and begins to die. The son leaves his mistress, attends to his
mother dying. He is left in the end naked of everything, with the drift
towards death.
This summary of the novel, written by Lawrence himself, draws attention
to the relationship between mother and son. Other female characters, such
as Miriam or Clara are reduced, in this account, to mere symbolic characters
with only a secondary function in the main mother-son relationship. As
Lance St John Butler notes about this letter in his York Notes:
Further, it is a Paul-centred view of the novel only after being a Mrs
Morel-centred view. This can be taken as evidence that Lawrence saw his
novel as a study of the Oedipus complex. This psychological term was being
employed by Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology, at about the
same time as Sons and Lovers was being written. It refers to Freud's theory
that all children are more or less affected by sexually-based feelings about
their parents: particularly, boys will always have some form of desire for the
mother and jealousy of the father. Clearly in Sons and Lovers Paul is very
close indeed to an incestuous relationship with his mother.
(St John Butler 1980: 45)
It is worth pointing out that when Lawrence says Mrs Morel selects her
sons 'as lovers’, he does not mean it literally. Lawrence is not writing about
incest, but about a powerful emotional connection. Initially, Sons and Lovers
was rejected by Heinemann and Lawrence wrote to his friend Edward
Garnett:
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The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of t h e 201" Century Y
Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling

invertebrates, the miserable sodding rutters, the flaming sods, the sniveling,
dribbling, dithering, palsied, pulse-less lot that make up England today.
They’ve got the white of egg in their veins and their spunk is that watery it's
a marvel they can breed.
In all his rage, he had clearly not foreseen the huge obstacles to publishing
yet to come. Sons and Lovers best exemplifies the Lawrentian idea of the
modern situation of man and woman. It also presents the loneliness of the
individual, the lack of communication, the split between one’s self and the
self of others, the notion of harmony and balance, the moral sickness in
England, and the necessity for a new conception of life.
Regarding its style, Sons and Lovers presents a combination of realistic
description and poetic images: the realism is strongest in the first half of the
novel, where the narrator describes the Morel family’s day-to-day existence.
Lawrence’s poetry comes to the forefront in his descriptions of nature,
where, for example, vivid sunsets and blazing rosebushes stand out against
darkening skies. The poetic segments of Sons and Lovers seem to make the
common lives of its characters miraculous and heroic. Sons and Lovers is a
masterpiece of technical brilliance as Virginia Woolf noted at the time of its
publication:
One never catches Lawrence —this is one of his most remarkable
qualities— ‘arranging.’ Words, scenes flow as fast and direct as if he merely
traced them with a free rapid hand on sheet after sheet. Not a sentence
seems thought about twice; not a word added for its effect on the architecture
of the phrase. There is no arrangement that makes us say: ‘Look at this. This
scene, this dialogue has the meaning of the book hidden in it.’ One of the
curious qualities of Sons and Lovers is that one feels unrest, a little quiver
and shimmer in his page, as if it were composed of separate gleaming
objects, by no means content to stand still and be looked at.
(Woolf, 'Notes on D.H. Lawrence’, 1948)
Sons and Lovers is set in the British Midlands at the turn of the nineteenth
century. This is a highly industrialised region in central England. Factories,
coal pits and ugly terrace houses are abundant. Yet, Robin Hood’s Sherwood
Forest is close by the busy industrial city of Nottingham, where Paul works,
and the River Trent swirls its way from the city through the wide-open
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«Life is a Luminous H a l o » : The Novel i n the Twentieth Century, Sons and Lovers
country hills and valleys. Sons and Lovers constantly contrasts the sensuous,
natural environment with that of the cold, drab monuments of industrial
town and city life. In Sons and Lovers the well-to-do families and the poor
families each live in the valley ironically designated for them: Bestwood for
the well-to-do and slums of ‘Hell Row’ for the poor.
When Lawrence was growing up, few members of the working class in
Great Britain had much chance of lifting themselves out of poverty. Many
were illiterate and were treated by the upper classes as little more than
beasts of burden (such was the case with Lawrence’s father, Arthur). One of
the only ways to better oneself was to be bright and ambitious enough to
earn scholarships to grammar school and university, as Lawrence himself
did. One could easily tell what class an individual belonged to by his speech.
Notice in Sons and Lovers that Walter Morel speaks in a local dialect,
whereas his wife Gertrude speaks a crisp refined English.
The working class had suffered humiliation and sub-human living
conditions for years but, finally, some workers began to rebel. They started
unions to improve their status, and socialism, a system calling for public
ownership of industry and land, became increasingly popular. The
relationship between Lawrence’s parents, Lydia and Arthur, as did that
between Gertrude and Walter Morel, reveals the gulf separating the lower
and middle classes. Arthur, and most miners (also called colliers), worked
twelve hours a day, exposed to grave dangers and unhealthy working
conditions. Miners’ lives revolved around the colliery and the pub, where
after an exhausting day’s work the men could forget their troubles with a
pint or more of beer: alcoholism was a serious problem in the mining
community. Arthur Lawrence drank heavily, and the tragic effect of an
alcoholic father on his family is painstakingly depicted in Sons and Lovers.
Lawrence’s mother, Lydia, differed markedly from her uneducated, easygoing
husband. She came from a lower-middle-class family that had suffered an
economic decline. Lydia’s father was humiliated by their fall in social status,
and this shame was transferred to his daughter.
One of the most important aspects of Sons and Lovers, therefore, is
Lawrence's treatment of class. He is an author who can write with authority
about class issues since, as has been shown above, class conflict was at the
heart of his family background. His depiction of working-class conditions in
this coal mining community at the turn of the century is accurate and
197
moving as well as novel and authoritative, as F.R. Leavis pointed out in his
essay ‘D.H. Lawrence and Human Existence:'
To be born, with that genius, a miners son at Eastwood in the eighteen-
eighties it is as if Destiny, having given him the genius, had arranged also
that he should be enabled to develop it to the utmost and qualified to use it.
for the purposes for which it was meant. If he had not been born into the
working-class he could not have known working-class life from the inside.
As it was he enjoyed advantages that a writer middle-class bom could not
have had: the positive experience and a freedom both from illusions and
from the debilitating sense of ignorance. On the other hand, gifted as he
was, there was nothing to prevent his getting to know life at other social
levels.
(ER. Leavis, ‘D.H. Lawrence and Human Existence', 1951)
The contrast between city and nature parallels the lack of harmony
between man and society. Man is so satisfied with his social, political and
economic achievements in the twentieth century that he seems to have lost
the basic instincts and violence of the animal in him. But when the pressure
of the social community is unbearable, man escapes quickly to the boundary
of civilisation, towards nature, to obey the rules of the 'spirit' and the flesh.
Lawrence presents nature as a kind of mother comforting people when they
feel alone and as strangers in a hostile world. The physical location in the
novel is extremely important, since it represents a moral situation, too. The
dualism city/nature, or factory/country, represents another modern dualism,
the natural man versus the social or industrialised man.
The novel opens with a description of the setting, but it is really an
account of how civilisation and financial ambition devour nature.
Throughout the novel unconquered nature stands for freedom, instinct and
purity. Consider at this point the similarity of the descriptions of nature in
some passages of the novel. Nature allows passion and communion of the
souls, as when Paul and Clara 'go down’ to the river, following their instincts.
There, Paul starts talking in dialect, like his father, very much as a primitive
man acting through instinct. Nature involves peace and relaxation, even for
Mrs Morel (as in Chapter Two) whereas industrialisation, on the contrary,
means slavery and restraint (as in Chapter Five).
198 3
ffl Industrial society is man's creation and it has turned against him,
making man lose his identity as a natural creature.
Lawrence proposes that, in order to overcome the opposition social man

versus natural man, a rediscovery of man through the flesh is needed. For
him, the greatest obstacle to achieving this was the spirit, which confines
the spontaneous flame in man. For Lawrence the mind is the prison of the
body, not the other way around, so they present themselves as antagonistic
forces. This confrontation is epitomised by the tensions between Mr and
Mrs Morel: she represents the ideas, he represents the senses. There is no
balance and no communication between them: «His nature was purely
sensuous, and she strove to make him moral, religious. She tried to force
him to face things. He could not endure it —it drove him out of his mind»
(Sons and Lovers 1913 [1995]: 14).
Those who choose real life over intellectual social life break the rules of
society and become outcasts, as did Walter Morel in Sons and Lovers. As
modern man searches for a life devoid of dangers, he sets limits on his
liberty to control and master his animal dimension in an attempt to destroy
it completely. For Lawrence, though, these limitations on the animal
dimension should be rebalanced; his ideal reality is a harmonious balance
between the social and the natural man, complementary because we are
social beings. Dorothy Van Ghent has this to say of Mr Morel as a ‘natural
man':
In Sons and Lovers, only in Morel himself, brutalized and spiritually -
maimed as he is, does the germ of selfhood remain intact; and, this is the
correlative proposition in Lawrence, in him only does the biological life
force have simple, unequivocal assertion. Morel wants to live, by hook or
crook, while his sons want to die. To live is to obey a rhythm involving more
than conscious attitudes and involving more than human beings —involving
all nature; a rhythm indifferent to the greediness of reason, indifferent to
idiosyncrasies of culture and idealism. The image associated with Morel is
that of the coal pits, where he descends daily and from which he ascends at
night blackened and tired. It is a symbol of rhythmic descent and ascent,
like a sexual rhythm, or like the rhythm of sleep and awaking or of death
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T h e Need to M a k e it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of t h e 20'" Century Y
and life. True, the work in the coal pits reverses the natural use of the hours
of light and dark and is an economic distortion.
(Dorothy Van Ghent, 'On Sons and Lovers', 1953)
UJ There are, we have seen, two ways to look at Walter Morel s failure
to be a good husband, father and family breadwinner. You can see him
as a man broken by an uncaring, brutal industrial system and an overly
demanding wife. You can also see Walter as his own worst enemy,
inviting self-destruction through drink and irresponsibility.
The end of the story is somewhat ambiguous: Paul has been searching
for light throughout his life, but as his mother dies he is slowly turning
towards darkness. Now that he is alone, he must rely on his own possibilities,
on his own body and mind in perfect union. The choice is either to look for
protection and join the forces of darkness, the monster of social man or defy
the monster and find the true reality of his being. He acts with resolution for
the first time in his life, and is prepared to begin anew, with his hands closed
into fists like a newborn baby.
The first social nucleus, the family, lacks balance because there is no
balance between man and wife. The lack of communication and the
degradation reaches the point of physical violence, which could well be a
first step to human annihilation. The couples relationship is incomplete
because there is no completeness within each member. To feel stronger, to
feel that she dominates the situation, Mrs Morel tempts the children to her
side and teaches them to hate their father. Paradoxically, though, she is
conscious of the 'idea' of the family (Chapter Four).
faM The relationship between Mrs Morel and her children is also very
poignant: she loves what she can make of them, not what they are. She
is very possessive.
As to the relationships between Paul and women, they are similarly

incomplete and unsatisfactory. The mind, the spirit and the body are
200
represented by three separate women. The spirit and the mind may exist as
long as they do not interfere with the expression of the body and are fully
integrated in it:
For Christianity the flesh receives its sanction and purpose from a life of
the spirit which is eternal and transcendent. For Lawrence the life of the
spirit has its justification in enriching and glorifying the life of the flesh of
which it is in any case an epiphenomenon.
(G. Hough, The Dark Sun)
Many authors have noted how, structurally, Sons and Lovers moves
rhythmically in the treatment of different characters' relationships: first
that of Walter and Gertrude Morel, then Paul and his mother, later Paul and
Miriam, and finally that of Paul and Clara:
Sons and Lovers moves along a structural pattern determined by the
nature of its human relationships. A wave-rhythm distinguishes, in beat and
counterbeat, the major involvements of the characters: those of Walter and
Gertrude Morel, Paul and his mother, Paul and Miriam, and Paul and Clara.
In each of these relationships, separate episodes focus — in dramatically
enacted dialogue, description, and action —aspects of each character—
interconnection. Each event is a successive wave, and the movement of the
relationship is the full tide which is its consummation. After that
consummation, there are wavelike returns to the achieved tension in that
relationship, but now each wave shows a diminishing strength and intensity.
The reader of Sons and Lovers soon comes to anticipate the rhythmic returns
and finds himself attuned to the Lawrencean mode. He doesn’t ask for the
conventional climactic development.
(Betsky, ‘Rhythm and Theme: D.H. Lawrences Sons and Lovers' , 1953))
The three women referred to above as representing the mind, the spirit,
and the body, are Gertrude Morel, Miriam, and Clara respectively. The first
impression we have of Gertrude Morel is that of a middle-class, determined
and intellectually alert character. The impression grows stronger when she
is compared to her husband, a working class, uncultivated, careless man.
Immediately, the reader perceives that theirs (Mr and Mrs Morel's) is a
confrontation between her mind and his instincts, which is likely to cause
many problems. Gertrude Morel married her husband because she could
201
not do better and she admired in him everything she did not have; at the
same time, she wanted to change him and make him more like her, although
he would not let her. As the following passage testifies, Morel and his wife
have had one of their many arguments. He resents what he considers her
accusations:
'I’ll may yer pay for this,’ he said, pushing back his chair in desperation.
He bustled and got washed, then went determinedly upstairs. Presently he
came down dressed, and with a big bundle in a blue-checked, enormous
handkerchief.
‘And now,’ he said, 'You'll see me again when you do.’ ‘It’ll be before I
want to,' she replied; and at that he marched out of the house with his
bundle...
When she went down to the coal-place at the end of the garden, however,
she felt something behind the door. So she looked. And there in the dark lay
the big blue bundle. She sat on a piece of coal-in front of the bundle and
laughed. Every time she saw it, so fat and yet so ignominious, slunk into its
comer in the dark, with its ends flopping like dejected ears from the knots,
she laughed again. She was relieved.
(Sons and Lovers 1913 [1995]: 44)
They cannot accept each other for the way they are. Mrs Morel is a
divided being, presented as a broken entity, because she is a woman, a wife
and a mother. As a wife she admits her failure, as a woman she still feels
some passion for Walter, and as a mother she is selfish and unnatural: «She
had a great belief in him, the more because he was unaware of his own
powers. There was so much to come out of him. Life for her was rich with
promise. She was to see herself fulfilled. » (236)
Miriam represents the spirit. Miriam Leivers, Paul’s teenage friend and
sweetheart, was modelled after Lawrences own young love, Jessie
Chambers. When Lawrence was working on Sons and Lovers (1910-12),
Jessie Chambers contributed many specific details, since the novel was so
closely based on their own difficult, intimate relationship. There are
documents proving that some passages of the novel were written in Jessie’s
own handwriting (they appear in the final work much expanded by
Lawrence) and some comments by Jessie on Lawrence's own work. These
are known as the ‘Miriam Papers’, first analysed by Harry T. Moore in his
202
book D.H. Lawrence: The Man and His Works (1969), and are, in fact,
documents relating to the original of 'Miriam' (Jessie Chambers) and to her
involvement with the writing of Sons and Lovers. It is clear from these
papers that, although Jessie often protests that Lawrence is changing the
past in writing his novel, the basic plot, many incidents and many details,
at least of the Miriam sections, are true to Jessies memory. The fact that
Lawrence was able to incorporate Jessies own writings into the novel, in
some cases without change, proves the point.
feU From a critical point of view the ‘Miriam Papers' provide a

warning: Jessie never realised that fiction is a different kind of writing
from history or biography. This is why it is important to distinguish
autobiography as a genre and the autobiographical details that can be
trace in a fictional writing such a Sons and Lovers.
From the beginning, Miriam Leivers is described as a 'romantic heroine’

and the reader gets a picture of a shy, religious, dreamy, intense, spiritual
girl. The ordinary is too ugly for her. Paul, being equally sensitive, enjoys life
for what it is on earth. Mrs Morel believes that Miriam is not an «ordinary
woman, who can leave me my share in him. She wants to absorb him till
there is nothing left of him, even for himself. He will never be a man on his
own two feet —she will suck him up» (193). Nature, represented by Willey
Farm, links them: «So it was in this atmosphere of subtle intimacy, this
meeting in their common feelings for something in nature that their love
started». Miriam is idealistic also in the area of love. First, she feels as God’s
sacrificed victim: «But Lord, if it is Thy will that I should love him, make me
love him— as Christ would, who died for the souls of men», and later on she
will make an ultimately romantic gesture: letting Paul go with Clara, for she
believes in the untouchable bond that links her to Paul. She tells herself in
Chapter Twelve:
If he must go, let him go and have his fill —something big and intense,
he called it. At any rate, when he had got it, he would not want it— that he
said himself; he would want the other thing that she could give him. He
would want to be owned, so that he could work. It seemed to her a bitter
thing that he must go, but she could let him go into an inn for a glass of
203
whisky, so she could let him go to Clara, so long as it was something that
would satisfy a need in him, and leave him free for herself to possess.
(Sons and Lovers 1913 [1995]: 318)
Miriam does not react to her secondary role and submits to Paul's
dominance. There are two sides at war in Miriam: her love of Paul Morel,
and her resistance to her sexual feelings towards him. Her mother taught
her that sex is one of the burdens of marriage, and although she does not
want to believe it, she cannot help but listen to the woman who has shaped
her life. When Miriam finally gives in to Paul (in Chapter Eleven), she does
so in a spirit of self-sacrifice that disappoints both of them:
She would submit, religiously, to the sacrifice. He should have her. And
at the thought her whole body clenched itself involuntarily, hard, as if
against something; but Life forced her through this gate of suffering, too,
and she would submit. At any rate, it would give him what he wanted, which
was her deepest wish.
(Sons and Lovers 1913 [1995]: 284)
Miriams inability to enjoy sex makes her an incomplete person in the
Lawrentian world, where sex as well as spirituality is necessary to an
individuals fulfilment. Clifford Chattcrlcy, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, has a
similar response to Miriams towards sex: «No, the intimacy was deeper,
more personal than that. And sex was merely an accident, or an adjunct, one
of the curious obsolete, organic processes which persisted in its own
clownishness, but was not really necessary. » However, spirit is not everything
for Paul. He is looking for a different kind of relationship, and so lets Miriam
know (309). Their love is a failure. The realisation of their failure comes to
them during Easter time: -
It made him mad with restlessness. She saw this, and wished bitterly
that Miriam had been a woman who could take this new life of his, and leave
her the roots. He fought against his mother almost as he fought against
Miriam.
It was a week before he went again to Willey Farm. Miriam had suffered
a great deal, and was afraid to see him again. Was she now to endure the
ignominy of his abandoning her? That would only be superficial and
temporary. He would come back. She held the keys to his soul. But
204
meanwhile, how he would torture her with his battle against her. She shrank
from it.
(Sons and Lovers 1913 [1995]: 222)
”All At spring time they feel queer, awkward and uneasy, and it is
quite fitting because spring symbolises mating and development while
they are always stagnant in their ideal love.
Lawrence completed the novel in 1913, while mourning his mothers

death and under yet another female influence, that of the independent and
sensuous Frieda von Richthofen Weekley, his future wife. Much of Friedas
personality can be seen in the passionate Clara Dawes, Paul Morels other
love. Jessie felt that her portrayal as Miriam was unflattering. She broke off
all ties with Lawrence and even wrote her own version of the relationship in
order to vindicate herself.
Clara stands for the body, the senses, the flesh that Miriam seems to lack.
She is presented as heavy, blonde, and defiant. She strikes the reader as
being a modern woman, owner of herself and of her destiny. Clara is depicted
as a new twentieth-century woman. She is a feminist before it was
fashionable. Determined to be independent, she leaves her husband, earns
her own living, and has an extramarital affair with Paul. Clara can be viewed
as representative of the many post-Victorian women who rebelled against
the traditional image of woman as the 'weaker sex.’ Clara is extraordinarily
intelligent, with a good critical mind. But Lawrence gives little demonstration
of this aspect of her personality, since the story concentrates on her physical
attractiveness to Paul. Nevertheless, since she left her husband, nothing
seems to have happened to her in terms of love and affection. In a way, she
is like a dead flower (Sons and Lovers 1913 [1995]: 295). Paul thinks that
flowers are there to be enjoyed. Their own beauty entitles people to pick
them and appreciate them. Curiously, Gertrude Morel and Miriam are also
frequently connected to flowers in the novel: in Chapter Seven, Gertrude
can hardly believe that some beautiful flowers have come out in her garden,
Miriam, every time she picks flowers, seems to devour them, to smell the life
out of them, just as she wants to do with Paul. The rose bush Miriam shows
205
to Paul eerily signifies their relationship. That Miriam is intensely loving

and warm towards the beautiful, white roses and that Paul feels strangely
'imprisoned' by them symbolises their feelings for each other and towards
sex with the other. Miriam would devote herself to Paul, who would feel
smothered by her intensity. Mark Spilka noted in 1955 that the women in
Sons and Lovers are frequently identified with flowers and gardening
(Miriam tends to smother flowers with her religious adoration, while Mrs
Morel nurtures them to become healthy and strong):
As these thoughts indicate, flowers are the most important of the 'vital
forces’ in Sons and Lovers. The novel is saturated with their presence, and
Paul and his three sweethearts are judged, again and again, by their attitude
toward them, or more accurately, by their relations with them. The 'lad-and- —
girl' affair between Paul and Miriam, for example, is a virtual communion
between the two lovers and the flowers they both admire.
(Spilka, 'How to Pick Flowers’, 1955))
Following this flower symbolism, Clara is like a beautiful flower that has
become forgotten: she is there both for someone to have her and to have
someone herself. In spite of the loathing and contempt she feels for men, the
reader senses that she is not cut out to be alone. Her detachment and self-
containment are extraordinarily attractive to Paul. She is like a goddess in
possession of the ultimate secret of a body, of a human relationship. Full of
a life to be expressed, she is linked to Paul in a non-spiritual way. In Chapter
Twelve Clara and Paul make love and their relationship reaches its high
point in their sexual fulfilment. By having his body near she seems to come
back to life again, and as she wants someone who needs her she starts to
move back towards her husband, Baxter. Clara notices why Paul cannot be
hers completely, how there is something she cannot reach: «She felt as if
something almost tangible fastened her to him; yet he seemed so easy in his
graceful, indolent movement, so detached as he tied up the too-heavy flower-
branches to their stakes, that she wanted to shriek in her helplessness»
(387).
Besides, the special tie between Miriam and Paul is something which
Clara will never have. She is honest enough to admit it and even to push him
back to Miriam. Lacking that particular quality, she can just feel resurrected,
alive again, by having a man. Paul, in return, loves the woman but does not
2066
:Life is a Luminous Halo»: The Novel in the Twentieth Century, Sons and Lovers S
feel consecrated to her: «But it was not Clara. It was something that
happened because of her, but it was not her. They were scarcely any nearer
each other. It was as if they had been blind agents of a great force» (422).
There is no unity between the two selves: Lawrence seems to be saying that
it is no use being available for sex, as is Clara, if there is no communion of
the souls, too. As Paul watches Clara swim in the sea, he thinks to himself,
«'She’s lost like a grain of sand in the beach —just a concentrated speck
blown along, a tiny white foam-bubble, almost nothing among the morning.
Why does she absorb me?'» (358).
The fulfilment of one's personality is achieved when the senses express
the reality of the inner self. If no tenderness governs or accompanies the
flesh, then, Lawrence says, we go back to our animal nature and the human
instinct is lost. That is what happens in the relationship between Paul and
Clara: they lack full understanding. Clara and Baxter Dawes get together
again. He needs her now for him to come back to life, to regain his lost
manhood, and she knows it. She has not been able to reach into the deepest
part of Paul, and now with Baxter she has the chance of being accepted as a
whole woman, in such a way as she has never been with Paul.
The only woman to whom Paul has ever felt himself given up is his
mother. Sometimes he feels he is not entire, for a mother cannot replace
sexual love. However, as a whole, his mother is his comfort, his peace, the
warmth of childhood, the steadiness, the person who understands him
perfectly well and who is always beside him. It is for him a very easy way of
loving for him: pleasant and without complexities, rewarding and satisfying.
Of course, it is not a completely fulfilling love, but it is far better than those
he receives from either Miriam or Clara. When Mrs. Morel dies, Paul’s
emptiness seems total. «She was the only thing that held him up, himself,
amid all this. And she was gone, intermingled herself. He wanted her to
touch him, have him alongside with her. But no, he would not give in... He
would not take that direction, to the darkness, to follow her» (420). When
Paul kisses his dead mother, he feels emotions he had never experienced
from her: cold and harsh, unreceptive and loveless. He does not want to let
his mother go from his life. As much as Paul wants his mother to be with
him, he decides that he cannot follow his mother. Even though her spirit
will guide him if he allows it to, but he decides to break away from her. He
knows he must separate himself from her to become a man of his own
207
instinct and will. At the end of the novel Paul walks away from the dark,
uninhabited country fields and towards the bright city lights. Some readers
see this act as Paul’s walking away from death and towards life. Paul has
been both blessed and cursed with such an extraordinary mother.
3. ACTIVITIES
3.1. Test yourself
1. What is new in D.H. Lawrences fiction?

2. How many phases could be drawn in Lawrence’s writing?
3 . What means for Lawrence the distinction between 'mechanical man’
and 'natural man’?
4 . Why has Lawrence been accused of misogynistic attitudes?
1 . Compare Mrs Morel’s respective feelings for Miriam and for Clara.
2 . What are the many different symbolisms evoked by flowers? How do
flowers figure differently in the fates of the various characters?
3 . Discuss briefly Sons and Lovers as a Bildungsroman.
3.3. Explore
1. The sentences below have been quoted from Chapter Ten, the final
chapter of Sons and Lovers. Read them, go to the novel and place both
sentences in context, explaining why Paul’s life had fallen into pieces
and who is that 'her' he is not going to follow. What do you think Paul
is going to do next with his life?:
a) ‘Paul’s life had fallen to pieces'.
b) 'He would not take that direction, to the darkness, to follow her’.
2088.
2. Write a short essay (450 words) comparing D.H. Lawrence’s life to

that of his character Paul paying particular attention to the
fictionalization of facts that make possible the building of Paul as a
fictional character.
3.4. Key terms
— Bildungsroman
— Censorship
— City
— Machine
— Nature
— Perspectivism -
— Poetic language
— Science
— Sex
— Sexuality
— Women
— Working Class
4 . BIBLIOGRAPHY
Callow, Philip. 1975. Son and Lover: The Young D.H. Lawrence. New York: Stein and
Day.
Draper, R.P. 1969. Profiles in Literature: D.H. Lawrence. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
Farr, Judith, ed. 1970. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Sons and Lovers.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Holloway, John. 1991. ‘The Literary Scene’ in From James to Eliot. The Pelican
Guide to English Literature Vol. 7, edited by Boris Ford. London: Penguin.
209
The Need to M a k e it New: English Literature and Thought i n the First Half of t h e 20'" Century
Tedlock, E.W. Jr., ed. 1965. D.H. Lawrence and Sons and Lovers. New York: New
York University Press.
Web Sites
— D.H. Lawrence resources at The University of Nottingham

http://rnss.libraiy.nottingharn.ac.uk/dhl_horne.html
— D.H. Lawrence index page
http://web.ukonline.co.uk/rananim/lawrence/
— D.H. Lawrence page
http://www.cswnet.com/~erin/lawrence.htm
210
Unit 5
TALES OF THE CITY: VIRGINIA WOOLFS

MODERNIST GEOGRAPHIES OF THE MIND
W Program
N
1. Presentation: Women and Modernism
1.1. Introduction to Virginia Woolf
1.2. The Bloomsbury Group and Bloomsbury Aesthetics
2. Texts Analysis: IS:
2.1. A Room of One’s Own and Other Essays
2.2. Mrs. Dalloway and the Womans Sentence
3. Activities
4. Bibliography Y
Learning outcomes
— To discern that Woolfs work is a response to a society that witnessed

multiple and profound changes, social and political convulsions, and
literary debates, in which she was an active participant and a reference
to her contemporaries.
— To become gender-conscious in order to understand that Woolf’s
commitment to the women’s struggle, what today is called Woolf's
feminism, is intrinsically linked to her artistic output.
— To analyse Woolf's complex use of language and narrative techniques
and her experimental approach to fiction as part of the new modernist
aesthetics she, among others, propounded.
— To understand the importance of the city and the visual effect of
k\
language in modernism and Woolf's work. _
J
1. PRESENTATION: WOMEN AND MODERNISM
As has been discussed i n previous Units, the period between 1910

and 1940 is one i n which the attitude towards art i n general and
literature i n particular changes radically. The argument over what
deserves to be represented and the right way to represent it was at the
center of the literary innovations of the period. After the War, this
argument was won by a group of male, middle-class writers (among
them Ford Madox Ford, T.E. H u l m e , Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot) who
advocated an art that would avoid the personal, the emotional, and the
213
The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20™ Century ”
mundane. The success of these writers meant that a particular kind of

modernism became accepted as the m o s t important and significant art
of its t i m e . The p o e t T.S. Eliot was a key figure in this process of
becoming through his theories o n impersonality and of the objective
correlative which were extremely influential d u r i n g the 1 9 2 0 s and
1930s, the period when modernism became institutionalised and
codified. The Eliotean model w a s , in fact, j u s t but one of the many
approaches regarding the writing produced i n this period. Women
writers experimented with form and content as did m a l e writers, yet
their way of experimentation, the means by which they experimented
and the goals they expected to achieve through this experimentation,
were different from those of male writers.
Male writers approached literary modernism in the belief that art
should convey a 'transcendent' reality that lay outside particular social
and ideological systems. As a matter of fact this view on modernism
produced an exclusive and discriminatory form of writing that
accentuated the dichotomy high art/low art. Forms of writing outside
modernist aesthetics were considered as low art; consequently, the so-
called popular fiction which, not surprisingly, was being produced by a
considerable number of women writers, was undervalued and catalogued
as a product to be consumed by the masses. In t h i s respect s o m e feminist
critics, such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, have gone so far as to
suggest that literary modernist arose as a reaction to the 'woman question’
and as a response to the increasing numbers of women entering the
literary market. That is, Gilbert and Gubar suggest that a major motive
for what was understood as modernism, with its exclusions and
discriminations, was a reaction against the rise of literary women.
However, if, as said before, women writers approached modernism
differently from the way men did they did not escape the elitism attributed
to their male counterparts. Virginia Woolf's novels, H.D.’s (Hilda Doolittle)
poetry and fiction, and Dorothy Richarson’s thirteen-volume novel-
sequence Pilgrimage participate of the modernist aesthetics (self-
reflexiveness, ambiguity, fragmentation of form, among other) and
produced difficult literary works that could hardly b e seen as popular
pieces of writing.
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Tales of the City: Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Geographies of the Mind
$/ Modernist art maintained its avant-garde position by defining

itself against mass culture and hence against traditional forms of
female writing and reading such as the popular romance. Yet it posed
a problem for the woman writer of the period, who saw herself torn
between a form of art whose very novelty opened up an arena where
the woman writer might be able to find her own voice, on the one
hand, and the rejection of mass culture (and, by implication, of the
feminine) on the other. How did women writers deal with this apparent
contradiction?
Some of the tensions produced in the woman writer by this dilemma

were explored in an early story by Katherine Mansfield, 'The Tiredness of
Rosabel’ (1908). This story concerns the daydreams and romantic fantasies
of an overworked shop assistant, and it is particularly interesting as an
example of how Katherine Mansfield in particular, and women writers of
the period at large, aligns herself both with high art and with mass culture.
At the beginning of the story we are placed at a critical distance from
popular romance. Coming home on the bus, the central character Rosabel
watches with distaste another girl reading a popular novel. She criticises the
way in which the girl is «mouthing the words in a way that Rosabel detested,
licking her first finger and thumb each time that she turned the page»
(Mansfield 1984: 17). Popular romance is thus connected with vulgarity and
the body, and is apparently condemned.
As the story continues, pointed contrasts are made between the romantic
daydream Rosabel falls into, and the pinched and impoverished realities of
her life. Romance is thus shown as dangerous because it covers over the real
(economic and sexual) causes of Rosabel’s oppression. Yet, as we are drawn
into the texture of Rosabel’s dream, we find that it powerfully affirms the
value of the life of the female body, and indeed celebrates it. Rosabel’s dream
world offers her light, warmth, colour, and sexual pleasure:
Harry took her home, and came in with her for just one moment. The
fire was out in the drawing room but the sleepy maid waited for her in her
boudoir. She took off her cloak, dismissed the servant, and went over to the
fireplace, and stood peeling off her gloves; the firelight shone on her hair.
215
Hany came across the room and caught her in his arms: 'Rosabel, Rosabel,
Rosabel!’...
(Mansfield 1984: 20)
Mansfield’s text thus discloses the way in which popular romance,

while denying some needs, speaks powerfully to other female needs,
pleasures, and desires. The text points in two directions and dramatises
the dilemma in which Mansfield finds herself as a woman writer of the
period. On the one hand she is pulled towards high art critical both of
romance and of femininity; she is pulled towards a ‘masculine’ writing
position that foregrounds such qualities as authority and autonomy, and
the opportunities offered by it. The solution to this dilemma, discovered
by Mansfield herself and other women writers of the period, a solution to
be considered as an achievement for it was truly new and avant-garde , is to
push modernism to the limit and attempt to deconstruct this opposition.
That is, women modernists tried to incorporate into their writing what
they felt constituted their femininity. In this sense, women writers of the
period challenged the claim of impersonality defended by the male writers,
turned to personal experience, and in their writings they made a journey
in search of a self that, as we shall see, was perceived as multiple and
fragmented.
Central to the rise of modernism and its questioning of reality as
portrayed in Victorian and Edwardian fiction is the development of science
in the late nineteenth century. Of particular importance was the appearance
of a new medical branch called sexology. The works of the German Krafft-
Ebing, and the British Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis exposed,
sometimes against the intention of the authors, the existence of female
sexuality and female sexual desire. This meant that the younger generation
of women, the women that would start writing after the end of the First
World War, stressed not just the need for constitutional reform, but also that
for a much greater personal and sexual emancipation for women.
The great turning point was marked by Freud's theories on the
unconscious. Freud’s work first became available in translation in 1909 and
his theory of the unconscious (that is, the fact that in the development of the
human psyche there are certain episodes which, while repressed, are still
contained in what he called the ‘unconscious’, and that these repressed
21 -
216
events affect the way we consciously perceive reality) constituted a break

from current ideas of an essential, immutable, unified self.
■f The modern self is perceived as multiple and fragmented because

there is always an inherent part of the self that by its very definition
remains unknown, but no less effective for the perception of 'who I
am’.
What are the key issues raised by the modernist woman writer? There
are five main characteristics to be found in the writings produced by women
in this period. The first refers to subjectivity and gender identity. Women
tended towards the split, fragmented, dispersed, and alienated subject
because they felt split within an external, male-dominated world; there was,
on the one hand, an external public vision of her self, and on the other, an
internal private self different from cultural prescription. That is they
perceived a self that stood against the liberal humanist view of a subject as
fixed, autonomous, conscious, rational, unified, and unifying.
The second characteristic has to do with history and myth and the
dissolution of time: that is, in their fiction past, present and future
intermingle; there is no chronology to be followed, just the path of involuntary
memory as a sound, a smell, may transport us elsewhere.
The third places great emphasis on the city: modernist women write
about urban places, about their experience within the city (as, for example,
in Mrs Dalloway) because the city is perceived as offering new possibilities
and as an unreal fragmentation. Other authors explore the new visions on
sexuality (it is notorious the case of Radclyffe Hall, and was also addressed
by other authors such as Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis).
The final characteristic is their alliance to stream of consciousness: May
Sinclair, when reviewing the early volumes of Pilgrimage in 1918, noted that
the novel centred on the mental process, that is, on the thoughts, responses
and interior emotional experiences of a single central character; that it
sometimes shifted point of view among several key figures, and that there
were interior monologues that contrasted heavily with the silence outside of
the character. Some modernist women are Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein,
217
H.D., Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield and Jean

Rhys. Of these authors, we shall concentrate in the following sections on the
work of Virginia Woolf.
I. 1. Introduction to Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf is a major figure in the Modernist movement. She made

significant contributions in the development of the novel and in the writing
of essays. Given the amount of material, her diaries and letters collected in
several volumes, the biographies she has inspired, and thousands of critical
works that have focused on her persona and work, it requires effort to
establish a complete and fixed picture of this woman of letters.
& Indeed, she has been seen in many different and contradictory .
ways: as a privileged woman out of touch with working class women; '
as a socialist working for the struggle of working class women; as an
oppressed woman whose mental instability made her an insecure,
fragile and weak person; as a strong and ironical person whose witty
commentaries could slice one into pieces; as having suffered an
oppressive Victorian upbringing; as, quite the opposite, having had a
liberal and privileged Victorian upbringing; as having been sexually
abused as a child by her stepbrother; as happily married; as unhappily
, married; as a lesbian; as courageous. Why are there so many points of
' views on Virginia Woolf?
From these views and others, the one fact that seems clear is that Virginia
Woolf was a complex and paradoxical woman whose unconventional
personality is difficult to pin down. Adeline Virginia Stephen was born on
25 January 1882 in London. Her beautiful mother, Julia Prinsep Duckworth
Stephen, had three children (George, Stella and Gerald) from a previous
marriage to the barrister, Herbert Duckworth. Virginia Woolf inherited her
mothers looks and Julia would be the inspiration for Mrs Ramsay in To the
Lighthouse. Leslie Stephen, her father, was also a widower, previously
married to the daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. From
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Tales of the City: Virginia Woolf's Modernist Geographies of the Mind
this marriage he had a daughter, Laura, who was mentally handicapped. In

addition to Virginia, Julia and Leslie Stephen had three other children:
Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian. All eight children lived with her parents and a
number of servants at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, in London. In
Moments of Being, a compilation of her memoirs edited by Jeanne Schulkind
in 1976, Woolf wrote:
Who was I then? Adeline Virginia Stephen, the second daughter of Leslie
and Julia Prinsep Stephen, born on 25th January 1882, descended from a
great many people, some famous, others obscure; bom into a large
connection, born not of rich parents, but of well-to-do parents, born into a
very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late
nineteenth century world.
(Woolf 1985: 65)
The Stephen family belonged to the upper-middle class that produced
most of the influential thinkers and artists of the day. The greatest writers
and politicians of the time, among them Henry James and Thomas Hardy,
were frequent visitors to Hyde Park Gate. On her mothers side, the famous
Victorian photographer, J. Margaret Cameron, was Virginia Woolf's great-
aunt.
'' & In 1926 Virginia Woolf and the painter, art critic and personal
ffriend, Roger Fry, contributed an introduction to Camerons Victorian
Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women.
Julia Stephen was mostly a devoted wife and self-sacrificing mother who
also worked very hard for the less privileged members of society. Her
premature death in 1895 prompted Virginias first nervous breakdown.
Leslie Stephen was a distinguished critic, biographer and philosopher.
Although he was never the genius he wanted to be, he was nevertheless one
of the most influential figures in the literary world in late Victorian England.
He was the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography (an on-going
publication that nowadays includes an entry on Virginia Woolf) and author
of the History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. As a young man
Leslie Stephen abandoned a promising career as a Cambridge don because
219
The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 2 0 t " Century Y
he declared that he had never believed in the literal truth of the Bible. He
was a liberal thinker and a passionate advocate of his views, some of which,
such as his agnosticism, were highly controversial in those days. He had an
extensive library open freely to his children. Virginia Woolf, working her
way through this library, became acquainted with a large number of English
and classical works.
“ The intellectual ambience at Hyde Park Gate was of significant

importance for the development of Woolf as a writer. During the
summers her family spent their long holidays at Tailand House in St
Ives, Cornwall. Both London and St Ives played an important role as
the settings of most of Woolf's works. In To the Lighthouse (1927), St
Ives serves as the background of the novel although it is actually placed
on the Isle of Skye, in Scotland. Mrs Dalloway (1925) is set in London
and, as we shall discuss in the section dedicated to the study of this ~
novel, the city plays an important part in the development of the novel.
Despite his alluring public life, which Virginia Woolf would always held
in high esteem, Leslie Stephen was, in the private world of the Stephen
family, an emotional bully and a domestic tyrant, as Virginia Woolf recalls
in her memoirs, 'A Sketch of the Past.' After the death of her mother, Virginia
Woolf's half-sister, Stella, took over the running of the household as well as
Julia’s role as the provider for Leslie’s demands for sympathy and emotional
support. Stella married in 1897 and died of peritonitis on her return from
her honeymoon. The household duties and the burden of coping with her
father fell on the painter-to-be, Vanessa, the eldest Stephen sibling.
Leslie Stephen died in 1904 and Virginia had a second nervous breakdown.
During this second breakdown Vanessa decided to move and took the
Stephen family to 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. The neighbourhood
chosen was not one of the most respectable; many old friends of the family,
including Henry James, criticised the way of life of the Stephen children. As
it turned out, the idea was an excellent one, for their new home allowed the
four siblings to overcome the gloomy atmosphere that surrounded them
after the death of Woolf’s mother: «Her death, on the 5th of May, 1895,
began a period of Oriental gloom» (Woolf 1985: 40).
220
For all Virginia Woolf had free access to her fathers library at a time
when many girls of her class were discouraged from reading, she never had
a proper education and she was never allowed out of the house to study. She
always felt this as a void in her development and it became, especially in her
two most overtly feminist essays, A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three
Guineas (1938), a gendered trope highlighting the educational privileges
afforded to her brothers and her other male peers, who had been given the
opportunity to read at Cambridge. Yet, in October 1897, Virginia Woolf,
attended classes in Greek and History at King’s College, London. She
received tuition from Dr George Warr in 1898. Later that year, Walter Paters
sister, Clara Pater, taught her Latin. In 1902 she resumed her Greek studies
and started private classes with Janet Case.
9 These classes continued in the following year but were interrupted

iin 1904 after her father’s death. She continued studying Greek on her
own, translating, reading and re-reading the poets, philosophers, and
dramatists. Greek became the main subject of two essays, ‘The Perfect
Language’ and ‘On Not Knowing Greek’.
Her elder brother, Thoby, left public school in 1899 and went up to Trinity
College, Cambridge. Greek was also important because it was a subject she
could share with Thoby, who also brought to Hyde Park Gate the atmosphere
of undergraduate life in Cambridge. It was there that Thoby made friends
with Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell (who married Vanessa in 1907), Saxon
Sydney-Turner, Lytton Strachey, and Maynard Keynes. They comprised the
embryo of what came to be called the 'Bloomsbury Group’.
At the end of 1904 Virginia Woolf started writing reviews for the
Manchester Guardian and in 1905 she started reviewing for the Times Literary
Supplement. In 1906, after a trip to Greece, Thoby died of typhoid fever. He
had started the ‘Thursday evenings’ meetings for his Cambridge friends. The
arrangement was continued by Vanessa and then, after Vanessa's marriage,
by Virginia and Adrian when they moved to 29 Fitzroy Square. Woolf was to
move again in 1911, a year before she married Leonard Woolf at St Pancras
Registry Office on 10 August 1912. From then onwards the Woolfs rented a
small house near Lewes in Sussex. Her sister Vanessa rented nearby
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Thb Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20"‘ Century
Charleston Farmhouse in 1916; in 1919, the Woolfs bought Monks House in

RodmelL This was a small, weather-boarded house which they used mainly
during the summer holidays until they were bombed out of their flat in
Mecklenburg Square in 1940. Monks House then became their home until
Virginia Woolfs death. She drowned herself in the nearby River Ouse.
In 1908 Virginia Woolf started writing her first novel, The Voyage Out
(1915). Originally to be called Melymbrosia, the novel was finished in 1913,,
but was not published until 1915 (by Duckworth & Co), as she suffered a
third bout of deep depression and debilitating headaches after her marriage.
The Voyage Out is, at first sight, rather conventional in form and was well
received by critics. Her second novel, if anything more conventional, was
Night and Day, also published by Duckworth, in 1919..
Leonard and Virginia Woolf had, in 1917, bought a small printing press
in order to take up printing as a hobby and as therapy for Virginia. By now
they were living in Richmond, south-west London, and the 'Hogarth Press’
was named after their house. The first publication in the Woolfs’ Hogarth
Press was Two Stories, with a story by each of them: 'The Mark on the Wall’
by Virginia and ‘Three Jews’ by Leonard.
_ , (7 The Woolfs continued hand printing until 1932. During these

years they became publishers rather than mere printers. Around 1922
the Hogarth Press had become a business, publishing the works of
other modern writers including Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot,
Maxim Gorky and E.M. Forster. *
From 1921 onwards, except for a few limited editions, Woolf always
published with the Hogarth Press. This same year she published her first
collection of short stories, Monday or Tuesday, most of them experimental in
nature. In 1922 she published Jacob’s Room an ironic tribute to her brother,
Thoby, and her first experimental novel. In 1924, the couple moved to 52
Tavistock Square, in London and in the following year, 1925, Mrs Dalloway
was published, followed in 1927 by To the Lighthouse, and The Waves in
1931. These three novels are generally considered to be her greatest
contribution to Modernism.
222
Her involvement with the aristocratic novelist and poet, Vita Sackville-
West, led to Orlando: A Biography (1928), a subversive fictional account
inspired by Vita’s life and ancestry at Knole, near Sevenoaks in Kent. The
story spans four centuries of the history of England. The central character
is a sixteen-year-old aristocratic poet, Orlando, who, in 1600, becomes the
favourite of Elizabeth I. During the reign of Charles II Orlando changes
sex and Lady Orlando continues down the centuries, finally able to finish
the poem she started when a young man. Two talks given at women’s
colleges at Cambridge in 1928 led to A Room of One’s Own (1929), a
discussion of women's writing and its historical, economic and social
underpinning.
The 1930s was an unhappy time for the Woolfs as the deaths of friends
and the prospect of war increasingly overshadowed the decade. Virginia
wrote a fictional biography of Elizabeth Barret Browning’s dog entitled
Flush in 1933. In 1937 she published The Years, perhaps her most overtly
political fictional work. A best-seller in America, the novel was a long and
painful exercise in writing. It is often read alongside Three Guineas (1938),
in a sense, a successor to A Room of One's Own although it is more
revolutionary in its view. The essay deals extensively with the relationship
between war, masculinity, and women's education and employment. In 1940
she wrote a biography of her friend Roger Fry. On 28 March 1941 she killed
herself while she was in the last revision of her final novel Between the Acts,
posthumously published by Leonard Woolf.
1.2. The Bloomsbury Group and Bloomsbury Aesthetics
It has already been pointed out that when the Stephen children moved
to 46 Gordon Square in 1904, Thoby started to organise meetings on
Thursdays at their house. The people who used to attend included many of
his friends at Cambridge such as the novelist E.M. Forster, the literary
journalist Desmond MacCarthy and his wife, the art critics Roger Fry (also
a painter) and Clive Bell, the biographer and essayist Lytton Strachey, the
painter Duncan Grant, the political writer and publisher Leonard Woolf, the
economist John Maynard Keynes, and Saxon Sidney-Turner, among others.
The Stephen sisters, Virginia and Vanessa, and their brother Adrian also
attended the meetings.
223
T Although it is doubtful that these people would agree to be _,

described as a generational group, they have come to be collectively
known as the 'Bloomsbury Group’. The meetings became one of the
most important an important centre of Other people such as Katherine
Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, David Garnett, James Strachey, and, later on,
Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson, attended the
meetings. ’
As said before, these meetings were continued by Adrian, Vanessa and

Virginia after Thoby’s death. If there is anything that would join the group
together it was their refusal to compromise with their Victorian upbringing.
The group was liberal in its attitudes and allowed a free range to blasphemy
and bawdiness; a variety of sexualities prevailed.
At first Virginia Woolf was unimpressed and rather sceptical towards
what she saw as a pretentious bunch of male students. Later on, however,
their discussion topics attracted her attention and, as she described in her
memoir ‘Old Bloomsbury’, even though she did not dare to participate, she
rather enjoyed the mode of discussion and the earnestness of these young
men in pursuit of topics such as 'beauty', ‘good’ and ‘reality’:
It filled me with wonder to watch those who were finally left in the
argument piling stone upon stone, cautiously, accurately, long after it had
completely soared above my sight. But if one could not say anything, one
could listen. One had glimpses of something miraculous happening high up in
the air. Often we could be still sitting in a circle at two or three in the morning.
Still Saxon would be taking his pipe from his mouth as if to speak, and putting
it back again without having spoken. At last, rumpling his hair back, he would
pronounce very shortly some absolute final summing up. The marvellous
edifice was complete, one could stumble off to bed feeling that something very
important had happened. It had been proved that beauty was —or beauty was
not— for I have never been quite sure which —part of a picture.
(Woolf 1985: 190)
In the long run Woolf would gain a group of friends who were, at the
same time, the fellow students she had been denied. From the meetings she
224
also learned a method of analysis that would very much influence her
writing and her thought. Although Thoby himself did not, some of the male
attendees to these 'Thursday evenings' —-Fry, MacCarthy, and Forster of the
older generation, Strachey, Leonard Woolf and Keynes of the younger—
belonged to the Cambridge Conversazione Society, or Apostles. The society
was a very exclusive and thus elitist group. There were never more than six
or seven members at one time, although those who had belonged to the
Society always remained linked to it. The Society started as an undergraduate
discussion club in 1820 and slowly developed into a semi-secret group
mainly preoccupied with the development of the intellect. Plato and the
German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, were haunting presences in the
Society. G.E. Moore, a classicist, became the most influential thinker among
the members. In particular, his work Principia Ethica (1903) influenced the
views of the members of the society. Andrew McNeillie in the chapter
dedicated to 'Bloomsbury' in the Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf
(2000) has very accurately summarised the main points of Moore's argument
in his Principia in the following way:
(i) Intrinsic goodness is an unanalysable concept and the word ‘good’,
when used in this way, to mean a thing 'good in itself’, is indefinable, like the
colour yellow; (ii) that instead of one thing, the Utilitarians’ concept of
'pleasure' being good in itself, there is a plurality of things that are, and the
most valuable of these are states of mind involving either the pleasures of
human intercourse... or the enjoyment of beautiful objects; (iii) that the
rightness of an action derives from the character of its consequences; (iv)
Moore's version of idealism —that when we call a state of things ‘ideal’ we
always mean to assert not only that it is good in itself, but that it is good in
itself in a much higher degree than many other things.
(Roe and Sellers 2000: 12-13))
In different forms, these strands of Moore’s argument can be traced in
Woolf’s writing. For instance, in The Voyage Out Richard Dalloway reads:
«Good, then, is indefinable» from the «black volume of philosophy» that
Helena Ambrose is reading.
Moore’s method of analysis is behind Woolf’s description of their
meetings as «piling stone upon stone» the arguments and her final ironic
comments of not being sure which one is the conclusion of the discussion.
225
The interesting aspect here is to be aware that what is important is not so

much to arrive at a definitive conclusion, but the method employed. The
journey is important, not the arrival.
feU As we shall discuss later, in many of Woolf essays, certainly in A

Room Of One's Own, the argument is built on the basis of Moore’s
principle. What elements do we encounter in Woolfs writing to support
this argument?
Moores radical philosophy appealed to Bloomsbury for its rationalism,

and its elevation of aesthetic life, claiming, as we have seen, that «the most
valuable states of mind are those we associate with the contemplation of
beauty, love and truth» to use Quentin Bell’s words. In a sense, Moore's
rationalism, his optimistic view of human nature and his willingness to
question received notions, as well as his idea of emotions appropriate to
specific objects, were so strongly associated with Bloomsbury’s own set of
ideals that the connection between the philosopher and the Group seems
natural.
It is through Moore, if we agree with Philip Rieff’s point of view, that the
Bloomsbury Group became interested in psychoanalysis and Freud’s work.
In Rieff’s view, Moore opens the path into Freud in his last chapter of
Principia Ethica. Frankness and as introspection in matters of sexuality
were hallmarks of the Bloomsbury Group. In this sense, the group’s interest
on 'the new psychology', as psychoanalysis was then referred to, comes as
no surprise. Yet, as Maynard Keynes pointed out later, the view of this set
towards the unconscious, sexuality, and neurosis was ‘intellectually pre-
Freudian’. Even if an ambivalent one, the interest in Freud’s theories led
several peripheral members of Bloomsbury to play an important role in the
foundation of the British Psychological Society. Among them was Adrian
Stephen, who abandoned his studies in medieval law to become, together
with his wife Karen Costelloe Stephen, one of the first analysts of the Society.
James Strachey, younger brother of Lytton Strachey, and his wife Alix,
became the translators of Freud's work into English. In 1924 James became
chief editor of the Standard Edition and together with Ernest Jones he
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Tales of the City: Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Geographies of the M i n d
approached the Woolfs to have the Edition published by the Hogarth Press.
The Woolfs eagerly undertook the project. About this enterprise Leonard
Woolf declared in his memoirs: «I am, I think not unreasonably, rather
proud of having in 1914 recognised and understood the greatness of Freud
and the importance of what he was doing at the time when this was by no
means common. »
However, the admiration of Freud and his work seemed to be at an
intellectual and theoretical level only. It is true, as Jan Ellen Goldstein has
pointed out, that it never occurred to Leonard or to Virginia herself to seek
the help of this new method as regards Virginia’s nervous breakdowns. On
the contrary: Virginia continued with the 'rest cures’ prescribed by
conventional psychiatrists. Woolf's own attitude towards Freud’s
psychoanalysis seems to be an ambivalent one. If, as did Leonard, she could
see the potential of Freud’s theories, especially those related to the
unconscious and its relationship to Literature, for her own illness, she still
distrusted the search of psychoanalysis for some kind of repressed inner
conflict. Although she allowed her artistic mind to play with the idea of
unknown territories in her mind, she seemed unable to allow herself to
think of her own mind as unknowable. The conflicts she identifies in her
own life are, then, external, conscious ones between, for instance, critical
and creative thought. In any case, Woolf was far from being completely
indifferent to psychology and the new science of psychoanalysis.
feU As we shall see later on, Woolf met Freud relatively late, in 1939,
when he arrived in London. However, his theories, particularly in
relation to the unconscious and the development of the human psyche,
played an important role in her narrative and in many arguments
presented in her essays.
Nonetheless, as McNeillie argues, in order to understand Woolf's oeuvre

in all her multiple aspects, one has to consider other authors and thinkers
who were of great interest to the writer. Among them were people such as
the anthropologist Jane Ellen Harrison and Walter Pater. In Woolf’s diaries
and letters she mentions meeting the anthropologist and in A Room of One’s
Own she describes Harrison in captivated terms:
227
A bent figure, formidable yet humble, with her great forehead and her
shabby dress —could it be the famous scholar, could it be JH herself?
(Norton 2000: 2161)
Harrison’s pioneering work impressed Woolf greatly and was the
inspirational force behind Woolf's constant search of the past (for its
implication in the present and the future) and her sceptical view on
History.
2 . TEXTS ANALYSIS
2.1. A Room of One’s Own and Other Essays
The study of Virginia Woolf’s essays has often been neglected in favour
of her fictional writings. At best they have been used as complementary
information to enhance the view of a particular point in her novels. Even
Woolf herself did not pay much attention to her essays, as can be inferred
from the relative silence on them in her diaries. Furthermore, many of her
literary reviews for The Times Literary Supplement were published
anonymously. The apparently capricious nature of the essays, published
here and there, on many topics and in many different styles, has led to a
number of heterogeneous collections starting in 1925 when the first
collection, The Common Reader, was published.
Leonard Woolf's four-volume Collected Essays (1966-67), still a selection
in spite of the comprehensive title of the edition, provided the first glimpse
of the magnitude and importance of Woolf's material. After Leonard Woolf's
death in 1969 several selections of non-fiction volumes were edited, including
Books and Portraits (1977) and Michele Barret's 'Women and 'Writing (1979).
Andrew McNeille in 1986 started his edition of Woolf’s essays, The Essays of
Virginia Woolf. The first three volumes of the six volumes that were to
constitute his edition were published between 1986 and 1988. The fourth
and, as yet, last volume was published in 1994. The two final volumes are
yet to come. McNeille's masterly editions provide a fully annotated
chronological order allowing the study of the essays as a whole, enabling
critics to discern their significance to the full and also their relationship to
her better-known works. In relatively recent years publications such as
228
Rachel Bowlby’s A Woman's Essays (1992) and The Crowded Dance of Modern
Life (1993) provide an approach to a selection of Woolfs essays that,
although, by far less comprehensive than McNeille’s edition, still constitutes
a good reference to discerning the significance of Virginia Woolf's essay
writing.
The difficulties encountered in producing a final and satisfactory
compilation of Woolfs essays is not in accord with the immense importance
that Woolf’s critical writing had during her lifetime. It must be stressed that
Woolf was a regular contributor to, among other journals, The Times Literary
Supplement and that T.S. Eliot regarded her as ‘the centre of the literary life
of London.’ The reasons behind Woolf’s apparent disdain for her essay
writing might be found in the fact that most of her essays were commissioned
and therefore written for money. In this sense, according to Bloomsbury
aesthetics, they could hardly be seen as artistic endeavours.
Critical studies on Woolf's oeuvre are starting to reconsider the importance
of Woolf's essays not only in relation to the engrossing quality of their subject
matter, but also to the experimental form in which they were written. This
being so, it is impossible to establish a clear line between the aesthetic
pleasure provided by her novels and that provided by many of her essays.
Woolf herself was hesitant about the aesthetic value of essay writing and in
essays such as ‘The Modern Essay’ (1922) she writes:
The principle which controls it [the essay] is simply that it should give
pleasure; the desire which impels us when we take it from the shelf is simply
to receive pleasure. Everything in an essay must be subdued to that end. It
should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake,
refreshed, with its last. In the interval we may pass through the most various
experiences of amusement, surprise, interest, indignation;... but we must
never be roused. The essay must lap us about and draw its curtains across
the world.
(Bowlby 1992: 40)
As can be seen in this quotation, Woolf discusses the nature of the essay
not in relation to their informative or persuasive nature, but in terms of
aesthetics which are precisely «the features expected to go with literature»
(Bowlby 1992: xi). In this sense, Woolf wrote most of her essays with this
pleasure principle in sight.
229
UJ Woolf's essays are not devoid of the experimental quality of her

novels. It could be said that she took Montaigne literally when he
coined the term for the genre that he initiated, essai, to try. Certainly
this quality is found in A Room of One’s Own and it may be the reason
why it is often mistaken for a work of fiction. Why does Woolf
experiement with her writing en the essays?
The length of the essays also varies, ranging from the short literary
reviews she wrote for journals, whose length was determined by the medium
in which they were published, to book-length pieces such as A Room of
One’s Own and Three Guineas. Many of the longer essays dealt with authors
. from the past who became subjects of essays from different sources —a new
edition of the works, a new biography, a memoir, a collection of letters. In
these essays she could feel more at ease because she had more room and a
greater perspective. Her writings about literary history show that she
preferred certain periods, such as classical Greece, the Elizabethan period,
eighteenth century literature, the Romantics, or nineteenth-century Russian
fiction. Authors she favoured were Daniel Defoe, James Boswell, Laurence
Sterne, Jane Austen, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, George
Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, George Meredith,
George Gissing, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad. They are
often mentioned in her non-fictional writings.
•f Her vast range of reading allowed her to theorise on contemporary

fiction and on issues related to literature, such as the literary market,
patronage and audience, and modern forms of literature. She also had
a strong inclination towards certain themes that recur in her essays,
_ such as essay writing itself, painting, womens lives, biography,
memoirs, and letters. '
However, the scope of the essays was not limited to the literary world and
many of them were inspired by seemingly unimportant events, such as an
evening drive, or by more important concerns, such as illness, laughter or
230 0'
reading itself. Woolf meditates about a wide rage of topics: architecture,

houses, street life, opera, travel, shops, flying, cinema, and radio, to name but
a few. Some of these topics, woman-like, banal and unimportant as they may
seem, conform to her endeavour to find a mode of expression that would
encapsulate what she saw as the task of the artist: the recording of reality.
Essays such as 'Modern Fiction’ (1919) or 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown'
(1924) argue against traditional forms of fiction writing defended by her
contemporary, albeit an older, generation of writers such as H.G. Wells
(1866-1946), Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) and John Galsworthy (1867-1933)
whom she calls « materialists » (Norton 2000: 2149). These writers, while
apparently innovative in the themes chosen for their novels, were too closely
concerned with realism and, as a consequence, left the conventional form of
fiction-writing unchanged. By a static approach to the traditional structure
of fiction, Woolf argues in ‘Modern Fiction’, these writers are unable to
portray reality because they bypass ‘life’ which, for Woolf, is not «a series of
gig lamps symmetrically arranged» but «a luminous halo, a semi-transparent
envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end»
(Norton 2000: 2150). According to Woolf fiction must reflect reality by
observing «an ordinary mind on an ordinary day» (Norton 2000: 2150). If
the writer dares to do so, he or she will be confronted with the fact that «the
mind receives a myriad of impressions, trivial, fantastic, evanescent or
engraved with the sharpness of steel» (Norton 2000: 2150). By breaking the
traditional structure of the novel, that is, by freeing the writer from the
obligation of providing a coherent plot structured in correlative chapters,
Woolf hopes that the narrative will show «the essential thing» comprising
«the proper stuff of fiction»(Norton 2000: 2153). This is precisely what, in
Woolf’s view, younger writers, members of her own generation, are doing.
Commenting on James Joyce's The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
(1916) and, particularly referring to the episodes of his Ulysses that were
being published in the Little Review, she propounds that the modern novel
should be: «concerned at all costs to reveal the flickering of that innermost
flame which flashes its messages through the brain» (Norton 2000: 2151). In
short, then, the modern writer is interested not so much in the outside world
of appearances, but in the «dark places of psychology» (Norton 2000: 2152),
that is in those emotions and feelings which, although difficult to express,
form as much part of reality as the straightforward world of appearances
portrayed in the realist novel.
231
For Woolf it is the duty of the writer to present in the novel those moments
when reality cannot be straightforwardly explained and that have thus been
silenced by the traditional novel. As a consequence, the form of the novel
and the use of language must also change so as to be able to provide the
reader with that moment of intense emotion that comes when he or she
perceives a flash of significance seeming to go beyond words.
ItU Every feeling and every thought is as much part of reality as is the
outside world, and because the perception of the outside world is
mediated by the observer, the writer must experiment with words and
forms, never being afraid of breaking away from the old structure of
the novel or the grammatical structure of the sentence.
In 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown', published five years later, she takes this
argument further. Arnold Bennett's assertion that there was no good novelist
at the time because they were «unable to create characters that are real, true
and convincing® prompted one of Woolf's most famous and intriguing
statements: «in or about December, 1910, human character changed® (Woolf
1992: 70). The puzzling question here is what happened in the year 1910
that was so significant as to change 'human character’.
The most immediate historical relevance of this date, alluded to by Woolf
herself in The Years as a turning point, is the death of King Edward VII (he
died in May). His death marked the end of the Edwardian era and the
beginning of the Georgian. In literary terms, and according to Woolf's essay,
this implied the end of the Edwardian narrative and the possibility of a new
form of narrative, started by Henry James and Joseph Conrad in the late
nineteenth century (see Unit 1 and Unit 2), and taken up by the younger
generation, the latter termed in Woolf's essay as the Georgian writers (see
Unit 3). They included, in her view, writers such as D.H. Lawrence (see Unit
4), James Joyce, Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster (see Unit 2) and T.S. Eliot.
Some critics have argued that this year, 1910, saw the opening of Roger
Fry’s strongly criticised exhibition of Post-Impressionist paintings, a term
coined by Fry himself. The show entitled 'Manet and The Post-Impressionists',
with a follow-up exhibition two years later, introduced Cezanne, Gauguin,
Signac and Van Gogh to the public in London: it also included works by
232
such contemporary artists as Picasso, Matisse, and Derain. The most widely
criticised feature of the exhibition was the shocking impact of the spectacular
colours used in the paintings, viewed by the outraged critics as a primitivistic
and unnatural use of colour.
k These exhibitions mark the defining moment of avant-garde

aesthetics. Following the second exhibition Clive Bell propounded his
theory of the 'Significant Form' which referred to the ability of a piece
of art to «stir our aesthetic emotions» (Bell 1914: 7). Does Virginia
Woolf achive to stir our imagination? How? 7 1
February of the same year is also significant in the personal life of

Virginia Woolf because, as Phyllis Rose has pointed out, she, together with
Adrian, Horace Cole and other friends, carried out what has come to be
known as the 'Dreadnought hoax’. For this 'massive practical joke’ Woolf, as
described by Quentin Bell in his Biography of Virginia Woolf, blackened her
face, dressed in a caftan and a turban, and wore a beard and a moustache to
impersonate the Emperor of Abyssinia. Her colleagues impersonated the
Emperor’s entourage and a delegation of British diplomats. The group went
as far as to mock-inspect H.M.S. Dreadnought, the most important warship
in the British Royal Navy of that time. They were received with honours by
the Captain and crew of the ship who, fooled by their very good impersonation,
showed the party the secret areas of the ship. Cole could not let it stop there:
he alerted the press. The Daily Mirror printed the story, with a picture of the
group. Rose has argued that the event is significant beyond the amusing
anecdote because it supposed the acting out of Virginia Woolf's 'own
rebellion against paternal authority'.
k The challenge to paternal authority was most subversive not only

because the joke struck at one of the foundations of the patriarchal
culture of war, but also because it disestablished socially assigned
sexual roles and taken-for-granted racial attitudes at a time, 1910,
when suffrage movement activism was at its peak, culminating in
' ‘Black Friday' when a demonstration ended in violent police repression.
233’
Following the argument of 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ it has to be said
that Woolf was referring to all these events at the same time, making
apparent with the multiple referents combined in one single sentence the
variety of 'realities' that are true, convincing and significant, depending on
the eye of the beholder. She now puts the stress on the different angles from
which a real character can be rendered. Introducing the character of Mrs
Brown, whom she has met on a train, she demonstrates that «Mrs Brown
can be treated in an infinite variety of ways, according to the age, country
and temperament of the writer» (Woolf 1992: 75).
Broadly speaking, the essays by Virginia Woolf mentioned in this Unit
could be divided into those strictly dealing with literature and those dealing
with what today could be termed feminist issues. Again, it is difficult to
establish a clear dividing line between these two major themes, which were,
in any case, major preoccupations for the writer. If it is true that 'Modem
Fiction' and 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ should be seen as Modernist
statements by a Modernist writer, it is no less significant to infer that in these
texts the writer shows a great interest in the relation between women's own
perception of reality and literature. On the other hand, what are already today
classic feminist textbooks such as A Room of One’s Own or Three Guineas
cannot be considered without acknowledging Woolf’s Modernist aesthetics.
Indeed the language and the structure of A Room of One’s Own participate
in those exploratory forms ascribed by Woolf to modern fiction. In a most
unconventional manner the essay begins with a «But» placing an
interrogation mark on the subject of «women and fiction» (Norton 2000:
2153), the main theme discussed in the text, while, at the same time, it
asserts the need for making problematic those traditional views on the
subject that are held as universal truths.
UJ ‘But’ in this text carries with it the awareness of the multiple

layers that constitute meaning, disturbing all those notions taken for
granted about women and about fiction. Does this intriguing start stir
our emotions?
By simultaneously implying doubt and assertiveness, the starting 'but’

puts the reader right from the first page in the questioning frame of mind
234
needed when exploring the subject of the essay. The aim, then, of this 'but'
is to introduce the unsettling aspect of the uncertainties of language and
knowledge, and to confront the reader with the discomfiting uneasiness
that comes when s/he is asked to re-evaluate preconceived ideas.
A few lines down Woolf pushes this uneasiness further and ponders
about the possible meanings that 'women and fiction’ might have. In doing
so she trespasses on another line of traditional conventions. She confesses
that she will never be able to «fulfil what is... the first duty of a lecturer»
(Norton 2000: 2153) because, instead of providing a «nugget of pure truth to
wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece
for ever» (Norton 2000: 2153-4), she will display a most unconventional
discursive practice based on her opinion that «a woman must have money
and a room of her own is she is to write fiction» (Norton 2000: 2154).
UJ This 'minor point' triggers off a vortex of rather complex, and

highly contemporary issues on gender, class, and the writing of fiction
hidden in the apparent simplicity of Woolfs style in A Room of One’s
Own.
Already, the irony and witticism present in the text can be observed. The
reassuring action of jotting down some notes of 'pure truth' from a lecture,
in the way we all do when attending such an event, is mocked by the very
fact that those notes will remain for ever 'on the mantelpiece'. Once more,
the ambiguity in Woolf’s words may not pass unnoticed. If at first sight these
words appear to mean that this ‘pure truth’ will indeed be preserved, it might
also be the case that the notes are placed on the mantelpiece and are never
looked at again; in this latter circumstance, she is showing the pointlessness
of ever writing them. Woolf's method is redolent of the discussions she
witnessed on 'Thursday evenings’ in Bloomsbury. By an expository argument
of how she arrived at the conclusion about money and a room in connection
with writing and women, it is expected that the reader will actively engage
in the argument, participating intellectually, rather than simply being a mere
and passive recipient of some preconceived and opinionated assumptions.
The most interesting aspect of the essay is, perhaps, its suggestive quality,
calling for as many different responses as it has readers.
235
The Need to M a k e it New: English Literature and Thought in t h e First Half of the 20™ Century Y
UJ There have been numerous debates about the many topics in the
book. If anything can be said for certain about A Room of One's O w n ,
it is that for those who search the text looking for readily available
answers the essay will be a disappointment. Instead, an exploration of
the material conditions, psychological, as well as the historical
constraints encountered by women writers, is found in this work. In
the process, these very same topics will also be explored in relation to
men. How does Woolf achieve this suggestive quality?
In order to be on a level with her audience and to allow the intellectual

rhapsody to take place, Woolf puts into practice a device that constitutes another
breaking of the conventions on essay writing. In 'The Modern Essay' she argued
that: «Almost all essays begin with a capital I» (Woolf 1992: 6). The authoritative
quality given to this T of the ‘expert’ impedes any communication: instead, it
precipitates a drowsy hedonism where the reader is a mesmerised sleeper for
the duration of the text. In A Room of One’s Own this T is totally abandoned and
its identity demystified. In the text Woolf refuses to use the traditional
phallocentric discourse by criticising the narcissistic T in mens writing:
But I am bored!... Because of the dominance of the letter 'I' and the
aridity, which, like the giant beech tree, it casts within its shade. Nothing
will grow there.
(Norton 2000: 2206)
The phallic shadow prevents the text from providing pleasure to the 'T
that is bored and that is, as we are told in the opening lines of A Room of
One’s Own, «only a convenient term for somebody who has no real beings
(Norton 2000: 2154). On a deeper level the T who has no real existence is
not portrayed as a celebratory T as some critics have claimed to see in it the
determination on formation of a women's society. The T who has no real
existence is an inquiring T trying to solve the enigma of the «true nature of
woman and the true nature of fictions (Norton 2000: 2154). The inclusion
of a different T in the discourse challenges the notion of the unified
homogeneous identity held by patriarchal discourse. Precisely by confronting
the T (who bores me) with an T that (as yet) has no real existence (Norton
2000: 2154) the very notion of identity is displaced.
236
feU Woolf's argumentative process is not a vindication of the formation

of a women’s society that would function outside the social realm in
which she is arguing. Rather, she attempts to redesign the 'I' at present
caged within patriarchal discourse, the ‘I’ she perceives as an
impediment for communication and hence for artistic production.
How does this principle work?
It is important at this point to highlight the fact that Woolf starts

challenging a monolithic notion of identity precisely by posing, right from
the beginning of her essay, the question of the possibility of an ‘unknown’ ‘I’.
The statement of the existence of this ‘unknown’ ‘I’ is given within a textual
context in which ‘I’ seems obsessively present. In the opening lines of A
Room of One’s Own, ‘I’ is scattered in sentences and intermingled with other
pronouns such as ‘you’ and ‘they’. Suddenly, when the meaning of the title
‘women and fiction' is being pondered, the rhythm is changed, by the
appearance of a series of sentences containing solely the first person singular
pronoun:
But when I began to consider the subject in this last way, which seemed
the most interesting, I soon saw that it had one fatal drawback. I should
never be able to come to a conclusion. I should never be able to fulfil what
is, I understand, the first duty of a lecturer.
(Norton 2000: 2153, emphasis added)
This use of the pronoun reaches its peak in a single sentence where it
appears three times: «I am going to do what I can to show you how I arrived
at this opinion about the room and themoney» (Norton 2000: 2154, emphasis
added). The reader is surprised when, once caught up in a web formed by
the pronoun ‘I’, the narrative states that this 'I' 'has no real existence’.
This technique works in two ways. First, it prepares the reader to be able
to sense the claustrophobic presence of the ‘I’ whose shadow impedes
growth. Second, it marks the textual tension emerging when the traditional
texture of essay writing is about to be torn apart, by Woolf's introducing a
fictional account into the text. When this new emergent ‘I’ burst forth in the
text Woolf's voice disappears: «Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary
237
Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please —it is not a matter of
importance)» (Norton 2000: 2154) and the new subjectivity drifts into a
fictitious world: «what I am about to describe has no existence; Oxbridge is
an invention; so is Fernham» (Norton 2000: 2154).
By diminishing the importance of the name of the narrator T, Woolf is
minimising the importance of an authoritarian voice in the text. Yet, at the
same time, she insists upon a name, 'Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary
Carmichael’ resolved by the end of the essay into «Mary Beton» (Norton
2000: 2209). Precisely at this point of naming, the reader understands that
the textual voice is that of a woman, a vital piece of information in the
subsequent development of Woolfs argument.
Moreover, Woolf is attempting to assemble an identity other than the
one allocated to women by patriarchal society. In this context, it is not by
chance that the name of that 'I’ is ‘Mary’. In Western Christian culture the
name ‘Mary’ is immediately associated with the Virgin. This name, repeated
three times (Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael), marks the point
of departure for Woolf's examination of female identity and the production
of writing. As is already known, the appearance of the Virgin in the
literature of the Middle Ages, particularly in the Romance period, meant
the idealisation of women in a process where women's voices were silent
and their attributes reduced to those of selfless nurturers and inspirers of
men. Apparently insignificant, the allusion to the figure of the Virgin
through the motif of the narrator’s name is, therefore, of great importance.
It is, indeed, a fundamental point entirely devoted to unsettling the
Establishment, represented in the text by the male audience hiding behind
the curtains.
UJ In this manner the subtle game Woolf is about to play starts. As

can be inferred from what has been said so far, the text constantly asks
for the participation of the reader, counting on his or her awareness of
and alertness to the snares of language, along with the dangers of
preconceived notions about the world, and taken-for-granted beliefs
and truths. It could be said that Woolf is the first advocate for the
‘reader-response’ theory in her desire to establish a shared, common
ground for communication between reader and writer.
238
A Room of One’s Own was the final version of two lectures delivered by
the writer at the female Oxford colleges of Newnham and Girton in October
1928. In the course of six sections and using, as has been already discussed,
a novelistic approach, she covered the topics she understands: the subject of
women and fiction. Once her hypothesis about the money and the room in
each of the sections has been stated, Woolf analyses topics such as the
contrast between male and female writing, university colleges and the
banning of women from public spaces in section one; the effect of poverty
on the writing of fiction, or anger in men and its effect on artistic production
in section two; the obvious but previously unstudied women’s exclusion
from history, in contrast with the obsessive presence of women in fiction
written by men, is analysed in section three.
Here, she introduces a fictional character who serves as an example to
speculate about never-acknowledged women writers. The story of Judith
Shakespeare also allows the writer to ponder about the relationship between
gender and genius, thus prompting the main line of thought for the following
section. Genius needs material conditions and social recognition; most
importantly, though, genius needs a tradition from which to learn the craft
and to master it. Woolf traces in section four, a womans literary tradition
and is confronted with the fact that it is not an easy task. Again anger comes
to the foreground when she analyses the works of women writers. For
instance, she analyses its detrimental effect in her criticism of Charlotte
Bronte who «had more genius than Jane Austen» but whose rage made her
writing «deformed and twisted» (Norton 2000: 2190). Because Jane Austen
was able to sustain an artistic integrity by freeing herself from this anger,
Woolf compares her genius as an artist to that of Shakespeare (Norton 2000:
2189).
It strikes the reader in this section that most of the women writers from
the sixteenth to the nineteenth century mentioned by Woolf were in one way
or another eccentrics, in the literal sense of the word. This section also
suggests that the genres are gendered and that the novel is young enough as
to allow the voices of women to be inscribed in it. The arrival of the
professional woman writer, the woman who self-consciously thought of
herself as a writer and who wittingly (if sometimes very tentatively) entered
the public domain of cultural production through publication for payment
(Aphra Behn was the first) marked a turning point in women’s literary
239
The Need to Make it New; English Literature and Thought i n the First Half of the 20"' Century Y
history: «Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came
about which, if I were rewriting history, I should... think of greater
importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle-class
woman began to write»(Norton 2000: 2188).
In the next chapter Woolfs quest is to find a position in language suitable
for women, one that allows them to express what Woolf sees as their different
artistic creativity:
If Chloe likes Olivia and Maiy Carmichael knows how to express it she
will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been.
(Norton 2000: 2198)
In order to write this experience Mary Carmichael will have to find a
language that has never been used before. The quotation above seems to
imply that the position in language for which Woolf is searching is a ‘lesbian’
one, an inference reinforced by her reference to Sir Chartres Biron, presiding
over Radclyffe Halls trial for her lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. Yet the
interesting point here is that Mary Carmichael will be breaking the silence of
history. Woolf points out that the structure of language, as transpires in some
books, has served men «out of their own needs for their own uses».
IbU Women, as Woolf asserts in ‘Women and Fiction’ (1929), should

twist the shape of the sentence and the structure of language. Language
ought to serve the woman writer to express «her thought without
crushing or distorting it» (Woolf 1979: 48). This is the tenement of
Virginia Woolf's modernist aesthetics.
However, language cannot just be invented. Time and experimentation

are needed. It is also important to refer to a network of writers who might
have experienced the same needs and noticed the same flaws in language. In
this respect, tradition is a prerequisite, so that any current generation of
writers may learn from their predecessors and also become a source of
knowledge for further generations. As Woolf stated in a letter to the editor
of the New Statesman, the presence of a tradition was fundamental for
Shakespeare’s writing:
240
The conditions which made it possible for a Shakespeare to exist are

that he shall have had predecessors in his art, shall make one of a group
where art is freely discussed and practised, and shall himself have the utmost
freedom of action and experience.
(The New Statesman, October 16, 1920)
These conditions, according to Woolf, coincided for women writers in
Sapphos Lesbos and then never again. Since women writers' encounter
with language is difficult, and language is perceived as deficient when trying
to express an experience felt as different, «it is useless to go to the great men
writers for help».
feU Women need a tradition of their own to turn to when approaching

the task of writing. Woolf exhorts women to «think back through our
mothers®. Women need to be able to express experience «as a woman®.
A Room of One’s Own is the first attempt in English literature to
establish this tradition.
Woolf believes that women’s writing is essentially different from men’s

writing. Having said this, to state what is specific to women’s writing and
how women achieve this type of writing poses a problem for her. As she
herself argues:
A woman's writing is always feminine; it cannot help being feminine; at
its best it is most feminine: the only difficulty lies in defining what we mean
by feminine.
(TLS 17 October, 1918. Reprinted 17 October, 1968)
In the context of these words her apparently contradictory warning, «It
is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or
woman pure and simple® (Woolf 1979: 48), becomes significant. Seemingly,
Woolf is hesitant about her conviction relating to the differences between
women’s and men’s writing. She is aware of the dangers of such a postulate,
which can tacitly imply a sense of biological determinism. She perceives
that patriarchy has used biologically determined theories to defend and to
justify the ideological superiority of men over women. For this reason she
241
places great emphasis on rejecting determinism. By questioning the meaning

of 'feminine’ she is hinting at the possibility that, in fact, femininity might
be a matter of representation.
Woolf encourages women to write because it is only by writing that a
new economy of representation other than that made through the repression
of the feminine can be developed. Women’s representation, if achieved
'unconsciously', will escape the economy of sameness that forms the
foundations of patriarchal writing.
One of the most outstanding and shocking ideas Woolf presents in A
Room of One’s Own is found in the last chapter when she says that the ideal
state of mind in which to produce art is an androgynous one:
If one is a man, still the woman part of his brain must have effect; and a
woman also must have intercourse with the man in her... Perhaps a mind
that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely
feminine.
(Norton 2000: 2205)
Woolf's account of the androgynous mind repudiates the idea of
rejecting the feminine, since it is important to the relationship between
women and fiction that androgyny be proposed as the ideal state of mind
in which to produce art. Furthermore, she explicitly expresses her fear that
androgyny can, eventually, be equated to man, as is the case with Freud’s
theory of bisexuality. In this sense she states: «It would be a thousand pities
if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men» (Norton
2000: 2200).
UJ Woolf’s androgyny does not come from a desire to be a man.

Woolf’s androgyne is a claim for further knowledge. The most unsettling
aspect of Woolf's androgynous ideal from a patriarchal perspective is
the acknowledgement of the two different sexes it conveys. What
differences will the androgynous mind bring to the text?
If the artist's aim is to portray reality she cannot afford to ignore the
various perspectives from which this reality can be observed. The artist,
242
rather than restricting herself to one sex, should through a state of mind
that is androgynous enhance her knowledge:
Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than
the similarities? For we have too much likeness as it is, and if an explorer
should come back and bring word of other sexes looking through the
branches of other trees at other skies, nothing would be of greater service to
humanity.
(Norton 2000: 2200)
The androgynous mind has as its central and most revolutionary
declaration the avowal of a form of writing that will be unconsciously
feminine. Such a form of writing will create a text characterised by a
'suggestive quality'. The number of critical readings inspired by A Room of
One’s Own accounts for its unique quality. Both the structure of Woolf’s
essay and the distinctive uses of the language it displays suppose a
breakthrough. As Showalter argues, though for different reasons, the text is
executed through repetition, exaggeration, parody, whimsy, and multiple
viewpoint» (Showalter 1978: 282). Woolf's use of language far from being a
fault, as Showalter claims, enhances precisely the subversive quality of the
essay. Through her experimentation with language Woolf is searching for a
form of writing capable of encompassing the ‘real’ world when it is perceived
from different angles.
2.2. Mrs. Dalloway and the Woman’s Sentence
Mrs Dalloway was published in 1925 and received much critical acclaim;
it has now become a ‘classic’. As a novel it broke with the pattern of the
novel established at that time. It is a different novel in themes, style and
method of writing. The whole work can be seen as an attempt to disrupt the
traditional way of writing, an exploration in new techniques, shifting
continuously from one character to another, from past to present, from one
subject matter to a different one.
However, and as you may have realised, the plot of Mrs Dalloway is quite
simple: one day in June in London, Clarissa Dalloway is planning a party for
the evening; Peter Walsh, her old suitor, returns to England after five years
2433
in India; at the end of the day, Sally Seton, another old friend, shows up
unexpectedly at the party; the ex-soldier Septimus Warren Smith kills
himself.
fcM The plot is revealed not by a narrator, nor by a main character,

but by several individual consciousnesses; it is as if Woolf did not want
to settle down to a specific line of narration but just wanted to fly over
the characters, giving clues for the reader to guess what is going on.
She shows the reader reality from many different perspectives. How is
the story constructed?
When a character starts thinking about one issue, he or she does not
finish with it completely, but it is forgotten and continued in the thoughts of
another character. This happens frequently, for example, with the
remembrances of the summer that seems to be the most important moment
in the lives of Mrs Dalloway, Peter Walsh, and Sally.
Virgina Woolf designed, for this novel, universal characters as can be
seen when she locates them in the streets and parks of London. On the other
hand, they are neither plain characters nor heroes nor heroines; they are
types: the housewife, the madman, the politician, the doctor, etc.
Furthermore, one of the main features in their presentation is that all
through the book they «Are frequently split between at least two times or
two places and always questioning their ability to know one another or
themselves» (Bowlby 1988: 127).
They are also the alibi to present 'reality' through very different individual
consciousnesses. One of the linking characters in this 'web' is Sir William
Bradshaw, a friend of the Dalloways and also Septimus’s doctor. This
metaphorical 'web' is made up of invisible threads that connect all of those
characters, otherwise unconnected (literally and figuratively), into a
common circle of experience, regardless of their class. There are several
examples of how the invisible threads join but, probably, the clearest
example occurs at the end. Here, Clarissa Dalloway hears at the party about
Septimus’s madness and death, and she notices that she feels ‘like him'. This
suggests an alignment between these two characters through a moment of
244
epiphany. At this moment Clarissa stands side-by-side with Septimus; this is

just what Woolf wanted to communicate when she started the novel. As she
wrote in her diary:
14 October 1922 —Mrs Dalloway has branched into a book; and I
adumbrate here a study of insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane
and the insane side by side— something like that. Septimus Smith? is that a
good name?
(from A Writer's Diary)
Woolf wrote «Mrs Dalloway has branched into a books because she had
written before about Mr and Mrs Dalloway, and about Clarissa in particular
in some short stories (the first was entitled 'Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’,
published in 1923) and in the novel, The Voyage Out, where Clarissa appears
as a minor character. In previous writings Woolf had presented the couple
in a harsher light than she did in Mrs Dalloway. Similarly Richard Dalloway
had appeared as a domineering and pompous personality and Clarissa as
dependent and superficial. But while these character’s characteristics
remain in Mrs Dalloway, the two generally appear much more reasonable
and likeable.
When one first takes the book and reads the title Mrs Dalloway, one may
assume that the story will be about the life of Clarissa Dalloway, as happens
for example, in Jane Eyre, where the title corresponds exactly to the plot of
the novel. But in this case, our expectations are unfulfilled.
C3 In fact the reader questions why this title and not others such as
‘the party’ or 'one day in the life of London’ or ‘Peter Walsh’, or The
Hours, the title she actually gave to it whilst writing the novel. Why
did she change the title from The Hours to Mrs Dalloway before
publication?
It might be an irony, a device Virginia Woolf uses to break the

traditional pattern. It might also be that the writer provides a clue for the
understanding of the novel, because Clarissa is the character who links
all the ideas she wanted to convey and is the one who closes the narrative
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The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20 ,h Century
circle. As Woolf commented in her diary: «In this book I have almost too
many ideas. »
Irony is also used when criticising the social system, as she uses irony
as a way to keep her anger out of the narration. Barret writes that in Mrs
Dalloway: «Feminist issues are usually raised in an oblique manner. They
arise through conversation, through characterization, and are frequently
presented with humour and irony» (Barret 1987: 24). It is noticeable, for
instance, how Virginia Woolf prevents herself from getting angry. Instead
it is the character of Sally who «suddenly lost her temper, flared up and
told Hugh that he represented all that was most detestable in British
middle-class life. She told him she considered him responsible for the
state of 'those poor girls in Piccadilly’ —Hugh, the perfect gentleman,
poor Hugh!» (Woolf 1976: 80). This technique allows her to criticise
society without interrupting the narration, in contrast, for example, to
Jane Eyre, where the narration is suddenly interrupted by a long feminist
discourse.
The framework of the novel could be placed in what Julia Kristeva has
called 'linear (historical) time': one day in the life of London, in the life of
several people, the day Clarissa Dalloway is going to give a party. The hours
pass one after the other. Big Ben strikes one hour after the other. The words
come in a sequence. But coexisting with this linear time, other times can be
identified, what Kristeva calls 'woman’s time', made up of cyclical time and
eternal time. During that day in June 1923, another day of the past is
constantly being re-lived by some of the characters (Clarissa, Sally and Peter
remember a summer of their youth, Septimus the death of Evans, his
comrade, during the war). Cyclical time occurs when the past is repeated
continuously, made 'present' all along the day.
Another beautiful example of the 'invisible thread’ also connecting the
use of time and consciousness remains in the importance attached to events
like the appearance of a car, an aeroplane writing in the sky, or the sound of
an ambulance: all these and other elements are presented repeatedly,
cyclically, through different individual consciousnesses.
On the other hand, the death of Septimus is not an end in itself; in a way
he is present in the party, so he has not died. He has not finished, but he
seems to be eternalised by the very fact that his situation is told at the party
246
and Mrs Dalloway internalises his death. He has entered into monumental
time, or as Clarissa thinks during the epiphanic ending:
Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate, people
feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded
them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone. There was an
embrace in death.
(Woolf 1976: 196)
Woolf in Mrs Dalloway shows interest in what is one of the features of
Modernism: the experimentation with temporality.
feU In Mrs Dalloway are found all of the features of Modernism: the
use of stream of consciousness techniques, fluid characterisations and
explorations of subjectivity, as well as the depiction of aspects of
modernity: the centrality of the city as metropolis and an uneasy
awareness of 'historicity’. What effects have these techniques on the
narrative?
The setting is a warm day in June 1923, and this technique echoes Joyce’s
Blooms day (which, in Ulysses, was 16 June 1922). However, Woolf goes
beyond Ulysses in that she records the thoughts and remembrances of a
number of consciousness: those of Septimus, Lucrezia, Clarissa, Miss
Kilman, Elizabeth, Peter and Sally among others (whilst Joyce focused
primarily on Leopold Bloom's consciousness).
Hillis Miller in ‘Mrs Dalloway. Repetition as the Raising of the Dead’
(1982) shows the new and complex means and methods used by Woolf in
her narrative. Repetition and the function of the omniscient narrator are
the significant aspects of this type of narrative. The omniscient narrator can
move from mind to mind and relate to the reader the thoughts and feelings
of any character. Time, as we saw above, is used in a unique manner: the
narrator relating the story after the event has happened using the present
tense: « Which moves forward toward the future by way of a recapitulation
or repetition of the past» (Miller 1982: 170). This repetition is achieved by
relating first the mind of one character and then the mind of another. In
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The Need to M a k e it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20’" Century Y
addition, one character can relate what he/she thinks to what another
character is thinking.
According to Miller, there comes at this point a «general mind», unity as
evidenced in common images throughout the narrative (Miller 1982: 173).
As a mode of transportation from one mind to another, Woolf uses external
objects for example, the aeroplane writing a brand name, Kreemo, in the sky
as «a means of transitions (Miller, 172). By repetition of events from the
past that are brought up in many minds, as was for example, the summer
when Clarissa met Richard Dalloway (remembered by Sally, Peter, Richard
and Clarissa), Woolf permits her narrator to remove, according to Miller,
the «usual boundaries between mind and worlds (Miller 1982: 169).
fcU By going deeply into each mind, there is a point when the mind
of one character and the minds of all characters become one. Why is
Woolf so interested in the minds of the characters?
There are several reasons why Woolf wanted the reader to enter people's
consciousnesses. It was firstly because she wanted to demonstrate that a
myriad of events, some apparently meaningless, can actually affect people’s
lives tremendously. Secondly it was because, as did Joyce in Ulysses, she
wanted to portray as closely as possible the workings of the mind through a
minute description of how the characters think about their world and not,
as in the traditional novel, through an edited, thematic and coherent version
of reality. As Woolf wrote to painter Jacques Raverat, it is «precisely the task
of the writer to go beyond the ‘formal railway line of sentence' and to show
how people 'feel or think or dream... all over the place’s.
tJJ Once the minute description of the workings of the mind is

written, it is the task of the reader to decide what is important and
what is unimportant, and thus not the task of the writer to narrate
only that that is important. An example of this is again the Kreemo
episode when the reader may ask ‘is the writing in the sky important?'
‘Is it a metaphor?’ ‘Is it merely trivial?’ This is left to the reader to
decide.
248
Finally, Woolf wanted the reader to enter peoples consciousnesses so

that the reader might get a sense of what madness feels like: the unrelated
thoughts are very much like the unrelated thoughts 'normal' people think all
the time, so remarking the fact that the dividing line between madness and
normality is quite fine. For all these reasons Woolf wrote Mrs Dalloway as
an experimental exercise of what was, for her as discussed above, the task
of the writer, to narrate reality as the mind perceived it, and not as the
conventions of fiction required.
These, then, are the reasons for such writing. But how is it achieved? It
is not an easy task for the writer, as the recording of the workings of the
mind may produce a very slow, even boring, text. The technique receives
many names and there are different variations, such as stream of
consciousness and interior monologue. According to David Lodge (1992)
there are two staple techniques for representing consciousness in prose
fiction:
One is interior monologue, in which the grammatical subject of the
discourse is an and we, as it were, overhear the character verbalising his
or her thoughts as they occur. The other method, called 'free indirect style’
(...) 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. This gives the illusion
of intimate access to a character’s mind, but without totally surrendering
authorial participation in the discourse.
(Lodge 1992: 43)
Woolf chooses the latter, and what Lodge calls 'authorial participation in
the discourse' refers to the traditional omniscient narrator mentioned by
Miller above. Lodge is saying that in the case of the interior monologue,
what happens is that the reader feels as if there were some kind of headphone
plugged into the character’s mind: what we hear is thus the first person
narrator. In the case of Woolf, or of the ‘free indirect style’, what happens is
that there is a narrator conveying these thoughts for the reader, but acting
almost as if the narrator were not there.
Woolf called her technique the ‘tunnelling process’ by which she created
‘caves’ behind her characters, not only caves of events, but caves that also
249
contained the character's fears, memories, dreams, and fantasies. She then
proceeded to dig connections between the different characters’ respective
caves in order to show how we relate to each other as human beings.
Remember that The Hours later became Mrs Dalloway.
30 August 1923 I have no time to describe my plans. I should say a good
deal about The Hours, and my discovery: how I dig out beautiful caves
behind my characters: I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity,
humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect and each come to
daylight at the present moment.
15 October 1923 —It took me a year's groping to discover what I call my
tunnelling process, by which I tell the past by instalments, as I have need of
it. This is my prime discovery so far.
(from A Writers Diary)
T If it took her a year to search for the appropriate technique, it took

her two further years to put it into practice in Mrs Dalloway. As you
can see Woolf appears in this way both as a literary critic, which she
was, and a very prominent one for, as already mentioned, T.S. Eliot
said of her she was «the centre of the literary life of London» (Barret
1979: 2) and as a writer who experiments and then practises her
theories on writing. What does Virginia Woolf want to explore in the
novel?
The theme of insanity was close to Woolf's past and present. She was
plagued by manic-depressive illness and she suffered nervous breakdowns
throughout her life. Suicide had often occupied her mind. In 1944 she
committed suicide, leaving a note explaining that she no longer wanted to
live. Woolf originally planned to have Clarissa die or commit suicide at the
end of the novel, yet finally decided that she did not want this ending for
Clarissa. By the end of the novel, however, Clarissa is so close to Septimus
that in a way she dies with him, for these two characters have been connected
throughout the novel.
The world of madness is clearly represented by Septimus, the
distinguished soldier, slowly being killed by the lingering effects of the war:
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Tales of the City: Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Geographies of the M i n d
he is suffering from what was later known as shell-shock syndrome, an

illness that affected many First World War veterans. Shell-shock syndrome
produced in its sufferers insistent, almost real-life, memories of the warm
and a total loss of feeling. Septimus feels he is living in an ongoing war and
feels guilt for having survived it when so many have died. Moreover, he
worries that the war «taught him not to care» when his superior officer,
Evans, was killed. He wants to die too. As with many other First World War
veterans, Septimus, a 'winner' and ‘survivor’ of the war, enjoys none of its
benefits. His Italian wife, Lucrezia, is miserable with his madness and the
doctors, Dr Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw, in a very critical portrait of
those that Woolf herself had known, are unhelpful.
Paralleling the life of Septimus is that of Clarissa, a rich housewife (her
husband Richard Dalloway is a moderately successful MP) and the web of
people that surrounds her: her friends Peter Walsh and Sally Seton (who
attends the party now as a married woman, Lady Rosseter), Clarissas
daughter Elizabeth, Miss Kilman, who is Elizabeth’s teacher, and
acquaintances such as Lady Bruton and Sir William Bradshaw. Clarissa
tries to keep thoughts of death at bay by focusing on her party. She spends
all day thinking about the past, about her old suitor Peter (who became so
discouraged by Clarissa’s refusal to marry him that he travelled widely,
recently having settled in India and in an affair with a married woman) and
her best friend Sally (who kissed her on the mouth in what is now a classic
passage of lesbian avowal). After many years all three meet at the party and
they have the time to go over the choices they have made in life.
fcU Again, as was the case of Septimus, Clarissa appears to be a

privileged, wealthy woman, yet she enjoys none of the personal security
and satisfaction that her social position appears to bestow.
The greatest fear, however, is the atrophy of the heart, such as that shown
by Sir William Bradshaw, who makes it his job to make sure «these unsocial
impulses... are held in control». In order to achieve this he secluded the
lunatics and forbade them from having children. Sir William lightly brings
the news of Septimus’s suicide to Clarissa's party, bridging these two and
connecting them through death. This is precisely what Woolf wanted to
251
convey with her novel: the world of the sane' and the 'insane' side by side,
in order to show that the dividing line between the two worlds is very fine:
19 June 1923 I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to
criticize the social system, and to show it at work at its most intense (...) Am
I writing The Hours from deep emotion? Of course the mad part tries me so
much, makes my mind squirt so badly that I can hardly face spending the
next weeks at it.... But to get further. Have I the power of conveying the true
reality?
(from A Writer's Diary)
«I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity®. This is achieved, as
has been argued throughout, through the alignment of Clarissa with
Septimus. This phrase is immediately followed by the words «I want to
criticize the social system, and to show it at work at its most intense®, a
reference to the post-war trauma of English people who, five years after the
war, were still discouraged and plagued by doubt and the memory of the
destruction of an entire generation. As Peter Walsh, an outsider, reflects:
«Those five years, 1918 to 1923 had been, he suspected, somehow very
important. People looked different. Newspapers seemed different and
morals and manners had changed®. Even the language is beginning to die:
Clarissa says young people «could not talk ... The enormous resources of
the English language, the power it bestows, after all, of communicating
feelings ... was not for them. They would solidify young.®
fill If the past is skilfully presented, so is the past’s traumatic history

powerfully connected to the present time.
This criticism of the social system also denounces the existence of new
legislation that wants to do away with all those that do not comply with the
'norm'. Political issues are embedded within the narrative: emigration,
imperialism, government party struggles. Septimus is destroyed by the
realities of the war, while society in general is in denial of the repercussions.
Lady Brutton’s proposal of forcing surplus women (so many men having
been killed in war there was an unusual number of women: spinsters, as
they were dismissively called at the time, and widows) to emigrate and to
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Tales of the City: Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Geographies of t h e M i n d
populate the colonies, are presented as cruel and satirised. The political
proposal of Sir William Bradshaw, who turns Septimus into a 'case’ to be
transformed into a provision in a Bill, is presented merely as dangerous.
One would think that in order to 'criticize the social system’ Woolf would
have wanted serenity and distance, yet next question is «Am I writing The
Hours [Mrs Dalloway] from deep emotion?» This is so because Woolf
believed that, in order to convey 'reality' she needed to write from her body
and from her mind, to write against the heart. This is why there is so much
pain in the following sentence of the quotation: «Of course the mad part
tries me so much, makes my mind squirt so badly that I can hardly face
spending the next weeks at it.» The pain of recollection was too strong,
Woolf suffered a serious breakdown after writing the novel because
emotionally she had invested too much in it: indeed Leonard Woolf, her
husband, and close friends compared her periods of insanity to a manic
depression quite similar to the episodes experienced by Septimus.
Many critics describe Septimus as Clarissa’s Doppelganger, that is, the
alternate persona, a darker, more internal personality compared to Clarissa’s
very social and singular outlook. Woolf’s use of the Doppelganger,Septimus,
portrays a side to Clarissa's personality that becomes absorbed by fear and
broken down by society as well as a side of society that has failed to survive
the War.
Udi The doubling portrays the polarity of the self and exposes the
positive-negative relationship inherent in humanity. It also illustrates
the opposite phases of the idea of life. What is the reason behind this
doubling?
The critic Deborah Guth believes that Clarissa achieves a final vision
through «three prominent frameworks: the romantic, the pagan, and the
Christian» (Guth 1990: 36). Through these frameworks Clarissa’s character
is able to evolve through her imaginative devices. She can substitute herself
for Septimus’ death without actually being a victim. Clarissa's use of
imaginative self-evasion» (Guth 1990: 41) keeps her from actually having
to confront the reality of Septimus’ madness because she does not allow
253
him to enter her life on a personal level. Similarly, the critic Suzette Henke
compares Clarissas party to a communion similar to the Catholic Mass,
culminating in a celebration of life. Septimus's suicide is likened to a
sacrifice that is offered, bringing a renewed sense of life’s value. Henke notes
the use of contrast within the text: the satirical and the tragic; political
power and artistic creativeness; death and life; evil and good; public demands
and individual preservation; patriarchal dominance and maternal love;
homosexuality and androgyny; possessiveness and privacy. Henke claims
that «Mrs Dalloway offers a scathing indictment of the British class system
and a strong critique of patriarchy» (Guth 1990: 125).
The novel's closing scene draws together its main arguments, as Clarissa
withdraws from the party to think about the death of a former soldier she
has never met, but with whom she feels an affinity: «A thing there was that
mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her
own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved)).
3 . ACTIVITIES
3.1. Test yourself
1. What are the main aspects of the modernist aesthetics?

2 . How do women contribute to these aesthetics?
3 . Is Virginia Woolf modernist in her essay writing?
4 . Briefly explain the importance of the Bloomsbury Group in Virginia
Woolf’s modernism.
5 . What aspects of Virginia Woolf’s background are important for her
literature?
6 . What is the importance of tradition for the modernist woman writer?
7 . What is the role of London in Mrs Dalloway?
8 . How are characters linked in Mrs Dalloway?
9 . What is the relationship between Septimus and Clarissa in Mrs
Dalloway?
254
1. Explain the importance of the fictional character of Judith Shakespeare

in A Room of One's Own.
2. Find examples in Mrs Dalloway of how 'the invisible thread’ links
characters of the novel otherwise unconnected.
3. Define 'stream of consciousness'. Give your own examples from the
text to illustrate your answer.
3.3. Explore
1. Read the following extract from A Room of One’s Own and answer the
questions below:
The title women and fiction might mean, and you might meant it to
mean, women and what they are like, or it might mean women and the
fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is
written about them; or it might that somehow all three are inextricably
mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light.
a) Try to locate the chapter to which this quotation belongs so that
you can put it in context.
b) Briefly explain how Woolf approaches the subject in the text,
taking into account the main themes of the different sections into
which the text is divided.
c) What is the relation between money, the space intended by Woolf,
and fictional writing?
d) Are there any other important constraints that prevent women
from freely approaching the art of fiction?
2. Read the first four lines of Mrs Dalloway and analyse the type of
narrator(s) in the novel. Use these four sentences to explain Woolf's
narrative technique.
3. Read the following extract from Charlotte Bronte’s novel Shirley,
published in 1849, and then answer the questions below:
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The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 2 0th Century Y
If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but
the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about
women: they do nor read them in a true light: they misapprehend
them, both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half
doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend.
a) Would you say that in view of these words Woolf found in Charlotte
Bronte that much-needed literary ancestor?
b) How do you relate Bronte’s words with Woolf's works?
3.4. Key terms
—- Ambiguity
— Class
— Doppelganger
— Experimentalism
— Fragmentation
— Gender
— Genre
— High art
— Interior monologue
— Low art
— Modernism
— Race
— Self-reflexiveness
4 . BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abel, Elizabeth. 1983. ‘Narrative Structure(s) and Female Development: The Case
of Mrs Dalloway.’ The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development. Eds. Elizabeth
256
Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland. Hanover, NH: University Press
of New England, 161-85.
Barret, Michele (ed.). 1979. Virginia Woolf on Women and Writing. London: The
Womens Press.
Beer, Gillian. 1996. Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground. Essays by Gillian Beer.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Beker, Mirslav. 1972. ‘London as a Principle of Structure in Mrs Dalloway.' Modem
Fiction Studies 18: 375-85.
Bowlby, Rachel. 1988. Virginia Woolf. Feminist Destinations . Oxford. Basil Blackwell.
Gambrell, Alice. 1997. Women Intellectuals, Modernism, and Difference: Transatlantic
Culture (1919-1945). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Griffin, Gabrielle (ed.). 1994. Difference in View: Women and Modernism. London
and New York: Taylor and Francis.
Guth, Deborah. ‘Rituals of Self-Deception: Clarissa Dalloway’s Final Moment of
Vision.’Twentieth Century’ Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 36:1 (1990):
35-42.
Jensen, Emily. 1983. ‘Clarissa Dalloway s Respectable Suicide.’ Virginia Woolf: A
Feminist Slant. Ed. Jane Marcus. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 162-
179.
Lee, Hermione. 1996. Virginia Woolf. London: Chatto & Windus.
Miller, J. Hillis. 1986. 'Mrs Dalloway: Repetition as the Raising of the Dead.’ Fiction
and Repetition: Seven English Novels. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1982.
Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. 1987. Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject:
Feminine Writing in the Major Novels. Sussex: The Harvester Press.
Moi, Toril. 1985. Sexual Textual Politics. Feminist Literary Theory. London. Routledge.
Roe, Sue, and Susan Sellers (ed.). 2000. The Cambridge Companion to Virginia
Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wang, Ban. 1992. '"I” on the Run: Crisis of Identity in Mrs Dalloway.’ Modem Fiction
Studies 38: 177-91.
257
Web sites
— Virginia Woolf Web: Part of the Orlando Project. Provides reliable information
and links to most of Virginia Woolfs web pages
http://orlando.jp.org/vww/
— Womens history: British Women Novelists 1910s-1960s
http://homepages.primex.co.ulc/~lesleyah/wmwrtrs.htm
258
GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
General Bibliography Y
Abel, Elizabeth. 1983. ‘Narrative Structure(s) and Female Development: The Case
of Mrs. Dalloway.’The.Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development. Eds. Elizabeth
Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland. Hanover, NH: University Press
of New England, 161-85.
Abrams, M.H. ed. 1993. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th Edition, Vol..
II. New York: W.W. Norton.
Achebe, Chinua. 1988. ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrads Heart of Darkness.'
Heart of Darkness. Robert Kimbrough, ed. Third Edition. New York: W.W. Norton.
Ackroyd, Peter. 1984. T.S. Eliot. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Aldington, Richard, ed. 1946. The Portable Oscar Wilde. New York: Viking.
Allan, Mowbray. 1974. T.S. Eliot's Impersonal Theory of Poetry, Lewisburg: Bucknell
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www.resort.com/~prime8/0rwell/
‘v
275‘,
— 1989. Animal Farm. London: Penguin Books.

— 1998. 'Inside the Whale’ in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents ,
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— 2000. ‘Politics and the English Language' in The Norton Anthology of English
Literature. M.H. Abrams ed., 2 vol. London: W.W. Norton and Co., II, 2462-71.
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London: Harvester.
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Dehli: Classical Publishing Co.
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Century. London: Arnold.
Roe, Sue & Susan Sellers (eds.). 2000. The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf.
Cambridge: C.U.P
Robson, W. W. 1990. Modem English Literature. Oxford: O.U.P
Ross, Stephen. 2004. Conrad and Empire. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
Said, Edward. 1993. Two Visions in ‘Heart of Darkness’: Culture and Imperialism.
New York: Vintage.
Schiach, Morag (ed.). 2007. The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel..
Cambridge: C.U.P.
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Continuum.
Sisson, C. H. 1981. English Poetry 1900-1950: An Assestment. Manchester: Carcanet.
Sloan, John. 2003. Oscar Wilde. Oxford: O.U.P.
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Stubbs, Patricia. 1979. Women and Fiction: Feminism and the Novel 1880-1920.
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Trotter, David. 1993. The English Novel in History, 1895-1920. London: Routledge.
276
General Bibliography PHY
Weatherburn, Jeny. 2001. D. H. Lawrence: A Beginner’s Guide. London: Hodder &

Stoughton.
Williams, John. 1987. Twentieth-Century British Poetry: A Critical Introduction.
London: Arnold,
Worth, Katherine. 1984. Oscar Wilde. New York: Grove Press.
Worthen, John & Andrew Harrison (eds.). 2005. D. H. Lawrence’s‘Sons and Lovers’:
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Worthen, John. 2007. D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider. London: Counterpoint.
277
ii"
This text-book, The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20th Century, m
encompasses the main areas of reference for students undertaking Literatura inglesa III: Pensamiento y
creation literaria inglesa en la primera mitad del siglo XX. This third-year course is compulsory for thosee-
students hoping to complete the degree Grado en Estudios Ingleses: Lengua, Literatura y Cultura. e.
In order to achieve the aims and objectives of the course, this book has been devised to make students aware e
that for every literary act produced in the period covered there is a parallel struggle in other fields of experiencece.
and thought. Likewise, it has; been written to help students to discern that authors were equally interested in
. finding out what makes literature into an art form. In this sense, the volume emphasises the critical effortss
authors were making, within their historical and intellectual context, to understand their own art..
. The main aim of this book is to encourage literary analysis and close reading as much as literary approaches es
that are deeply concerned with the actual interaction between thought and literary creativity. Within the whirlpool l
of new ideas and technological advances the first half of the twentieth century witnesses, literature rediscovers rs
itself as a way of artistic expression at the vortex of an increasing number of discourses that describe the world
across all disciplines, thus challenging the traditional view of art as an autonomous object. The main challenge, e,
and the breaking point with the past, being whether there is any one reality that literature can reflect. t.
The Need to Make it New: English Literature and Thought in the First Half of the 20th Centuryhas been written
bearing in mind the importance of a personal commitment to literature. Its main challenge is to help students s
to articulate and to concretise their personal responses to primary literary texts in the belief that encouraging ng
these responses will open up the path to a learning process with "the pleasure of the text" on the agenda. If
this is achieved, then the effort will not have been m vain. .
j
Ana I. Zamorano (Lie. Complutense, MA and PhD Hull) has taught English and American literature at the
universities of Hull (UK) and Complutense of Madrid and is currently working as a lecturer on English. and
American Literature as well as on gender and literature at the UN ED. She specialises in twentieth century Britishh
and American literature, gender studies and literary theory and has published extensively on women's writing
(botk fiction and poetry), American drama and contemporary fiction and criticism, and, more recently, on the
perspectives on violence in detective fiction. .
Maria M. Garcia Lorenzo (Lie. Universidad de Deusto, Ph. D. Universidad de Alcala de Henares) has been a
lecturer of English and American literature for over fifteen years at several Spanish universities. She is currently y
working as lecturer at the UNED. She specializes in modem American literature and cultural studies, and has
published articles on gender-related issues, popular forms, media culture and, more recently, the influence of ’9'
science on US fiction.
ISBN: ‘r?a-SH-3ba-U218-6
0231 1
UnED Editorial l
coleccion
Grado
l ' l l l ”ll
9 788436 262988
640231 1GR01A01 oIA01

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‘ The Need to Make it New: English Literature

UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE EDUCACION A DISTANCIA

Quedan rigurosamente prohibidas, sin la

© Universidad National de Education a Distancia

Libreria UNED: Bravo Murillo, 38 - 28015 Madrid

© Ana Zamorano y Maiia M. Garcia Lorenzo.

Primera edition: octubre de 2011

Impreso en Espana - Printed in Spain

Unit 1. The Discourse Between or the Need to «Make It New»:

Unit 2. «The White Man’s Burden»: Different Approaches to

3. Activities ................................................................................................ 113

Unit 3. Literature and War: «Disillusion as Never Told in the Old

Unit 4. «Life is a Luminous Halo»: The Novel in the Twentieth

Unit 5. Tales of the City: Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Geographies

General Bibliography ................................................................................. 259

Q The contents that appear circumscribed here are of particular

• The ‘Explore’ questions are relational and analytical exacting from

9 ¥ M I For this reason it is essential that students read carefully

The question of the relation between literary and biographical time is

alternative perspectives on the authors, and thus expand the reductive

THE DISCOURSE BETWEEN OR THE

In any case, it is always risky and not devoid of controversy to refer

9 The best way to approach the contents of this Unit is by trying to

If one single noun could summarise the period, it would be 'change'.

_ 9 Perhaps the most immediate issue that will be encountered when

1.1. The Crisis of Victorian Positivism

The 1851 Great Exhibition at the brilliant, impressive and magnificent

On 21 January 1919, some members of the south Tipperary Brigade of

on rebellious action. A special powers resolution, allowing the army to hold

WJ Oscar Wildes The Importance of Being Earnest (Norton 2000:

■f At the turn of the century artists, writers and playwrights were

1.2. The Interpretation of an Ever-changing World

The belief that species were immutable had been questioned by

In turn, «degeneracy» referring to the phenomenon that the social status

The theological search for God had been replaced by a epistemological

of an underlying cosmic reality. In this sense Schopenhauer had a pessimistic

different approaches of Modernism towards literature. «We moderns» said

travelling at a speed near to that of light, matter transforms into energy.

In talking about language a reference to Ferdinand Saussure (1857-1913)

It is important to note that Wittgenstein, as were other philosophers of

T As can be seen in the preceeding paragraphs, language stops being - i

A subjectivity made up of language participates in the very nature of

time as fragmented and people inhabiting time only in memory and

¥ Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, which, significantly, was going to

Because ‘reality’ is shaped according to a mind's perception of time,

realm of repressed desires is the unconscious. Together with the conscious

1.3. The New Woman Enters the Stage

This period also witnessed developments in concepts of femininity

she places particular emphasis in the «social shift from matrilineal to

The relation of these early matriarchal, husbandless goddesses... to the

In this passage Harrison offers alternative concepts of gendered

By perpetuating stereotypes of masculinity and femininity in his theory

Perhaps the field of knowledge that assumed special relevance in relation

Woman attempted a re-conceptualisation of womanhood and produced a

lack of understanding between the sexes. His consideration of female

Another writer of the period, Victoria Cross, provided in 'Theodora: A

to sexual education. Stopes’s first marriage was unconsummated so it was

k Feminism in the period between the wars engaged in learning the

2. TEXT ANALYSIS: OSCAR WILDE’S EARNESTNESS TO BREAK

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) grew up in Dublin, where his parents, Sir

After Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated in classics, Oscar Wilde

During his imprisonment, Wilde referred to The History of the Renaissance

In 1882, Wilde, short of funds, embarked on a lecture tour of the United