Modernism, Literature and the Feminist Perspective Virginia Woolf Modernism, Literature and the Feminist Perspective

Virginia Woolf by Vanessa Bell, c.1912

The Stephen Family in 1894

Bloomsbury Years

Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and John Maynard Keynes

Portrait of Virginia Woolf by Vanessa Bell, 1912

Woolf and the Dreadnought hoax 1910

Virginia and Leonard Woolf

Poster for the first Post-Impressionist exhibition, London, 1910

Roger Fry, self-portrait Woolf’s biography of Roger Fry, The Hogarth Press, 1940 Roger Fry, self-portrait

Https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS37SNYjg8w

A Room of One’s Own Instantly a man's figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help; he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. The only charge I could bring against the Fellows and Scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was that in the protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in succession, they had sent my little fish into hiding…

A Room of One’s Own but here I was actually at the door which leads into the library itself. I must have opened it, for instantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way with a flutter of black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.

A Room of One’s Own When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without singing them, was often a woman.

Modernism in Literature Rejection of tradition, Victorian values Experimental: Fragmented, non-representational, anti-realist No definite plot and sense of progress New narrative techniques: stream of consciousness, interior monologue, intertexuality

Modernism in Literature Themes related to the psyche: self-alienation, self-reflexivity, emancipation, representation of human subjectivity Making art equivalent to life Challenging, unsettling and discomforting effect on reader

Woolf’s Innovation Experimental story telling Use of Stream of Consciousness Use of historical past and its renewal

Stream of Consciousness 20th century narrative mode Expresses flow of character’s thoughts and emotions Like being inside the character’s mind

Stream of Consciousness

Stream of Consciousness “What a lark! What a plunge! For so it always seemed to me when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which I can hear now, I burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as I then was) solemn, feeling as I did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen …”

Fragmentation She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs Richard Dalloway. … ‘That is all,’ she said, looking at the fishmonger’s. ‘That’s all,’ she repeated, pausing for a moment at the window of a glove show where, before the War, you could buy almost perfect gloves…