Characters in Modernist writing are often described
as incomprehensible. How far do you agree with this view?
When a character in a play says of her recently returned
from honeymoon that she was 'excruciatingly bored'
(298) this is not difficult to comprehend, to a modern audience,
at least. She is obviously in an unhappy marriage, we assume,
she chose the wrong guy. Perhaps she was forced to marry him.
We reason, and we can reflect on the character of Hedda Gabler.
She is a strong and defiant character, but, we think, she
is in an understandable situation, living as we do in a time
where dissatisfaction is relationships is rife.
However. Put these characters in the 1890s Norway, a restrictive
society, before women's rights had ever happened, where theatre
consisted mainly of melodrama, where its literary companion
was romantic fiction, then you have a shocking and incomprehensible
woman. Middle and upper class women were the angels of the
house, the mothers, the passive daughters.
Add to this the symbols and constructs of her hidden need
for power and sexuality and you, as either a Victorian audience
or a modern-day one, see the dangerous workings of a woman's
mind, which are not, on face value, entirely understandable.
Hedda Gabler is a difficult and inexplicable character, seen
in the way in which she uses her gun, an odd possession for
a woman to have, 'Oh, I just shoot up into the blue' (296).
Her actions are not decisive or explained. She does not explicitly
tell the audience what she is feeling, or tells the other
characters her problems. From this the tension rise in the
play. Even when the audience realises she is a woman raised
by her father as a man, her character still seems odd. This
comes from her lack of interaction with the other characters
on stage juxtaposed with glimpses of the potential violence
contained within a beautiful and rich woman. This incoherence
was Ibsen's aim and other modernist writers' aims, two of
which will be discussed here, those being James Joyce and
Virginia Woolf, both admirers of Ibsen's work. These three,
evenly spaced out in what is now call the modern period, (Hedda
Gabler was written in 1890, Joyce's Dubliners 1914 and Woolf's
Mrs Dalloway 1925) share similarities in their conveying of
character, that is to say, their characters seem incomprehensible.
Characters seem not to be fully seen, or their actions are
isolated and not explained. The use of flashback and running
commentary of their feelings along with the multi-voiced technique
of the texts means there is no main narrative or authorial
control. The world seen, then, is not so clear cut. The overall
style, therefore, requires concentration and there is a need
to understand the psychology of the characters. The authors
here ultimately question the truth of texts, making the reader
work harder to understand multiple characters.
Why would they do this? What brought this change in style,
which created ultimately, along with other modern writers,
the Modernist period in literature?
The time in which Ibsen lived and wrote was pre-First World
War, a time where the middle classes were rich, and when many
people were educated. This was the height of Empire; the industrial
revolution had changed the lives of people, creating a wealthy
class of people.
A sense of this achievement and a need to celebrate the achievement of human civilisation is seen
in the two main male characters of Hedda Gabler, one who has
written a book on the history of civilisation, the other researching
Middle Ages crafts. The difference in scope suggests the construction,
or view of themselves. Ejlert Lovborg sees himself as an independent
man, making as many intellectual changes as a man he might himself
have written about, while Tesman, mirroring the way he has constructed
a domestic sphere for himself, sees the particular, the power
of the small craftsman to change the world, from his own home.
Both are involved in the study of the past. However, the scope
of Lovborg's book almost seems to weigh him down, almost as
if civilisation kills him. There is an ennui surrounding the
life of the stage that is both vast in human scope in terms
of thought but also realises the particular, that institution
of society that is supposed to hold the society together, marriage.
Hedda says tiredly of the union, 'Everlastingly having to be
with…the one and the same person…' (299). This is
also echoed throughout Joyce's Dubliners. The institution of
marriage is seen as limiting to the human consciousness. Hedda
speaks of her ultimate form of existence, 'I prefer to remain
sitting where I am, alone with the other person.'(301) This
more intellectual peace between two people is what some of Joyce's
characters strive for, or perhaps, to just be alone in nature.
The room that Hedda stands within is limiting her. She moves
and through the movements of her hands we see her frustration.
She 'walks about the room, raises her arms and clenches her
fists as though in a frenzy' (276). Janet Garton speaks of 'a
relentless effort of will'
on Hedda's part to control her environment, but further her
actions suggest a tension of wills- between herself and her
situation, her marriage, symbolised by the domestic room. She
looks out of the window repeatedly, as Joyce's characters do.
It is clear that marriage or relationships are stifling.
But neither does Hedda comprehend an affair with another man.
Brack says to her 'You have never gone through anything that
really roused you.' (306) She does not fit into the stereotypical
construct of the fictional woman, who dissatisfied, becomes
adulterous. Garton talks of how she is a woman raised as a man
and it is this comment that is key to Hedda's character. She,
like the male characters in Joyce's Dubliners, needs more than
set male/female relationships and then marriage. She needs some
different destiny, some intellectual freedom.
There are no female characters like Hedda in Joyce's Dubliners.
But the question of relationships remain an important one. While
Ibsen presents a woman physically on stage then undermines an
audience's perception of a stereotype, Joyce, through his innovation
of how language is used in novels, finds a new perspective on
women. In 'An Encounter', a boy, sitting with a strange man
who talks to him, perceives the structure of the man's language,
'he gave me the impression that he was repeating something which
he had learned by heart or that, magnetized by some words of
his own speech, his mind was slowly circling round and round
in the same orbit.'
(26) The man is talking about women and the way in which the
boy sees the stagnated structure of his words, so the reader
can see the words are signifying a set way of thinking, a stagnation
of how people see women, and so, by implication, how they see
religion, society and their own identity.
Perspective used in this way, suggesting much but saying nothing
explicitly, makes language symbolic, the words, the signifiers
that the reader must pay attention to. The very fabric of the
text, the order in which the words are placed on the page become
highly symbolic, just as the Freudian symbols of Hedda's gun
must be read in conjunction with this social theme of relationships.
The ennui experienced by these characters juxtaposed by the
need for free experience and life that is never experienced
seems to result many times in violence. Hedda wants her self
to mean more than just a married woman, 'Do you think it was
some power in me?' (316) and she finds release in the suicide
of Lovborg, 'Something done, at last!' (355). This view of the
world suggests her conflict well. Her restrictive life has pushed
her into viewing life as needing to be on the brink of death
in order to be realised properly, as she says of the suicide,
'There is an element of beauty in this' (355).
This regarding of life as paralysed in a time where, on the
surface, nothing had been so good for so long before for so
many people, constructs itself in the character of Eveline in
Dubliners,
'The evening deepened in the avenue. The white of two letters
in her lap grew indistinct. One was to Harry; the other was
to her father. Ernest had been her favourite but she liked Harry
too. Her father was becoming old lately, she noticed; he would
miss her. Sometimes he could be very nice. Not long before,
when she had been laid up for the day, he had read he out a
ghost story and made toast for her at the fire. Another day,
when their mother was alive, they had all gone for a picnic
to the Hill of Howth. She remembered her father putting on her
mother's bonnet to make the children laugh.' (41)
This stream-of-consciousness style at first reflects Eveline's
passivity as she regards nature take over the man-made world
she can see outside. She is seen by the author for a moment
as a typical woman, staring out of the window, letters from
men in her lap, trying to decide her destiny on the emotional
weight of their words and the real weight they carry because
of the memories they carry that she straight after remembers.
She drops back mentally from one recent time to a time long
ago, reflecting the importance she puts on past events, as if
they happened all at once, and were not superseded by her father's
recent behaviour. So it can be seen that time for people stops
their actions. Further to this, Joyce suggests a sense of degeneration
in the way in which Eveline in the end chooses her father. Women,
he seems to be saying, cannot create new choices.
Joyce saw the use of time and perspective as of paramount important
in his work as multiple voices in multiple characters would
succeed in giving a multiple sense of what the people of Dublin
were like. He wanted them to, as John Kelly says 'welcome life,
to escape the nets, whether they be of nationality, language,
or religion, which seemed to Joyce to impede the full expression
of human potentiality.'
Without an authorial voice, people's subjectivity could fully
be seen, and a character could be created that was truer to
life. However, the bias still lies in the perspective, particularly
in the characters of women. The fact of Joyce's male perspective
hinders his aim of multi perspective as the women are often
represented the same, passive and not fully seen. In fact, they
are often seen through the eyes of men as in 'The Dead', 'He
asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the
shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of.' (240) There
seems to be a self-conscious note that women are difficult to
represent having always been represented by men to the point
of symbolism, and this awareness Joyce creates, by presenting
a character who perceives the inherent difficulty.
The difficulty of properly representing women perhaps can be
explained by the changing role of women at this time. As women
became more educated their perception changed of themselves,
and so did men's perception of them. And so the relationship
of men and women needed to change, as these writers could see,
and as Woolf articulates that since 1910 'all human relations
have shifted- those between masters and servants, husbands and
wives, parents and children. And when human relations change,
there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics
and literature.'
In fact, female articulation is key to these texts. The lack
of speaking and silence from female characters, or the seemingly
meaningless small talk of women in Joyce suggests the incomprehensibility
the writers themselves may have been experiencing. How to voice
an identity when one half of the society were articulating a
new voice?
This new voice gave rise to new identities, in social reality
and so in art. Essentially, people were coming to terms with
new interpretations of gender because of social change: not
only the mixing of roles as women went out to work, but the
traditional role of men, the soldier, was questioned as the
war started. The effect of shell-shock, a new phenomena, caused
Woolf and other writers to examine what was seen as a 'crisis'.
It seemed masculinism, as well as feminism was being affected
by the war. This is seen in Mrs Dalloway, where Septimus Smith
fluxes from the everyday to his own terrible memories of the
war, 'this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre
before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface'
(16). He seems
to hallucinate and inhabit a form of being that does not align
with the rest of the London scene.
The confusion felt by the people of the time becomes reflected
in the texts. The multi voices of perspective of Joyce do not
only voice a social change but also articulate a crisis in identity
which can only satisfyingly result in violence or death, which
can be seen many times in his novel, but also in the other two
texts. This seems incomprehensible, but merely reflects a world
in flux.
Moreover, in this sense, Woolf seems to move on from Joyce,
through her pulling together of seeming meaningless violence,
which culminates in Septimus Smith's death. To do this she uses
time, juxtaposing characters' consciousnesses until they are
almost one. First, Woolf constructs a London that is alive and
moving but a heroine that can only look into the past, remembering
fleeting moments involving a past love, 'a few sayings like
this about cabbages.' (3) The chimes of the clock count her
descent into old age; this is supplemented by the symbol of
greenness and the generations of women in the novel, suggesting
a cycle of love and death, wrong choices made, and time folded
as the past becomes the present in Mrs Dalloway's mind. The
fabric of her life is false 'she had a passion for gloves' (12),
suggesting again an inaction, a passive attitude to life. Then,
through the time or a symbol of the city, the focus moves to
Septimus Smith and his decline, his witnessing of death and
his need for degenerate violence, that is, a need to kill himself.
People are interwoven in action under the scope of the city.
They are not like Joyce's separate cerebral beings. They become
linked to the point that Septimus' consciousness can be seen
as Mrs Dalloway's, which was what Woolf intended .
Essentially this shared experience, regardless of class or sex,
or indeed actual shared experience, suggests a connectiveness
in psychosis that was significantly of that period. The worries
of a post-war England that revelled in the roaring twenties,
but was not deeply emotionally or intellectually satisfying
is also similarly seen in the isolated ennui of the characters
of a restricted Irish society pre-war. Likewise, Hedda Gabler
can be seen as a symbol of not just a restricted woman, but
a restricted individual, with no recourse to positive action,
except the compulsion to death, a running thought in this very
intellectual period, explicated by philosophers such as Schopenhauer
and Neitzsche.
Yet it is not only the anxiety of these few decades that
pervades these texts and makes them seem incomprehensible.
In the use of Joyce's symbols, it can be seen that the ancient
human belief of religion, articulated automatically from a
small boy's mouth, is traditionally and almost eternally destructive,
'O pa! He cried. Don't beat me, pa! And I'll…I'll say
a Hail Mary for you…I'll say a Hail Mary for you, pa,
if you don't beat me…I'll say a Hail Mary…' (109,
'Counterparts') Joyce's motive would have been to make the
people see how they use religion in everyday life that is
not positive. He ends the story here, giving an alarming and
startling effect. He points out the disparity between modern
life and traditional religion and how little it has to do
with real faith, real ritual. Instead, as it is seen, it is
only out of habit and fear that people utter religious words.
This was a concern for many writers of the time, an important
concern, as it was a time where belief was being shaken by
social changes and then by an impending war. It can be seen
that belief, and the words of belief, could be unconnected
from the person speaking themselves, it is simply an articulation
of fear. Joyce points out here that the meaning is comprehensible,
but the words are out of place in the text and so out of place
within the society. The almost self-conscious way in which
this is done may seem overdone or incomprehensible to readers
now- the characters become almost vehicles for thought; however,
this loss of realism to symbolism instead seems to reflect
the important point Joyce wanted his readers to see, and that
perhaps we will always have to learn to see: that the symbols
in our language which represent thought in our society can
be destructive. He wants to encourage change and so he creates
a little odd construction of language at the end of the story.
This symbolism is a technique of alienation used in order
to realise how manipulative and destructive religion was and
is, and in a similar way, which can still appeal to people
today, if they read closely enough, is the representation
of mental thought and how that can destroy a person. In 'A
Painful Case' the protagonist 'lived at a little distance
from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances.'
(120) He distrusts other people's language, calling them 'phrasemongers'
and is decided that any intellectual relationship between
men and women would be impossible. He is, in some ways, opposite
to other men represented in the novel. Here, intellectual
thought, like religion, is also seen as destructive. Joyce
suggests the lack of relation to the character's mind and
body is his downfall. He cannot be free to have a relationship
with Mrs Sinico, with whom he enjoys intellectual conversations,
as he has preconceived ideas of relationships. This is similar
to the character of Gabriel in 'The Dead' who sees his world
as 'a thought-tormented age' where people are over-educated.
So it is not only old constructs that restrict life, but thought,
which, in terms of wide-spread changes in education and the
rise of the economy, was, relatively, a new innovation. This
is an anti-thesis to experience, and explains, in part, why
sex and death are represented so heavily in these texts, and
others of this period.
The constructs of life become threatened and questioned in
face of social and political change. The image of the body
changes as well as an effect of this. Meanwhile, authors find
ways in which to represent characters, in realism and symbolism.
But the symbolism is limited as people may not understand
it. So, juxtaposed next to new symbolism is old symbolism,
as seen in Joyce. In 'A Painful Case' a train is described
as 'a worm with a fiery head winding through the darkness,
obstinately and laboriously.' Dublin becomes hell in a Dantean
reference. In 'The Dead', 'One by one they were all becoming
shades.'(255) For Woolf the circular sense of a city is seen
in the chiming of the hour of Big Ben, 'the leaden circles
dissolved in the air.' (4) The circular descent into hell
and therefore seeing death everywhere in the demise of the
city is unmistakable. The juxtaposition between modern life
and old symbols created a mythical and disordered sense of
the world. Elaine Showalter remarks on Mrs Dalloway that 'what
is so profound and moving about the book is the way Woolf
sees behind people's social masks to their deepest human concerns,
without elevating them to the level of myth.'
In fact, what happens in the novel is that people become engaged
in a new sense of mythical setting through the inclusion of
circular imagery. In the mythological language of death the
truth is seen. This juxtaposition may seen incomprehensible
at first, and then an innovation. The reason for using this
kind of imagery is to convey the seriousness in the character's
acts.
Similarly, in 'The Dead' the image of feast, fish and so secular
tradition appears in an episode that seems reminiscent of
the Last Supper. However, the speech Gabriel makes on the
demise of the Irish people, as seen in the younger generation,
repudiates the image. Earlier he says 'I'm sick of my own
country, sick of it!' (216) The festive symbols are undermined
by a growing sickness, re-written and re-imaged for this period.
The sickness is the real social problem of intellectualism
in old social constructs that Joyce sees.
This use of symbolism are useful devices that help people
to understand the constructed world and their society. The
text is becoming, in this period, a vehicle for thought, that
has previously not been seen before. In Mrs Dalloway, however,
the symbols which represent the structures do not alleviate
the pain in the character's lives. Their awareness of the
symbols, seen in the clock and the city, manipulates their
thought. Here, the old and the new and the past and the present,
cannot save the characters, as their own thoughts become their
killers. Woolf said 'I adumbrate here a study of insanity
and suicide: the world seen by the sane and the insane side
by side' (xxvii). She not only sees demise in thought, but
insanity. The soldiers that experienced 'shell-shock' for
the writers served as new symbols and apt ones of a changing
time. People were not mechanistic, the writers were saying,
but people too full of thought to survive. The body would
be the last to go, rather the mind would be destroyed first.
Woolf ultimately finds new perspective in the use of cinematic
flow and cutting from scene to scene, and this technique effectively
matches the pain from character to character or isolates and
distances individuals in their own vacuum while a city whirls
around them. Their articulation is not fully realised by themselves,
rather by the symbolic landscape they move within. This sense
of being inexplicit while articulating ordinary speech creates
the effect that some people may find 'incomprehensible.' Yet,
when the symbols are interpreted as ones that affect us all,
and when knowledge of the period is taken into account, all
the texts become comprehensible. It is the need for new articulation
in a changing world that created these texts and this is best
reflected in the inarticulate speech and actions that the
characters make.
Perhaps it can be seen in the writing of a contemporary how
deeply the social changes were being felt, to the point that
humanity is seen as being a anomaly, a mistake. D H Lawrence
writes through his world-weary Birkin 'what is mankind but
just one expression of the incomprehensible. And if mankind
passes away, it will only mean that this particular expression
is completed and done.'
To the modernists, people were striving destructively for
a goal that was out of their reach, and in a manner that could
not comprehend the world. This sense of frustration is ultimately
seen in the verbal destruction of the texts which, as language
is the unique tool of humans, well reflects the feeling that
realisation of the world cannot be found by humans. Language
is itself limited as humans are; what is clear from the symbols
is that an underlying spirituality had to be sought, and that
is where the true 'incomprehensible' lay.
Please note: The above essays and dissertations were written by students and then submitted to us to display and help others. Thanks to all the students who have submitted their work to us.
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