1925–27: Modernist Fictions

Abstract

In the decade from 1922 to 1931, Virginia Woolf was astonishingly productive. She published five major novels, a collection of essays and a path-breaking work about women and fiction. By the end of the decade she was successful and famous. But perhaps the most astonishing thing about her work in these ten years is that every one of her books differed in the most basic ways from each of the others. It was not a matter of her hitting upon a successful and fruitful ’method’ and staying with it. Each work was a new experiment, innovatory in form, fundamentally changing the rules of the fictional game. The other feature of the decade’s production as far as the fiction is concerned, is that it is all, in spite of the differences and constant invention, within a modernist aesthetic. ’Modernism’ has so many different varieties that it might be as well to spell out briefly the meaning of the term in this case. Virginia Woolf’s modernism, in this decade, has much in common with the modernist ’formalism’ of the Bloomsbury painters. Its main features are these. First, a self-consciousness about the categories and conventions of art. She could not write fiction without being aware of the artificial, conventional nature of the rules by which fiction is constructed - rules of character, plot and narration. Her writing forced this conventionality upon the reader’s attention. Just as with cubism in painting, we can no longer take the space of the made-up scene for granted. Secondly, these conventions are radically changed. The stable, unified character and the meaningful coordinations of plot are abandoned. There is a third feature, and it is one which suggests the analogy with Post-Impressionism in painting. It is her emphasis on the unity of composition or design. However, Virginia Woolf was not interested in design for its own sake. There were always reasons for her formal inventions, for they always sprang from her attempts to display aspects of reality.