In their
discussion of modernism, Bradbury and McFarlane describe it as “a revolutionary
movement, capitalising on a vast intellectual readjustment and radical
dissatisfaction with the artistic past” (p28.) I will consider the ways in
which these readjustments and dissatisfactions are evident in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898) and
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse’ (1927.)
Specifically, the forms of the novels and their shifts of focus from external
events to internal experience will be shown to be characteristic of modernist
writing and constitute a break from the past.
In the novels of
the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century, the reader was traditionally
presented with a problem and guided authoritatively through a linear plot
comprising of external events and character development to a satisfactory resolution. The modernist novel, David Lodge argues, is experimental and innovative, “concerned with consciousness and a ‘plot’ which often has ‘no real
beginning,’ a lack of objective events, a mixture of viewpoints and an
ambiguous ending”( 1976 p481.) Some ‘moderns,’ including Henry James, exhibit
only some of these characteristics or exhibit them in a modified form because “they
belong to an early phase of modernism and retain some of the conventions and
assumptions of traditional fiction’ whilst others like Virginia Woolf ‘exhibit
nearly all of these qualities” (Lodge p 483.) Fletcher and Bradbury also describe
James as “the most useful starting point” in the move away from Victorian
realism (1976 p396) and Marianne Dekoven argues that “Woolf pushed fiction as far formally as any of the other
major Modernists” (2011 p226.)
It will be argued that this distinction
between early modernism and high modernism can be seen in these two novels. James can be seen to modify “the conventions
and assumptions” of earlier fiction in his form and his ‘plot’ to be so
ambiguous that critics have argued plausibly that it is entirely related to
objective external events or wholly psychological. Woolf’s novel will be shown
to break radically from earlier writing with its fragmented form and its
neglect of external events in favour of the internal and the psychological.
Both authors profess a sense of liberation in
writing. James says in ‘Future of the Novel’ (1900) “Prose picture… can
do simply everything… It moves in a luxurious independence from rules and
restrictions.” Woolf says ‘Nothing is forbidden – method or experiment even of
the wildest … There is no proper stuff of fiction – everything is its proper
stuff’ ( 1921 p164.)
Bradbury and
McFarlane argue that “modernism is less a style than a search for a style” (1976
p29) and that “the great works of modernism… balance on the sensibility of
transition, often holding in suspense the fores that persist from the past and
those that grow from the novel present” (P49.) We see this sense of transition
in The Turn of the Screw. When James’ governess wonders ‘was there a "secret" at Bly—a mystery of
Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected
confinement? (loc 467) we are
reminded Of Anne Radcliffe’s gothic novel The
Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Jane Austen’s ironic Northanger
Abbey (1818.) However, if we are
led to anticipate a rational explanation in conclusion, we are frustrated. The
possibility of trickery is closed down early with a simple ‘I felt sure…that I had not been practiced upon by the servants nor
made the object of any "game"( loc 484.) James described his novel
as ‘a shameless potboiler’ (Letters 1898)and ‘a fairy-tale’ ( 1908)and Ernest
Tuveson argues that it belongs to the genre of the mirchen, in the
Romantic tradition’ (1972 p738) In this case, we might anticipate a conclusion
which confirms a supernatural explanation but James does not provide this
either. The novella has a lengthy
explanatory beginning, an escalation of events and a tragic ending in
traditional narrative style and yet a satisfactory resolution of meaning is
withheld. We see here a ‘modification’
of a linear realist form to encompass modernist ambiguity and multiplicity of
meaning.
Virginia Woolf
makes no such concessions to realist forms. In ‘Modern Fiction’ (1921) she rejects
a sense of obligation ‘to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love
interest and an air of probability embalming the whole’ (162.) The beginning of
To the Lighthouse is such as Lodge as identifies as modernist;
one which ‘ plunges us straight into a flowing stream of consciousness with which we gradually familiarise ourselves‘(1976
p481.)
The
novel begins with Mrs Ramsey’s answer to an unknown question. ‘Yes of course,
if it’s fine tomorrow’ and it is not until two pages later that we learn that
James has asked if he might go to the lighthouse (1927. loc 1-43.) However, in
these pages we have learnt that James is six and at this time, he adores his
optimistic mother and hates his pessimistic father. In a
similar way we learn about the other characters in the first and third parts of
the novel which ends before
the party have reached the lighthouse denying us any conclusion apart from
completion of Lily’s painting. The ‘plot’ progresses by jumping from
consciousness to consciousness and from thought to thought within a single
consciousness. Woolf describes the mind
as receiving ‘ a myriad impressions … an incessant shower
of Innumerable atoms’ (1921 p160)
and we see this very clearly in Mrs Ramsey’s thoughts;
‘All the great men she had ever known,
she thought, deciding that a rabbit must have got in, were like that, and it
was good for young men …simply to hear him, simply to look at him. But without
shooting rabbits, how was one to keep them down?’ (loc 979)
By contrast, in the middle part
‘Time Passes,’ an unknown third person narrator
states baldly the deaths of three main characters which would surely be events
of central importance in earlier novels,
amidst a description of the decaying house . “Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in
France, among them Andrew Ramsey, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous” (loc
1865) “ The pivotal part ii , “Time Passes,” boldly reduces the crisis novel’s crisis
to parentheses …Events no longer obtrude, to be enshrined in
metaphor.” (Trotter 2012 p81.) This
is characteristic of modernist writing. “The structure of external ‘objective’
events essential to narrative art in traditional poetics is diminished in scope
and scale or presented selectively and obliquely in order to make room for introspection, analysis,
reflection and reverie” (Lodge p 481.)
Here
again we see James in a liminal position. Do objective events guide the plot of
The Turn of the Screw? This depends
entirely on how and, most significantly, when
it is read. Ernest Tuveson argues that ‘only after World War I did anyone doubt
the governess actually experienced some kind of externally- caused
apparitions’ (p800.) Tuveson argues for
the novel being a ghost story driven by external supernatural events. The
earliest psychological reading of it is by Harold Goddard in the 1920s in which
he argues that the ‘ghosts’ are purely a creation of the governess’ ‘pent up
emotion (which) overflows in a psychical experience, a daydream, or internal
drama’ (c 1920s p8.) He describes the general reaction to this argument. “Evidently
my view was utterly heretical” (4) but concludes that ‘the whole story might be
reviewed with profit under this psychoanalytic aspect’ (p34.) Of course this was
done very thoroughly by Edmund Wilson in 1934.
Tuveson insists
that his argument places the mystery ‘against the matrix of thought, the
beliefs and interests which James assumed in his readers rather than against
the atmosphere of the later twentieth century’ (p783.) He cites Rebecca West in
1916 describing ‘the clear eyes of the honourable and fearless lady who tells
the tale’ (p790) but in the following decade, Goddard describes the governess as ‘an excessively nervous and emotional
person’ (p6.) Tuveson asserts that Mrs. Grose,” is intended as a reliable
witness for verification” (p792) and is “emphatically not superstitious” (p791)
but to Goddard the housekeeper is ‘an ignorant and superstitious woman’ (p28.)
Both critics
insist that they have uncovered James’ true meaning but James himself insists that
he gave “not an inch of expatiation” (1908) and the text provides justification
for both interpretations. The governess expresses her
“duty of resistance to extravagant fancies” but makes huge leaps of logic. She interprets
Miles looking upwards as proof “there was another person on the tower” (l 1145)
and feels ‘a curious thrill of triumph (1177.) Mrs Grose too is described at one time as “a magnificent monument to the blessing
of a want of imagination” but her suggestibility is confirmed
when the governess says “had I wished to mix
a witch's broth and proposed it with assurance, she would have held out a large
clean saucepan” ( p1167.) Tuveson’s assertion that “none of
these [psychological] questions occurred to James himself” (p789) is less
persuasive than his argument that “the rise of psychoanalysis may be
both cause and evidence of a profound change in ways of reacting to forms of
experience and art”(p 800.)
Virginia
Woolf expresses this focus on the psychological in her essay ‘Modern Fiction’(1921.)
“For the moderns …the point of interest
lies very likely in the dark places of psychology” (p162.) In To
the Lighthouse, James’ hostility to his father and possessiveness of his
mother has frequently been read with reference to Freud’s ‘Oedipal complex.’ Likewise, Lily’s vacillation between sympathy
with Mrs Ramsey and hostility to her could be seen as the conflict between the need
for the maternal bond and blame of the mother for ‘castration’ in the ‘Electra
complex.’ Lily perceives a mute appeal from Mrs Ramsey
to take over conciliating Mr Tansley; “ Mrs. Ramsay said all this…the glance in her eyes
said it” and she complies but then feels
resentful when she feels “Mrs. Ramsay's gratitude… ah, she thought, but what
haven't I paid to get it for you? She had not been sincere” (1278.) Lily’s inner thoughts contradict
the external event of the dinner conversation and are privileged over it. To
Dekoven, the two women’s relationship is symbolic of the conflict between past
and present portraying the “inspiring/inhibiting
Victorian mother, Mrs.Ramsay, and cramped/autonomous Modernist daughter, Lily”
(2011 p229.)
We also see a shift from external focus to internal
in Woolf’s portrayal of ‘moments of being.’ To Woolf, reality is not derived
from an event itself but from its significance to the ‘self’ perceiving it. “What
is meant by “reality”? It would seem very erratic, very undependable—now to be
found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a
daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual
saying” ( 1929 p 165) This occurs frequently in the novel. James’ joy at his mother’s consent to the lighthouse
trip as he cuts pictures from a catalogue, “endowed the picture of a
refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss” (loc 25.) This scrap of
paper, much like Woolf’s scrap of newspaper, is not itself significant but
becomes an entirely subjective symbol of a moment of joy which is then crushed
by his father. Later Lily experiences such a moment. “So
that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a
ball.” The tableau has induced an intensely subjective ‘sense’ of marriage in
Lily; “suddenly the meaning…descends on people, making them symbolical, making
them representative” (1003.)
For Virginia Woolf, we see that the ‘internal’ and
the psychological are more ‘real’ than external events and are privileged over
them in both the structure of her novel and in her construction of meaning.
This constitutes a radical break with earlier novelistic traditions in which a
linear plot guided by events provides meaning and places her novel within the
canon of ‘high modernism.’ Henry James has been shown to ‘balance on the
sensibility of transition’ retaining many conventions of form but nevertheless
failing to fulfil the expectations they arouse in the reader, instead leaving
‘meaning’ open to contradictory interpretations in a style which is
characteristic of modernist literature.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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*This was published in 1957 from a lecture given by Goddard
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