Modernist features in virginia woolf's novel
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf brought a totally new approach to fiction in the second decade of the 20th century, her work having a common feature with the works of other two writers of the time, namely James Joyce and DH Lawrence. The thing that united the works of the three modernist writers was the common reaction against realist method as illustrated by Edwardians writers who tried to express through symbols, order, truth and justice. Virginia Woolf and the other modernist writers become aware of the importance of conscious aesthetic attention, meaning that writers are now self-conscious about the nature of their endeavour. Art and the process of art is the subject of the 20th century fiction. Virginia Woolf’s attitude to experience is aesthetic. The artists that struggle to order experience into a coherent vision become one of the concern of Virginia Woolf. Thus she tried to give coherence to the chaos of experience.
Virginia’s fiction was not a ‘criticism of life’, but a re-creation of the complexities of experience, seen as a flux that the novelist must communicate. The fiction must be adaptable to catch the ‘tones’, the light and shade of experience. The task of the novelist was also to dematerialize what was material, to de-create form and to make the novel a self-creating species, at once decomposition, and composition. The key notions of Virginia Woolf’s fiction were flux, change, time as opposed to order and form. The unique quality of her art is given by her ability to balance these notions in such a way that one enhances the other. Plot, character, comedy, tragedy and the concentration on ‘love interests’, the old conventional themes, were all disposed of, and no longer considered adequate to communicate the stream of the modern consciousness. Consciousness’ became a key word in modern fiction, the unconscious mind becomes as important as the conscious. Consciousness in not a