Modernism and Virginia Woolf

Woolf’s narrative style literary called stream of consciousness, correspond to the perception of time, which has to be viewed as the vital element of modernity. Therefore, before addressing to Woolf’s literary style it is necessary to describe how modernist authors were influenced by the new concept of time. Time has experienced by modernist author as a phenomenon in which past, present and future are juxtaposed at the same time; therefore, time is not the representative of chronological moment. In this sense, our experience of life is not restricted to presence rather it is a combination of unfulfilled wishes, memories and desires. To describe the concept of time in modernism, Tim Armstrong writes: the dynamization of temporality is one of the defining features of modernism: past, present, and future exist in a relationship of crisis” (modernism, 9). Metaphorically, Woolf applies Big Ben in “Mrs. Dalloway” to emphasize on the fact that, different characters: Clarissa, Peter Walsh, Septimus and others in different parts of London hear the Big Ben which associated them to different things. Moreover Woolf describes the Big Ben shortly: “irrevocable” and “The leaden circles dissolve in the air” (4) which reveal the fact that she has noticed the passing of time and also suggest the importance of time associated with individuals’ temporal experience in modern life.
After the emergence of Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, it was impossible for Woolf to ignore the effect of unconscious on the perception of reality in conscious; thereby, to perceive the mental chaos of modern human which is mainly derived from the latent crisis of modernity and the aftermath of the Great War, Woolf examines their mental life and the stream of human though...

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...s is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance” (144).
Woolf’s concerns and anxieties regarding how social and historical forces shaped individual’s life which is embodied artistically in “Mrs. Dalloway” reveals the fact that her aesthetic experience is totally different from previous literary form. For a deep perception of Woolf aesthetic experience, take into consideration the perplexity of major characters in “Mrs. Dalloway” accompanied with the way they are influenced by contradictions and ambivalences governing in the society; these approaches open the path to consider this novel a social and historical criticism. In this sense, Mrs. Dalloway expands our perception of modernism and modern aesthetic by presenting a profound critique of crisis in modernity which diminishes the vital need to literature and art.