Train(ing) Modernism

Abstract

In her now widely anthologized essay ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ (1924) Virginia Woolf famously claimed that ‘in or about December, 1910, human character changed’.¹ Woolf’s pronouncement, delivered initially to the Heretics society at Cambridge, morphed into a tagline for modernism, announcing the arrival of profound changes in everything from ‘human relations’ to ‘religion, conduct, politics, and litera-ture’.² These dramatic upheavals, Woolf elaborates, explain the struggle among Georgian writers to give form to their moment and to present characters whose personalities can no longer be conveyed through the conventions of their Victorian and Edwardian literary predecessors. As much an apologia for herself and her contemporaries as it is a trenchant critique of her forebears — most conspicuously, Arnold Bennett, who had recently questioned the merits of Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922)³ — Woolf’s essay pleads with its audience to accept ‘the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary’ quality of modern fiction as a genuine and, in its own way, realistic expression of a fractured, fractious and ever-changing modernity.⁴ Which is to say that ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ is not simply an aesthetic manifesto meant to herald the new and exciting styles of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot (whom Woolf proceeds to fault for certain excesses) but also something of a melancholy document marking the substitution of ‘the sound of breaking and falling, crashing and destruction’, for the more ‘melodious’ strains and rhythms of ‘Shakespeare and Milton and Keats or even of Jane Austen and Thackeray and Dickens’.⁵