Modernism is an aesthetic movement that covers the first three decades of the 20^th C. Its interest is the form; the aim is to find a new way to show poetries and fictions. Modernism may be considered a reaction against the Victorian Age because there is a radical transformation in the way in which people see the world, so there is a different concept of life. First of all there is a change in the concept of time: in fact during the Victorian Age the time is LINEAR; while after Albert Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity (during the Modern Age) the concept of time becomes a SIMULTANEUM concept of  time that is a mixture of past, present and future, in other words it is the time of consciousness.   

An example of Modernism Fiction is “MRS. DALLOWAY” written by Virginia Woolf. The novel is about one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway. We have analyzed three extracts of the story:

v      In the first extract Clarissa Dalloway is going out to do some shopping because she has   to organized a party. In the first two lines Virginia Woolf adopts the third person omniscient narrator. He is an omniscient narrator because he knows all about someone or something. After the first two lines she uses the interior monologue in which the reader has got the impression to be insider character’s mind. The narrator, first of all, focus the attention in the Clarissa’s status: she is married and she is member of aristocracy, so she comes from a very rich family. After that, in the course of the interior monologue, the reader can know Mrs. Dalloway’s personality. She is an insecure woman, she seems not able to make choices, because she is contradictory in a lot of part of the extract. She is scared about life and she doesn’t believed in her-self. So her characterization is made up by her thoughts, ideas and doubts. Besides the narrator utilizes a lot of technical device such as similes and repetitions to convey the nature of the obsessions of thought. The reader, through her consciousness is introduced to the other characters, particularly she tells about Peter Walsh who was in love with her; thanks this old relation ship she recalls her past. But in the end of the extract she also think about her future, and she express her feelings towards death through a quotation of Shakespeare.

v      The second extract consists in the start of the novel. She speaks about the weather and she compares it with her children hood. There are a lot of exclamation marks that give the idea to the reader to listen; there are also lots of technical device, because Virginia Wolff, who is a Modernist, focus her attention in the form in order to understand the reality. She uses alliteration, simile, metaphor, so an onomatopoeic used of language in order to try to reproduce the emotions. Right from the first part of the text we know about Peter Walsh. His characterization is made up by Clarissa’s point of view. We discover that she received letters by him, and that he is coming back to India, we can also notice that past, present and future are content in Clarissa’s mind. In the extract emerges her dynamic life and a mixture of positive and negative feelings.

v      In the last extract Mrs. Dalloway is in Bond Street. She going on up Bond Street to a shop where they kept flowers for her. When she takes her walk she observes a glove shop and this shop recalls her, her uncle William. She starts to think him and she remembers that her uncle used to say that a lady is known by her shoes and her gloves. So, also in this case the reader knows  William through Clarissa’s position. After that, she tells about her daughter, Elizabeth. Her daughter’s interest is only her dog. Mrs. Dalloway associates Elizabeth’s dog with Miss Kilman, who is a poor and religious woman: in Mrs. Dalloway’s opinion she is a monster. In the end of the extract the protagonist is arrived in front of the swing doors of Mulberry’s the florists. We can observe that there is relation between the time of narration and the chronological time.