Learning Paths » 5A Interacting
1. During Modernism some changes took place in the traditional concept of novel. The new experimental narrative strategies disrupt the concept of plot, space and time to enter characters' inner reality. As a consequence, external reality is replaced by the private room of conscience and so, a difference idea of simultaneous idea of time rendered through the use of the interior monologue and the stream of consciousness, the leitmotiv and the focus on moments of being or epiphanies to convey the utmost moment of existence. Plot is reduced to the minimum to allow subjective dynamics to come to surface. The narrator is eclipsed in order to focalize the attention on the character’s inner thoughts.
2. Mrs Dalloway mirrors the fragmentation that was taking place within her own culture and society, and provides a “delicate rendering of those aspects of consciousness in which she felt that the truth of human experience really lay For Woolf, time is a device with which she not only sets the pace of the novel, but with which she also controls her characters, setting and plot. It is also used to question ‘reality’ and the effect of that on the individual characters within the story as they journey through their day. The most dramatic way of entering the character’s consciousness is by the modes of time, those modes intimately connected with the moment of being and the way the character apprehends it emotionally.
3. At the end of XIX century, a reaction against the self-satisfying morality and rigid orthodox
respectability of the age happened. It came to be known as the Anti-Victorian reaction and brought to a climax the rebellion which the Pre-Raphaelites had already attempted. One of the literary movement of the Anti-Victorian reaction was the “Aesthetic Movement”, whose founder and theorist was Walter Pater . The movement began to develop in Paris in the 80ies, aiming to move art away from its traditional role as a teacher and moral guide. It follows that the objective of art was art’s sake. What’s more, the statement was the ideological basis for Pater’s Studies In The History Of The Renaissance(1873) : since time flows incessantly like a river towards death and there is no way of seizing its reality, Pater affirmed that art was the only way of stopping time through the intensity of the ecstatic moment. The moment of ecstasy, the full comprehension of life and destiny, time and art, in one single figure, was the only kind of success worth pursuing in life.