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Virginia Woolf described hers as an age in which ‘character [was] dissipated into shreds,’ in similar vein, Lawrence’s writes to Edward Garnett in 1914 urging him not to ‘look in [his] novel for the old stable ego of character.’ In their public addresses, personal correspondence, novels and poems; modernist writers challenged traditional notions of wholeness of character, rendering instead what was often characterized as the fragmentary panorama of modern experience. The sense of a changing world was stimulated by urbanism, imperialism, gender roles, developing theories of psychology and anthropology, and the cataclysmic upheaval of the Great War. Attuned to these important contexts, this essay will investigate the presentation of character in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Woolf’s The Waves. It will attempt to elucidate debates on this subject and contrast the nineteenth and early twentieth century writing. An exploration of various devices, such as narrative technique and symbolism, will ensue and the question of the development of characters will be considered. Woolf’s observation of the ‘dissipation’ of character was a manifestation of the new approaches prevalent in modernist writing. The disappearance of character summary, of discrete well-demarcated characters, typically found in the writings of Victorian authors such as Dickens, is absent from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Waves. In nineteenth-century commentary, character was commonly cited as a principal object of a well-written novel. This narrative production of character emerged from and perpetuated a notion of personhood that was deeply embedded in Victorian culture. In modern texts traditional characters give way to entities like the ambiguous Stephan Dedalus and the interpenetrating voices of The Waves. Virginia Woolf wrote not only fiction, but a range of critical studies, involving herself, in many contemporary debates. A disagreement between novelists occurred when, in two essays, Woolf attacked the well known authors Arnold Bennett, H.G Wells and John Galsworth. In her first essay, ‘Modern Fiction’(1919), Woolf contrasts the accumulation of detail presented by realist authors, to the fundamental interest of the modernist writers which ‘lies in the dark places of psychology’. She goes on to describe the human mind which ‘receives a myriad of impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms.’ Woolf argues for an expression of character, with close reference to the human mind through thought, memory and desire. She juxtaposes this with the extensive recording of externalities pertaining to the person’s appearance, class, job and possessions. Life she claims is not: ‘a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever ever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little alien and external as possible?’ Bennett and Woolf agreed that the purpose of the novel was to represent character; it was the means of doing this on which they differed. Bennett berated Georgian authors such as Joyce and Lawrence for not succeeding in creating characters that were real and convincing. He argues in favour of Edwardian authors such as himself who invent ‘societies, factories and even utopias together with recognisable people living in them’. Woolf satirises Bennett’s attention to detail in her essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’: ‘Bennett convinces us so well that there is a house, in every detail, that we become convinced that a person lives there.’ She develops her argument by sketching a portrait of Mrs Brown, a lady sitting in a railway carriage, and attempts to outline the Edwardian approach to describing her – giving superfluous information but never accessing her mind and therefore, never knowing her in any meaningful sense. As an alternative, Woolf suggests that character should be presented through a plethora of memories and thoughts: ‘In one day thousands of ideas have coursed through your brains; thousands of emotions have met, collided and disappeared in astonishing disorder. Nevertheless, you allow the writers to palm of upon you a version of all this , an image of Mrs Brown, which has no likeness to that surprising apparition whatsoever.’ Despite their interest in ancient myth and ritual, modern writers broke with the literary past in more ways than they tried to preserve it. The symbolist movement foreshadowed modernism's interest in penetrating the surface of reality. Part of that new, deeper reality involved a reconsideration of the portrayal of literary characters. Virginia Woolf suggested that, ‘in or about December, 1910, human character changed.’ It has been debated whether Woolf's comment refers the death of England's King Edward VII or the first Post-Impressionist exhibition in London, but it is apparent that she detected a wave of change. Though she may have been exaggerating, the understanding and perception of human character had changed. This can be largely attributed to the writings of Sigmund Freud, concerning the power of the unconscious. Writers began to assimilate the idea the human personality, far from being a rational and comprehensible whole, was infinitely more complex than previously imagined. Consequently, the nineteenth century's tendency to define character by means of historical and social contexts was no longer adequate; newer, subtler techniques were developed to portray the irrational and unpredictable side of human nature. One such technique was the ‘stream of consciousness’ device in which a character's thoughts are reproduced as they occur, not in full sentences or in any logical sequence, but according to an associative process that depends on the conscious or unconscious connections made by each individual's mind. Interior monologue is the major component of stream-of-consciousness and as the term suggests, is a representation of the inner ‘speech’ of a character. It is distinguishable from a soliloquy in that it occurs before vocalisation. In giving credence too this pre-speech level, interior monologue gives a greater sense of psychological realism. Since interior monologue is unorganised, it is generally conveyed within third person narrative frames. To use a first person narrative implies a degree of conscious arrangement normally absent from interior monologue. Within such third person frame narratives, however, interior monologue may be either direct or indirect. In direct interior monologue, once the narrator has entered the consciousness of a particular character, that consciousness takes over entirely and the narrator does not interrupt until the end of the monologue. In indirect interior monologue the narrator intermittently intrudes upon the character's stream of consciousness. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is an example of a third-person, indirect narrative. Stephen Dedalus does not tell his story himself, but the reader is predominantly offered only what he perceives.
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