Introduction
When Virginia Woolf specifically cites December of 1910 as marking significant changes in human character, she is in fact indicating a vast range of movements and international events that would define the decade. As the centuries were changing and nations were moving toward war, what was occurring was a disintegration of social systems which would in fact be reinforced by the consequences of that war. Woolf was of course not alone in addressing world changes in fiction; E. M. Forster, both in Howards End and A Passage to India, very similarly comments on the immorality of imperialism and the collapse of the British class system in general (Schwarz, 2008, 246). Then, through assessing certain works of Woolf, it seems that she is more asserting that human character changed as it both confronted and influenced shifts in thinking and behavior, an inherently exponential process. Advances in the sciences, and the emerging and catastrophic clashes between governments, acted as forces shaping character and ultimately shaping societies. As the following supports, examining the fictional characters of Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando provides insight into how Woolf interpreted the immense changes occurring in human character and the Western world as the 20th century began.
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Discussion
As a writer of both essays and fiction, Woolf would frequently incorporate the realities of the early 20th century in that fiction. Without question, these years motivated Woolf to explore gender inequality in essay form. Famously, A Room of One’s Own investigates the many layers obstructing women writers from creating in a fully free sense. Woolf argues that, as ‘fullness of expression’ is the cornerstone of great fiction, this is a tool long defined and used by men, and women face immense difficulties in applying freedom of expression when their lives themselves are denied this (Woolf, 1989, 77). The ways in which this translates to her fictional characters, however, takes varying forms, and forms supporting perspectives on gender as changing human thinking.
With the character of Clarissa Dalloway, for example, Woolf takes an interesting approach, in that she seeks to underscore a woman’s limitations in society by sympathetically presenting a woman locked in traditional norms. From the novel’s beginning, the reader is aware that Mrs. Dalloway is committed to the ‘old order’ and is immensely relieved that the end of the war has, as far as she is concerned, allowed England to be what it was. From 1910 and throughout the decade, the Western world saw upheavals never before known, as class systems were destroyed in the conflict and traditions of social rank were increasingly meaningless. What Woolf then does is underscore this reality through a heroine who is still reliant upon a past loved and familiar to her, and one distinctly British and imperialist in nature. ‘The war was over…the King and Queen were at the palace’ (Woolf, 1996, 4). Put another way, human change is emphasized by a clinging to the past, and because even Mrs. Dalloway experiences ideas and sensations new to her, and in contrast with the old order.
There are other situations in the novel wherein the changes in humans and the broader changes of the times connect, as in how Septimus is so shattered by his wartime experiences. He embodies, in a sense, the extreme disillusionment created for so many by World War I. He is deeply scarred, seeing death everywhere even when safely home (Woolf, 1996, 52), which reflects the wider changes in humanity following the horrific conflict. At the same time, Woolf also uses Clarissa Dalloway to indicate, as noted, how new ideas could strike even a woman of the era who held to older norms and values. For example, and unknown to her as a symptom of discontent, Mrs. Dalloway finds herself thinking of Sally Seton in ways beyond the friendship they shared: ‘The strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the integrity, of her feeling for Sally’ (Woolf, 1996, 26). A woman’s character was changing, Wolf seems to say, because the circumstances of living in these years were reinforcing denials of possibilities and feeling women so long had accepted. This in turn must have promoted change in male thinking or values, ranging from greater understanding of a woman’s existence to an increased insistence on masculine domination.
The title character of Orlando further reveals how Woolf’s sense of human character as changing as an exponential reality, and one also delving into the more fundamental natures of both men and women. In these first years of the 20th century, both England and Western societies in general were increasingly turning to science as explaining human behavior, and there was an emphasis on the new thinking regarding genetics. In lay terms, the public was perceiving, or was encouraged to perceive, that human beings act in ways dictated by biology. Woolf was deeply interested in the directions science was taking, but she also was unwilling to accept so convenient an explanation for behavior because, to her, it could so easily be used to perpetuate the British class system (Henry, 2003, 151). In a very real sense, she comprehended that traditional patriarchies could easily manipulate the new ideas of genetics, and ignore the greater truth of men and women as unjustly defined as such by social conventions. Few characterizations in modern literature are as daring as Woolf’s exploration of gender and sexuality in Orlando, and the important aspect here is how and why Woolf literally alters the hero’s gender in the novel.
This in turn goes to Woolf’s setting the story in Elizabethan England, rather than a later century. More exactly, critics argue that Woolf’s real intent was to demonstrate how literature would have benefited from a woman’s movement so long ago (Gruber, 2012, 34). Certainly, Woolf’s own feminism was linked to, and influenced, the rising tides of feminism around her, and a feminism that may also be more accurately defined as humanism.
For example, it is important to see that the character and the novel by no means exist to promote a strictly gender issue in the sense of justice, and social and legal equality. As Orlando moves through the centuries and changes sex, the greater impact of the transformation goes to the psychological need to understand the inner self (Osborne, Sayers, 2013, 108). The original era of the story then provides a stronger foundation for understanding the powerful traditions holding human beings to specific behaviors based on gender, which in turn argues for humanism. Of course, Woolf is sometimes playful in the satire, as when Orlando considers the new thinking prompted by having become female: ”Lord! Lord!…Must I then begin to respect the opinion of the other sex, however monstrous I think it?” (Woolf, 1995, 76).
Still, this is a serious treatment of a far larger issue: ‘In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above’ (Woolf, 1995, 92). As with Mrs. Dalloway, then, Woolf presents here how she, entertaining new ideas herself, is part of a larger world in which change is simultaneously individual, influenced by advances in scientific thinking, and affecting all.
Conclusion
The early 20th century set the stage for immense change, just as the great war and other changes in societies led the way to the individual human changes in character that would shape the societies. For Woolf, gender roles are a significant factor here, but she expands the thinking to consider more deeply humanist perspectives as evidence of the changes. Consequently, the fictional characters of Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando allow for insight into how Virginia Woolf interpreted the immense changes within both human character and the Western world as the 20th century began.
- Gruber, R., 2012. Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman. New York, NY: Basic Books.
- Henry, H., 2003. Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
- Osborne, P., & Sayers, S., 2013. Socialism, Feminism and Philosophy: A Radical Philosophy Reader. New York, NY: Routledge.
- Schwarz, D. R., 2008. Reading the Modern British and Irish Novel: 1890 ‘ 1930. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
- Woolf, V., 1996. Mrs. Dalloway. Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Classics.
