The Modern Novel

I have found, to this point, several similarities between Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Forster’s Howards End and what I have determined from reading the secondary materials assigned for this week is that this resemblance is a direct result of genre more than anything else. Yes, Forster and Woolf were similar in their personal demographic and both were writing in England, but what I find to be the most common thread is the focus on character which, as Virginia herself suggests in “Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown,” is the cornerstone of successful fiction. She quotes, “The foundation of good fiction is character-creating and nothing else” (234). The importance of character creating is strongly linked with character reading, a skill which also finds manifestation in Mrs. Dalloway.
Woolf proves she not only endorses the importance of character driven narrative, but also practices it as is evident in reading her novel. Mrs. Dalloway begins by introducing the main character and speaking, ever so briefly, of her personality: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” (3). This may seem insignificant, but as Woolf stresses the importance of character in her essay, we witness her elimination of any mention of setting. She says of the modern novel, “Style counts; plot counts; originality of outlook counts. But none of these counts anything like so much as the convincingness of the characters” (234). By making the first sentence of her novel revolve around the main character, Woolf sets the tone for a character driven piece. Also present in this work is the notion of the readability of characters and importance in reading and understanding people. Woolf states that such is the “art of the young,” but aligns the skill with a character whom she prefaces as “[feeling] very young” (8). Woolf goes on to explain that “[h]er only gift was knowing people almost by instinct” (9).
Such commonalities between what Woolf thought necessary of the modern novel and what she included in her own Mrs. Dalloway are significant insofar as they speak to her savvy and foresight. Eliot expressed his view that “The novel had effectively ‘ended’” (Trotter 70), whereas Woolf felt it need only change. Trotter also expresses a changing focus on character in the modern novel, explaining that, “[f]igures in narrative fiction do tend towards cliché because they have to be made continuously recognizable despite internal and external alterations” (72). In having characters who must transcend across all lines in order to be accessible by the largest margin of readers, it seems proponents of such an approach would endorse sacrificing other narrative elements so as to concentrate on character.
Eliot endorsed making “the novel possible again by instilling into it a stricter form” (Trotter 74). However, I can’t help but read the example which Trotter provides, The Sound and the Fury, for instance, and see that the work tends much more towards the character driven fiction of which Woolf speaks, as Faulkner’s novel seems to focus exclusively on characters, sometimes at the expense of form, the former emphasized by the point-of-view of each section and the latter by the fragmented, at times convoluted, structure. That is not to say that only one, Eliot or Woolf, must be correct in their thinking; it is possible, in fact likely, that the success and longevity of the novel are a result of a sliding scale of emphasis between form and character. We know from Steinberg’s article, “Mrs. Dalloway and T.S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land” that the two intellectuals did not always see eye to eye and that “Virginia’s early reactions to Eliot were rather negative” (4). However, we also read in this piece that commonalities exist between Eliot’s famed poem and Woolf’s novel. Perhaps her incorporation of elements of The Waste Land in her own work is the ur example of what she felt was at the heart of the success of modern fiction: “Art is somehow an improvement upon the old” (1). Possibly she saw Mrs. Dalloway as an improvement on Eliot’s work and, in turn, the inclusion of such ideas an improvement on her own novel.