victorianism vs. modernism: an overview liliana …

Buletinul Ştiinţific al Universităţii de Stat „Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu” din Cahul

№. 1 (3), 2016

Ştiinţe Umanistice

142

VICTORIANISM VS. MODERNISM: AN OVERVIEW

Liliana COLODEEVA,

doctorand, lector universitar,

Universitatea de Stat „Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu” din Cahul

Abstract: Under focus in the present paper is the novel of the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The purpose of the study is to

introduce the context within which the art and literature of the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries underwent a series of significant,

even radical changes. Furthermore, the study considers modernism, which

as a literary movement represents fresh, bold approaches and techniques, a

new, panoramic point of view and advanced literary and critical theories. It

departs significantly from the traditions of the Victorian period, rejecting its

realism and conservatism.

The art and literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries underwent a series of significant, even radical changes. It aimed at

escaping the traditional and classical forms specific to the Victorian period

and it embraced the idea of experimentation and avant-garde. The artistic

and literary movement called modernism struggled with the conventions and

realism of the previous period.

The term modernism itself was used for the first time in 1908 by the

British journalist, editor and literary critic Rolfe Arnold Scott-James in his

Modernism and Romance. At the time, this term was used not only to

designate something new and fashionable, but also the new literary trend of

the early twentieth century (Stevenson, 1992: 3)1.

Along with modernism, a range of other movements in literature and

the arts originated that are interrelated and have common ground: they all

involved a different perception of reality and were striving for autonomy

and individualism, while simultaneously rejecting imitation.

Worth retaining, among others, are the following:

- Impressionism (has free and liberated ideas; presupposes an

individual impression of the object, and not the imitation of the object itself;

emphasizes the subjectivity of perception);

1 Stevenson, R. (1992) Modernist Fiction An Introduction, Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hertfordshire


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- Symbolism (goes over imposed aesthetic or moral limits; centres on

the multiplicity and mobility of self; attempts to gain insight into a reality

beyond the limits of the visual);

- Futurism (rejects the static, identifies itself as a process; believes that

physical objects have their own vitality and personality; underlines all

existence);

- Cubism (rejects imitation as the principle of creation; promotes

dynamism, simultaneity and multiplicity of perspectives);

- Surrealism (attempts to surface zones that had not been explored

before; it is a reproduction of the mind in absence of any control of reason);

- Expressionism (attempts to give things a new expression infused

with subjectivity). (Dobrinescu, 2014: 36-51)1

Beyond doubt, all these new forms and trends in modern art

influenced and moulded modernist literature. As stated by Stevenson,

“along with so much contemporary art, modernist fiction changed radically

in structure and style because the world it envisaged changed radically at the

time” (1992: 8). In short, modernist fiction developed as a reaction against

the realism, traditionalism and inhibition of the Victorian age, during which,

the novelists sought to portray life as it was, in an objective, realistic

manner, while the modernists rejected realism, adopting a subjective, inward

viewpoint instead, one which was contaminated by personal experience. As

Henry James suggests, “experience is never limited and it is never complete;

it is an immense sensibility”; he, therefore, advises the younger generation

of novelists to “write from experience, and experience only” (James, 1984:

53)2.

David Lodge gives a clear definition of realism in literature in his The

Modes of Moderns Writing: “the representation of experience in a manner

which approximates closely to description of similar experience in non-

literary texts of the same culture” (1983: 25)3.

The realists tried to capture the essence of social life, with its

concerns, issues and everyday problems. The modernists, on the other hand,

presented the world through the character’s eyes. The novel of the Victorian

period has a clear form and well defined traits: it was influenced by realism,

1 Dobrinescu, A. (2014) The Discourse of Modernism. The Novel, second edition, Ploieşti: Editura

Universitatii Petrol-Gaze 2 James, H. (1984) In Edel, L. (ed.), Literary Criticism: Essays in Literature, American Writers,

English Writers. New York: Library James, Second Printing, New York 3 Lodge, D. (1983) The Modes of Modern Writing, Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern

Literature, Whitehall Company, Wheeling, Illinois


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the puritan code, and the values and vices of a double-standard society. It

expresses a concern, often obsession with the character, and it tends to guide

and instruct the reader. Finally, the emphasis is placed on social aspects. By

comparison, the modernist novel has a broken and deconstructed plot, lacks

chronology and is rich in interior monologue and free indirect discourse

(Praisler, 2005: 15-16)1. Henry James, for example, in the preface to The

Portrait of a Lady is not afraid to announce that he would rather “have too

little architecture (structure) than too much” if that threatens to meddle in

his “measure of the truth” (1995: 5)2.

The English author and academic, Malcolm Bradbury, in The Modern

British Novel, claims that the essential secret of the modern novel is that it

“came, but the Victorian novel did not completely go away” (1994: 5). In

his chapter on ‘The Turn of the Novel 1878-1900’, Bradbury presents a

comprehensive overview on the novel of the end of the nineteenth century

and counts the factors that have influenced the “turn of the novel”: social,

philosophical, psychological and intellectual. It appears that these factors

gave the modernist novel a new kind of novelist, a new kind of subject, a

new kind of reader, and a new kind of writing traditions (1994: 3)3.

The powerful tradition of Victorian fiction – moral, realistic, popular –

began to die, and something different and more complex came to emerge:

the tradition of what we now name the “modern” novel. (…) The novel was

aspiring to become a far more complex, various, open and self-conscious

form, one which, in a new way, sought to be taken seriously as “art”

(Bradbury, 1994: 1-2).

The major form of the Victorian novel is the Bildungsroman – a

German type of novel, or “education novel”, the novel of personal growth

and development. The Bildungsroman is characterized by specific elements.

Firstly, the plot evolves around one major character, whose development

and growth are presented from childhood to adulthood. Secondly, the

narrator of such novels is usually an omniscient one. Besides, the

Bildungsroman is characterized by the “cause and effect” structure of

narration. Lastly, the major character is placed in a certain social milieu that

helps his development and self-education (Golban: 2002)4.

1 Praisler, M. (2005) On Modernism, Postmodernism and the Novel, Bucuresti: Editura Didactica si

Pedagogica 2 James, H. (1995) The Portrait of a Lady, Oxford University Press, New York 3 Bradbury, M. (1994) The Modern British Novel, second edition, London: Penguin Books 4 Golban, P. The Vector of Methodology in Fiction Studies, available from

http://birimler.dpu.edu.tr/app/views/panel/ckfinder/userfiles/17/files/DERG_/7/331-352.pdf


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The modernist novel has undergone a lot of transformations in terms

of themes, point of view, perception of life, and character presentation.

While the Victorian novel is taken with both the portrayal of the character

and plot, the modernist novel, on the contrary, is concerned with the

character’s perception of life and the representation of inner reality. In

addition, the authors of modernist fiction were preoccupied not just with the

process of writing, but also with the theory of the novel. By the end of the

nineteenth century, Plato’s theory of mimesis and diegesis found a new

interpretation. As Françoise Mirguet asserts, the role and the presence of the

narrator is broached by Henry James, in the prefaces to his books, while he

explains the “germ of his ideas” (2009: 20)1.

The fiction of the twentieth century has benefited from the new

techniques of exploration of the human consciousness. A distinctive feature

of modernist fiction is the development and the employment of the stream

of consciousness technique, first introduced in his Principles of Psychology

(1890) by the American psychologist William James.

William James was the first American thinker to argue that while

ideology, or something very much like it, colours the whole of our

conceptual life as human beings, it does not, or at least need not, determine

all the ways we can reflect on this process (Gunn, 1995: 144)2.

The modernist novel was also influenced by the new tendencies in

philosophy and psychology of selfhood. In their work, the novelists of the

early twentieth century tended to explore their personal views about life and

morality, to experiment with the form of the novel and the type of the

narrator, and to have a different perception of time and space. Due to the

new theories, advanced first by William James, and then by Henry Bergson

and Mikhail Bakhtin, time was not a series of chronological moments to be

presented by the novelist in a sequence, but a continuous flow in the

consciousness of the individual, with the “already” merging into the “not

yet” (Balakrishnan, 2008)3.

Philosophers such as Bergson, Nietzche, and William James all

suggest a change in something as fundamental as the relation of mind and

world – a kind of epistemological shift, from relative confidence towards a

1 Mirguet, F. (2009) La représentation du divin dans les récits du Pentateuque, Brill, Leiden, Boston 2 Gunn, G. Thinking Across the American Grain Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism 3 Balakrishnan, G. (2008) The Genesis of a Genre: Impact of Philosophy and Psychology on Modern

Fiction, available from: http://worldlitonline.net/2008-jul/the-genesis-of-a-genre.pdf

http://worldlitonline.net/2008-jul/the-genesis-of-a-genre.pdf


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sense of increased unreliability and uncertainty in the means by which

reality is apprehended in thought (Stevenson, 1992: 11)1.

The shift in values and interests of the modernist authors provided a

smooth switch from the Bildungsroman to the Künstlerroman, a variation of

the former, dealing with the determinative and formative period of an artist.

The major character of the Künstlerroman is usually an artist that is also

placed in a certain social setting. This kind of novel expounds his or her

spiritual and artistic growth from childhood to maturity. Tony Pinkney

describes the Künstlerroman as follows:

Künstlerroman is a study of the artist’s formation. Such works end, at

least in principle, at the point where the central character has acquired

sufficient maturity and technical expertise to write or ‘paint’ or ‘compose’

the text in which he or she appears, there is a self-fulfilling circularity about

this sub-genre, with the snake ultimately swallowing its own tail. The

Künstlerroman sustains the ambition of totality, but raises it one level,

containing it entirely in the aesthetic rather than the phenomenal realm:

subject and object now converge when the fledgling artist can write the

work which presents him or her to us. Totality in this sense never reaches

the community at all, which is felt as threat to it rather than its field of

possibility, the novel now evokes that poignant, subject-centered

‘transcendental homelessness’ (1990: 32)2.

Classic examples of Künstlerroman in English literature are James

Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Henry James’s

Roderick Hudson (1875) and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927).

The Künstlerroman may also be called the reflection of the author’s mind

and life, uncovering some of its own concerns and fears of their artistic life.

“The protagonists of the modernist-proper novel are not simply involved in

daily life, but retreat from it to meditate on it, to give it coherence in terms of

vision, to come out a better person at the end of the day” (Praisler, 2005: 34)3.

To sum up, modernism as a literary movement represents fresh, bold

approaches and techniques, a new, panoramic point of view and advanced

literary and critical theories. It departs significantly from the traditions of

the Victorian period, rejecting its realism and conservatism.

1 Stevenson, R. (1992) Modernist Fiction An Introduction, Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hertfordshire 2 Pinkney, T. (1990), D.H. Lawrence and Modernism, Iowa: University of Iowa Press 3 Praisler, M. (2005) On Modernism, Postmodernism and the Novel, Bucuresti: Editura Didactica si

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