Literary Movements: From Edwardian to Postmodern

Edwardian and Modernist Literature

Edwardian characters, in the works of authors like Wells and Bennett, focused on the society, economy, politics, and moral state of the nation. This gave rise to an Edwardian version of the “Condition of England” novel. They differed from modernist writers in that they were not interested in the characters’ individual psychology, but in their existence as social types to criticize society. The important thing was what was narrated, not how. Modernists were experimental, while Edwardians were socially committed. However, despite his rejection of experimentalism, Wells saw himself as a modern writer because his novels conveyed the feeling of uncertainty about what to believe, which is considered quite modern.

Rejection of Traditional Realism

Traditional realism was rejected by modernist writers. This included social realism in the Victorian novel and its successor, the Edwardian novel. The realist method of representation was based on the illusion that our perception of reality *is* reality, as if our senses could have direct access to external reality and we were able to depict it in an absolute way.

Focus on Human Consciousness

Human consciousness became the main object of representation in modernist texts. Psychic realism was represented by an extremely detailed representation of the inner life, down to moment-to-moment mental processes. This meant that writers were looking at psychological life with a kind of microscope, where the characters’ subjectivity appeared enlarged, occupying most of the fictional space. It left very little space for the simple narration of external events or the description of external objects perceived by our senses.

Social realism did not disappear in most modernist texts; it simply occupied less textual space.

Psychic Realism and Stream of Consciousness

Psychic realism is represented by an extremely detailed representation of the inner life, down to moment-to-moment mental processes. Writers were looking at psychological life with a kind of microscope, where the characters’ subjectivity appeared enlarged, occupying most of the fictional space. This left very little space for the simple narration of external events or the description of external objects that can be perceived by our senses. Its main technique is the stream of consciousness, which transmits subjective content. We find an integration of psychic content and technique, flowing thoughts isolated from technique, referring to content. This technique was designed in a way that even if we cannot comprehend the words, the technique conveys the stream of consciousness of the character. We are not aware of what the character thinks, but the technique engages content: the stream of having consciousness, a state of the self that is conscious but is being unconscious. Our state of self, mind, consciousness, or identity changes all the time in a contradictory way. You can see or feel one thing now and another differently afterwards, depending on what state of consciousness you want to embody.

Narrative Techniques in Modernism

Modern relativism and uncertainty involved new literary techniques to integrate form and content:

• Open Endings: Prevent the reader from finding any final meaning or truth, since there is no final resolution.
• Multiplication of Narrative Voices: Several narrators telling the same story produces irony and ambiguity. It is used so the reader participates actively in the work and reaches their own conclusions. In Mrs. Dalloway, Peter is reliable when his perspective coincides with Clarissa’s, but unreliable when he thinks about his present life.

Temporality in Modernist Fiction

In modernist fiction, time is in our mind—our mental experience of time rather than clock time—which led to the construction of non-linear plots. Modernist writers were reluctant to trust chronological temporality as the basis of their plots because consciousness does not often follow chronological time. The time of the plot is our mental experience of time, how time really works in our mind. In the mind, past and present coexist all the time. The past constantly influences how we see our present; states of mind are changing. We can see in the same paragraph of a text that past and present are mixed, as one influences another. Our consciousness in the present is full of memories; the present carries the past with it in our memory, where past states do not disappear but interpenetrate present ones. Interaction between past and present.

Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Postmodern Eve

In Orlando, a man is magically reborn with a biologically female body, like Eve (born out of a man). In Angela Carter’s novel, the new Orlando, although biologically female, must learn how to be feminine, how to *become* a woman. “One is not born a woman, but rather, becomes one.” The new Orlando, as the new Eve, is always under a cultural compulsion to become one. Nature does not determine gender; any definition of what it is to be a woman is relative. There is no ontological definition of it. Gender is a social construction of reality.

Woolf’s novel questioned monolithic, rigid definitions of gender and sexuality, challenging the ideology of her day, which saw gender and sexual identity as fixed and essential/natural. Orlando, as a construction, as an androgynous boy, one day magically is born as a woman or with a female body. We are born with a certain body, which determines gender; feminism had to make that distinction: biology and gender are different things.

Myths and Truth in The Passion of New Eve

Carter was especially concerned about myths about femininity and its relation to masculinity, the relations between sexes. Hence, her interest in demythologizing those assumptions about femininity and the relationship between men and women. Since reality is a social construction through frames, the object of demythologizing is going to be reality that has to do with the construction of gender identity, sexual relation, and sexual identity. In fact, her interest in the myths about femininity came from herself, into her own reality as a woman. She wondered how that social fiction of femininity was palmed off on her as a real thing.

Concerning the myth of the eternal feminine embodied by Tristessa, she writes that this myth leaves women with mythical notions such as the virgin and the whore, eternal feminine, passivity, melancholy, enigma, and beauty. Tristessa embodies this paradoxically. The irony comes when we discover she has a male body; gender and sexuality are not biological but historically constructed. Moreover, her identity is changed, demythologizing not only gender aspects but also sexual ones. Carter considers that both gender and sexuality are always represented as historical/cultural constructs, so there is a distinction between biological sex and learned gender/sexual identity. Carter stresses the mutability and flexibility of identity. Tristessa is the perfect woman and embodies the myth of the eternal feminine, but it is not true; she is very passive, very beautiful, like an angel. Her function is just to be there to the eyes of spectators. She is masquerading in Hollywood films. Biologically she is a male; through that, Carter shows that femininity is a masquerade and does not depend on biology. He or she is a very good actor, and the fantasies that he/she embodies or acts out are fantasies about himself/herself.

Lastly, with respect to Mother, Mother is mythologized; she has been constructed, blending different meanings regarding motherhood.

Waiting for Godot

All commentators consider that the play is a parable or a fable because it remains on the level of abstraction. The characters are abstractions; they are all men, they have different nationalities. Godot is an abstraction. It is considered a philosophical play characterized by its existentialist ideas shaped as situations, but it is a negative parable. It portrays a philosophical play about the human condition, with characters from different backgrounds. It is due to that historical novel that has often been praised for its didactic function. Texts are dealing with history, representing people as well as places and events that are historically confirmed. The main difference is that in historiographic metafiction, a central theme is the epistemological question of how we know history. Historical novels belong to biography novels. As a postmodern historical novel, there is a contrast to traditional novels; historical novels have a pedagogical question, so we learn about people and enjoy them at the same time. Hence, the traditional historical novel considers that the historical truth that the writer is narrating, even if it is a fictional historical novel with fictional characters, is the objective, absolute truth. But a postmodern writer is not going to suppose that the historical truth represented is the absolute truth. He or she is going to offer multiple perspectives. The truth is a question of perception and is, to some extent, subjective because the historian/narrator is personally interested in those facts. Historiographic metafiction, different to traditional historical novels where history is viewed as external facts which can be shown in an objective way, as it really was, questioning the objectivity of historical representation. They even doubt the status, the nature of historical facts. Postmodern historical novels confuse the difference between history and fiction. How we can know about the past? Subjectivity and relativity are stressed.

Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Project

Virginia Woolf sought to record women’s obscure lives and the things people didn’t say—concretely, the things that women *could not* say. Literary modernism and political feminism were being integrated. A literary revolution was also a feminist revolution. Woolf found new literary forms for women while their lives were not yet being narrated. In this way, she was interested in showing the ordinary mind on the ordinary day of women. Before this, everything (the psychology of women) was being written from men’s perspective, and women were absent from history. Henceforth, Woolf’s project was the representation of women’s psychology, their own subjective relation to themselves and even to other women, their perspective of the world, their self-construction as women. The new stream of consciousness was a technique, a literary strategy that allowed the uninhibited and uncensored representation of women’s minds.

“A Woman’s Sentence”

“A woman’s sentence” does not mean a linguistic sentence but rather could be said as a utopian sentence that expresses Woolf’s desire for a new literature where the old conventions, repressions, and prohibitions regarding what a woman could or should express did not exist. Woolf repeatedly encountered the problem of censorship. In the late 1930s, she said, “I have been thinking about Censors. How visionary figures admonish us.” She developed it and applied it with respect to her own uses. Thereafter, a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence, considering the feminine gender, in the same sense that it would be used to describe a woman’s mind.

Look Back in Anger

In the fifties, a theatrical company was founded to create a stage of opposition with respect to commercial theatre, “The Court,” in London. The first season opened with Look Back in Anger, so it was the play that marked the beginning of modern British drama. Henceforth, there was a first opportunity for many aspiring young dramatists. In fact, it became a revolutionary image, represented by intelligent, thought-provoking theatre, normally staging plays of a political and social kind. New realism on stage: ordinary people, ordinary life, the authentic tone of the 1950s—desperate, savage, resentful, and at times even funny. The play is intense and undisciplined, even crazy, but it is young. The play presents post-war youth as it really is. Qualities were depicted there: the movement towards anarchy, the automatic rejection of official attitudes. This play was considered the model for the more ideologically radical and aesthetically experimental drama of the following decades. It was also a sociological phenomenon, rather than an artistic one. A formally rather old-fashioned play, it had an impact out of all proportion to its dramatic quality. What identified it as a clear break with the older drama was the extreme social realism—the naturalism—of its content, its setting, its characters, and the language used by the characters. The play showed a single domestic interior, but an untidy and squalid attic flat. A common situation of ordinary young people on an ordinary Sunday.

Angry Young Men

Angry Young Men is portrayed by its presentation of a young man from a low-middle-class or working-class background in a provincial setting, struggling against the barriers set by the English class system, just at the moment when these barriers became less rigid or fixed. Consequently, people of working-class origins had a university education, thanks to the Welfare State. These new novels and plays were revealing important changes in society, as social realism or naturalism has always done. None of these young writers expressed themselves in political terms. They were all considered rebels without a cause.

Existentialist Ideas in The Absurd

Existentialist ideas about fundamental issues such as freedom and authenticity are being represented negatively, not positively. This play represents the ideals negatively. The characters are negative role models of people that are authentically free (not alienated). They are not free, not living an authentic life, do not project their future, they act passively. The characters’ names represent different nationalities, a world condition in which all humanity is involved. A human condition beyond nationality, the play not only lacks characters in the traditional realistic sense but also a plot; the play is telling no story.

Temporality

A mental experience of time, where the past and particularly the future is shaping the present. It is in time that the goal is pursued and that freedom verifies itself by escaping the absurdity of the pure moment. Time as a mental experience. Time of a person that is being alienated, a person that prefers not to be free, forgets the past and does not project himself into the future.

Freedom

Represents people who are tragically self-alienated and who lead inauthentic lives because they decide not to make their lives meaningful and purposeful; they prefer not to bear responsibility for their own lives and the world, not to be committed to concrete projects and goals. They choose not to be free.

Authenticity

When we pursue to create meaning and purpose, life does not make sense in principle; it is up to you to give it meaning and value, according to the meaning chosen.

Language in The Absurd

Language is not used to communicate but totally the opposite: to evade communication. What happens on the stage is more important than what is being told; words may be often ordinary or they simply do not make sense, but what matters dramatically is the moment in which they are spoken. Language is used as merely one component of the play; the stage is a multidimensional medium where visual objects, light, and movement may be highly significant. Absurd not only situations but also objects which transmit more meaning than words. These are symbolic objects, for instance, a hat. Language is often reduced to a meaningless pattern; it is often deprived of logic, or it can also contradict the action.

The America in The Passion of New Eve

The America that Carter shows in The Passion of New Eve is the symbolic space of the postmodern condition, an anarchic scenery of a plural world. This is typical of a culture moving fast, provoking great changes, in a chaotic state. What postmodernist fiction represents is the pluralistic and anarchic reality of advanced capitalist cultures. Some postmodern writers classify this space as “the zone.” In the zone, numerous fragmented worlds exist together. There are a few favored geographic areas chosen as zones throughout postmodernist fiction; America is one of them. The postmodern condition is chaotic; this world is full of chaos and anarchy; many different world visions are juxtaposed/conflicted, different world views, not making sense when put together. The hero/heroine of The Passion of New Eve is continuously moving from east to west across a future America, delegating into confronted cities. Each city shows a different scenery. The meaning of war in this case is one of the sources of the term “zone”: the war zone, the inhabited zone. The fictional representation of the postmodernist zone means that the work asks ontological questions about the postmodern world.

Linguistic Self-Consciousness and Metafiction

Linguistic awareness or consciousness, the power of words/symbols that construct worlds, is explicit and clearly present. It is fully thematized. Certain texts clearly point to the fact that they *are* texts; their own identity is a linguistic as well as a narrative one. So, it is generally true that all literary texts are constituted of words; the evident variety of self-consciousness about the processes of language thematizes both this fact and awareness of it. The objective can be either the immense power of words in creating worlds or the inadequacy of language. Linguistic relativism represents that the novel is defying a clear-cut, absolute definition, in such a way that its linguistic instability is part of its definition. Novels are created through the integration of different forms of communication, different languages, genres, or discourses, histories, memoirs. No dominant language or discourse; the different languages relativize each other.

Metafiction foregrounds and examines framing procedures in the construction of both the real world and novels. The main question that can be found in metafiction is ontological, having regard to what is the relation between reality and fiction, life and art, which raises the question, what separates reality from fiction? There is no simple dichotomy: reality/fiction, life/art. Metafiction doesn’t separate art or fiction from life or reality.

Historiographic Metafiction

In the traditional historical novel, the combination of fiction and history maintains the realist demand for objectivity and factual accuracy.