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CHAPTER 2. ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE 20TH CENTURY
2.1 English Literature in the First Half of the 20th Century
Two world wars and an intervening economic depression predetermined the quality and direction of English literature in the first half of the 20th century. The traditional values of Western civilization came to be questioned seriously by a number of new writers, who saw society breaking down around them. It is difficult to say exactly when the Victorian literary heritage gave way to new tendencies. In the first ten years of the 20th century some writers continued to adhere to tried and tested Victorian traditions, while others began to modify their style in accordance with the changing world around them. While the traditional novel continued to find a wide readership, there appeared more daring forms of expression which were relevant to the complexities of the new age. Among the writers who used the realistic method and traditional forms were John Galsworthy (1867–1933), William Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) and Edward Morgan Forster (1879–1970). They observed society very closely and in great detail. John Galsworthy was a novelist and playwright whose literary career bridged the Victorian and Edwardian eras. He is viewed as one of the first writers who challenged some of the ideals of society depicted in the preceding literature of Victorian England. The Edwardian era or Edwardian period in Great Britain is the period covering the reign of King Edward VII, 1901 to 1910, and is sometimes extended beyond Edward’s death to include the four years leading up to World War I. The Edwardian period is imagined as a romantic golden age of long summer afternoons and garden parties. This perception was created by those who remembered the Edwardian age with nostalgia, looking back to their childhoods across the horrors of World War I. The Edwardian age was seen as a mediocre period of pleasure between the great achievements of the preceding Victorian age and the catastrophe of the following war. As a novelist Galsworthy is chiefly known for The Forsyte Saga (1906–1921). The first novel of this vast work The Man of Property (1906) was a harsh criticism of manners and values of the upper middle classes: the narrow, snobbish, and materialistic attitudes of people from Galsworthy's own background and their suffocating moral codes. In other novels, In Chancery (1920), To Let (1921), which follow the lives of three generations of the Forsytes, the author became more and more sympathetic to the world he had judged very harshly. This development is evident than in the author's changing attitude toward Soames Forsyte, the “man of property”, who dominates the first part of the work. The most recurring themes in Galsworthy’s novels are duty vs. desire, generations and change, a woman in an unhappy marriage. The character of Irene in The Forsyte Saga is drawn from Ada Pearson, Galsworthy’s wife who had been married to his cousin. In 1932 Galsworthy won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Content Somerset Maugham became a witty satirist of the post-colonial world. He was a sophisticated world traveler, and many of his works depict Europeans in alien surroundings that provoke strong emotions. Maugham’s writing is remarkable for realistic portrayal of life, powerful character observation, interesting plots and an astonishing understanding of human nature. His manner is distinguished by economy and suspense. He avoided verbose sentimentality in favour of a clear, simple and expressive style that makes easy reading. Maugham said: “I have never pretended to be anything but a story teller.” The writer’s philosophy of life can be described as certain skepticism about the extent of man’s innate goodness and intelligence. Many of his novels and stories end with a bitter hint of irony. Maugham always wants the readers to draw their own conclusion about the characters and events described in his works. Maugham's masterpiece is generally agreed to be Of Human Bondage (1915), a semiautobiographical novel that deals with the life of the main character Philip Carey, who, like Maugham, was orphaned, embarrassed by his physical defect of a club-foot (echoing Maugham's struggles with his stutter), and like Maugham himself would live for many years in search of his calling and a place where he belonged. The novels of E. M. Forster A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910) had exposed the senselessness of abstract intellectuality and upper-class social life. Forster called for a return to a simple, intuitive reliance on the senses and for a satisfaction of the needs of one's physical being. His most famous novel, A Passage to India (1924), combines these themes with an examination of the social distance separating the English ruling classes from the native inhabitants of India and shows the impossibility of continued British rule there. A member of the Bloomsbury Group, Forster was deeply critical of the upper-middle classes from which he himself came. The structure and style of his novels was traditional, but his revolt against conventions and hypocrisies of society placed him among an avant-garde group of writers. The Bloomsbury Group was an influential group of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists. This loose collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied together near Bloomsbury, London, during the first half of the 20th century. Their works and outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality. Unlike Forster, Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) was one of a new breed of writers who came from relatively poor backgrounds. His interest and wide reading in the sciences led him to write some of the first science fiction novels in the language. The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898) were all outstanding in their ideas which seem extremely advanced for their era. Wells explored the effects of modern science and technology on men’s lives and thoughts. In the 20th century the short story became a popular and significant form of writing. One of the Content most talented short-story writers of the beginning of the 20th century was Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923). She has been seen as an originator of the modernist style, and an early practitioner of stream-of-consciousness technique. Stream of consciousness is a narrative device used in literature to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind. Another phrase for it is interior monologue. The term “Stream of Consciousness” was coined by philosopher and psychologist William James in The Principles of Psychology (1890): consciousness, then, does not appear to itself as chopped up in bits ... it is nothing joined; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let’s call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life. In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode that seeks to portray an individual’s point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character’s thought processes, either in a loose interior monologue, or in connection to his or her actions. Stream-of-consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative leaps in thought and lack of punctuation. Stream of consciousness and interior monologue are distinguished from dramatic monologue and soliloquy, where the speaker is addressing an audience or a third person, which are chiefly used in poetry or drama. In stream of consciousness the speaker’s thought processes are more often depicted as overheard in the mind (or addressed to oneself); it is primarily a fictional device. Mansfield’s best known stories are Miss Brill (1922) and ACup of Tea (1922). Above all, she is praised for her capacity to pack complex emotion and thought into simple and direct plots. Mansfield was influenced by the works of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. Her stories aim to reveal to the reader some essential truth implicit in the narration. A master of understatement, Mansfield built up each story through the description of closely observed, seemingly insignificant moments. Thus, the complexity of human relationships is shown through everyday concerns of ordinary people. Katherine Mansfield’s main subjects were the troubles of family relations, the selfishness of the rising middle classes, the social consequences of war, and people’s attempt to find beauty and vitality in their difficult lives. Aldous Huxley (1894–1936) was another novelist and short-story writer, who expressed the sense of disillusionment and hopelessness in the period after World War. Like Huxley, Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966), exposed the evils of society. His novels Decline and Fall (1928), The Loved One (1948) and Brideshead Revisited (1945) are similarly satirical and extravagant. Much of the reputation of George Orwell (1903–1950) rests on two works of fiction, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) – both directed against the dangers of totalitarianism.
Content The main line of development of the early 20th century novel represents a break with the school of realism and naturalism and a movement towards a more subtle and complex vision of man and his world. The factors that seem to be responsible for this were the total decline of social, moral and intellectual values and the development of new theories. Novelists up to the end of the 19th century had concentrated on describing people and the world from the outside. Modernist writers applied psychoanalytic theory to their work so that the inner psychology of man became as important as the external world. Modernist literature flourished in the first half of the 20th century. It was initiated by Henry James (1843–1916), Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930), James Joyce (1882–1941) and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941). Henry James was one of the first “moderns”. His interest in the consciousness of his characters and his innovative use of limited point of view made him one of the forerunners of the stream of consciousness technique.
Modernist writers, along with artists such as Picasso and Matisse, tried to find forms of expression that reflected the complexity of 20th century life. Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, known as Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. As one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement and the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works is Guernica (1937), a portrayal of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso and Henri Matisse (1869–1954) are among the artists who most defined the revolutionary developments in painting, sculpture, printmaking and ceramics. Josef Conrad shared with Henry James the central position in the development of the modern novel and explored the technical possibilities of fiction. He was one of the earliest writers to experiment with time shifts. He abandoned chronological plot and narration in favour of fragmented but highly significant flashes of thought which gave truer impressions of how the mind really works and how it perceives the world. He made use of multiple points of view, so that, one and the same event is seen from different angles and the complete shape of the story is put together through the intervention of several witnesses, each of whom knows only a fragment of the whole. Joseph Conrad, whose real name was Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski, is a unique case of a foreigner writing in English, a language that he had not learnt until his twenties, and acquiring such knowledge of the language as to come to be regarded as one of the supreme masters of English prose fiction. Conrad’s fiction is related with unusual closeness to his own experience. He was concerned with men under stress, deprived of the ordinary supports of civilized life and forced to Content confront the mystery of human individuality. His first great novel was Lord Jim (1900). It is a story of a young English officer who, in a moment of panic, deserts his ship, which he believes to be sinking, and finally finds redemption in an honorable death. His other important works are The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897) and Heart of Darkness (1902). The most important writer to use new literary techniques was James Joyce. He influenced many writers on both sides of Atlantic. The portrayal of the steam of consciousness as a literary technique is particularly evident in his major novel Ulysses (1922). Generally regarded as the greatest novel of the 20th century, Ulisses is the story of one day in the city of Dublin, written in a framework based on the Greek classic epic of the same name. Joyce wanted to present a day in ordinary life as a miniature picture of the whole human history. Joyce’s novels were paralleled by those of Virginia Woolf, whose Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) demonstrate the technique of interior monologue to great effect. The complexity of human psychology and the central importance of man’s emotional and sensual life are core features of the works of D. H. Lawrence, one of the period’s most revolutionary writers. In the semi-autobiographical Sons and Lovers (1913), the daring Women in Love (1921), and the scandalous Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) Lawrence reveals his characters’ deepest inner emotions as they strive to find renewed vitality in the materialised world. Man’s salvation, according to Lawrence, lies in rooting himself in his natural instincts. He offers sexual liberation as the means to overcome social and moral repression. Like fiction, poetry in the first half of the 20th century developed along two lines which can be broadly defined as traditional and Modernist. Traditional poems were conventional in form and did not move very far away from the canons of Victorian poetry. The traditional strand was best exemplified by the Georgian Poets, so called because much of their work was published during the reign of George V (1910 – 1936). Among traditional poets there were those who produced a unique corpus of work around the theme of war. Their work has survived to give us a gripping account of the brutality and absurdity of the war. Many of them died at the front. Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) joined the Royal Navy as an officer. While on leave, in December 1914, he wrote the five War Sonnets that made him famous. Like Brooke Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) enlisted in the army when the war broke out. Suffering from shell shock he was sent to hospital in Scotland where he met Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) who inspired him to write poetry as a form of therapy.
The term high culture embraces he moral, social, intellectual, and physical qualities that are perceived to be the most valuable to a culture. High culture is thought by many to be developed and refined by training in the tastes and manners of society. It includes aspects of culture, such as classical music, ballet, poetry, and fine arts, which involve a relatively small segment of the population. These aspects are usually the domain of the upper class or well-educated social elite, particularly in Western countries. High culture is opposed to mass culture, or popular culture. Thomas Eliot is regarded as the father of modern poetry in English. The publication of The Waste Land (1922) had a great impact on the literary world. The poem expresses the horror of a man looking at the gloomy materialistic world of nothingness surrounding him while he searches for the meaning of life. The poem includes images and allusions symbolising the spiritual emptiness of a godless society. Content As far as drama is concerned the early 20th century is dominated by George Bernard Shaw’s (1856–1950) comedy of ideas. A man of exeptional energy, Shaw was a master of innovation. His plays aim to entertain and engage the audience intellectually. In many ways Shaw saw the theatre as a vehicle for social reform, and the long prefaces to many of his works offered him the opportunity to express his views. Many of the best plays of the period were produced in Bernard Shaw’s native country. Due to the Irish Literary Revival and the openning of the Abbey Theatre in 1904, Dublin became a major theatrical centre. The most renowned Irish playwrights were John Millinton Synge (1871–1909) and Sean O’Casey (1880–1964). Synge’s description of peasant life in the west of Ireland caused scandal among a shocked public, and the first performance of The Playboy of the Western World (1907) was greeted with rioting. O’Casey’s portrayal of blind and unthinking patriotism in The Plough and the Star (1926) was also greeted with the protest of angry nationalists. As England entered the second half of the 20th century the Modernist revolution had changed the face of fiction and poetry forever. The new age that began in the 1950s would extend that revolution to the world of theatre.