Theme: modernism in american literature contents: introduction chapter the early twentieth century literature (1901-1939). Modernism

Comprehension Questions and Tasks

1. Comment on Modernism as a major literary movement. Name the main representatives of Modernism. Explain modernists’ ideas and slogans.

2. Briefly tell Virginia Woolf’s biography. What well-known novels did she write? Comment on Virginia Woolf’s central themes in her writings. Can we call her a fighter of women’s rights? Why?
3. What writings is James Joyce famous for? Speak on the subject of Ulysses. Name all the main characters of the book. Explain: Why nowadays James Joyce remains the archetypal modern writer.
4. Tell about D.H. Lawrence’s lifetime and literary work. Comment on the critic’s words: “Novels which explore the interrelation between the individual self, the social self and nature”. Name and classify the relations between the members of the family according to their quality and intensity (Sons and Lovers).


UNIT 2. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE. NEW PERIOD. PROSE AND DRAMA

John Galsworthy

1867-1933

John Galsworthy is one of the outstanding representatives among the English authors of the close of the XIX century and the beginning of the XX century. He was an extremely intellectual man, trained for the Bar.
John Galsworthy was born in a well-to-do family in Surrey. He got his first education at home. At the age of fourteen he was sent to Harrow School, a very old and famous public school for boys. At Harrow Galsworthy distinguished himself as an excellent pupil. After Harrow he studied law at Oxford; but he did not find his studies in law exciting though he received an honours degree in law in 1889 and was admitted to the Bar. But very soon he gave up law entirely for literature. His decision was influenced greatly by Ada Galsworthy, his wife.
In 1899 Galsworthy published his first novel Jocelyn. Afterwards, at frequent intervals he wrote plays, novels and essays.
His first notable work was The Island of Pharisees (1904) where he attacked the stagnation of thought in the English privileged classes, with their reject of any emotion and their preference for a dull, settled way of life. Five following works entitled The Country House (1907), Fraternity (1909), The Patrician (1911), The Dark Flower (1913) and The Freelands (1915) show a similar attitude. Here the author criticizes country squires, the aristocracy and artists, and professes his deep sympathy towards strong passions, sincerity and true love.
However he gained popularity only after the publication of The Man of Property (1906) – the first part of The Forsyte Saga. Galsworthy had not intended to write a sequel to The Man of Property. But speaking about the Forsyte family he said: “I never meant to go on with them, but after 1918 they began to liven up again, and the whole thing then came on with a rush – six books and four interludes full of them.”
The first three books of The Forsyte Saga for which John Galsworthy was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932 – The Man of Property, In Chancery and To Let show us Soames Forsyte in his dealings with his elders and his contemporaries. The dominant theme of this trilogy is the struggle between the possession instinct which would reduce even human beings to the level of property, and the instinct for beauty and freedom which eternally eludes possession.
Other three novels – The White Monkey, The Silver Spoon and Swan Song were united under the general title A Modern Comedy (1928) – in which the younger generation of the Forsytes are depicted against the background of the post-war England. The action is centered round Soames’ daughter Fleur. The third trilogy is called End of the Chapter (1931-1933) and includes Maid in Waiting, Flowering Wilderness and Over the River.
It took Galsworthy 22 years to accomplish this monumental work. It is both a family chronicle and the history of the English bourgeois society during fifty years of gradual decay. We see World War I altering the aspect of many things, the workers movement threatening to overthrow the old economic system, uncertainty growing in morals as well as economics.
Galsworthy was also a great playwright of his time. In his plays he is a social reformer, but too often he is only an observer, trying to mete out equal justice for both sides. His best plays such as Strife (1909), The Silver Box (1909), Justice (1910), which is concerned with the evils of the prison system, and The Loyalties (1922), by many regarded as Galsworthy’s best play, attack the most pressing social issues of the day. His Strife treats of industrial warfare in tin-plate works on the borders of England and Wales. The central theme is that of class distinction. In the play The Silver Box he shows the difference between the rich and the poor in the interpretation of the law. In the tragedy Justice the barbarity of the English Penal Code is revealed; we see that “justice” is kinder to the rich man than to his poorer brother. His plays, like his novels, are often didactic; that is to say, they are directed not towards entertainment but towards enlightening the minds of their audiences, towards guiding them to the solution of social problems and to the clearing up of social abuses. They are full of ideas and thoughts, they are intellectually stimulating.
Galsworthy is not only a novelist and a dramatist, but also a short story writer and an essayist. His short stories give a most complete, and critical picture of English bourgeois society in the first part of the XX century. It is in his short stories that Galsworthy deals with the most vital problems of the day – he condemns the imperialist war, exposes capitalism that brings suffering and unemployment to the people, showing his sympathy for the so-called “little men” and reflecting their hard life and tragic fate, though his characters are mostly members of the upper middle-class, with which he was wholly familiar.
Galsworthy is a great master of exciting plots, realistic depiction of life and characters, of critical attitude towards national prejudices. He tried to revive the realistic traditions of his predecessors – the writers belonging to “the brilliant school of English novelists.” Though Galsworthy’s criticism is not as sharp and acute as that of Dickens and Thackeray, he is justly considered to be one of the greatest realists of his time. The novels and plays of Galsworthy give a most complete picture of English bourgeois society in the XX century. A bourgeois himself Galsworthy nevertheless clearly sees the decline of his class and truthfully portrays this in his works. To him it is not man who is wicked-but society that is wrong. He believes in man as all humanists do. Yet one cannot help seeing the limitations of Galsworthy’s realism. His criticism of the bourgeoisie is ethical and esthetic only. He aims to improve his class, but in no case does he want it to lose its ruling position. The descriptive talent of the author, the richness of his style, sincerity and keen sense of beauty put Galsworthy on the level with the most prominent writers of world literature.
The Forsyte Saga
The Man of Property. At the beginning of the novel we see the Forsyte family in full plumage. All the Forsytes gather at the house of old Jolyon to celebrate the engagement of Miss June Forsyte, old Jolyon’s granddaughter, to Mr. Philip Bosinney. Old Jolyon is the head of the family, eighty years of age with his white hair, his domelike forehead and an immense white moustache, he holds himself extremely upright and seems master of perennial youth. He and his five brothers and four sisters (James, Timothy, Nickolas, Rodger and others) represent the first generation of the Forsytes. All of them are rich businessmen, heads of various firms and companies – big landowners, salesmen, lawyers, publishers. With distrust and uneasiness they watch June’s fiancé – a young architect without any fortune. In their opinion Jolyon ought never to have allowed the engagement. Bosinney seems to be an impractical fellow with no sense of property, while the Forsytes consider property to be a sacred thing, the object of worship and respect. Their aim of life is to enlarge their wealth by all means. They are clinging to any kind of property – money, wives, reputation.
The most typical man of property is Soames Forsyte, a representative of the second generation of the Forsytes. Soames’ sacred sense of property even extends to works of art, human feelings and family relations.
Having married Irene, 20-year old daughter of a poor professor, a woman who has never loved him, Soames treats her as though she were his property. “Out of his other property, out of all the things he had collected, his silver, his pictures, his houses, his investments, he got a secret and intimate feeling; out of her he got none. In this house of his there was writing on every wall. His business-like temperament protested against a mysterious warning that she was not made for him. He married this woman, conquered her, made her his own, and it seemed to him contrary to the most fundamental of all laws, the law of possession, that he could do no more than own her body – if he indeed could do that, which he was beginning to doubt.”
Wanting to get his beautiful wife out of London, away from opportunities of meeting people, Soames decides to build a house in the country. He asks Bosinney to design the house, because he thinks that Bosinney will be easy to deal with in money matters. Irene falls in love with the young architect, and Soames, driven by jealousy, brings a suit against Bosinney for having exceeded the sum of money which had been fixed for the construction of the house. On the day of the trial Bosinney meets with a tragic death. Being passionately in love with Irene and depressed by the hopeless state of affairs he wanders aimlessly in the foggy streets of London and is run over by an omnibus. Irene leaves Soames. But she is forced to return to him though not for a long time. The new house remains empty and deserted.
“The Man of Property” represents a typical bourgeois who is a slave of property, which is to him not only money, houses and land, but also his wife, the works of art and the talent of artists whose works he buys. Soames believes that the souls and thoughts, ideas and love, the inspiration of a genius, the kindness and sympathy of a warm heart are all to be bought for their value in money. In his conversation with Philip Bosinney young Jolyon, a painter, the son of old Jolyon says: “We are, of course, all of us the slaves of property, and I admit that it's a question of degree; but what I call a “Forsyte” is a man who is decidedly more or less a slave of property. He knows a good thing, he knows a safe thing, and his grip on property – it doesn’t matter whether it be wives, houses, money, reputation – is his hallmark.”
Although Galsworthy depicts a concrete family of men of property – the Forsytes – he shows us at the same time the life of the class which rules the country, the upper-middle class. Every Forsyte feels great pleasure speaking about money matters. If he sees anything, he immediately states the value of it.
Extreme individualism, egoism, snobbery, an ability never to give oneself away, contempt for everything “foreign”, a sense of property and money-worship – these are the most characteristic features of the Forsytes. The collision between the sense of property and money-worship, on the one hand, and true love and a keen sense of beauty, on the other, is the main theme of the novel. Irene symbolizes beauty, Bossiney – art. But the above mentioned characters are not as vivid and full-blooded as those of the Forsytes. They are created to contrast the Forsyte clan and its evil qualities.
The second and the third novels of the trilogy – In Chancery and To Let tell about the marriage of Soames with a French girl Annet who is 20 years his junior. She doesn't love him, but she is practical. This marriage produces an heir – the daughter Fleur. Irene marries young Jolyon and they have a son – John. They represent the third generation of the Forsytes. The young people fall in love with each other, but Irene can not bear the idea of her son being in love with the daughter of the man whom she hates. They send John off to America to separate two young loving souls. Robin Hill house is sold. Hence, the title To Let. This is the end of the Forsytes efflorescence.
A Modern Comedy.
The second trilogy opens with The White Monkey. Galsworthy shows habits, customs, views and psychology of the so-called “lost generation”. The typical figure of this generation is Wilfred Desert, a poet, who falls in love with Fleur, but she refuses him and he leaves England and spends many years in the East. Fleur still longs for John. But she is hot a girl to waste time and she decided that it was better to have whatever life held for her and she soon marries Michael Mont. Fleur is the very image of colour and vitality. She is sly and cunning, acute and clever, she is self-possessed and self-restrained, she has a ready answer for everything and everybody. She could keep on the tracks she was on. She is overflowing with health and life. She is a marvel of energy. The title of the novel is allegorical. Once Soames bought a picture with a monkey eating an orange. Her eyes express the tragedy of a human soul – it seems to the monkey that there is something hidden in the orange she is trying to peel off, she tries to find it but in vain, and she is unhappy and angry. When Michael Mont saw the picture he said that it should be placed in the British Museum under the title “Civilization as it is”.
The meaning of the second novel The Silver Spoon is disclosed in the phrase concerning Fleur, Wilfred Desert, Fleur’s son Kit and others. All of them were born with the silver spoon in the mouth. “Since their birthday they had everything they needed. There was only one thing for them to do – to puzzle over something, to seek what else they could have.” Again the author pictures the aristocratic society allegorically, in the image of an old toothless woman sucking a silver spoon. She fears to let the spoon out of her mouth and at the same time she is no longer able to keep it in her mouth.
End of the Chapter
The third trilogy End of the Chapter shows the decay of an aristocratic family. We meet many young people of the new generation, among them Dinny Cherrel, who is opposed to empty society. She has the aim in her life – to save the family from ruin. Dinny is a remarkable young woman with lots of qualities (plenty of pluck, singular power of acumen, natural spring of wit not devoid of humour). But the greatest testimony to her character lies in her transparent honesty. It is out of her character to tell lies; she likes a straight deal in everything. She is as straight as a die. Dinny is a marvel of energy. Being in the know that her brother’s reputation is aspersed she sets her mind on pulling useful strings to vindicate Hubert’s honour without thinking of herself.
Talking of relations between men and women Dinny is of the opinion that affection should come first. The giving of her heart would be no rushing affair. As her old Scotch nurse used to say “Dinny knows on how many toes a pussy-cat goes.” No wonder she receives her due of respect and admiration on the part of everybody. No wonder that Hallorsen took a toss over her and Alan Fasburgh fell for her charms on sight.
We again meet Wilfred Desert who returned from the East. Wilfred Desert is brightly portrayed by the author. He is a tall young man of about thirty four, with a disdainful look about his mouth, with daring and compelling face, whose eyes were his best point. He comes from an old family and has a streak of the wanderer in him. His face gave the impression of spiritual struggle and disharmony, of dreaming, suffering and discovery. Though on his own admission he got over the war there were in him nerves not yet mended up. Wilfred is acutely unhappy from deep inward disharmony, as though a good angel and a bad one were for ever seeking to fire each other out. Wilfred is suffering from a deep spiritual discontent. He is at odds with himself according to Dinny. He has sort of enmity against people and life and his not shared love for Fleur started him as a rolling stone. He went to seek sanctuary in the East. The greatest testimony to his character is that he could see through any falsity, for it was alien to his nature.
On his return to England Wilfred Desert finds himself in complete isolation because being in the East he recanted at the pistol point and took mohammedism under the threat of life. He felt sorry that he stifled his first instinct which was to say: shoot and be damned. It was not cowardice. It was just better scorn that men can waste each other’s life for beliefs that seemed to him equally futile. Dinny and Wilfred love each other. But although Dinny is ready to fight for him and help him he again leaves England and parishes in the East.