A 20-C Inheritance: From Woolf to Murdoch and Winterson
Originally presented in part at the South Central Modern Language
Association Conference, Fall 2000.
As I sat down to think about
this writing project, I was suddenly struck by its portentous
meaning. We have come or we will come, depending on your perspective,
to the end of the twentieth century in the next two months. In
my studies, my particular field of specialization is this time
period– its literature, history, science, technology, politics,
cultural mores, etc. Now, it should presumably stop changing
and stand unified in time. As scholars of literature, however,
we naturally know that this is not the case. The long eighteenth
century does not sit in contentment within its temporal borders
nor did the study of the twentieth century modes and mores begin
in 1901. After further consideration, I did manage a small sigh
that at least now this canon should begin to take account of
itself from a more retrospective aspect which is the purpose
of this exploration.
The past century has been one of
tremendous innovation in the realm of British Literature as a
whole, but particularly in the realm of British fiction. As the
moderns began to react against that proper society of the Victorians,
they became obsessed with traversing the boundaries of interior
and exterior. I was recently at a conference at Texas A&M
where Professor Victoria Rosner spoke at a faculty roundtable
on a book project in which she will focus on the environment
that the Bloomsbury Group occupied and their various forays into
the visual arts and even furniture making. In one slide, she
showed a Roger Fry harpsichord that looked perfectly acceptable
for any parlor when the lid was closed but on raising it, the
figure of a naked female was revealed, lounging with her body
constrained by the available space which seems to capture the
tentative raids on proper manners practiced by this group of
innovators.
It was this attitude that lead
authors to eschew the traditional reliance on an omniscient narrator,
the conventional order of chronology, and introduce stream of
consciousness narratives. As these changes took place, British
fiction authors began to venture into new genres and categories
of knowledge, such as the realms of science and philosophy. The
interdisciplinary quality of the work produced towards the latter
end of this century is astounding in its depth and breadth. The
loss of omniscience in narrative voice and chronological ordering
of plot has opened a gateway into the world of the quantum.
Many of these principles of change
have been influenced by and in some cases have anticipated Einstein's
theories of relativity and a new understanding of time. Since
the world no longer operates in a linear fashion, it is understandable
that the portrayal of time becomes equally elusive. At the beginning
of the twentieth century, creative artists such as Ford Maddox
Ford, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf transformed the face of
narrative fiction. Even before the theories of Einstein were
widely popularized, these artists understood the chaos of the
twentieth century and the separation that technology had created
in the hearts of humanity.
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