Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown In a paper entitled 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown3 read to the Heretics at Cambridge in 1924, Virginia Woolf proclaimed that late in 1910 human perception and character changed and that the influence of early twentieth century novelists like H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy was on the wane. In the paper, Woolf attacked the conventional novel of her time. The crux of her argument is that the Edwardians are 'materialists' who are Concerned not with the spirit but with the body. Woolf states: “they write of unimportant things; ... they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial, and the transitory appear the true and the enduring.” Of the Edwardians, she singled Bennett out for attack. She called him the worst culprit and instanced Hilda Lessways as a novel that was concerned with house property, rent and valuation of real estates i.e. with material reality rather than life itself. Woolf used the example of an old lady travelling in a railway carriage - 'Mrs Brown in the corner - to show how the Edwardian novelists had ignored the representation of life. Novelists like Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy had devoted their energies to the representation of material details. What is Novel according to Woolf and her comments on Bennette… To Woolf, a novel should recreate 'life’ and ‘life' for Woolf is the representation of the complexities of experience and impressions. Woolf writes: “Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day* The mind receives a myriad impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent or engraved with the sharpness of steel* From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the ascent falls differently from the old..”
Fiction then is life or experiences given in a succession. The novelist is to record these successive experiences and to trace their supple and subtle interaction in people of different temperaments and convictions. It is noteworthy that Woolf cited December 1910 as the watershed in the development of the modern fiction* The date coincided with the opening of the post-Impressionist exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries* Post-Impressionist painters like Roger Fryand Van Gogh had inspired Woolf with their preoccupation with moments of existence which are individual and devoid of temporal and spatial relationships . T h e Myriad impressions of consciousness, the texture of experiences, the process of living and the colour and tone of experience constitute what she terms ‘life’. As Arnold Kettle suggests, Woolf presents in her novels *the moment-by-moment texture of feeling, the intricate pattern of reaction, the wispish, wayward flitting of consciousness, the queer changes in tempo of the responses, the taste of the food, the sudden violent swoops of emotion and the strange, enhanced significance of outside, inanimate, casual things, a shadow on the table, the pattern of cloth. The novel then becomes a framework and a loose boundary within which 'the growth and development of feeling' are presented, Woolf thinks that plot, characters, comedy, tragedy, love interest or catastrophe in the conventional sense are no longer the subject of the novel. All feelings, all thoughts, every atom of the brain and every slight change in spirit are the 'proper stuff of fiction1. This attitude is, of course, potentially dangerous. As Frank Bradbrook suggests, 'the novelist may merely end by reproducing the chaos from which it is the function of intelligence to save us’. Experience is a flux. However, in representing the flux, Woolf resists radical linguistic innovation. She singles out the Georgian novelists as writers who capture inner responses and emotions. ‘Mr Forster, Mr Lawrence, Mr Strachey, Mr Joyce, and Mr Eliot’ share her vision in accommodating the complexities of experience in their novels; however, she criticizes Joyce and Eliot for their lack of finesse. She finds Joyce indecent, and his ‘indecency’ in Ulysses seems 'the conscious and calculated indecency of a desperate man who feels that in order to breathe he must break the windows. At moments, when the window is broken, he is magnificent. But what a waste of energy! In her linguistic rendering of
consciousness, however, Woolf is more conventional than she imagines. Stylistically speaking, her fiction is more like James’ novels and her experimentation, unlike Joyce, is achieved without stretching the linguistic apparatus to the limit. The main objective in Woolf’s novels is the representation of the varied impressions and responses of her fictional characters. To accomplish this objective, Woolf creates multiple perspectives through which the depths of the experiencing consciousness are revealed, Woolf feels that in overemphasizing the materiality of human existence, Bennett has failed to capture the essence of life which should be the main concern of novelists. Woolf critcizes Bennett for his concern with material reality. Bennett explains his interest in materialism in his Journals. His basic assumption is that art treats as its subject all aspects of life. The author, he writes, should relate himself to the community instead of alienating himself from general humanity. While striving for the moment of perception, the author must be prepared to accept the ordinary. The author 'must be able to conceive the ideal without losing sight of the fact it is a human world we live in . This pursuit of the ideal in the ordinary leads him to reproduce in his novels the material world. Woolf’s perception of a character In 1924, in "Character in Fiction," Virginia Woolf wrote that the writers of her time must put aside the tools used by writers in the past. Arguing with Arnold Bennett, she said that it was important to try to describe the particular character of individual subject, for example, Mrs. Brown, and that one could not do so by resorting to the usual conventions of narrative. As in "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," she says that the Victorians and the Edwardians have failed to truly capture character, and in "Character," she uses the example of Hilda Lessways, a character in an Arnold Bennett novel of the same title. After quoting from the novel, Woolf points out that in all Bennett's description of Hilda's house and its cost and the surroundings, "we cannot hear her mother's voice, or Hilda's voice; we can only hear Mr. Bennett's voice telling us facts about rents and freeholds and copyholds and fines. . . .he is trying to make us imagine for him; he is trying to
hypnotise us into a belief that, because he has made a house, there must be a person living there. With all his powers of observation, which are marvellous, with all his sympathy and humanity, which are great, Mr. Bennett has never once looked at Mrs. Brown in her corner." Mrs. Brown is Woolf's representative of "human nature," and she says that the Edwardian writers (such as Bennett and Wells and Galsworthy) "have looked. . .out of the window; at factories, at Utopias, even at the decoration and upholstery of the carriage; but never at her, never at life, never at human nature. . .they have developed a technique of novel-writing which suits their purpose; they have made tools and established conventions which do their business. But those tools are not our tools, and that business is not our business. For us those conventions are ruin, those tools are death." Later in the essay VW argues that these Edwardian tools of writing "are the wrong ones for us to use. They have laid an enormous stress upon the fabric of things. They have given us a house in the hope that we may be able to deduce the human beings who live there. To give them their due, they have made that house much better worth living in. But if you hold that novels are in the first place about people, and only in the second about the houses they live in, that is the wrong way to set about it. Therefore, you see, the Georgian writer had to begin by throwing away the method that was in use at the moment." She goes on to say how the Georgian writers of her time (from 1910 on) were having difficulty, because they did not yet have new tools with which to replace the old. E.M. Forster [her friend] and D. H. Lawrence [who had a powerful contempt for Woolf] spoiled their early work by trying to use the old tools instead of throwing them away. But at least they were trying to rescue poor Mrs. Brown. And in trying to find ways to capture the reality of Mrs. Brown, writers will cause "smashing and crashing" in their destruction of literary conventions. "Grammar is violated; syntax disintegrated . . ." She refers to Joyce's "indecency" in Ulysses and Eliot's obscurity in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and The Wasteland. Of Joyce's indecency she writes that "it seems to me the conscious and calculated indecency of a desperate man who feels that in order to breathe he must break the windows." She says that these "failures and fragments"—the works of writers trying to free themselves, and literature, and human character—Mrs. Brown—
from oppressive conventions are "the sound of their axes" as they try to rescue Mrs. Brown.
And then she speaks directly to readers. Readers have duties as partners of writers. Mrs. Brown, Woolf says, "is just as visible to you who remain silent as to us who tell stories about her. In the course of your daily life this past week you have had far stranger and more interesting experiences than the one I have tried to describe. You have overheard scraps of talk that filled you with amazement. You have gone to bed at night bewildered by the complexity of your feelings. In one day thousands of ideas have coursed through your brains; thousands of emotions have met, collided, and disappeared in astonishing disorder. Nevertheless, you allow the writers to palm off upon you a version of all this, an image of Mrs Brown, which has no likeness to that surprising apparition whatsoever." She asks readers to stop being so modest and humble and "to insist that writers shall come down off their plinths and pedestals, and describe beautifully is possible, truthfully at any rate, our Mrs. Brown. You should insist that she is an old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety; capable of appearing in any place; wearing any dress; saying anything and doing heaven knows what. But the things she says and the things she does and her eyes and her nose and her speech and her silence have an overwhelming fascination, for she is, of course, the spirit we live by, life itself. "
Then she cautions the reader to be aware of the difficulty writers face in trying to capture this spirit. "But do not expect just at present a complete and satisfactory presentment of her. Tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure. Your help is invoked in a good cause. For I will make one final and surpassingly rash prediction—we are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature. But it can only be reached if we are determined never, never, to desert Mrs Brown." Man and woman scenario
Using a man and woman she sat near on the train (whom she calls ‘Mr Smith’ and ‘Mrs Brown’) as her test-case, Woolf asks: how would Arnold Bennett respond to this real-life woman sitting opposite Woolf on the train, this ‘Mrs Brown’? How would he rework her as a fictional character? For Woolf, the problem is that Bennett and his fellow Edwardian writers go about establishing how ‘real’ a character is by very materialist means, as mentioned above. For Woolf, there is something dissatisfying about such a method, and readers must not assume that writers know more about ‘Mrs Brown’ than they do. For Woolf, everyone experiences a myriad thoughts, feelings, and impressions in their day-to-day life, and this is real life, the stuff of which ‘real’ characters should be made, rather than the flesh-and-blood materialism (and focus on economic factors) which a writer like Arnold Bennett uses to make his characters ‘real’. ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’ In ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, Woolf also makes one of her most famous pronouncements, that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’. Woolf doesn’t spell out what exactly happened in December 1910 to make this sea-change occur, so we as readers are left to pick over this provocative statement. There are several reasons why 1910 might have been singled out by Woolf (writing 14 years later, remember) as an important watershed in ‘human character’:
Artistic revolution: 1910 was the year that Woolf’s friend Roger Fry (an associate of her circle known as the Bloomsbury Group) held a Post-Impressionist exhibition. PostImpressionism heralded the beginning of a new style of abstract art which moved away from realism, just as Woolf was advocating a move away from the ‘materialist’ realism of Arnold Bennett and his fellow novelists.
Political change: there were two general elections in 1910, one in January and one in December (the very month Woolf singles out in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’). The January election had produced a hung parliament with the result that there was another election later that year; the Liberals, led by Herbert Asquith, won a slight majority and his government was re-elected.
Change of king: 1910 was also the year that Edward VII died (in May) and George V acceded to the throne. So 1910 (though not December 1910) was the year in which the world stopped being ‘Edwardian’ and started being ‘Georgian’. This is perhaps significant in light of Woolf’s distinction between Edwardian writers and their conventions and their successors, whom she even calls the ‘Georgians’ (James Joyce had been mentioned in particular in her previous essay, ‘Modern Fiction’, as embodying this new spirit in fiction).
Woolf’s own manifesto? In 1910, Woolf and a number of her friends had carried out what became known as the ‘Dreadnought hoax’, which involved Woolf and her fellow Bloomsburyites disguising themselves as Abyssinian princes (complete with false beards – click on the link above to see a photo!) in order to blag their way on board the HMS Dreadnought to receive a full guided tour by the Royal Navy. Woolf was fond of proclaiming that specific moments in history – especially her own history – were great watersheds between the ‘pre-modern and ‘modern’, so perhaps her mysterious reference to 1910 is an oblique hint at her own circle of artistic friends, with the suggestion that they are remaking the world, and, also, reinventing literature. (One such anecdote involves another moment at which the world became ‘modern’, according to Woolf: in 1907 her friend Lytton Strachey showed up at the house where Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell were living. Strachey, pointing to a stain on Vanessa Bell’s dress, casually enquired ‘Semen?’
After that moment, all ‘barriers of reserve’ went down and it was okay, it seemed, to discuss such things.)
