Modernism

Modernism ,rebelling against the previous Victorian, Romantic and realist trends in the early 20th century took the movement a step further into a world of the unconscious mind and the surreal generated by the psychological insights given by Sigmund Freud’s works who changed the understanding of the nature of the self and psyche. Another influential thinker of the 1920ies was Henry Louis Bergson and in his view intuition and immediate experience is more significant than rational science as the basis for understanding reality. In his works he used were memory, interior time, exterior time and intuition. Modernism offered a new way of understanding the world, since many people came to be disillusioned by the previous trends, on the verge of World War One. By extending the relationship between artists and the representation of reality, modernism implied a break with the past artistic conventions which created a literature of crisis and dislocation, desperately trying to shape the new world. Virginia Woolf creates a modern novel which has also most of the features of modernism. Mrs. Dalloway (her novel)as many other works describes a day in the life of its central character, Clarissa Dalloway on a June day in post-World War I England. In this novel , personality is one of the main underlying themes of Virginia Woolf’s fiction: “ Clarissa Dalloway has a private searching moment when she examines her image in the mirror. There she sees a face distinctively” pointed, dartlike definite” the familiar face, composed and tense, that her mirror reflected“many million times”. Mrs.Dalloway depicts a rapidly changing society and its narration reflects these changes. Mrs.Dalloway offers a scathing indictment of the British class system and a strong critique of the patriarchy. The work’s social satire takes much of its force from ironic.