Modernism (Literature)

Among slaughterhouses and suffragists—writers of the American Modernist movement were called to the creative task of reimagining boundaries between human and nonhuman while also extending this conversation onto the site of “New Women.” The threat to “civilized man” by “primal nonhuman animal” becomes tied up with the threat of an independent “wild” woman to a system which traditionally depends upon her domestication. Female animality in modernist texts thus emerges as a symbol of both masculine anxiety and feminine liberation. When women begin to challenge traditional institutions which would see her survive exclusively by contract to a male “keeper,” men become increasingly desperate to establish an apex social, economic, and political position. As such, female animality in these texts is designed to reinforce or resist standard constructs of human/nonhuman and masculine/feminine, yet both assert the feminine-animal-character as a hybrid commodity bred for patriarchal consumption.
Despite the heteronormative compulsion to sketch woman as an elusive animal to be hunted (courtship), caged (marriage), and kept (children)—there is also an advantage in recognizing one’s place in such a “jungle,” as scholars have often described progressive-era America. By examining the intersection of animality and feminist theory within modernist literature, it becomes clear that the category of nonhuman animal is one historically manipulated through patriarchal systems to delegate women’s bodies as a site of oppression and subordination.

Margherita Luti, the daughter of a hard-working but nai've baker, Francesco Luti,
discovers her potential in La Panetteria da Francesco as she hones her craft of breadmaking,
while also adding cakes and other dolces to her repertoire. Her simple life takes
great turns as Margherita learns about new passions of hers: dolce, art, and love. After
colliding with Raphael Sanzio, one of Rome's most prominent painters, she disguises
herself as one of the elite and begins to live a life unknown and drastically contrary to the
lifestyle she had always had. Set in the backdrop of Renaissance Italy, Rita soon opens
the gates to her own inhibited desires as wells as confronting the expectations of her class
and her role as a woman. Margherita and Raphael will have to decide whether or not their
love for each other is greater than the social challenges they must face.

There is deep personal and artistic empathy for T. S. Eliot's modernist poetry in Doris Lessing's early novels and two later autobiographies. As Eliot did, Lessing uses the modernist doctrine of difficulty to portray the education and development of the writer-artist as a long, problematic process, involving prodigious, rigorous, energetic reading efforts, and self-conscious reflexive writing. Lessing also frequently quotes other authors, and she thoroughly uses subverted allusive schemes and extrusive structural complications to render realism in her narratives more vividly. Her mature aesthetic sets at a distance a sense of personal displacement, exile, and uncertain cultural identity and echoes Eliot's dictum that the Poet needed to be impersonal and to seek the significant emotion. Her search for moral intelligibility by narrative framing that combines both fiction and autobiography in autobiographical space or 'pact' may also arguably be modernist.

This study of three novels by Virginia Woolf---Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves---examines the various narrative techniques Woolf employs to construct her concept of character in the modernist novel, and also considers her related assumptions about the multiple dimensions of identity. As Woolf questions whether life and reality are "very solid or very shifting," she generates a series of framing devices---such as mirrors, portraits, dinner parties, and narratives---that acknowledge a solid, visible, and structured reality within the frame amidst a shifting, invisible, and unstructured reality outside it. Woolf's attention to the operation of the frame as simultaneously facing inward and outward enables her to umbrella this contradistinction of elements in her expression of identity. This analysis of Woolf's orchestration of multiple framed perspectives and images evidences her visionary contributions to studies in narrative and human character.

James Ensor's depictions of Belgian cities and their inhabitants offer a derisive critique of modern urban space, and the resulting societal transformations, that developed during the nineteenth century. His illustrations of the contemporary urban societies of Brussels and Ostend generally always include images of crowds and masks, elements which represent the horror and emptiness of the modern city.

The two main characters of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse interpret and find meaning in the world around them in two different ways. Mrs. Ramsey seeks a form of meaning that exists independent of her in the world. Lily, on the other hand, won't rely on meaning that is predetermined or inherent in the world outside of her own perception of it. Both of these positions are problematic because neither one of them actually allows the characters to establish a way in which to understand their world. It is only when Lily gains insight from Mrs. Ramsey's position that she is finally able to form a new, third strategy, represented in the act of painting, which allows her to create a kind of meaning that succeeds where her and Mrs. Ramsey's original strategies had failed. In the completion of her work of art she has both represented her vision and established her own way of relating to and understanding her world.