Liberal Humanists: the 'Bloomsbury' Group

Name: Vishva Gajjar

Roll no.: 33

Paper: 9 (The Modernist Literature)

Submit to: English Department (MKBU)

Liberal Humanists: the ‘Bloomsbury’ Group

·       The Modern Period:

The modern period traditionally applies to works written after the start of World War 1. Common features include bold experimentation with subject matter, style, and form, encompassing narrative, verse, and drama. W.B. Yeats’ words, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold” are often referred to when describing the core tenet or “feeling” of modernist concerns. Some of the most notable writers of this period, among many, include the novelists James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Dorothy Richardson, Graham Greene, E.M. Forster, and Doris Lessing; the poets W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Seamus Heaney, Wilfred Owens, Dylan Thomas, and Robert Graves; and the dramatists Tom Stoppard, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Frank McGuinness, Harold Pinter, and Caryl Churchill. New Criticism also appeared at this time, led by the likes of Woolf, Eliot, William Empson, and others, which reinvigorated literary criticism in general. It is difficult to say whether modernism has ended, though we know that postmodernism has developed after and from it; for now, the genre remains ongoing.

·       The Postmodern Period:

The postmodern period begins about the time that World War II ended. Many believe it is a direct response to modernism. Some say the period ended about 1990, but it is likely too soon to declare this period closed. Poststructuralist literary theory and criticism developed during this time. Some notable writers of the period include Samuel Beckett, Joseph Heller, Anthony Burgess, John Fowles, Penelope M. Lively, and Iain Banks. Many postmodern authors wrote during the modern period as well.

·       Characteristics:

1.      In contrast to the Romantic world view, the Modernist writers care little for nature.

2.      In their literary works, The Modernist writers were interested in deeper reality than surface reality.

3.      Most of the literary works of the Modern Age were influenced by the disillusionment that came after the World War II

4.      Irony, satire and comparisons are used frequently to illustrate points used frequently to illustrate points in regard to society.

5.      Modern Literature with its modern themes and techniques appeared as a reaction against the Victorian Age with its restrictions and traditions.

6.      Modernist fiction spoke of inner self and consciousness and many writers of that age adapted the stream of consciousness technique in their writings, such as James Joyce in his literary work: Ulysses

7.      Earlier, most literature had a clear beginning, middle and end, the Modernist story was often a more of a stream of consciousness.

·       The ‘Bloomsbursy’ Group:

The Bloomsbury Group was a circle of writers, artists and intellectuals from the Bloomsbury district of London. The Bloomsbury Group originally started off with 10 members and later expanded:

Virginia Woolf, writer
E.M. Forster, writer
Lytton Strachey, writer
Leonard Woolf, writer
Roger Fry, artist
Vanessa Bell, artist
Clive Bell, art critic
John Maynard Keynes, economist
Duncan Grant, artist
Desmond McCarthy, journalist

The “Bloomsbury’s,” as they were called, were mostly privileged and well-educated members of the upper middle class. Yet, what separates them from other intellectual groups at the time was that they were the only group to support gay rights, women in the arts, pacifism, open marriages, uninhibited sexuality and other unconventional ideas. Having grown up in Victorian households, the Bloomsbury Group openly rejected the old Victorian ideals from their childhoods and adopted more liberal and progressive attitudes.

Seeing Victorian society as prudish and narrow-minded, they chose to live freely and unrestricted. As the book “Great World Writers: Twentieth Century” explains: “In short, they were determined to reinvent society, at least within their own circle.”

THE REVOLT AGAINST the Victorian age can be seen as a conflict of generations. VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882—1941) will be among that select company of writers who outlive their time. At sent there is a note of uncertainty in most critiques of her work. Yet to have been a genius in some sense in which Lytton Strachey not, and in which even E. M. Forster was not. She belongs to the company of Henry range and scale of her work is so much smaller that comparison is difficult. Woolf was the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, the distinguished critic. She was brought up partly in London and partly in Cornwall. She married Leonard Woolf in 1912 and collaborated with him in the Hogarth Press, which pioneered the publication of experimental and controversial writers. Her early novels, The Voyage Out (1915) and Night novels and included Day Mrs. (1919), Dalloway were followed (1925), by To Jacob's the Lighthouse Room (1922). (1927), Later the Waves (1931), The Years (1937), and Between the Acts, which was published posthumously in 1941. Virginia Woolf was a born writer. Forster said of her that 'she liked writing with an intensity that few writers have attained, or even desired'. She derived many of her ideas from her circle and in this circle personal relationships, it seems, tended to lack depth and stability. This may partly account for the bloodless grace and cool detachment of her work. Yet in her best novels, To the Lighthouse and The Waves, we feel that her relationship with a few people mattered deeply to her. Her essential subject-matter may not differ as much as it seems to do from that of the traditional novelist. But her way of presenting it is very different. She tried to capture in her style the actual experience of life as it is lived, the flow of perceptions from moment to moment, a thought as it is actually thought, and a feeling as it is actually felt

 Woolf's first novel of promise was Night and Day. This novel is rather neglected, because its main themes are developed more convincingly in To the Lighthouse. And it remains on the whole faithful to the traditional form of the old-fashioned novel, which she was later to ridicule. Her new technique first appears in Jacob's Room, in which she draws an impressionistic sketch of a volatile young man. Mrs. Dalloway, which followed, raises the question of Mrs. Woolf's debt to Joyce. Six lives, in essence, are shown in a cross-section of time—one day in the neighborhood Of Bond Street.

By the late twenties Woolf had become the center of a cult. Her idiosyncrasies deterred readers accustomed to ordinary novels. As her journals show, Woolf was very concerned with the barometer of her own reputation, and it is possible that in the fantasy Orlando (1928), and the novel The Years (1937), she attempted to reach a wider public. But neither shows her strength as an artist. The Years looks like a compromise between the method of the ordinary novel and Mrs. Woolf's own poetic method of creation. As such, it is disappointing, and often strangely lifeless, as if Mrs. Woolf had exhausted her subject-matter.

It was in The Waves (1931) that Woolf wrote her last successful novel. This is the most experimental of her novels, the farthest from conventional notions of character, story, and plot. It shows, in semi dramatic structure, a group of characters at certain stages in their lives, different times and seasons. It is a prose poem, held together by the symbolic use of the sea, recurrently punctuating the sextet of voices with its sound and movement. The Waves is a strange book. It is as if someone were to write down their dreams, very poetically, but without comment or interpretation. The only clue to its meaning lies in Woolf's obsession with death. At the end the sea, which stands for death, has the last word: 'the waves broke on the shore'. In To the Lighthouse and The Waves the preoccupation with death is overpowering. But we also have the sense that Woolf was groping for insights of a glory that transcends the flux of change and time. She seems to have sensed that this glory did not belong to works of art or human beings in themselves, but was merely a reflection of another glory that is not in this world. Virginia Woolf, daughter of the Leslie Stephen of An Agnostic's Apology, never came near any sort of reconciliation with formal religion. But her two best novels convey her sense that the mutability which obsessed her was not ultimate and absolute. Had she survived her last illness, her art might have taken a new direction. But her last, unrevised novel, Between the Acts (1941), is aimless and drifting.

By the 1930s, the Bloomsbury group began to fall apart. Several members died suddenly, including Lytton Strachey in 1931, followed by Dora Carrington’s suicide shortly after and Roger Fry’s accident in 1934.

In 1937, the death of the first Bloomsbury group child, Julian Bell, hit the group especially hard. In 1941, with the possibility of a Nazi invasion looming and suffering from another bout of depression, Virginia Woolf killed herself. John Maynard Keynes died five years later in 1946 and Leonard Woolf passed away in 1969. The last surviving member of the group was Duncan Grant, whose death in 1978 officially brought the Bloomsbury group to an end.