Annotated Twentieth Century English Literature Part I Amalia Marasescu

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Tehnoredactare computerizat: Amalia Mrsescu
Coperta: Mdlina Stoian
Revizie final: Lect. univ. dr. Amalia Mrsescu
Refereni de specialitate:
ProI. univ. dr. Procopie Clonea
ConI. univ. dr. Elena Ghi
Bun de tipar: 30. 05. 2009

Descrierea CIP a Bibliotecii Naionale a Romniei

MRSESCU, AMALIA
Annotated 20-th Century English literature / Amalia
Marasescu. - Pitesti : Editura Universitatii din Pitesti, 2009-

2 vol.

ISBN 978-973-690-881-1

Partea 1. - 2009. - Bibliogr. - Index. - ISBN 978-
973-690-883-5

821.111.09

CONTENTS

Great Britain at the End of the 19
th
Century and the
Beginning of the 20
th
Century..............

7

Henry 1ames..................... 18
x Henry James`s Literary Technique........ 26
x Character Evolution. From 7KH $PEDVVDGRUV...... 34
x Questions Ior Discussion.............. 40

1ohn Galsworthy................. 41
x John Galsworthy`s Literary Technique........ 47
x Character Portrayal. From 7KH )RUV\WH 6DJD..... 49

1oseph Conrad.................. 56
x Joseph Conrad`s Literary Technique........ 61
x Setting and Atmosphere. From +HDUW RI 'DUNQHVV.. 70

David Herbert Lawrence................ 76
x David Herbert Lawrence`s Literary Technique.... 85
x The 'Healthy Relationship. From 6RQV DQG /RYHUV.. 89

British Poetry in the First Half of the 20
th
Century... 94
William Butler Yeats................. 95
x William Butler Yeats`s Literary Technique....... 97
x /HGD DQG WKH 6ZDQ............... 103

T. S. Eliot..................... 105
x T. S. Eliot`s Editorial and Literary Activity....... 106
x From 7KH :DVWH /DQG............. 112

1ames 1oyce.................... 116
x James Joyce`s Literary Technique......... 129
x Stream oI Consciousness. From 8O\VVHV...... 135

Virginia Woolf.................. 141
x Virginia WoolI`s Literary Technique....... 147
x Stream oI Consciousness. Space-Montage. From 0UV
'DOORZD\..................

154

Edward Morgan Forster.............. 162
x E. M. Forster`s Literary Technique........ 172
x Setting and Atmosphere. From $ 3DVVDJH WR ,QGLD.... 175

British Drama in the First Half of the 20
th
Century... 181
George Bernard Shaw............... 181
x The Art oI Comic Dialogue. From 3\JPDOLRQ..... 192

Bibliography................... 199

Great Britain at the End of the 19
th
Century and the
Beginning of the 20
th
Century

In an essay entitled Mr. Bennet ana Mrs. Brown,
Virginia WoolI stated that 'in or about December 1910, human
character changed. Human character does not change
overnight, but some changes did take place in the British
society, starting with the 2
nd
halI oI the 19
th
century.
AIter a long period oI prosperity, the British Empire
began to pass through an economic crisis. The decline began
around the middle oI the 1870`s and did not last longer than a
decade, but during this time the English middle class lost its
Iormer selI-conIidence. It began to Ieel the economic
competition oI Ioreign nations such as the Germans and the
Americans, and it Iaced problems with and in the colonies. The
decline in exports reduced production and diminished the
standard oI living oI the working class. Unemployment
increased. British isolationism seemed to be breaking down,
which prepared the ground Ior Ioreign intellectual inIluences (oI
major importance are the inIluences oI the French and Russian
literature, writers like Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant,
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev). The whole intellectual
development bore the stamp oI a Iight Ior Ireedom. Modernism
became the aesthetic and moral slogan oI the young generation.
The ideal oI selI-realization became the aim and content oI liIe.

AMALIA MRSESCU
8
ThereIore, while until about 1875 the young generation had
conIronted a comparatively stable society, selI-conIident in its
traditions and conventions, now all the norms oI social liIe
became problematical and open Ior discussion, being no longer
recognized as valid. Consequently, the Victorian attitude oI
acceptance oI and belieI in authority was replaced by an attitude
oI mistrust and by a desire to question everything. This involved
a growing relativity oI values.
With the death oI Queen Victoria in 1901, an age seemed
to have ended. The death oI King Edward VII in 1910 seemed to
mark the end oI a period oI relative peace. The war with
Germany began on August 4, 1914. Some gave it also as the
date Ior the ending oI the old world. Maybe it was not like this,
but World War I did break Europe into pieces, Irom a political
point oI view, and gave rise to the Iirst communist state. For
Britain it marked the beginning oI a decline that has not yet
stopped and that transIorms the great colonial power that it was
in the previous centuries into an average European state.
On the other hand, however, the Iirst decade oI the 20
th

century saw several crucial developments in the artistic Iield.
'Despite its reputation Ior being straitlaced and insular, pre-war
London had cautiously emerged both as responsive to aesthetic
novelty and as a Iocal point in the international dissemination oI
an art which seemed as distinctively modern` as it was
innovative. (Sanders 2004: 515)

Annotated 2
th
Century English Literature

9
The visual arts saw the introduction oI Cubism in 1907
and the issuing oI a Futurist Manifesto in 1909. The latter called
the arts to recognition oI modern technology, speed, noise, and
demanded the abolition oI syntax in poetry and oI the
representation oI movement in painting. In November 1910, the
exhibition Manet ana the Post-Impressionists organized by
Roger Fry in London introduced the public to the blazing
colours and visual Iragmentation oI the works oI Paul Cezanne,
Vincent Van Gogh or Paul Gauguin. Though the press mocked
at the paintings and Iew visitors laughed at them, the success oI
the exhibition changed the course oI the British painting in the
20
th
century. Thus, a second Post-Impressionist exhibition in
1912 presented, besides paintings by Matisse or Picasso, the
works oI British painters, including Vanessa Bell, Virginia
WoolI`s sister. The pictures exhibited displayed visual
economies, rethinkings oI Iorm and abstractions. In 1916 Tristan
Tzara Iounded the most radical and inIluential oI the
'abolitionist movements, Dadaism, which denied progress,
knowledge, morality, logic, memory, the past, and aIIirmed that
the emotion we need most is disgust.
The Russian ballet perIormance oI Sergei Diaghilev`s
company at Covent Garden in 1911 introduced the public to
athletic choreography and new, innovative subjects, and
revolutionized English conceptions oI dance and set design.

AMALIA MRSESCU
10
AIter William Forster`s Education Acts oI 1870 that
provided compulsory primary education Ior everybody, there
emerged a socially and intellectually emancipated lower-middle
class, served by new newspapers such as the 'Daily Mail
(Iounded in 1896), the 'Daily Express (Iounded in 1900) and
'Daily Mirror (Iounded in 1903 and devoted to women`s
interests). These newspapers advocated the idea that not only the
educated and privileged lite could have access to culture and
participate in the events oI national liIe. They sponsored the
reissuing oI history books, classic novels, dictionaries and
moderately priced encyclopaedias.
Detached and semi-detached villas started to appear in
the expanding outer suburbs oI British cities. These dwellings
gave ordinary people a good quality oI liIe: conveniently sized
rooms, a garden and distance Irom the supposed annoyances oI
the town.
As a consequence oI these developments, the reading
public increased. However, its quality did not. ThereIore, Irom
the 1880`s until the 1940`s more and more novels were
published, but Iewer and Iewer oI them had any pretension oI
being literature. Fiction thus became stratiIied. There appeared
psychological novels, novels oI adventure, detective novels,
thrillers or women`s romances, each category having its own
public. In addition to that, also during the 1880`s the traditional
three-volume novel was replaced by the one-volume novel. This

Annotated 2
th

11
imposed on the novelist the necessity oI a more rigorous
selection oI material.
With the advent oI the wireless in the 1920`s, popular
entertainment moved Irom the public domain to the private,
Irom the theatre and the ballroom to the individual house.
Actors, novelists, journalists or poets directly addressed
audiences by means oI the radio. So did kings George V and
Edward VIII. Those who could aIIord enjoyed also the beneIits
oI television, starting with the late 1930`s. Television
diminished the glory and the audiences oI the cinema. The
luxurious Iilms made until the beginning oI World War II both
at Hollywood and in Britain inIluenced the perceptions oI
various novels, like Priae ana Prefuaice, Wuthering Heights,
Great Expectations, or Frankenstein. The Iilms Iollowed the
plot oI the novels or departed more or less Irom them.
As Iar as 'serious literature was concerned, in both
Iiction and poetry this is a period oI technical experiment,
paralleled by the appearance oI a new series oI ideas that were to
aIIect literature. Naturalism, impressionism, symbolism,
expressionism, the developments in natural sciences,
philosophy, anthropology and psychology are the most distinct
inIluences aIIecting literature since about 1880.
Starting with the second halI oI the 19
th
century, people
began discussing about the limits oI the scientiIic type oI

AMALIA MRSESCU
12
knowledge, looking at the same time Ior an alternative model
that was expected to explain in a better way the phenomena
associated with liIe and the living. That alternative model oI
knowledge was related with the artistic discourse and with
mythical thinking, and replaced the relationship cause-eIIect
with the accidental. The new model led to a reaIIirming oI
subjectivity, oI intuition, oI the 'perspectivated point oI view
which maintained that the result oI perception was not a
mirroring oI things but a transIormation according to an interior
model oI the observer.
Naturalism asserts the supreme importance oI heredity
and environment, and Iinds its best material in the lowest and
most revolting aspects oI liIe. It oIIers detailed evidence and
discards literary ornament.
Impressionism is based on the idea that in conveying to
somebody the image oI an object, the observer is also conveying
his mood or disposition. Moreover, the object is suggested by
characteristic Ieatures and not reproduced by minute
elaboration. Impressionist poetry and prose are characterized by
lyricism because they present emotions, and not so much the
objective reality. The French impressionists (Marcel Proust,
Anatole France) claimed that the artist cannot surpass the limits
oI his own subjectivity. ThereIore, he expresses himselI through
the personal novel, in which he speaks in his own name, and

Annotated 2
th

13
through the kaleidoscopic novel, which combines several
narrative perspectives.
Symbolism starts Irom the idea that poetry is the
expression oI the relationships and correspondences which
language, leIt to itselI, creates between the concrete and the
abstract, the material and the ideal, etc. It is characterized by
variability oI interpretation (every symbol can be interpreted in
various ways).
Expressionism seeks to present in detail considerable
blocks oI consciousness oI one individual, in order to reproduce
the exact conditions oI the mind; the expressionist presents an
hour, a day, a week oI his character`s mental liIe as completely
as possible.
OI the anthropologists, Sir James G. Frazer (1854-1941)
had the most powerIul eIIect on literature. The Golaen Bough
(1911-1915, abridged in 1922) gave a coherent ritual pattern to a
huge mass oI disparate mythical material and underlined the
idea that underneath our skeptical and rationalizing intellects
there are traces oI a mythical thinking that aIIect our behaviour.
Frazer took as his starting point an investigation into the
succession rituals oI the priest-kings oI Diana`s Grove, a sacred
wood in ancient Italy. The rite involved the ancient custom oI
allowing a runaway slave to Iight the priest-king, kill him and
take his title iI he could Iirst pull down a bough Irom a special

AMALIA MRSESCU
14
tree. In order to explain why the successor had to kill his
predecessor and why he had Iirst to pluck the 'golden bough,
Frazer examines at large the relationship primitive man had with
the supernatural. AIter analyzing topics like tree-worship, the
nature oI the soul, royal and priestly taboos, killing the divine
king and the tree spirit, eating the god, etc., he comes to the
conclusion that the priest-king was a personiIication oI the tree
spirit. The golden bough was the mistletoe which the ancient
people believed to contain the soul oI their sacred tree, the oak.
In order to kill the priest-king, it was necessary to break the
mistletoe where his liIe was. Moreover, he could live only as
long as he could prove his divine right by his strong hand.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1938) published his Interpretation
of Dreams in 1900, and The Psychopathology of Everyaay Life
in 1901. He also believed that the primitive myths explain much
oI our conduct, and we behave in accordance with universal
patterns. Freud also introduced the idea oI subconsciousness as a
place where people store their Irustrations. Carl Gustav Jung
developed this idea Iurther and talked about the collective
subconsciousness, a common subconscious mentality that
people develop and that is reIlected in the archetype. The
inIluence oI psychoanalysis has made itselI Ielt particularly in
stream oI consciousness Iiction.
On the other hand, the advances in psychology and
psychoanalysis led to the disappearance oI the line between the

Annotated 2
th

15
normal and the abnormal. II the 19
th
century was dominated by a
strict morality and a strict bringing up oI children, a decent
Iaade being kept regardless oI what went on beyond it, in the
20
th
century more importance was given to the demands oI the
libido, which aIIected morality. At the same time, man`s sense
oI selI-responsibility was dealt a blow. Consequently, issues like
inIantile sexuality, perversions or Oedipus complex became oI
interest and started being discussed.
Another inIluence that has to be noted, as Iar as the
dealing with time and space is concerned, is that oI Albert
Einstein`s Special Theory of Relativity (1905).
All these ideas and movements are included within
modernism, a philosophical, literary and artistic trend that
covers the late 19
th
century and the early 20
th
century, though its
roots may be Iound as early as the 17
th
century. A number oI
diIIerent dates were given Ior the birth oI modernism: 1857,
when Baudelaire published Les Fleurs au mal and Flaubert
Maaame Bovary, or 1859 when Darwin`s Origin of Species
appeared, or 1899 when Arthur Symon`s The Symbolist
Movement in France was published. The works oI this period
strike us not only by their novelty, but also by their respect Ior
the past. They include the great novels oI J. Conrad, D. H.
Lawrence, E. M. Forster, J. Joyce and much oI the best poetry
written by W. B. Yeats and E. Pound. In French literature

AMALIA MRSESCU
16
Marcel Proust is an important representative, while in the visual
arts we should mention Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky,
and in music Igor Stravinsky.
The novel gains an undoubted ascendancy over all other
literary Iorms. Besides the realistic literature that presents major
problems and conIlicts in terms comprehensible to the man in
the street (J. Galsworthy, E. M. Forster), there emerges a new
novelistic method, the stream oI consciousness technique, used
by writers like V. WoolI, J. Joyce, Dorothy Richardson.
Moreover, theoretical problems connected to writing a novel are
now seriously dealt with Ior the Iirst time.
Writing tends to become a proIession, being perceived as
having common traits with the divine act oI creation. Artistic
creation is seen thus less as a production activity and more as
the result oI the irrepressible outburst oI the artistic instincts.
Modernist literature has the Iollowing characteristics:
- the omniscient method (which transIorms the writer into a sort
oI god that knows everything about everybody and everything)
tends to disappear, and the action in modern Iiction is thus
reduced to so much as can be comprehended Irom a single
human point oI view working under the ordinary human
limitations. The Iact that things are presented Irom the point oI
view oI the individual may lead to the use oI many voices and
contrasts oI perspective;

Annotated 2
th

17
- emphasis is laid on the process oI perception, which is
presented in detail;
- reality is no longer presented as a sequence oI events that
Iollow each other logically, according to a relationship cause-
eIIect, but as something that is disconnected and Iragmented;
- language is no longer seen as something transparent, that helps
us see reality, but as a complex mechanism, with multiple
meanings and various connotations;
- the world is moved 'inside, the authors present the interior or
symbolic landscape, the inner reality;
- time is seen as the result oI the overlapping oI the present with
the past and the Iuture; a distinction is made between the
objective, clock time, and the subjective time (as perceived by
the individual).
- open or ambiguous endings are preIerred, which are seen to be
more representative oI reality than closed endings in which
everything is solved;
- man appears isolated, estranged, unsure oI his position;
characters become Iluid, the identity oI each character being
made up oI multiple personalities.
As a result, the novels are no longer clearly deIined and
allow Ior various interpretations.

AMALIA MRSESCU
18
Henry 1ames (1843-1916)

Henry James was born in New York on April 15, 1843,
in a wealthy and cultivated Iamily with Iive children. His Iather,
Henry James Senior, was preoccupied with philosophy and
theology, developing a system oI his own, Iocusing on the role
oI suIIering and submission, and viewing marriage and the
diIIerence between the sexes in a conservative way. That is the
reason why the Iamily, though close together, was also
somehow oppressed. The only girl in the Iamily, Alice, suIIered
with depression partly because oI the restrictions imposed on her
as a woman. Henry`s older brother William, however, studied
medicine and became a proIessor oI physiology and later on a
psychologist. Henry was educated both in America and Europe
(Geneva, London, Paris, Bologna, Bonn), at schools or with
private tutors. He also read extensively on his own - Hawthorne,
Balzac, George Sand, Turgenev, George Eliot, and many others.
In 1862 he went to Harvard to study law, only to abandon these
studies to concentrate on writing. AIter spending much time in
England, he settled there Ior good in 1875, but became a British
subject only in 1915, a year beIore his death. James never
married, which was attributed by biographers to his love Ior his
cousin Mary (Minnie) Temple or to his alleged homosexuality.
Henry James began his literary career as a contributor to
the 'Atlantic Monthly and other American magazines. His Iirst

Annotated 2
th

19
published work was a review oI a stage perIormance, Miss
Maggie Mitchell in 'Fanchon the Cricket` (1863). Throughout
his liIe he wrote:
x short stories: A Trageay of Errors (1863, his Iirst short
story, published anonymously), The Turn of the Screw, A
Passionate Pilgrim, The Aspern Papers, The Figure in
the Carpet, The Beast in the Jungle, The Jolly Corner,
included in volumes such as The Maaonna of the Future
ana Other Tales (1879), The Aspern Papers ana Other
Stories (1888), The Birthplace ana Other Tales (1909);
x novels: Watch ana Wara (1871, his Iirst novel), and
others, that will be mentioned and discussed later;
x plays: dramatizations oI Daisy Miller and The American,
Guy Domville (1895), The High Bia (1907);
x travel books: English Hours (1905), The American Scene
(1907), Italian Hours (1909);
x critical works: Notes on Novelists (1914), The Art of
Fiction (1884);
x autobiographies: A Small Boy ana Others (1913), Notes
of a Son ana Brother (1914), The Miaale Years (1917,
unIinished);
x letters: Henry James. Letters, edited by Leon Edel
(1974-1984, 4 volumes), Henry James. A Life in Letters,
edited by Philip Horne (1999); his correspondents

AMALIA MRSESCU
20
include his brother William, but also Iellow writers like
Edith Wharton and Joseph Conrad.
He also contributed with reviews to the 'New York
Tribune.
His liIe and Iiction inspired several novels, among which
Emma Tennant`s Felony. The Private History of The Aspern
Papers (2002), Colm Toibin`s The Master (2004) or David
Lodge`s Author, Author (2004). On the other hand, many oI his
novels and stories have been turned into Iilms: The Portrait of a
Laay, The Golaen Bowl, Washington Square, The Europeans,
The Turn of the Screw, etc.
Henry James`s career as a novelist is usually divided into
3 periods:
1. 1875 (he published Roaerick Huason) 1886 (The Princess
Casamassima)
Other works belonging to this period include: The
American, The Europeans, Daisy Miller, Washington Square,
The Portrait of a Laay (considered the best oI the period), The
Bostonians. These novels are simple in both subject matter and
in literary technique, dealing with the contrast between the
young American civilization and the older European culture.
Roderick Hudson oI the novel by the same name, who is
an egotistical and exceptionally giIted, but poor artist, is taken
Irom New England to Rome by Rowland Mallet, a rich man
who intends to give him the possibility to develop his genius.

Annotated 2
th

21
Roderick is overwhelmed by the history and tradition oI
European art, and, not succeeding in Iinding a balance within
this new context, commits suicide.
Daisy Miller is a nave, but energetic and vivid
American lady who comes to Rome and discovers Italian
culture. She tries to get rid oI a sophisticated, unnatural
mentality and behave naturally as a native European. But doing
this she oIIends convention and seems to compromise her
reputation.
Christopher Newman, the hero oI The American, is
rejected by the Iamily oI the French woman he loves because he
lacks European culture and social status.
The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima are
concerned with political issues, the Iormer with the rise oI
Ieminism, the latter with leIt politics and a terrorist assassination
plot. In these two novels, James was the chronicler oI his age,
the historian oI his own time.
Washington Square is one oI the Iew Jamesian novels set
in the United States, a tragicomedy on the conIlict between a
dull daughter and her tyrannical Iather on the question oI
marriage. It was compared with Jane Austen`s novels Ior its
clarity and grace and Ior its Iocus on Iamily relationships.
Isabel Archer, the heroine oI The Portrait of a Laay,
modelled on James`s cousin Minnie Temple, is another

AMALIA MRSESCU
22
American who comes to Europe, brought to England by her
aunt, Mrs. Touchett. Her development is presented in connection
with choice in love. She rejects Caspar Goodwood, a kind, rich
American, but also Lord Warburton, the English aristocrat at its
best. A third oIIer that she might reject is however not even
made by her cousin Ralph, who is too ill with tuberculosis to
consider getting married. It is courtesy oI Ralph that she is
bequeathed a Iortune by her uncle. Thus, she has the opportunity
to Iollow her inclinations. She travels to Italy, where she meets
and accepts the worse man possible, Gilbert Osmond. Isabel is
captivated by his dedication to art and by his apparent
disinterestedness, only to realize that he wants only her money
to provide his and Madame Merle`s daughter Pansy with a
dowry. Admitting that she had been deceived, both by her
husband and by Mme Merle whom she had considered her
Iriend, Isabel goes to the deathbed oI Ralph, where she again
meets Caspar and again reIuses to go with him. 'Right and
wrong are not simple matters Ior James`s great heroes and
heroines; they are related to what may be called their liIe-style.
At the moment oI choice they Ieel a categorical imperative to
behave according to their deepest idea oI themselves and oI
what they owe to selI-respect, regardless oI comIort or personal
happiness. Isabel returns to Osmond because no other course
would be Iitting to her own conception oI herselI. (...) Honour,
in Iact, is at stake. (Allen 1954: 267-268)

Annotated 2
th

23
John Carlos Rowe notes that The Portrait of a Laay was
inIluenced by George Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Anthony
Trollope, but also by John Milton`s theme oI the Iall. He
identiIies similarities between James`s novel and Hawthorne`s
The Scarlet Letter: between Isabel and Hester Prynne, Osmond
and Roger Chillingworth, Ralph Touchett and Arthur
Dimmesdale, and Pansy and Pearl. The critic also notices a
similar treatment oI sin in the two novels. Hester`s sins include
adultery, proud isolation and the condition oI exile, while
Isabel`s are her romantic isolation and her pretension to
autonomy, her Iortune and her ambition to make something oI
Osmond. In both novels, the sin is to be recognized both in the
main characters and in those who shaped their identities.
Trollope`s inIluence is Ielt in the choice oI women as centres oI
interest, and in the viewing oI compromises as sins resulting
Irom the desire oI each class to assert its authority over another.
2. 1890 (The Tragic Muse) 1899 (The Awkwara Age)
In this period he wrote two other novels, The Spoils of
Poynton and What Maisie Knew. All Iour novels are devoted to
the study oI the English character. Their protagonists are
Iemales, oIten immature, Iacing diIIiculties and Irustrations.
Maisie, Ior example, is a young girl with divorced parents, who
is Iighting to understand the adult world and to 'Iunction in it.

AMALIA MRSESCU
24
Between 1890 and 1897 James abandoned the novel and
wrote plays, which were not very successIul, but helped him
develop his technique in writing dialogues.
3. 1902 (The Wings of the Dove) 1904 (The Golaen Bowl)
This period, which also contains The Ambassaaors
(1903) represents the climax oI his career.
The Wings of the Dove has love as its central theme. The
'dove is Milly Theale, a wealthy, angelic and sick American
visiting Europe. She Ialls in love with Merton Densher, who is
in love with Kate Croy. Kate may inherit some money Irom her
rich aunt, but the latter does not like Merton, who is poor. Kate
then suggests that Merton should pretend to be in love with
Milly, who might thus be convinced to leave her money to him
when dying. He does so indeed and receives the inheritance, but
does not want it anymore. He has genuinely Iallen in love with
Milly and thinks it wicked to take advantage oI her. Moreover,
he is disappointed with Kate. He oIIers to marry Kate without
accepting the money, but she leaves admitting that something
has irrevocably changed in their relationship.
The Golaen Bowl is also a story oI love and money. A
rich Iather and his daughter, Adam and Maggie, meet a poor
couple, Amerigo and Charlotte. Amerigo marries Maggie, Adam
marries Charlotte. But Amerigo and Charlotte continue their
love aIIair till Maggie Iinds out and destroys both oI them. The
title reIers to a beautiIul crystal bowl encrusted with gold, which

Annotated 2
th

25
has, however, a barely visible crack. Some characters see it, but
keep the knowledge to themselves; others do not see it at all.
This object is a metaphor Ior the relationships in the book.
Some oI Henry James`s best Iiction is to be Iound among
his short-stories, dealing also with the clash between America
and Europe, but also with love, Iate, liIe and death. His most
Iamous short-story is The Turn of the Screw (1898), which is a
ghost story written at a time when ghosts were considered to be
scientiIically observed phenomena. It is the story oI a governess
working at a country house with two children, whom she
suspects to be controlled by the ghosts oI the previous governess
and her lover. The strange Iact is that she seems to be the only
one who sees the ghosts. However, the children know more than
they tell and are evasive when questioned. When the governess
presses the boy to open up to her, he dies.
Another interesting story is The Figure in the Carpet
(1896), a metatext about writing in general, about the diIIiculty
to truly understand a literary work or about the relationship
criticism-literature.
Many oI James`s novels were serialized in magazines
beIore being published in book Iorm, which is why he had little
opportunity to revise them beIore publication. However, he did
revise many oI his novels and short stories Ior a 23-volume New
York Eaition oI his works (1907-1909). In this edition, the

AMALIA MRSESCU
26
novels are preceded by preIaces in which he subjects his own
writings to criticism. In the Preface to The Portrait of a Laay,
Ior example, he presents some Iacts about the genesis oI the
book, which was started in Florence in the spring oI 1879, and
was continued in Venice in the Iollowing year. It was serialized
simultaneously in the USA (the 'Atlantic Monthly) and
England ('Macmillan`s Magazine) in 1880. He did not start
Irom the plot, but Irom the construction oI the main character.
His intention was not to Iocus on the heroine`s relationship with
those around her, but on her consciousness, on her relationship
with herselI. He considered this novel his most balanced work,
bettered only by The Ambassaaors.

Henry 1ames`s Literary Technique
James began as a realistic writer and ended as a
psychological novelist. He is a representative oI what has been
called psychological realism. He is also considered to be the
Iather oI modernism in British Iiction.
His work has a moral tone, though he despised the
didactic and did not believe that art ought to have a moral.
James`s work was inIluenced by George Eliot and
Nathaniel Hawthorne, but also by Henrik Ibsen, Honore de
Balzac, Ivan Turgenev.
Henry James was one oI the Iirst to view novel as an art
Iorm, to be judged only by artistic standards, and concerned

Annotated 2
th

27
with the objective and impartial presentation oI the realities oI
liIe. In his essay The Art of Fiction, he claimed that the supreme
virtue oI a novel is its air oI reality. That is why the writer`s
work is similar to the historian`s. Besides, James also considered
that no rules should stay in the way oI the novelist`s
imagination. He should enjoy total Ireedom, on condition that he
creates 'interesting novels proceeding Irom one working idea.
In his novels, James used the 'scenic method and the
'indirect approach. He turned many oI his projected plays into
novels, which explains the Iact that they are a succession oI
'scenes, in which narration, dialogue, and description blend. In
later works, descriptions develop a signiIicance in relation to the
action presented in the 'scene in which they appear. Events
Iollow one another, but we do not necessarily learn about them
in the order oI their occurrence (Ior example, one oI James`s
Iavourite devices is to present the eIIect Iirst, and then to slowly
reveal its cause). James`s technical excellence in what concerns
this method was viewed at the same time as his downIall
because it was perceived as artiIicial. James`s scenic method
reaches its most complete expression in his work beginning with
The Ambassaaors, a novel in which 'mere storytelling has given
way to intricate events, as on a stage. (Edel 1960: 33)
In the scenic novels, most oI what is narrated is not
presented to us directly by the author. Instead, it is Iiltered

AMALIA MRSESCU
28
through the mind oI one oI the central characters (in The
Ambassaaors everything is seen Irom Strether`s point oI view).
This is called the 'indirect approach. The characters that have a
mediating role between the author and the reader are called
'Iunctional characters (reIlectors or Iicelles). They interpret
what happens, suggest alternatives, see deeper into the matter
than any oI the other characters, and ultimately Iilter the moral
debate through their conscience. This helps them Iind more
about themselves. The reIlector characters are not narrators.
James still uses a third person narration, but the narrator
becomes unimportant and the reader gets the illusion oI being
present at the action. The use oI such a central intelligence
imposes unity upon the events related, giving them coherence
and consistency. In addition to that, it turns the novel into an
open-ended experience by leaving part oI the value oI the
experience unexpressed.
Feminist issues are also present in James`s Iiction, in his
treatment oI marriage, but also in the way in which he deals with
the psychological eIIects oI women`s subordination in a
patriarchal society. Still, James presents mostly high-society
themes and subjects and can do nothing more than just present
the psychology and sociology oI women`s servitude.
As we can see, James`s major concern is human
consciousness, the analysis oI the characters` psychology. His
characters are intelligent and very subtle people. Very oIten, he

Annotated 2
th

29
emphasizes their intelligence by making them use certain clichs
or exaggerated attitudes that become genuine mannerisms.
Though he tries to present all levels oI society, Irom working
class to aristocratic, his Iigures are usually sensitive, reIined,
sophisticated intellectuals, able to control impulse by reason and
capable oI selI-analysis. They view their motives and reactions
with detachment. James is primarily interested in a character
developing as part oI a social group. Very oIten, the respective
character is an American who has come over to Europe to
assimilate its culture, but is usually disappointed by the Old
World. Some oI the shocks which cause to the character
moments oI selI-analysis and selI-knowledge result Irom the
collision oI cultural values and emotional truths.
James`s works are built around two dominant (though
they are not the only) themes, related to each other:
1. 'the international subject (as he himselI called it), i.e. the
relationship between Europe and the Europeans on the one hand
and America and the Americans on the other hand;
2. the theme oI the innocent that is corrupted by the
sophisticated, who seems to possess the good parts sought by the
innocent.
James Iound rich material Ior the treatment oI these
themes. In almost all cases Europe is a mirage Ior the innocent
American who is attracted to the cultural and spiritual values oI

AMALIA MRSESCU
30
the Old World. In a much-quoted study about Hawthorne
(1879), James complained that American society was a cultural
wasteland, without aristocracy, court, castles, thereIore the
American writer had nothing American to write about no
manners, customs, habits, Iorms. These things, that make human
beings social, were all to be Iound in Europe, whose civilization
was regarded by him as the greatest achievement in human
history. However, his Americans` experience there is in many
cases bitter and disappointing. Usually, the pattern oI his novels
involves innocent Americans, generous and enterprising, Iull oI
candour and integrity, who live in limited environments where
they Ieel that they cannot develop. They try to transcend their
condition and start a journey oI initiation that takes them to
Europe (France, England and/ or Italy). Here, they are exposed
to a very complex contact with culture, art, manners, but also
evil. The European subtleties oI manners and morality, evolved
over many centuries, are strange and diIIicult to understand Ior
the visiting Americans, accustomed to directness oI behaviour.
This very complex experience makes them Iace a moment oI
choice between three possibilities:
1. they may give up Europe and return to America unchanged,
aIter only a superIicial contact with the Old World;
2. they may accept partial assimilation, which is quite
dangerous because it leaves them halI-European, halI-
American, i.e. neither European, nor American.

Annotated 2
th

31
Consequently, they cannot Iind their place on either
continent because they do not Iully belong to either;
3. they may accept a complete assimilation, a complete
initiation, aIter which they become both European and
American, at large on both continents, belonging equally to
both. This is the case oI Henry James himselI, but also the
case oI his hero Lambert Strether in The Ambassaaors.
Lewis Lambert Strether (named aIter Balzac`s Louis
Lambert, see Edel 1960) comes to Europe sent by Mrs.
Newsome to save her son Chad Irom the grips oI Parisian liIe
and persuade him to come back home and marry Mamie Pocock.
'Home is a town in New England called Woollett, a name that
can be associated with wool, which suggests a tangling and
restraining environment. Strether is 55 years old, which means
that he is mature enough to undergo this very important
experience. On his return, which he hopes to be successIul, he
would like to marry Mrs. Newsome, who is a widow.
Arriving in Paris, Strether Iinds Chad completely
changed. He is now in the company oI young artists (the painter
Bilham, the sculptor Gloriani), and oI two beautiIul women:
Mme Marie de Vionnet and her daughter Jeanne. Mme de
Vionnet is the 'author oI Chad`s change and has Iallen in love
with her own 'creation.

AMALIA MRSESCU
32
Strether`s guide in Paris is Maria Gostrey, with whom he
talks very oIten, about anything, and who makes him discover
the beautiIul side oI Europe, oI Paris especially - its museums,
parks, caIs, but also its spirit and atmosphere. In opposition to
her is Waymarsh, a Iriend oI Chad`s, who has a negative attitude
towards Europe, Iinding the old continent a nightmare.
Discovering Paris, Strether also understands Chad`s choice and
realizes his own Iailure, brought about by his liIe in Woollett, by
the early loss oI his wiIe and child. At a party in Gloriani`s
house, he has a moment oI epiphany, understanding that he
should not waste his liIe, but should live it by discovering and
Iollowing what is beautiIul. When Mrs. Newsome calls him
back home, he does not want to return. He is no longer just her
ambassador. That is why new ambassadors arrive: Mamie
Pocock, her brother and his wiIe, Chad`s sister. But Mamie is
also taken in by the Parisian atmosphere, and enjoys a love story
with John Little Bilham.
Towards the end oI the novel, however, Strether
understands that evolution and happiness also imply choice, and
choice sometimes implies giving up. But since he has undergone
a process oI complete assimilation, he can saIely return to
Woollett, taking the whole richness oI his Parisian experience
with him. Chad remains with Mme de Vionnet, while the
Pococks and Waymarsh, those who do not appreciate Paris,
leave Ior Switzerland.

Annotated 2
th

33
The Ambassaaors is also memorable Ior some
innovations brought to novel writing by Henry James, such as:
x selective omniscience, i.e. he combined the 3
rd
person and 1
st

person narration; this combination results in an objective and
exterior narration, Iiltered through the consciousness oI the
central character;
x extension oI the narratorial discourse which introduces the
dialogue;
x special importance assigned to the dialogue, which then
appears loaded with meaning and subtext, very tensionate,
ambiguous and subversive to the reader. This type oI
dialogue allowed Henry James to develop his concept oI
'ambiguity, which, alongside his method oI dramatizing
human mind and catching it in an important moment oI
awakening anticipate the later interest in the chaotic
workings oI the human mind oI the stream oI consciousness
writers.

AMALIA MRSESCU
34
***

Character Evolution
From 1he Ambassadors, Book Twelfth, Part Five

The Iragment is practically the ending oI the novel, the
last conversation between Strether and Maria Gostrey. The
setting is Miss Gostrey`s house, that appears as a haven oI
peace, both to the reader, and to the main character himselI, but
in which he cannot be made to remain. The impression oI
warmth, calm and plenitude, even oI perIection is suggested Iirst
by the image oI the 'small ripe round melon, on which
Strether`s eyes rest, then by the 'exquisite service and
'lightened care that he is sure await him iI he gives in to the
temptation. He does not, however, even iI everything is over
between him and Mrs. Newsome. A prooI oI his evolution is the
Iact that he sees her now as he has never seen her beIore, as a
person who cannot develop and who consequently cannot
respond to his new needs. A second prooI oI Strether`s evolution
is the Iact that he was the one who insisted on Chad`s remaining
with Mme de Vionnet, recognizing, moreover, the role she
played in Iorming him, in helping him develop in the rules oI
good taste. Though many things are leIt unsaid between the two
participants in the dialogue, they do understand each other.

Annotated 2
th

35
Thus, Maria can understand why this new Strether, better and
enriched spiritually, chooses to return home.

'(...) Theres nothing more to wait for, I seem to have
aone a gooa aays work. Ive let them have it all rouna. Ive
seen Chaa, who has been to Lonaon ana come back. He tells me
Im exciting, ana I seem inaeea pretty well to have upset every
one. Ive at any rate excitea him. Hes aistinctly restless.`
'Youve excitea me,` Miss Gostrey smilea. 'Im
aistinctly restless.`
'Oh you were that when I founa you. It seems to me Ive
rather got you out of it. Whats this,` he askea as he lookea
about him, 'but a haunt of ancient peace?`
'I wish with all my heart,` she presently repliea, 'I
coula make you treat it as a haven of rest.` On which they
frontea each other across the table, as if things unutterea were
in the air.
Strether seemea, in his way, when he next spoke, to take
some of them up. 'It woulant give me - that woula be the
trouble - what it will no aoubt, still give you. Im not,` he
explainea, leaning back in his chair, but with his eyes on a small
ripe rouna melon 'in real harmony with what surrounas me.
You are. I take it too hara. You aont. It makes - thats what it
comes to in the ena - a fool of me.` (.) 'Ana I wrote to Sarah,`

AMALIA MRSESCU
36
he aaaea, 'the first thing this morning. So Im square. Im reaay
for them.` (.) Theres nothing any one can ao. Its over. Over
for both of us.`
Maria wonaerea, seemea a little to aoubt. 'Are you so
sure for her?`
'Oh yes - sure now. Too much has happenea. Im
aifferent for her.`
She took it in then, arawing a aeeper breath. 'I see. So
that as shes aifferent for you - `
'Ah but,` he interruptea, 'shes not.` Ana as Miss
Gostrey wonaerea again. 'Shes the same. Shes more than ever
the same. But I ao what I aiant before - I see her.` (.)
'What then ao you go home to?`
(.) He put the question by for the moment, he tola her
more about Chaa. 'It woula have been impossible to meet me
more than he aia last night on the question of the infamy of not
sticking to her. |to Mme de Vionnet our note|`
'Is that what you callea it for him infamy?`
'Oh rather' I aescribea to him in aetail the base
creature hea be, ana he quite agrees with me about it.`
'So that its really as if you haa nailea him?`
'Quite really as if - ' I tola him I shoula curse him.`
'Oh,` she smilea, 'you have aone it.` Ana then having
thought again. 'You cant after that propose - '` Yet she
scannea his face.

Annotated 2
th

37
'Propose again to Mrs. Newsome?`
She hesitatea afresh, but she brought it out. 'Ive never
believea, you know, that you aia propose. I always believea it
was really she - ana, so far as that goes, I can unaerstana it.
What I mean is,` she explainea, 'that with such a spirit - the
spirit of curses' - your breach is past menaing. She has only to
know what youve aone to him never again to raise a finger.`
'Ive aone,` saia Strether, 'what I coula - one cant ao
more. He protests his aevotion ana his horror. But Im not sure
Ive savea him. He protests too much. He asks how one can
aream of his being tirea. But he has all life before him.`
Maria saw what he meant. 'Hes formea to please.`
'Ana its our friena who has formea him.` Strether felt
in it the strange irony.
'So its scarcely his fault'`
'Its at any rate his aanger. I mean,` saia Strether, 'its
hers. But she knows it.`
'Yes, she knows it. Ana is your iaea,` Miss Gostrey
askea, 'that there was some other woman in Lonaon?`
'Yes. No. That is I have no iaeas. Im afraia of them.
Ive aone with them.` Ana he put out his hana to her.
'Gooa-bye.`
It brought her back to her unanswerea question. 'To
what ao you go home?`

AMALIA MRSESCU
38
'I aont know. There will always be something.`
'To a great aifference,` she saia as she kept his hana.
'A great aifference - no aoubt. Yet I shall see what I can
make of it.`
'Shall you make anything so gooa - ?` But, as if
remembering what Mrs. Newsome haa aone, it was as far as she
went.
He haa sufficiently unaerstooa. 'So gooa as this place at
this moment? So gooa as what you make of everything you
touch?` He took a moment to say, for, really ana truly, what
stooa about him there in her offer - which was as the offer of
exquisite service, of lightenea care, for the rest of his aays -
might well have temptea. It built him softly rouna, it roofea him
warmly over, it restea, all so firm, on selection. Ana what rulea
selection was beauty ana knowleage. It was awkwara, it was
almost stupia, not to seem to pri:e such things, yet, none the
less, so far as they maae his opportunity they maae it only for a
moment. She woula moreover unaerstana - she always
unaerstooa.
That inaeea might be, but meanwhile she was going on.
'Theres nothing, you know, I woulant ao for you.`
'Oh yes - I know.`
'Theres nothing,` she repeatea, 'in all the worla.`
'I know. I know. But all the same I must go.` He haa got
it at last. 'To be right.`

Annotated 2
th

39
'To be right?`
She haa echoea it in vague aeprecation, but he felt it
alreaay clear for her. 'That, you see, is my only logic. Not, out
of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself.`
She thought. 'But with your wonaerful impressions
youll have got a great aeal.`
'A great aeal` - he agreea. 'But nothing like you. Its
you who woula make me wrong'`
Honest ana fine, she coulant greatly pretena she aiant
see it. Still she coula pretena fust a little. 'But why shoula you
be so areaafully right?`
'Thats the way that - if I must go - you yourself woula
be the first to want me. Ana I cant ao anything else.`
So then she haa to take it, though still with her aefeatea
protest. 'It isnt so much your being right - its your horrible
sharp eye for what makes you so.`
'Oh but youre fust as baa yourself. You cant resist me
when I point that out.`
She sighea it at last all comically, all tragically, away. 'I
cant inaeea resist you.`
'Then there we are'` saia Strether.

AMALIA MRSESCU
40
Questions for Discussion
1. Why does Strether consider that everything is over
between him and Mrs. Newsome?
2. Explain the way in which Strether and Chad have
evolved since the beginning oI the novel.
3. What can Maria Gostrey oIIer to Strether?
4. What diIIerences are there, in Strether`s opinion,
between him and Maria?
5. Comment on the statement: 'Strether felt in it the
strange irony.
6. Comment on Strether`s remark: 'That is I have no iaeas.
Im afraia of them. Ive aone with them.
7. To what does Strether return home?
8. What are, in your opinion, the Ieelings that the two
characters have Ior each other? Motivate your answer
with extracts Irom the text.

Annotated 2
th

41
1ohn Galsworthy (1867-1933)

John Galsworthy was born at Kingston Hill in Surrey on
August 14, 1867. He was the son oI a wealthy solicitor and, in
his turn, studied law at New College, OxIord. He graduated, but
having already money, did not try to establish a practice.
Instead, he started travelling. During one oI his travels he met
and beIriended the Polish Iirst mate oI a ship, who showed him
one oI his writings. This encouraged him to take up a literary
career, as did the Polish sailor, the Iuture writer Joseph Conrad.
During World War I Galsworthy wanted to enlist in the
army, but he was rejected because he was shortsighted.
However, he worked Ior the Red Cross in France.
For his literary achievement he was oIIered a knighthood
in 1917, but he reIused it. He was awarded the Nobel Prize Ior
literature in 1932, and accepted the Order oI Merit in 1929. In
1924 he became one oI the Iounders oI PEN, the international
organization Ior writers, oI which he was also president. He died
in London.
Galsworthy wrote:
x short stories: From the Four Winas (1897, his Iirst
volume, under the pseudonym John Sinjohn), Five Tales
(1918);

AMALIA MRSESCU
42
x poems, in the volumes: Mooas, Songs ana Doggerels
(1912), Jerses New ana Ola (1926), Forty Poems
(1932);
x plays: The Silver Box (1906, his Iirst play), Strife (1909),
Justice (1910), The Skin Game (1920), Loyalties (1922),
The Show (1925);
x essays: A Justification for the Censorship of Plays
(1909), The Spirit of Punishment (1910), Two Essays on
Conraa (1930), The Creation of Character in Literature
(1931);
x letters: Autobiographical Letters of Galsworthy. A
Corresponaence with Frank Harris (1933), Letters from
John Galsworthy 1900-1932 (1970);
x novels: Jilla Rubein (1900, his Iirst novel), The Islana
Pharisees (1904, considered by him his Iirst important
work, and the Iirst published under his real name), The
Country House (1907), Fraternity (1909), The Patrician
(1911), The Dark Flower (1913). His best contribution to
the English novel is represented by the two Forsyte
trilogies, each consisting oI three novels and two
interludes:
1he Forsyte Saga:
The Man of Property (1906)
The Inaian Summer of a Forsyte (Interlude, 1917)
In Chancery (1920)

Annotated 2
th

43
Awakening (Interlude, 1921)
To Let (1921)
A Modern Comedy:
The White Monkey (1924)
A Silent Wooing (Interlude, 1927)
The Silver Spoon (1926)
Passers-By (Interlude, 1927)
Swan Song (1928)
There is also a third trilogy, consisting oI novels that
appeared between 1931 and 1933, that were assembled
posthumously under the title End of the Chapter: Maia in
Waiting, Flowering Wilaerness, Over the River; this last trilogy
contains some characters Irom the previous two, but it is not,
properly speaking, their continuation.
During his liIe, Galsworthy was mostly known and
appreciated Ior his plays. They are 'well knit, with taut action
and sparse, realistic dialogue; he had an ear Ior language, as his
adept use oI dialect proves. People and situations are presented
objectively, and both sides oI a question are considered; the
emotion inherent in the nature oI the conIlicts motivating his
characters is not exaggerated, and rarely are situations
sentimentalized. (Hochman 1984: 232) The characters are
governed by social Iorces, that play a role similar to that oI Iate
in classic tragedies. 'Society is a corrupting Iorce, operating

AMALIA MRSESCU
44
with a dual standard oI morality and justice, one Ior the rich and
another Ior the poor. The inequities that result Irom the
intractability oI an unjust society, the evils and the waste oI
human lives, are presented in plays which are still pertinent.
(ibia.) Legal injustice, capital and labour, women`s place in
society are some oI his main themes. It is said that Winston
Churchill, Home Secretary at the time when Justice was
perIormed, was so moved with the human suIIering presented in
it that he abolished solitary conIinement in prisons.
Nowadays, Galsworthy is mostly known as a novelist,
especially Ior his masterpiece The Forsyte Saga, a roman-Ileuve
presenting the story oI three generations oI Forsytes.
The novel begins on June 15, 1886, with the engagement
oI June Forsyte to the architect Philip Bosinney. The whole
Iamily is gathered at the event. The Iirst generation is
represented by 'old Jolyon, Timothy, James, and their brothers
and sisters, the sons and daughters oI a Iarmer who made his
Iortune in house building business in London. From the second
generation, the most important character is Soames Forsyte,
James`s son. Soames, who is married to Irene, a woman who has
never loved him, decides to build a country house Ior her at
Robin Hill, on the outskirts oI London, with Bosinney`s help.
When Irene and Bosinney Iall in love with each other, Soames
Iinds out about their relationship and, asserting his rights over
his wiIe, rapes her. Bosinney is killed in a car accident, and

Annotated 2
th

45
Irene is Iorced to return to Soames, only to divorce him some
time later, aIter which she marries 'young Jolyon. Irene and
'young Jolyon have a happy marriage with a son, Jon. AIter the
divorce, Soames also gets married (to Annette Lamotte) and has
a daughter, Fleur. Jon and Fleur meet by chance, Iall in love and
would like to get married, but when Jon hears about Irene and
Soames`s past, he rejects Fleur. She marries Michael Mont,
while Jon will go with his mother to America. The action oI the
trilogy ends in 1926, when the house at Robin Hill is sold away.
A Moaern Comeay continues the story oI Fleur, Jon and
other younger members oI the Iamily. But this generation,
shaken by the dramatic events oI the Iirst two decades oI the 20
th

century (the Boer War, World War I), loses the vitality and
assurance oI the previous generations; it becomes skeptical,
introspective and selIish, being most oI the time involved in
trivial actions. The character that emerges as the only hero oI the
chronicle, thereIore deserving the sympathy oI the author, and oI
the readers, is, paradoxically, Soames, who acquires grandeur
and dignity due to his devotion to his daughter, whom he even
saves Irom Iire.
The two trilogies present not just the history oI the
Forsytes, but are also a social chronicle oI England at the end oI
the 19
th
century and the beginning oI the 20
th
century. The
Forsytes have risen with the gradual industrial and commercial

AMALIA MRSESCU
46
development oI the country. The dissolution oI the Iamily
coincides with the political, social and economic decline oI the
country.
Galsworthy calls his chronicle a saga with an implied
irony, as he explains in the preIace. Though the Forsytes have
certain qualities, they are Iar Irom the grandeur and dignity oI
the heroes oI the old Germanic tribes. They represent at Iirst a
well-consolidated clan. They are shrewd, cautious, and
tenacious in accumulating riches and in preserving themselves.
They hate intrusion, reIuse to accept other points oI view but
their own, and ignore all reality that has no commercial value or
is outside their reach. The only things they appreciate are real
estate and other properties, a generic term in which they also
include their wives. Their main characteristic is their possessive
instinct, which even becomes contagious, coming to aIIect the
people that come in contact with them. The Forsytes are 'the
apothesis oI the British merchant. (...) They live entirely in
terms oI property; money conditions them completely. It takes
the place oI Iamily aIIection, but as a linking binding them
together it is no less strong. (Allen 1954: 324) For them, what
cannot be bought does not exist. However, these attributes
become diluted in the younger generations.
In a sort oI opposition to them we Iind Irene, who
becomes a symbol oI beauty and oI its disturbing inIluence. But
she 'exists as a thin sentimentality, as does the notion oI art

Annotated 2
th

47
which Galsworthy also opposes to the standards oI the
Forsytes. (Allen 1954: 325) The character was inspired Irom
Galsworthy`s wiIe, Ada, and her marriage with Soames was
partly based on Ada`s previous marriage to one oI Galsworthy`s
cousins.

1ohn Galsworthy`s Literary Technique
John Galsworthy continued the patterns oI Victorian
Iiction, being related to authors like W. M. Thackeray or George
Eliot. He also assimilated the methods oI the French and
Russian great novelists (Zola, Maupassant, Flaubert, Turgenev,
Tolstoy), and devoted much attention to style and structure. He
was inIluenced by the French naturalists and dealt, thereIore,
with the role played by inheritance and inbred ideas, the theme
oI dissolution and decay, the motives oI Bovaric love and cyclic
evolution. However, he did not accept the rigid determinism oI
naturalistic writers and he reIused their clinical, scientiIic
approach to liIe. In addition to that, Galsworthy illustrated the
Iact that the modern epic novel was essentially an ironic novel
based on a cyclical vision (oI growth and decay) and on a
degradation oI the hero.
John Galsworthy was considered the best novelist alive
in the second decade oI the 20
th
century, but his reputation
diminished dramatically aIter his death. Thus, according to

AMALIA MRSESCU
48
Marcel Pop Cornis (1981) he came to illustrate a paradoxical
situation: he enjoyed European reputation and popularity with
the English public, but was underrated by English criticism. This
happened, according to Pop Cornis, because oI some limitations
oI his writing:
x he never went beyond the vision oI his own class (upper
middle class);
x he avoided the tougher aspects oI liIe, as he wanted to be a
perIect gentleman (this being considered both his virtue and
his Iault);
x he built conventional characters, that know, in general, only
the complications oI sentimental and domestic liIe;
x he used an exaggeratedly restrained style.
Many oI these critical points are, however, true only in
part. We cannot deny the Iact that Galsworthy gave, in his
novels, a vivid and rather comprehensive picture oI
contemporary England, he oIIered us an intricate recital oI
events and a memorable typology oI English liIe, and he is a
brilliant creator oI dialogue, atmosphere and mood.
His work was rejected by D. H. Lawrence and Virginia
WoolI, but was widely read in Europe and inIluenced Thomas
Mann, among other writers.

Annotated 2
th

49
***

Character Portrayal
From 1he Forsyte Saga, vol. I 1he Man of Property, Part I,
Chapter I, "At Home" at Old 1olyon's

The Iragment is the beginning oI the novel, presenting
the Iamily who will be in its centre. From the very beginning,
the author identiIies them as belonging to the upper middle-class
and introduces their main Ieature the Iact that they appreciate
only monetary values. This is done in a casual manner, and,
actually, the whole Iragment is ironic. The spectacle oIIered by
the gathering oI the Forsytes is worth watching because, though
close together on important events, they have no real Ieelings Ior
one another. Still, they are very united in Iront oI the possible
enemy. AIter presenting the whole Iamily, Galsworthy
concentrates on several oI its members. It is interesting to note
that the more important the people are, the more detailed their
description is. Thus, the three ladies, Aunts Ann, Hester and
Juley, are not given individual descriptions, as are some oI the
men (Swithin, James and Soames). The head oI the Iamily, and
its most important member, old Jolyon, is presented last.
Another thing worth mentioning is the way in which Galsworthy
manages to create suspense. Although we are given Irom the

AMALIA MRSESCU
50
beginning the precise date, hour, place and occasion Ior the
event, the person that actually caused it and the reason Ior their
dissatisIaction with him are presented only in the end.

Those privilegea to be present at a family festival of the
Forsytes have seen that charming ana instructive sight - an
upper miaale-class family in full plumage. But whosoever of
these favourea persons has possessea the gift of psychological
analysis (a talent without monetary value ana properly ignorea
by the Forsytes), has witnessea a spectacle, not only aelightful
in itself, but illustrative of an obscure human problem. In
plainer woras, he has gleanea from a gathering of this family -
no branch of which haa a liking for the other, between no three
members of whom existea anything worthy of the name of
sympathy - eviaence of that mysterious concrete tenacity which
renaers a family so formiaable a unit of society, so clear a
reproauction of society in miniature. He has been aamittea to a
vision of the aim roaas of social progress, has unaerstooa
something of patriarchal life, of the swarmings of savage
horaes, of the rise ana fall of nations. He is like one who, having
watchea a tree grow from its planting - a paragon of tenacity,
insulation, ana success, amiast the aeaths of a hunarea other
plants less fibrous, sappy, ana persistent - one aay will see it
flourishing with blana, full foliage, in an almost repugnant
prosperity, at the summit of its efflorescence.

Annotated 2
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51
On June 15, 1886, about four of the afternoon, the
observer who chancea to be present at the house of ola Jolyon
Forsyte in Stanhope Gate, might have seen the highest
efflorescence of the Forsytes.
This was the occasion of an at home to celebrate the
engagement of Miss June Forsyte, ola Jolyons granaaaughter,
to Mr. Philip Bosinney. (...)
When a Forsyte was engagea, marriea, or born, the
Forsytes were present, when a Forsyte aiea - but no Forsyte haa
as yet aiea, they aia not aie, aeath being contrary to their
principles, they took precautions against it, the instinctive
precautions of highly vitali:ea persons who resent
encroachments on their property.
About the Forsytes mingling that aay with the crowa of
other guests, there was a more than orainarily groomea look, an
alert, inquisitive assurance, a brilliant respectability, as though
they were attirea in aefiance of something. The habitual sniff on
the face of Soames Forsyte haa spreaa through their ranks, they
were on their guara.
The subconscious offensiveness of their attituae has
constitutea ola Jolyons at home the psychological moment of
the family history, maae it the preluae of their arama.
The Forsytes were resentful of something, not
inaiviaually, but as a family, this resentment expressea itself in

AMALIA MRSESCU
52
an aaaea perfection of raiment, an exuberance of family
coraiality, an exaggeration of family importance, ana - the sniff.
Danger - so inaispensable in bringing out the funaamental
quality of any society, group, or inaiviaual - was what the
Forsytes scentea, the premonition of aanger put a burnish on
their armour. For the first time, as a family, they appearea to
have an instinct of being in contact with some strange ana
unsafe thing.
Over against the piano a man of bulk ana stature was
wearing two waistcoats on his wiae chest, two waistcoats ana a
ruby pin, insteaa of the single satin waistcoat ana aiamona pin
of more usual occasions, ana his shaven, square, ola face, the
colour of pale leather, with pale eyes, haa its most aignifiea
look, above his satin stock. This was Swithin Forsyte. Close to
the winaow, where he coula get more than his fair share of fresh
air, the other twin, James - the fat ana the lean of it, ola Jolyon
callea these brothers - like the bulky Swithin, over six feet in
height, but very lean, as though aestinea from his birth to strike
a balance ana maintain an average, brooaea over the scene with
his permanent stoop, his grey eyes haa an air of fixea
absorption in some secret worry, broken at intervals by a rapia,
shifting scrutiny of surrounaing facts, his cheeks, thinnea by two
parallel folas, ana a long, clean-shaven upper lip, were framea
within Dunareary whiskers. In his hanas he turnea ana turnea a
piece of china. Not far off, listening to a laay in brown, his only

Annotated 2
th

53
son Soames, pale ana well-shavea, aark-hairea, rather bala,
haa pokea his chin up siaeways, carrying his nose with that
aforesaia appearance of sniff, as though aespising an egg
which he knew he coula not aigest. Behina him his cousin, the
tall George, son of the fifth Forsyte, Roger, haa a Quilpish look
on his fleshy face, ponaering one of his saraonic fests.
Something inherent to the occasion haa affectea them
all.
Seatea in a row close to one another were three laaies -
Aunts Ann, Hester (the two Forsyte maias), ana Juley (short for
Julia), who not in first youth haa so far forgotten herself as to
marry Septimus Small, a man of poor constitution. She haa
survivea him for many years. With her elaer ana younger sister
she livea now in the house of Timothy, her sixth ana youngest
brother, on the Bayswater Roaa. Each of these laaies hela fans
in their hanas, ana each with some touch of colour, some
emphatic feather or brooch, testifiea to the solemnity of the
opportunity.
In the centre of the room, unaer the chanaelier, as
became a host, stooa the heaa of the family, ola Jolyon himself.
Eighty years of age, with his fine, white hair, his aome-like
foreheaa, his little, aark grey eyes, ana an immense white
moustache, which aroopea ana spreaa below the level of his
strong faw, he haa a patriarchal look, ana in spite of lean

AMALIA MRSESCU
54
cheeks ana hollows at his temples, seemea master of perennial
youth. He hela himself extremely upright, ana his shrewa, steaay
eyes haa lost none of their clear shining. Thus he gave an
impression of superiority to the aoubts ana aislikes of smaller
men. Having haa his own way for innumerable years, he haa
earnea a prescriptive right to it. It woula never have occurrea to
ola Jolyon that it was necessary to wear a look of aoubt or of
aefiance.
Between him ana the four other brothers who were
present, James, Swithin, Nicholas, ana Roger, there was much
aifference, much similarity. In turn, each of these four brothers
was very aifferent from the other, yet they, too, were alike.
(...) At one time or another auring the afternoon, all
these faces, so aissimilar ana so alike, haa worn an expression
of aistrust, the obfect of which was unaoubtealy the man whose
acquaintance they were thus assemblea to make.
Philip Bosinney was known to be a young man without
fortune, but Forsyte girls haa become engagea to such before,
ana haa actually marriea them. It was not altogether for this
reason, therefore, that the minas of the Forsytes misgave them.
They coula not have explainea the origin of a misgiving
obscurea by the mist of family gossip. A story was unaoubtealy
tola that he haa paia his auty call to Aunts Ann, Juley, ana
Hester, in a soft grey hat - a soft grey hat, not even a new one -
a austy thing with a shapeless crown. 'So extraorainary, my

Annotated 2
th

55
aear - so oaa'` Aunt Hester, passing through the little, aark hall
(she was rather short-sightea), haa triea to shoo it off a chair,
taking it for a strange, aisreputable cat - Tommy haa such
aisgraceful frienas' She was aisturbea when it aia not move.

1. Characterize the Forsytes as a Iamily.
2. Enumerate the members oI the Iamily present at June`s
engagement and establish in what relation they are with
one another. Then comment on the descriptions the
author oIIers Ior each oI them.
3. Comment on the statement: 'but no Forsyte haa as yet
aiea, they aia not aie.
4. What was the 'danger that the Iamily Ielt? Why?
5. Comment on the comic oI the Iragment.

AMALIA MRSESCU
56
1oseph Conrad (1857-1924)

Joseph Conrad is the pseudonym oI JoseI Teodor Konrad
Korzeniowski. He was born in a Ukrainian province oI Poland
that was under Tsarist rule. In 1861 he moved to Warsaw with
his parents, but in the Iollowing year, his Iather, a Polish patriot
and a leader oI what would become the Polish insurrection
against Russia in 1863, was banished to Vologda, Russia. His
wiIe and his son Iollowed him. Because oI the wiIe`s weak
health, the Iamily was allowed to return to the Ukraine in 1865.
Still, JoseI`s mother died in the same year, and his Iather in
1870. The young boy was leIt in the care oI his maternal uncle.
He was educated in the gymnasium oI St. Anne, the Ioremost
public school in Cracow, and was intended Ior the University.
But he was determined to go to sea so, despite his tutor`s mild
opposition, went to Marseilles in 1874 and joined the French
Mercantile Marine. While there, he tried to kill himselI, being
disappointed and Irustrated, and having numerous debts. He
recovered, however, and moved to England, joining the British
merchant service in 1878. It was in England that he changed his
name because it was Irequently mispronounced, and it was also
there that he started learning English. AIter many voyages,
Conrad leIt the sea in 1894 because oI ill health, settled in
England, and began his career as a writer. He became a British
subject in 1886.

Annotated 2
th

57
Conrad`s Iirst novel was Almayers Folly (1895),
Iollowed by The Nigger of the 'Narcissus` (1897), Lora Jim
(1900), Heart of Darkness (1902), Chance (1913), Jictory
(1915). The climax oI his career was reached with the novels
Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1906) and Unaer Western
Eyes (1910). He also wrote:
x short stories/ novellas: The Iaiots (his Iirst short story),
The Lagoon, An Outpost of Progress (considered by
Conrad his best story), Amy Foster, Gaspar Rui:
(Conrad`s only literary work adapted by himselI Ior
cinema as Gaspar the Strong Man), The Tale (Conrad`s
only story about World War I); they were included in
volumes such as Tales of Unrest (1898), Youth (1902),
Typhoon (1903), Tales of Hearsay (1925);
x essays: The Mirror of the Sea (1906; a volume oI essays
based on his experience in the oceans oI the world), Last
Essays (1926);
x autobiographical notes: A Personal Recora, also
published as Some Reminiscences (1912), Notes on Life
ana Letters (1921).
Conrad`s Iather was a highly cultivated man, a poet and
a translator Irom French and English into Polish. He encouraged
his son to read widely, which he did, not only as a child, but also
later, during his sea years. He was Iamiliar with the works oI

AMALIA MRSESCU
58
Mickiewicz, Dickens, De Vigny, Hugo, Cervantes, Fenimore
Cooper, Flaubert, Maupassant, Trollope, Henry James.
In his own writings, Joseph Conrad blends the late
romanticism oI adventures at sea with realistic pictures oI the
liIe in the Iormer British colonies and other exotic places. He
disliked being called a 'sea writer because although he was an
exquisite story-teller, he was mainly concerned with the
characters, and with the consequences oI the impact oI events
upon them. He presents man`s struggle against hostile Iorces, his
courage and endurance. He deals with the liIe and psychology oI
human beings that live outside the 'civilized world, mostly in
isolation Irom human agglomerations. Still, his heroes
permanently carry the stamp oI the society at home, they are still
'prisoners oI its rules, traditions and ideas about colonist
exploitation or proIiting by the myth oI white supremacy. But
his talent can also be seen in the evocation oI atmosphere and in
the extraordinarily vivid and impressive descriptions oI
landscapes and especially seascapes.
'Conrad is the novelist oI extreme situations. In the
greater part oI his work his theme is man against himselI, the
environment, whether sea or exotic place, having a double
Iunction, to isolate the character Irom society and the larger
world oI men, so that he can be put in extremis, and to act as the
agent oI his selI-conIrontation. Nature itselI can then become a
symbol oI evil; or rather, nature and the human being appear to

Annotated 2
th

59
exist almost as maniIestations oI each other. (Allen 1954: 303)
Conrad is very preoccupied with evil. At its simplest, evil is
something inherent in the physical universe and malevolent
towards man. But evil can also be deeply embedded in man`s
soul. Then 'the sea and exotic places are not the causes oI his
|man`s our note| destruction but the agents, and to this extent
counterparts oI the destructive elements within him. (Allen
1954: 307-308) At the other extreme, the supreme quality man
has is Fidelity his moral value, his selI-respect, that can
Iunction as a barrier against evil.
Although Conrad`s Iiction is closely related to his
experience, this experience is developed and transIigured in
writings which are primarily works oI the imagination. For
example, Heart of Darkness was inspired by his visiting the
Congo in 1890, and his character Kurtz was based on A. E. C.
Hodister, but not in minute detail. Hodister was a company
agent and explorer, who had not acquired the quality oI a man-
god among savages, like Kurtz. Then, Conrad`s excitement to
leave was replaced by Marlow`s skepticism, while Congo`s
isolation and primitiveness were exaggerated.
As we have already pointed out, Conrad uses extensively
the context oI the sea and oI the ship. Aboard a ship, there is a
relatively ordered society prepared to Iace the challenges oI an
external and impersonal hostility. At sea, man`s relationship to

AMALIA MRSESCU
60
nature is more tensionate than the one on land. II a storm starts
on land, people can Iind a shelter till it passes, but at sea there is
no shelter. One has to Iight the storm iI one is to survive.
Aboard the ship, there is a microcosm, a society organized
according to some very deIinite rules. First, there is a strict
hierarchy. The captain is the absolute master oI the ship,
Iunctioning also as the 'Iather oI this 'Iamily. Like any Iather,
he has rights, but also obligations towards his crew, one oI them
being that in case the ship is in any danger, he should be the last
to abandon it. Each member oI this society has a speciIic role.
Each has a speciIic job that has to be done in a very disciplined
way because any Ilaw, however minor, in the Iunctioning oI this
micro-universe, any inIringement on the rules destroys the
equilibrium and puts in danger not only one person aboard, but
the security oI the whole crew, and oI the possible passengers.
ThereIore, it is severely punished. In Lora Jim, the title hero, at
the time a young Iirst mate oI the 'Patna, an old, ruined
steamer packed with pilgrims on the way to Mecca, is one oI the
Iirst to jump into the sea when the steamer is about to sink. Jim
will spend his whole subsequent liIe repenting, and trying to
reach a place where the rumour oI his cowardice will not catch
up with him. Even iI he Iinally manages to become the ruler oI a
remote district in Malaya, and his liIe seems to be on a smooth
path, his past cannot be so easily Iorgotten. In the end oI the

Annotated 2
th

61
novel Jim brings ruin to Patusan as well and is killed by the
villagers.
The crew oI a ship is an exclusively masculine society,
without sentiments and sentimental complications. Women,
when they appear at all in Conrad`s novels, have only
subordinate roles.

1oseph Conrad`s Literary Technique
Conrad`s major aim was the presentation oI Truth, as it
appeared to his somber imagination, and he viewed the novel as
one oI the great instruments oI knowledge. He considered
Iiction as a way oI telling the truth (i.e. oI being IaithIul to liIe),
but also as an art. Conrad spent hours oI laborious work over his
writings in order to make his readers see, hear, Ieel what he
wanted to communicate to them. He wanted to renew the novel
Iorm, abolishing logical narration by the authorial voice and
substituting a sequence oI impressions, which had the
authenticity oI real liIe.
In Lora Jim, Conrad uses Ior the Iirst time his technique
oI oblique narrative, which means that the action is almost never
seen at Iirst hand, but in reIlection, through the eyes oI others.
The story in this case is told through Marlow. As a matter oI
Iact, Conrad uses Marlow as a narrator in many oI his novels.
Marlow is an eye-witness to the events and recalls them years

AMALIA MRSESCU
62
later. This kind oI narrator reveals events and thoughts without
the author`s omniscient intervention. As Miroiu points out
(1983: 51), the use oI Marlow has important consequences Ior
the reader`s understanding oI the action:
1. as the narrator is not necessarily the protagonist (as in Lora
Jim), he is more interested in the story oI the events than in
the Ieelings oI the protagonists, thereIore the narration
becomes more vivid;
2. the events he tells transcend sometimes his understanding,
he is incapable to perceive their deepest meaning, thereIore
the reader has to understand them himselI or to accept the
Iact that he just cannot understand everything;
3. because the narrator tells a group oI Iriends what happened
to another group oI Iriends, we have the suggestion that the
borderline between the world oI the story and the real world
can be easily crossed. What happened to the characters in
Marlow`s story can happen to his listeners as well.
On the one hand, Marlow helps the reader see perhaps
more than he himselI does because he has limitations which at
points make his narrative suggestive rather than explicit. On the
other hand, the reader never sees the matter in its
straightIorward clarity. 'Such a method makes greater demands
upon the reader than the simple direct narrative, but is ideal Ior
the kind oI psychological investigation in which Conrad was
interested. (Miroiu 1983: 65).

Annotated 2
th

63
Marlow speaks in the Iirst person and changes Irom book
to book. He is eager in Youth, disillusioned and weary in Heart
of Darkness, sympathetically tolerant in Lora Jim. Sometimes
he is a persona Ior Conrad (as in Lora Jim), a character (as in
Heart of Darkness), or just a device (as in Chance). This device
enables Conrad to make comments that he could not do in his
own person as a novelist. Marlow talks too much and sometimes
he hides meaning, or he hides the absence oI meaning. This
leads to a use oI hollow rhetoric.
The events are not always narrated in the order in which
they happen. By Ireely moving backwards and Iorwards in time,
the writer makes us see the liIe oI the characters in motion. This
also makes Ior greater authenticity and creates suspense, since
the most interesting parts are leIt Ior the ending.
Direct reIerences to symbols and symbolic meanings
appear very Irequently in Conrad`s work. As Miroiu notices,
'There are recurring major symbols and images, - such as the
sea, the stars, ships, voyages, graves standing Ior large,
general ideas on liIe, living, Iate, truth. They appear all through
Conrad`s work, oIten permeating or controlling large episodes,
perhaps a whole novel. Then there are symbols having a more
local signiIicance in a novel, - gold, bowler-hats, card houses, an
arrow oI gold - which illuminate details oI liIe and action, Irom
important problems to conventions oI behaviour. (1983: 58)

AMALIA MRSESCU
64
For example, a tea table in Chance becomes a symbol oI
domestic liIe in its lighter hour, while Kurtz, the character in
Heart of Darkness, becomes a symbol oI evil. Conrad`s symbols
are not esoteric. The reader does not need a key in order to
understand them. Their meaning can be easily grasped.
At extremes, the image and the symbol become
interchangeable. The more complex the symbol, the less direct
the guidance given to the reader.
One oI Conrad`s most representative novels is Heart of
Darkness. It was originally written to appear as a three-part
serial in 'Blackwood`s Magazine, a magazine specialized in
adventure stories, and it was published in book Iorm in 1902
with two other novels. Its material derives Irom Conrad`s time
in the Congo in 1890, a brieI period thought oI as the turning
point oI his career, since it was there and then that he suIIered a
physical and mental breakdown that aIIected his health Ior the
rest oI his liIe and that opened his eyes to the possibility oI a
new liIe ashore. At the time oI Conrad`s visit, Congo was
virtually the private property oI Leopold II, king oI Belgium.
The area had been explored and brought to the attention oI
Western Europe by Henry Morton Stanley, the journalist who
went there in search oI Dr. David Livingstone, but the British
had shown no interest in it. Leopold II spoke about opening it to
civilization and about Christianizing it, but he used this actually
as a cover Ior ruthless exploitation: barbarous labour policy,

Annotated 2
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65
cruel punishments and utter contempt Ior the savages that were
supposed to be saved.
'Conrad`s primary image oI the ordered society, oI
Iidelity, oI courage and endurance in human crisis was a well-
Iound sailing ship in salt water. To explore the heart oI darkness
both Conrad and Marlow sailed up a river into the heart oI a
continent. (Kermode, Hollander, eds., II, 1993: 1617)
The novel begins with Marlow and other people on the
'Nellie, a cruising yawl, waiting Ior the turn oI the tide. Stirred
by the gloomy view and atmosphere, Marlow starts telling his
companions about one oI his experiences in a place that used to
be blank on the map when he was a little boy and that now has
become a place oI darkness. 'The conquest oI the earth, which
mostly means the taking it away Irom those who have a diIIerent
complexion and slightly Ilatter noses than ourselves, is not a
pretty thing when you look into it too much. (1989: 31-32) This
is what he has discovered in the heart oI AIrica, the heart oI the
dark continent. But the title has also a symbolic meaning. By
going to the Congo, Marlow will also plunge deeply into the
darkness oI man`s heart.
Paradoxically enough, it is not the dark people that have
the darkest hearts. The Iirst image Marlow has oI the land and
its people is that oI black men building a railway. Each has an
iron collar on his neck and all are connected together by a chain.

AMALIA MRSESCU
66
They wear rags, and appear to the white visitor as nothing
earthly, as black shadows oI disease and starvation, who are
dying slowly. Still, they are considered by other 'civilized
people as enemies and criminals. Going up the river towards the
Inner Station where he is to meet a certain Mr. Kurtz, Marlow
Ieels like a wanderer on prehistoric earth, on an earth that seems
unearthly. He sometimes catches glimpses oI the natives`
maniIestations ashore and is unable to Iully comprehend them,
but thinks oI his remote kinship with these people. More
importantly, the behaviour oI the natives hired on his steamer
baIIles him and makes him wonder iI they are indeed more
primitive and cruel than the white men. The respective people
are about to starve to death since they have practically nothing
to eat but some stuII that to Marlow seems uneatable. Still, they
mind their business as iI everything were in order and, to
Marlow`s utter surprise, do not attack and eat the white men
aboard, even though they are more numerous and stronger. Is it
because oI superstition, disgust, patience, Iear or some kind oI
primitive honour? None oI these can prevent a starving man
Irom eating. At least not in Marlow`s opinion as a 'superior
white man. Especially as he makes reIerence at the beginning oI
his story to two ships, 'Erebus and 'Terror, whose crews
turned to cannibalism in order to survive. Still, their primitive
Iellows do not resort to this practice and the mystery oI their
behaviour remains unexplained.

Annotated 2
th

67
Finally, they arrive at the Inner Station, where they meet
the Iamous Mr. Kurtz. The chieI oI this station, he has been
entrusted with the making oI a report Ior the International
Society Ior the Suppression oI Savage Customs. One oI the
ideas Irom the report, that whites must appear to the savages as
supernatural beings, as well as the name oI the society itselI,
draw our attention to the ironic contrast that exists between the
proIessions oI colonists and missionaries and their actual
conduct. Kurtz embodies the dark side oI the white man`s soul.
He is involved in ivory trading, and is reduced to this
materialistic point. He is very savage and very brutal. Some
white people admire him and Iind him Iascinating (the
Iascination oI evil), others are terriIied by him. By the time
Marlow reaches him, Kurtz is too ill. He dies on the steamer.
His last words are 'The horror! The horror!. Marlow is
entrusted with taking his letters and some papers to his Iiance,
a girl who worships him. When asked about Kurtz, Marlow
cannot tell her what kind oI man he really was, but he tells her
that his last words were her name, as she is also white and she
also represents the colonizer. Marlow was Iascinated by Kurtz,
but he realized that iI he got to understand the secrets oI the
darkness he would become like him. Moreover, the surIace
reality the Iact that he was in charge oI the ship prevented

AMALIA MRSESCU
68
Marlow Irom giving in to the temptations oI the wilderness, like
Kurtz.
The story ends as it began, with Marlow sitting in the
position oI Buddha, which shows that he has evolved and now
has reached Iull illumination. The journey thus gets a mythical
quality: it was a journey oI initiation, during which Marlow
learnt that the white men, the colonizers represent the dark side,
that the western civilization is corrupted, while the primitive
world is beautiIul and pure. The question that remains then to be
answered is who is civilizing whom?
'In Conrad`s work colonialism generally emerges as
both brutal and brutalizing, alienating native and settler alike.
(Sanders 2004: 481)
Throughout the novel Conrad plays with light and
darkness in a number oI ways. 'Darkness is night, the unknown,
the impenetrable, the primitive, the evil. Yet when he reaches
AIrica, the colours oI skin invert the accepted associations oI the
contrast. White` is above all ivory, the beautiIul luxury oI
civilized man which is the root oI all evil in the darkness, and
which obsesses the white men until they, like Kurtz, come to
resemble it. (O`Prey 1989: 9) But 'darkness is also the
mystery oI man`s spiritual liIe.
'Written in the last year oI the nineteenth century (a
commission Ior the thousandth issue oI Blackwood`s magazine),
Heart of Darkness can be seen as the Iirst twentieth-century

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69
novel, with its climate oI doubt and vagueness, its loss oI moral
conIidence, its need Ior belieI` in the midst oI moral
wilderness, its exploration oI the subconscious, and its
aIIirmation oI individual Ireedom. (O`Prey 1989: 23-24)
Conrad is a rather diIIicult writer, alooI in his style,
manner and range oI subjects. 'Conrad`s genius (...) is Ioreign to
even the most advanced English tradition. He is not concerned
with righting the world and he is not sparkling. He is neither the
novelist oI himselI like Chesterton nor the novelist oI types like
Meredith. He is the novelist oI real people. (...) And Conrad`s
romantic spirit, too, is alien to the English mind. It is not the
mere spirit oI improbable adventure, but a sort oI philosophy
impressing itselI with ardour and pessimism upon the splendour
and darkness oI the world. (Curle 2005: 7) Still, he was a
legend in his own liIetime, being highly appreciated by critics,
though not so popular with ordinary readers. His reputation,
aIter a relative decline Iollowing his death, has grown steadily
since World War II.
Conrad reIormed the English novel and contributed to
the development oI narrative theory, inIluencing writers such as
William Faulkner, Graham Greene, George Orwell, William
Golding, Louis Ferdinand Cline, Ernest Hemingway.

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***

Setting and Atmosphere
From Heart of Darkness

The Iragment is the beginning oI the novel, part oI its
Irame, and establishes the conditions in which Marlow will tell
his story: where he tells it, to whom and why. The Irame is also
told in the Iirst person, which creates tension and dramatism
through the direct participation oI the narrator in the action.
Still, he does not tell us anything about himselI. The atmosphere
seems peaceIul at the beginning: there is no wind, the air is
motionless, the place is silent. However, in the distance, 'over
the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth, the air is dark and
everything is gloomy, like a menace lurking around. The Iour
people aboard the 'Nellie Ieel lazy. They are supposed to play
dominoes, but Ior one reason or another they do not play. Nor
do they speak. The sun sets. With the darkness spreading
around, especially over the 'monstrous town in the west,
Marlow starts telling his story oI light and darkness.

The 'Nellie`, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor
without a flutter of the sails, ana was at rest. The flooa haa
maae, the wina was nearly calm, ana being bouna aown the

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71
river, the only thing for it was to come to ana wait for the turn of
the tiae.
The sea-reach of the Thames stretchea before us like the
beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea ana
the sky were welaea together without a foint, ana in the
luminous space the tannea sails of the barges arifting up with
the tiae seemea to stana still in rea clusters of canvas sharply
peakea, with gleams of varnishea spirit. A ha:e restea on the
low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was
aark above Gravesena, ana farther back still seemea conaensea
into a mournful gloom, brooaing motionless over the biggest,
ana the greatest, town on earth.
The Director of Companies was our captain ana our
host. We four affectionately watchea his back as he stooa in the
bows looking to seawara. On the whole river there was nothing
that lookea half so nautical. He resemblea a pilot, which to a
seaman is trustworthiness personifiea. It was aifficult to reali:e
his work was not out there in the luminous estuary, but behina
him, within the brooaing gloom.
Between us there was, as I have alreaay saia somewhere,
the bona of the sea. Besiaes holaing our hearts together through
long perioas of separation, it haa the effect of making us
tolerant of each others yarns - ana even convictions. The
Lawyer - the best of ola fellows - haa, because of his many years

AMALIA MRSESCU
72
ana many virtues, the only cushion on aeck, ana was lying on
the only rug. The Accountant haa brought out alreaay a box of
aominoes, ana was toying architecturally with the bones.
Marlow sat cross-leggea right aft, leaning against the mi::en-
mast. He haa sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight
back, an ascetic aspect, ana, with his arms aroppea, the palms
of hanas outwaras, resemblea an iaol. The airector, satisfiea the
anchor haa gooa hola, maae his way aft ana sat aown amongst
us. We exchangea a few woras la:ily. Afterwaras there was
silence on boara the yacht. For some reason or other we aia not
begin that game of aominoes. We felt meaitative, ana fit for
nothing but placia staring. The aay was enaing in a serenity of
still ana exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically, the
sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstainea light,
the very mist on the Essex marsh was like a gau:y ana raaiant
fabric, hung from the wooaea rises inlana, ana araping the low
shores in aiaphanous folas. Only the gloom to the west,
brooaing over the upper reaches, became more sombre every
minute, as if angerea by the approach of the sun.
Ana at last, in its curvea ana imperceptible fall, the sun
sank low, ana from glowing white changea to a aull rea without
rays ana without heat, as if about to go out suaaenly, stricken to
aeath by the touch of that gloom brooaing over a crowa of men.
(...)

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The sun set, the ausk fell on the stream, ana lights began
to appear along the shore. The Chapman light-house, a three-
leggea thing erect on a mua-flat, shone strongly. Lights of ships
movea in the fairway - a great stir of lights going up ana going
aown. Ana farther west on the upper reaches the place of the
monstrous town was still markea ominously on the sky, a
brooaing gloom in sunshine, a luria glare unaer the stars.
'Ana this also,` saia Marlow suaaenly, 'has been one
of the aark places of the earth.`
He was the only man of us who still 'followea the sea`.
The worst that coula be saia of him was that he aia not
represent his class. He was a seaman, but he was a wanaerer,
too, while most seamen leaa, if one may so express it, a
seaentary life. Their minas are of the stay-at-home oraer, ana
their home is always with them - the ship, ana so is their country
- the sea. One ship is very much like another, ana the sea is
always the same. In the immutability of their surrounaings the
foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life,
gliae past, veilea not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly
aisaainful ignorance, for there is nothing mysterious to a
seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his
existence ana as inscrutable as Destiny. For the rest, after his
hours of work, a casual stroll or a casual spree on shore suffices
to unfola for him the secret of a whole continent, ana generally

AMALIA MRSESCU
74
he finas the secret not worth knowing. The yarns of seamen have
a airect simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the
shell of a crackea nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his
propensity to spin yarns be exceptea), ana to him the meaning of
an episoae was not insiae like a kernel but outsiae, enveloping
the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a ha:e, in
the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are maae
visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.
His remark aia not seem at all surprising. It was fust like
Marlow. It was acceptea in silence. No one took the trouble to
grunt even, ana presently he saia, very slow
'I was thinking of very ola times, when the Romans first
came here, nineteen hunarea years ago - the other aay ... Light
came out of this river since - you say Knights? Yes, but it is like
a running bla:e on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouas.
We live in the flicker - may it last as long as the ola earth keeps
rolling' But aarkness was here yesteraay.

1. What is the setting oI the scene described in the
Iragment?
2. What are the characters present? Who is the only one
that is identiIied by name? Give possible reasons Ior this.
3. Describe brieIly each oI the characters.

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75
4. Comment on the sentence: 'Ana farther west on the
upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still
markea ominously on the sky, a brooaing gloom in
sunshine, a luria glare unaer the stars.`
5. Why does the author state that most seamen lead a
sedentary liIe?
6. In what way was Marlow diIIerent Irom his Iellow
seamen?
7. How do his Iellows react to his Iirst remark?
8. Comment on Marlow`s statement: 'But aarkness was
here yesteraay.`
9. What are the dominant colours in the Iragment?
Comment on their signiIicance.
10. Give examples oI words that are repeated several times
in the Iragment. What general atmosphere do they help
to create?

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76
David Herbert Lawrence (1885 - 1930)

David Herbert Lawrence was born at Eastwood, in
Nottinghamshire as the son oI a miner and oI a schoolteacher.
He was educated at Nottingham High School and then at
University College oI Nottingham, aIter which he became Ior a
time a schoolteacher at Croydon.
He married the German Frieda von RichthoIen Weekley,
the Iormer wiIe oI one oI his proIessors. Because oI his attitude
towards the war and his wiIe`s nationality, he was persecuted
and this, together with the suppression oI The Rainbow (1915),
which was considered obscene, and the banning oI an exhibition
oI his paintings made him want to leave England. He did so,
returning only Ior short visits. He travelled all his liIe, looking
Ior a both mentally and physically healthier way oI liIe in Italy,
Ceylon, CaliIornia, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico or
Switzerland. He died oI tuberculosis in France, aIter he had
suIIered Irom this disease since his childhood.
Lawrence was a proliIic modern writer. In the 19 years
that passed between the publication oI his Iirst novel and his
death he produced:
x novels: The White Peacock (1911), The Trespasser
(1912), Sons ana Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915)
and its sequel Women in Love (1921), Aarons Roa

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77
(1922), Kangaroo (1923), The Plumea Serpent (1926),
Laay Chatterleys Lover (1928);
x volumes oI short stories: The Prussian Officer (1914),
Englana, My Englana (1922), The Woman Who Roae
Away ana Other Stories (1928), The Lovely Laay (1933),
etc. The themes and subjects oI his short stories
generally parallel those oI the novels.
x volumes oI poems: Love Poems ana Others (1913),
Biras, Beasts ana Flowers (1923), Collectea Poems
(1928);
x plays: Touch ana Go (1920), A Colliers Friaay Night
(1934), The Marriea Man (1940);
x travel books: Twilight in Italy (1916), Mornings in
Mexico (1927);
x essays: Psychoanalysis ana the Unconscious (1921),
Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), Apocalypse (1931);
x literary criticism: Stuaies in Classic American Literature
(1923).
Lawrence`s literary activity is usually divided into three
periods:
1. 1910 1913 (Sons ana Lovers), when the artist was still
trying to Iind his own style and created works that were
somewhat immature, intensely personal and traditionalistic
in Iorm;

AMALIA MRSESCU
78
2. 1914 1920, when he wrote his major novels;
3. 1921 1930, when his inspiration seemed to be Ialling oII
and his ideas deteriorated.
The Iirst works printed by Lawrence are poems, in
magazines, in 1910. His poetry is similar to his prose in that it is
in the Iirst place a commentary on his liIe and thought. His early
poems are poems oI love and nature, but the later ones are based
on his biography; his Iather, his mother`s death, his Ilight with
Frieda, his marriage, the period oI adjustment Iollowing it, the
war, the visiting oI other places leIt traces on his poetry. They
are high quality poems, direct and intense, expressing, like his
novels, his passionate belieI in the primitive and elemental
impulses. Some are written in Iree verse, being characterized by
overwhelming spontaneity and direct simplicity oI utterance.
Lawrence considered that poetry should have a hidden
emotional pattern. The poem Figs in Biras, Beasts ana Flowers,
Ior example, dwells on the culinary, botanical, symbolical and
sexual connotations oI the Iruit.
Lawrence is, however, mostly known as a novelist.
The White Peacock inaugurates the modern novel oI
poetic autobiography. In it, Lawrence Iirst presents themes that
will dominate his later works: the male-Iemale war oI the sexes,
the contest Ior a woman between the supercivilized man and an
inarticulate down-to-earth man, the destruction oI the instinctive

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man by the spiritual woman, the antagonism oI the son toward
the Iather and the authority.
The Trespasser is inspired Irom Lawrence`s love aIIair
and elopement with Frieda. Siegismund (Lawrence), a sensitive
musician, is married, with children, but is bored with Iamily liIe.
He has an aIIair with Helena, a teacher (Frieda), but returns
Irom his escapade with a sense oI guilt and dissatisIaction and
commits suicide.
Sons ana Lovers is also autobiographical. It is his Iirst
signiIicant novel, considered by many critics his best work,
exploring the relationship between mother and son. The
experimental quality oI the novel lies in an unprecedented
search Ior the inner reality. Not the thoughts or the words are
important Ior Lawrence, but the Ieelings.
Sons ana Lovers is better organized than Lawrence`s
earlier 2 novels. It has a more complex and detailed plot, being
'closer to the naturalistic and realistic tradition oI the
Bildungsroman. (Pop Cornis 1981: 210) It is a chronicle novel,
with grim details Irom the Nottingham coalIield district. The
naturalistic elements are represented by physical and moral
degradation (through drink), instinctive maniIestations, domestic
conIlicts and Iamily dissolution. Mrs. Morel is unIulIilled and,
much like Mrs. Lawrence herselI, turns Irom her husband
towards her sons, Iirst William, then Paul with whom she

AMALIA MRSESCU
80
establishes a close relationship. This relationship is very
important Ior Paul, aIIecting his both love aIIairs, with Miriam
and with Clara. He Iails in both, partly because he is too close to
his mother, partly because the two girls oIIer him only limited
responses. Miriam (modelled aIter Jessie Chambers, a childhood
(girl-)Iriend oI Lawrence`s) can communicate with Paul only on
a spiritual level, while Clara`s relationship to him is mostly
physical. ThereIore, at the end oI the novel, aIter his mother`s
death and the Iailure oI both relationships, Paul is rather Iar
Irom IulIilment. Still, he resolves to live on and explore reality.
The novel makes extensive use oI symbols. Mr. Morel,
the sensuous being, is associated with darkness, spending his
days in the pit. Mrs. Morel, on the other hand, is linked with
light. Both she and Miriam are associated with white Ilowers,
while Clara is oIIered by Paul only red Ilowers. Paul`s dates
with Clara usually take place in the darkness.
The Rainbow and Women in Love are parts oI a novel
that Lawrence variously entitled The Sisters, The Weaaing Ring,
or Noahs Arc.
In The Rainbow, IulIilment is gained not only through
human relationships, but also through a relation with society.
Tom Brangwen`s marriage to the Polish widow Lydia Lensky
brings him IulIilment on a sensuous level. Tom considers the
marriage the only achievement oI his liIe and he is proud oI it.
Still, he misses something. Anna, Tom`s stepdaughter, marries

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81
Will, Tom`s nephew, and takes the marital relationship a step
Iurther. She believes in knowledge and in the human mind. Her
husband does not share her rational attitude but, thanks to her
inIluence, he comes to be concerned with education. He begins
to live on both the sensual and the conscious plane, in
connection with his wiIe and with society.
The story then centres on Ursula, Anna and Will`s
daughter, who must discover her own identity and place in the
world. She lives on both the sensual and the conscious levels,
but she cannot reconcile them. FulIilment Ior her is diIIicult to
attain. She Iinds it neither in her relationship with Anton
Skrebensky, her lover who lives only physically, nor in relation
to society (i.e. in school as a teacher), which leaves out her
individual soul. The society she discovers is just an inhuman
mechanism that she can only reject. It is no longer, as it was Ior
Will, something in which the individual can creatively
participate. At the end oI the novel, Anton leaves Ursula
pregnant to marry his commander`s daughter. Ursula loses the
child, but during convalescence is on the point oI discovering
her real, isolate selI, which has no relation to anyone or to
anything. As she does that, she sees the rainbow Iorming in the
sky. The rainbow, the Iinal symbol oI the novel, seems to stand
as a promise oI Ursula`s Iuture achievement and IulIilment.

AMALIA MRSESCU
82
The Rainbow was the Iirst novel in English to examine
basic sexual relationships, normal or otherwise (hence, it was
promptly banned), and the Iirst novel to trace what the social
revolution oI the past hundred years had meant in the passionate
liIe oI the individual.
'The plot oI The Rainbow is a detailed representation oI
the evolution oI the complete selI` which covers three
generations and involves both human relationships and relations
with humanity as a whole, and includes Iull and sensitive studies
oI the nature oI unconscious and conscious experience and oI
the relationship between them. (Miroiu 1983: 152)
The sequel oI The Rainbow, Women in Love, Iurther
presents the destiny oI the Brangwens, by analyzing two
contrasted love aIIairs, one successIul and creative (Birkin -
Ursula), the other deathly and destructive (Gerald - Gudrun).
Birkin and Ursula get married and decide to travel the world, in
a sort oI relationship in which each preserves his/ her
individuality. Gerald and Gudrun have a purely sensual
relationship, but in which each oI them wants to dominate.
Gerald dies and Gudrun starts a similar love aIIair with Loerke.
All Iour main characters have real correspondents: Rupert
Birkin is Lawrence himselI, Ursula is Frieda, Gudrun is
Katherine MansIield, and Gerald Crich is John Middleton
Murry. Some oI them also have mythological correspondents:
Gudrun was SiegIried`s wiIe in the Germanic sagas, Loerke`s

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83
name sounds like that oI Loki, the evil god, Ursula means 'she-
bear, while Gerald means 'spear-bearer in German.
Several other relationships (including Birkin - Gerald)
are presented, rendering the novel more complex.
The novel`s central characters move easily through the
various strata oI the English society oI the early 20
th
century,
encountering industrial workers and magnates, inhabitants oI
cottages and country mansions, the clienteles oI London caIes
and tea-shops, or oI Swiss skiing hostels. The novel 'opens with
an unanswered question about marriage and ends with an
unanswerable speculation about relationships both beyond the
marital and the narrowly heterosexual. (Sanders 2004: 530)
There are many characters in Women in Love (more than
in The Rainbow) that are driven to disintegration and death. One
oI them is Hermione, Birkin`s lover beIore Ursula.
Many symbols appear both in The Rainbow and in
Women in Love, but they are never precisely explained. The
characters do not Iully understand their meaning and do not
discuss about them. They are a mode oI secret communication
between the author and the reader. Flood and water, Ior
example, are associated with death. Gerald`s sister drowns.
Gerald himselI Irequently swims and Gudrun would like
sometimes to join him, but Ursula would not. Marshland is
another symbol oI dissolution, and so are the living things that

AMALIA MRSESCU
84
inhabit it or are associated with it. Flowers, on the other hand,
are symbols oI creative liIe. There are also other symbols in
Women in Love that are understood by the characters and
usually explained by Birkin to the others. Such a symbol is the
West AIrican statuette to which all the main characters are
linked and which reveals their attitudes and the similarity
between Gerald, Gudrun and Loerke.
Lawrence`s later novels are simpler than The Rainbow
and Women in Love both in content, ideas and issues involved,
and in organization.
Kangaroo (1923) presents the rise and Iailure oI an
Australian proto-Iascism, while The Plumea Serpent (1926)
presents Mexican liIe with an emphasis on the values oI the
primitive as opposed to the civilized. It deals with the revival in
20
th
century Mexico oI the cult oI the mythical god Quetzalcoatl,
the bird-serpent. 'Both novels are symptomatic oI Lawrence`s
rejection oI his roots and oI his restless search Ior new
landscapes and new bases Ior social relationships. (Sanders
2004: 531)
Laay Chatterleys Lover (1928) appeared in Florence.
Lawrence attempted to say everything about love and did it with
such Irankness and in such uninhibited language that the novel
was suppressed in England until 1960. Crippled and impotent by
a war wound, Sir CliIIord Chatterley becomes a writer, then
Iinds pleasure in building up his colliery business. His wiIe

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85
Constance starts a love aIIair with Oliver Mellors, her husband`s
gamekeeper. Mellors is the dark, sensual, Iull man, set against
the blond, sterile, incomplete CliIIord. In the end Mellors and
Constance intend to get married, but have to wait Ior their
divorces.

D. H. Lawrence`s Literary Technique
As the son oI a rough hard working miner, Lawrence
was shocked Irom early childhood by the physical and moral
ugliness brought about by industrial civilization. ThereIore, in
his writings he attacked industrialism and intellectualism which
he considered responsible Ior the evils oI western civilization.
He was aware oI an estrangement oI human society Irom its
natural environment through the introduction oI ultra-developed
technique. His work is a protest against a world dominated by
reason and industry; 'he combined a violent hatred oI the values
oI modern mechanized civilization with a love oI the primitive
and the natural, and a passionate belieI in the importance oI the
development oI each unique individuality (Miroiu 1983: 166).
He places his trust in the experiences oI the senses. His
philosophy, like Freud`s psychology, is centred on the concept
oI a subterranean male consciousness and on the liberation oI
sexuality Irom inherited social repression.

AMALIA MRSESCU
86
Lawrence rejected narrative experiments. He considered
that his mission as a novel writer and critic was one oI the most
elevated, radical and urgent. In the essay Morality ana the Novel
(1925) he claimed that a moral work reveals true and vivid
relationships, and a great work honours the relationship in itselI.
In Why the Novel Matters (1925) he stated that the novelist was
superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher or the poet
because unlike them, who analyse only parts oI the experience,
he deals with liIe as a whole. The novel, in Lawrence`s opinion,
is the supreme human achievement and its main concern should
be the 'man alive.
Lawrence believed that every novel should have its
unique organization and that any novel which simply Iollows
old-established rules oI construction is a mere copy oI other
works. In each oI Lawrence`s novels, organization is unique,
though not entirely original. Lawrence 'does not revolutionize
the Iorm oI the English novel. (.) Lawrence uses modes oI
organization which were well-established in the English novel
long beIore he was born, but they are constantly changed or
expanded or enriched by the demands oI each particular
subject. (Miroiu 1983: 160). Rather than abandoning the old Ior
the new, he adds the new to the old. For example, his plots are
based on his proIound and individual conception oI human
motivation. Characters are driven by the Iorce oI liIe or by the
urge towards death that exists within themselves, by strong

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87
emotions and passions. ThereIore, in the use oI the plot,
Lawrence is neither entirely original, nor entirely conventional.
As Ior his narrative method, Lawrence`s novels are
successions oI scenes rather than tightly articulated stories.
While The Rainbow has a rather linear structure, Women in Love
has a scenic one, being shaped around certain symbolic,
signiIicant incidents. He is not the absolute master oI the
development oI the story, but limits himselI to rendering
emotional situations as concretely as possible. He does not
discard the narrative commentary as Virginia WoolI does.
Nature is always present in his novels, not as a mere
background, but with a liIe oI its own.
There are certain motives oI Freudian psychology in his
works: the Oedipean complex, Ior example. But Lawrence
wanted to Iree the selI Irom the social constraints. He suggested
the existence oI a reality deeper than mental consciousness,
which he called blood consciousness. He thought that while our
minds can be wrong, what our blood Ieels is always true.
ThereIore, his main interest was in man`s physical liIe.
His characters can be divided into two main groups:
1. those who live instinctively, beyond mental consciousness,
sensitive, unpredictable, violent, spontaneous, warm; they
are usually simple people, like Oliver Mellors in Laay
Chatterleys Lover;

AMALIA MRSESCU
88
2. intellectuals, artists or industrialists who live on the level oI
mental consciousness, by intelligence and will; they are cold
and unresponsive, like Gerald Crich.
The plot usually shows how the liIe oI the Iormer leads
to joy and IulIilment, while the liIe oI the latter ends in isolation,
destruction and death.
Lawrence`s vision oI liIe is neither Irivolous nor idyllic.
The ideal oI his characters is a relationship in which each
preserves his/ her individuality. This ideal is oIten threatened by
a struggle oI wills. Especially women try to dominate (like
Gudrun in Women in Love).
The question oI Lawrence and Ieminism has also been
widely discussed. It was Iirst approached by John Middleton
Murry in Son of Woman (1931). Then, in D. H. Lawrence. An
Unprofessional Stuay (1932), Anais Nin stated that Lawrence
wrote Irequently as a woman, and expressed the woman wholly
and completely. What cannot be argued is that his women
characters are strong, independent and complex, and some oI
them even Ilirt with Ieminism to various degrees. Ursula, in The
Rainbow, Ieels stirred by Ieminism but its practical aspects
somehow transcend her. Mrs. Morel, on the other hand, is a
member oI the Women`s Guild, and even writes papers to be
read at its meetings that are held every Monday night. Lawrence
was also sensitive to the economic basis oI the women`s
oppression. Mrs. Morel could not leave her husband because

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they had children together. Clara Dawes, on the other hand,
another 'Ieminist character, being childless, has managed to do
it, and to earn her own living. Clara`s misIortune, however, has
nothing to do with women`s Iate, being personal.
Though not very popular in his liIe time, Lawrence was
appreciated by Aldous Huxley, E. M. Forster, or F. R. Leavis.
'OI all the writers oI this century, D. H. Lawrence was the most
impassioned and persistent in seeking to diagnose some oI the
psychic dangers besetting his society, and the potential sources
oI strength Irom which they might be combated. (Ford 1978:
87)

***

The ~Healthy Relationship
From Sons and Lovers, Part II, Chapter 15, Derelict

The Iragment, Iound towards the ending oI the novel, is
illustrative oI Lawrence`s ideas about a perIect relationship. It is
a discussion between Paul and Miriam, but in which what is
most important is leIt unsaid, being only thought oI by the two.
Though they have Ieelings Ior each other and each understands
what the other wants, neither has enough power to comply with
the other`s wishes. Each would like the other to act and to assert

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his/ her will, but neither can. ThereIore, the conversation is
sterile, leaving them more unhappy at the end oI it than they
were at the beginning.

She bowea her heaa in silence. He lay feeling his aespair
come up again.
'Im not sure,` he saia slowly, 'that marriage woula be
much gooa.`
'I only think of you,` she repliea.
'I know you ao. But - you love me so much, you want to
put me in your pocket. Ana I shoula aie there smotherea.`
She bent her heaa, put her fingers between her lips,
while the bitterness surgea up in her heart.
'Ana what will you ao otherwise?` she askea.
'I aont know - go on, I suppose. Perhaps I shall soon
go abroaa.`
The aespairing aoggeaness in his tone maae her go on
her knees on the rug before the fire, very near to him. There she
crouchea as if she were crushea by something, ana coula not
raise her heaa. His hanas lay quite inert on the arms of his
chair. She was aware of them. She felt that now he lay at her
mercy. If she coula rise, take him, put her arms rouna him, ana
say, 'You are mine,` then he woula leave himself to her. But
aare she? She coula easily sacrifice herself. But aare she assert
herself? She was aware of his aark-clothea, slenaer boay, that

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seemea one stroke of life, sprawlea in the chair close to her. But
no, she aarea not put her arms rouna it, take it up, ana say, 'It
is mine, this boay. Leave it to me.` Ana she wantea to. It callea
to all her womans instinct. But she crouchea, ana aarea not.
She was afraia he woula not let her. She was afraia it was too
much. It lay there, his boay, abanaonea. She knew she ought to
take it up ana claim it, ana claim every right to it. But - coula
she ao it? Her impotence before him, before the strong aemana
of some unknown thing in him, was her extremity. Her hanas
flutterea, she half-liftea her heaa. Her eyes, shuaaering,
appealing, gone, almost aistractea, pleaaea to him suaaenly.
His heart caught with pity. He took her hanas, arew her to him,
ana comfortea her.
'Will you have me, to marry me?` he saia very low.
Oh, why aia not he take her? Her very soul belongea to
him. Why woula he not take what was his? She haa borne so
long the cruelty of belonging to him ana not being claimea by
him. Now he was straining her again. It was too much for her.
She arew back her heaa, hela his face between her hanas, ana
lookea him in the eyes. No, he was hara. He wantea something
else. She pleaaea to him with all her love not to make it her
choice. She coula not cope with it, with him, she knew not with
what. But it strainea her till she felt she woula break.
'Do you want it?` she askea, very gravely.

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'Not much,` he repliea, with pain.
She turnea her face asiae, then, raising herself with
aignity, she took his heaa to her bosom, ana rockea him softly.
She was not to have him, then' So she coula comfort him. She
put her fingers through his hair. For her, the anguishea
sweetness of self-sacrifice. For him, the hate ana misery of
another failure. He coula not bear it - that breast which was
warm ana which craalea him without taking the buraen of him.
So much he wantea to rest on her that the feint of rest only
torturea him. He arew away.
'Ana without marriage we can ao nothing?` he askea.
His mouth was liftea from his teeth with pain. She put
her little finger between her lips.
'No,` she saia, low ana like the toll of a bell. 'No, I
think not.`
It was the ena then between them. She coula not take him
ana relieve him of the responsibility of himself. She coula only
sacrifice herself to him - sacrifice herself every aay, glaaly. Ana
that he aia not want. He wantea her to hola him ana say, with
foy ana authority. 'Stop all this restlessness ana beating against
aeath. You are mine for a mate.` She haa not the strength. Or
was it a mate she wantea? or aia she want a Christ in him? He
felt, in leaving her, he was aefrauaing her of life. But he knew
that, in staying, stilling the inner, aesperate man, he was

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aenying his own life. Ana he aia not hope to give life to her by
aenying his own.
She sat very quiet. He lit a cigarette. The smoke went up
from it, wavering. He was thinking of his mother, ana haa
forgotten Miriam. She suaaenly lookea at him. Her bitterness
came surging up. Her sacrifice, then, was useless. He lay there
aloof, careless about her. Suaaenly she saw again his lack of
religion, his restless instability. He woula aestroy himself like a
perverse chila. Well, then, he woula'
'I think I must go,` she saia softly.

1. Explain what Paul and Miriam want Irom each other and
why each oI them Iinds it impossible to oIIer that.
2. Comment on Paul`s and Miriam`s Ieelings.
3. How do Miriam`s gestures characterize her?
4. Comment on the last paragraph.
5. Comment on Lawrence`s idea oI a perIect relationship.

AMALIA MRSESCU
94
British Poetry in the First Half of the 20
th
Century

The poetry aIter 1910 departed Irom the English
tradition in that it no longer looked Ior inspiration to the
countryside, but to the great city, taking images Irom
contemporary liIe. Moreover, it was addressed to and written by
a metropolitan intelligentsia, which explains the polyglot,
cosmopolitan interests that lie behind it. Poetry was not to be
made easy in order to be understood by everybody. The ideas
expressed in it were laconically juxtaposed, instead oI being
ordered in a lucid exposition.
The Modernist revolution in poetry was announced and
propagated through magazines. The educated audience was
ready Ior the change. This audience was rather small and
predominantly young, but came to establish critical norms that
extended beyond their range.
In the years preceding the First World War the poetical
scene was dominated by the Imagists, a group oI poets oI whom
the best known was Ezra Pound (1885-1972), an American who
came to London in 1909 and remained there Ior the Iollowing 11
years, a period oI crucial importance Ior the Iuture oI English
and American poetry. The imagists considered that poems
should be built around strong clear images, and that poetry
should use the language oI everyday speech and enjoy total
Ireedom as regards its choice oI subject matter. Besides

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95
imagism, expressionism, symbolism, but also surrealism and
vorticism were present in the poetry oI the period, which bears
not only the inIluence oI French poems, but also oI the Japanese
and Chinese ones.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

William Butler Yeats was the eldest child oI the painter
John Butler Yeats and was born in Dublin on June 13, 1865.
Two years later, the Iamily moved to London. William went to
school Iirst in London and then (Irom 1880 to 1883) in Dublin.
In 1884 he entered the Metropolitan School oI Art in Dublin,
where he grew interested in the occult and in the cause oI Irish
independence. In 1887 he returned to London where he met and
Iell in love with Maud Gonne, who was to Iigure prominently in
his poetry, but who reIused several times to marry him. In 1890
he joined the Order oI the Golden Dawn, a secret society in
which he held an important oIIice. One year later, the Rhymers`
Club was Iounded. Yeats was a Iounder and a member oI this
club, consisting oI London-based poets who met at the Cheshire
Cheese pub, in Fleet Street.
In 1894, he visited Paris and became interested in the
Symbolist movement.

AMALIA MRSESCU
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In 1896 he returned to Ireland and was caught up in the
Celtic Renaissance, oI which he came to be the acknowledged
leader. Later on, he became president oI the Irish National
Dramatic Society and opened The Abbey Theatre in 1904. AIter
an American tour in 1911, he met Ezra Pound, who was 20
years younger than him. They became Iriends and inIluenced
each other very much. In 1922, Yeats became a senator oI the
new Irish Free State.
'Yeats was playwright, literary journalist, critic, editor,
public speaker, student and recorder oI oral tradition, genuine
and independent investigator oI the occult, mythologist and
mythmaker, theatre director, and promoter oI national
literature. Yet, 'poetry was Yeats`s greatest achievement,
arising Irom a capaciousness oI imaginative endeavour and a
consistency oI application, and embracing a variety oI literary
Iorms and a variety oI interests which can be seen as diverse yet,
ultimately, interconnected. (Webb 1991: XIV).
Yeats`s Iirst volume oI poems was The Wanaerings of
Oisin (1889), containing poems on Irish legendary themes. This
was Iollowed by Poems (1895), The Wina Among the Reeas
(1899), Responsibilities (1914), The Winaing Stair (1933). He
also wrote the verse play The Countess Cathleen (1892), Ior
Maud Gonne, plays like At the Hawks Well (1916), or
Purgatory (1939), the volume oI essays The Celtic Twilight
(1893), the autobiography The Trembling of the Jeil (1922) and

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97
the volume oI prose A Jision (1926, revised in 1937). He also
compiled two anthologies, A Book of Irish Jerse (1895) and The
Oxfora Book of Moaern Jerse (1936), and published translations
oI two plays by Sophocles, King Oeaipus and Oeaipus at
Colonus (both in 1928).
Yeats` literary pre-eminence was marked by the award
oI the Nobel Prize Ior literature in 1923.

William Butler Yeats`s Literary Technique
In an essay written in 1901 Yeats expressed his view that
the human minds can Ilow into one another and create or reveal
a single mind. Similarly, all memories are part oI one great
memory, the memory oI Nature herselI. Both this great mind
and this great memory can be evoked by symbols.
As Iar as his theatric productions are concerned, Yeats
wanted to create a poetical or legendary drama with a symbolic
and decorative setting. His original ambition was to create a
national dramatic style, drawing Irom Celtic and Christian Irish
traditions. He created a cycle oI plays centred on the ancient
Celtic hero Cuchulain, oI which the Iirst was On Bailes Strana
(1903). His plays were written also under the inIluence oI the
Japanese Noh drama, a symbolic and ritual drama, with masks,
dances and instrumental music, bare stages and shiIts oI time
perspective.

AMALIA MRSESCU
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As a poet, however tempted he might have been by
Iashionable vagueness, Yeats was aware oI the need Ior
concreteness, Ireshness and Ilexibility. His poems generally
reIer to his occult belieIs, his personal liIe and the politics oI
Ireland.
He believed that poetry should be a revelation oI hidden
liIe, and not a criticism oI liIe. He considered that the Irish still
had an imaginative heritage, unlike the English. In many parts oI
Ireland, the oral tradition was still alive, while modern English
literature was almost entirely printed, which inIluenced its
character, but also made it available only Ior a cultivated
minority. He tried to resist the inIluence oI contemporary
England and oI contemporary English literature. ThereIore, the
English environment was quite excluded Irom Yeats`s poetry.
In Yeats`s poems, his own selI was disguised in a series
oI personae which helped him to articulate and dramatize the
conIlicts within himselI. In the Iirst edition oI The Wina Among
the Reeas, many oI the poems are attributed to a range oI
speakers, imaginary (Red Hanrahan), legendary (the legendary
wizard and king Mongan) or historical (the peasant poet
O`Sullivan Rua).
He considered that the poet`s source oI inspiration
should be his personal liIe, but in the process oI creation it
should be transIigured. 'The poet is not the man who Ialls into
casual conversation with his neighbour or who appears to be

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99
sitting at the breakIast table in the seemingly unquestionable
completeness oI everyday identity but an artiIicial construction
or concept, which is the result oI a deliberate act oI the poetic
imagination. (Webb 1991: XXI). By stating and applying this,
Yeats was in the tradition oI European poetry, Iollowing
Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, and even Byron and Shelley.
However, he aimed to create poems that give the impression oI
speaking, written Ior the ear. ThereIore, he returned to the
spoken word and to the model oI peasant speech.
Yeats viewed the poet rather as a miniaturist or
craItsman, continuously struggling to give an appropriate Iorm
to his work. He considered that the art oI writing requires
discipline more than inspiration. For him, the Iorm oI the poem
was also important. He used the traditional verse Iorm, and not
Iree verse. He considered that the events taking place in the
world are accidental and incoherent and this should be
counteracted by the grammar oI civilized discourse. He needed a
system because he saw that the work oI a writer is Iragmentary
and multiple unless one poem highlights another and unless they
all reIer to the poet himselI and to his set oI belieIs. He also Ielt
that the poet had to impose his own wholeness to the world,
which at that time was also Iragmentary. The only way to resist
in a disintegrating world was to renew oneselI, and this passion
oI Yeats Ior making and remaking himselI led him to revise his

AMALIA MRSESCU
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early work. ThereIore, critics consider that the Iinal versions oI
his poems are those that appeared in Collectea Poems in 1949,
aIter his death. This is the Iinal stage oI Yeats`s poetic evolution
which, however, would not have been possible without the
preceding stages. This process oI creation and revision was
crucial to Yeats`s poetic development.
One oI Yeats`s main objectives was 'not only to Iind an
appropriate utterance Ior himselI but to give a voice to
Irishness. In the 1880`s, when he began his poetic career, 'Irish
poetry was not yet strong enough to attain its own identity or to
claim its rights with suIIicient assurance. (.) Together with
Joyce, Yeats made modern Irish poetry possible. Like Joyce, he
set an example which was national without being nationalist.
Like Joyce, though to a lesser extent, he was open to European
inIluence; in particular he was indebted to the work oI the
symbolistes. Like Joyce, he applied to his work an exacting and
critical eye. (Webb 1991: XXXI-XXXII)
Yeats was hostile to the modern city, be it London or
Dublin, and consequently he returned to the ideals oI the
Renaissance or oI Byzantium, oI courtly Japan or oI Ireland`s
eroic age. His poem Sailing to By:antium (1927) reIers to a
triple journey: spatial (to the East), temporal (to the past), and
valoric (to a past that is superiour to the present). The Iirst line
oI the poem, 'That is no country Ior old men., seems to reIer
both to Byzantium and to the Irish Free State. The Iirst stanza

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101
pictures the sensuous world oI youth, Iull oI vitality, living only
Ior the senses, but subjected to death. It neglects, and is in
opposition to 'monuments oI unaging intellect, i.e. to the world
oI art. In the second stanza, Yeats pictures the old man as
something oI little consequence, similar to a scarecrow, unless
he concentrates on the intellect, seeking thus to escape Irom the
constraints oI the human body. In order to manage this, he
himselI takes a metaphorical voyage to the city oI Byzantium,
the symbol, Ior him, oI artistic magniIicence and permanence.
The third stanza begins with an invocation oI the martyrs that
were burnt Ior their Iaith and that were represented in the
mosaics oI the city. The poet would like them to help him break
Iree Irom his decrepit body and integrate into the world oI art.
Once he would do so (the Iourth stanza), he would reIuse to
return to the body oI any 'natural thing, but would preIer to
become part oI an artistic object himselI, like a golden bird
singing on a golden bough or keeping 'a drowsy Emperor
awake. So he would like to break with the sensual mortal world
in Iavour oI an intellectual permanence produced by a work oI
art. However, both the word 'drowsy and the line 'OI what is
past, or passing, or to come suggest that the poet`s intellect is
limited by his human condition. Many symbols are used in the
poem: the images oI birds, Iish and young lovers Ior mortality

AMALIA MRSESCU
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and transience; scarecrow Ior decrepitude oI old age; the golden
bird Ior durability and preciousness.

That is no country Ior old men.
The young in one another`s arms, birds in the trees
Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-Ialls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, Ilesh, or Iowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments oI unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments oI its own magniIicence;
And thereIore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city oI Byzantium.

O sages standing in God`s holy Iire
As in the gold mosaic oI a wall,
Come Irom the holy Iire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters oI my soul.

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103
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And Iastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artiIice oI eternity.

Once out oI nature I shall never take
My bodily Iorm Irom any natural thing,
But such a Iorm as Grecian goldsmiths make
OI hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies oI Byzantium
OI what is past, or passing, or to come.

Leda and the Swan
A suaaen blow. the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressea
By the aark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holas her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrifiea vague fingers push
The featherea glory from her loosening thighs?
Ana how can boay, laia in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

AMALIA MRSESCU
104

A shuaaer in the loins engenaers there
The broken wall, the burning roof ana tower
Ana Agamemnon aeaa.
Being so caught up,
So masterea by the brute blooa of the air,
Dia she put on his knowleage with his power
Before the inaifferent beak coula let her arop?

1. To what mythological moment does the poem reIer?
2. Explain the lines 'A shuaaer in the loins engenaers
there/ The broken wall, the burning roof ana tower/ Ana
Agamemnon aeaa.
3. IdentiIy the syntagms by which the poet denotes the
swan. How does he appear?
4. Find the epithets that reIer to Leda. In what way is she
presented?
5. Comment on the prosody oI the poem.

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th

105
T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in a distinguished Iamily
in St. Louis, Missouri (USA) on September 26, 1888. In 1906 he
entered Harvard to study philosophy. He wrote his dissertation
on the work oI the English idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley,
whose emphasis on the private nature oI individual experience
had a considerable inIluence on Eliot`s poetry. In 1910, aIter
having got a Harvard MA, he went to Paris Ior a year and
studied the philosophy oI Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941), being
inIluenced by his theory oI time and intuition. (Bergson
distinguished between clock time and subjective time, and
between orders oI experience which one analyzes with one`s
intelligence and those which one intuits.) In 1911 Eliot was a
graduate assistant in philosophy at Harvard and in 1914 he went
to Germany to study philosophy, but because the war began he
abandoned Germany Ior OxIord, England.
In 1915, he married the English Vivienne Haigh-Wood
and continued to teach Ior some time beIore joining Lloyd`s
Bank, where he worked Ior 8 years. In 1927 he became a British
citizen. His marriage was not a success, thereIore he leIt his wiIe
in 1933. Ten years later, he married a second time and Iinally
Iound marital happiness.

AMALIA MRSESCU
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T. S. Eliot`s Editorial and Literary Activity
Between 1917 and 1919 Eliot was assistant editor Ior
'The Egoist, a London literary magazine. In 1922 he Iounded
'The Criterion, which was to become an inIluential right-wing
literary journal which he edited until it ceased publication in
1939. In 1925 he joined the London publishing Iirm oI Faber
and Gwyer, becoming a director when the Iirm became Faber
and Faber.
Eliot`s earliest writings appeared in the magazine oI
Smith Academy, St. Louis, in 1905. While at Harvard, he edited
and contributed poems to 'The Advocate. However, the bulk oI
his literary activity was carried out aIter he came to live in
England and it is represented by his activity as a literary critic,
as a playwright and as a poet.
As a critic, he is the author oI a series oI essays, which
illustrate his ideas on poetry and drama. The most Iamous is
Traaition ana Inaiviaual Talent (1919), which 'has been
perhaps the single most inIluential work in Anglo-American
criticism. (Seldon, Widdowson, Brooker 2005: 16) In it, he
emphasizes two ideas:
1. that writers must have 'the historical sense, a sense oI
the tradition oI writing in which they must situate
themselves;
2. that writers have to undergo a process oI
'depersonalization iI they want their art to achieve the

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107
'impersonality it must display in order to approach the
condition oI science.
In Hamlet ana His Problems (1919), he introduces the
term 'objective correlative, closely related to the notion oI
'image as used by Imagism. By objective correlative he
denoted an object or a situation that should correctly represent a
particular emotion; that way, iI the respective object is given,
the corresponding emotion is immediately evoked. He considers
that that was the only way oI expressing emotion in the Iorm oI
art and that Shakespeare Iailed in Iinding such an object to
express Hamlet`s emotions. In The Metaphysical Poets (1921)
he introduces another term, 'dissociation oI sensibility,
considering that aIter the metaphysical poets, sensibility was
dissociated Irom the intellect, thereIore the poets could no
longer establish a concordance between the way in which they
Ielt and the way in which they wrote. This is, in his opinion,
what determined the course oI English poetry throughout the
18
th
and 19
th
centuries. What he himselI aimed at in his own
poems was to reestablish that uniIied sensibility that he Iound in
Donne and other early 17
th
century poets and dramatists. In The
Music of Poetry (1942), he expresses his belieI in the
independence oI poetry versus the surrounding world. The value
oI a poem rests not only in its internal coherence, but also in its
autonomy.

AMALIA MRSESCU
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Eliot wrote a series oI plays on religious themes. His Iirst
play, Muraer in the Cathearal (1935) is built around the murder
oI Archbishop Thomas Becket (1170) in the Canterbury
Cathedral, as a result oI a conIlict with king Henry II. The
Family Reunion (1939) deals with the Ieelings oI guilt and
redemption in a modern upper-class English Iamily. In The
Cocktail Party (1950), The Confiaential Clerk (1954) and The
Elaer Statesman (1959), however, the serious religious themes
are cast in the Iorm oI sophisticated modern social comedies.
His Iirst published collection oI poems is Prufrock ana
Other Observations (1917), Iollowed by The Waste Lana
(1922), Ash Weanesaay (1930) and Four Quartets (1936 1942
separately and in 1943 in book Iorm)
In his poems, Eliot wanted a combination oI precision,
symbolic suggestion and ironic mockery. As he had learned
Irom the Imagists the necessity oI clear and precise images, he
sought to make poetry more subtle, more suggestive and more
precise at the same time. He was inIluenced by the French
symbolists: Jules LaIorgue, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine,
Arthur Rimbaud, Stphane Mallarm, but also by Dante. He
considered Baudelaire the inventor oI modern poetry because he
renovated it, while Dante was appreciated Ior being a medieval
authority that addressed the modern condition. There is a strong
romantic element in his poetry, but it is combined with a dry

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th

109
ironic allusiveness and a colloquial element that are not
normally Iound in poets oI the romantic tradition.
The Love Song of J. Alfrea Prufrock, the most Iamous
poem in Prufrock ana Other Observations is a very suggestive
modernist poem. The title is supposed to indicate a romantic
poem, but it actually is a poem about the Iears, Irustrations, and
Iailures oI the hero. IndiIIerence, hypocrisy, triviality dominate.
PruIrock is marked by his physical decay and Ieels that he
would remain ridiculous and unheroic. His Iear, however,
Iinishes with an epiphany he hears and sees the mermaids.
The Waste Lana, Eliot`s most Iamous poem, is like a cry
Irom a world which its author Ieels to be slipping into the abyss
and came to be viewed as the epitome oI post-war desolation.
The war is, however, present only allusively in the poem. There
are lots oI reIerences to rats, bones and corpses, suggesting the
landscape oI the battle-Iront. The poem is also concerned with a
deep reluctance to remember. Memory is painIul because it is
associated with Iear.
The poem is made up oI Iragments that are simply
juxtaposed, without any authorial comment, Eliot deliberately
eliminating all connective and transitional passages. The
juxtaposed Iragments are arranged in sections whose titles hint
at meaning and the actions presented in each episode generally
reIer to themes elaborated in Sir James Frazer`s The Golaen

AMALIA MRSESCU
110
Bough and Jessie L. Weston`s From Ritual to Romance (1920,
an account oI the legend oI the Holy Grail). It is based thus on
pre-Christian Iertility and vegetation myths having as a central
theme birth out oI death. The main theme oI Eliot`s poem,
however, is the hopelessness and conIusion dominating in the
city, its decay, the contrast oI the heroic past with the degraded
present. By distorted quotations or by halI-concealed allusions
(explained in the writer`s notes), Eliot made analogies to other
works oI literature, some oI them quite obscure to most readers
oI his time. Such works are not only those written by
Shakespeare or Dante, but also by pre-Socratic philosophers or
17
th
century poets and dramatists. There are allusions to Spenser,
Goldsmith, Sappho, Verlain, the ParsiIal story and the myth oI
Tiresias. However, even a reader who is ignorant oI most oI the
literary allusions can understand the poem and get the general
impression oI isolation, decadence and sterility. The poem is
rendered diIIicult also by the multitude oI the languages quoted:
Italian, Latin, English, French, Sanskrit, suggesting the disorder
oI Babel.
The Iive interrelated sections are entitled The Burial of
the Deaa, A Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death by Water
and What the Thunaer Saia. The unity oI the poem is given by
the idea oI the exploration oI a both physical and Iiguratively
urban desert. Eliot mentions real places (streets, hotels,
churches), but the town is 'unreal. London is compared to

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decayed metropolises like Alexandria, which it resembles in
corruption. 'The urban wasteland also assumes a mythical
identity as a landscape in which a quest Ior healing, power,
Iertility and meaning is pursued. (Sanders 2004: 541). This
quest is both Arthurian and anthropological.
The 'speaker oI the poem is not clearly deIined. The
words are spoken in several voices. Time and place become
Iluid, and there are many visual and lexical inconsistencies.
Ash Weanesaay is a poem in six sections which are given
'an almost liturgical character by the reiterated echoes oI the
prayers and metaphors oI Anglo-Catholicism. (Sanders 2004:
541)
In Four Quartets Eliot explored religious moods, dealing
with the relation time-eternity (among other themes). Its
constituent poems (Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages
and Little Giaaing) are concerned with mental experiences and
have their roots in the poet`s earliest philosophical interests and
in his Christian conviction and his readings in mysticism. Their
Iorm and lyricism resemble chamber music. They resemble The
Waste Lana in Iorm, each having Iive sections.
'The most important and inIluential English poet oI his
own and oI the two subsequent generations (Sanders 2004:
537), T. S. Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize Ior literature in
1948. He can be viewed as the conscience oI his generation, as a

AMALIA MRSESCU
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man that clearly expressed the spiritual disease oI the 20
th

century, the doubt and questioning that began aIter World War I.

***

From 1he Waste Land, I. 1he Burial of the Dead

April is the cruelest month, breeaing
Lilacs out of the aeaa lana, mixing
Memory ana aesire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeaing
A little life with ariea tubers.
Summer surprisea us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain, we stoppea in the colonnaae,
Ana went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
Ana arank coffee, ana talkea for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm aus Litauen, echt aeutsch.
Ana when we were chilaren, staying at the arch-aukes,
My cousins, he took me out on a slea,
Ana I was frightenea. He saia, Marie,
Marie, hola on tight. Ana aown we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I reaa, much of the night, ana go south in the winter.

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What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
Ana the aeaa tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
Ana the ary stone no souna of water. Only
There is shaaow unaer this rea rock,
(Come in unaer the shaaow of this rea rock),
Ana I will show you something aifferent from either
Your shaaow at morning striaing behina you
Or your shaaow at evening rising to meet you,
I will show you fear in a hanaful of aust.
Frisch weht aer Wina
Der Heimat :u
Mein Irisch Kina
Wo weilest au?
You gave me hyacinths first a year ago,
They callea me the hyacinth girl.
-Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garaen,
Your arms full, ana your hair wet, I coula not
Speak, ana my eyes failea, I was neither
Living nor aeaa, ana I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oea una leer aas Meer.

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Maaame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Haa a baa cola, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wickea pack of caras. Here, saia she,
Is your cara, the arownea Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look')
Here is Bellaaonna, The Laay of the Rocks, The laay of
situations.
Here is the man with three staves, ana here the Wheel,
Ana here is the one-eyea merchant, ana this cara,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbiaaen to see. I ao not fina
The Hangea Man. Fear aeath by water.
I see crowas of people, walking rouna in a ring.
Thank you. If you see aear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself.
One must be so careful these aays.
Unreal City,
Unaer the brown fog of a winter aawn,
A crowa flowea over Lonaon Briage, so many,
I haa not thought aeath haa unaone so many.
Sighs, short ana infrequent, were exhalea,
Ana each man fixea his eyes before his feet.
Flowea up the hill ana aown King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

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With a aeaa souna on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, ana stoppea him, crying. Stetson'
You who were with me in the ships at Mylae'
That corpse you plantea last year in your garaen,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
Or has the suaaen frost aisturbea its bea?
O keep the Dog far hence, thats friena to men,
Or with his nails hell aig it up again'
You' Hypocrite lecteur' - mon semblable, - mon frre'

1. IdentiIy the languages in which the Iragment is written.
2. What places are mentioned?
3. How many 'speakers can you identiIy? What about
'protagonists?
4. Comment on the perception oI the seasons that the
speaker has.
5. Comment on the images that suggest liIe and
respectively death. Which are dominant?
6. Comment on the symbolism oI the Tarot cards
mentioned in the poem.
7. What is / are the dominant Ieeling(s) oI the poem?
8. Comment on the last line oI the poem.

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1ames 1oyce (1882-1941)

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born in Dublin on
February 2, 1882, as the son oI an impoverished gentleman. His
mother was an accomplished pianist, whose liIe was dominated
by the Roman Catholic Church. In spite oI their poverty, the
Iamily struggled to maintain a solid middle-class Iaade.
From the age oI six, Joyce was educated at Clongowes
Wood College at Clane, and then at Belvedere College in Dublin
(1893-97). Both were Jesuit institutions, where the young boy
was provided with thorough knowledge oI philosophy and
languages. Though he rejected the religious instructions he
received, he later thanked Jesuits Ior teaching him to think
straight. From 1898 to 1902 he studied at University College,
Dublin. AIter graduation he went to Paris, where he spent a year
pursuing a medical education, returning when a telegram arrived
saying his mother was dying. Not long aIter her death, Joyce
was travelling again. He leIt Dublin in 1904 with Nora Barnacle,
a chambermaid whom he married in 1931. He lived most oI his
liIe in Europe (Trieste, Rome and Zurich), returning to Ireland
only Ior short visits.
Joyce`s children were also born abroad. His daughter
Lucia, born in Trieste in 1907, became Carl Jung`s patient in
1935. In her teens, she studied dance, and later 'The Paris
Times praised her skills as choreographer, linguist, and

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perIormer. With her Iather she collaborated in Pomes Penyeach
(1927), Ior which she did some illustrations. Lucia`s great love
was Samuel Beckett, who was not interested in her. In the
1930s, she started to behave erratically and was diagnosed
schizophrenic. Joyce was leIt bitter at Jung`s analysis oI his
daughter and in revenge he played in Finnegans Wake with
Jung`s concepts oI Animus and Anima. Lucia died in a mental
hospital in Northampton, England, in 1982.
At the beginning oI the First World War, Joyce moved
with his Iamily to Zurich, where Lenin and the poet essayist
Tristan Tzara had also Iound their reIuge. Then he went to Paris
to prepare the publication oI Ulysses, but the outbreak oI World
War II Iorced him to return to Zurich, where he died.
Throughout his liIe, he wrote:
x poems, in volumes such as: Chamber Music (1907),
Pomes Penyeach (1927), Ecce Puer (1932);
x short stories published in Dubliners (1915);
x drama: Exiles (1918);
x novels: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916),
Ulysses (1922), Finnegans Wake (1939), Stephen Hero
(1944);
x essays: Drama ana Life (about Henrik Ibsen).
Joyce had problems with having his works published.
Dubliners was Iinished in 1905, but published only in 1914,

AMALIA MRSESCU
118
aIter being rejected in London and postponed in Dublin.
Initially, in its 1905 edition, it contained 12 stories. Ulysses was
published in Paris in 1922, but in the United States only in 1933,
and in London in 1937. Finnegans Wake was published with the
help oI T. S. Eliot, at Faber and Faber, whose director he was.
Literary critics and ordinary readers were divided in
appreciating Joyce`s works. Some oI them considered his
writings as experimental and highly innovative, others Iound
them erratic and incomprehensible. For example, writers like D.
H. Lawrence and H. G. Wells did not like his work, but he
inIluenced V. WoolI, W. Faulkner, J. Dos Passos, L. Durrell,
etc. Joyce himselI is quoted to have said to an interviewer that
the demand he made on his reader is to devote his whole liIe to
reading his works. Similarly, when asked by the American
writer Max Eastman why Finnegans Wake was written in a
diIIicult style, his rather cynical reply was: 'to keep the critics
busy Ior three hundred years. (see James Joyce at
http://www.readprint.com/author-52/James-Joyce)
There is a great consistency in his work. His later works
should be understood through the earlier. Each piece oI writing
should not be viewed separately, but as part oI an entire ediIice.
Joyce`s characters, like their creator, leave Ireland, but
not Ior England or English-speaking countries. Joyce wrote
Dubliners in Trieste, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in
Dublin and Trieste, Ulysses in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, and

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Finnegans Wake in Paris. But though he leIt Ireland, he did not
Iorget it and explored it in all his works. Dublin was never
absent Irom his blood during his selI-imposed exile and it was
never absent Irom his writings. Joyce sensed an atmosphere oI
Irustration and disintegration over his native city and over all
modern society. He took reIuge in art, perIorming a most
absolute and brilliant experimentation upon the novel.
Joyce considered that the artist`s aim was to attain
Iormal purity and aesthetic perIection. He did not see the artist
as totally indiIIerent to moral values, and did not exclude the
physical responses or the moral and social activities Irom the
sphere oI the aesthetic. He tried to oIIer an objective perspective
and to gain a realistic control on things, being a remarkable
combination oI realist and symbolist.
Joyce began as a poet and remained a poet in his
unusually creative handling oI language. However, his poetry
proper is relatively inIerior, revealing Joyce`s reliance on
autobiography and on musical models. Emphasis is laid
sometimes on visual imagery and sound eIIects.
His Iirst volume oI prose, Dubliners, consists oI 15 short
stories, studies in intellectual, moral and spiritual paralysis,
which he considered dominant in his native city. This view
opposed his contemporary Celtic Renaissance. In writing this
volume, Joyce was partially inIluenced by Flaubert, Maupassant

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and Chekhov. The stories are impressionistic, trying to create a
particular emotional atmosphere by means oI a 'slice oI liIe,
but also show a naturalist inIluence. The writer viewed the
volume not as a collection oI 15 independent stories, but as a
work with a unitary structure and a complex method and style,
preIiguring his later novels. Why Dublin? Joyce himselI
explained why: because it was an important European city, a
capital that preserved its national and individual identity. It
could sustain Joyce`s theme oI the modern metropolis as a
typical social macrocosm and it could reinIorce his moral and
political theme, 'that oI an Irish community paralyzed by the
Catholic Church and the British State. (Pop Cornis 1981: 143)
His intention was to present Iour aspects oI liIe in Dublin:
childhood (in The Sisters, An Encounter and Araby),
adolescence (in Eveline, After the Race, Two Gallants and The
Boaraing House), maturity (in A Little Cloua, Counterparts,
Clay and A Painful Case) and public liIe (in Ivy Day in the
Committee Room, A Mother and Grace). The stories have
several themes: Irish paralysis (central in all stories; the
characters lose their lives in dreams, but do not do anything to
IulIil their dreams); Irustrated escape; Irustrated love (Araby);
the search Ior a symbolic Iather (An Encounter). The
protagonists are oIten artists or would-be artists, set in
opposition with the unimaginative, arrogant men oI action. The
volume also has an epilogue, The Deaa, in which all themes are

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brought to a climax. Gabriel Conroy is an intellectual with
artistic tastes, who Ieels alienated. He is incapable oI being
sympathetic to the problems oI the people around him. He is
even devoid oI national Ieelings. When his wiIe (who is under
the spell oI painIul memories about a dead lover) openly rejects
him, Gabriel Ieels humiliated and ridiculous, and Ieels also the
need to communicate and commune with the whole universe, oI
the living and oI the dead. Gretta Conroy, his wiIe, is the Iirst oI
Joyce`s extraordinary Iemale characters. 'In touch with the
semiotic rhythms oI maternal love and erotic bonding, Gretta
articulates a spiritually redemptive aesthetics oI desire that
subverts the logocentric world oI patriarchal discourse and
presages the Iuture textual victories oI Bertha Rowan in Exiles,
Molly Bloom in Ulysses, and Anna Livia Plurabelle at the end
(or beginning) oI Finnegans Wake. (Henke 1990: 48-49) At the
end oI The Deaa, 'the snow seems to join the living and the
dead, the romantically lost and the practically present, but it
does more than stir memory and desire; it oIIers a momentary
vision oI a release Irom time and Irom purely temporal and
mundane preoccupations. (Sanders 2004: 547)
Joyce`s next work, Stephen Hero, is an unIinished novel,
published posthumously. It contains important material Ior
Joyce`s later works and anticipates A Portrait of the Artist as a

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122
Young Man. As a matter oI Iact, its pages were concentrated in a
chapter oI the respective novel.
Joyce`s Iirst published novel, A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man, presents the liIe oI Stephen Dedalus Irom inIancy
until he leaves Ior Paris to live the liIe oI a selI-exiled artist. The
name oI the central character is highly symbolical: Stephen was
the Iirst Christian martyr, while Daedalus was the mythical
artisan who built the labyrinth and who, being imprisoned in it,
made waxen wings with which to escape Ilying. However,
Stephen can be associated with Icarus, Daedalus`s son, who
went too close to the sun with his wings and Iell. Symbolically,
Stephen stands Ior the angel Iallen Irom divine grace or the
Iallen artist, held back by a constraining society. Stephen is an
anarchic rebel, oversensitive, physically weak, insecure in his
relations, contemptuous oI authority, discipline and convention.
At the same time, he is a constant dreamer, in a dramatic
conIlict with reality.
The novel is organized around a Iew successive
moments oI initiation and crisis. Stephen Ieels oppressed,
trapped and spiritually deIormed by his Iamily, by his country
and by the Church. At Clongowes Wood College he is
mistreated by the priests who teach him. But his brilliance
makes the Jesuits want to attract him into their order. For a
while, young Stephen becomes Ianatically pious, but as a
consequence oI a sexual adventure he starts Ieeling terribly

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guilty and sinIul. In college, he gradually undergoes a
conversion Irom Iaith and the Church to liIe and art. Finally, he
Ilees to Paris, but his search Ior selI-realization has barely
begun.
The novel presents the 20
th
century artist in rebellion,
breaking Irom his matrix and becoming himselI. It is a
Bildungsroman, but also a Knstlerroman, presenting the
development oI the artist in relation to society and his vocation.
'Though the work is largely autobiographical, the writer
preserves a cool detachment in the precise analysis oI his hero`s
spiritual liIe torn between the standards oI an ascetic, religious
upbringing and his desire to IulIil himselI as a man and an
artist. (Miroiu 1983: 72)
Exiles (1918), Joyce`s only drama, presents Richard
Rowan, a lonely rebel, victim oI jealousy and possessiveness,
returning to Dublin Irom exile in 1912.
Joyce`s greatest achievement in novel writing is
represented by his novel Ulysses, once conceived as a story Ior
Dubliners. The title connects the novel with Homer`s Oayssey.
But while Homer`s Ulysses is a hero oI the Trojan war, who in
the ten years necessary Ior him to return home Irom Troy, went
through various adventures proving his courage, intelligence,
bravery and cunning, Leopold Bloom is quite the opposite. He
has Jewish origins, but is successively a Protestant and a Roman

AMALIA MRSESCU
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Catholic. His 'adventures take place on a single day, June 16,
1904. They are rather trivial experiences, happening on his way
Irom his house to the cemetery, where he is to attend the Iuneral
oI his Iriend Paddy Dignam, and then Irom the cemetery back to
his house. Somewhere on his way, he meets Stephen Dedalus
whom he takes home with him. Stephen parallels Telemachus,
Ulysses`s son in the Oayssey, while paralleling Penelope
(Ulysses`s IaithIul wiIe) is Molly Bloom, Leopold`s unIaithIul
wiIe. The novel picks up the story Irom A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man, but places it in an ampler social and political
background, presenting the daily activities oI the three main
characters and a multitude oI minor ones, underlining the
diversity oI liIe in Dublin.
In Ulysses, 'Stephen emerges as an arrogant introvert,
more a sterile aesthete than a genuine artist, a denier with
remorses and an exile who returns home in search oI a Iather
and a sense oI social belonging. (Pop Cornis 1981: 141) In his
search oI his Iather, Stephen is similar not only to his mythical
correspondent, but also to Shakespeare`s Hamlet. Bloom is a 38
year old advertising agent, an average individual, matter-oI-Iact,
vulgar and halI educated, but kind and naive/ innocent at the
same time, while Molly, an ex-singer, is amoral, complex and
vivid. Stephen is partly autobiographical, the other two are
imaginary characters. All three are archetypes. Each oI them
represents one oI the basic principles oI liIe: male (Bloom),

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Iemale (Molly), progeny and artist creator (Stephen). But each
has also a multitude oI roles. Leopold Bloom, Ior example, is
Iather, husband, lover, citizen, outcast, hero and anti-hero. He is
'the most universal character in modern Iiction, a creation oI
Shakespearean amplitude. (Allen 1954: 356)
In order to illuminate the complexity oI the book, Joyce
himselI provided us with a plan, containing the Homeric titles oI
the sections, the set where the respective section takes place, the
hour oI the day when it takes place, the human body part, art,
colour with which it can be associated, its symbol and the
technique used in it. For example, the section Oxen of the Sun
takes place at the hospital at 10 p.m., and is associated with the
womb, medicine, white, mothers and the technique oI
embryonic development. The episode is related in parodies oI
the English language Irom its earliest Iorms to its maniIestations
in modern newspaper journalism. The parodies oI the successive
stages in the development oI language mirror the development
oI the embryo in the womb. The subtitles were Joyce`s
intention, but were omitted Irom the printed text to prevent
overemphasis on the Homeric allusions. The hours make up a
whole day, the organs Iorm a complete human body, the sets
represent the main places oI interest in a city, the arts a synopsis
oI human activities, the techniques a repertoir oI novelistic

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strategies. Thus, we can say that the novel attempts to
encompass the whole oI liIe.
The novel deals with several themes, introduced ever
since the Iirst episode: the search Ior the Iather, the Hamlet
motiI, the situation oI Irish nationalism and Irish art, the motiI oI
the lost key, the theme oI the usurper and pretender, the Christ
motiI.
Ulysses is a thoroughly documented novel, and an
intensely local one, to such an extent that it can almost be used
as a guide-book to Dublin. Joyce actually uses real names oI
places in the city, which his publishers did not appreciate.
Following the lives oI ordinary people, he takes us in pubs or on
the streets, in a recreation oI the town that is 'populist and
plebeian. (Parrinder 1984: 4).
A parody oI Homer and a criticism oI the 20
th
century,
'Ulysses is basically a human comedy with the mythical
reIerences meant both to elevate contemporary realities and to
set them in an ironic conIlict with the heroic past. Ulysses may
be read also as a parody Ior the Oayssey, just as it is a parody oI
history and literature, oI the popular styles and sentimental
productions oI Joyce`s time. (Pop Cornis 1981: 162) It belongs
to post-impressionism and expressionism. Due to the Iact that it
has lots oI symbolic and mythic reIerences, it requires repeated
readings in order to be Iully understood.

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127
Joyce`s last creation is Finnegans Wake, a very diIIicult
work; thereIore, except Ior several major points, Iew interpreters
agree upon its meaning. Most obviously diIIicult is the
language, Joyce`s own creation out oI a combination oI English
and even Ioreign words. Joyce sought multiple layers in the
meaning oI each word. The starting point Ior the work is an old
vaudeville Irish song about a man who Ialls oII a ladder in a
drunken Iit and is believed dead. At his wake (watch), his
grievers spill whiskey upon him, and Finnegan comes to liIe to
join the general celebration. The Iall oI Finnegan symbolizes
every Iall starting with the Fall oI Man, while his wake can be
included among the death and resurrection myths oI mankind.
The actual subject oI the work is actually the entire course oI
history and human destiny. The central character is Humphrey
Chimpden Earwicker, a Dublin tavernkeeper, who symbolically
represents 'Everyman. His wiIe Anna Livia Plurabelle
represents many women and embodies the eternal principle oI
love and Iertility. The couple have a daughter Issy (standing Ior
the vanitous, tempting side oI Ieminity) and two sons, Shem (the
man oI letters) and Shaun (the man oI business). Within this
Iamily and its ramiIications struggle all the polarities oI liIe:
male - Iemale, thinking - doing, age - youth, love - hate, liIe -
death. These polarities provide the energy that sustains the
individual and allows the human species to go through its cyclic

AMALIA MRSESCU
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evolution. (Joyce adopted the cyclic view on history oI the 18
th

century Italian philosopher Giambatista Vico, as presented in La
Scien:a Nouva). In order to exempliIy this circular movement,
Joyce begins Finnegans Wake in mid-sentence and ends it with
the Iirst halI oI the initial sentence in the idea that the reader
may begin anywhere in the work and read circularly.
The novel is however, practically unreadable as it
requires Irom one thorough knowledge oI psychoanalysis, world
history, literature, mythology and many languages. It seems to
become more intelligible iI read aloud, as Joyce, almost blind
when he wrote it, relied more on the sound oI words.
Joyce claimed that Ulysses is a humorous work. It
displays 'anarchic humour a humour which subverts existing
structures and hierarchies without taking up a political stance.
(Parrinder 1984: 6) Anarchic humour is associated with the
carnival, and indeed Joyce`s works seem to transIer us to such
carnivalesque world. The hero in Ulysses is cuckolded, while
Finnegans Wake is based on Irish Iuneral merrymaking. It
seems to tell us that laugh and excess keep misery Iar, not only
Ior Joyce`s heroes, but also Ior the writer himselI, who had to
cope with his mother`s death, the loss oI his eyesight or his
daughter`s schizophrenia. The author uses not only anarchic
humour, but also grotesque humour, associated usually with a
distorted view oI the body. But we should also mention here his
grotesque treatment oI Shakespeare. Stephen in Ulysses

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129
identiIies with Hamlet and has a theory ridiculed by Buck
Mulligan that Hamlet`s grandson is Shakespeare`s grandIather,
and that Hamlet himselI is the ghost oI his Iather. Stephen also
considers that the motive power oI Shakespeare`s art is his
experience oI cuckoldry.

1ames 1oyce`s Literary Technique
When discussing Joyce`s technique, we should mention
on the one hand, his use oI the epiphany, and, on the other hand,
his use oI the stream oI consciousness.
The meaning oI the epiphany is explained in Stephen
Hero. 'By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual
maniIestation, whether in the vulgarity oI speech or oI gesture or
in a memorable phase oI the mind itselI. (apud Pop Cornis
1981: 141). 'The literary epiphanies then must be understood as
complex images revealing essential Ieatures oI the world, oI
character and experience, apprehended intuitively in the Iorm oI
brieI sketches, deliberately objective and Iragmentary in Iorm.
They are moments` oI liIe, oIten trivial in appearance, little
errors and gestures mere straws in the mind by which people
betrayed the very things they were most careIul to conceal.
(ibid.: 141-142) They are Iragments oI dialogue or personal
experience to which Joyce attributed higher spiritual meanings.

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In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen
describes the three stages oI the epiphany:
x integritas/ wholeness apprehension oI an object, an image,
in time and space, as a single thing;
x consonantia/ harmony apprehension oI the parts oI the
object and oI their relation to each other;
x claritas/ radiance apprehension oI the individual Ieatures
oI beauty, the aesthetic pleasure attained by the mind.
The epiphany is achieved when the mind discovers this
third quality.
Both persons and things are capable oI epiphanies, but
those oI the things depend on their observers. The objects may
reveal themselves, i.e. epiphanize, but they are not aware oI it.
They have to be noticed by the persons. Such moments oI
epiphany are experienced only by thoughtIul, selI-conscious
characters, who are reIlective, doubtIul and selI-analytical.
Molly does not Iit this description, but her epiphanies are as
intense as those oI Stephen or Leopold Bloom.
The stream oI consciousness is a technique used by such
writers as J. Joyce, Virginia WoolI in English literature and
William Faulkner in American literature. The name oI the
technique was coined by Henry James`s brother, William James
(1842-1910). The idea behind the term is that consciousness is
not Iixed, it is not logically ordered, but rather Iluid and shiIting.
'Stream oI consciousness Iiction presents a character`s thoughts,

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emotional reactions, mental associations and images, etc., on an
approximated preverbal level, with little or no direct comment
or explanation by the author. (Miroiu 1983: 22) In other words,
the stream oI consciousness represents a person`s state oI mind
beIore it has been ordered by discursive reason. Thus, memory,
association and analogy replace the relationships that usually
control language. Every impression Irom the outer world
triggers a string oI associated thoughts and memories. As a
consequence, logical connections disappear, words become
blurred and unclear (sometimes new words are Iormed, speciIic
to each writer), sentences become loose Iragments, linked by
accidental associations (a smell, a sound etc.), not by logic. A
new, Ireer syntax is used instead oI the normal one.
The technique was Iirst used in France by Edouard
Dujardin and later by Marcel Proust in A la recherche au temps
perau (1913-1927), which came to the attention oI the British
both in the original and the its 1922-1931 translation as
Remembrance of Things Past. But the phrase 'stream oI
consciousness was apparently used Ior the Iirst time in literary
criticism in 1918 by May Sinclair in an essay on Dorothy
Richardson`s technique in her 12-novel sequence Pilgrimage
(1915-1938). (cI. Sanders 2004) Apparently Dorothy
Richardson was the Iirst English novelist who deliberately
employed the technique in Pointea Roofs (1915), the Iirst novel

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in Pilgrimage (though the stream oI consciousness technique
was also used beIore, by Laurence Sterne, Ior example). The
central character is Miriam Henderson and the novel has no plot,
recording only her Ieelings, experiences, reactions.
Joyce`s own stream oI consciousness technique is
inspired Irom Edouard Dujardin`s 'monologue intrieur,
introduced in 1887 in Les lauriers sont coupes (The Laurels Are
Cut). The method was Iurther supported by Remy de Gourmont
who in Promenaaes Philosophiques (1908) considered language
as the machinery through which the human organism reveals its
innermost processes. Joyce takes this idea a step Iurther. He
Iollows Locke`s principle oI Iree association, but, underneath it,
there is a rich structure oI uniIying motives and symbols. In his
works, the stream oI consciousness, written in the 3
rd
person,
includes the character`s interior monologue, which is written in
the 1
st
person and is more ordered.
In Ulysses, Ior instance, we get to know the three main
characters Irom the inside.
In Bloom`s case, Joyce rather suggests the stream oI
consciousness. As he walks through Dublin, Bloom has stray
thoughts provoked by what he does, by what he sees, or smells.
Below these, he has other constant thoughts: oI his child`s death,
his Iather`s suicide, Molly`s cheating on him, or his Ieeling an
outsider as a Jew.

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Stephen Dedalus seems to be a projection oI Joyce as a
young man: arrogant, tortured by ambition, remorseIul towards
his mother. He thinks in intellectual terms, in learned words. He
has more awareness, purpose and control than Leopold Bloom.
'The language Joyce puts into his mind is much more a notation
oI the way in which Stephen thinks than an attempt literally to
transcribe his thoughts. (Allen 1954: 356)
Joyce uses the stream oI consciousness technique most
thoroughly in his treatment oI Molly, who appears as having
'the Iullness, the rankness, the sensuality, the whole-hearted
acceptance oI liIe oI a Magna Mater, an earth-goddess. (Allen
1954: 355) Throughout the novel, Molly remains in her bed.
She sleeps, entertains a lover, then moves to the centre oI the
stage as she thinks oI her liIe and loves in her monologue. She
thus appears as a character in its own right only at the end oI the
novel, her monologue being its climax. With it, Joyce realizes a
true psychological and stylistic tour de Iorce. What is
extraordinary in this monologue is the Iact that the heroine`s
thoughts, presented along more than 50 pages, are not
interrupted by any punctuation mark. The only punctuation
marks in the chapter are the Iinal Iull stops, which precede and
respectively Iollow the last word. The Iinal Iull stop may be
interpreted as a symbol oI the Earth, since it has the same shape

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as the planet, or it may give the Iinal yes the power oI a supreme
triumph oI love.
Molly`s thoughts are preceded by her husband`s, who is
also in bed, by her side, waiting to Iall asleep. His ideas take the
Iorm oI a careIully articulated series oI questions and answers
until they too become an unpunctuated succession oI words that
are isolated Irom one another (the last two answers).
The elimination oI the punctuation marks has several
consequences:
x identiIies the narrator with Molly;
x allows the reader`s access to Molly`s raw Ieelings and
thoughts, thus allowing the reader to understand her
directly;
x gives mobility to Molly`s thoughts;
x makes the word the basic unit oI the discourse.
While making the text diIIicult to read, it undoubtedly
gives the reading an alert rhythm, similar to the one with which
Molly`s thoughts unIold in her mind.
Still, there are several indentations in the chapter, either
to mark the heroine`s Ialling asleep Irom time to time, or to
respond to the novelist`s need oI a blank space; anyway, they do
have a certain stylistic value. (cI. Brnzeu 1995)
A 'cultural chronicler, with a work that 'Iunctions as a
library or archive which conIers permanence to the material

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deposited in it (Parrinder 1984: 4), Joyce is certainly the most
diIIicult, but also the most interesting novelist oI the period.

***

Stream of Consciousness
From Ulysses, Molly`s Monologue

YES because he never aia a thing like that before as ask
to get his breakfast in bea with a couple of eggs since the City
Arms hotel when he usea to be pretenaing to be laia up with a
sick voice aoing his highness to make himself interesting to that
ola faggot Mrs Rioraan that he thought he haa a great leg of
ana she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself ana her
soul greatest miser ever was actually afraia to lay out 4a for her
methylatea spirit telling me all her ailments she haa too much
ola chat in her about politics ana earthquakes ana the ena of the
worla let us have a bit of fun first Goa help the worla if all the
women were her sort aown on bathing-suits ana lownecks of
course noboay wantea her to wear I suppose she was pious
because no man woula look at her twice I hope Ill never be like
her a wonaer she aiant want us to cover our faces but she was a
welleaucatea woman certainly ana her gabby talk about Mr
Rioraan here ana Mr Rioraan there I suppose he was glaa to get

AMALIA MRSESCU
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shut of her ana her aog smelling my fur ana always eaging to
get up unaer my petticoats especially then still I like that in him
polite to ola women like that ana waiters ana beggars too hes
not proua out of nothing but not always if ever he got anything
really serious the matter with him its much better for them go
into a hospital where everything is clean but I suppose Ia have
to aring it into him for a month yes ana then wea have a hospital
nurse next thing on the carpet have him staying there till they
throw him out or a nun maybe like the smutty photo he has shes
as much a nun as Im not yes because theyre so weak ana puling
when theyre sick they want a woman to get well if his nose
bleeas youa think it was O tragic ana that ayinglooking one off
the south circular when he sprainea his foot at the choir party at
the sugarloaf Mountain the aay I wore that aress Miss Stack
bringing him flowers the worst ola ones she coula fina at the
bottom of the basket anything at all to get into a mans bearoom
with her ola maias voice trying to imagine he was aying on
account of her to never see thy face again though he lookea
more like a man with his beara a bit grown in the bea father was
the same besiaes I hate banaaging ana aosing when he cut his
toe with the ra:or paring his corns afraia hea get blooa
poisoning but if it was a thing I was sick then wea see what
attention only of course the woman hiaes it not to give all the
trouble they ao yes he came somewhere Im sure by his appetite
anyway love its not or hea be off his feea thinking of her so

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either it was one of those night women if it was aown there he
was really ana the hotel story he maae up a pack of lies to hiae
it planning it Hynes kept me who aia I meet ah yes I met ao you
remember Menton ana who else who let me see that big
babbyface I saw him ana he not long marriea flirting with a
young girl at Pooles Myriorama ana turnea my back on him
when he slinkea out looking quite conscious what harm but he
haa the impuaence to make up to me one time well aone to him
mouth almighty ana his boilea eyes of all the big stupoes I ever
met ana thats callea a solicitor only for I hate having a long
wrangle in bea or else if its not that its some little bitch or other
he got in with somewhere or pickea up on the sly if they only
knew him as well as I ao yes because the aay before yesteraay
he was scribbling something a letter when I came into the front
room for the matches to show him Dignams aeath in the paper
as if something tola me ana he coverea it up with the
blottingpaper pretenaing to be thinking about business so very
probably that was it to someboay who thinks she has a softy in
him because all men get a bit like that at his age especially
getting on to forty he is now so as to wheeale any money she can
out of him no fool like an ola fool ana then the usual kissing my
bottom was to hiae it not that I care two straws who he aoes it
with or knew before that way though Ia like to fina out so long
as I aont have the two of them unaer my nose all the time like

AMALIA MRSESCU
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that slut that Mary we haa in Ontario terrace paaaing out her
false bottom to excite him baa enough to get the smell of those
paintea women off him once or twice I haa a suspicion by
getting him to come near me when I founa the long hair on his
coat without that one when I went into the kitchen pretenaing he
was arinking water I woman is not enough for them it was all
his fault of course ruining servants then proposing that she
coula eat at our table on Christmas if you please O no thank you
not in my house stealing my potatoes ana the oysters 2/6 per ao:
going out to see her aunt if you please common robbery so it
was but I was sure he haa something on with that one it takes
me to fina out a thing like that he saia you have no proof it was
her proof O yes her aunt was very fona of oysters but I tola her
what I thought of her suggesting me to go out to be alone with
her I woulant lower myself to spy on them the garters I founa in
her room the Friaay she was out that was enough for me a little
bit too much I saw too that her face swellea up on her with
temper when I gave her her weeks notice better ao without them
altogether ao out the rooms myself quicker only for the aamn
cooking ana throwing out the airt I gave it to him anyhow either
she or me leaves the house I coulant even touch him if I thought
he was with a airty barefacea liar ana sloven like that one
aenying it up to my face ana singing about the place in the WC
too because she knew she was too well off yes because he
coulant possibly ao without it that long so he must ao it

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somewhere ana the last time he came on my bottom when was it
the night Boylan gave my hana a great squee:e going along by
the Tolka in my hana there steals another I fust pressea the back
of his like that with my thumb to squee:e back singing the young
May Moon shes beaming love because he has an iaea about him
ana me hes not such a fool he saia Im aining out ana going to
the Gaiety though Im not going to give him the satisfaction in
any case Goa knows hes change in a way not to be always ana
ever wearing the same ola hat unless I paia some nicelooking
boy to ao it since I cant ao it myself a young boy woula like me
Ia confuse him a little alone with him if we were Ia let him see
my garters the new ones ana make him turn rea looking at him
seauce him I know what boys feel with that aown on their cheek
aoing that frigging arawing out the thing by the hour question
ana answer woula you ao this that ana the other with the
coalman yes with a bishop yes I woula because I tola him about
some Dean or Bishop was sitting besiae me in the fews Temples
garaens when I was knitting that woollen thing a stranger to
Dublin what place was it ana so on about the monuments ana he
tirea me out with statues encouraging him making him worse
than he is who is in your mina now tell me who are you thinking
of who is it tell me his name who tell me who the German
Emperor is it yes

AMALIA MRSESCU
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1. Enumerate the persons Molly is thinking oI.
2. Characterize each oI these persons according to Molly`s
perception.
3. Characterize Molly.
4. How many times does the word 'yes appear in the
Iragment? IdentiIy the respective instances and comment
on the use oI the word in each oI them.
5. Comment on the use oI the stream oI consciousness
technique in this Iragment.

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Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Virginia WoolI was born in Kensington, London, as the
daughter oI Sir Leslie Stephen, a Iamous Victorian critic and
scholar (he edited The Cornhill Maga:ine and The Dictionary of
National Biography) having Iamily connections with W. M.
Thackeray (her Iather`s Iirst wiIe was Thackeray`s daughter)
and Ch. Darwin. She was educated at home, in a household oI
remarkable culture and intellect. Her youth, devoid oI travels
and school adventures, was rather uneventIul, thereIore she
concentrated on the inner experience. In 1912 Virginia married
the historian and sociologist Leonard WoolI. It was a marriage
that was more like a literary partnership, but it oIIered her
stability. Both spouses were members oI the Bloomsbury Group
that also included Virginia`s sister and her husband, the artists
Roger Fry and Duncan Grant, the novelists Lytton Strachey and
E. M. Forster, the literary critic Desmond MacCarthy, the
economist Maynard Keynes, the philosophers George Edward
Moore and Bertrand Russell, the historian G. M. Travelyan. The
group had been started in the Iamily`s Gordon Square house, in
the Bloomsbury area oI London, and had originated in the
Thursday evening meetings initiated by Virginia`s brother
Thoby with his Iriends Irom Cambridge. Virginia and her
husband also Iounded the Hogarth Press, which published T. S.

AMALIA MRSESCU
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Eliot and Katherine MansIield, establishing itselI as an avant-
garde publisher. Virginia WoolI committed suicide in 1941,
drowning herselI in the river Ouse, aIter having suIIered a series
oI nervous breakdowns Iollowing the deaths oI several members
oI her Iamily.
Virginia WoolI began her writing career as a contributor
to 'The Times Literary Supplement. She wrote:
x novels: The Joyage Out (1915), Night ana Day (1919),
Jacobs Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the
Lighthouse (1927), The Waves (1931);
x short stories gathered in volumes like: Monaay or
Tuesaay (1921), A Hauntea House ana Other Stories
(1944);
x about 500 essays and critical articles collected in more
than 10 volumes, including: Mr. Bennett ana Mrs. Brown
(1924), The Common Reaaer (1925), The Secona
Common Reaaer (1932), A Room of Ones Own (1929),
The Captains Death-Bea (1950);
x the biography oI Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-
1861), entitled Flush (1932) and told Irom the point oI
view oI the poetess`s pet dog.
WoolI`s Iirst two novels, The Joyage Out and Night ana
Day are traditional in Iorm, bearing traces oI the Bloomsbury
attitude (high-class, over-reIined, but limited in preoccupations).
The Iormer novel introduces Clarissa Dalloway and the theme oI

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death (the main character dies). The latter introduces the image
oI the lighthouse and the senseless bird dashing into it. All these
will also appear in her later masterpieces.
The search Ior a new technique was Iirst successIul in
WoolI`s stories and sketches. The Mark on the Wall and Kew
Garaens are two oI her most Iamous stories. They have no plot,
but develop only series oI recollections and impressions oI the
characters. The uniIying element that stimulates the impressions
is a nail on the wall and a bed oI Ilowers, respectively.
WoolI`s Iirst stream-oI-consciousness novel is Jacobs
Room (1922). The title character is a commonplace person
whose room or sequence oI rooms represents his attempt to
construct meaning. The book has no plot in the traditional
meaning oI the word and is not sensational, but it is one oI the
most sensitive perceptions oI youth. The 14 sections oI the book
record impressions and glimpses oI the main character`s liIe as
recalled by several people who knew him, however little. He
seeks Ior reality and Ior his own identity, moving Irom place to
place, thus inhabiting various rooms. The novel is a
representation oI WoolI`s idea that any human being is the sum
total oI the human beings he has known and oI the objects he
has touched.
Mrs. Dalloway (1925), also using the stream-oI-
consciousness technique, is an experiment with time, whose

AMALIA MRSESCU
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action takes place during one day in June, but which is more
concerned with the past. In it, 'individual characters are brought
into relationship with a number oI others oI whose existence
they may be quite ignorant, by shared experience. (i.e. they see
and hear the same things). Thus, WoolI creates 'the illusion oI
many lives lived simultaneously, oI a speciIic place and a sense
oI community. (Allen 1954: 349)
The setting is London, and the 'plot presents the
relations that Clarissa Dalloway, 52 years old, has to certain
people. Though she Ieels rather isolated, as her husband is too
busy with politics and her daughter is being driven away Irom
her, she is the one to whom all characters connect. Clarissa
unites them all and, though she has a deep sense oI time and
waste, it is her desire to create human relations. She is going to
give a party and is visited by Peter Walsh, her lover oI thirty
years ago. While she represents the Ieminine intuition and
sensibility, he is the raisonneur oI the book, being experienced
enough to be able to dissect reality. In opposition to Clarissa, we
Iind Sir William Bradshaw, standing Ior the masculine
insensitivity. Clarissa`s double is the shell-shocked veteran
Septimus Warren Smith, another victim oI the emptiness oI the
modern world. In the end Septimus commits suicide, but the
party is a success.
The novel either stands still in time and moves about in
space (exploring the consciousness oI a number oI Londoners)

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or stands still in space and moves about in time (as Mrs.
Dalloway remembers her past liIe). Clock time is symbolized by
the recurring striking oI Big Ben, which signals the shiIts Irom
one character to another, but it is the subjective time that is Ielt
to be the reality.
Another stream-oI-consciousness novel is WoolI`s
masterpiece, To the Lighthouse (1927). It is made up oI three
parts: The Winaow, Time Passes and The Lighthouse (presenting
the integration-disintegration-reunion oI a Iamily). The Iirst part
presents Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay spending the summer with their
children and Iriends at their cottage in the Hebrides. Their little
son James intends to make a trip to the lighthouse, on the Isle oI
Skye, but Mr. Ramsay announces bad weather, thereIore the
plan is abandoned. Mrs. Ramsay is the one that brings the whole
Iamily and their guests together in at least momentary
communion. In the unity she creates, liIe has achieved meaning,
a window to reality. The second part presents the war period.
The summer cottage decays, reIlecting the disintegration oI the
Ramsays, as Mrs. Ramsay dies, one oI the sons is killed in the
war, and a daughter dies in childbirth. Nature, however, remains
impersonal to the destruction oI human hopes. In the last part,
the Iamily is reunited and Iinds a new meaning oI liIe. James
and his Iather Iinally make the trip to the lighthouse, while the

AMALIA MRSESCU
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painter Lily Briscoe Iinishes Mrs. Ramsay`s portrait, Iinally
understanding her importance.
The people in To the Lighthouse are a microcosm oI
mankind, not concerned with the economic and other values
important Ior most human beings, but exploring the essence oI
liIe. Mrs. Ramsay symbolically represents the lighthouse,
bringing shelter to those around her. The most important idea oI
the novel is that womanly love is what creates meaning in an
otherwise senseless universe.
The Dutch theorist Douwe W. Fokkema considers that
the main theme oI the novel To the Lighthouse is the act oI
communication, more precisely the impossibility to
communicate produced by the incapacity oI the language to
transmit the most intimate Ieelings. The verbal expression,
considers WoolI, IalsiIied the originality oI the emotions,
placing them in ordinary cliches.
The Waves (1931), V. WoolI`s most experimental novel,
has in its centre the search Ior identity. It has six characters,
Bernard, Neville, Louis, Susan, Rhoda, and Jinny, whose
cultural background, sensitivity and intelligence parallel
WoolI`s, but not the general reader`s. There are nine sections,
carrying the six persons Irom childhood to approaching death.
The Iorm oI the novel has been compared to a classic ballet,
with each dancer stepping Iorth to deliver a lyric solo, as each
character has a monologue. The six people are brought together

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twice, with the occasion oI two dinner parties, one taking place
some years aIter the other. The interludes beginning each
section are a counterpointing Irom Nature, the rhythms oI the
physical world passing Irom dawn to sunset. The artist Bernard
is the most complex character, being also WoolI`s alter-ego. He
Ieels most poignantly the loneliness oI mankind and voices
Virginia WoolI`s vision that the only meaning oI liIe is the love
we Ieel Ior each other. Paradoxically, she considered that
independence brings unhappiness and a loss oI identity.

Virginia Woolf`s Literary Technique
Virginia WoolI was compared with Joyce in her radical,
innovatory approach to the novel and like him, she was little
read by the public in her own liIe. Her writings were inIluenced
by the atmosphere within the Bloomsbury Group, oIten
reIlecting the reIined, but unstable personal relations inside it,
and the snobbish preoccupations oI some oI its members. Her
critical judgement was also occasionally spoilt by their
mentality. In her early essays, WoolI tended to underestimate
writers that were not part oI the group, like H. G. Wells, D. H.
Lawrence and even Joyce. But in the end she managed to
overpass the limitations oI her upbringing, opening herselI to the
best inIluences oI the time: Henri Bergson, S. Freud, Dorothy
Richardson, Marcel Proust, Henry James, James Joyce, L. N.

AMALIA MRSESCU
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Tolstoy. She believed that traditional realistic literature had
exhausted its possibilities and that a new set oI conventions had
to be introduced in Iiction. ThereIore, she gave up the
conventional character and the plot, trying to recreate the inner
complexities oI experience. She was never a popular writer, but
had an enormous impact upon modern intellectuals.
WoolI considered criticism inIerior to the creative
impulse, and revolted against the realistic-naturalistic school,
pleading Ior the inner exploration oI the truth oI experience.
Consequently, most oI her early essays attacked the conventions
oI the traditional novel as practiced by her contemporaries, that
she called 'materialists because they insisted on external
details oI liIe. To them, she opposed a more Ilexible,
impressionistic conception oI liIe and art. She considered that
the novelist should be Iree to abandon the conventions oI plot
and character, the clearly distinguished genres or the traditional
themes. Time and space should be treated Ireely, characters do
not have to be divided rigidly into good and bad. Stress was laid
on the spontaneity oI Iiction and on the passivity oI the mind
that receives innumerable impressions.
Later on, Virginia WoolI abandoned this position,
developing a Iorm oI impressionism that gradually strove
towards method, pattern, rhythm, showing that the novel is
constructed through careIul selection and arrangement oI
material. She 'seeks to represent the nature oI transient

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sensation, or oI conscious and unconscious mental activity, and
then to relate it outwards to a more universal awareness oI
pattern and rhythm. (...) WoolI`s particular preoccupation with
time is closely related to her maniIest interest in Ilux, a
dissolution or dissipation oI distinctions within a Iluid pattern oI
change and decay, which she recognizes in nature and sciences
as much as in the human psyche. Her universe, though
eIIectively Godless, is not one deprived oI imposed meaning
and patterning. Her narratives are variously punctuated by
clock-readings and clock-soundings, by the measurement oI
tides and the altitude oI the sun, by history and archaeology, by
ageing and dying. (Sanders 2004: 523-524)
According to Joan Bennett, WoolI`s mature novels Iail to
provide a gallery oI memorable portraits. Her characters are
elusive, the reader discovering them gradually and incompletely,
partly Irom their own speech and reIlections, partly Irom their
eIIect upon other people. Moreover, the range oI her characters
is very small. They belong to the upper-middle class
intelligentsia and to one temperament, being all alike and
resembling their creator. Some oI them are drawn aIter members
oI her Iamily, and some oI her novels have autobiographical
elements. Mr. Ramsay`s absorption in his philosophical work
echoes Virginia`s Iather`s absorption in editing the Dictionary of
National Biography, while Mrs. Ramsay`s philanthropical

AMALIA MRSESCU
150
excursions echo those oI Virginia`s mother. In addition to that,
both Mr. Ramsay and Leslie Stephen shared a love oI
mountaineering. On the other hand, Septimus`s experiences
echo Virginia`s own.
In Walter Allen`s opinion, it is not very appropriate to
speak oI the stream oI consciousness proper in Virginia WoolI`s
novels because her characters constantly watch their thoughts
and Ieelings. 'There is in her work a rendering, vivid almost to
the point oI hallucinatory, oI the scene and bustle oI everyday
living reIracted through the consciousness oI the character,
together with the very strong sense, below it, oI a mind engaged
in perpetual soliloquy, obsessed with a question that is always
the same. (Allen 1954: 351) Moreover, the stream oI
consciousness oI V. WoolI`s characters is not presented directly,
but it is reported by the author. At the same time, all her
characters talk with their creator`s voice. Their monologues do
not diIIer Irom each other, as do those oI Joyce`s characters.
Virginia WoolI discovered aIIinities with Lev Tolstoy
(1828-1910), Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) and Anton Chekhov
(1860-1904), complaining, at the same time, that in England
there was no modern tradition with the exception oI several
writers among whom she mentioned Joyce as the most notable.
She praised Henry James and Marcel Proust Ior having shiIted
their interest Irom the world oI objects to an examination oI the
mind and Ior demanding a more active participation oI the

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reader in understanding their novels. She also admired Jane
Austen.
V. WoolI had a Ieminist attitude, considering that the
Ieminine mind and sensibility cannot go on imitating the
masculine mind Iorever. She claimed that a woman writer can
be more impersonal and more sensitive to the nuances required
Ior a psychological novel (provided that she had a 'room oI her
own and a satisIactory income). She considered that a woman
would not just record what she noticed, but would also go
beyond the mere Iacts. In the centre oI her novels we Iind
women with artistic and aesthetic preoccupations. Their
sensibility and sensitivity are contrasted with the Iactual
materialism oI a male-dominated world. The women have brieI
dreams or moments oI epiphany, while men are leIt in a
supposed control, but with a limited grasp oI the physical world.
Feminism is a collection oI social theories, political
movements and moral philosophies, largely motivated by or
concerning the experiences oI women, especially in terms oI
their social, political and economic situation. It Iocuses on
limiting or eradicating gender inequality and promoting
women`s rights, interests and issues in society, such as:
women`s right to vote, to get a job with an equitable wage, to
initiate divorce proceedings, to contraception and abortion, to

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education, etc. The term was coined by the utopian socialist
Charles Fourier in 1837.
The Ieminist literature Iocuses on the struggles oI
women to achieve and maintain equality in a male-dominated
society. As Iar as the English language is concerned, the English
Ieminists are proponents oI what they consider to be non-sexist
language, using 'Miss to reIer to both married and unmarried
women, 'humanity instead oI 'mankind, 'he/ she instead oI
'he, or, ironically, the term 'herstory instead oI 'history.
'Throughout its long history, Ieminism (Ior while the
wora may only have come into English usage in the 1890`s,
women`s conscious struggle to resist patriarchy goes much
Iurther back) has sought to disturb the complacent certainties oI
such a patriarchal culture, to assert a belieI in sexual equality,
and to eradicate sexist domination in transIorming society.
(Selden, Widdowson, Brooker 2005: 115)
Feminism developed as a strong Iorce in America and
Britain throughout the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries, in strong
connection with the Women`s Rights and Women`s SuIIrage
movements. Virginia WoolI was the one who announced many
oI the critical issues that Ieminists will deal with. WoolI
produced two texts that are major contributions to Ieminist
theory: A Room of Ones Own (1929) and Three Guineas
(1938). She is concerned with women`s material situation. The
Iirst text Iocuses on women`s literary productions, the second on

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the relationship between male power and the proIessions (law,
education, etc.). In both texts she promotes Ieminist projects,
like a women`s college, women`s newspapers, a divorce-law
reIorm and allowances Ior mothers. In A Room of Ones Own
she also argues that women should write about Ieminine
experience in its own right and not in relation to men`s,
proclaims that women`s writing has nearly come oI age, and
pays tribute to those English novelists that established its
tradition. She believes that women Iace obstacles to their literary
ambitions. What she promotes is a balance between masculine
and Ieminine, or a total annihilation oI Iixed gender identities.
As Iar as her own critical essays are concerned, WoolI
considered them rather attempts at revitalizing past works than
objective analyses.
Though her novels are restricted to the English scene and
to the intellectual middle class, V. WoolI remains in the critics`
and readers` attention Ior her deliberate subjectivity, her
elegance and delicacy oI style and her poetic impressionism.

AMALIA MRSESCU
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***

Stream of Consciousness. Space-Montage.
From Mrs. Dalloway

The Iragment is to be Iound towards the beginning oI the
novel and is meant to illustrate the way in which Virginia WoolI
connects various people in various places in London (the Mall,
the Green Park, Piccadilly, Regent Street, Regent`s Park) with
the help oI the same image that they see, that oI an airplane. She
then concentrates on Septimus Warren Smith and on his wiIe
Lucrezia, and on their inner thoughts, rendered in Iree indirect
style. Septimus will be one oI the main characters in the novel,
and some oI his experiences (including one presented here, his
impression that the birds sang to him in Greek words) are
actually autobiographical. While most oI the characters are
preoccupied with deciphering the letters written by the airplane
in the sky, Lucrezia is also concerned with her husband`s state,
Ieeling lonely away Irom her country, Iamily and Iriends, and
Septimus Ieels more connected to the trees, leaves and birds
around him that to his own wiIe who is 'always interrupting in
her desperate attempts to make him return to reality.

Suaaenly Mrs. Coates lookea up into the sky. The souna
of an aeroplane borea ominously into the ears of the crowa.

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There it was coming over the trees, letting out white smoke from
behina, which curlea ana twistea, actually writing something'
making letters in the sky' Every one lookea up.
Dropping aeaa aown, the aeroplane soarea straight up,
curvea in a loop, racea, sank, rose, ana whatever it aia,
wherever it went, out flutterea behina it a thick rufflea bar of
white smoke which curlea ana wreathea upon the sky in letters.
But what letters? A C was it? an E, then an L? Only for a
moment aia they lie still, then they movea ana meltea ana were
rubbea out up in the sky, ana the aeroplane shot further away
ana again, in a fresh space of sky, began writing a K, an E, a Y
perhaps?
'Blaxo,` saia Mrs. Coates in a strainea, awe-stricken
voice, ga:ing straight up, ana her baby, lying stiff ana white in
her arms, ga:ea straight up.
'Kreemo,` murmurea Mrs. Bletchley, like a sleep-
walker. With his hat hela out perfectly still in his hana, Mr.
Bowley ga:ea straight up. All aown the Mall people were
stanaing ana looking up into the sky. As they lookea the whole
worla became perfectly silent, ana a flight of gulls crossea the
sky, first one gull leaaing, then another, ana in this
extraorainary silence ana peace, in this pallor, in this purity,
bells struck eleven times, the souna faaing up there among the
gulls.

AMALIA MRSESCU
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The aeroplane turnea ana racea ana swoopea exactly
where it likea, swiftly, freely, like a skater
'Thats an E,` saia Mrs. Bletchley
or a aancer
'Its toffee,` murmurea Mr. Bowley
(ana the car went in at the gates ana noboay lookea at it), ana
shutting off the smoke, away ana away it rushea, ana the smoke
faaea ana assemblea itself rouna the broaa white shapes of the
clouas.
It haa gone, it was behina the clouas. There was no
souna. The clouas to which the letters E, G, or L haa attachea
themselves movea freely, as if aestinea to cross from West to
East on a mission of the greatest importance which woula never
be revealea, ana yet certainly so it wasa mission of the
greatest importance. Then suaaenly, as a train comes out of a
tunnel, the aeroplane rushea out of the clouas again, the souna
boring into the ears of all people in the Mall, in the Green Park,
in Piccaailly, in Regent Street, in Regents Park, ana the bar of
smoke curvea behina ana it aroppea aown, ana it soarea up ana
wrote one letter after another but what wora was it writing?
Lucre:ia Warren Smith, sitting by her husbanas siae on
a seat in Regents Park in the Broaa Walk, lookea up.
'Look, look, Septimus'` she criea. For Dr. Holmes haa
tola her to make her husbana (who haa nothing whatever

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seriously the matter with him but was a little out of sorts) take
an interest in things outsiae himself.
So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signalling to
me. Not inaeea in actual woras, that is, he coula not reaa the
language yet, but it was plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite
beauty, ana tears fillea his eyes as he lookea at the smoke woras
languishing ana melting in the sky ana bestowing upon him, in
their inexhaustible charity ana laughing gooaness, one shape
after another of unimaginable beauty ana signalling their
intention to proviae him, for nothing, for ever, for looking
merely, with beauty, more beauty' Tears ran aown his cheeks.
It was toffee, they were aavertising toffee, a nursemaia
tola Re:ia. Together they began to spell t . . . o . . . f . . .
'K . . . R . . .` saia the nursemaia, ana Septimus heara
her say 'Kay Arr` close to his ear, aeeply, softly, like a mellow
organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshoppers,
which raspea his spine aeliciously ana sent running up into his
brain waves of souna which, concussing, broke. A marvellous
aiscovery inaeeathat the human voice in certain atmospheric
conaitions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can
quicken trees into life' (...) He woula shut his eyes, he woula see
no more.
But they beckonea, leaves were alive, trees were alive.
Ana the leaves being connectea by millions of fibres with his

AMALIA MRSESCU
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own boay, there on the seat, fannea it up ana aown, when the
branch stretchea he, too, maae that statement. The sparrows
fluttering, rising, ana falling in faggea fountains were part of
the pattern, the white ana blue, barrea with black branches.
Sounas maae harmonies with premeaitation, the spaces between
them were as significant as the sounas. A chila criea. Rightly far
away a horn sounaea. All taken together meant the birth of a
new religion
'Septimus'` saia Re:ia. He startea violently. People
must notice.
'I am going to walk to the fountain ana back,` she saia.
For she coula stana it no longer. Dr. Holmes might say
there was nothing the matter. Far rather woula she that he were
aeaa' She coula not sit besiae him when he starea so ana aia not
see her ana maae everything terrible, sky ana tree, chilaren
playing, aragging carts, blowing whistles, falling aown, all were
terrible. Ana he woula not kill himself, ana she coula tell no
one. 'Septimus has been working too hara`that was all she
coula say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she
thought. She coula tell noboay, not even Septimus now, ana
looking back, she saw him sitting in his shabby overcoat alone,
on the seat, hunchea up, staring. Ana it was cowaraly for a man
to say he woula kill himself, but Septimus haa fought, he was
brave, he was not Septimus now. She put on her lace collar. She
put on her new hat ana he never noticea, ana he was happy

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without her. Nothing coula make her happy without him'
Nothing' He was selfish. So men are. For he was not ill. Dr.
Holmes saia there was nothing the matter with him. She spreaa
her hana before her. Look' Her weaaing ring slippeashe haa
grown so thin. It was she who suffereabut she haa noboay to
tell.
Far was Italy ana the white houses ana the room where
her sisters sat making hats, ana the streets crowaea every
evening with people walking, laughing out loua, not half alive
like people here, huaalea up in Bath chairs, looking at a few
ugly flowers stuck in pots'
'For you shoula see the Milan garaens,` she saia aloua.
But to whom?
(...) Men must not cut aown trees. There is a Goa. (He
notea such revelations on the backs of envelopes.) Change the
worla. No one kills from hatrea. Make it known (he wrote it
aown). He waitea. He listenea. A sparrow perchea on the railing
opposite chirpea Septimus, Septimus, four or five times over ana
went on, arawing its notes out, to sing freshly ana piercingly in
Greek woras how there is no crime ana, foinea by another
sparrow, they sang in voices prolongea ana piercing in Greek
woras, from trees in the meaaow of life beyona a river where the
aeaa walk, how there is no aeath.

AMALIA MRSESCU
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There was his hana, there the aeaa. White things were
assembling behina the railings opposite. But he aarea not look.
Evans was behina the railings'
'What are you saying?` saia Re:ia suaaenly, sitting
aown by him.
Interruptea again' She was always interrupting.
Away from peoplethey must get away from people, he
saia (fumping up), right away over there, where there were
chairs beneath a tree ana the long slope of the park aippea like
a length of green stuff with a ceiling cloth of blue ana pink
smoke high above, ana there was a rampart of far, irregular
houses ha:ea in smoke, the traffic hummea in a circle, ana on
the right, aun-colourea animals stretchea long necks over the
Zoo palings, barking, howling. There they sat aown unaer a
tree.
'Look,` she implorea him, pointing at a little troop of
boys carrying cricket stumps, ana one shufflea, spun rouna on
his heel ana shufflea, as if he were acting a clown at the music
hall.
'Look,` she implorea him, for Dr. Holmes haa tola her
to make him notice real things, go to a music hall, play cricket
that was the very game, Dr. Holmes saia, a nice out-of-aoor
game, the very game for her husbana.
(...) 'Look,` she repeatea, for he must not talk aloua to
himself out of aoors.

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161
'Oh, look,` she implorea him. But what was there to
look at? A few sheep. That was all.

1. What is the central image oI the Iragment?
2. Who are the people that it connects?
3. With what do they associate the plane?
4. From what object is their attention drawn when they see
the plane?
5. Why is Lucrezia Warren Smith sad?
6. How does she try to counteract her husband`s state?
7. IdentiIy Septimus Warren Smith`s thoughts. How are
they rendered?
8. Characterize Septimus.
9. IdentiIy and comment on the images Irom nature that
appeal to Septimus.
10. IdentiIy and comment on the images Irom nature that
appeal to Lucrezia.
11. Comment on the use oI stream oI consciousness in the
Iragment.
12. Comment on the use oI space-montage.

AMALIA MRSESCU
162
Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970)

Edward Morgan Forster was born in London on January
1, 1879 as the son oI an architect. His Iather died when Edward
was only one year old, thereIore the Iuture novelist spent his
childhood and much oI his adult liIe dominated by his mother
and his aunts. His happiest childhood years (1883-1893) were
spent at Rooksnest, Stevenage, a house he will later evoke in his
novel Howaras Ena. In 1893 he and his mother moved to
Tonbridge, and he attended Tonbridge school, where he had a
diIIicult time because oI the cruelty oI his classmates. Between
1897 and 1901 Forster attended King`s College, Cambridge,
where he met members oI the later Iormed Bloomsbury group.
He will later become a member oI this group, too. Due to a
legacy received Irom his paternal great-aunt Marianne Thornton
he had the Ireedom to travel and to write. He travelled
extensively: in Italy and Greece with his mother, aIter
graduating, in Germany (in 1905) where he was also tutor to the
children oI the Countess von Armin, in India (in 1912-1913 and
1921, when he was the private secretary oI the Maharajah oI
Dewas), in Alexandria, Egypt, as a member oI the Red Cross
during World War I.
Over the years, Forster took a stand against censorship,
being involved in the work oI PEN, the Association oI Writers,
that promotes Iriendship and cooperation among writers and

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163
Iights Ior Ireedom oI expression. He was also a member oI the
National Council Ior Civil Liberties. In 1960 he appeared as a
deIense witness in the trial oI the publishers oI Laay
Chatterleys Lover.
Forster was awarded various distinctions. Though he
reIused a knighthood in 1949, he became a Companion oI
Honour in 1953, and accepted an Order oI Merit in 1969.
He died on June 7, 1970, aIter a series oI strokes.
He began writing in 1905, contributing essays and short
stories to the Inaepenaent Review. Among his most important
works we should mention:
x novels: Where Angels Fear to Treaa (1905), The Longest
Journey (1907), A Room with a Jiew (1908), Howaras
Ena (1910), A Passage to Inaia (1924), Maurice (1971);
x short stories (his Iirst short story published in the
'Independent Review was The Story of a Panic)
collected in such novels as: The Celestial Omnibus
(1911), The Eternal Moment (1928), The Life to Come
(1972);
x biographies: Golasworthy Lowes Dickenson (1934),
Marianne Thornton (1956);
x essays, published in the volumes: Abinger Harvest
(1936), Two Cheers for Democracy (1951), The Hill of
Devi (a portrait oI India with commentary; 1953);

AMALIA MRSESCU
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x the libretto oI Benjamin Britten`s opera Billy Buaa.
AIter 1924, Forster abandoned novel writing to
concentrate on writing critical and political essays. In 1927, he
was invited to deliver the 'Clark Lectures at Trinity College,
Cambridge. The lectures were a popular success, thereIore they
were published in the same year as Aspects of the Novel.
The book points out the gradual transIormation oI the
traditional requirements oI Iiction in the modern world. Forster
analyses plot, character, time, space, but also Iantasy, prophecy,
pattern and rhythm. He questions the importance oI the writers
who were just story tellers (like Walter Scott), and praises the
authors oI poetic, experimental or philosophical novels (Emily
Bronte, Virginia WoolI and George Meredith respectively). For
him, art is supposed to bring order in a chaotic age. The work oI
art, he thinks, is above the human muddle, like a transcendent
and luminous reality. Forster seeks models Ior literature in
music, in the works oI Wagner and Beethoven, thus anticipating
Huxley`s attempts to musicalize Iiction. Forster introduces the
distinction between flat and rouna characters. The Ilat
characters are those that have a dominant characteristic Ieature.
The round ones are those that are complex and undergo an
internal evolution throughout the novel. A good novel needs
both types oI characters, but only the round ones can perIorm
tragic roles. These points made Aspects of the Novel an

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innovation at the time when it was published, and even today
Forster`s views Iorm an important part oI literary analysis.
Forster`s early novels are based on the material Irom the
holidays spent abroad with his mother, satirizing the attitudes oI
English tourists abroad, suspicious oI anything Ioreign. They are
mainly comedies oI manners, but also novels oI ideas,
emphasizing the contrast between maturity and immaturity, age/
convention and youth, England and Italy. 'In Where Angels
Fear to Treaa (1905), A Room with a Jiew (1909), and A
Passage to Inaia (1924), Forster`s English abroad are
conIronted with individuals and events that shock them. His
bravest and most sensitive characters react by embracing
diIIerence, discovering love, passion, and the hope oI enduring
happiness; his more timorous and close-minded characters Iail
or reIuse to accept the lessons liIe oIIers them. These national
allegories Iunction parabolically: Forster dares English readers
to learn Irom his characters` experiences, to reIuse suburban
repression and hypocrisy, and to embrace liIe and nature.
(Bradshaw ed. 2007: 47)
Where Angels Fear to Treaa, Forster`s Iirst novel, gets
its title Irom a quotation Irom Alexander Pope`s Essay on
Criticism: 'Fools rush in where angels Iear to tread. It is a
tragi-comedy describing the consequences oI the marriage oI

AMALIA MRSESCU
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Lilia Herriton, an impulsive young widow, to the son oI an
Italian dentist, Gino Carella, whom she meets in Italy.
Lilia`s Iormer mother-in-law in suburban Sawston
(modelled on Tonbridge), outraged by the news oI the
engagement, sends her young son, Philip Herriton, to prevent
the marriage, but he arrives too late, Ior the two are already
married. Lilia dies shortly aIterwards in childbirth and Philip`s
sister Harriet is sent to rescue the baby Irom his Iather. Harriet
practically kidnaps the baby, who is accidentally killed when
their carriage overturns. Philip and Caroline Abbott, Lilia`s
Iriend, begin to understand Gino`s Ieelings and to recognize that
the Sawston society is prejudiced and conventional. The title
reIers to Italy.
The Longest Journey is an autobiographical novel,
oIIering us the story oI Forster`s own upbringing and Cambridge
years. It is a melodramatic, violent and satiric novel, presenting
us the main character`s initiation and destruction. In the end he
dies physically, but will survive by virtue oI his high values and
spirit oI selI-sacriIice.
A Room with a Jiew also presents the contrast between
the prejudices and aIIectations oI Victorian England and the
emotional Ireedom oI Italy. It is the best oI Forster`s early
books. The Iirst part oI the novel is set in Florence, where the
young Lucy Honeychurch is touring with her older cousin
Charlotte Bartlett. Here, their complaint that the room they are

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167
about to rent has no view is overheard by the Emersons, Iather
and son, who oIIer to exchange their rooms. Lucy considers it
impolite, but will Iind herselI Irequently in George Emerson`s
company. Back in England, she becomes caught between him
and Cecil Vyse, that is between true passion and convention.
Finally, Lucy marries George and the story ends with the two
sharing a room with a view at the pension where they Iirst met.
The title also has a symbolic meaning: the view stands Ior a
richer understanding oI liIe that George will oIIer to Lucy.
Howaras Ena takes its title Irom the name oI a country
estate in HertIordshire that has a central position in the narrative.
The house is a symbol oI rural England, with its stability,
resources and natural roots. The house belongs to the Wilcoxes,
who are concerned with the business side oI liIe and distrust
emotions and imagination. During a trip to Germany they meet
the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, who care about
civilized living, music and literature. Mrs. Wilcox and Margaret
become Iriends and upon her death, the Iormer expresses her
wish that she would like the latter to have the house. Her Iamily
strongly disagrees, but in the end Margaret marries Mr. Wilcox
and becomes the rightIul mistress oI Howards End. The book
established Forster`s reputation as a novelist.

AMALIA MRSESCU
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Maurice is a novel with a homosexual theme, revised by
Forster several times during his liIe and published, at the
writer`s expressed wish, aIter his death.
Forster`s masterpiece is his last novel, A Passage to
Inaia, an account oI the country in the early 20
th
century, under
British rule. 'The British Iorm an lite, cut oII by their ill-
Iounded sense oI racial, social, and cultural superiority Irom the
multiple signiIicance oI the native civilizations oI India, while
maintaining the class-distinctions and petty snobberies oI
home`. Throughout the story connections Iail doomed by race,
class, colonialism, and religion. At the core oI the novel, Forster
leaves a hiatus, a considered narrative gap in which an assault
either happens, or doesn`t happen, or is enacted by someone
other than the man who is later accused oI it. This hiatus takes
on the Iorce oI a disjuncture which in turn enhances other
disjuncture, silences and assaults on the reader`s consciousness.
(Sanders 2004: 497-498)
The book begins with the arrival oI Adela Quested and
Mrs. Moore to Chandrapore, India. Adela, who longs to know
the 'real India and tries to disregard the taboos and snobberies
oI the British circle, is to visit Ronny Heaslop beIore she makes
up her mind whether to marry him or not. They meet Dr. Aziz,
assistant to the British Civil Surgeon, who is very Iriendly and
enthusiastic, and who organizes an expedition Ior the visitors to
the Iamous Marabar Caves. The trip ends abruptly, with Adela

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169
accusing Aziz oI having assaulted her aIter Mrs. Moore`s
departure. The doctor is arrested. The accusation rouses deep
antagonism between the two races. Mrs. Moore and Cyril
Fielding, Aziz`s Iriend, doubt their truthIulness. Adela herselI,
though pushed Iorward by her Iriends and Iamily, admits that
she was mistaken and withdraws the accusations at the trial. But
Aziz becomes bitter and disillusioned, turning away Irom the
British. The end oI the novel Iinds him to a post in a native state,
bringing up his Iamily in peace. He is visited by Fielding. They
discuss the Iuture oI India and Aziz predicts that only when the
British are driven out oI it can he and Fielding really be Iriends,
thus ending the novel in a tone oI Irustration.
A Passage to Inaia can be analyzed on two levels:
realistic and symbolic. On the realistic level it deals with the gap
between the English and the Indians, a gap brought about by
racism and nationalism. The word 'passage underlines the
eIIorts some characters make to bridge the gap. Besides the
clash oI cultures, the novel also presents the conIrontation oI the
human heart with the machinery oI government, class
conventions and social barriers. On the symbolic level, the three
parts oI the novel (Mosque, Caves and Temple) have been
connected to the Indian seasons (cold, hot and rainy) or to the
three human approaches to reality (emotionality Dr. Aziz,
intellect Fielding and Adela, and capacity Ior love ProI.

AMALIA MRSESCU
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Godbole). On this level, reconciliation between the two peoples
is possible through the Iigure oI Mrs. Moore. She appears as a
Magna Mater, illustrating all three attitudes. AIter she dies, she
becomes almost a local goddess. The Marabar Caves symbolize
the modern world as a wasteland, but also the subconscious, the
hidden, dark side oI the human mind.
Adela Quested 'is clearly identiIied as a product oI a
Bloomsbury-type world (...) and seeks, in an environment which
is conspicuously resistant to her designs, to implement her
Bloomsbury values. The rebuII that she receives is a
dramatization oI the perception that it is proIoundly dangerous
to attempt to transpose values without a careIul consideration oI
the contexts in which they are to be applied. (Bradshaw ed.
2007: 38)
The novel is dedicated to Syed Ross Masood, a young
Indian Moslem whom Forster tutored in Latin in Weybridge
when he was 27. Masood then went to OxIord and later had a
distinguished career. He was the one who introduced Forster to
the world oI India. Forster also Iell in love with Masood, who
did not share his homosexuality, but remained his Iriend Ior 17
years.
Forster began writing the novel in 1913, but the
enterprise went on with diIIiculty and many interruptions, being
Iinished in January 1924. A Passage to Inaia was an immediate
success.

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171
By its early readers, it was considered a political novel
because many characters borrow traits Irom real persons. Aziz`s
love oI practical jokes is taken Irom the Maharajah oI Dewas,
who also lent some traits to ProIessor Godbole. But the book is
not a political one. According to Forster himselI, 'It`s about
something wider than politics, about the search oI the human
race Ior a more lasting home, about the universe as embodied in
the Indian earth and the Indian sky, about the horror lurking in
the Marabar Caves and the release symbolized by the birth oI
Krishna. It is or rather desires to be philosophic and
poetic... (apud Stallybrass 1989: 25)
What happened in the Marabar Caves? At one stage oI
writing, Forster made someone Iollow Adela and attempt to
assault her. But later he gave up telling us precisely. He claimed
he did not know either. It was either a man, or the supernatural,
or an illusion. The blur was possible only because the action
took place in India, where the mystery can remain unsolved.
Forster`s short stories have the same themes as his
novels and are inspired Irom his travels in the Mediterranean
area, especially Greece. They exploit classic mythology and
underline the importance oI spontaneity and impulse. Some oI
them are parables oI a rather incredible character. In Mr. Bons,
Ior example, the title character is a man who has Iancy editions
oI books oI poetry, but does not like this literary genre. As a

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punishment Ior his snobbery (his name read backwards is
'snob) he is driven by Dante in the celestial omnibus, being
dropped Irom a great height and smashed to death.

E. M. Forster`s Literary Technique
Forster belongs to the older English tradition oI story
telling. 'As a novelist, he is oIten delightIul and always baIIling
and ambiguous, and he has always stood apart Irom his
contemporaries. (Allen 1954: 332) His novels are close to the
Victorian Iiction, being improbable, melodramatic and Iar-
Ietched. On the other hand, they 'are almost exclusively
concerned with Edwardian middle-class perceptions and
imperceptions, being mixtures oI 'a sharp, observant, and
sometimes bitter social comedy with didactic narrative
insistence on the virtues oI tolerance and human decency.
(Sanders 2004: 497)
'Fundamentally, Forster is a tragic humanist Ior whom
man is justiIied by his selI-awareness and by the Iruits oI his
imagination, by the arts and, especially perhaps, by music. He is
the advocate oI balance, oI the whole man; but man is rarely
balanced and Iew can be said to be whole. The criticism oI lack
oI balance, oI lack oI wholeness, is the impulse behind his Iirst
Iour novels, Where Angels Fear to Treaa, The Longest Journey,
A Room with a Jiew, and Howaras Ena. (Allen 1954: 335)

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In these novels, his satire is directed against the
'undeveloped heart. Forster`s villains are those who are
emotionally immature, those who do not recognize or who
betray the heart`s aIIections; their values are associated with the
public school and the established church. Against these values,
he sets a diIIerent way oI liIe, symbolized by Greece in his short
stories and Italy in his early novels.
'The plots oI these early novels are very complicated;
Ior Forster, plot is a sort oI obstacle race which his characters
must undergo, a series oI tests which serve to expose them.
(Allen 1954: 336) ThereIore, his plots are considered by Allen
implausible and the characters too small Ior what their creator
wants them to represent. In Peter Burra`s opinion, however,
Forster`s novels are improbable only in relation to the real
world, while being true enough in relation to themselves. Lionel
Trilling considers Forster`s plots sharp and deIinite, based on a
struggle between opposing Iorces representing Good and Evil:
LiIe and Death, Light and Darkness, Fertility and Sterility,
Intelligence and Stupidity etc. Neither oI these groups oI
opposing Iorces comes oII victorious, however, Forster casting
doubt on both.
Trilling identiIies in Forster`s works inIluences Irom
Henry Fielding, Charles Dickens, George Meredith and Henry
James, especially in what concerns his comic seriousness and

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his playIulness. 'Forster takes Iull and conscious responsibility
Ior his novels, reIusing to share in the increasingly dull
assumption oI the contemporary novelists, that the writer has
nothing to do with the story he tells and that (...) through no
intention oI his own, the story has chosen to tell itselI through
him. Like Fielding, he shapes his prose Ior comment and
explanation, and like Fielding he is not above an explanatory
Iootnote. He summarizes what he is going to show, introduces
new themes when and as it suits him to do so, is not awed by the
sacred doctrine oI point oI view` and, understanding that
verisimilitude (...) can guarantee neither pleasure nor truth, he
uses exaggeration and improbability. (Trilling 1971: 10)
Forster`s style is colloquial, making use oI everyday
words, and short and relatively simple sentences, but also witty,
daring and intense.
Forster`s popularity with the English public was rather
low, but he became more successIul in America aIter World
War II. In all his novels except Ior A Passage to Inaia, he
succeeds as a moralist, but Iails as a poetic novelist (as a
symbolist). (cI. W. Allen)

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***

Setting and Atmosphere
From A Passage to India, Part II. Caves, XII

The Iragment represents the Iirst chapter oI Part II, and is
a description oI the Marabar Caves, the place that will play such
an important role in the plot, as it is there that the act which will
bring into the open the latent tension between the Indians and
the British will take place. Forster recreates a history oI the
place, presenting it Irom a geological, but also Irom a religious
point oI view, imagining also its Iuture. By various means, he
creates the impression that the caves are immemorial, and
perIect.

The Ganges, though flowing from the foot of Jishnu ana
through Sivas hair, is not an ancient stream. Geology, looking
further than religion, knows of a time when neither the river nor
the Himalayas that nourish it existea, ana an ocean flowea over
the holy places of Hinaustan. The mountains rose, their aebris
siltea up the ocean, the goas took their seats on them ana
contrivea the river, ana the Inaia we call immemorial came into
being. But Inaia is really far olaer. In the aays of the prehistoric
ocean the southern part of the peninsula alreaay existea, ana the

AMALIA MRSESCU
176
high places of Draviaia have been lana since lana began, ana
have seen on the one siae the sinking of a continent that foinea
them to Africa, ana on the other the upheaval of the Himalayas
from a sea. They are olaer than anything in the worla. No water
has ever coverea them, ana the sun who has watchea them for
countless aeons may still aiscern in their outlines forms that
were his before our globe was torn from his bosom. If flesh of
the suns flesh is to be touchea anywhere, it is here, among the
increaible antiquity of these hills.
Yet even they are altering. As Himalayan Inaia rose, this
Inaia, the primal, has been aepressea, ana is slowly reentering
the curve of the earth. It may be that in aeons to come an ocean
will flow here too, ana cover the sun-born rocks with slime.
Meanwhile the plain of the Ganges encroaches on them with
something of the seas action. They are sinking beneath the
newer lanas. Their main mass is untouchea, but at the eage their
outposts have been cut off ana stana knee-aeep, throat-aeep, in
the aavancing soil. There is something unspeakable in these
outposts. They are like nothing else in the worla, ana a glimpse
of them makes the breath catch. They rise abruptly, insanely,
without the proportion that is kept by the wilaest hills elsewhere,
they bear no relation to anything areamt or seen. To call them
'uncanny` suggests ghosts, ana they are olaer than all spirit.
Hinauism has scratchea ana plasterea a few rocks, but the
shrines are unfrequentea, as if pilgrims, who generally seek the

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177
extraorainary, haa here founa too much of it. Some saaahus aia
once settle in a cave, but they were smokea out, ana even
Buaaha, who must have passea this way aown to the Bo Tree of
Gaya, shunnea a renunciation more complete than his own, ana
has left no legena of struggle ana victory in the Marabar.
The caves are reaaily aescribea. A tunnel eight feet long,
five feet high, three feet wiae, leaas to a circular chamber about
twenty feet in aiameter. This arrangement occurs again ana
again throughout the group of hills, ana this is all, this is a
Marabar cave. Having seen one such cave, having seen two,
having seen three, four, fourteen, twenty-four, the visitor returns
to Chanarapore uncertain whether he has haa an interesting
experience or a aull one or any experience at all. He finas it
aifficult to aiscuss the caves, or to keep them apart in his mina,
for the pattern never varies, ana no carving, not even a bees
nest or a bat, aistinguishes one from another. Nothing, nothing
attaches to them, ana their reputation for they have one aoes
not aepena upon human speech. It is as if the surrounaing plain
or the passing biras have taken upon themselves to exclaim
'Extraorainary'` ana the wora has taken root in the air, ana
been inhalea by mankina.
They are aark caves. Even when they open towaras the
sun, very little light penetrates aown the entrance tunnel into the
circular chamber. There is little to see, ana no eye to see it, until

AMALIA MRSESCU
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the visitor arrives for his five minutes, ana strikes a match.
Immeaiately another flame rises in the aepths of the rock ana
moves towaras the surface like an imprisonea spirit, the walls of
the circular chamber have been most marvellously polishea. The
two flames approach ana strive to unite, but cannot, because
one of them breathes air, the other stone. A mirror inlaia with
lovely colours aiviaes the lovers, aelicate stars of pink ana gray
interpose, exquisite nebulae, shaaings fainter than the tail of the
comet or the miaaay moon, all the evanescent life of the granite,
only here visible. Fists ana fingers thrust above the aavancing
soil here at last is their skin, finer than any covering acquirea
by the animals, smoother than winaless water, more voluptuous
than love. The raaiance increases, the flames touch one another,
kiss, expire. The cave is aark again, like all the caves.
Only the wall of the circular chamber has been polishea
thus. The siaes of the tunnel are left rough, they impinge as an
afterthought upon the internal perfection. An entrance was
necessary, so mankina maae one. But elsewhere, aeeper in the
granite, are there certain chambers that have no entrances?
Chambers never unsealea since the arrival of the goas? Local
report aeclares that these exceea in number those that can be
visitea, as the aeaa exceea the living four hunarea of them,
four thousana or million. Nothing is insiae them, they were
sealea up before the creation of pestilence or treasure, if
mankina grew curious ana excavatea, nothing, nothing woula be

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179
aaaea to the sum of gooa or evil. One of them is rumourea
within the boulaer that swings on the summit of the highest of
the hills, a bubble-shapea cave that has neither ceiling nor
floor, ana mirrors its own aarkness in every airection infinitely.
If the boulaer falls ana smashes, the cave will smash too empty
as an Easter egg. The boulaer because of its hollowness sways
in the wina, ana even moves when a crow perches upon it, hence
its name ana the name of its stupenaous peaestal. the Kawa Dol.

Questions for Discussion:
1. Who are Vishnu and Siva?
2. Reconstruct the geological history oI the place, then
comment on its present state and on the way in which the
writer sees its Iuture.
3. Why are the shrines present here unIrequented?
4. What is extraordinary about the place?
5. Describe the caves.
6. Comment on the possible symbolism oI: 'The two flames
approach ana strive to unite, but cannot, because one of
them breathes air, the other stone. A mirror inlaia with
lovely colours aiviaes the lovers, aelicate stars of pink
ana gray interpose, exquisite nebulae, shaaings fainter
than the tail of the comet or the miaaay moon, all the
evanescent life of the granite, only here visible.`

AMALIA MRSESCU
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7. What is the only contribution oI mankind to the caves?
8. How does the author create the impression that the caves
are immemorial?
9. Comment on the symbolism oI the cave.
10. Comment on the atmosphere that Forster creates.

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181
British Drama in the First Half of the 20
th
Century

The last two decades oI the 19
th
century and the
beginning oI the 20
th
saw a remarkable revival oI the drama both
on the continent and in England, through the works oI Henrik
Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, Luigi Pirandello or Oscar Wilde.
In the period 1880-1900 new theatres were built,
designed in Victorian rococo. In 1881 electric lighting was
introduced, Iavouring the creation oI extraordinary eIIects. The
competition Irom the Iilms encouraged stage designers to oIIer
imaginative settings.
In 1904, the Royal Academy oI Dramatic Art was
Iounded, becoming soon a prestigious drama school providing
talented actors.

George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin on 26th July,
1856. His Iather was involved in the wholesale grain trade. He
was also an alcoholic (which made his son become a teetotaller)
and was not very close to his children (George and his two
sisters). Because Mr. Shaw drank, the Iamily was always in
debt. Consequently, George did not receive good education. He
went to Wesleyan Connexional School (now Wesley College),

AMALIA MRSESCU
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Dublin, and to various other local schools, but Iinished his
education at 15 (at the Dublin English ScientiIic and
Commercial Day School). Then he started to work as a junior
clerk in an estate agent`s oIIice. In 1876 he went to London,
joining his sister and his mother, who were there merely trying
to stay away Irom his Iather. His mother supported herselI and
the Iamily giving music lessons, while George took care oI his
(selI)-education by reading extensively at the British Museum.
In 1884, Shaw joined the Fabian Society (named aIter
the Roman General Quintus Fabius Maximus, who advocated
the weakening oI the opposition by harassing operations rather
than becoming involved in battles, and who oIIered a passive
resistance to the enemy), and he served on its executive
committee Irom 1885 to 1911. The members oI this middle-
class socialist group considered that passive methods like
preaching or educating people through literature and theatre
might bring about changes in society. They supported the
abolition oI private property, a radical change in the voting
system, women`s rights and the equality oI income. Shaw shared
Karl Marx`s opinion that capitalism was deeply Ilawed and was
unlikely to last. However, unlike Marx, he Iavoured gradualism
over revolution, preIerring debate to action. Together with a
Iriend, he tried to establish a new political party that should be
committed to obtaining socialism through parliamentary

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th

183
elections. The members oI the Fabian Society (Shaw included)
were involved in Iounding the Labour Party.
Shaw was coIounder oI the London School oI
Economics, and launched the petition against the imprisonment
oI Oscar Wilde. In 1897 he entered local government.
In 1898 he married Charlotte Pyne Townshend, but he
was a Don Juan both beIore and aIter his marriage. Among other
women, he had a relationship with the youngest daughter oI Karl
Marx. Actually, he said he dated women to get material Ior his
plays.
George Bernard Shaw remained committed to the
socialist cause until his death on 2nd November, 1950. He died
at Ayot St. Lawrence, HertIordshire. He was cremated and it
was his wish that his ashes be mixed with those oI his wiIe, who
had died seven years beIore.
Throughout his liIe, Shaw wrote:
x novels: Immaturity (1879), Love Among the Artists
(1900), The Irrational Knot (1905);
x pamphlets: The Fabian Manifesto (1884), The True
Raaical Programme (1887), Fabian Election Manifesto
(1892), Fabianism ana the Empire (1900), Socialism for
Millionaires (1901), Common Sense About the War
(1914, opposing Britain`s involvement in the First World
War).

AMALIA MRSESCU
184
x art, music and drama criticism Ior Pall Mall Ga:ette or
Saturaay Review very appreciated in the 1880`s and
1890`s; his articles were later collected in Our Theatres
in the Nineties (1932) or in Shaws Music (1981).
x essays: The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), The
Perfect Wagnerite (1898);
x theatre plays.
Shaw always dreamt oI becoming a writer. He began his
literary career by writing novels, but they were not successIul.
They are at the same time semi-autobiographical works and
products oI a IanciIul imagination. 'In spite oI their youthIul
romanticism, |they| nevertheless constitute a record oI the
adventures oI an earnest and anarchic young man, with a knack
oI keen observation and terse portraiture, striving to give voice
to and to interpret the spirit oI the century. (Henderson 2004:
61)
But Shaw is mostly known as a playwright. He is the
author oI more than 50 plays. His Iirst one was Wiaowers
Houses, perIormed in 1892. It was included in the volume oI
Plays Unpleasant, alongside Mrs. Warrens Profession and The
Philanaerer. The Plays Unpleasant, ideological attacks on the
evils oI capitalism and explorations oI moral and social
problems, were Iollowed by more entertaining but as principled
productions, written Ior commercial purposes, however: Plays
Pleasant (Arms ana the Man - 1894, Canaiaa 1897, You Never

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th

185
Can Tell - 1899) and by Three Plays for Puritans (Caesar ana
Cleopatra, The Devils Disciple, Captain Brassbounas
Conversion).
Shaw`s Iirst plays were not well received. Both The
Philanaerer and Mrs. Warrens Profession, though written in
the early 1890`s, had to wait Ior perIormance until the early
1900`s because they were censored by the Lord Chamberlain.
Still, Shaw managed to publish them in 1898.
In the early 1900`s he tried to create a 'New Drama on
the stage oI the Royal Court Theatre in London. Between 1904
and 1907 the Royal Court perIormed John Bulls Other Islana,
Man ana Superman and Mafor Barbara. The 1905 production oI
Man ana Superman even introduced a motorcar on stage.
John Bulls Other Islana (1904) was Shaw`s Iirst
London success and it helped the author to gain popularity in
England as well (as in the Unites States and Germany Shaw`s
name was already well-known). Then, his popularity declined
aIter his essay Common Sense About the War, which was
considered unpatriotic. With Saint Joan (1923), however, Shaw
was again accepted by the post-war public, being regarded as 'a
second Shakespeare, who had revolutionized the British
theatre. Shaw did not portrait Joan oI Arc, his protagonist, as a
heroine or martyr, but as a stubborn young woman.

AMALIA MRSESCU
186
Uncommonly Shaw showed some sympathy to her judges. The
play was written Iour years aIter Joan was declared a saint.
As a matter oI Iact, in most oI his plays Shaw derides
heroism. The supermen/ superwomen that he presents are
creatures oI Ilesh and blood, with strengths but also weaknesses,
like everybody else. Caesar is his Iirst great portrait oI the
Shavian statesman, the superman that must be wise, mild,
eIIicient, but most oI all oI superior civilization, while Cleopatra
appears as young and inexperienced, sometimes cruel, and
develops under Caesar`s inIluence.
In his plays Shaw combined contemporary moral
problems with an ironic tone and paradoxes. He was the author
oI such phrases as 'He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches,
'England and America are two countries divided by a common
language, and 'I never resist temptation because I have Iound
that things are bad Ior me do not tempt me.
His plays are dramas oI ideas, or 'discussion plays,
because what is important with them is not the plot, but the
dialogue, which is supposed to be an argument between two
opposing attitudes and ideas. It is the audience`s job to decide
which idea is more important, correct or moral. Unlike other
dramatists, he expresses his opinions in his plays.
'No other playwright has ever matched Shaw in lengthy
speeches and prolonged stage conversations that somehow never
drag or lose out as theatre. (Day 1964: 275) In addition, his

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187
stage directions include lots oI comments, descriptions,
presentations oI characters, involving the author himselI in the
discussions presented in the play. 'His drama is not so much
didactic as instructive; his arguments Iuse elements oI socialism,
science, and philosophy in a way which continues to vex
socialists, scientists, and philosophers; his dialogue can move
easily, but disconcertingly, Irom broad comedy to anguish and
declaration and back again to comedy; his protagonists have a
vivid, iI at times coarse, energy. His settings, like his
preoccupations, may be predominantly those oI the England oI
the turn oI the twentieth century, but he continues to surprise, to
nag, and to provoke at the turn oI the twenty-Iirst. (Sanders
2004: 487)
Various inIluences were identiIied in Shaw`s plays,
among which those oI:
x Henrik Ibsen in the creation oI strong-willed women,
capable oI mastering men (Shaw considered that man is
a tool in the woman`s hands); Ior a summer meeting oI
the Fabian Society in 1890, Shaw wrote The
Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), in which he comments
on the speciIicity oI Ibsen`s work;
x Richard Wagner`s and WolIgang Amadeus Mozart`s
operas in Shaw`s dramatic action; Man ana Superman,
Ior example, was inIluenced by Mozart`s Don Giovanni.

AMALIA MRSESCU
188
Shaw even wrote an essay, The Perfect Wagnerite
(1898), in which he explained that the dwarIs in
Wagner`s operas are the instinctive, greedy people, the
giants are the patient, toiling, money-worshipping people
and the gods are the intellectual, moral, talented ones.
This scheme inIluenced Wiaowers Houses;
x Charles Dickens in Shaw`s comic energy, social
diversity and political observation;
x Friedrich Nietzsche in Shaw`s concept oI the
superman; however, to the biological and evolutionary
Iactors that are at the basis oI Nietzsche`s superman,
Shaw adds environmental Iactors such as society,
economics, politics, education and Iamily. He considers
that society creates barriers in the evolution oI the
superman as does romantic Iervour, which is a
distraction, but stresses the importance oI the intellect.
He also states that the transIormation oI man into
superman is not an external process, but an internal,
creative, gradual one.
Shaw`s masterpiece, and certainly his Iunniest and most
popular play, is Pygmalion. It was originally written Ior the
actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, with whom Shaw carried on a
passionate correspondence over the years. (All the other
actresses reIused to say the taboo word 'bloody that the
playwright had put in the mouth oI Eliza.)

Annotated 2
th

189
It was claimed by Shaw to be a didactic drama about
phonetics, as its antiheroic hero, Henry Higgins, is a
phonetician. He and Colonel Pickering bet that ProIessor
Higgins can, in a matter oI months, convince the London high
society that Eliza Doolittle, a Ilower girl, is a duchess. In order
to do this, he should teach her not only the manners oI the high
society, but also the correct English that they speak. AIter a Iew
months` work and a Iirst trial in Mrs. Higgins`s house (the
proIessor`s mother), Eliza is really put to test at an ambassador`s
party. Nobody there suspects that she is not a noble lady.
AIterwards, the two men get bored with the experiment, and
Eliza reproaches to them that now she will not Iind her place
anywhere. She cannot return to selling Ilowers, and she is not a
lady either. So what is to become oI her? ProIessor Higgins
suggests that she should get married. Eliza is very upset and
runs away to Mrs. Higgins. The latter reproaches to her son and
to Colonel Pickering with playing with the girl`s aIIections.
Eliza thanks Pickering Ior having always treated her as iI she
had been a lady, but threatens Higgins that she will go and work
with his rival phonetician. Higgins does not believe it and thinks
that she will return to him. Eliza has the prospect oI getting
married to Freddy, the son oI a Iriend oI Mrs. Higgins`, and oI
opening a Ilower shop. As a matter oI Iact, the ending as Shaw

AMALIA MRSESCU
190
saw it is given in a prose epilogue. On stage, the relationship
between Eliza and Henry is leIt ambiguous.
Beneath the comedy lies a satire on the superIiciality oI
class distinctions.
The play was Iirst perIormed in German in Vienna in
1913, then in London in the original English in 1914, when it
created a sensation because oI the phrase 'not bloody likely.
Pygmalion has been both Iilmed (1938), winning an Academy
Award Ior Shaw Ior his screenplay, and adapted into an
immensely popular musical, My Fair Laay (1956; motion-
picture version, 1964).
The title oI the play comes Irom the name oI a legendary
giIted Greek sculptor who made such a beautiIul statue that he
Iell in love with it. He treated it as iI it were alive (gave it
presents, dressed it etc.). On the Iestival oI Aphrodite, he prayed
to the goddess oI love to give him a wiIe like his statue.
Aphrodite heard him and granted his wish. When he returned
home, he Iound the statue had become a living girl. They got
married. Pygmalion became a symbol Ior the creator who Ialls
in love with his creation.
What ProIessor Higgins teaches Eliza is Received
Pronunciation (RP). It is a term in phonetics, applied linguistics,
and language teaching Ior the accent generally associated with
educated BrE and used as the pronunciation model Ior teaching
it to Ioreign learners. It was Iirst described by Daniel Jones in

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th

191
the English Pronouncing Dictionary (EPD) in 1917. It is oIten
inIormally reIerred to by the British middle class as a BBC
accent. In England, it is also oIten reIerred to as Standard
English.
Many British people dislike it, usually arguing that it is a
mark oI privilege and (especially among the Scots, Northern
Irish, and Welsh) oI social domination by the English. It has
always been a minority accent, used by only 3 - 4 oI the
British population. British phoneticians and linguists have oIten
described it as a 'regionless accent in the UK, in that it is not
possible to tell which part oI the country an RP speaker comes
Irom; it is never, however, described as a 'classless accent,
because it identiIies the speaker as a member oI the middle or
upper classes. Because it is class-related, it is socially and
politically controversial.
In 1925 Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize Ior
literature. He displays Iirst and Ioremost an intellectual talent,
being an 'unprecedented combination oI the most brilliantly
whimsical humour with the most serious and vital purpose
(Henderson 2004: 4)

AMALIA MRSESCU
192
***

The Art of Comic Dialogue
From Pygmalion, Act Three

The scene takes place during Mrs. Higgins`s at-home
day, where Higgins invited Eliza to oIIer her (and himselI) the
opportunity oI a 'rehearsal Ior the party where Eliza is to be
passed Ior a duchess. She is to keep to two subjects, the weather
and everybody`s health, as he considers that they are 'saIe. She
does indeed as she has been told, but how saIe the two subjects
are shall be seen in the Iragment. It is to be noted that as she
becomes more passionately involved in the conversation, the
quality oI her English changes Ior the worse.

Eli:a, who is exquisitely aressea, proauces an
impression of such remarkable aistinction ana beauty as she
enters that they all rise, quite flutterea. Guiaea by Higginss
signals, she comes to Mrs. Higgins with stuaiea grace.
LIZA |speaking with peaantic correctness of pronunciation ana
great beauty of tone| How do you do, Mrs. Higgins? |She gasps
slightly in making sure of the H in Higgins, but is quite
successful|. Mr. Higgins told me I might come.
MRS HIGGINS |coraially| Quite right: I`m very glad indeed to
see you.

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th

193
PICKERING. How do you do, Miss Doolittle?
LIZA |shaking hanas with him| Colonel Pickering, is it not?
MRS EYNSFORD HILL. I Ieel sure we have met beIore, Miss
Doolittle. I remember your eyes.
LIZA. How do you do? |She sits aown on the ottoman
gracefully in the place fust left vacant by Higgins|.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL |introaucing| My daughter Clara.
LIZA. How do you do?
CLARA |impulsively| How do you do? |She sits aown on the
ottoman besiae Eli:a, aevouring her with her eyes|.
FREDDY |coming to their siae of the ottoman| Ive certainly had
the pleasure.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL |introaucing| My son Freddy.
LIZA. How do you do?
Freaay bows ana sits aown in the Eli:abethan chair,
infatuatea.
HIGGINS |suaaenly| By George, yes: it all comes back to me!
|They stare at him|. Covent Garden! |Lamentably| What a
damned thing!
MRS HIGGINS. Henry, please! |He is about to sit on the eage
of the table|. Dont sit on my writing-table: youll break it.
HIGGINS |sulkily| Sorry.
He goes to the aivan, stumbling into the fenaer ana over
the fire-irons on his way, extricating himself with mutterea

AMALIA MRSESCU
194
imprecations, ana finishing his aisastrous fourney by throwing
himself so impatiently on the aivan that he almost breaks it. Mrs.
Higgins looks at him, but controls herself ana says nothing.
A long ana painful pause ensues.
MRS HIGGINS |at last, conversationally| Will it rain, do you
think?
LIZA. The shallow depression in the west oI these islands is
likely to move slowly in an easterly direction. There are no
indications oI any great change in the barometrical situation.
FREDDY. Ha! ha! how awIully Iunny!
LIZA. What is wrong with that, young man? I bet I got it right.
FREDDY. Killing!
MRS EYNSFORD HILL. I`m sure I hope it wont turn cold.
Theres so much inIluenza about. It runs right through our whole
Iamily regularly every spring.
LIZA |aarkly| My aunt died oI inIluenza: so they said.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL |clicks her tongue sympathetically|!!!
LIZA |in the same tragic tone| But it`s my belieI they done the
old woman in.
MRS HIGGINS |pu::lea| Done her in?
LIZA. Y-e-e-e-es, Lord love you! Why should she die oI
inIluenza? She come through diphtheria right enough the year
beIore. I saw her with my own eyes. Fairly blue with it, she was.
They all thought she was dead; but my Iather he kept ladling gin

Annotated 2
th

195
down her throat til she came to so sudden that she bit the bowl
oII the spoon.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL |startlea| Dear me!
LIZA |piling up the inaictment| What call would a woman with
that strength in her have to die oI inIluenza? What become oI
her new straw hat that should have come to me? Somebody
pinched it; and what I say is, them as pinched it done her in.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL. What does doing her in mean?
HIGGINS |hastily| Oh, thats the new small talk. To do a person
in means to kill them.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL |to Eli:a, horrifiea| You surely dont
believe that your aunt was killed?
LIZA. Do I not! Them she lived with would have killed her Ior a
hat-pin, let alone a hat.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL. But it cant have been right Ior your
Iather to pour spirits down her throat like that. It might have
killed her.
LIZA. Not her. Gin was mother`s milk to her. Besides, he`d
poured so much down his own throat that he knew the good oI
it.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL. Do you mean that he drank?
LIZA. Drank! My word! Something chronic.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL. How dreadIul Ior you!

AMALIA MRSESCU
196
LIZA. Not a bit. It never did him no harm what I could see. But
then he did not keep it up regular. |Cheerfully| On the burst, as
you might say, Irom time to time. And always more agreeable
when he had a drop in. When he was out oI work, my mother
used to give him Iourpence and tell him to go out and not come
back until he`d drunk himselI cheerIul and loving-like. Theres
lots oI women has to make their husbands drunk to make them
Iit to live with. |Now quite at her ease| You see, it`s like this. II
a man has a bit oI a conscience, it always takes him when he`s
sober; and then it makes him low-spirited. A drop oI booze just
takes that oII and makes him happy. |To Freaay, who is in
convulsions of suppressea laughter| Here! what are you
sniggering at?
FREDDY. The new small talk. You do it so awIully well.
LIZA. II I was doing it proper, what was you laughing at? |To
Higgins| Have I said anything I oughtnt?
MRS HIGGINS |interposing| Not at all, Miss Doolittle.
LIZA. Well, thats a mercy, anyhow. |Expansively| What I
always say is -
HIGGINS |rising ana looking at his watch| Ahem!
LIZA |looking rouna at him, taking the hint, ana rising| Well: I
must go. |They all rise. Freaay goes to the aoor|. So pleased to
have met you. Good-bye. |She shakes hanas with Mrs. Higgins|.
MRS HIGGINS. Good-bye.
LIZA. Good-bye, Colonel Pickering.

Annotated 2
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197
PICKERING. Good-bye, Miss Doolittle. |They shake hanas|.
LIZA |noaaing to the others| Good-bye, all.
FREDDY |opening the aoor for her| Are you walking across the
Park, Miss Doolittle? II so
LIZA. Walk! Not bloody likely. |Sensation|. I am going in a
taxi. |She goes out|.
Pickering gasps ana sits aown. Freaay goes out on the
balcony to catch another glimpse of Eli:a.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL |suffering from shock| Well, I really
cant get used to the new ways.
CLARA |throwing herself aiscontentealy into the Eli:abethan
chair|. Oh, it`s all right, mamma, quite right. People will think
we never go anywhere or see anybody iI you are so old-
Iashioned.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL. I daresay I am very old-Iashioned; but
I do hope you wont begin using that expression, Clara. I have
got accustomed to hear you talking about men as rotters, and
calling everything Iilthy and beastly; though I do think it
horrible and unladylike. But this last is really too much. Dont
you think so, Colonel Pickering?
PICKERING. Dont ask me. Ive been away in India Ior several
years; and manners have changed so much that I sometimes dont
know whether I`m at a respectable dinner-table or in a ship`s
Iorecastle.

AMALIA MRSESCU
198
CLARA. It`s all a matter oI habit. Theres no right or wrong in it.
Nobody means anything by it. And it`s so quaint, and gives such
a smart emphasis to things that are not in themselves very witty.
I Iind the new small talk delightIul and quite innocent.
MRS EYNSFORD HILL |rising| Well, aIter that, I think it`s
time Ior us to go.
Pickering ana Higgins rise.

1. Who are the characters taking part in the scene?
2. How does Eliza behave in the beginning? What is
strange about her behaviour and conversation?
3. What determines the change in her attitude?
4. What identiIies her as belonging to the lower classes?
5. What are the advantages oI drinking in her opinion?
6. How does Mr. Higgins behave during the meeting? What
about Colonel Pickering?
7. Comment on the comic oI the scene.
8. IdentiIy the peculiarities oI Eliza`s English.

Annotated 2
th

199
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AMALIA MRSESCU
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