As the the english language and the literature that accompanies and animates it advance into the 20th century we start to see significant change take place, which we now label as those characteristic of the Modern era. Chief among these is the daunting issue of how to best portray character, which is a very sweeping term, but for Virginia Woolf it means nothing less than to embody human life and existence itself. This is an extremely difficult and elusive objective, one that she admits herself she has no firm grasp of how it should be done, and one that I often wonder if it is possible at all. Nonetheless this is the goal she sets out not only for herself, but what she defines to be the overarching goal that all young novelists of her day should have been reaching for. Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925, would have been well into the swing of the modernist era, and represents Woolf’s own rebuttal to her essays Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown and Modern Fiction, which detail her thoughts and beliefs as to where English literature needed to proceed.
This being the second book of the semester it would be only natural for us to compare the small taste of 20th century fiction we’ve enjoyed so far, but oh, how different the two novels at a glance would seem! Jumping from the early to 20’s to the 60’s not only do see the extreme changes in culture and everyday life that occurred in that quickly evolving setting, but we’re faced with completely different approaches to the idea of what character means. On one hand you have Woolf’s approach with her variety of characters each one of whom are spinning, seething balls of emotion, and the other you have Howie and his drinking straws. That’s not to take away from the importance of Howie as a character and a thought experiment, but certainly the contrast is striking.
While both books still work on addressing the idea of the character, you find entirely different takes on what the defining points should be in both Mrs. Dalloway and The Mezzanine. Looking at a Woolf character you really sympathize and feel for their struggles.For me, all the major characters in Mrs. Dalloway do a great job of prompting very introspective and interesting thought into my own human relations and actions towards those in my life. Definitely this is an extremely important part of my own character, and the very fact that I have this kind of a response I think signals a certain degree of success on Woolf’s part. When reading the Mezzanine, however, I had extremely different, but perhaps not any less meaningful or introspective thoughts. In a book that spends whole pages talking about the development of the drinking straw, Baker does a good job as well of causing me to consider my own character, but in a completely different manner. Instead of having the focus of his novel be on exploring the dynamics of human interaction he instead sends us on a voyage through his careful observation and reflection on the material things that make up his everyday life. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that other humans are important to Howie, (he claims he thinks of L. 580 time a year, and his family 400) but certainly his focus is much more on the little ways in which we react to our outside environment, as opposed to the mini storms of emotion that go on within.
Now I would never presume to make any statement about which of these two books is more important or influential, they both touch excellently on two entirely seperate aspects of what makes up our overall identity. Perhaps the lesson to be learned here is that there is no one correct in which one might go about exploring the topic of character. Both novels do good jobs at what they set out to accomplish, but both fail to capture in enough the full extent to human life. I suppose this might support my own belief that the quest for the perfect novel is an endless one, but this does lend a certain heroism to the novelist who would spend their whole life attempting doesn’t it?
