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1. Characteristics of Modernism(s) (1890-1960 or 1890-Now)
3. Enlightenment: Thomas Gainsboroughs Blue Boy (1777) and Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (1748-9)
4. Victorian: Dante Gabriel Rossettis A Vision of Fiammetta (1878)
5. Modernism(s) As far as literature is concerned modernism reveals a breaking away from established rules, traditions and conventions, fresh ways of looking at mans position and function in the universe and many experiments in form and style. It is particularly concerned with language and how to use it (representationally or otherwise) and with writing itself (Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory).
Consider the following passage from Wide Sargasso Sea as an example of an experimental break with established rules of narrative description in a novel or novella:
Then I open the door and walk into their world. It is, as I always knew, made of cardboard. I have have seen it before somewhere, this cardboard world where everything is colored brown or dark red or yellow that has no light in it. As I walk along the passages I wish I could see what is behind the cardboard. They tell me I am in England but I dont believe them. We lost our way to England. When? Where? (Rhys 107).
6. Compare the first person description from Wide Sargasso Sea with the following description of England by the narrator in A Christmas Carol: The house-fronts looked black enough, and the windows blacker, contrasting with the smooth white sheet of snow upon the roofs, and with the dirtier snow upon the ground which last deposit had been plowed up in deep furrows by the heavy wheels of carts and wagons, furrows that crossed and recrossed each other hundreds of times where the great streets branched off, and made intricate channels, hard to trace, in the thick yellow mud and icy water (Dickens 82).
Please note:
Modernists are not the first group of thinkers and artists to consider themselves modern. The Renaissance and the dawn of secular humanism, the Enlightenment tradition of rational liberalism, and even the Victorians faith in technological progress all qualify as modern.
All modernisms share a desire to offer universal solutions to complex problems. Think Atomic Bomb, Picassos Guernica, or James Joyces Finnegans Wake that writes all human history into a single book
7. Modernism emerged as a reaction to realism or romanticism. These often challenging perspectives evolved over several years before emerging into diverse artistic approaches that emphasized cultural context as well as the implications of form. Originally called avant-garde by practitioners, modernism worked to break with past traditions, instead of reforming traditions to meet contemporary social, political and artistic needs.
Like the Rene Magritte painting, The Portrait, shows, modernism examined the bases of certainty, the structures of knowledge, the systems of belief, and the repositories of authority of the Bourgeois class who rose to dominate the late part of the 19th century.
8. Modernism is as much interrogative as it is productive; it inquires about how knowledge is processed and creates new categories of knowledge along with new knowledge. The following are some of the subsidiary movements that make up modernism, and all share an obsession with the relationship between the perceiver and the object of perception:
Constructivism; Dadaism; Decadence; Existentialism; Expressionism; Futurism; Imagism; New Humanism; Primitivism; Surrealism; and Symbolism.
Some other categories of knowledge emerge in the twentieth century such as:
Chemistry: aided by the discovery of important underlying elemental structures.
Astronomy: which seemed to make the universe more rational and predictable and suggested the possibility of human mastery.
Dialectical Materialism: Thesis/anti-thesis/synthesis into which Marx plugged class struggle to explain the failure of enlightenment revolutions to completely reform repressive political systems.
Compulsory Education: Leads to a mass literate population, at whom a new popular literature and mass media is aimed.
Anthropology: altered basic conceptions of culture, religion, and myth by decentering Western Religion by placing it in a global, cultural context.
9. The people of the twentieth century were the first to live with machines in their everyday lives. Modernism is, in part, a response to ways technology forced culture to restructure how it made sense of daily experiences. Consider the social impact of just a few modern inventions: electricity, cinema, radio, x-rays, antibiotics, airplanes, mass produced cars, refrigeration, gramophone, canned food, DNA, the double-helix, and the atomic bomb.
10. Modernism is also partially a response to mass dislocations of population due to war, empire, and immigration. This dislocation resulted in the unprecedented close quartering of different classes and ethnicities in rapidly expanding cities. Civic and ethnic nationalism developed in part as a response to population shifts, often with disastrous consequences. As Picassos Guernica shows, modernism investigates how individual identity functions as part of larger economic, political, and bureaucratic systems-often dislocated from regions that defined group and individual identity for other movements.
11. Modernism and Psychoanalysis: Many, if not all, modernists examine the relationship between unconscious impulses and civilized repressions. Perhaps more profoundly, Freud changed the nature of attentiveness itself. It was in listening to patients differently that Freud discovered the unconscious-a force of otherness as powerful as, but in no way equivalent to, a god. Inside every person, he said, there was something transmitting scrambled messages in a cryptic language, trying to break through the conscious surface of life. The other was in ourselves-indeed it was ourselves (Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism 917).
12. Location of Modernism(s) Nevertheless it is valid to point out certain places and periods where and when modernist tendencies were at their most active and fruitful:
In France from 1890 until the 1940s
In Russia during the pre-revolutionary years and the 1920s
In Germany from the 1890s and on during the 1920s
In England from the 1890s and on during the 1930s
In America from shortly before the First World War and on during the inter-war period.
Thus it was a European and transcontinental movement, and its principle centers of activity were the capital cities (515).
13. Wide Sargasso Seas as a Modernist Text
14. Consider Wide Sargasso Sea as critical response to both romanticism and realism. This is evident through the obsession with literary form throughout the novel and the criticism of ways Empirical reason silences non-privileged social groups. I feel very much a stranger here, I said. I feel that this place is my enemy and on your side.
You are very much mistaken, she said. It is not for youre and not for me. It has nothing to do with either of us. That is why you are afraid of it, because it is something else. I found that out long ago when I was a child. I loved it because I had nothing else to love, but it is as indifferent as this God you call on so often (Rhys 78).
15. Consider the ways Wide Sargasso Sea inquires about how knowledge is processed to create new categories of knowledge along with new knowledge itself: She was undecided about certain facts-any fact. When I asked her if the snakes we sometimes saw were poisonous, she said, Not those. The fer de lance of course, but there are none here, and she added, but how can they be sure? Do you think they know? Then, Our snakes are not poisonous. Of course not (Rhys 52).
16. Consider the ways Wide Sargasso Sea depicts the dislocation of people which resulted in the unprecedented close quartering of different classes and ethnicities in rapidly expanding cities: As it was late I ate with them instead of by myself as usual. Myra, one of the new servants, was standing by the sideboard, waiting to change the plates. We ate English food now, beef and mutton pies and puddings. I was glad to be like an English girl but I missed the taste of Christophines cooking. My stepfather talked about a plan to import laborers-coolies he called them-from the East Indies (21).
17. Psychoanalysis: Inside every person, [Freud] said, there was something transmitting scrambled messages in a cryptic language, trying to break through the conscious surface of life. The other was in ourselves-indeed it was ourselves (917). Consider the following: And then, she went on in her judges voice, you make love to her till she drunk with it, no rum could make her drunk like that, till she cant do without it. Its she cant see the sun any more. Only you she see. But all you want is to break her up.
(Not the way you mean, I thought)
But she hold out, eh? She hold out.
(Yes, she held out. A pity)
So you pretend to believe all the lies that damn bastard tell you.
(That damn bastard tell you)
Now every word she said was echoed, echoed loudly in my head.
So you can leave her alone.
(Leave her alone)
Not telling her why.
(Why?)
No more love, eh?
(No more love) (Rhys 92).
18. Consider Wide Sargasso Sea as an experiment in representing landscape: I can remember every second of that morning, if I shut my eyes I can see the deep blue color of the sky and the mango leaves, the pink and red hibiscus, the yellow handkerchief she wore round her head, tied in the Martinique fashion with the sharp points in front, but now I see everything still, fixed for ever like the colors in a stained glass window (Rhys 71).
19. Freewrite (5 minutes): Draft a discussion question on Wide Sargasso Sea.
