Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown

In a paper entitled 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown3 read to the Heretics at
Cambridge in 1924, Virginia Woolf proclaimed that late in 1910 human perception
and character changed and that the influence of early twentieth century novelists
like H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy was on the wane. In the
paper, Woolf attacked the conventional novel of her time. The crux of her
argument is that the Edwardians are 'materialists' who are Concerned not with
the spirit but with the body.

Woolf states: they write of unimportant things; ... they spend immense skill and
immense industry making the trivial, and the transitory appear the true and the
enduring. Of the Edwardians, she singled Bennett out for attack. She called him
the worst culprit and instanced Hilda Lessways as a novel that was concerned
with house property, rent and valuation of real estates i.e. with material reality
rather than life itself. Woolf used the example of an old lady travelling in a railway
carriage - 'Mrs Brown in the corner - to show how the Edwardian novelists had
ignored the representation of life. Novelists like Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy
had devoted their energies to the representation of material details.

What is Novel according to Woolf and her comments on Bennette

To Woolf, a novel should recreate 'life and life' for Woolf is the representation of
the complexities of experience and impressions. Woolf writes:

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day*

The mind receives a myriad impressions - trivial, fantastic,

evanescent or engraved with the sharpness of steel* From

all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable

atoms, and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the

life of Monday or Tuesday, the ascent falls differently from

the old..
Fiction then is life or experiences given in a succession. The novelist is to record
these successive experiences and to trace their supple and subtle interaction in
people of different temperaments and convictions. It is noteworthy that Woolf
cited December 1910 as the watershed in the development of the modern
fiction* The date coincided with the opening of the post-Impressionist exhibitions
at the Grafton Galleries* Post-Impressionist painters like Roger Fryand Van Gogh
had inspired Woolf with their preoccupation with moments of existence which
are individual and devoid of temporal and spatial relationships . T h e Myriad
impressions of consciousness, the texture of experiences, the process of living
and the colour and tone of experience constitute what she terms life. As Arnold
Kettle suggests, Woolf presents in her novels *the moment-by-moment texture of
feeling, the intricate pattern of reaction, the wispish, wayward flitting of
consciousness, the queer changes in tempo of the responses, the taste of the
food, the sudden violent swoops of emotion and the strange, enhanced
significance of outside, inanimate, casual things, a shadow on the table, the
pattern of cloth. The novel then becomes a framework and a loose boundary
within which 'the growth and development of feeling' are presented, Woolf
thinks that plot, characters, comedy, tragedy, love interest or catastrophe in the
conventional sense are no longer the subject of the novel. All feelings, all
thoughts, every atom of the brain and every slight change in spirit are the 'proper
stuff of fiction1. This attitude is, of course, potentially dangerous. As Frank
Bradbrook suggests, 'the novelist may merely end by reproducing the chaos from
which it is the function of intelligence to save us.

Experience is a flux. However, in representing the flux, Woolf resists radical

linguistic innovation. She singles out the Georgian novelists as writers who
capture inner responses and emotions. Mr Forster, Mr Lawrence, Mr Strachey,
Mr Joyce, and Mr Eliot share her vision in accommodating the complexities of
experience in their novels; however, she criticizes Joyce and Eliot for their lack of
finesse. She finds Joyce indecent, and his indecency in Ulysses seems 'the
conscious and calculated indecency of a desperate man who feels that in order to
breathe he must break the windows. At moments, when the window is broken,
he is magnificent. But what a waste of energy! In her linguistic rendering of
consciousness, however, Woolf is more conventional than she imagines.
Stylistically speaking, her fiction is more like James novels and her
experimentation, unlike Joyce, is achieved without stretching the linguistic
apparatus to the limit.

The main objective in Woolfs novels is the representation of the varied

impressions and responses of her fictional characters. To accomplish this
objective, Woolf creates multiple perspectives through which the depths of the
experiencing consciousness are revealed, Woolf feels that in overemphasizing the
materiality of human existence, Bennett has failed to capture the essence of life
which should be the main concern of novelists.

Woolf critcizes Bennett for his concern with material reality. Bennett explains his
interest in materialism in his Journals. His basic assumption is that art treats as its
subject all aspects of life. The author, he writes, should relate himself to the
community instead of alienating himself from general humanity. While striving for
the moment of perception, the author must be prepared to accept the ordinary.
The author 'must be able to conceive the ideal without losing sight of the fact it is
a human world we live in . This pursuit of the ideal in the ordinary leads him to
reproduce in his novels the material world.

Woolfs perception of a character

In 1924, in "Character in Fiction," Virginia Woolf wrote that the writers of her time
must put aside the tools used by writers in the past. Arguing with Arnold Bennett,
she said that it was important to try to describe the particular character of
individual subject, for example, Mrs. Brown, and that one could not do so by
resorting to the usual conventions of narrative. As in "Mr. Bennett and Mrs.
Brown," she says that the Victorians and the Edwardians have failed to truly
capture character, and in "Character," she uses the example of Hilda Lessways, a
character in an Arnold Bennett novel of the same title. After quoting from the
novel, Woolf points out that in all Bennett's description of Hilda's house and its
cost and the surroundings, "we cannot hear her mother's voice, or Hilda's voice;
we can only hear Mr. Bennett's voice telling us facts about rents and freeholds
and copyholds and fines. . . .he is trying to make us imagine for him; he is trying to
hypnotise us into a belief that, because he has made a house, there must be a
person living there. With all his powers of observation, which are marvellous, with
all his sympathy and humanity, which are great, Mr. Bennett has never once
looked at Mrs. Brown in her corner." Mrs. Brown is Woolf's representative of
"human nature," and she says that the Edwardian writers (such as Bennett and
Wells and Galsworthy) "have looked. . .out of the window; at factories, at Utopias,
even at the decoration and upholstery of the carriage; but never at her, never at
life, never at human nature. . .they have developed a technique of novel-writing
which suits their purpose; they have made tools and established conventions
which do their business. But those tools are not our tools, and that business is not
our business. For us those conventions are ruin, those tools are death."

Later in the essay VW argues that these Edwardian tools of writing "are the wrong
ones for us to use. They have laid an enormous stress upon the fabric of things.
They have given us a house in the hope that we may be able to deduce the human
beings who live there. To give them their due, they have made that house much
better worth living in. But if you hold that novels are in the first place about
people, and only in the second about the houses they live in, that is the wrong
way to set about it. Therefore, you see, the Georgian writer had to begin by
throwing away the method that was in use at the moment." She goes on to say
how the Georgian writers of her time (from 1910 on) were having difficulty,
because they did not yet have new tools with which to replace the old. E.M.
Forster [her friend] and D. H. Lawrence [who had a powerful contempt for Woolf]
spoiled their early work by trying to use the old tools instead of throwing them
away. But at least they were trying to rescue poor Mrs. Brown. And in trying to
find ways to capture the reality of Mrs. Brown, writers will cause "smashing and
crashing" in their destruction of literary conventions. "Grammar is violated;
syntax disintegrated . . ." She refers to Joyce's "indecency" in Ulysses and Eliot's
obscurity in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and The Wasteland. Of Joyce's
indecency she writes that "it seems to me the conscious and calculated indecency
of a desperate man who feels that in order to breathe he must break the
windows." She says that these "failures and fragments"the works of writers
trying to free themselves, and literature, and human characterMrs. Brown
from oppressive conventions are "the sound of their axes" as they try to rescue
Mrs. Brown.

And then she speaks directly to readers. Readers have duties as partners of
writers. Mrs. Brown, Woolf says, "is just as visible to you who remain silent as to
us who tell stories about her. In the course of your daily life this past week you
have had far stranger and more interesting experiences than the one I have tried
to describe. You have overheard scraps of talk that filled you with amazement.
You have gone to bed at night bewildered by the complexity of your feelings. In
one day thousands of ideas have coursed through your brains; thousands of
emotions have met, collided, and disappeared in astonishing disorder.
Nevertheless, you allow the writers to palm off upon you a version of all this, an
image of Mrs Brown, which has no likeness to that surprising apparition
whatsoever." She asks readers to stop being so modest and humble and "to insist
that writers shall come down off their plinths and pedestals, and describe
beautifully is possible, truthfully at any rate, our Mrs. Brown. You should insist
that she is an old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety; capable of
appearing in any place; wearing any dress; saying anything and doing heaven
knows what. But the things she says and the things she does and her eyes and her
nose and her speech and her silence have an overwhelming fascination, for she is,
of course, the spirit we live by, life itself. "

Then she cautions the reader to be aware of the difficulty writers face in trying to
capture this spirit. "But do not expect just at present a complete and satisfactory
presentment of her. Tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the
failure. Your help is invoked in a good cause. For I will make one final and
surpassingly rash predictionwe are trembling on the verge of one of the great
ages of English literature. But it can only be reached if we are determined never,
never, to desert Mrs Brown."

Man and woman scenario

Using a man and woman she sat near on the train (whom she calls Mr Smith and
Mrs Brown) as her test-case, Woolf asks: how would Arnold Bennett respond to
this real-life woman sitting opposite Woolf on the train, this Mrs Brown? How
would he rework her as a fictional character? For Woolf, the problem is that
Bennett and his fellow Edwardian writers go about establishing how real a
character is by very materialist means, as mentioned above. For Woolf, there is
something dissatisfying about such a method, and readers must not assume that
writers know more about Mrs Brown than they do. For Woolf, everyone
experiences a myriad thoughts, feelings, and impressions in their day-to-day life,
and this is real life, the stuff of which real characters should be made, rather
than the flesh-and-blood materialism (and focus on economic factors) which a
writer like Arnold Bennett uses to make his characters real.

on or about December 1910 human character changed

In Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Woolf also makes one of her most famous
pronouncements, that on or about December 1910 human character changed.
Woolf doesnt spell out what exactly happened in December 1910 to make this
sea-change occur, so we as readers are left to pick over this provocative
statement. There are several reasons why 1910 might have been singled out by
Woolf (writing 14 years later, remember) as an important watershed in human
character:

Artistic revolution:

1910 was the year that Woolfs friend Roger Fry (an associate of her circle known
as the Bloomsbury Group) held a Post-Impressionist exhibition. Post-
Impressionism heralded the beginning of a new style of abstract art which moved
away from realism, just as Woolf was advocating a move away from the
materialist realism of Arnold Bennett and his fellow novelists.
Political change: there were two general elections in 1910, one in January and one
in December (the very month Woolf singles out in Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown).
The January election had produced a hung parliament with the result that there
was another election later that year; the Liberals, led by Herbert Asquith, won a
slight majority and his government was re-elected.

Change of king:

1910 was also the year that Edward VII died (in May) and George V acceded to the
throne. So 1910 (though not December 1910) was the year in which the world
stopped being Edwardian and started being Georgian. This is perhaps
significant in light of Woolfs distinction between Edwardian writers and their
conventions and their successors, whom she even calls the Georgians (James
Joyce had been mentioned in particular in her previous essay, Modern Fiction, as
embodying this new spirit in fiction).

Woolfs own manifesto?

In 1910, Woolf and a number of her friends had carried out what became known
as the Dreadnought hoax, which involved Woolf and her fellow Bloomsburyites
disguising themselves as Abyssinian princes (complete with false beards click on
the link above to see a photo!) in order to blag their way on board the HMS
Dreadnought to receive a full guided tour by the Royal Navy. Woolf was fond of
proclaiming that specific moments in history especially her own history were
great watersheds between the pre-modern and modern, so perhaps her
mysterious reference to 1910 is an oblique hint at her own circle of artistic
friends, with the suggestion that they are remaking the world, and, also,
reinventing literature. (One such anecdote involves another moment at which the
world became modern, according to Woolf: in 1907 her friend Lytton Strachey
showed up at the house where Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell were living.
Strachey, pointing to a stain on Vanessa Bells dress, casually enquired Semen?
After that moment, all barriers of reserve went down and it was okay, it seemed,
to discuss such things.)