31 pages • 1 hour read
Virginia WoolfMr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1929A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Intergenerational Conflict
The early 20th century was a period of dramatic social change. The period saw the First World War, a catastrophic conflict that took place from 1914 to 1918. Millions died, and it was seen by many as a betrayal of the younger generation by the older. “Lions led by donkeys” became a common phrase and expressed a belief that the bravery of youth was exploited and sacrificed by incompetent and indifferent leaders. Woolf frequently wrote about war in her fiction and nonfiction. Several of her novels, including Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Years (1937), feature World War I as a major event and theme. Her work is concerned with understanding the grief and trauma brought about by this unprecedented conflict, exploring the experience of shellshock (in Mrs. Dalloway) and the loss of young life (in To the Lighthouse). It was a period marked by trauma and loss that created a division between generations because those who made the war and led it were not the ones who suffered. It also contributed to a range of social changes, including women’s voting rights which, it is often argued, was accelerated by the role women played during the war, working as nurses and taking on traditionally male roles on the home front while men were away fighting.
“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” alludes to social turbulence and generational conflict, but the war remains a conspicuous absence. Arguably, for an audience who lived through the war and its aftermath, this context was implicit and not necessary to state. The war, indeed, was one subject of Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922), the novel Bennett criticized as being “clever” but neglecting “character.” In addition to the turbulence and trauma brought by war, the early 20th century was also a period of continued industrialization, urbanization, and scientific revolution (including Einstein’s theory of relativity), which increased the perception that the modern world was fundamentally different from that of the Edwardian era.
This context informs the strong theme of generational conflict in Woolf’s essay in which Arnold Bennett, a famous and commercially successful Edwardian author who is treated as representative of his generation, is set against Modernist authors who are “making it new,” to adapt Pound’s famous phrase. Woolf begins by placing “the Edwardians and Georgians in two camps” (4), making explicit the tension between two different approaches to life as well as to literature. The generational gaps that were created by the historical conditions described above were reflected in new approaches in art and literature, which sought to better reflect the complex experiences of modernity. Modernist art and literature began to experiment more freely with styles of representation. This experimentation is a theme throughout “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” in which Woolf calls for a new kind of novel writing which might be “spasmodic, […] obscure, […and] fragmentary,” but which could usher in “one of the great ages of English literature” (24). Her idea of generational conflict and generational change is hopeful for the future.
Representation of Character
Woolf makes the surprising statement that human character changed in December 1910. The essay is premised on the idea that this moment of transformation rendered older ways of writing inadequate and obsolete. This thesis suggests a vibrant connection between art and society. Indeed, Woolf states that how people relate to each other is fundamental across all parts of life: “when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature” (5). This context makes Woolf’s discussion of character (which is the main subject of her essay) more vital because it is not merely a matter of literary style but a question of how art can represent a changing society.
Woolf understands “character” differently than Edwardian writers like Bennett. For the older generation, character meant a clear, unambiguous literary representation of a person that can be judged real or not real (3). Woolf proposes a more complex and elusive notion of character. Instead of simply explaining her position she depicts it through the creation of a character in her essay. This character is presented first as Woolf encountered her in a train carriage and then is put through a process of varied representation according to the conventions of a diverse set of authors. Woolf intends “that [the reader] may realise the different aspects [character] can wear” (6). Mrs. Brown has many dimensions that are drawn out by different literary conventions and forms of representation.
Woolf asserts that old conventions are no longer adequate for the representation of character. She also suggests, however, that new approaches to representation are still being developed and might lead to “fragmentation” and even “failure” (24). She writes that she felt she had “let […] Mrs. Brown slip through [her] fingers” because she had told the reader “nothing whatever about her” (18). She insists, however, that the problem is “partly the great Edwardians’ fault” because they tell her how to represent Mrs. Brown by saying: “[b]egin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the year 1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe cancer. Describe calico. Describe——,” to which Woolf cries, “Stop! Stop!” (18).
Woolf argues that the previous generation of novelists used external details and social circumstances to pin down character, but this technique is no longer adequate. Modernists must find other ways. Woolf begins to suggest avenues for the development of new approaches through her adoption of techniques such as stream of consciousness. She ends her essay with the hope that the process of developing new methods for representing character will remain ongoing and collaborative. Her final sentence asks that writers and readers should “never, never […] desert Mrs. Brown” (24), reasserting the idea that character should be at the center of literary fiction.
The Creative Process
While the subjects of Woolf’s essay are character and reality, she also focuses on the creative process. Writers depict character and reality through a process of imagination and composition, and many passages of the essay connect the depiction of character to the process of literary creation. Woolf notes in the first paragraph that she is probably the only person in the room who has written a novel or even tried to write one. Thus, her essay focuses partly on the characters that writers create and partly on the character of the writer herself.
Later, she turns to the story of “Mrs. Brown,” a title character in her essay, and she describes the train journey from Richmond to Waterloo. She watches Mrs. Brown and her male companion converse and interact, and she describes the subsequent events:
Mrs. Brown and I were left alone together. She sat in her corner opposite, very clean, very small, rather queer, and suffering intensely. The impression she made was overwhelming. It came pouring out like a draught, like a smell of burning. What was it composed of—that overwhelming and peculiar impression? Myriads of irrelevant and incongruous ideas crowd into one’s head on such occasions; one sees the person, one sees Mrs. Brown, in the centre of all sorts of different scenes (8-9).
Woolf then takes her audience through a sequence of fictional events—the life she imagines Mrs. Brown to have lived and a story of how she came to know the man in the train compartment. In Woolf’s writing process, the writer does not primarily describe reality as the Edwardians might think. Rather, reality, as manifest in the person of Mrs. Brown, is a set of points on a graph that may be connected by many different lines. The writer does not depict reality but rather creates words from the few data points that experience offers. Woolf suggests that the writer’s encounter with reality is so fleeting, slight, and subject to bias that writers cannot hope to create “real” characters as Bennett wishes. They can only, along with their readers, engage in creative interpretation.
Related Titles
By Virginia Woolf
