B.A. (Hons.

) English – Semester V Core Course

Paper XII : British Literature: The Early 20th Century Study Material

Unit-5
Background Readings

Edited by : Dr. Seema Suri

Department of English

SCHOOL OF OPEN LEARNING

University of Delhi
Paper XII – British Literature: The Early 20th Century

Unit-5
Background Readings

Edited by:
Dr. Seema Suri
School of Open Learning
University of Delhi
Delhi-110007

SCHOOL OF OPEN LEARNING

UNIVERSITY OF DELHI
5, Cavalry Lane, Delhi-110007
 Paper XII – British Literature: The Early 20th Century

Unit-5
Background Readings

Contents

S. No. Title Pg. No.

1. Sigmund Freud: “The Structure of the Unconscious, the Id, the Ego, and 01
the Super-ego”

2. Albert Camus: “Absurdity and Suicide” and “The Myth of Sisyphus” 05

3. Virginia Woolf: “On Being Ill” (1926) 10

4. D. H. Lawrence: “Morality and the Novel” (1925) 14

5. Raymond Williams: “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of 19

Modernism”

Prepared by:
Sameer Chopra

SCHOOL OF OPEN LEARNING

UNIVERSITY OF DELHI
5, Cavalry Lane, Delhi-110007
 Unit-5

Background Readings
Sameer Chopra

1. Sigmund Freud: “The Structure of the Unconscious– the Id, the Ego and the
Super-ego”
1.1 Learning Objectives
After going through this lesson, you will be able to:
- Recognise the crucial link between bodily and mental processes;
- Develop a clear understanding of Freud’s distinction between the conscious,
the unconscious, and the preconscious; and
- Acquire an in-depth perspective into the workings of the id, the ego and the
superego.
1.2 About the Author
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was an Austrian neurologist famous for being instrumental in
the development of psychoanalysis, a method for treating psychological illnesses involving
sustained, uninhibited conversations between a patient and a trained psychoanalyst.
Beginning his career as a medical doctor, Freud soon shifted his focus to psychopathology.
Some of the most well-known concepts associated with Freudian thought are free association,
the Oedipus Complex, dream analysis, wish-fulfilments, repression, Freudian slips and the
tripartite distinction between the id, the ego, and the super-ego. Freud’s persistent focus on
sexual impulses as the centre of the unconscious was as pathbreaking as it was controversial.
Although the scientific objectivity and political correctness of Freud’s theories have come
under sharp criticism over the years, they continue to be widely used and discussed not only
in contemporary psychiatry and psychotherapy but also in academia. His important works
include The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1904),
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and
Civilisation and its Discontents (1930). Freud died in the UK in 1939.
1.3 Analytical Summary of the Text
In “The Structure of the Unconscious-Id, Ego, Super-ego,” Freud gives us his well-known
tripartite division of the human psyche into the id, the ego and the super-ego. In the first part
of the reading, he establishes a firm link between physical and mental processes: the body
and the mind constantly manifest each other. More specifically, somatic, or bodily processes,
are a reflection of the unconscious workings of the mind. By unconscious, Freud refers to
those thoughts/feelings/desires/emotions that are hidden away from consciousness or not
commonly acknowledged and processed. This assertion, Freud contends, goes against the
grain of a “majority of philosophers . . . [who] declare that the notion of a mental thing being

1
unconscious is self-contradictory.” Consequently, consciousness is “a very highly fugitive
condition”: in other words, consciousness is always in a state of flux, such that what is
conscious at a given moment is not so in another. All those aspects of the unconscious that
are “capable of entering the consciousness,” even if momentarily, are characteristic of what
Freud terms “preconscious.” The preconscious is to be contrasted with the “unconscious
proper,” the seat of mental processes that does not readily enter consciousness and therefore
need more painstaking decoding or interpretation. Mental processes are thus categorized as
conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. This division, however, is prone to change and
modification; it is not absolute and fixed. The preconscious can be brought to consciousness
relatively easily; the unconscious, on the other hand, encounters stronger resistances in its
journey to consciousness. It is in the laying bare the workings of the unconscious, often with
the help of a trained practitioner, that the value and power of Freudian psychoanalysis chiefly
rests.
Interlinked with the division of mental processes into the conscious, the preconscious
and the unconscious is the categorization of the mind itself into id, ego, and super-ego:
a) The id is where our unconscious energies and motivations are concentrated. Freud
describes it as the centre of our instincts, one that only follows the “pleasure-
principle” and is consequently concerned with the gratification of our infantile
impulses like hunger and thirst and innermost sexual urges. Elsewhere, Freud argues
for the existence of the “Oedipus Complex,” named after the ill-fated Greek
mythological hero who kills his father and marries his mother. According to Freud,
a male infant’s foremost sexual desires are directed towards his mother, making him
instinctively jealous of his father. Such longings are guided by the id, and because
they are considered socially taboo, they are usually “repressed” i.e., buried deep into
the psyche. Repression is a key term in psychoanalytic theory: it involves, “the
‘forgetting’ or ignoring of unresolved conflicts, unadmitted desires, or traumatic
past events, so that they are forced out of conscious awareness and into the realm of
the unconscious” (Barry 96-97). Logic and morality have no sway over the id: it
does not conform to any social or moral values or notions of good/evil, right/wrong,
acceptable/unacceptable: “Instinctual cathexes [mental/emotional force] seeking
discharge . . . is all that the id contains.” The id is also impervious to the passage of
time: our sexual urges, for instance, remain remarkably steady over a large period,
whether or not we consciously acknowledge them.
b) The ego, Freud notes, is “that part of the id which has been modified by its
proximity to the external world.” In other words, the ego makes the id, to the extent
possible, conform to pressures of the real world, even as it enables the gratification
of the id’s impulses in ways that are deemed socially acceptable. For example, when
a male infant directs his primordial sexual energies towards his biological mother,
the ego enables him, as he grows up, to reconcentrate those energies on a non-
biological lover/partner. The ego is thus a force of adjustment and negotiation

2
 between various elements of the consciousness that are often in conflict with one
another. Unlike the id, associated with the pleasure principle, the ego is premised on
the “reality principle,” one that attempts to render the id more attuned to the
normative demands of our day-to-day social existence and thereby “promises
greater security and . . . success.” The ego achieves this by introducing the
“procrastinating factor of thought” that makes us delay the satisfaction of our
instinctive desires until they take a more culturally appropriate form. It is under the
pressure of the ego that we “think twice” before acting on our desire/impulses. The
ego subordinates instinct to the power of rationality: “the ego stands for reason and
circumspection, while the id stands for the untamed passions.” But this is not an
easy task for the ego; the mind, according to Freud, is a battlefield where multiple
forces juggle with one another to establish their dominance. The mind is thus not the
wholly rational and conscious entity we assume it to be. The ego has to work hard to
reconcile and harmonize drives and energies that weigh it down from all sides: the
external world, the super-ego, and the id. When overwhelmed by this continual
discord, the ego reacts by developing anxiety or even depression.
c) If the id is one end of the spectrum, the super-ego is the other. It is the public voice
of morality that upholds certain norms as unquestionable. It is that dimension of the
mind most strongly conditioned by socio-cultural values and expectations, without
consideration for our unconscious desires and impulses. A failure on the part of the
ego to meet the demands of the super-ego results in the generation of “feelings of
tension . . . inferiority and guilt.” For example, if a married woman/man experiences
a romantic-sexual connection with anyone except her/his spouse, s/he is going
against socio-religious values of her/his community and is thus bound to feel guilty
under the pressure of the workings of the super-ego. The guilt is produced by the
dismissal of the dictates of the super-ego. A homosexual man or woman living in a
heteronormative environment is similarly likely to experience intense anguish and
trauma owing to his/her disregard for what is deemed socially acceptable. The
super-ego, to that extent, is the psychic manifestation of mainstream culture and
morality.
As in the case of the conscious, the unconscious, and the preconscious, the lines that divide
the id, the ego, and the superego are not sharply drawn. Freud stresses the tentative nature of
his own categories, contending that the three dimensions of the psyche are to be more
properly understood as overlapping. Using a painting metaphor, he describes them as “areas
of colour shading off into one another” rather than the “linear contours” of a simple “drawing
or . . . a primitive painting.” His model resembles the impressionistic quality of modern art
where the object of representation is presented without clear boundaries. Freud ends by
laying down the agenda for psychoanalysis: to strengthen the ego such that it can more
successfully balance the conflicting and often uncompromising demands of the id and the
superego. The ego is, hence, indispensable to good psychic health.

3
1.4 Conclusion
In this reading, Freud gives us two sets of corresponding distinctions: the conscious, the
preconscious, and the unconscious on the one hand and the id, the ego and the superego on
the other. Freud convincingly argues in his writing that consciousness is a fragile equilibrium
between warring dimensions of the psyche and it is prone to breakdown when the ego is
unsuccessful in neutralizing the conflict between the claims of the id (instincts) and the super-
ego (morality). Psychoanalysis typically involves the “patient” lying down on a couch and
engaging in “free association” i.e., speaking, as uninhibitedly as possible, about their
unacknowledged or repressed fears and longings to a trained practitioner. The psychoanalyst
potentially uses this information to uncover the operations of the unconscious as well as
resolve the psychic dilemmas an individual is facing. The recognition of sexuality as the core
of our innermost instincts is a controversial aspect of psychoanalysis: Freud was criticized in
his day for unduly foregrounding the centrality of erotic impulses to our mental make-up.
Feminists have also attacked him for the phallocentric and heteronormative biases embedded
in some of his theories. Notwithstanding this beleaguered reception, Freud remains
enduringly relevant to our increasing recognition of the importance of mental well-being.
Contemporary psychotherapy owes a great deal to Freud and while there are disagreements
about the scientific “objectivity” of his theories, it remains undeniable that he irrevocably
altered how we understand our psyches. The considerable appeal of psychoanalytic
discourses to the study of literature is also noteworthy. This is so because both literature and
the unconscious can be seen to possess an overlapping structure. We strive to lay bare the
hidden operations of the unconscious in a way that roughly approximates our close reading of
literary texts: both kinds of interpretive procedures are frequently, if not always, based on
decoding the significance of indirect imagery, symbolism, metaphorical patterns and so on.
Not surprisingly, then, Freud’s ideas have spawned a large body of work dedicated to literary
analysis and criticism, one that is engaged in, among other things, exploring the gaps between
a text’s covert and overt content on the one hand and the unconscious or repressed
motivations of a particular character’s conduct on the other. The enormity of Freud’s
influence on contemporary thought is best summarized in W. H. Auden’s memorable eulogy
to the doctor: “if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd/to us he is no more a person
now/but a whole climate of opinion/under whom we conduct our different lives” (qtd. in Neu
1).

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2. Albert Camus: “Absurdity and Suicide” and “The Myth of Sisyphus”
from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (1955)
2.1 Learning Objectives
After going through this lesson, you will be able to:
- Recognise the significance of suicide as one of the most pressing philosophical
questions for Camus;
- Understand the nuances of the relationship between absurdity as a phenomenon
and suicide as a solution to it;
- Engage with the myth of Sisyphus as a metaphor and how it offers valuable
lessons for our struggle against the meaninglessness of human existence; and
- Reflect on the critical link between absurdity and happiness.
2.2 About the Author
Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a French philosopher, novelist and playwright. His most
well-known works include the novels The Stranger (1942), The Plague (1947), The Fall
(1956) and a collection of essays central to the development of existentialist and absurdist
philosophy, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). He strongly aligned himself with leftist, pacifist,
and human rights causes. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.
2.3 Analytical Summary of the Text
“Absurdity and Suicide” and “The Myth of Sisyphus” – extracted from Camus’ 1942
collection of philosophical essays titled The Myth of Sisyphus – are representative of the
literature of the “absurd,” a philosophical approach that views life as devoid of any essential
or transcendental meaning. Influenced by early twentieth-century movements such as
existentialism (whose motto was “existence precedes essence”) surrealism and
expressionism, absurdism challenges our traditional faith in God, rationality, absolute truth
and an underlying purpose to existence. According to Christopher Bigsby, the “absurd”
epitomizes a “tension which emerges from the individual’s determination to discover purpose
and order in a world which steadfastly refuses to evidence either” (1). In the opening section
of “Absurdity and Suicide,” Camus claims that suicide is the “one truly serious philosophical
problem” of his time, one that precedes in importance all the other concerns that have
routinely preoccupied philosophers, thinkers, and scientists. From the absurdist perspective,
even a debate as fundamental as the one between heliocentric and geocentric models of the
universe is a “futile question”; Galileo, according to Camus, was not entirely unjustified in
choosing to recant his heretical beliefs over the possibility of being burnt at the stake. In
comparison, what motivates or forces some people to take their own lives merits far more
serious consideration. At the heart of the problem of suicide is the very meaning of life itself;
the relationship between what life stands for and the decision to voluntarily end it, in other
words, “is the most urgent of questions.” Suicide has hitherto been considered purely as a
“social phenomenon.” One needs to delve more deeply into what psychological and

5
experiential factors are responsible for it. While doing so, it is important not to demonize and
pathologize those who decide to end their lives, let alone treat them as criminals in the eyes
of the law (as was the case in many countries around the time Camus was writing). This is
not to suggest that suicide is always undertaken as a well-thought-out strategy. More often
than not, it is a consequence of a crisis whose precise cause is “almost always unverifiable”
even though it is commonly attributed to “personal sorrows” or “incurable illness.” Rather
than seeking to voyeuristically determine what leads to suicide, we must reflectively examine
the phenomenon as a testament to the inherent meaninglessness of life itself. In a key passage
that merits extensive quotation, Camus notes:
In a sense, . . . killing yourself amounts to confession. It is confessing that life is too
much for you or that you do not understand it . . . It is merely confessing that [it] ‘is
not worth the trouble.’ Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the
gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying
voluntarily implies that you have recognised, even instinctively, the ridiculous
character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane
character of that daily agitation and the uselessness of suffering.
We continue to live out of sheer habit and suicide is the most explicit and dramatic
recognition of the absurdity of that protracted ritual. In thinking about suicide thus, Camus is
seeking to shift the onus of suicide away from the individual to life as such. Those who take
their own lives are often configured as “cowardly” or “disturbed.” In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs
Dalloway (1925), for instance, the shell-shocked war veteran Septimus Warren Smith’s
contemplation of the possibility of suicide makes his doctors label him “insane” and a threat
to the “normal” and “sane” society around him. From Camus’ perspective, individualizing the
problem of suicide misses the point completely: rather than holding an individual responsible
for her/his unwillingness to continue living, one must interrogate more critically how such a
state of being is engendered by the unbearably oppressive and unintelligible world that s/he
inhabits. When humans confront life as a meaningless charade – based on a veritably
“unbridgeable gulf between aspiration and fulfilment, the impossibility of communication . . .
[and] the futility of human relationships” (Bigsby 1) – they feel a sense of alienation and
exile. They are divested of many illusions that life is constituted of, including the “hope of a
promised land” i.e., a belief in life as a linear progression towards one’s cherished goals, such
as personal fulfilment and professional success. Camus properly defines absurdity as a
feeling of estrangement, a “divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting.” Once
the absurdity of life is recognised as the norm and not an aberration, one begins to long for
death as it potentially offers a release from being entrapped in a meaningless universe.
There is no necessary correlation, nevertheless, between absurdity and suicide.
Indeed, the “exact degree to which suicide is a solution to the absurd” remains an open
question for Camus. Engaging with the problem of the meaninglessness of life does not
involve easy, dualistic solutions. For most people, it continues to be an irresolvable dilemma
and they negotiate with it in multiple and complex ways, suicide being merely one of them.

6
Moreover, there are many contradictions present: those who choose to live might still be
convinced about the importance of suicide in the face of the absurd condition; conversely,
those who commit suicide possibly have access to their own meaning of life and seek to
preserve it by dying. In any case, killing oneself does not come easy to most of us. According
to Camus, this is so because “we get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of
thinking.” As a result, the body “shrinks from annihilation” even as the mind pushes us in
that direction. Invariably, many of us participate in an “act of eluding”: we seek to get the
better of death by investing in “hope.” We hope for a better life, one that will have more
meaning and help us tide over its gnawing arbitrariness. Thus, realising that life is without
meaning does not compulsorily lead to ending it. Camus ends “Absurdity and Suicide” by
posing a set of provocative questions that make the reader wonder whether there can be
another response to the absurd condition, beyond suicide on the one hand and false hope on
the other. Camus does not precisely outline the contours of this response in this essay. All he
offers by way of explanation is his implicit conviction that there can be indeed be more
unconventional ways of negotiating with absurdity: “Does its [life’s] absurdity require one to
escape it through hope or suicide – that is what must be clarified, hunted down and elucidated
while brushing aside all the rest.” By challenging the inevitability of suicide as the only
legitimate way of dealing with the absurd condition, Camus suggests one can perhaps go on
living while embracing the disturbing truth that life is essentially, and irredeemably,
meaningless. This becomes clearer in Camus’ reflections contained in the Preface that he
added to a 1955 edition of The Myth of Sisyphus:
The fundamental subject of The Myth of Sisyphus is this: it is legitimate and
necessary to wonder whether life has a meaning; therefore it is legitimate to meet the
problem of suicide face to face. The answer, underlying and appearing through the
paradoxes which cover it, is this: even if one does not believe in God, suicide is not
legitimate . . . [T]his book declares that even within the limits of nihilism, it is
possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism . . . Although The Myth of
Sisyphus poses mortal problems, it sums itself up for me as a lucid invitation to live
and to create, in the very midst of the desert (3).
Going on living and rejecting suicide in “the very midst of the desert” is not only possible but
also necessary for the creative affirmation of the self. Seeking ways beyond nihilism requires,
in other words, a leap of imagination. It is the ultimate triumph of the human will to survive,
and possibly even thrive, in a godless world.
In “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Camus offers some answers to the questions that he raises
in “Absurdity and Suicide.” He uses the Greek myth of Sisyphus – doomed by the gods to
eternally roll “a rock to the top of a mountain,” only to find it slide down again once he
reaches the top – as a metaphor for humankind’s constant struggle to come to grips with the
absurdity of existence. While stories diverge as to what earned the Greek hero this fate, it is
clear that this “futile labourer of the under-world” is the archetypal “absurd hero” insofar as
his “whole being is exerted towards accomplishing nothing.” For Camus, the condition of the

7
modern-day worker, who performs the same repetitive, monotonous tasks, day after day in a
factory or an office is not very different from that of Sisyphus; her/his existence is just as
suffused with empty, pointless actions that don’t lead to anything remotely affirmative or
meaningful. Camus is keen on exploring the philosophical implications of what goes on in
Sisyphus’ mind at the precise moment he returns to the base of the mountain to once more
push the stone back to the summit. Does his wretched plight horrify him endlessly? Camus
hypothesizes a less predictable and straightforward response: if Sisyphus can somehow
stoically accept the absurdity of his condition as a given rather than bemoaning it, his pain
can potentially transform into self-assertion. “There is no fate,” Camus notes, “that cannot be
surmounted by scorn.” In doing so, Sisyphus potentially becomes “superior to his fate” and
“stronger than his rock” i.e., he defeats the gods’ intention to weigh him down with an
overbearing punishment. His “lucidity” in the face of torture renders him victorious. The key
to turning sorrow into joy lies in confronting the meaninglessness of life head-on: “crushing
truths perish from being acknowledged.” Camus is here fleshing out the alternative – referred
to in the closing section of the previous essay – to suicide and hope, responses typical of
human beings when faced with the immensity of the absurd condition. Such an alternative
can only be realised when humankind learns to make peace with the innate absurdity of life
rather than experiencing it as infinite suffering or angst. Even Oedipus, that most tragic of
Greek characters destined to kill his father and marry his mother, is able to “conclude that all
is well” and his measured optimism despite his troubles is a “recipe for the absurd victory.”
Howsoever counterintuitive it may seem at first, Camus suggests that happiness and
the absurd are closely linked. Once the absurd is recognised as integral to the human
condition, one can proceed to demolish the illusions one has created to make life seem
meaningful, including God and religion. This approximates Nietzsche’s famous
pronouncement: “God is dead . . . and we have killed him.” In this view, God is merely an
idea that human beings have created and reposed faith in to counter the looming
meaninglessness of existence; outside this belief, God has no objective or factual existence.
In Samuel Beckett’s prototypical absurdist play, Waiting for Godot (1953), Vladimir and
Estragon wait for an individual named Godot who never ultimately arrives. Critics have
interpreted Godot to be symbolic of humankind’s fruitless longing for God and divine
intervention. For Camus, a godless universe need not be experienced as traumatising. Instead,
godlessness can spur human beings to take charge of their destinies and eventually make,
what they wish to, of their lives: fate becomes a “human matter, which must be settled among
men.” The loss of God ought, therefore, to be celebrated as liberating:
All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his
thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the
idols.
Silencing the idols entails rejecting any transcendental explanation for the creation and
existence of the universe. This involves a fundamental shift of perspective from the
metaphysical to the physical, from essence to existence. Guided by the realisation of a

8
“personal fate” and the absence of a “higher destiny,” the absurd man can become “the
master of his days.” This is not to suggest that effecting such a shift of perspective is by any
means easy: most people are unable to relinquish their nostalgia for preordained meaning.
Hence, they continue to manufacture lies, deceptions and distortions that prevent them from
confronting the terrifying reality that life is meaningless. To that extent, pain and suffering
are the expected manifestations of the absurd condition. Camus is interested here in exploring
the less expected: the emancipatory outcomes that accrue from the embrace of a “universe . . .
without a master.” As Sisyphus prepares to roll the rock up the mountain yet again, he is in
complete control of the situation. What has changed is not his situation but his outlook; his
plight has turned into self-awareness due to his acceptance of the absurd as the unavoidable
condition of life. Consequently, Camus concludes, “[o]ne must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
2.4 Conclusion
In “Absurdity and Suicide,” Camus makes a strong case for considering suicide a compelling
philosophical issue. Establishing the importance of suicide as a response to the absurd
condition, he goes on to argue that killing oneself is not the only legitimate way of
negotiating with existential loneliness and meaninglessness. In “The Myth of Sisyphus,”
Camus elaborates one such response not based on the necessity of self-annihilation:
embracing the absurd condition and rejoicing in the freedom and self-actualization that
potentially come in the wake of rebuffing the notion that life has an essential, divinely-
ordained purpose to it. This psychological metamorphosis is the only way one can experience
happiness amid absurdity.
2.5 Suggestions for Further Reading
Bartlett, Elizabeth Ann. Rebellious Feminism: Camus’s Ethic of Rebellion and Feminist
Thought. Palgrave/Macmillan, 2004.
Braun, Lev. Witness of Decline. Albert Camus: Moralist of the Absurd. Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 1974.
Bronner, Stephen Eric. Camus: Portrait of a Moralist. University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Dunwoodie, Peter and Edward J. Hughes, editors. Constructing Memories: Camus, Algeria
and ‘Le Premier Homme.’ Stirling French Publications, 1998.
Isaac, Jeffrey C. Arendt, Camus and Modern Rebellion. Yale University Press, 1992.
Knapp, Bettina L. Critical Essays on Albert Camus. G. K. Hall & Co., 1988.
McCarthy, Patrick. Camus. A Critical Study of his Life and Work. Hamish Hamilton, 1982.
Sprintzen, David. Camus: A Critical Examination. Temple University Press, 1988.

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3. Virginia Woolf– “On Being Ill” (1926)
3.1 Learning Objectives
After going through this lesson, you will be able to:
- Understand the overall thrust of Woolf’s argument in the essay;
- Engage in an in-depth analysis of the essay;
- Reformulate your understanding of themes considered appropriate for literary
representation; and
- Consider illness as a metaphor for an altered engagement with literature.
3.2 About the Author
Born in London in 1882, Virginia Woolf (née Stephen) was the daughter of Sir Leslie
Stephen, who edited the influential The Dictionary of National Biography. In 1904, she
moved to Bloomsbury along with her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, and spearheaded the
“Bloomsbury Group,” an informal collective of intellectuals known for their progressive
approaches to art, literature and culture. Woolf married Leonard Woolf, a writer and political
theorist, in 1912. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915. Her other novels
from this early period – Night and Day (1919) and Jacob’s Room (1922) – demonstrate an
increasing willingness on Woolf’s part to challenge literary convention, both in terms of form
and content. Her masterpieces – Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and The
Waves (1931) – adopt a highly innovative, impressionistic narrative style that is often dubbed
“stream of consciousness.” In many ways, Woolf’s writing, along with James Joyce’s and
T.S. Eliot’s, is representative of Anglo-Irish Modernism. Equally significant are her
contributions to the fields of literary criticism (“Modern Fiction” and “Mr Bennett and Mrs
Brown”), non-fiction (A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas) and experimental
biography (Orlando). Owing to a long struggle with mental illness, Woolf died by suicide in
1941.
3.3 Analytical Summary of the Text
Although Woolf is known primarily for her pathbreaking Modernist novels, her essays are
equally important, according to David Bradshaw, in establishing her “distinctive contribution
to four of the key achievements of Modernist literature – its radical reconfiguration of prose
forms; its embrace of a new and subversive approach to life-writing; its promotion of feminist
discourse; and its responsiveness to the bustle and spectacle of modernity” (14). Woolf
begins “On Being Ill” (1926) by wondering why literature has not paid adequate attention to
physical illness as a theme, considering how common and life-changing it is. For the most
part, literature has been preoccupied with “grand” themes such as love and war. A seemingly
banal subject like illness is usually considered inappropriate for literary representation.
Literature, thus, excludes a very integral part of life to maintain its studied distance from the
mundane and unseemly aspects of our everyday existence.

10
 Furthermore, Woolf argues, the focus of literature is concentrated on the mind rather than
the body. She notes:
[L]iterature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind . . . On the
contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes, blunts or
sharpens, colours or discolours . . . it must go through the whole unending procession
of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health
and illness . . . But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record.
In emphasizing the need to prioritise the workings of the body, Woolf challenges the mind-
body hierarchy, an enduring legacy of the Enlightenment in general and Cartesian thought in
particular (René Descartes famously said: “I think, therefore I am”). From such a perspective,
the body is considered inferior to the mind because it is the seat of passions and instincts as
against reason and intellect. This duality between the body and the mind is also gendered: the
mind is often configured as “masculine” and the body, with its perceived limitations and
frailties, “feminine.” Woolf bemoans the disavowal of the body and the celebration of the
mind as the force of phallocentric control and domination engaged in “the pursuit of conquest
and discovery.” Acknowledging the centrality of the body to one’s everyday life requires a
thoroughgoing reconfiguration of one’s overall worldview, a process that Woolf describes as
developing a “robust philosophy . . . rooted in the bowels of the earth.” The objection that a
novel “devoted to influenza” would lack plot and exploration of more conventionally
appropriate narrative themes such as love is unfounded: considered metaphorically, “illness
often takes the disguise of love and plays the same odd tricks.” As for “plot,” it becomes
amply evident in Woolf’s other well-known essays such as “Modern Fiction” (1919) and “Mr
Bennet and Mrs Brown” (1924) that she is strongly invested in challenging its importance by
way of revolutionising the novel form. In the former, she famously writes:

“[I]f a writer were a free man and not a slave [and] . . . if he could base his work
upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy,
no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style . . . We are . . .
suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would us
believe it (54).
In this dramatically altered novelistic landscape premised on experimentation and
transgressing established literary norms, illness deserves a far more central place. What this
passage from “Modern Fiction” establishes conclusively is that Woolf’s plea for a serious
consideration of illness as a valid literary theme in “On Being Ill” aligns with her status as a
pioneering modernist of her time.
The “poverty” and unidimensionality of the English language aggravates the erasure
of illness from the domain of literature. English can aptly express the tragic emotions
experienced by Lear and Hamlet, but “has no words for the shiver and the headache.” When
one is in love, one has literary precedents to fall back on in the form of Shakespeare’s or

11
Keats’ words to adequately convey her/his thoughts and feelings. When one is ill, however,
one is unable to find any literary instances to draw from, to articulate, or even make sense of,
one’s pain and suffering. The excessive and slavish reverence that the English have for their
language thwarts their ability to take liberties with it. Literature, which is seen as a universal
and all-encompassing “mirror” to the human condition, is hence highly selective in its choice
of themes. To redress this problem, one needs to not only write in a “new language” that is
less formal and idealized but also believe in a “new hierarchy of passions”: love and jealousy
as the standard themes of literature must fundamentally give way to the changing facets of
illness and its impact on the human body.
Paradoxically, illness is an enabling condition for Woolf. When we are healthy, we
are expected to be respectable, responsible, and accountable to others at all times. The
pretence involved in always having to communicate and share one’s life with others is
“intolerable” for Woolf. “In illness,” she writes, “this make-believe ceases” as we transform
into “deserters.” In this “irresponsible and disinterested” state of solitude, we can finally act
on our instincts without the fear of being judged and even seek a more authentic communion
with Nature. Woolf explains this point by offering the example of an ill person gazing into
the sky. Under “normal” circumstances, this would not be possible: the healthy person’s
attempt to observe the sky in public would be “mutilated by chimneys and churches.” When
the ill person does the same in the privacy of her/his room, “lying recumbent” in bed and
“staring straight up,” undistracted by the niceties of polite demeanour, s/he discovers the
luminous, aesthetically exciting potentialities of the sky in a way her/his healthier counterpart
is simply not able to. While the healthy go about conducting their routines, indifferent to the
power of Nature, “[i]t is the recumbent who know . . . that she in the end will conquer.” Far
from being deficient and disabled, then, the ill person emerges in the essay as a visionary,
much more in touch with existential and mystical truths of life. Illness, Woolf implies, brings
us closer to ourselves as well as Nature, as we become relatively free of the burdens and
stresses of socially normative behaviour.
Our reading of literature, especially poetry, also undergoes a qualitative shift when we
are ill. As far as prose is concerned, engaging with it becomes very demanding and irksome
for the ill person. Because one is intensely attuned to the way the body responds to the effects
of illness, our reading of texts becomes more appreciative of the sensory (related to the
senses: hearing, seeing, touching, smelling, tasting), rather than purely intellectual (related to
the mind and human intellect), aspects of reading:
In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond the
surface meaning, gather instinctively this, that and the other . . . In health meaning
has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers over our senses. But in
illness . . . words give out their scent and distil their flavour, and then, if we at last
grasp the meaning, it is all the richer for having come to us sensually first, by way of
the palate and the nostrils, like some queer odour.

12
Illness changes the way, in other words, that we read and interpret literature. We acquire a
heightened awareness of the sensual dimensions of the text: considerations such as the
sound/texture of a particular word or the effect of rhyme on a stanza become as important, if
not more, as the “meaning” of the content of a poem. As readers, we respond to the text far
more subjectively and individualistically during illness. We read it with a certain level of
spontaneous intensity and independence – a state that Woolf terms “rashness” – in a way that
undercuts our “trained” and calculated responses to literature; our tastes become more
“sudden, fitful, intense.” Rashness comes easier to us when we are ill as we are less
answerable to others about what we do or how we behave in that state. The word often carries
a negative connotation in common parlance, referring to behaviour that is considered reckless
or even dangerous. Woolf, on the other hand, resignifies rashness as a marker of creativity,
individualism, and spontaneity: when we read “rashly,” we look within to intuitively navigate
a text. Concerned as we are with other people’s opinions when we are healthy, our responses
to literature self-consciously draw from the critical-scholarly body of work that informs the
writing of, for instance, Shakespeare. “Illness,” by comparison, “sweeps all that aside and
leaves nothing but Shakespeare and oneself.” As a result, reading becomes relatively
unencumbered by critics’ viewpoints, which necessarily erect a barrier between the reader
and the text. By underscoring the importance of “rashness” as the preferred mode of reading,
Woolf seeks to register a paradigm shift: she aspires to turn reading into an affective exercise
that is not mediated by extraneous and preexisting opinions.
3.4 Conclusion
In “On Being Ill,” Woolf makes a strong case for thinking about illness in unconventional
ways. In the first part of the essay, she argues for the expansion of the thematic scope of
literature to include concerns relating to the materiality of physical illness as well as its effect
on the body. Subsequently, she suggests that illness is actually a more liberating state of
being than hitherto recognised. It allows us to emancipate ourselves from the shallowness and
hypocrisy of everyday sociable conduct and return to a state where we are far more closely
attuned to the rhythms of the body rather than the workings of the mind. Consequently, we
also read literature far more freely and intensely: we forge an individualistic relationship with
a text, focusing on how it moves us on a sensory level and not merely what it “means”
linguistically or intellectually. In terms of style, Woolf’s essay “achieves a remarkable sense
of pleasurable intimacy with the reader, as if she were speaking to us . . . across a . . . café
table” (Bradshaw 15). This accounts for the conversational and relatively informal and non-
distant quality of her prose: her essays incorporate, and blur the distinctions among, elements
of story-telling, life-writing and autobiography.

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4. D. H. Lawrence; “Morality and the Novel” (1925)
4.1 Learning Objectives
After going through the lesson, you will be able to:
- Develop a broad as well as detailed understanding of Lawrence’s ideas in the
essay;
- Recognise the difference between artistic and social morality; and
- Appreciate the layered concept of the “subtle interrelatedness” of life.
4.2 About the Author
David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) was born in a working-class family; his father was a
coal miner in East Midlands, England. Lawrence began his career as a school teacher in 1908.
Around the same time, his short stories and poems emerged in print. His first novel, The
White Peacock, was published in 1911 but it was Sons and Lovers (1913) that established
Lawrence as a writer of considerable standing. Lawrence’s writings were ahead of their times
in their frank and nonjudgmental depiction of sex and sexuality; they stressed the importance
of pursuing one’s instincts without being hindered by the constraints of morality and social
approval. Lawrence consistently emphasized the superiority of the life of the senses over the
circumscribed and dehumanizing nature of the life of the mind: as the scholar James T.
Boulton notes, the celebrated modernist writer espoused a “belief in the blood, the flesh, as
being wiser than the intellect” (qtd. in Dyer 8). Lawrence’s work offered, moreover, a strong
critique of modern industrialization and mechanization of culture. This made his work highly
controversial, evidenced by the fact that his fourth novel, The Rainbow (1915), was censored
and banned on the charges of promoting obscenity. Lawrence travelled extensively across
various parts of Europe, Asia, Australia and the Americas and settled eventually in New
Mexico. It is here that he wrote Studies in Classic American Literature (1925). Returning to
Italy due to poor health, he wrote his last major novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), which
earned him tremendous notoriety and official persecution. Lawrence died in 1930 from the
effects of tuberculosis.
4.3 Analytical Summary of the Text
In the essay “Morality and the Novel,” published in 1925, Lawrence seeks to redefine
morality and the relationship between that term and the novel form. He begins by outlining
the purpose of art: to “reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the
living moment.” In simpler terms, art provides an account of the way human beings interact
with the larger cosmos. The phrase “at the living moment” brings home the point that this
relationship is constantly evolving; it is not fixed. What art represents is the relationship
between the self and the universe at one given point rather than a permanent record of the
object of representation. Lawrence explains this idea with an example:
When van Gogh [the famous Dutch artist] paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves,
the vivid relation between himself . . . and the sunflower . . . at that quick moment of

14
 time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what
the sunflower itself is.
From this perspective, the painting captures the way the painter perceives the sunflowers at a
given moment and not what they intrinsically are. The painting merely provides an
impression of the flowers from the standpoint of the artist. In other words, according to
Lawrence, art is thoroughly subjective: it is not so much a “mirror” to a concrete reality “out
there” as an expression of the artist’s personal, ephemeral perception of that reality. The
vision of the artist, therefore, is not the same as “the sunflower as a botanical organism.” It is
possible to classify the sunflower scientifically but it is close to impossible to quantify the
artist’s representation of the art object on the canvas: “You cannot weigh or measure nor even
describe the vision on the canvas.” Art is forever new because it seeks to record a relationship
between the artist and what s/he perceives that is always in a state of flux; it doesn’t give us a
stable and unchanging truth. In this, Lawrence is making a profound departure from the
conventions of nineteenth-century realism that are premised on the writer’s presumed ability
to objectively record and delineate a solidly transparent reality in literature. His position is
influenced by the Romantics, who placed tremendous emphasis on the writer’s inner vision
and its capacity to engender imaginative and reflective modes of engagement with the world.
In the second part of the essay, Lawrence redefines “morality” for the reader.
Conventionally, morality is a code of conduct derived from religion, culture, society or
family. It prioritizes collective beliefs over individual choices. Philosophy, religion, and
science, according to Lawrence, are engaged in “nailing things down” to provide us with a
fixed template for our day-to-day conduct. This concept of morality is antithetical to the spirit
of artistic creativity. Instead, morality should be seen as a “delicate, forever trembling and
changing balance” between the writer and her/his “circumambient universe.” To put it
simply, nothing about morality should be prescriptive. The writer must resist subscribing to
conventional morality, channelizing her/his art to focus on exploring the nuances of the
shifting interrelationship between the self and the universe. This “subtle interrelatedness” of
life finds its highest manifestation in the novel. The novel does not convey conventional
truth, dealing instead with its relative and contextual nature:
Everything [in the novel] is true in its own time, place, circumstance, and untrue
outside of its own place, time, circumstance. If you try to nail anything down, in the
novel, either it kills the novel or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.
When the novel is acutely sensitive to the unstable dimension of truths that it expresses, it is
being “moral.” When the novelist uses, on the other hand, the novel to simply reflect her/his
predilections and biases, the literary form suffers from “immorality” because it turns into a
dogmatic record of the writer’s narrow vision.
The contemporary novel, according to Lawrence, is highly “immoral” in that sense: it
is often bogged down by the writer’s worldviews and preferred themes. The immorality of
the novel, however, lies not so much in its foregrounding of a specific subject as turning it

15
into the “only emotion worth fighting for.” When the writer treats the novel merely as a tool
for autobiographical expression – writing a novel about love when s/he is in love, for
example – s/he forgoes the possibility of adequately exploring the “relatedness” between the
self and the universe and reduces the scope of her/his writing to herself/himself. Life is made
up of contradictory emotions, feelings and states of being; the novelist must strive to
“balance” them and provide a complex and subtle account of their sway on the human
psyche. The novelist ought to remain mindful of the dangers of making the novel entirely
about her/his life.
Further, the novel does not represent “life” in its mundane sense, instead imbuing it
with heightened emotional intensity. This is a critique of the all-encompassing, kaleidoscopic
focus on everyday life in the Victorian novel. Life from this perspective is “something that
gleams”- charged with a special, mystical significance. The Lawrentian credo of “life” echoes
similar notions by two other influential novelists of his day: James Joyce’s “epiphany” and
Virginia Woolf’s “moments of being.” All major Modernist novelists of the early twentieth
century resignify the novel in their own different ways but an underlying point of
commonality is the way they highlight the significance of moments when the extraordinary is
revealed in the midst of the ordinary. The novel represents life in this exalted sense, not as a
sum of all our daily experiences:
A thing isn’t life just because somebody does it. This the artist ought to know
perfectly well. The ordinary bank clerk buying himself a new straw that isn’t ‘life’ at
all; it is just existence . . . [but] if the bank clerk feels really piquant about his hat, if
he establishes a lively relation with it, and goes out of the shop with the new straw on
his head, a changed man, be-aureoled, then that is life.
When the novel portrays such a notion of “life,” and the “true and vivid relationships” that it
is constituted of, it is to be deemed “moral” irrespective of the fact that the relationships it
describes are considered “immoral” by societal standards. Artistic morality, hence, is
different from, and higher than, conventional morality. Socially speaking, a sexual
relationship between a lady and her servant – such as the one depicted in Lady Chatterley’s
Lover – may be considered “immoral” but if the couple finds joy, affirmation and
transcendence in it, it is “moral” in a more elevated, creative sense and deserves to be
honoured in the novel form. A “true relatedness” between a man and woman involves each
being sincere to their respective sexual roles and courageously embracing all the dimensions
of their union, romantic as well as sexual, without being constrained by social or religious
beliefs. Many critics, especially feminists, have taken objection to Lawrence’s views in this
context as outdated and somewhat sexist: he essentializes and stereotypes what “masculinity”
and “femininity” stand for, and remains willfully oblivious of how cultural ideals of
“femininity” often entrap women, even as he makes a plea for a more nonjudgmental
treatment of the man-woman relationship in the novel form. A particular case in point is Kate
Millett’s pathbreaking work of feminist literary scholarship, Sexual Politics (1970).
According to Ann Fernihough, Millett’s book “knocked Lawrence off the pedestal he had

16
been occupying as a sexual and moral example in the 1960s” and transformed, perhaps
irredeemably, his critical reputation into being a “subtle conveyor of a masculine message”
that preys upon “a feminine consciousness” (4). Moreover, when Lawrence claims that the
“great relationship, for humanity, will always be the relation between man and woman,” he
betrays a heterosexist bias that excludes same-sex relationships. Such limitations
notwithstanding, Lawrence’s plea for more authenticity and forthrightness in the
representation of relationships that are considered socially taboo is timely and bound to cause
discomfort to those who expect literature to merely reinforce the status quo: a “to read a
really new novel,” he stresses, will always hurt” (emphasis in the original). Literature must
necessarily be engaged in the “displacing of old connexions” and bringing to light what
society refuses to acknowledge. The novelist should neither seek to domesticate or sanitise
the man-woman relationship nor attempt to define it exclusively in terms of “love”:
It is an absurdity, to say that men and women must love. Men and women will be for
ever subtly and changingly related to one another; no need to yoke them with any
‘bond’ at all. The only morality is to have man true to his manhood, woman to her
womanhood, and let the relationship form of itself, in all honour.
Men and women connect in shifting, unpredictable ways and the task of the novelist is to
convey this “changing rainbow of our living relationships” in an unbiased manner, without
succumbing to socially constructed conceptions of an “ideal” or “acceptable” bond. When the
novel embraces and affirms this openness, fluidity and unconventionality, it “can help us live,
as nothing else can.” Otherwise, it degenerates into becoming, Lawrence ends on a note of
caution, “an unparalleled perverter of men and women.”
4.4 Conclusion
In “Morality and the Novel,” Lawrence first attempts to alter our understanding of the
relationship between the artist and the art object, challenging the long-established
mimetic theory that art reveals something stable and enduring about life or reality. He
goes on to argue that conventional morality has no place in the novel. The writer must
foster a different yardstick of morality, one that is premised on giving expression to the
“subtle interrelatedness” between the self and the universe. Furthermore, the novel’s
treatment of interpersonal human relationships, especially between men and women,
should be honest and uninhibited, even if this entails going against the grain of normative
societal standards. Artistic morality and social morality are incommensurable and thus art
is always threateningly ahead of its times. Finally, the notion of “life” that the novel
epitomizes is more than a collection of the facts of everyday life: we “live” only insofar
as we can transcend the mundaneness of existence and foster a mystical relationship with
our “circumambient universe.”
4.5 Suggestions for Further Reading
Becket, Fiona. The Complete Critical Guide to D.H. Lawrence. Routledge, 2002.
Bloom, Harold, editor. D. H. Lawrence: Modern Critical Views. Chelsea House, 1986.

17
Draper, R. P., editor. D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, 1970.
Ellis, David, and Howard Mills. D. H. Lawrence’s Non-Fiction: Art, Thought and Genre.
Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Holderness, Graham. D. H. Lawrence: History, Ideology and Fiction. Gill and Macmillan,
1982.
Lewiecki-Wilson, Cynthia. Writing Against the Family: Gender in Lawrence and Joyce.
Southern Illinois University Press, 1994.
Poplawski, Paul, editor. Writing the Body in D. H. Lawrence: Essays on Language,
Representation and Sexuality. Greenwood, 2001.
Sagar, Keith. The Life of D. H. Lawrence: An Illustrated Biography. Eyre Methuen, 1980.
Simpson, Hilary. D. H. Lawrence and Feminism. Croom Helm, 1982.
Worthen, John. D. H. Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel. Macmillan, 1979.

18
5. Raymond Williams; “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of
Modernism” from The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists
(1989)
5.1 Learning Objectives
After going through this lesson, you will be able to:
- Develop a keen understanding of the intricacies of Williams’ argument; and
- Understand how the metropolis is at the centre of the early twentieth literary-
artistic movement that we term Modernism.
5.2 About the Author
Raymond Williams (1921-1988) was a British theorist and academic who, “more than
anyone else in the English-speaking world since the late 1940s,” contributed to the
development of the interdisciplinary field of Cultural Studies (Fekete 496). Some of his
notable works are Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958), The English Novel from
Dickens to Lawrence (1970), The Country and the City (1973), Marxism and Literature
and (1977) The Politics of Modernism (1989). One of the leading lights of the British
New Left, Williams is instrumental in consolidating a mode of reading and interpreting
literature that has now acquired an axiomatic status: paying close attention to the socio-
political contexts of the text rather than reading it in isolation as a purely formal artefact
or a verbal icon. In the process, his work reflects on the reciprocal relationship between
literature and culture: how one is shaped by and, in turn, shapes the other. He understands
culture more comprehensively than most literary critics of his generation. Challenging
the dominance of liberal-humanists such as F. R. Leavis, who espoused a highly narrow
and elitist conception of culture as constituted primarily of “great” literary works often
accessible to a few, Williams’ work destabilises the reified dichotomies between “high”
and “low” and “polite” and “popular” culture. In the Foreword to Culture and Society, he
instructively notes: “We live in an expanding culture, yet we spend much of our energy
regretting the fact, rather than seeking to understand its nature and conditions” (qtd. in
Lodge 580). Such a commitment to an ever "expanding culture,” one that incorporates
not only literary works but also emergent forms like cinema and television, is the
cornerstone of William’s rebellion against established literary-critical trends of his day.
5.3 Analytical Summary of the Text
In “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism,” Chapter 2 of The
Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (1989), Raymond Williams
explores the link between European Modernism (a literary, artistic and cultural
movement that emerged in the early twentieth century and is often associated with radical
experimentation) and the values and ways of life enabled by the modern metropolis. He
debunks the conventional characterization of Modernism as exclusively concerned with
reformulating Victorian yardsticks of form and content and argues that at the heart of the

19
Modernist revolution is the metropolis. Williams begins by explaining the reasons for the
persistence of the terms “modern” and “Modernism” throughout much of the twentieth
century, although the very definition of the “arts” during this period has undergone a
significant shift to include cinema, television, radio and recorded music. He argues that
this is so because the metropolis continues to provide a conducive ambience for art that is
recognizably “avant-garde” or “progressive,” through “publishing houses, newspapers
and magazines, and intellectual institutions.” Another reason he offers for the continued
currency of Modernist themes, across socio-cultural and historical contexts, is their
relatively old provenance. The “lonely and isolated” artist in a crowd and “paradoxical
self-realization in isolation,” for instance, are established Romantic tropes. Similarly,
urban crime, squalor and “deadening uniformity” on the one hand and the “vitality, the
variety, the liberating diversity and mobility of the city” on the other are recurring
Victorian concerns. What Modernism does, then, is not so much invent new themes as
recontextualize familiar ideas in the “newly expanding and overcrowded city.”
Williams further demonstrates how such a diversity of themes accounts for the
heterogenous character of Modernism. Although Modernism is often associated with a
thoroughgoing “challenge to more traditional forms of art and thought,” there is a vast
“internal diversity of methods and emphases” that characterizes the movement. This
means that its response to modernity and modernization is neither unified nor consistent.
We encounter, for instance, in Virginia Woolf’s novels a relatively celebratory embrace
of the “modern times” in comparison to T. S. Eliot’s highly pessimistic vision of the city
as a symbol of fragmentation, alienation and moral despair. Having thus established
continuity between Modernist, Victorian and Romantic themes, Williams argues that
what is truly new and pathbreaking about Modernism – more than an isolated concern
with formal and content-related innovations – is its uniquely metropolitan ethos:
For it is not the general themes of response to the city and its modernity which
compose anything that can be properly called Modernism. It is rather the new and
specific location of the artists and intellectuals of this movement within the changing
cultural milieu of the metropolis.
This is the crux of the essay: how the metropolis is central to the emergence of
Modernism. The metropolis, Williams elaborates, represents a “new cultural dimension”
and is to that extent more than a “city.” A city is a geographical area; a metropolis, on the
other hand, embodies possibilities of “new social and economic and cultural relations.”
The metropolis owes its rise, first and foremost, to imperialism and the concentration of
power, wealth and affluence in urban locations such as London. It is, however, much
more than a colonial concept. A metropolis is truly valuable for the way it troubles
orthodox ideas by allowing “exceptional liberties of expression.” The open and liberal
milieu it fosters contrasts greatly with the more provincial, traditional ways of life
possible in the countryside and smaller towns. While not being completely free from
constraints of conservative morality, the metropolis nevertheless offers considerable
space for unconventional forms of art and expression, dissent and freedom of thought. A

20
metropolitan society is not a homogenous one: it houses people from a “variety of social
and cultural origins” that are potential consumers of a new kind of art catering to their
needs and aspirations.
Thus, the most significant shift Modernism registers is in the “character of the
metropolis”: it is in foregrounding new modes of being, values and cultural relations,
under the impact of the metropolis, that Modernism is truly revolutionary. This is
evidenced by the fact that many of the most-well known Modernists, including Eliot,
Ezra Pound and James Joyce, immigrated to the metropolis to make the best use of the
opportunities for creative freedom it afforded. The modernist artist is, in that sense, an
exilic innovator who is at odds with her/his “national or provincial cultures” and finds
within the metropolis a favourable community of other writers and thinkers similarly
dedicated to expressing unorthodox ideas and principles. Choosing to dislocate
herself/himself from a rootedness in a social or religious community, the artist finds the
“community of the medium” in the metropolis i.e., of fellow artists focused on creative
innovation. This is aptly reflected in the unfamiliar use of language, one that is
responsible for the perceived “difficulty” of modernist writing. The linguistic
“strangeness” and unconventionality of, for instance, Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Eliot’s
The Wasteland (1922) can be seen as an effect of the workings of a metropolitan
consciousness, one that enables a sustained interrogation of received uses of language as
a stable and transparent medium of communication. The metropolis, in other words, is
the veritable basis of the Modernist rebellion against literary tradition. It is, according to
Williams, a “crucible,” a “visually and linguistically exciting process in its own right”
that gives birth to new forms of art. The essay ends with Williams foreshadowing the
decline of Modernism and the “uncertain and precarious” rise of what has been termed
“post-modernism.”
5.4 Conclusion
The title of Williams’ essay, “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of
Modernism,” is quite self-explanatory. Williams argues that the traditional understanding
of Modernism as a departure from Victorian form and content is flawed. He establishes
links between Modernist, Victorian and even Romantic themes to ultimately argue that
the truly revolutionary aspect of Modernism is its embeddedness in a metropolitan ethos.
The metropolitan aspect of Modernist writing is at the core of its unconventional and
experimental nature: if we consider form and subject matter in isolation, there is little that
is remarkably original about Modernism. The metropolis allows the artist the creative
space to channelise her/his radical energies and foster a sense of community with other
artists focused on unconventional ways of self-expression. Modernist aesthetics allow
room for the dislocation of the artist from familiar networks of social, religious and
familial belonging. The exilic artist finds her/his true calling, in other words, in the
metropolis. The open, heterodox and progressive milieu of the metropolis is germane to
Modernist innovation.

21
 Works Cited
Primary Texts
Camus, Albert. “Absurdity and Suicide.” The Myth of Sisyphus. Trans. Justin O’ Brien,
Penguin, 2005 [1942], pp. 1-9.
---. “The Myth of Sisyphus.” The Myth of Sisyphus. Trans. Justin O’ Brien, Penguin,
2005 [1942], pp. 115-119.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Structure of the Unconscious, the Id, the Ego and the Superego.”
Background Prose Readings. Worldview, 2001, pp. 97-104.
Lawrence, D. H. “Morality and the Novel.” The Bad Side of Books: Selected Essays.
Edited by Geoff Dyer, New York Review of Books, 2019, pp. 193-198.
Williams, Raymond. “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism.” The
Politics of Modernism. Verso, 1996, pp. 37-48.
Woolf, Virginia. “On Being Ill.” Selected Essays. Edited by David Bradshaw, OUP,
2008, pp. 146-156.
Secondary Texts:
Bradshaw, David, editor. Introduction. Selected Essays. OUP, 2008, pp. 13-26.
Barry, Peter. “Psychoanalytic Criticism.” Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary
and Cultural Theory (Second Edition). Manchester UP, 2007, pp. 96-120.
Camus, Albert. Preface. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans. Justin O’ Brien,
Vintage, 1991 [1955], pp. 2-3.
Bigsby, Christopher. “Absurd.” The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms. Edited by
Peter Childs and Roger Fowler, Routledge, 2008, pp. 1-2.
Dyer, Geoff, editor. Introduction. The Bad Side of Books: Selected Essays. New York
Review of Books, 2019, pp. 8-17.
Fekete, John. “Williams, Raymond.” Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: The
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