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Essay / Modernist and Experimental Influences in Virginia Woolf's 'The Mark on The Wall' and 'Kew Gardens' large-scale. '. It was a genre of predominantly English fiction writing, popular from the 1910s to around the 1960s. Modernist literature arose from increasing industrialization and globalization. New technologies and the horrific events of two world wars made people wonder about the future of humanity: what was becoming of the world? Instead of progress, the modernist writer saw a decline in civilization. Instead of new technologies, the modernist writer saw cold machinery and a capitalist economy, which alienated the individual and led to estrangement and loneliness. Writers responded to this question by turning to these feelings. Gone is the romantic period focused on nature and being. Modernist fiction was about the inner self and consciousness. Writers experimented with forms rather than confirming traditionalist realism. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayVirginia Woolf, considered a pioneer of this modern aesthetic, criticized contemporary concepts of what constitutes art and content characteristic of literature and demanded changes in terms of style, subject matter and values, according to Woolf, "the very essence of fiction is somewhat other than what custom would have us believe". Woolf wrote numerous novels, short stories, essays, biographies and reviews. Here two of his famous short stories, 'The Mark on the Wall' and 'Kew Gardens' are looked at. These stories contain modernist and experimental influences. “The Mark on the Wall” is one of the Monday or Tuesday stories, and Kew Garden has been reissued in the same collection. The mark on the wall is essentially introspective and has been called a “manifesto of modernism.” And Kew Gardens is located in the Royal Botanic Gardens in London. Woolf decides to use a third person narrator while delving into the psyche of her characters. Using the memories, perceptions, stream of consciousness and dialogue of said characters, she effectively paints a vivid picture of the scenes the reader is exposed to. The first story begins with the main character – most likely Woolf herself – remembering the moment she first saw the mark on the wall. That’s when a series of seemingly unrelated thoughts begin. She considers several possible identities for the mark, starting with a hole produced by a nail – this leads to thoughts about how quickly life is disappearing and what might await us next. Next comes another possibility of what the mark could be: a small rose leaf or Shakespeare. Then she sees the mark on the wall as something sticking out from it. It reminds him of the South Downs and the mystery of their true origin. Nature and fantasies about trees make her forget reality and civilization, but towards the end she comes right back to it. Additionally, the reference to war is given by a male speaker who interrupts his thoughts. He mentions the war, then asks why there is a snail on the wall, abruptly cutting off her contemplation and leaving the reader with an unsatisfying feeling when she ends the story with: "Ah, the mark on the wall!" It was a snail.” In Kew Gardens, Woolf details the brief interactions between four different groups of people as well as the slow journey of a snailin the garden. The first of his themes – perspective – appears immediately through the juxtaposition of contrasting scenes. A married couple enjoying the silence between them contrasts with two young lovers who fill every moment with superficial conversations. A son who walks with his senile father sees him as a man in need of care and patience, while two middle-class women see the same old man from afar and use him as a brief subject of curiosity. All these people together, capable of calmly roaming the garden, contrast with the snail which struggles to overcome the many small obstacles that cross its path. Virginia Woolf also uses her short story as a commentary on the uncertainty of life and the progression of time, where she probably emphasizes that we should not let the contemplation of these infinite possibilities delay us for long because time continues to progress regardless . The old man caught in his imaginary memories of decades ago is unable to grasp the beauty of the present and seems forever lost in his mental degradation. The married man, unable to let go of his past love, unconsciously remains estranged from his family and loses the present joys of spending the afternoon with his wife and children. As a whole, the progression of time is characterized by the eventual movement of all the characters. Virginia Woolf, following her modernist aesthetic, experimented with how episodes are organized, how time is reflected in modernism, external events are minimized, and introspection. is named principal. It eliminates the traditional focus on characters and their dialogue with far fewer characters and replaces the dialogue with long, uninterrupted trains of thought called streams of consciousness. Woolf uses stream of consciousness in both of her short stories. It is “a method of storytelling that depicts events through this flow in a character’s mind.” It differs from free indirect speech in that the entire story is written from the first person point of view and takes place in the present. This is an inner monologue of thought, not an interpretation of someone else's mind. In "The Mark on the Wall", the reader is first presented with a mark, then through a long stream of thoughts and visions, with different interpretations of the mark leading to different ideas the character does not remember more of what he was thinking about. . In Kew Gardens, readers experience the inner thoughts of many characters. The effect of Kew Gardens on thoughts is demonstrated by Woolf; she focuses on the inner self, using language to describe a stream of consciousness, as if the reader is directly reading the character's thoughts although they are written in the third person. By focusing on a description in the flowerbed, the people walking past are described, and Woolf moves in and out of their minds. The first character introduced is Simon, a married man who thinks of a past time when he visited Kew Gardens: Another perspective comes from his wife Eleanor. She remembers painting by the lake and remarks that the water lilies were "the first red water lilies" she had ever seen. However, few critics believe that Woolf chose a "sense of duality" instead of a stream of consciousness, in this case the duality of fact and vision and mind and body in the stream of consciousness . It brings together two themes, namely the fact that there is a mark on the wall and the visions that that mark evokes within it, with different interpretations of the mark leading to different ideas. She compares trees to life, human thoughts to fish swimming in water and tablecloths to reality. AllThroughout the story there are different definitions of the brand, from nails to rose leaves, until at the very end of the story the true identity of the brand is revealed: it acts like a snail. This puts an abrupt end to all the ideas she had had before she knew reality, confirming that reality oppresses fantasy. The fact trumps the vision, the body trumps the mind Even the mark on the wall corresponds to this model: from a hole made by a nail, it considers the possibility that it is a sheet of rose, a dent on the wall, an old nail, a crack in the wood, until she realizes that it is actually a snail. Perhaps reality is not controlled by man, but by nature and its circle of life. Humans are part of nature, not above it, and Woolf doesn't want the reader to forget that. Impressionism is also found in Woolf's work. Impressionism is the rejection of the conventional tendency to document the precise details of a given moment and instead seek to capture its general essence, or pervasive emotion. An important aspect of “Kew Gardens” is the way in which Woolf describes the setting to us. The story has a strong emphasis on color and texture. From the oval-shaped flower bed rose perhaps a hundred stems spreading into heart-shaped visual images, the use of which, in particular, is neither simple nor straightforward, but a complete spectrum. interference of a psychological nature which imposes itself on the empty space between our perception of color and its expression in words, together forming the flow of consciousness. Furthermore, it's not just impressionism: Woolf cleverly uses texture to depict Kew Gardens as a portrait with colors appearing in several 'points', which can be linked to post-impressionism. Furthermore, in these two stories, Woolf is not only looking at nature itself but also at how it fits into the modern world. This is another aspect that underlines the modernist quality of his work. Virginia Woolf tried to break with realism. Realism is often thought to be a particular trend in Victorian fiction. According to Woolf, realistic novelists use detailed descriptions of external reality to give their characters an "air of probability." The other reality that Woolf intends to highlight in the narration is a different treatment of narrative time and a stratified use of language, but also a less falsified conception of the characters. What is perceived from the outside is only the “shell” of the subject and this necessarily distorts the complex and multi-level nature of the inner life. In this sense, Woolf once again emphasizes the importance of writers focusing on consciousness and leaving “more and more the description of reality outside their stories.” In an attempt to break away from realistic or romantic writers, Woolf experimented with her writing style. Woolf used poetic descriptions on several occasions, which is particularly evident in Kew Gardens, which reads more like a poem than a work of prose fiction. Also, "Kew Gardens" can be read, from a very objective, detached, abstract point of view, as a physics experiment: a hidden microphone (the snail) is placed at random in a public garden, and which records fragments of conversations from various of the characters as they approach and pass, their voices emerging from the noise to make sense, then fading back into the noise. "Her short stories turn out to function for Woolf as an ideal field of experimentation in matters of perception, in which reality is not only represented in its complex aspects and.
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