savagely attacked the Victorian conceptions of the family, education, and religion in his novel Tlte Way of All Flesh (completed in 1884, posthumously published in 1903), the bitterest indictment in English literature of the Victorian way of life. And the high tide of anti-Victorianism was marked by the publication in 1918 of a classic of ironic debunking, Lytton Strachey's collection of biographical essays Eminent Victorians.
A pivotal figure between Victorianism and modernism, Thomas Hardy marked the end of the Victorian period and the dawn of the new age in 'The Darkling Thrush,' a poem originally titled 'By the Century's Deathbed' and postdated December 31, 1900, the last day of the nineteenth century. The poem marks the demise of a century of relative conviction and optimism, and it intimates the beginnings of a new era in its skeptical irresolution, its bleak sense of the modern world as 'hard and dry'?favorite adjectives of later writers such as Ezra Pound and T. E. Hulme:
The land's sharp features seemed to be The Century's corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervourless as I.
This poem and other works by Hardy, A. E. Housman, and Joseph Conrad exemplify the pessimism of imaginative writing in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. Stoicism?a stiff-upperlip determination to endure whatever fate may bring?also characterizes the literature written in the transitional period between the Victorian era and modernism, including the work of minor authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling.
By the dawn of the twentieth century, traditional stabilities of society, religion, and culture seemed to have weakened, the pace of change to be accelerating. The unsettling force of modernity profoundly challenged traditional ways of structuring and making sense of human experience. Because of the rapid pace of social and technological change, because of the mass dislocation of populations by war, empire, and economic migration, because of the mixing in close quarters of cultures and classes in rapidly expanding cities, modernity disrupted the old order, upended ethical and social codes, cast into doubt previously stable assumptions about self, community, the world, and the divine.
Early-twentieth-century writers were keenly aware that powerful concepts and vocabularies were emerging in anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and the visual arts that reimagined human identity in radically new ways. Sigmund Freud's seminal Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1900, and soon psychoanalysis was changing how people saw and described rationality, the self, and personal development. In his prose and poetry D. H. Lawrence adapted the Oedipus complex to interpret and present his relationships with his parents, though rejecting Freud's negative definition of the unconscious. By the time of his death in 1939, Freud had become, as W. H. Auden wrote in an elegy for him, 'a whole climate of opinion / / under whom we conduct our different lives.' Also in the early twentieth century, Sir James Frazer's
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Golden Bough (1890?1915) and other works of anthropology were altering basic conceptions of culture, religion, and myth. Eliot observed that Frazer's work 'influenced our generation profoundly,' and the critic Lionel Trilling suggested that 'perhaps no book has had so decisive an effect upon modern literature as Frazer's.' For both anthropologists and modern writers, Western religion was now decentered by being placed in a comparative context as one of numerous related mythologies, with Jesus Christ linked to 'primitive' fertility gods thought to die and revive in concert with the seasons. Furthering this challenge to religious doctrine were the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, the nineteenth-century German philosopher who declared the death of God, repudiated Christianity, and offered instead a harshly tragic conception of life: people look 'deeply into the true nature of things' and realize 'that no action of theirs can work any change,' but they nevertheless laugh and stoically affirm their fate. W. B. Yeats, who remarks in a 1902 letter that his eyes are exhausted from reading 'that strong enchanter,' greets death and destruction in a Nietzschean spirit of tragic exultation.
These profound changes in modern intellectual history coincided with changes of a more mundane sort, for everyday life was also undergoing rapid transformation during the first years of the twentieth century. Electricity was spreading, cinema and radio were proliferating, and new pharmaceuticals such as aspirin were being developed. As labor was increasingly managed and rationalized, as more and more people crowded into cities, as communications and transportation globalized space and accelerated time, literature could not stand still, and modern writers sought to create new forms that could register these profound alterations in human experience. This was a period of scientific revolution, as exemplified in German physics by Max Planck's quantum theory (1900) and Albert Einstein's theory of relativity (1905), and T. S. Eliot reflects the increasing dominance of science when he argues that the poet surrenders to tradition and thus extinguishes rather than expresses personality: 'It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science,' he claims, adding that 'the mind of the poet is the shred of platinum' that catalyzes change but itself remains 'inert, neutral, and unchanged' ('Tradition and the Individual Talent').
The early twentieth century also brought countless advances in technology: the first wireless communication across the Atlantic occurred in 1901, the Wright Brothers flew the first airplane in 1903, and Henry Ford introduced the first mass-produced car, the Model T or 'Tin Lizzie,' in 1913. Not that modern writers univocally embraced such changes. Although some were more sanguine, many modern writers were paradoxically repulsed by aspects of modernization. Mass-produced appliances and products, such as the 'gramophone' and canned goods ('tins'), are objects of revulsion in Eliot's Waste Land, for example. Because scientific materialism and positivism, according to which empirical explanations could be found for everything, were weakening the influence of organized religion, many writers looked to literature as an alternative. His 'simple-minded' Protestantism spoiled by science, Yeats says in his autobiography, he 'made a new religion, almost an infallible church of poetic tradition.' Whether or not they welcomed the demise of tradition, habit, and certitude in favor of the new, modern writers articulated the effects of modern- ity's relentless change, loss, and destabilization. 'Things fall apart,' Yeats wrote, 'the centre cannot hold.' Eliot describes in Four Quartets his quest for the 'still point of the turning world.' The modernist drive to 'make it new'?in
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1830 / THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND AFTER
Ezra Pound's famous slogan?thus arises in part out of an often ambivalent consciousness of the relentless mutations brought by modernization.
The position of women, too, was rapidly changing during this period. The Married Woman's Property Act of 1882 allowed married women to own property in their own right, and women were admitted to universities at different times during the latter part of the century. Since the days of Mary Wollstonecraft, women in Great Britain had been arguing and lobbying for the right to vote, but in the first decades of the twentieth century, Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel encouraged suffragettes, as they were known, to take a more militant approach, which included boycotts, bombings, and hunger strikes. The long fight for women's suffrage was finally won in 1918 for women thirty and over, and in 1928 for women twenty-one and over. These shifts in attitudes toward women, in the roles women played in the national life, and in the relations between the sexes are reflected in a variety of ways in the literature of the period.
