Life and Art in Modernist Literature

Paper Summary:

This paper looks at the treatment of art in Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse", D.H. Lawrence's "Women in Love" and James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" by examining the way in which Gudrun, Stephen Dedalus, Lily Briscoe and other characters in the novels view art. It discusses whether art is truly the central priority of the modernist era by looking at it as a means of making life eternal and explores how art is used to "capture the moment" forever and how this is one of the main themes of modernism.

From the Paper:

"What comes across most strongly in To the Lighthouse is its attempt at permanence, or the character's struggle for permanence. As Mrs. Ramsay watches the sea beat at the rocks, prompting her to think that "It was all ephemeral as a rainbow" (20) and her husband paces to and fro, musing on the nature of fame and immortality, and conceding in anguish that "...the very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare" (41), we think of Woolf herself. Was the author using this, her most autobiographical work, as an attempt to make life (which is transitory) eternal, or crystallized through art?"

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