The term modernism describes a movement in literature, science, art, philosophy and lifestyle, which reached its peak between 1910 and 1930. As the term itself already indicates, people tried to move away from the past to new concepts of the modern reality. In literature we can find a new way of representing reality, new images as well as different approaches to questions of gender and race. Although I will mainly concentrate on the treatment of gender issues the other concepts mentioned will be introduced as well. One of the most representative figures in modernist fiction is the author Virginia Woolf, who was rediscovered in the 2 ^nd wave of feminism during the 1960s and 70s (Marcus, p.209). Her texts are still used as key evidence for a new/modern way of writing as well as for the analysis of gender questions. Woolf will be in the centre of attention in the following analysis of gender issues in modernist texts. However, other modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce are as well included to mark contrasts.

Firstly, as a key representative in the canon of modernist fiction it is to prove that Virginia Woolfs texts contain major concepts of the time. The one that can be found in nearly all modernist writings is the desire to break with the past. New scientific insights such as Darwin’s theory of evolution or Freud’s psychoanalysis contributed very much to a new understanding of individuality and to scepticism about inherited values and beliefs. The concept of the “unconscious” came to the fore. Authors were looking for a new language to express the new reality they suddenly found themselves in. Therefore, writers including Virginia Woolf tried to differentiate themselves from Victorian and Edwardian literature (Whitworth, 150). Comparing texts from Victorian authors like Charlotte Brontë, H.G. Wells or Charles Dickens with those of Woolf or Joyce shows that the latter have been quite successful in creating something new and innovative. Victorian characters such as Jane Eyre or Oliver Twist are not moved by the complexes and neuroses of the twentieth-century man. They show predictable combinations of attributes, which leads to conventional types. Language and narrative form are far more experimental in modernist texts. Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” (1927) for example, which is her most popular and widely read novel, is divided into three parts: the short middle part Time Passes describes the events of a whole decade, while the first and last part (The Window, The Lighthouse) are mirror-image depictions of just two days (Mepham, p.1). In terms of language we get the perspectives of nearly all characters involved in the story, which is another difference to i.e. Charlotte Brontë, who tells the story only from the perspective Jane. Woolf attempted to come “close to the quick of the mind” (Stevenson, p.13). Woolf’s very innovative stream of consciousness prose tries to represent the mental inner life of her characters. The following quote from the opening scene of Mrs. Dalloway (1925) shows that very clearly:

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Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumplemayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa, what a morning-fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! {…} For having lived in Westminster - how many years now? (Woolf, p. ??)

Rethorical questions such as “how many years now?” and the exclamation “what a lark!” clearly belong to the inner voice of Clarissa. However, there is still an authorial organisation as frequent cues such as “thought Clarissa” indicate (Stevenson, p.54). In her later novel To the Lighthouse (1927) she even goes a step further. Everything is written in indirect speech (‘oratio obliqua’)(Stevenson, p.55). This novel does not only represent the inner life of one person but of a nearly all characters involved in the story. In that way the narration jumps from one character to the next. Consequently, there is not much action. The external world, especially in the first part of the novel, nearly disappears. Frequent modern images such as ‘the city’ or ‘technology’ (i.e. the plane in Mrs Dalloway) also prove her status as a central modernist writer.

Secondly, Virginia Woolf is often referred to as a feminist writer. Feminism is not only a theoretical investigation of gender inequalities but also a political movement. Although Woolf was a member of the “People’s Suffrage Organisation” in 1910, her activities, however, were more or less restricted to her writings, which, however, are still really influential. Woolf’s novels as well as her non-fictional works show very clearly that she was very concerned about gender identities, women’s lives, histories and fiction (Marcus, p.209). The question of gender in modernism has come to the fore in recent literary criticism since a bundle of female writers such as Gertrude Stein, H.D., Katherine Mansfield and others have been included in the canon. Critics are looking for a special female mode of writing such as the kind of ‘oversubjectivism’ found in Woolf’s texts (Marcus, p.210). Woolf was a forerunner of feminist literary criticism, since she started to look back in history to identify or rather to look for a female literary tradition. Her results are published in several essays such as Three Guineas (Hogarth Press, 1938) and her most influential one A Room of One’s Own (1929). The former, written as a letter, is a series on women and feminism showing among other things the contrast between the public sphere and the private sphere (Marcus, p.215). Victorian novels such as Jane Eyre are exemplary for the role of women in 19 ^th century society. The woman is excluded from the public sphere. While the man has the possibility to work in the city, to travel and educate him in countless libraries and academic groups the woman is restricted to household and child caring duties. This stereotype of a woman, who is virtuous, obedient, kind and gentle, is to be challenged by the “new”, “modern” woman. A

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