Thomas Hardy’s 1891 novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles opens with a five-line evocation of John Durbeyfield – narrating his ‘rickety’ legs and ‘ruffled’ hat – an apt example of the detailed character visualisations Victorian authors sought to emulate. Eponymously, realist goals were to accurately represent the real, with prose aiming to observe one’s reality closely. Other famous realist texts, such as George Eliot’s Silas Marner or Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist likewise used precise physical images to make their characters a tangible reflection of a particular contemporary society, or even further, used physiognomy to communicate something about their intrinsic person. By the onset of the 1890s however, modernism was usurping realist tendencies, with a new focus on the subjective and the abstract. As such, physical depictions of characters somewhat waned in favour of more interior expressions of selfhood. Expressing this, one meets Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs Dalloway with the line ‘Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself’, placing emphasis on Clarissa’s independence and domestic confinement rather than her extraneous presentation. Indeed, both the verbs ‘said’ and ‘buy’ connote selfhood, somewhat at odds with the identification of Clarissa with her husband’s surname, an ‘insignia of patriarchal power’.2 In the first line, Woolf rejects the physical, opting instead to foreground a competing identity within Clarissa herself, a starkly opposing literary technique to that of Hardy’s realism. I use these two authors as broad embodiments of their respective literary movements, figureheads of diverging approaches to character building, and by proxy written expression. One can track a modernist rejection of external signifiers with a broader repudiation of stability and truth, and likewise the elaborate descriptions of Victorian
authors emulate a strong social order governed by both dogmas and a matriarch. This essay will attempt, albeit somewhat muddily and inarticulately at times, to highlight yet another point of division between 19th and 20th century literature, and extrapolating this at the risk of sounding overwhelmingly new historicist, to demonstrate how shifting world orders invaded the written word.
To begin, let me provide a generalised account of traditional Victorian character construction, using Silas Marner, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Tess) and Daisy Miller as examples. The first is an archetypal Victorian novel, whereby the miserly titular protagonist discovers the joy of familial bonds and religion, transforming from a social outcast to a loving father – akin to Ebenezer Scrooge’s redemption in A Christmas Carol. Eliot carefully assembles her main character through bodily images, narrating his ‘large brown protuberant eyes’, ‘pale face’, ‘stiff’ limbs and ‘eyes…set like a dead man’s’. Such an unpleasant portrayal removes Silas from states of vitality and warmth, instead coupling him with something quietly unnerving, directly mirroring his antisocial nature. Indeed, the repeated necromantic images depict Silas almost as a walking corpse, allowing us to understand his alienating and monotonous existence by Page thirteen. Although one could argue this description does offer interiority, for example shining a light into Silas’ aversion to human interaction, it is mediated through the physical, with the omniscient narrator always at a distance. Opposingly, in modernist fiction, the subject is often a conduit for one’s own consciousness, with the popular stream of consciousness style placing the reader into an invasive position inside the character’s mind, unlike a Victorian readership who take on the role of passive observer.
Other texts mirror Eliot’s approach, namely Tess, often taken as a foundational Victorian novel. Written by Thomas Hardy, the protagonist is again introduced only through her physicality, with her ‘white’ attire and ‘innocent eyes’ cementing her as a ‘mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience’. Here, Hardy deploys stereotypical, androcentric lexis of purity and female subservience, prefiguring Tess as a nebulous form rather than a sovereign being. Like Eliot, the protagonist is first and foremost an appearance, and we are not afforded a glimpse into their mind, forced to rely on an interlocutor. Indeed, Hardy’s novel is rich with physiognomic density – its primary antagonist Alec D’Urberville introduced as having an ‘almost swarthy complexion, with full lips’, hinting at his unbridled flirtatious nature, a presage that becomes tragically realised as he rapes Tess in Chapter Eleven. Often, authors wrote in similar ways, with initial character appearances functioning almost as a litmus test for audiences to make up their mind on a character’s personality – an authorial guidebook that modernists often tore up.
My last example, Daisy Miller is less of a typically Victorian nature, with Henry James often deemed a ‘bridge’ between my aforementioned literary periods. Yet he too priorities the physical. Through a first-person narrator (a signifier of his more innovative writing approach),
Daisy Miller is continually objectified, thus becomes a projection of a male gaze. Her ‘complexion, her nose, her ears, her teeth’ are afforded detailed observation, and if one can crudely summarise the short story as a ‘New Woman’ being examined by the unsparing eyes of an outmoded social order, physical indicators become integral to the piece. Somewhat paradoxically, this external description provides a level of interiority within James’ narrator, revealing his fascination with the female form, yet again this glimpse into the self is largely communicated through physical language. James’ novella is nonetheless unique in how it wields physiognomy, refusing to physically constrict Miller within the shackles of a ‘Mary’ or an ‘Eve’ figure. The line describing her face – ‘not at all insipid, but it was not exactly
expressive…eminently delicate…want of finish.’ – uses the language of negatives, leaving the reader with a hazy grasp of Miller’s appearance, thereby obscuring her moral nature, reflecting how the tragic protagonist straddles the boundaries of Victorian girl and 21st century woman.
In a sense, Derrida’s philosophy of ‘difference’ can be roughly applied here. In his own words: ‘When we cannot grasp or show the thing, state the present, the being-present, when the present cannot be presented, we signify, we go through the detour of the sign. We take or give signs. We signal. The sign, in this sense, is deferred presence.’ Simply put, meaning exists in a flux of perpetual deference, displaced onto other signifiers and infinitely postponed. I am admittedly taking slight liberties with broadening the principle from the originally linguistic application, but his notion of an infinite web of signal and signified lends itself to a generalised commentary on characters.
For Victorian writers, often interiority appears to be deferred – either pushed onto physical denotations of morality or reflected through interactions with others. Even on a very basic level, the popularised third-person narrator displaces this interiority, with narrative tools like free indirect discourse providing yet another barrier between reader and subject. After both world wars, this sense of a ‘contained narrative’ (a phrase I use to describe a piece of writing created with limits, such as an overseeing, controlling narrator or conventional plotlines) became somewhat insincere and disloyal to reality, and an individual’s immediate, unfiltered experience became prioritised. With the advent of general relativity in 1915, an omniscient narrator lambasting fate and monitoring a character’s every move now felt incongruous to a reorientated worldview.
self-
Stemming from this, modernists were more sceptical of notions of ‘society’ and human connection, and in their era of fragmentation characters became arenas of exploration and
discovery, comprehended through abstract concepts and thought processes that were often realms away from an understood ‘reality’. I cannot help but return to my tried-and-true active v passive dichotomy – Victorian literature I term ‘passive’ in the sense that reading was primarily to observe and to ponder externalities, holding up a sometimes unwelcome mirror to societal injustice and ridiculous norms, see The Importance of Being Earnest for example. Modernist texts, however, require a more ‘active’ readership, where often meaning takes an elusive form, with mental quarrying needed to make sense of Woolf’s lyricism or T.S Eliot’s allusions. Generally, writing for modernists was less about delivering didacticism or truth, but instead as a medium for self-expression amongst a broader crisis of language and humanity; a way of making sense of a turbulent and ruptured climate that self-reflexively required a reader to consider their own mind simultaneously. Whilst one may read Hardy and bemoan gender standards, one cannot read modernist literature without being forced to interrogate the inner workings of their own mind. I often visualise Victorian literature as a screen, and modernist literature as a hand – the former designed to be watched and considered, and the latter a living appendage reaching into mental corners. This may seem distanced from the over-arching thesis of this essay, but physical appearance ties into these fundamental differences. Characters, defined by physical attributes, were supposed to be believable for a Victorian audience, clashing with a typically modernist character often divorced from reality. Although the purpose of characters is arguably similar – acting as mirrors for an audience to consider their own world – modernist characters often lack the same sense of ‘realness’ prefigured by exterior descriptions, rather being made tangible through consciousness and experience.
To demonstrate this, I turn yet again to Woolf. Her dream-like work, The Waves introduces six characters through mediation, not by a god-like narrator casting their gaze upon such subjects.
Indeed, one’s initial grasp of such characters is hazy, forcing one to visualise Bernard, Susan,
Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis by almost entirely relying on their thought process. Through
Commented [ME1]: Could I yap abt characters allowing self understanding as a meta level of interiority??
deliberately obscuring their appearance, Woolf places the physical, thereby the accepted ‘real’ and the obvious, in a subsidiary position, instead encouraging a reader to immediately grapple with notions of consciousness and individualistic experiences.
To open, each character delivers a short sentence, narrating a visual or auditory experience. Woolf deploys syntactic parallels, with each phrase mirroring the others, to evoke both a collective and personalised experience, reminiscent of a modernist balancing of the self and society. To truly understand these characters, one must ask what these seemingly innocuous observations actually mean. For example, Rhoda hears ‘a sound’ yet cannot afford it the specificity of a particular verb as Louis does (who hears ‘stamping’), possibly foreshadowing her later inability to adequately express her feelings or to make sense of the chaotic world around her. Rather than taking transposing her senses into her own words, she relies on basic vocabulary and mimesis, ‘cheep, chirp’, situating her in a state of child-like inarticulation. Likewise, whilst they are all staring at the same sunrise, Jinny sees a ‘crimson tassel…twisted with gold threads’, a clearer indication of her hedonistic nature and materialist gaze, whereas Bernard sees ‘a ring’ hanging ‘in a loop of light’, his almost theological description reflective of his wordsmith aspirations and desire to understand the universe through contemplation.11
Woolf thus refuses to dictate or explain emotion, rather communicating it and letting the reader interpret such for themselves. It is this malleability that differentiates modernist characters from Victorian ones, as the physical is almost absent. Indeed, even when mentioned, it is far from convincing or even enlightening. Louis, in the space of three lines, offers two completely contradictory descriptions of his own eyes, both ‘green leaves’ and ‘lidless eyes of a stone figure in a desert’, a juxtaposition between life and death, vitality and inertia, natural and
artificial. Is one supposed to now have a defined image of ‘Louis’, from which a defined character is clearer? This seems doubtful. Woolf’s deliberate strategy of nebulousness rejects a reader’s comfort of a told appearance, and the lack of given framework for a reader to enter Woolf’s prose necessitates another form of reading entirely. For her audience, neither the characters nor narrator operates as a guide – the readership a 20th century Christopher Columbus, confusedly stumbling around her chapters within a condensed microcosm of the war-torn landscape outside the pages.
If one can take physiognomy as a method to create a perceived ‘realness’ or clarity for a particular character, modernists reject this aspect as well. Even when external descriptions are used, it is more to baffle and confound than to comfort – see The Well of Loneliness. Radclyffe Hall deploys Victorian-esque layers of physical description (‘His chin…very slightly cleft, his forehead intellectual, his hair tinged with auburn.’), yet when it comes to Steven, the protagonist, Hall’s use of physiognomy arguably does more to confound than it does to present. Steven is described with ‘the strong line of the jaw, the square, massive brow, the eyebrows, too thick and too wide for beauty’, and whilst this may seem straightforward, the attribution of masculine features to a biological female is a deliberate complication of preestablished gender norms, and in turn a rejection of discerning a person’s mental qualities through their presentation.14 Steven’s experience is confusing, their existence a gendered liminality, and Hall uses physical portrayals to highlight that, intending to question accepted truths rather than to make her character more accessible or clearly defined. For a world still grappling with a burgeoning ‘queer’ population, (the book was published in 1928), perhaps Hall’s conventional means of character construction is an attempt to make Steven more palatable to broader audiences, to grant her protagonist legitimacy by allying herself with
accustomed literary technique. It reads as a strategic act of rebellion – using a well-worn stage to exhibit something ‘grotesque and splendid, like some primitive thing conceived in a turbulent age of transition.’ Whilst Hall’s method of character building is not new, her character very much is.
To conclude, approaches towards characters are often indivisible from their corporeal presentation, whether as a gauge of their character, an entry-point into a text, or merely for a reader’s comfort. Where this becomes disrupted is under modernism, where frequently the literal or the bodily is dislocated, and the intangible consciousness elevated. This divergence marks both a literal rejection of linguistic fixities, and a more metaphoric rejection of human understanding. This essay is not seeking to argue every modernist broke from a reliance on physical designations, or to comprehensively categorise all modernist literature (which would be ironically antithetical), but rather to explore yet another facet of modernist innovation.
