ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

technique of modernist narrative, but also makes the human mind central to Woolf’s
technique, even as that same technique mutes the importance of action: in Mrs.
Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves, “the search for reality is not a matter of
dramatic external action. [… t]he search, thought Virginia Woolf, is a psychic activity,
and it is the preoccupation (it surrounds us) of most human beings. The only thing is
that most human beings are not aware of this psychic activity, so deep down is it in
their consciousness” (Humphrey 13). If, as Humphrey argues, the goal of this streamof-consciousness
technique is specifically to reveal the search for reality within the
human psyche, a middle that nearly eliminates human characters for large stretches
and limits the reader’s access to their psyches is at least equally disruptive to Woolf’s
modernist narrative form as it is to the traditional narrative featuring easily identified
human agents engaging in clearly identifiable actions. Furthermore, this narrative
innovation takes place largely during, though spatially separate from, World War I.
Fussell argues that “the masters of the modern movement,” including Woolf, left war
to “lesser talents—always more traditional and technically prudent” (Fussell 314).
Even more, he argues that the title of Woolf’s posthumous novel, Between the Acts,
invokes the trope of war as drama to suggest that novel’s inter-war setting, while
making no mention of To the Lighthouse (Fussell 230). To the Lighthouse doesn’t go
so far as to narrate the fighting of the war, but its very difference suggests that war, or
its trauma, creates a different sort of wartime that affects even a spatially distant
narrative, and one that extends beyond the temporal bounds of the war itself to its
prelude and aftermath. Furthermore, here it is wartime that is between the novel’s
beginning and ending acts, which, is not dramas themselves, are at least more easily
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