In literary Modernism composers seek to capture the

subjective reality of an individual living a changed world. Do

you agree?
Support your view by detailed reference to one poem and one
short story that you have studied this year.
The existence of Modernism was marked by great changes in Western
society, characterised by the increased emphasis on psychology, time,
urbanisation and the loss of ontological ground resultant from the
catastrophic effects of WWI. Thus Modernist Literary composers aimed
to manifest these ideas in their work, capturing the human minds
subjective concerns and perceptions of their rapidly changing reality.
Virginia Woolf's short story Mark on the Wall and T.S Eliots poem
Rhapsody on a Windy Night are both examples of Modernist texts
which address these issues of their context. They achieve this through
the rendering of thought processes, depiction of alienation and the loss
of meaning and moral bearing resulting from shifting paradigms in the
new Modernist world.
Throughout the short story Mark on the Wall Virginia Woolf attempts to
capture the workings of the narrator's female mind to create a sense of
a different reality and time to those portrayed in previous century
Realist literature. During the Modernist time psychology was becoming
a discipline and the philosophical idea of an internal reality was
becoming more prominent. Woolf appears to explore this by
replicating the mind through an almost complete stream of
consciousness, stemming from a mark on the wall. She utilises a
series of techniques to give the impression of continuously running
thought including anacoluthon and antiopesis (supposed to take place
on a summers eveningBut how dull this is, this historical fiction!). As
it is structured like this, the story is also written in a non-linear method
determined by memory and thoughts in between shifts to actions and
occurrences to reflect the digressive nature of a female mind as well as
the inaccuracy of thought. It also causes the story to have a cyclical
structure around the mark and thus makes the amount of time from
beginning to end immeasurable, reflecting the Modernist notion of time
being subjective and ambiguous rather than fixed as it was becoming
with the creation of train timetables. The use of time in the narrative as
is either sped up by exclamations and repetition of sound (brown
paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office!) or slowed down
by ellipses and dashes (Nelson drank out ofproving I really dont
know what.), and separate from actual real time further emphasises
this. Time is also symbolic of how it constricted the physical and
cognitive reality of a person and contributed to the angst related to
dull continuity of life related to Rhapsody on a Windy Night.

T.S Eliots poem Rhapsody on a Windy Night presents via a persona of

a man the relatively newly urbanised society as one of alienation and
isolation, far removed from the previous century life. This can be seen
in the Eliots deviation from traditional poetic devices to describe the
city, one being how the defamiliarisation in imagery conveys how
urbanisation has disorientated the individual. For example the
objective correlative of midnight shakes the memory/As a madman
shakes a dead geranium provides a startling connection between the
lonely night and lunacy. This trend of lunacy is extended with the
anaphora of the personification of the street lamps the street lamps
muttered/ the street lamps muttered. As the only form of
communication this man receives, the street lamps also demonstrate
the sheer loneliness this man wandering the night feels. Loneliness is
also highlighted by the repetition of memory with it being the only way
the man can access any sort of connection with anyone or anything, as
does his noticing of only disembodied images of people such as corner
of her eye. Hence this portrayal of disconnection and lack of complete
human interaction is moreover a depiction of this mans introspective
reality, just as done in Mark on the Wall.
The Mark on the Wall also explores the shifting moral and structural
paradigms of the time and the ensued loss of meaning and purpose
that . The new chaotic nature of the modern life is referenced in the
simile if one were to compare life to anything, one must liken it to
being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour while the
materialistic and consumerist trends of society becoming prevalent are
reflected in They wanted the leave this house because they wanted to
change their furniture. The narrators inability to grasp the mystery of
life due to these reasons are metaphoric in the reference to being torn
asunder like the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train. The
confusion as to what the actual mark on the wall is can furthermore be
construed as a metaphor of this confusion in the direction of life. The
mark is also a tangible symbol of the static continuity of the
real/physical world and the restrictions of it. Thus Woolf regularly refers
to the mark to write that if you cannot accept how the world functions,
think instead of the mark on the wall. However Woolf does not always
do this, she questions the physical reality and the attempts to restrict it
by writing that nothing is proved, nothing is known as well as
criticising Whitakers Table of Precedency and the resulting cause that
nobody makes their own ideas as everyone follows another. The
narrator even begins to doubt herself, an extension of the confusion
described earlier in Where was I? What has it all been about? and I
cant remember a thing. Everthings moving, falling, slipping,
vanishing. Woolf aimed by doing this to reiterate that in the mind an
individual has lost the ontological ground and confidence in human
nature and human purpose itself.

Rhapsody on the Windy Night also focuses on loss in the new Modernist
world but extends this more to by focusing on the cultural desolation,
highlighting the physical and emotional displacement of individuals
moral ground. During and after WWI there was recognition of the fact
that traditional values and morals of an ordered and stable society had
led to such violence, thus causing Modernists to reject nineteenth
century optimism. Eliot mirrors this disillusionment with the uneven
fragmentation of the poem into times from midnight to 4 oclock to
illustrate the fragmentation of the human psyche. The man wandering
aimlessly has no purpose in life and this is demonstrated by him
always obeying the street lamps imperative requests such as regard
that woman, Remark the cat.., Regard the moon and the
montage of daily rituals at the end of the poem . The chain of
deteriorated imagery of rust that clings to the form and broken
spring in a factory yard accentuates the hopelessness and all that is
lost in the skeleton world. The negative connotations of the diction of
the poem to describe the streets including twisted creates a
disturbing and unappealing picture of the city. Similarly, the
destruction of original human values is evident in the description of
even the traditionally innocent child having nothing behind that childs
eye after stealing a toy as well as the beauty of the moon being
degraded into a disease with smallpox cracks on her face. The very
dark metaphor of the preparations for life being the last twist of the
knife concludes the poem and implies that the transformed world has
degenerated beyond repair.
Virginia Woolf and TS Eliot both moved from objective reality to the
subjective perceptions of reality through their portrayals of the values
and issues of their altered world. Whilst Woolf achieves this by
replicating the stream of consciousness as well as the thoughts and
concerns of a woman in her short story, Eliot furthers this through the
disturbing and particular depictions of the urban life as isolated as well
as morally and culturally degrading.