"Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown" by Virginia Woolf - Article Summary and Response

Woolf, Virginia. "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown." Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Ed. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. 21-34.Google Books. Web. 15 June 2012.

This is an essay by Virginia Woolf, originally a speech she made it seems. Its tone is rather informal.

Summary

Writing an essay is tough. There is a notion of a character which haunts the writer until he is compelled to begin writing. It is crucial for the novelist to be obsessed with character. She ascribes ultimate importance to convincing characterization- that that is, in fact, the purpose of novels. The essay will explore:

• What "real" character means
• What "character" means
• Why young novelists fail to create characters

We all "read characters".

Woolf claims human character changed around 1910. There was a shift in human relations, a sort of liberation, around this time, which was reflected in all areas of life. Arnold Bennet, an English novelist who lived at the turn of the century, shares this view.

There is a story within the essay. Woolf saw two people on a train and closely described their behavior and appearance and drew conclusions about them. She thinks the man who she named Mr Smith has some power over an older lady, Mrs Brown. He gets her to bring a George to see him, then quickly gets off the train, leaving Mrs Brown in emotional pain. Woolf imagines what her house must look like. She imagines Mr Smith confronting her one day. The purpose of the story is to illustrate how crucial it is for writers to be obsessed with characters. Mrs. Brown represents human nature

A character may be treated in different ways- it may be abstracted, or emphasis may be put on the physicality or the soul.

Different people find different characters realistic. A realistic character is one that has the power to make the reader think of the character as having a whole perspective on life.

Books written by authors who are interested in external events rather than the universe of the book churned out novels which can hardly be called that; they were unsatisfactory. The true novel is self contained and closed, and satisfying, thanks to its author's interest in human nature.

The writer opens communication with the reader via something that is familiar to the reader. Only then can he introduce more interesting, less familiar idea. The writers in the generation of Bennet and Wells (Edwardians) used as familiar ground descriptions of physical setting. This was no longer satisfactory for the following generation (that of Woolf- Georgians). It is too dull and technical and impersonal for them. However writers should not swear off existing tools if they have not created new ones, or the result is chaos (Ulysses).

There is a gap between writers and readers that must be closed; the essence of writing is characters and characterization is an ability that writers and authors both possess equally. The gap makes it so that it is legitimate for literature to be vague and uninteresting because the reader deems himself a bad judge of good writing. The reader must insist on convincing characterization and thus we may get great novels.

Virginia Woolf

Response

There are two aspects to this essay. First, it is very humanist, putting the character, man, in the center and attributing to it ultimate importance. Then, there is an attempt at periodization, a historical perspective, where she says the nature of mankind changed in 1910.

Let us try to unite these two views. What seems to emerge, then, is that before 1910 humanity was different, and for that reason literature that was about humans was different. Humanity became more liberal, less repressed and so now literary representations of humans have to focus on the internal and not the external.