The notion of aesthetics in the modern novel : James Joyce’s ‘A portrait of the artist as a young man’ and Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the lighthouse’

Abstract

James Joyce and Virginia Woolf may be characterised as two modernist novelists who believed that there was a need to break from previous generic conventions of the past so that they may express the true nature of modern life accurately, and to do so they explored the possibilities of a subjective realism, rather than a social and mimetic one89. In his commentary on the modern novel, David Daiches has identified three features which distinguish the modern novel. Despite their being both similarities and differences shared between these two novelists, most notably in Joyce’s treatment of the epiphany and Woolf’s use of ‘moments of vision’, they were, indeed, both instrumental in their treatment of the inner world of their characters rather than the physical outlook of the traditional novel92. It can be stated that they are identifiable as modernist writers most clearly through their concern with style as presented through an aesthetic dimension. The aesthetic aspect of Joyce’s writings is apparent in the transformation he presents of the ordinary and mundane aspects of everyday life into the extraordinary and transcendental, whilst in Woolf it is shown through the transfixing and crystallizing of fleeting moments in life, which she views as being little daily miracles that are essential illuminations to lead to the great revelation about the meaning of life.