What's in a Word?

It is futile to attempt a single definition for modernism as it pertains to one era. However, if modernism is placed in the same sentence with a person or a group of people, a time, and a place, a concrete concept is carved into the word itself. As such, one must look into modernism’s origin to truly construct a concrete meaning. In order to do this, an understanding of the movement’s history and the people involved with its history must be understood.

Modernism is said to have begun in 1890 and have ended in 1940. Three tiers of this progressive movement were established within these fifty years. However, the defining textiles of modernism were clearly woven between 1910 through 1940. During this time, there were several contributing artists from various parts of the world that infused meaning into this movement as we know it today. However, the works of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and Clive and Vanessa Bell brought modernism to its pinnacle, not simply in artistic form, but as a way of political and social life. “For these figures the aim could never be simply to set the imagination free; it was rather first of all to challenge an unfreedom, the oppressions of journalism, of genteel audiences, of timid readers, of political and religious orthodoxy” (Levenson 2). Along with other women noted above, Virginia Woolf also contributed critical writings on the topic of gender, which responded to a man-driven society.

“Women writers were often deemed old-fashioned or of merely anecdotal interest” (Scott 2). Yet, Woolf questioned her society’s ideas of why women were still considered a lesser sex. She did not see any reason why a woman’s craft should be looked at with any less esteem than a man’s but knew that it would not be an issue easily resolved. Woolf responded to her society in Professions for Women and asserted, “Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against” (Norton 1348). Although Woolf was keenly aware of her changing environment, she also knew her environment was steeped in the intellectual thoughts and theories of men.

Woolf and her counterparts in Bloomsbury shared their lives through their works, as many artists tend to do. I found myself asking as I read, “What made them so different from other artists in other centuries?” They were intellectuals, yes; but, they were still considered outsiders when compared to the rest of their society because of their radical thought. It was when I began to read “Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography that I loosely grasped what might be obvious to others. Geography and social space influenced who they were and how they conveyed themselves though their crafts. Admittedly, I have a long way to go in better understanding this and modernism as a whole, but it is a theory that I would like to investigate further.

I have, however, established that to define modernism in a neatly confined sentence or two would be too easy and would take away from the notions that created this terminology. Bloomsbury’s modernism flourished from its artistic notions because it was not created for art’s sake alone. It was as much of a social and political movement as it was an artistic one.