Splitting the Husks: Woolf's Modernist Language in "Night and Day"

Abstract

Her language is a subversive one; much of her task until the 1930s was to undermine and dismantle the linguistic and literary structures of the past. In her later years, she consciously began to reassemble the remnants from the past into a clearly-envisioned system of discourse. Woolf breaks the English language down into what she sees as its lowest common denominator between its fading past and its energized present condition, and this is the fragment. Fragments of language themselves, and images of fragmentation, recur throughout her writing. When Woolf presents a fragment (or a more general moment of fragmentation), she has broken a scene, or a dialogue, or a sensibility, down to its core. She has stripped away the dross, which is the first task of the modernist writer, and has presented what will endure of the obsolete material with which she begins. Such obsolescence is exemplified by institutions and manners that seem stable, meaningful, durable, until Woolf exposes them as unacceptable. Then, what had been perceived as a unity is broken into pieces. This happens, for example, with the patriarchally oppressive household and marriage of the Ramsays in To the Lighthouse; or the near-dead convention of Pointz Hall's country pageant, along with the hackneyed version of England's national history and heritage that goes along with it, in Between the Acts; or the perfect evening party that the hostess envisions early in her day in Mrs. Dalloway; or even the biographically objective account of the stately Barretts in Flush. After Woolf microscopically examines and dissects these unities, a few meaningful vital fragments are left for her to rework. Of crucial importance is the fact that she is always in the process of doing this reworking, this translation of the languid artifacts from the past into what must carry on into the future. Fragments are her tokens of the future: she revels in them