The Shepherdess in the City

Abstract

N OVELISTS OF THIS CENTURY, especially those who have reacted against the traditions of nineteenth-century realistic fiction, have raided the conventions of other, older genres. Their spoils are evident when they create a person; in the search for a more immediate illusion of life, we find experiments with soliloquy, dramatic monologue, lyrical interludes, patterns borrowed from fable and myth. Much of this experimentation, especially in British fiction, seems to be aimed at creating characters whose vitality is not dependent on reference to any particular set of manners or morals; manners are never absent, but writers like Lawrence or Woolf talk of luminous haloes and carbon characters and try to come closer to direct imitation of the flow of thought or of sensation. Two extremes emerge: the purely introspective, self-conscious character (his roots in confessional literature, his paradigm Dostoyevski's Underground Man); and the inarticulate, unselfconscious character, whose vitality lies in some irrational sympathy with nature or man (these characters are often idiots, abnormal by social standards, or they are peasants or animals). These two extremes reflect the vague idea, prominent in twentieth-century literature, that man's intelligence has become split in some crucial way from his heart-fror morality, love, intuition, belief, from all the values that had given meaning to life-hardly a new idea, but still a very lively one. Confrontations of the two extremes are common, when the self-conscious writer or character tries to come to terms with the irrational. Such confrontations help to explain the intrusion, in odd ways, of pastoral conventions in characterization, for pastoral is the sophisticate's song of innocence. Pastoral poetry in its traditional form has disappeared; the pastoral convention may be most important in the poetry of this century as a