Dalloway, Gatsby, and Modernism—100 Years On

“In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.”
—Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”
—Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

It was 1925—the midpoint of the “Roaring Twenties,” when capitalism’s recoil after the trauma of World War I sparked an era of excess and moral uncertainty—and the concurrent publication of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby suddenly crystallized the sense of disillusionment and rebellion that defined Modernism, a movement spanning continents and disciplines which continues to shape Western culture today.

The moment, according to veteran Colorado Academy Upper School English Instructor Stuart Mills, lives at the heart of the long-running Honors elective course Modernism, which plunges CA Juniors and Seniors into a trimester-long exploration of the anxiety, alienation, and experimentation that so profoundly influenced almost everything that would follow, from literature and visual art to music and architecture, and from fashion design to film.

 

“The goal of this course is to explode the idea that the study of literature is confined to the English classroom,” states Mills. By examining Modernism as a confluence of artistic, historical, political, and socio-economic forces, students see that “English as a discipline can speak to a much larger movement that literature both informs and is informed by.”

According to Senior Evan Brown, “I think it’s interesting that when you look at Modernist ideas, you can still see the correlations with our own ideas today; you can point out the similarities between their movement and the way we are constantly pushing against the norms of the past, seeking change, trying to say something that is your own, yet at the same time being influenced by your contemporaries.”

 

In short, Mills explains, Modernism is a lens through which to spy on the complex and reciprocal ways that culture and its artifacts are made.

Milestones

CA students get their first introduction to the rich and challenging landscape of the Modernist era when they take the required course American Literature as Tenth Graders, surveying centuries’ worth of writing as both evidence of historical moods and movements and the primary forces—speeches, songs, pamphlets, poems, and stories—that shape them.

The Great Gatsby is a central text in the Tenth Grade course. Readers observe a protagonist trapped between a glowing, irretrievable past and a present day that seems empty and materialistic. They debate the novel’s critique of the corruption of the “American Dream,” arguing how Gatsby’s idealism is destroyed by the decadence and greed of a wealthy elite—one of the key pivot points on which the Modernist movement balances.

In the popular Junior- or Senior-year elective, after a summer assignment in which students experience Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis—whose main character is transformed into a “monstrous vermin” symbolic of modernity’s alienation and absurdity—they nod to Gatsby’s status as a Modernist milestone before moving on to Woolf’s very different, and very difficult, Mrs. Dalloway.

“Most students can’t stand Woolf at first,” acknowledges Mills. The novel’s stream-of-consciousness style, much like James Joyce’s, “is so unlike anything they’ve read before.”

But the friction and resistance are the point, he says. At the start of the trimester course, Mills invariably presents students with a quotation by Modernist British writer D.H. Lawrence:

“...to read a really new novel will always hurt, to some extent. There will always be resistance. The same with new pictures, new music. You may judge of their reality by the fact that they do arouse a certain resistance, and compel, at length, a certain acquiescence.”

In her novel, Woolf employs an interior perspective in traveling forwards and backwards in time to construct an image of Clarissa Dalloway’s life and inter-war society. A subjective, fragmented experience of the world—embodied in Woolf’s stream of consciousness—haunts a civilization reeling from World War I’s psychological damage and societal collapse.

According to Mills, the central question his students face in grappling with Mrs. Dalloway is, in fact, why would Woolf write in such an opaque, sometimes infuriating, mode? The answer: “The world has just been blown up literally and figuratively, so how do we define the times we live in now that established forms and Victorian ideals no longer help us? We must locate truth and beauty in all-new ways.”

Other ‘-isms’

For Junior Vivi Rosenquist, such questions retain a striking relevance.

“I feel like the literature from this time period lets us see what it looked like when people first realized they could express their inner lives. After the strict social norms of the 19th century, it’s almost as if this explosion of personal expression happened. The umbrella of Modernism is symbolic of all the different ‘-isms’ that came after.”

 

Surrealism, Cubism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Futurism, post-Impressionism, and all the other sibling movements across fields such as architecture, music, and design—these, ultimately, are embraced within the Modernism elective too, as students follow threads from art and literature weaving through the works of figures such as composer Igor Stravinsky, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and fashion designer Coco Chanel.

Students even look back to Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 drama A Doll’s House to see how its critique of gender roles and societal norms became part of the lead up to modern feminism.

“This could be a year-long course and still not even scratch the surface of all that Modernism was,” explains Mills. The not-so-secret trajectory of the course’s arc, he explains, is planting the critical seed that “art forms and culture are perpetually in dialog with each other and with themselves. That’s what happened then, and that’s exactly what’s happening now, on TikTok and Instagram; though we don’t know what scholars will call our own ‘-ism’ 100 years from now.”

What we do know, Mills goes on, is that teenagers love to rebel, and Modernism was “a rebellion writ large.” Today’s high school students may not know exactly what they’re pushing against, or why, he notes, but being able to do so thoughtfully, aware of the cultural past and present, provides essential groundwork for whatever they’ll take on in the future.

At the Armory Show

Students try on the role of early-20th-century rebel in a trimester-ending public event, the “Armory Show,” modeled on the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art in New York, which was the first such show in the United States and served as a major catalyst for the Modernist movement in America.

The original Armory Show, held inside New York City’s 69th Regiment Armory, featured works such as Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” many of which scandalized local officials and critics. At CA, the annual event—staged in the halls of the Upper School for at least the past 15 years—highlights the works and philosophies of major Modernist figures, whom students research and then impersonate. 

This year, the CA Armory Show included France’s Coco Chanel, American poet e.e. cummings, German-American architect Walter Gropius, American painter Jackson Pollock, French street photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, and American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, among many others.

 

Abby Dawson, who represented Cartier-Bresson, is in the midst of work on her own Senior Portfolio of landscape photography. Researching Cartier-Bresson, she says, yielded important lessons.

“Cartier-Bresson didn’t pose any of his pictures,” explains Dawson, “focusing on the movement and simplicity and everyday details of French life. He never tried to make images that were perfect, and that made me think about the value of showing something with all of its imperfections, not getting caught up in appearances.”

For Senior Macey McKean and Junior Sophie Cox, researching the rivalry between designers Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli—the former known for understated elegance, the latter for surreal artifice—was just as illuminating. 

 

“I think Modernism as a movement was actually more extreme than where we are as a culture today,” McKean says. “We’re pretty far from Victorian fashion standards, but in some ways I feel we’ve moved closer in that direction than those early-20th-century designers.”

Modernism itself, says Mills, may be 100 years distant from these CA students, but its influence remains “all around them.”

“The aim of literature in my humble opinion is to ask the question, ‘What does it mean to be human?’ I would say art asks the same question; film, fashion, and music do, too. Our task in school is to break apart those silos so that our students can find better answers.”