Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown

“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” is an essay about generational conflict and how the writing and reading of literary fiction change in response to social transformations. Woolf’s argument concerns the depiction of “character” in fiction. Character was the element of novel writing that Bennett identified as deficient in younger novelists. Bennett’s essay used Woolf’s novel Jacob’s Room (1922) as an example of a wider trend of novelists emphasizing “originality” and “cleverness” over the development of “real” characters. Woolf starts by agreeing with Bennett that character is fundamental to fiction. She writes that character creates the impetus and “seduct[ion]” to write fiction at all (3). Where she differs from Bennett is in the definitions of “character” and “reality.” Her argument reflects the Modernist position that traditions should be handled critically and with conscious care, and that inherited conventions should not be unthinkingly duplicated. It also demonstrates a Modernist—or “Georgian”—skepticism of the assumption that “reality” can be captured objectively (expressed by Bennett and characteristic of realist literature of the Edwardian era).

Woolf argues that society changed in the transition from the Edwardian to the Georgian era, which correspond to the reigns of King Edward VII (1901-1909) and King George VI (1910-1936). One of the first premises of Woolf’s argument is that “all human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children” (5). She goes on to claim that “when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature” (5). Woolf identifies December 1910 as the moment when human character changed, though she also states that it was not as “sudden” or “definite” a process as this precise date might suggest. She explains this with a metaphor of a garden: “I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg” (4). One reason for this slightly contradictory message—that the change was specific to a particular month but also gradual—is that the changes Woolf alludes to had numerous causes and symptoms, although she does not name them. There are silences that Woolf’s contemporaries would have filled in because she refers to dramatic events of recent history.

Before coming to December 1910, it is illuminating to consider the historical backdrop against which Woolf was writing, and the more “gradual” processes she might be alluding to. One significant recent upheaval was World War I (July 28, 1914, to November 11, 1918), which brought conflict to Europe on an unprecedented scale. This conflict was a major subject of Woolf’s writing. Her novels To the Lighthouse (1927) and Mrs. Dalloway (1925) are both concerned with the social and psychological costs of this war. Jacob’s Room (1922), the novel that Bennett criticized, was also shaped by the war; it is a portrait of a young man who struggles to reconcile his love of Classical culture with the turbulence of modern life and who then dies in the war. The changes in “human relations” that Woolf describes also refer to other recent social transformations: Women won the right to vote in Britain in 1918, only six years before Woolf wrote “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.”

Woolf’s choice of December 1910 as the moment when human character changed appears to allude to an art exhibition. Though she does not state it explicitly, this date is usually taken to refer to the exhibition “Manet and the Post-Impressionists,” which was organized by Roger Fry, a prominent member of the Bloomsbury Group. It took place at London’s Grafton Galleries and introduced English audiences to major Continental artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne, and Paul Gauguin. Woolf considered this exhibit a defining cultural moment and chooses it as the watershed event which encapsulates a change in human character and relations and also a change in the “convention[s]” of art (17) that represent these new conditions. The subject of Woolf’s essay is the change in literary arts brought about by social changes.

Woolf’s essay combines expository argument (in which she explains and defends her position) with fictional storytelling (in which she illustrates how literature can change to capture new human relations and experiences). She says that she tells fictional stories in her essay so “that [the reader] may realise the different aspects [character] can wear” (6). Rather than only giving an abstract theory of fiction, she puts it into practice.

Woolf tells the story of a woman she calls Mrs. Brown, a stranger she encounters in a railway carriage. Woolf shares the carriage with this woman and her companion, a man Woolf calls Mr. Smith. The carriage is a fitting setting for this story because it is a typically modern space, characterized by speed, technology, and fleeting interactions with strangers. It separates people from their typical milieus in which there might be further clues to their character. The setting frees Woolf to imagine Mrs. Brown’s character in many different ways. Woolf distinguishes her methods of characterization from those of her Edwardian predecessors who “laid an enormous stress upon the fabric of things” (18). Woolf argues that character is more complex than this older approach allows and that “Mrs. Brown’s character will strike you very differently according to the age and country in which you happen to be born” (10). Woolf imagines, for example, the different ways English, French, and Russian novelists would describe Mrs. Brown: the English as an eccentric “character,” the French as a social type “to give a more general view of human nature,” and the Russian as a “soul” (10). Mrs. Brown contains all these possibilities and more, and her character is not fixed.

Woolf asks, “What is reality? And who are the judges of reality?” (10). She subverts the premises of Bennett’s argument that novelists should aim to depict “character” that is “real,” by questioning both terms. Woolf explores the possibility that character isn’t singular but myriad and “reality” is not entirely objective but shaped by subjective perspectives.

Woolf goes on to reflect on “convention in writing,” suggesting that it is “not much different from convention in manners” (17). Convention is useful, but its use depends on context. She argues that Bennett seeks to impose old conventions on a new situation: “For that age and generation,” Woolf writes, “the convention was a good one” (17), but “the Edwardian tools are the wrong ones for us to use” (18). She argues that the Georgians do not yet have a set of conventions to capture an altered human nature and the turbulence of their society. To find new conventions requires experimentation, Woolf suggests. Fry’s 1910 exhibition receives such a prominent role in this essay because it pushed the boundaries of artistic representation in painting. Woolf thinks the same kind of experimentation is needed in literature. She suggests that in pursuit of this aim, her contemporaries must “reconcile [them]selves to a season of failures and fragments” (22) to fulfill the Modernist slogan to “make it new,” coined by American poet Ezra Pound.