Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown

“My first assertion is one that I think you will grant—that every one in this room is a judge of character. Indeed it would be impossible to live for a year without disaster unless one practised character-reading and had some skill in the art. Our marriages, our friendships depend on it; our business largely depends on it; every day questions arise which can only be solved by its help.”

Woolf employs rhetorical devices to persuade her audience. The passage begins, clearly and decisively with the announcement of her “first assertion,” which Woolf then explains through appeals to the reader’s experience and a list of three items: marriages, friendships, and business. This listing of three is a standard rhetorical device and perhaps reflects the fact that this essay was first delivered as a speech.

“But now I must recall what Mr. Arnold Bennett says. He says that it is only if the characters are real that the novel has any chance of surviving. Otherwise, die it must. But, I ask myself, what is reality? And who are the judges of reality?”

Woolf engages with Bennett’s argument that characters should be “real” and echoes his language of “surviving” or dying, language that raises the stakes of the discussion and makes it clear that Woolf considers it crucial. Woolf’s first-person voice creates a reflective tone, for example in the phrase “I ask myself.” This effect is heightened with the use of questions that ask the reader to consider these matters for themselves.

“With all his powers of observation, which are marvellous, with all his sympathy and humanity, which are great, Mr. Bennett has never once looked at Mrs. Brown in her corner.”

Woolf returns to the motif of the railway carriage that she introduced in her sketch of Mrs. Brown. She contrasts her approach to the representation of character, which pays attention to the complete person, with Bennett’s focus on circumstantial details. Woolf brings Mrs. Brown to life as a real woman and not only a character in a book. This passage develops the reader’s sense that the author cannot completely know the character.

“A convention in writing is not much different from a convention in manners. Both in life and in literature it is necessary to have some means of bridging the gulf between the hostess and her unknown guest on the one hand, the writer and his unknown reader on the other. The hostess bethinks her of the weather, for generations of hostesses have established the fact that this is a subject of universal interest in which we all believe. She begins by saying that we are having a wretched May, and, having thus got into touch with her unknown guest, proceeds to matters of greater interest. So it is in literature.”

Woolf develops an analogy between literary conventions and social manners. She offers a relatable story concerning why conventions are useful and how they can be limited. This passage serves to connect “life” and “literature.” Woolf uses similes to make a complex concept clearer.

“You will see how keenly I felt the lack of a convention, and how serious a matter it is when the tools of one generation are useless for the next. The incident had made a great impression on me. But how was I to transmit it to you? All I could do was to report as accurately as I could what was said, to describe in detail what was worn, to say, despairingly, that all sorts of scenes rushed into my mind, to proceed to tumble them out pell-mell, and to describe this vivid, this overmastering impression by likening it to a draught or a smell of burning.”

This passage explains Woolf’s efforts to represent complex impressions in literature when the old conventions are no longer adequate. Her sentences become long and full of short clauses as she struggles to articulate herself, communicating a feeling of being overwhelmed. She reaches for similes (“likening it to a draught or a smell of burning”) but implies that these are inadequate with the phrase “all I could do.”

“I let my Mrs. Brown slip through my fingers. I have told you nothing whatever about her. But that is partly the great Edwardians’ fault. I asked them—they are my elders and betters—How shall I begin to describe this woman's character? And they said, ‘Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the year 1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe cancer. Describe calico. Describe——’ But I cried, ‘Stop! Stop!’”

Woolf is in dialogue with the “great Edwardians” like Bennett who tell her how to represent character. This passage takes the form of an actual dialogue in which the speech of the Edwardians is clipped, matter of fact, and laden with imperative verbs giving instructions including the repetitive “describe […] describe […] describe.” This conveys a sense of the oppressiveness of past conventions.

“That is what I mean by saying that the Edwardian tools are the wrong ones for us to use. They have laid an enormous stress upon the fabric of things. They have given us a house in the hope that we may be able to deduce the human beings who live there. To give them their due, they have made that house much better worth living in. But if you hold that novels are in the first place about people, and only in the second about the houses they live in, that is the wrong way to set about it.”

Woolf rejects “Edwardian tools” of literary representation, which focused on the “fabric of things,” She extends the metaphor of “tools” by making these writers create “houses” which, though “worth living in,” have undue prominence in novels which should be about “people” rather than things. Through the image of literary tools building a house, Woolf gives the reader a sense of the materiality of Edwardian writing against which she sets her approaches.

“A writer is never alone. There is always the public with him—if not on the same seat, at least in the compartment next door. Now the public is a strange travelling companion. In England it is a very suggestible and docile creature, which, once you get it to attend, will believe implicitly what it is told for a certain number of years.”

Woolf introduces the character of the reader or reading public. This figure appears in the railway carriage beside the Georgian writer and plays a role in what this author can or will do. Woolf’s metaphor of the English reader as “a very suggestible and docile creature” embodies a general category in a specific and singular “creature.” This personification makes a large and abstract category tangible.

“For this state of things is, I think, inevitable whenever from hoar old age or callow youth the convention ceases to be a means of communication between writer and reader, and becomes instead an obstacle and an impediment. At the present moment we are suffering, not from decay, but from having no code of manners which writers and readers accept as a prelude to the more exciting intercourse of friendship. The literary convention of the time is so artificial—you have to talk about the weather and nothing but the weather throughout the entire visit—that, naturally, the feeble are tempted to outrage, and the strong are led to destroy the very foundations and rules of literary society.”

This passage extends Woolf’s image of literary convention as social decorum and imagines writers who conform to outdated standards as speaking always and only about the weather, unable to progress to more meaningful topics. Woolf takes this metaphor further in imagining writers and readers in “the more exciting intercourse of friendship” once they escaped conventional chitchat. This set of metaphors imagines a relationship between writer and reader that is more active, meaningful, and vibrant, but which cannot be achieved until new literary conventions are established.

“Grammar is violated; syntax disintegrated; as a boy staying with an aunt for the weekend rolls in the geranium bed out of sheer desperation as the solemnities of the sabbath wear on. The more adult writers do not, of course, indulge in such wanton exhibitions of spleen. Their sincerity is desperate, and their courage tremendous; it is only that they do not know which to use, a fork or their fingers. Thus, if you read Mr. Joyce and Mr. Eliot you will be struck by the indecency of the one, and the obscurity of the other. Mr. Joyce's indecency in Ulysses seems to me the conscious and calculated indecency of a desperate man who feels that in order to breathe he must.”

Woolf describes the bad behavior of a child under the constraints of a formal and solemn occasion as a metaphor to explain the tendency of Modernist writers to abandon, “violate,” or “disintegrate” conventions of grammar or syntax. Woolf suggests that a desperate effort is needed to break the bonds of literary forms that do not fit their subjects or their times.

“Ulysses, Queen Victoria, Mr. Prufrock—to give Mrs. Brown some of the names she has made famous lately—is a little pale and dishevelled by the time her rescuers reach her.”

Mrs. Brown is shown to inhabit a range of guises. She is imagined as the basis for characters of Modernist literature—in poetry, a novel, and biography—by her contemporaries: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria, and T. S. Eliot’s Mr. Prufrock. These authors are imagined metaphorically as “rescuers” whose efforts, while admirable, have not spared Mrs. Brown some “dishevel[ment],” by which Woolf means that Modernist writers, in attempting to truthfully represent character without falling back on old conventions, are not always fully successful. Woolf argues that it is nevertheless a worthwhile effort.

“May I end by venturing to remind you of the duties and responsibilities that are yours as partners in this business of writing books, as companions in the railway carriage, as fellow travellers with Mrs. Brown? For she is just as visible to you who remain silent as to us who tell stories about her.”

Woolf reasserts the role of the reader as a “fellow traveller” with the writer. In the previous example, the reader impeded the writer and was a “docile” creature who would resist innovation. Here the reader is imagined as a “partner […] in the business of writing books.”

“Your part is to insist that writers shall come down off their plinths and pedestals, and describe beautifully if possible, truthfully at any rate, our Mrs. Brown. You should insist that she is an old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety; capable of appearing in any place; wearing any dress; saying anything and doing heaven knows what. But the things she says and the things she does and her eyes and her nose and her speech and her silence have an overwhelming fascination, for she is, of course, the spirit we live by, life itself.”

The metaphor of writers coming down from “plinths and pedestals,” presumably representing unimpeachable authority and esteem, is used to discuss the changed role of the author. The primary emphasis is given to the character—Mrs. Brown—whose value and variety are packed into a dense list of attributes that imply an abundance of possibilities.