Reinterpreting Silence in the Early Twentieth-Century Modernist Novel

My project analyzes how modern novelists James Joyce, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf experiment with various usages of silence in their novels: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), The Return of the Soldier (1918), and Jacob’s Room (1922), to elucidate a broken, modern consciousness in both textual form and ineffable experiences. I explore how all three writers use their characters to show how sound is detrimental to their personal growth, individual artistic identity, and selfhood. While the modernist soundscape is loud and enervating, Joyce, West, and Woolf demonstrate how silence and solitude are a necessity for their three protagonists—Stephen Dedalus, Chris Baldry, and Jacob Flanders—who do not fit the mold of the lead character in a Bildungsroman plot. During the early 20th century, noise abatement campaigns emerged as a response to the din of the new era, and I use these crusades as a lens to examine the unlikely association between modern novels and silence. Instead of participating in communal engagement and communication, Stephen, Chris, and Jacob desire to move away from technological noises and toward the silent solitude of their pasts or former periods in history. All three novelists foreground their protagonist’s wish for exclusion as a protective mechanism from the onslaught of modern noise. Joyce, West, and Woolf transport their characters to other places in time through quiet modes of speech and innovative narrative techniques, including epiphany, telepathy, modernist ellipses, and textual gaps where dialogue is entirely absent from the story. Reinterpreting Silence in the Early Twentieth Century Modernist Novel reinterprets the power of silence within the inextricable linkage between noise and modernity. Through the novel form, I illustrate how language has its origins in silence and that words are not a necessary means to express the inexpressible.