Faculty of philology department of english philology viktorija mi

sense of increased unreliability and uncertainty in the means by which reality is apprehended”. 
During the period of Classicism, philosophers and scientists had confirmed a spatial sense of time, 
and humans viewed the past as a unity of completed events that have no direct connection with the 

---

38 
present. Later, in the context of the Romanticism innovations, the emphasis shifted to the value of 
nature and human development putting emphasis on the presence of organic unity including both 
the process of history and the growth of the individual. Indeed, the literature of the Romanticism 
often expressed the sense of continuity and relationship with the past. Romanticists treated the past 
as the period of mystery and glorious events, the time of great victories and discoveries. At the 
same time, though, they were disappointed by the picture of the reality they faced and past was not 
only a beautiful memory but also a way to escape from the depressing reality. Lee claims (1977:56) 
that the romantic literature convincingly mirrors the theme of transcendentalism, as in romantic 
songs, poems, and novels natural forces such as the changing seasons and weather remain 
unchanged by the influence of time. Thus, transcendentalism aims to ignore the barriers between 
past, present, and future and attempts to find the unity underlying an individual’s growth from 
childhood to old age. (Lee, ibid.) 
Without doubt, new theories in the fields of science and psychology in the latter nineteenth 
century have directed modern thought regarding time and have influenced trends in modern fiction. 
There is enough evidence to claim that the formulation of the theory of quantum mechanics raised
the dilemma of time, scientists no longer treated time as an abstract absolute entity. According to 
modernists, the amount of time an event takes is dependent upon the observer’s frame of reference; 
in other words, time is relative, a concept which, in T.S.Eliot’s words (1975: 177) , serves as “ a 
way of controlling, or ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of 
futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”. As the theorist Michael H. Whitworth called 
it, modernists believed in “psychological time and clock time”. (2007:123) Thus, the notion of time 
began to be understood from several different angles: there is time measured by clocks and a certain 
abstract universal time that no human being is able to determine, divide, or stop. 
Indeed, Stevenson (1998:182) claims that in the nineteenth century, sociology and 
anthropology began investigating the past and seeing its significance for human beings. For 
instance, Carl Jung, under the great influence of the insights of Freud, formulated an innovative 
theory of the collective unconscious, and, consequently, provided support for the modern writer’s 
thoughts about cohesion between individuals living in the present and those of the historical past. In 
Stevenson’s words (ibid.), artists and philosophers then aimed “to see life and reality as fluid, 
continuous, perpetually creative, but falsely apprehended by the divisive, dissecting apparatus of 
the intellect – clocks, calendars, concepts categories”. These innovations lead us to the natural 
conclusion that the scientists and psychologists of the nineteenth century established new theories 
studying and interpreting the influence the peculiarities of modernist temporality, while writers and 

---

39 
philosophers aimed to popularize these new attitudes towards the notion of time related to the 
changing conception of human reason and mind.
Various technical advances were occurring so rapidly that with no doubt, man was not able to 
predict his life in the future; the future, as well as the past and present, remained unpredictable, a 
human being had, therefore, lost his sense of stability as he participated in the increased mobility of 
modern life and in rapid social and economic change. Besides, to quote Stevenson (1998: 11), “new 
concerns with space and time, however, were symptoms of still more fundamental changes of 
outlook apparent in the early twentieth century”. The theorists Anna Snaith and Michael H. 
Whitworth (2007: 168) support Stevenson and Lee and emphasize the fact that modernist writers 
aim to focus on the phenomenological relations between time and space in order to portray the 
modernist human who is aware of passing time that shapes human life. Besides, Snaith and 
Whitworth believe that the accelerating speed of life and growing intensiveness of physical and 
mental experience also serve as meaningful factors that change man’s relationship with the past and 
with present time. 
As inferred by Baldic, Virginia Woolf was born in the twentieth century society and thus, she 
had a great opportunity to borrow some ideas related to the notion of time from the works of 
Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and other authors that had been dealing with the problematic 
nature of temporality over centuries. To quote Baldic (1996 :112), “Woolf reviews the question of 
women’s literary achievements in the context of the obstacles – economic, social, ideological – that 
stand in their way, and in so doing she exposes major injustices distorting the worlds of learning 
and literature themselves”. She felt it was necessary for the modern fiction writer to show the 
existing reality in the new light and from new angles, to deny or at least to contradict conventional 
attitudes towards time and history, reason and mind, life and death. Indeed, in her novels, Woolf 
views time as a highly personal, subjective, and fragmented entity, in contrast to time measured by 
the clock, which is limited by physically perceived boundaries. Lee supports Baldic’s ideas and 
notices (1977: 87) that the writer rebels against the role of the clock time in human beings’ life 
since, for them, time based on observations of physical science is not natural. According to the 
clock time, every day is the same length, and every hour is exactly one twenty-fourth of this 
interval. This concept is the time of matter in motion; it knows nothing of the human being who is 
not governed by the same laws as objects without life or spirit. Indeed, the clock time is based on 
repetition of a spatial nature, whereas time in the mind gains form from its repetitive nature, but on 
a personal level, in a man’s inner world. Woolf’s major interest is to express time as a changing 
vague entity that cannot be clearly measured or defined on the basis of stable background. Thus, as 

---

40 
Lee explains (1977: 89), the repetition of these permanent, or stationary, moments adds a lot to the 
specific treatment of time and space in her novels.
According to the analyst Leon Surette (1993:22), in her novels “Woolf devoted much energy to 
the problem of history – of the relation between the present, the past, and the future”. Without 
doubt, the stream of consciousness method and the new structural patterns employed this modernist 
writer affect her characters to a great extent, remote from conventional operations of time, her 
characters move in a complex ever – changing world, and they are, for the most part, aware of its 
implications. Interestingly, there is evidence to claim that in each Woolf’s novel, there is one 
character who understands time better than the others do: the central figure of a particular novel 
helps other characters bring their own time concepts into perspective. Thus, indeed, there is enough 
evidence to claim that Woolf’s fiction gives priority to the personal subjective metaphysical time 
existing in human mind that is opposed to the easily measured, divided, and controlled clock time.