ABSTRACT

The battle scenes that fill the traditional epic with heroic greatness and masculine courage become, in Virginia Woolf's reflections on the spirit of European modernity, the fear of war instead. To Woolf, war is a "masculine fiction". Woolf's epic vision does not depend on battles, national destinies, and male heroics; rather, conspicuous "heroism" is reserved for the characters—female and male—who possess an "ordinary mind on the ordinary day", as "Modern Fiction" describes it, and who attempt to cope and survive in an increasingly painful world. Woolf exploits the fragmentation that is implicit in such "ordinariness" through her characters' often banal memories of the past, scattered and disjointed, that come rushing to the present through emotionally charged internal monologues. Woolf's own writing can be seen as belonging to a nascent female tradition that defines the epic through a differently coded form of heroism, strength, and vision.