How Perception of Time Effects Writing Style

Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf are from two different centuries and their writing styles prove how technological advances have changed writing and time. Emma is chronological and slow paced whereas Mrs. Dalloway takes on almost a stream of consciousness quality and is clipped and jumps from past to present and from place to place.
Austen lived in a time when the carriage was the fastest mode of land transportation. Some of her characters lived quite close to each other in today’s standards but only interacted with each other maybe once or twice a year. Austen describes every interaction and conversation between her characters in Emma. Her paragraphs are long and detailed and she analyzes every gesture and word that transpires. One can’t tell the exact time of day but always tell when it is night, day, and morning, evening, midnight or noon in Emma. Austen is precise and displays everything chronologically and does not have any flashbacks but will diverge and give information and detail when appropriate and needed. Austen immediately lets the reader know what Emma will be about, romance and the changing of her characters over time and describes her characters immediately as well either through dialogue or a direct paragraph or two including history, looks and social rank.
Woolf lived in a time when the car, railroad, steamboat and airplanes were making their debuts. Standard time was being introduced and watches accurate to the second were being engineered. Woolf starts Mrs. Dalloway with a flashback and introduces a few main characters with it. The reader isn’t even quite sure it’s a flashback until later when Woolf mentions in passing that Mrs. Dalloway is actually older than eighteen. As said earlier, Woolf writes Mrs. Dalloway in almost a stream of consciousness style. She flashes back without warning, jumps from character to character intermittently and the only reason the style wouldn’t be characterized as stream of consciousness is because Woolf writes the book in the third person. Unlike Austen, Woolf divulges information about her characters in a roundabout, hidden and indirect way. The events in Mrs. Dalloway are not chronological and it is not clear from the beginning of the book what it will be about. Even thirty pages in, it is hard to predict exactly what the rest of the book will be about.
One would think that with the introduction of standard time and the speeding up of time via modern transportation would make modern books more fast paced but also precise and chronological, but they seemed to have achieved the opposite effect. With precise time came the ability and motivation to make books and artwork that are clipped and distorted by time and space. Fast and precise time gave artists the motivation to distort and represent it in unconventional ways. The standardization and change in the perception of time and also space gave artists free reign, and these changes ushered in a new era of writing and artist movements such as cubism, dada and the Edwardians.

Citation:

Austen, Jane. Emma London: Penguin, 1996. Print

Woolf, Virginia. “Mrs Dalloway.” Oxford University Press. 2009. Print.