When Virginia Woolf conceived her pioneering modernist novel To The Lighthouse, she sought to revolutionize literary representations of consciousness, time, and identity itself. By utilizing a stream-of-consciousness narrative approach, Woolf dissolved the barriers between a character's rambling inner psyche and the outer world of material reality. This radical technique allowed her to transcend the rigid categorizations and assumptions that had constrained human expression and understanding throughout patriarchal history.
In the same era, the novels of Ernest Hemingway's masculine voice reigned. From The Sun Also Rises to his famous collection Men Without Women, Hemingway probed straight into the deceptive performances and destructive repressions demanded of men by America's cult of hypermasculinity. His tort, spare prose laid bare the ferocious damage of funneling the complexity of male psyches into simplistic antiquities like bravado, stoicism, and violence.