Ambivalence and the Waning of Character in Modernism

Moral philosophers typically take the explanatory value of character for granted. As an interpretive device, character helps us to see what we witness in the mosaic of human behavior: that was honesty, not cowardice; flirtatiousness, not gregariousness. What often goes unnoticed, however, is the epistemic dependence of our ascriptions of character on the historical composition of moral experience. On this point, literary modernists do much better. Examining works by Woolf, Ford, Stein, and others this essay presents the details of a conspicuously modernist ambivalence about the explanatory and moral value of character in the context of the First World War.