Modernism and Gender

Virginia Woolf,

A Room of One’s Own

“The title women and fiction might mean,

and you may have meant it to mean,

women and what they are like,

or it might mean women and the fiction that

they write;

or it might mean women and the fiction that

is written about them;

or it might mean that somehow all three are

inextricably linked together.” (3)

Ezra Pound

“Make it new”

“The phallus or spermatozoid charging, head-on, the female chaos”

“Even oneself has felt it driving any new idea into the great passive vulva of London”

“The mind is an up-spurt of sperm”, “the form-creator”

“Without any digression on feminism, [. . .] one offers woman as the accumulation of her hereditary aptitudes, [. . .] but to man, given what we have in history, the ‛inventions’, the new gestures, the extravagance, the wild shots, the new bathing of cerebral tissues.”

Marinetti’s futurist manifesto (1909):

“We are out to glorify war:

The only health-giver of the world!

Militarism! Patriotism!

The destructive Arm of the Anarchist!

Ideas that kill!

Contempt for women!”

Otto Weininger: Sex and Character: “Women have no existence and essence; they are not, they are nothing. Woman has no share in ontological reality.”

D.H Lawrence: “Perhaps the greatest revolution in our modern times is the emancipation of women: and perhaps the deepest fight for two thousand years or more has been the fight for woman’s independence, or freedom, call it what you will. The fight has been bitter and, it seems to me, it is won. It is even going beyond, and becoming the tyranny of woman, of the individual woman in the house, and of the feminine ideas and ideals in the world.”

T.S. Eliot: The Love Song of J.

Alfred Prufrock

“In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time

To wonder: ‛Do I dare’ and, ‛Do I dare?”

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—

(They will say: ‛How his hair is growing thin!’)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

(They will say: ‛But how his arms and legs are growing thin!’)

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

[...]

For I have known the arms already, known them all—

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl

And should I then presume?

And should I begin?”

D.H. Lawrence: Hensure Men and

Cocksure Women

“And this is what makes the cocksureness of women so dangerous, so devastating.It is really out of scheme, it is not in relation to the rest of things. So we have the tragedy of cocksure women. They find, so often, that instead of having laid an egg, they have laid a vote, or an empty ink-bottle, or some other absolutely unhatchable object, which means nothing to them. [. . .] It is all fundamentally disconnected. It is all an attitude, and one day the attitude will become a weird cramp, a pain, and then it will collapse. [. . .] Having lived their life with such utmost strenuousness and cocksureness, she has missed her life altogether. Nothingness!”

“Fight for your life, men. Fight your wife out of her own self-conscious pre-occupation with herself. Batter her out of it until she is stunned.”

Virginia Woolf,

A Room of One’s Own

“ The history of men's opposition to

women's emancipation is more

interesting perhaps than the story of

that emancipation itself.”

“as the battle of the sexes raged in public and in private, between stern Victorian husbands and their maddened wives, between turn-of-the-century misogynists and rebellious suffragists, between modernist no-men and autonomous New Women, between mid-century he-men and ambitious independent women, between contemporary masculinists and second-wave feminists, literary men and women began to wage war not only with but over words themselves.”

(Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar)

“literary men and women began to wage war not only with but over words themselves. Indeed, both the sphere of literary history and the nature of the language out of which that history is constituted became crucial combat zones, since both the man’s case and the woman’s cause had to be based not only on redefinitions of female and male nature but also on revisions of the aesthetic assumptions and linguistic presumptions of patriarchal culture.” (Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar)

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923)

(Kathleen Beauchamp)

Life/work

New Zealand (upper middle-class)

From 1903-1906; 1908-: England

John Middleton Murray: 1911/1918

Short stories: Rhythm, Blue Review,

Athaeneum

Volumes:

In German Pension

Bliss and Other Stories

The Garden Party and Other Stories

The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories

Illness, death

Themes, topics, mode of writing

Loneliness

Fragmentation

Alienation

Gender troubles

Social criticism

Point of view technique

Metaphoricity, symbolism

Open-ended stories

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

Gertrude Stein

Salon: 27 Rue Fleurus, Paris

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Three Lives (The Good Anna,

Melanctha, The Gentle Lena)

“Ada”

Tender Buttons

The Making of Americans

Metonymic modernism

“Lena was patient, gentle, sweet and german. She had been a servant for four years, and had liked it very well.

Lena had been brought from Germany to Bridgepoint by a cousin and had been in the same place there for four years.

This place Lena had found very good. There was a pleasant, unexacting mistress and her children, and they all liked Lena very well.

There was a cook there who scolded Lena a great deal but Lena’a german patience held no suffering and the good incessant woman really scolded Lena for Lena’s good. [. . . ]

Lena had good hard work all morning, and on the pleasant, sunny afternoons she was sent out into the park to sit and watch the little two year old girl baby of the family.

The other girls, all of them that make the pleasant, lazy crowd, that watch the children in the sunny afternoons out in the park, all liked the simple, gentle, german Lena very well.”

(‘The Gentle Lena’)

Women of the Left Bank

Natalie Barney

Anais Nïn

Djuna Barnes

Colette

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

Edith Wharton

Jean Rhys

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Major works

The Voyage Out 1915

Night and Day 1919

Jacob’s Room 1923

Mrs Dalloway 1925

To the Lighthouse 1927

Orlando 1928

A Room of One’s Own 1929

The Waves 1931

Flush 1933

The Years 1937

Three Guineas 1938

Between the Acts 1941

Periods, topics, modes of writing

Till 1919: early

Post-Victorian/Edwardian

Topics: social critique, new woman, colonial encounter,

loneliness

1919-1931: high modernism

The human subject/mind, social critique, gender

Multiple point of view, free indirect speech, stream of

consciousness, free associations, metaphoricity

1928-1941: late modernism

Literary legacy, generic re-writings

The human subject and their cultural heritage

Self-reflexivity (often foreshadowing the postmodern)

To the Lighthouse

Mrs and Mr Ramsay, Lily Briscoe

Elegy/farewell to the preceding/ parents’

generation

Three parts

1st: desire and (dis)empowerment; culmination: dinner

party

2nd: post-WWI reconstruction of the space; slow-motion

movie (death, divorce)

3rd: Lily Briscoe finishing her painting // Cam, James and

Mr Ramsay reaching the lighthouse

Female Künstlerroman

A Room of One’s Own

“For we think back through our mothers if we arewomen.” (ch. 4)

The parable of Shakespeare’s sister (ch. 3)

“ Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth centurya change came about which, if I were rewritinghistory, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Warof the Roses. The middle-class woman began towrite. ” (ch. 4)

Alternative canon

Matrilineage (vs. patrilineage)

Harold Bloom, Anxiety of Influence (1973)

Thematic and textual significance

“Woolf [...] seems to practice what we

might now call a deconstructive form of

writing, one that engages with and thereby

exposes the duplicitous nature of

discourse. In her own textual practice

Woolf exposes the way in which language

refuses to be pinned down to an underlying

essential meaning. (Toril Moi, Introduction:

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Feminist

Readings of Woolf in: Textual/Sexual

Politics 11)

Jean Rhys (1890-1979)

Life/workDominica; Europe: London, Paris, (Budapest), US,

England

Novels:

The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927)

Voyage in the Dark (1934)

Good Morning, Midnight (1939)

Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

Smile Please (1979)

Themes:

Displacement

Cultural encounter

Loneliness, alienation

Fragmentation

Gender

Peter Childs: Modernism

“any history or definiton insinuates many

implicit exclusions. Modernism has

predominantly been presented in white,

male, heterosexist, Euro-American middle-

class terms, and any of the recent

challenges to each of these aspects either

reorients the term itself and dilutes the

elitism of a pantheon of modernist writers,

or introduces another one of a plurality of

modernisms.”

Thank you for your attention!