A History of Modernist Literature

Andrzej Gasiorek

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118607343
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A History of Modernist Literature offers a critical overview of modernism in England between the late 1890s and the late 1930s, focusing on the writers, texts, and movements that were especially significant in the development of modernism during these years.

• A stimulating and coherent account of literary modernism in England which emphasizes the artistic achievements of particular figures and offers detailed readings of key works by the most significant modernist authors whose work transformed early twentieth-century English literary culture
• Provides in-depth discussion of intellectual debates, the material conditions of literary production and dissemination, and the physical locations in which writers lived and worked
• The first large-scale book to provide a systematic overview of modernism as it developed in England from the late 1890s through to the late 1930s

1
Early Modernism

The New Woman

Towards the end of Honeycomb (1917), the third volume of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1915 − 1938), her protagonist Miriam Henderson identifies herself through a plume of cigarette smoke as ‘a new woman’ (P1 436). This new subject position is troubling, however, leading her to ponder how she is to ‘reconcile the role with her work as a children’s governess’ (P1 436). The much vaunted independence of the New Woman sits uneasily with the traditional female job of governess, not least because the latter typically functioned as the guardian of the gendered social norms that the former was ostensibly challenging. In fact, the New Woman was a complex and contradictory figure, as the numerous novels written by and about her amply attest. Her critics saw her as an iconoclastic, unnatural, and anarchic figure bent on inverting time-honoured sexual roles and destroying the patriarchal family in the process, but New Woman writing was often conservative, seeking to educate women, rehabilitate men, and reform the institution of marriage rather than overthrow it. But it was easy to overlook this aspect of New Woman writing and to focus on its more sensational elements, especially its interest in female sexuality. Various forms of behaviour (smoking, dressing ‘mannishly’, wearing make-up, living in rented flats, attending free-thinking artistic salons, riding bicycles) were seen by outraged commentators as the manifestations of a disturbing intellectual independence and also of dubious sexual morals. Thomas Hardy in Jude the Obscure (1895) described his character Sue Bridehead as a ‘woman of the feminist movement – the slight, pale “bachelor” girl – the intellectualized, emancipated bundle of nerves that modern conditions were producing’, thereby making the link between the New Woman and the politics of gender.¹ Other writers, most notably George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne), stressed the New Woman’s active sexuality, an emphasis that drew insults and opprobrium.

The origins of cultural phenomena are hard to identify with precision. Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) is often taken to be the first novel in a genre that includes (among many others) such key texts as Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did (1895), Mona Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus (1894), Mary Cholmondeley’s Red Pottage (1899), Gertrude Dix’s The Image Breakers (1900), Menie Muriel Dowie’s Gallia (1895), Isabella Ford’s On the Threshold (1895), George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893), Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman (1894), and Netta Syrett’s Nobody’s Fault (1896). In the wake of the Wilde trial in 1895 and the scandal it generated, New Woman fiction went into decline, but it would be a mistake to think it died out entirely, for not only did novels in the genre continue to be written but also its influence is discernible on a number of early twentieth-century works, among them Bryher’s Development (1920) and Two Selves (1922), E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1912), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in Love (1920), Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1915–1967), May Sinclair’s The Creators (1910) and The Three Sisters (1914), H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica (1909), Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915), and Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy (1924 − 1928). New Woman fiction was a genre in its own right and also a source for twentieth-century modernism, which both reacted against this powerful precursor and transformed it.² Bonnie Kime Scott argues that we need to recognise the ways in which ‘modernism was inflected […] by gender’, and this recognition leads us to see how a modernism ‘caught in the mesh of gender is polyphonic, mobile, interactive, sexually charged’.³

Although New Woman fiction took a variety of forms and comprised a range of political positions, it was associated with a wider drive for social change. New Women were linked with a desire for independence and education, equality between men and women, reform (rather than abolition) of marriage, criticism of sexual hypocrisy, the right to be able to work on equal terms with men, the struggle for the franchise, class politics, a rethinking of women’s ‘nature’ and their social roles, and, somewhat contradictorily, at times a call for full sexual freedom and at others an emphasis on purity for both genders. The novelist Sarah Grand, author of The Heavenly Twins (1893) and The Beth Book (1897), maintained in ‘The New Aspect of the Woman Question’ (1894) that the New Woman wanted to challenge long-established gender assumptions, argue in favour of sexual purity for both genders, and suggest that a reciprocal model of male–female relations was required, since ‘there are in ourselves, in both sexes, possibilities hitherto suppressed or abused, which, when properly developed, will supply to either what is lacking in the other’.⁴ This is a rather safe-sounding reformist account. Ella Hepworth Dixon, in contrast, argued that by gaining independence the New Woman had freed herself from the need to marry at all. This suggested that a more far-reaching challenge to sexual hierarchies was being mounted: ‘If young and pleasing women are permitted by public opinion to go to college, to live alone, to travel, to have a profession, to belong to a club, to give parties, to read and discuss whatsoever seems good to them, and to go to theatres without masculine escort, they have most of the privileges […] for which the girl of twenty or thirty years ago was ready to barter herself to the first suitor who offered himself and the shelter of his name’.⁵ According to this view, marriage was little more than a form of legalised prostitution; if women were now free to do the things many had longed to do for years, then what need was there for the institution of marriage? In short, Grand’s stress on ‘purity’ for both sexes and on the reform of marriage was not shared by all who engaged with the New Woman question, just as the Pankhursts’ puritan view of sexual morality was criticised by feminists in the 1910s. It is clear that, as Jane Eldridge Miller puts it, ‘there is no single type who is the rebellious woman’ in this period; there were, rather, various rebels and reformers who frequently disagreed with one another about the nature of the dilemmas confronting them.⁶

The more radical figure described by Hepworth Dixon was widely perceived as a social threat. This kind of New Woman − outspoken, hard-headed, and open-minded – was associated with decadence, degeneration, and anarchy. Her feminism was interpreted by defensive commentators as ‘a sign of decay and corruption’ that would doom civilisation to decline, and it was feared that her egotistical desire for autonomy would cause ‘incalculable upheaval and destruction’.⁷ The New Woman was also sexually ambiguous. She could be portrayed either as a sexually forward minx or as a bloodless brainbox with an aversion to sex. Jude’s Sue Bridehead would be an example of the latter type, as would Ann Veronica’s Miss Miniver, who, in contrast to the heroine’s ardour − ‘Hot-blooded marriage or none!’ − longs for a purely spiritual relationship: ‘Bodies! Bodies! Horrible things! We are souls. Love lives on a higher plane. We are not animals’.⁸

To her critics, the New Woman was a perverse and decadent being who betrayed her innate nature and her purpose in life: to be a dutiful daughter and wife, bear children, act as a help-meet to her husband, and sanctify the home with her dewy-eyed idealism. The New Woman’s independence threatened a society that relied on distinct gender roles and the cultural assumptions that underpinned them. Numerous commentators deplored her demand for independence, and her candid interest in politics, social questions, and sexuality led her to be denounced in some quarters as a licentious degenerate. The New Woman, moreover, was also frequently seen as but one instance of a wider process of cultural (perhaps even biological) decline. Following B. A. Morel, who saw degeneration as ‘a morbid deviation from an original type’, Max Nordau, for example, argued in his widely read Degeneration (1895) that ‘all the fin-de-siècle movements in art and literature’ revealed their proponents’ fundamental decadence.⁹

Opponents of the New Woman and her supposedly destructive ideas were hostile not only to her independent life in the modern city but also to her pernicious reading habits. Radical books were the enemy. It is no surprise, then, that fierce battles were fought in the 1880s and 1890s over censorship. Hardy’s problems with Jude the Obscure were part of a wider struggle with circulating libraries and booksellers like W. H. Smith, both of which exercised a good deal of control over people’s access to books. However, worries about the consequences of indiscriminate reading and disputes over candour in fiction were prevalent throughout the fin-de-siècle period.¹⁰ Wells registered these concerns in Ann Veronica when his heroine’s father – a reader of ‘healthy...