Gender and the Intersubjective Sublime in Faulkner, Forster, Lawrence, and Woolf

Erin Speese

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317130383
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Exploring how the modern novel's complex depictions of parenthood restructure traditional conceptions of the Romantic sublime, Erin K. Johns Speese shows how William Faulkner, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf use related strategies to rewrite the traditional sublime as an intersubjective experience. Speese shows that this reframing depends on the recognition of social objectification and an ethics of reciprocal empathy between mothers and fathers. She juxtaposes traditional aesthetics and Slavoj Žižek's concept of the sublime object of ideology with recent theoretical work regarding identity, arguing that these modern novelists construct what she terms a "sublime subject, " that is, a person who functions in the space of the traditional sublime object. In revealing the possibility of transcendent emotional connection over reason, these novelists critique the objectification of the other in favor of a sublime experience that reveals the subject-shattering power of empathy.

1 Introduction

Empathy. With increasing gun violence, the rise of social media, and a larger cultural awareness of bullying, the buzz-worthy word “empathy” identifies a pivotal need in our increasingly desensitized society. In the last few years, The New School for Social Research and the (Canadian) National Reading Campaign’s articles on the link between empathy and early childhood reading surfaced in social media and the blogosphere, indicating that one of the best ways for a child to develop empathetic behavior is reading literature.¹ In 2013, an issue of Smithsonian magazine featured a study about the development of morality and empathy in children as young as nine months as the cover story.² Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams was surprisingly popular, highlighting empathy as a concern of the larger public, in 2014.³ Also, the seeming crisis regarding the rise of technological access, especially through social media, in Generation Y has led to increased attention to cyber-bullying. In articles on this issue, one of the first arguments cited against bullying is the lack of empathy in that particular generation.⁴ Culturally, there has been a noticeable uptick in attention to how we interact with others and the importance of emotion in an increasingly desensitized society. Currently, there is growing anxiety regarding this issue, but if we look to the past, we will see that many intellectuals in the early twentieth century had a similar reaction to the popularity of salacious newspaper articles that they thought contributed to the destruction of society. Although that desensitization at the time related to anxieties about the decline of an elite class, especially as it concerned the reception and perception of art, in the early twenty-first century, the callousness of individuals is still attributed to the rise of media—albeit in other, more visual forms like television, movies, the internet, and video games. Still, the anxiety is one and the same: a concern about the decline of emotional response in a seemingly unaware audience.

In Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf depicts a modern woman, Isa, as she reads the account of a soldier inflicting violence on a woman, probably in the act of rape, in a newspaper. The narrator writes that “For her [Isa’s] generation the newspaper was a book” (14), noting the younger generation’s preference for entertainment from this type of media. While reading, Isa equates a scene of violence with romance as she reads the Times:

She took it and read: “A horse with a green tail…” which was fantastic. Next, “The guard at Whitehall…” which was romantic and then, building word upon word, she read: “The troopers told her the horse had a green tail; but she found it was just an ordinary horse. And they dragged her up to the barrack room where she was thrown upon a bed. Then one of the troopers removed part of her clothing, and she screamed and hit him about the face….”

(Between the Acts 14)

For Isa, the scene invites the image of romance; however, Woolf juxtaposes that patriarchal narrative with a scene involving the objectification of a woman through male violence. In fact, Isa sees this scene as reality:

That was so real; so real that on the mahogany door panels she saw the Arch in Whitehall; through the Arch the barrack room; in the barrack room the bed, and on the bed the girl was screaming and hitting him about the face.

(Between the Acts 15)

As the audience of a newspaper, Isa has been taught to read this narrative as one of romance; however, that narrative also reflects the insidious nature of patriarchal control. Isa’s insistence on the realness of this scene offers a moment of empathy that suggests men’s violence is a reality for all women. Her fantasy illustrates the double bind of a woman’s position in a patriarchal society—torn between a subconscious awareness of the constant objectification of women by men and an unconscious complicity in narratives of romance—that keeps women blind to the constant violence enacted on them, both ideologically and physically. Despite all of this, Isa’s first reaction is to see the narrative as romance and then see the scene as reality—an act of empathy that connects her with the woman in the narrative.

Gender and the Intersubjective Sublime in Faulkner, Forster, Lawrence, and Woolf’s foundation rests on the importance of empathy and the ways that cultural narratives have often denied emotion in order to condition modern subjects to a patriarchal and imperialist society that relies on the marginalization of minorities. Inspired by how this issue is still at play today, I look back to early-twentieth-century novels in order to address the way that British and American modernists used their aesthetic practices to promote empathy. While working on this project, I noticed a trend in the modern novel where moments of empathy correlated with the possibility of intersubjectivity, and in order to convey its importance, I saw an aesthetic narrative emerging among modern novelists. At their very heart, these novelists challenged the language of traditional aesthetics, specifically the ideas of subject and object, as well as distanced themselves from a similar aesthetic narrative that emerged in Ezra Pound’s brand of modernism. William Faulkner, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf fought the subject/object or self/other split necessary for both patriarchy and aesthetic practice to function. Their representations of marriage, parenthood, and birth reveal a modernist reinterpretation of the sublime experience between two subjects, a mother and a father, rather than between a subject and an object. Using birth as an intersubjective experience between parents, these writers rewrite the sublime as a soul-shattering moment of empathy that allows two people to connect despite the strictures of ideology. Modernism’s recalibration of the sublime as an intersubjective experience indicates the movement’s intent to discuss, deconstruct, and rethink subject positions, especially in relation to gender. As I Lay Dying (1930), Howards End (1910), The Rainbow (1915), and To the Lighthouse (1927) represent the relationship between mothers and fathers as reciprocal. The depiction of both the father and mother as confined to particular subject positions results in an intersubjective relationship that draws attention to the confinement of social and gender roles. These writers rethink the sublime as an experience between two living, breathing, emotional subjects rather than a simplified object, like nature in the traditional sublime. In reimagining the sublime, these novelists show that the terror constantly threatening the modern subject results from social interactions and ideology rather than the unknown, vast universe invoked in the philosophical ponderings of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant.

Faulkner, Forster, Lawrence, and Woolf point to gender and its performance as key to not only familial but also social conflict. These novelists reveal the family consistently failing to align with its ideological image. Using new, experimental prose forms like stream of consciousness and free indirect discourse, modern novelists explore the possibility of human connection by rewriting the imagined “objectivity” of aesthetics. Incorporating the inherent tensions between objectivity and subjectivity in the sublime, these writers stress the importance of subjectivity against multiple social discourses that claim to be “objective.” Although these writers explore issues of sexuality, race, and class, the emotional rewriting of aesthetics and intersubjectivity coheres in images of familial gender dynamics. Sexuality, race, and class all come into play in many of these novels; however, gender differences overtly show larger social conflicts about identity. These writers reconsider sublimity through gender inequalities often depicted in ideal images of the Victorian family.

Ultimately, I combine the ideological “sublime object” of Slavoj Žižek, the symbolic object (patriarch) and subject approach to gothic fiction of Anne K. Mellor, the queerly sublime practice of Lee Edelman, and the ethical solution of Joanna Zylinska in order to reconfigure the sublime experience between two empathetic subjects, the Victorian mother/wife and father/husband, in modernist novels. Instead of the “sublime object” of Žižek, I propose the “sublime subject”—a person (rather than a thing) who can create a sublime experience. Like the gothic “patriarch” of Mellor, I examine the Victorian “patriarch,” replete with an understanding of the construction of both masculinity and femininity. Drawing on the sinthomosexual, a “sublime subject,” who offers rupture as the realization of identity located in ideological nothingness, I explore the possibility of a reciprocal relationship where a queer figure fulfills the role of both object and subject. Using Zylinska’s self/other representation of an ethical sublime that elides difference through the performance of identity, I see a reciprocal, empathetic, and intersubjective sublime emerge in the interactions between two subjects. Combining these theories, I trace a similar representation of gendered sublimity in Faulkner, Forster, Lawrence, and Woolf that shows the collapse and confrontation of binary thinking at the turn of the twentieth century.

Aesthetic theory, exemplified by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, proposes the sublime as a transcendent encounter provoked by a physical object. In the typical sublime moment, a person experiences or perceives an object (usually of art or nature) in a way that elicits a transcendent feeling of awe, terror, and pain, but also pleasure. Through empirical categorization of sublime objects, Burke suggests that the sublime is evoked in liminal spaces between borders and beyond boundaries. Immanuel Kant, on the other hand, focuses on the mental process that arises in the person experiencing the sublime. Slavoj Žižek has extended this traditional theory of the sublime in arguing that the “sublime object” signifies a larger ideological structure that is transcendent (i.e., money signifies capitalism). For Žižek, particular ideologies take on a transcendent function as they come to stand in for an idealized imaginary constructed through language and discourse. The “sublime object” reveals the mechanisms of ideology that appear to work beyond their material signifiers.

Žižek’s articulation of the sublime draws on Jean-François Lyotard’s interest in its relationship to form, avant-garde aesthetics, and postmodernism. In positing the postmodern condition, Lyotard takes the sublime as a key aesthetic, ethic, and moral theory stemming from Kant, but he reconsiders the term in tandem with the developments of modernity in relationship to capitalism. He writes,

There is something of the sublime in the capitalist economy. It is not academic, it is not physiocratic, it admits of no nature. It is, in a sense, an economy relegated by an Idea—infinite wealth or power. It does not manage to present any example from reality to verify this Idea. In making science subordinate to itself through technologies, especially those of language, it only succeeds, on the contrary, in making reality increasingly ungraspable, subject to doubt, unsteady.

(“The Sublime and the Avant-Garde” 105)

Lyotard latches onto the way science, technology, and language work together in a capitalist economy in order to capitalize on doubt or the fissures that are not presentable. In essence, it draws on the negativity of the Kantian sublime in order to function—a very negativity that Žižek then explores through the intersections of Lacan, Marx, and Kant. Lyotard perhaps best articulates the modern sublime in his The Postmodern Condition, remarking,

Here, then, lies the difference: modern aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure. Yet these sentiments do not constitute the real sublime sentiment, which is in an intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain: the pleasure that reason should exceed all presentation, the pain that imagination or sensibility should not be equal to the concept.

(81)

Lyotard explores the tensions between pleasure and pain as they appear for the modern subject but in terms of nostalgia that blur the lines between “modernism” and “postmodernism” as two separate entities. As Gillian B. Pierce notes,

Lyotard does not see the postmodern as an historical period or as a rupture with an earlier “modernism,” but rather as an impulsion and a tendency from within the heart of the project of modernity itself, an expression of an essential struggle and difference perhaps best expressed through the search for forms in the work of art.

(3)

Through Lacanian psychoanalysis, Slavoj Žižek assesses Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant’s arguments by examining the sublime object in relation to its ideological function, locating the sublime as negativity related to the “modern” subject’s interaction with social norms. Žižek writes that

[t]he Sublime is an object in which we can experience this very impossibility, this permanent failure of the representation to reach after the Thing. Thus, by means of the very failure of representation, we can have a presentiment of the true dimension of the Thing.

(The Sublime Object of Ideology 229)

In his critique and analysis, Žižek focuses on objects traditionally associated with the sublime like nature, art, and literature. The “Thing” for Žižek tends to be an object that represents a transcendental signified. Although mostly concerned with political structures, Žižek’s approach points to how a person, like a king, can function as an ideological sublime object. The king, as the figurehead, maintains the apparent transcendence of a monarchial political structure. Sublime objects, like money, provoke the sublime experience for a subject by failing to represent the complexities of ideological structures, like capitalism, that ultimately create the subjects the sublime objects invoke. Žižek’s discourse maintains the traditional subject/object terminology of Burke and Kant and transfers that binary into subjectivity. Even when a sublime experience occurs between two subjects, as Anne Mellor articulates between a daughter and her patriarchal father, one of the subjects fulfills the role of an object, which echoes the subject/object dynamics of Lacanian psychoanalysis in his articulation of the woman as “other.”⁵ Thus, Žižek’s “sublime object” reiterates subject/object discourse as it relies heavily on Lacanian psychoanalysis. By focusing on ideology, Žižek not only explores how multiple identities are constructed through encounters with objects but also points to issues of subjectivity. As a Marxist critic, Žižek focuses on political and capitalist functions of ideology; however, his approach to the “sublime object” can be applied to other identity categories outside of class, particularly gender.

Žižek’s emphasis on Lacanian psychoanalysis suggests alterity as an always, already present component of the sublime, which critiques critical readings of the sublime as only “egotistical.”⁶ At the end of The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek explores the process of sublimation through the conflict between “essence,” which “presupposes itself as its own other, in the form of externality, of something objectively given in advance” (256), and “appearance.” Žižek writes, “[W]e can speak of the difference, the fissure separating the essence from appearance…only, that is, in so far as the essence presupposes itself as something alien, as its own Other” (The Sublime Object of Ideology 257). Žižek reveals “essence” as key to determining the subject:

This self-fissure of the essence means that the essence is ‘subject’ and not only ‘substance’: to express this in a simplified way, ‘substance’ is the essence in so far as it reflects itself in the world of appearance, in phenomenal objectivity; it is the movement of mediation-sublation-positing of this objectivity, and the ‘subject’ is substance in so far as it is itself split and experiences itself as some alien, positively given Entity.

(The Sublime Object of Ideology 257)

Here, Žižek implies a complicated idea of “objectivity” that reveals subjectivity and suggests an “alterity” in the sublime as related through the spilt subject created by ideology. The conflict between essence and appearance reveals the complicated interaction of the subject in ideology that offers a space of intersubjectivity through alterity. Žižek, though, returns to Hegelian and Kantian constructions of both the sublime and ideology, as well as maintains a reading of the sublime that is “egotistical” and relies on reason. In essence...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A novel feeling: aesthetics of emotion and the modern novel
• 3 Mater sacer: Addie as sublime object in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying
• 4 Only disconnect: Ruth Wilcox, death, and the sublime object in Howards End
• 5 Transcending the rainbow: the possibility of sublime intersubjectivity in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow
• 6 “What is R?”: Mrs. Ramsay as feminism’s sublime object in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
• Epilogue: Žižek’s mom: theory, feminism, and the mother
• Works cited
• Index