Women Artists and Writers

Modernist (Im)Positionings

B. J. Elliott, Jo-Ann Wallace

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317762133
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this beautifully illustrated and provocative study, Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace reappraise women's literary and artistic contribution to Modernism. Through comparative case studies, including Natalie Barney, Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Gertrude Stein, the authors examine the ways in which women responded to Modernism and created their artistic identity, and how their work has been positioned in relation to that of men.
Bringing together women's studies, visual arts and literature, Women Writers and Artists makes an important contribution to 20th century cultural history. It puts forward a powerful case against the academic division of cultural production into departments of Art History and English Studies, which has served to marginalize the work of female Modernists.

1

WHOSE MODERNISM?

The subtitle of our book, Modernist (im)positionings, evokes both a discourse and a strategy. The discourse is that of modernism as it has been constructed in the visual and literary arts. The strategy is, but only in part, that of a feminist recovery of “lost” or neglected women writers and artists. Our use of the portmanteau word “(im)positionings” is meant not only to invoke the reevaluation of writers like Natalie Barney or artists like Nina Hamnett (“imposing” them on an academy which has refused to recognize the degree of their contributions to “modernism”), but also to suggest our commitment to rethinking modernism as a discursive and historical field. This means re-examining the critical reception even of now canonical writers and artists like Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Marie Laurencin. Rather than regarding them as privileged individuals whose genius assured them a place in a largely masculine modernist canon, we want to explore more broadly the conditions of their work. What were their material and financial resources? What kinds of audiences did their work attract or reach? What kind of effect did this have on their aesthetic decisions? How did they position themselves and how were they positioned in relation to the avant-garde, alternate women’s communities, and the geographical centres or peripheries of modernist production? How does a fuller understanding of women’s position within modernism alter our understanding of modernism as a discursive field?

We are influenced here by Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the field of cultural production and the ways in which the cultural necessarily participates in or reflects the political. Because it is “occupied by objects and practices with minimum use-value,” the cultural is also “a field in which par excellence the struggle is governed by a pure logic of difference or distinction, a pure logic of positionality” (Garnham and Williams 1986: 124).¹ Furthermore, as Bourdieu argues, “Specifically aesthetic conflicts about the legitimate vision of the world, … about what deserves to be represented and the right way to represent it, are political conflicts (appearing in their most euphemized form) for the power to impose the dominant definitions of reality, and social reality in particular” (Bourdieu 1986: 154–55). What we want to borrow from Bourdieu is the possibility of understanding “modernism” as just such a cultural field, one which must be further understood as the evolving product of a continuing struggle for certain kinds of symbolic power (Bourdieu 1986: 159). This means examining the ways in which women artists, writers, publishers, and gallery owners in London, New York, and Paris negotiated and competed – with men, but also with each other – for the power to define a modern aesthetics and poetics. However, it also means examining current institutional investments in “modernism.” What is at stake for English studies and art history in their various disciplinary representations of “modernism”? As feminist scholars, how do we negotiate our own “positioning” in relation to the still largely masculinist academy, the work of an earlier generation of feminist researchers, the larger women’s community beyond the university, and, not least, the women whose lives and work are the focus of this book? As cross-disciplinary, collaborative writers how do we negotiate competing disciplinary claims? Whose “modernism,” whose terminology, whose theory? Bourdieu’s approach will help us to articulate some of our questions and to understand what is at stake for the field of modernism, for the women we are studying, and for feminist interventions in our respective disciplines. However, we also need to supplement his work, for while his theory of symbolic power and cultural reproduction is premised upon a theory of class (or “habitus”), he largely neglects to take gender into account either theoretically or empirically. Nonetheless, and as Toril Moi points out, a feminist supplement to Bourdieu’s theory “permits us to grasp the immense variability of gender as a social factor” (Moi 1991: 1035). Since the women who form the basis of this study are all differently positioned – in terms of class, financial resources, education, and sexual orientation – in relation to each other and to the larger field of “modernism,” their gender inflects the production and reception of their work in very different ways.

In calling “modernism” a discursive or a cultural field, and in placing the term within inverted commas, we want to suggest that there is no innate or unproblematic modernism whose history can simply be uncovered. In imposing and positioning women within the literary and art historical discourses of modernism, we are not recovering a more authentic or a“truer”’ modernism. We hope instead to expose some of the ways in which cultural fields are constructed and especially the ways in which gender influences and informs those constructions. The “modernist” period provides an especially promising framework for such an inquiry, for one of its paradoxical characteristics is the degree to which so many of its practitioners and its subsequent historians have self-consciously participated in the construction of various hegemonic “modernisms.” In the next four sections of this chapter we outline the ways in which modernism has been variously configured within the fields of literary and art historical studies; the chapter concludes with a brief introduction to the eight women who comprise our case studies.

FORMAL CONFIGURATIONS

As one interdisciplinary critic of “modernism” notes, “The common thread for anyone who yearns to be Modern, whatever the medium, is the ability to refurbish the language of his [sic] art, whether through disruption and new formations, or through colors, tones, sound sequences, visual effects, neologisms” (Karl 1988: xi; our emphasis). Certainly “modernism” has traditionally been constructed less as a period than as a style or a series of formal interrogations, and this has had profound implications for any assessment of women’s cultural production within “modernism.” This is further complicated by the different dating of “modernism” within various disciplines. In English literary studies, the “modernist” period is usually defined as covering 1890 to 1939, with the 1920s as the period of “high modernism;” in the visual arts, a formalist notion of “modernism” is equated with the rise of avant-garde artistic groups preoccupied with visual perception and aesthetic innovation, often taking the form of an emphasis on abstraction. Broadly speaking, the period of such avant-gardism extends from the mid-nineteenth century (e.g. Impressionism) through to the third quarter of the twentieth century (e.g. Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism).² In terms of art criticism, the rise of a formalist “modernism” is almost invariably associated with the Bloomsbury aesthetics of Roger Fry and Clive Bell. In his various activities as curator, writer, painter, educator, and collector, Roger Fry sought to rid British aesthetic taste of its latent Victorianism by promoting works of art that embodied an internal formal purity which did not relate to the moral responsibilities of actual existence.³ As Simon Watney points out, Fry’s thinking generated a two-tiered system involving imagery which was instinctive and disinterested as opposed to that which was social and symbolic. Only the former qualified as art by evoking purely disinterested aesthetic emotions and not raising the mundane spectres of subject matter, social usage, and representational content. Fry utilized these evaluative criteria for measuring past art by tracing a tradition that extended from Giotto, Byzantine mosaics, Piero Della Francesca, Poussin, and Cézanne to the French Post-Impressionists (Watney 1980: 4).

It should be emphasized that Fry organized the First and Second Post Impressionist exhibitions (1910 and 1912) and wrote his most influential critical essays during the 1910s and 1920s. During this period his ideas were popularized in Clive Bell’s Art, which largely simplified Fry’s notions of the aesthetic hypothesis and the appreciation of “significant form.”⁴ This was also the period when the discipline of art history was institutionalized through the launching of journals such as the Burlington Magazine (for which Fry often wrote) and the establishment of art history courses at British academic institutions such as the Courtauld Institute of Art at the University of London. Fry’s influential position within the British arts establishment and his emphasis on the internal development of the artistic tradition help explain why his ideas proved so appealing to the newly emerging profession of art history.

Clement Greenberg, perhaps the best known apologist for “modernism” in the visual arts, was indebted to many of Roger Fry’s ideas which he expanded into a more systematic theory of internal change and development in modern art.⁵ In the course of indirectly acknowledging his debt to Fry and Bell, Greenberg also argued that although the notion of “pure” (or modernist) poetry emerged earlier than “pure” painting, a “pure” art criticism preceded its literary counterpart and actually influenced writers (Greenberg 1961: 240). In such (in)famous essays as “Modernist painting” and “Avant-garde and kitsch” Greenberg provides perhaps the most definitive rationale for the formalist “modernist” project in the visual arts. In the following passage from his 1965 essay, “Modernist painting,” he emphasizes the self-criticism and disciplinary purity of “modernism” across the arts:

The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself – not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence. ... It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique to the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thereby each art would be rendered “pure”, and in its “purity” find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence.

(Greenberg 1984: 5–6)

According to Greenberg, such rigorous self-criticism and purification was necessary in order to counter the “levelling” effects of academicism, commercialism, and, especially, mass production – trends which Greenberg subsumes under the label of “kitsch” (Greenberg 1961: 9).⁶ Because it is unreflectingly imitative and infinitely reproducible, characteristics which ensure its accessibility to “the masses,” kitsch is more susceptible to propagandistic manipulation and thus to being a tool of fascistic regimes. The function of the modernist avant-garde, therefore, was “to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence” (5). One effect of the new disciplinary purity was that “subject matter or content [became] something to be avoided like a plague” (5).

The establishment of a recognizably English-language literary modernism is usually attributed to the influence of poet and philosopher T.E. Hulme and the impresario efforts of Ezra Pound. In his much quoted essay, “Romanticism and classicism” (published posthumously and alternately dated 1913/14 or 1911/12; see Levenson 1984: 81–87), Hulme anticipated a “classical revival” of poetry grounded in “a new technique, a new convention.” He called for a poetry which would be emotionally “reserved” as well as “dry and hard” (as opposed to the “dampness” of the Romantics), producing “accurate, precise and definite description.” Significantly, Hulme drew an analogy between the precise craftsmanship of the architect and the classical poet; like the architect, the poet is a “man who simply can’t bear the idea of ‛approximately.’ He will get the exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an idea in the mind.” In classical poetry the “subject doesn’t matter;” the real struggle is with language, which the poet must hold fixed to his purpose (Hulme 1924: passim). Correspondences between Fry’s aesthetics and Hulme’s poetics are obvious and the effects were similar. Hulme’s poetics were adapted and popularized by Ezra Pound who – together with F.S. Flint, Richard Aldington, and H.D. – established the relatively small and short-lived but enormously influential Imagist movement (see Zach 1976). Pound also provided a credo for what would become “high modernism” in his emphasis on technical or formal experimentation, best summed up in his demand of writers to “make it new” and in his catechism-like “Credo” which asserts, in part, “I believe in technique as the test of a man’s sincerity” (Pound 1968: 9).

While there is no single literary critic of “modernism” who holds as central a place in English studies as Clement Greenberg does in art history, it is nonetheless possible to suggest a composite definition and justification of formalist literary “modernism” by drawing on the work of Irving Howe, Harry Levin, and Stephen Spender.⁷ Levin’s elegiac “What was modernism?” (1960) sets what will become a familiar tone. In that essay he marks the passing of a homogeneous and cross-disciplinary movement, a generation of “giants” whose creative energies climaxed in 1922 – an annus mirabilis of modernist production (619) – and whose hallmark was a devotion to “craftsmanship” (626) coupled with an “uncompromising intellectuality” (628). Levin’s elegiac tone – the sense that he is commemorating a past greatness and coherence – is, in part, also ascribed to modernism itself. All three critics emphasize the time-consciousness of “modernism” – its sense of “nowness” (Levin 1960: 621), of “historical impasse” or “apocalyptic cul de sac” (Howe 1967: 15), its distrust of progress and its confrontation of the present with the past (Spender 1963: x, 71–78).⁸

Spender describes the “predicament” of modernism as “that of past consciousness living in the present;” “with his intellect [the modern] is committed to criticizing that present by applying to it his realization of the past” (78).⁹ Spender is careful to distinguish between what he calls “contemporaries” and “moderns,” suggesting that “contemporaries” still adhere to a Victorian belief in progress while “moderns” distrust progress and “view the results of science as a catastrophe to the values of past civilization” (x). Unlike the “contemporary,” who may still believe in the efficacy of political action, the “modern” looks to art to fuse past and present (78) and to restore a lost sense of coherence. According to Spender, this helps to account for the modernist emphasis upon formal experimentation. The modern world can only be healed by an artistic vision which “restores wholeness to the fragmentation, even by realizing it as disaster, as the waste land, or night town” (81). That is, the self-referentiality and self-sufficiency of modernist art and literature enact a wholeness which is missing from the external world.

Thus traditional literary critical and art historical constructions of “modernism” share a causal emphasis upon a sense of historical and cultural impasse. Of equal interest, however, is a shared critical rhetoric which constructs the “modernist” enterprise as a heroic, if doomed, last stand in a losing battle against the forces of what Levin revealingly calls “domestication” (615). Examples of such heightened rhetoric abound: “modernism must always struggle but never quite triumph, and then, after a time, must struggle in order not to triumph” (Howe 1967: 13); “while some of [modernism’s] lights are still among us, before they have all been extinguished, we should ask ourselves why they have burned with such pyrotechnic distinction” (Levin 1960: 620); “since the avant-garde forms the only living culture we now have, the survival in the near future of culture in general is thus threatened” (Greenberg 1961: 8). The questions which remain unasked in traditional/formalist configurations of “modernism” are: whose culture is threatened? is a modernist sense of historical impasse shared, or is it gender, class, and race specific? did formal experimentation mean the same thing to women and men artists, or to the women and men who viewed or read their work? did women feel the same need to restore a lost cultural coherence? whose interests did “modernism” (and its critics) serve?

INSTITUTIONAL CONFIGURATIONS

Within the last decade, there has emerged a second generation of “modernist” critics which has been far less interested in sketching in the broad outlines of a modernist movement; instead, they want to expose the diversity within “modernism” and to explore “modernism’s” institutional alliances and strategies. That is, to what degree was “modernism” self-consciously constructed by its practitioners and by its critics, and how did various social and market for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedicated
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Whose Modernism?
• 2 Fleurs Du Mal or Second-Hand Roses?
• 3 Professionalism, Genre, and the Sister(S') Arts
• 4 The Making of Genius
• 5 Mediating Modernism
• Conclusion Enabling strategies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index