Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism

Ewa Płonowska Ziarek

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780231530903
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism

Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women's transformative literary and political practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and she situates these tensions within the entrenched opposition between revolt and melancholia in studies of modernity and within the friction between material injuries and experimental aesthetic forms. Ziarek's political and aesthetic investigations concern the exclusion and destruction of women in politics and literary production and the transformation of this oppression into the inaugural possibilities of writing and action. Her study is one of the first to combine an in-depth engagement with philosophical aesthetics, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno, with women's literary modernism, particularly the writing of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen, along with feminist theories on the politics of race and gender. By bringing seemingly apolitical, gender-neutral debates about modernism's experimental forms together with an analysis of violence and destroyed materialities, Ziarek challenges both the anti-aesthetic subordination of modern literature to its political uses and the appreciation of art's emancipatory potential at the expense of feminist and anti-racist political struggles.

PART I

Revolutionary Praxis and Its Melancholic Impasses

1 On Suffrage Militancy and Modernism

Femininity and Revolt

In studies of Western modernism and modernity we encounter an unresolved and endlessly replicated contradiction between “revolutionary” and melancholic politics and art. How should we interpret this contradiction rather than reproduce it by privileging either the revolutionary or melancholic side of modernism? How is the divide between revolt and melancholia implicated in gender and race politics? And what are its implications for the status of women’s literary practice in modernism? I argue that the exclusive focus on melancholia is a symptom of the forgetting of the revolutionary tradition in modernity. By contrast, the celebratory insistence on revolution and subversive art forgets loss and domination, which persist despite ongoing particular struggles for freedom. Consequently, the oscillation between revolution and melancholia reveals the unresolved political contradiction between particular struggles for freedom coexisting with multiple forms of domination—what feminist theory has theorized as the intersection of race, gender, class, and sexuality.

In this chapter I offer a new interpretation of the revolutionary side of modernism by reconstructing the import of British suffrage militancy for political and aesthetic theories of modernity. In particular I analyze suffragettes’ insistence on the female right to revolt in the context of Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy and Theodor Adorno’s modernist aesthetics. By reconstructing the political discourse of female revolt in the first section of the chapter, I develop its implications for rethinking women’s literary practice in the second section. This juxtaposition of suffrage militancy with aesthetic and political theory allows us to rethink the pervasive modernist preoccupation with the new beyond mere formal experimentation for innovation’s sake and address it instead in the context of political struggles. Without this intersection between political and aesthetic struggles, it is all too easy to dismiss the rhetoric of the new as a symptom of either the aestheticization of politics or the commodification of art instead of recognizing it as the transformative political and aesthetic force.

Right to Vote or Right to Revolt?: Arendt and the British Suffrage Militancy

Although the feminist reception of suffrage has moved beyond Elaine Showalter’s dismissive claim that “the suffrage movement was not a happy stimulus to women writers” because it failed to produce a “real manifesto of female literature,”¹ British suffrage militancy (1903–1914) still remains marginalized in feminist political and aesthetic philosophies of modernity, and it seems that feminist theory has yet to catch up with this unprecedented female militancy. As a result, suffrage militancy remains a crucial event in the history of feminism without an extensive philosophical or aesthetic elaboration and as such demonstrates a certain failure of thinking and remembrance. As far as political theory is concerned, the role of suffrage militancy is still confined primarily to a historical and controversial intervention. Regrettably, there is little discussion of the contributions of suffrage militancy to feminist political philosophy, ranging from Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. Denise Reily’s and Joan Scott’s works are notable exceptions because they underscore the implications of suffrage movements for the unsolved dilemmas of feminist theory today. Reily’s “Am I That Name?” analyzes the British nineteenth- and twentieth-century suffrage movement through her account of the theoretical implications of the unstable collective category of “women” for feminist politics, whereas Scott’s Only Paradoxes to Offer inquires into the implications of the French suffrage movement for the still unreconciled contradiction between the feminism of equality and the feminism of difference.²

The most important work on the British suffrage militancy has been produced by feminist historians and cultural and literary scholars of modernism.³ Socialist historians, such as Sheila Rowbotham or Jill Liddington,⁴ have reconstructed the initially neglected or forgotten contributions of working-class and labor women to the suffrage movement both on the regional and national levels. Feminist cultural critics, like Jane Marcus, Lisa Tickner, Janet Lyon, and Barbara Green, have moved from a reconstruction of the history of the suffrage movement in the twentieth century to the analysis of the forms of its political activism, its diverse artistic and literary productions as well as its visual iconography. In the context of modernist literature, Jane Marcus and Janet Lyon have revealed parallels between the suffragettes’ interruptions of male political discourse and the iconoclastic impulse of the artistic avant-garde movements.⁵ Building on these studies, I want to raise a new question, one that has not yet been addressed by feminist critics of modernity—namely, the question of the political and aesthetic implications of the suffragettes’ redefinition of the right to vote as the right to revolt. In other words, what is at stake in my analysis is a conflicting relation between women’s political and literary discourses of revolution and the inaugural force of innovation. In contrast to the studies devoted to the history of the movement, iconography, or artistic and literary activities, I want first of all to reconstruct the political theory of revolution produced by suffrage militancy. Such a redefinition means that suffragettes’ contributions to political modernity and modern aesthetics are not limited to the enfranchisement of women, although historically this has been an enormous victory. Equally significant is the suffragettes’ discourse of revolution, which, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt’s insights, reveals the inextricable connection between freedom, the emergence of female political and artistic subjectivities, and the creation of new forms of political life. It is only by reconstructing the political discourse of female revolt that we can develop the implications of suffrage militancy for rethinking the status of women’s literary practice in modernity.

In order to develop the suffrage political discourse of revolution, I will focus on the militant stage of the British suffrage campaign because it is the experience and justification of female militancy that propelled suffragettes to redefine the right to vote as a more fundamental women’s right to revolt. British suffrage militancy is mainly associated with the political activism of the Women’s Social and Political Union, a British suffrage organization founded in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia, and, to a lesser degree, with the Women’s Freedom League, which emerged out of the split in the WSPU in 1907 over a disagreement about strategy, internal governance, and connections to the labor movement.⁶ As Rowbotham argues, although the militants were a controversial minority within the suffrage campaign, they nonetheless “set the pace” and “challenge[d] all the prevailing assumptions about womanhood.”⁷ The first militant protest organized by the WSPU occurred in 1905, when two of its leaders, Annie Kenney and Christabel Pankhurst, interrupted the Liberal political meeting in Manchester and subsequently provoked an arrest on the charge of an “assault” on a policeman in order to end the press blackout on suffrage political agitation. Indeed, the first task of suffrage militancy was to break the “conspiracy of silence” and force an entry of women as speaking subjects into the political arena of discourse and action. In fact, such a forced entry and insistence on women’s active participation in the political can be seen as the first militant act of the suffragettes. In response to the British Liberal government’s continuing refusal to consider woman’s suffrage legislation and in protest of the increasingly violent repressions of the suffragettes, the WSPU’s militant tactics escalated from the “interruption” of male political discourse to large-scale demonstrations, deputations to the prime minister, hunger strikes,⁸ window-smashing campaigns, the destruction of letter boxes, property, commodities, and shopping windows, the slashing of paintings in museums, and finally, to isolated acts of arson.⁹ After having claimed access to political space through their street demonstrations and marches, the suffragettes responded to the refusal of the vote by contesting and destroying the public circulations of letters and commodities that blocked their access to citizenship. As their window-smashing campaign in London’s fashionable shopping districts suggests, they also turned against the new techniques of advertising, display, and consumption, techniques that positioned middle-class women primarily as commodities and consumers rather than political subjects of speech and action. At the same time, in order to justify their militancy, suffrage activists produced in their numerous speeches, letters, manifestos, and journalism unprecedented redefinitions of femininity, revolution, and politics. In skillful quotations of historical precedents of militant protest and revolutionary struggle in the formation of British law and constitutional reforms, from the Magna Carta to male suffrage campaigns in the nineteenth century, suffragettes not only drew upon the tradition of male political radicalism asserting the right to oppose a despotic government, as Laura Mayhall points out,¹⁰ but through this practice of citationality produced an original notion of women’s revolutionary politics, the implications of which have yet to be fully appreciated and articulated by feminist political theory today.

Emerging from the practice and justifications of female militancy, the centerpiece of suffrage political praxis lies in the redefinition of women’s right to vote as the right to revolt. As Teresa Billington-Greig (who refers to herself as TBG), the founder of the Women’s Freedom League,¹¹ eloquently puts it, “our revolt itself was of very much greater value than the vote we demanded.”¹² Contesting the opposition between militant and constitutional methods (that is, the methods of protest that either respect or break the law), Billington-Greig’s defense of “the duty … to rebel” (TBG, 116) or “the right to rebellion” (TBG, 147) finally culminates in the claim that the deeper meaning of militancy lies not in the fight for the vote but in the defense of women’s right to revolution: “Militancy,” she writes, is not “the mere expression of an urgent desire for the vote, but … an aggressive proclamation of a deeper right—the right of insurrection” (TBG, 147). Despite all the differences between the two main British militant suffrage organizations, the WSPU and WFL, and despite all the internal debates about militant tactics, internal governance, and relations to the labor movement within both these organizations, “the right to insurrection” is in fact the paradigmatic expression and legitimation of suffrage militancy. We see the same definition of militancy as revolution again and again in numerous suffrage speeches and manifestos. In her 1908 speech at St. James Hall, “The Militant Methods of the N.W.S.P.U.,” Christabel Pankhurst proclaims that suffrage militancy “is seeking to work the most beneficent revolution in human affairs that the world has yet seen.”¹³ Similarly, Emmeline Pankhurst, in her 1913 New York speech “Why We Are Militant,” skillfully appeals to the ideals of the American and the French Revolutions in order to claim legitimacy for suffrage militancy as a new revolutionary movement: “I want to ask you whether, in all the revolutions of the past, in your own revolt against British rule, you had deeper or greater reasons for revolt than women have to-day?” (SP, 159).

How should we understand this revolutionary supplementation of women’s right to vote—a signifier of gender equality and female autonomy—with the right to insurrection? What kind of revolution is implied in suffrage proclamations? This appeal to the revolutionary tradition takes us beyond the logic of identification with the nation-state suggested, for instance, by Julia Kristeva, who associates the first generation of feminism with the feminism of equality.¹⁴ On the contrary, the redefinition of the women’s right to vote as revolt announces women’s participation in a transformative, creative praxis, its inaugural temporality, and the plurality of political agents. As Arendt argues in her book On Revolution, “the modern concept of revolution, inextricably bound up with the notion that the course of history suddenly begins anew, that an entirely new story, a story never known or told before, is about to unfold…. Crucial, then, to any understanding of revolutions in the modern age is that the idea of freedom and the experience of a new beginning should coincide.”¹⁵ That is why she argues that in order to understand the role of revolution in modernity we need, together, to think political freedom, the creation of the “new story,” and the institution of a new beginning in history.

This convergence of freedom, novelty, and revolution changes the meaning of all three of these terms. First of all, revolution in Western modernity has to be distinguished from historical change, resistance, or the restoration of lost liberties, as it refers to the occurrence of an unprecedented event, inaugurating a new course in history. The “revolutionary pathos of the absolutely new” (OR, 37) distinguishes modern revolutionary struggle from previous forms of protests. As Arendt writes, “only where this pathos of novelty is present and where novelty is connected with the idea of freedom are we entitled to speak of revolution” rather than the struggle for the restoration of lost liberties (OR, 34). Second, novelty also acquires a new sense in the context of the eighteenth-century revolutions. Prior to the revolutions of the eighteenth century, novelty was associated with discoveries in science and with new ideas in philosophy. It is the migration of the “new” from the realm of scientific and philosophical thought to the public realm of political action that radicalizes this notion and links it with the praxis of the multitude rather than with the achievements of a chosen few. Likewise, the revolutionary novelty has to be distinguished from the modern desire for consumption of commodities. It is precisely this revolutionary, collective sense of novelty that is critical for rethinking the status of women’s innovative literary practices in modernism.

Finally, revolutionary struggles change the meaning of freedom itself. Political freedom in the contingent historical world is different from liberation, even though liberation is its necessary precondition (OR, 33–34). Liberation is primarily negative—it is the struggle to end oppression—while freedom is positive, implying the creation of a new way of life. Furthermore, freedom is neither given by nature nor is it the property of the individual subject, but is relational, contingent, and created by acting with others in the polis. As a modality of being with others, freedom, Arendt argues, implies a participation in public speech, action, and government. And, most importantly, freedom in the positive and revolutionary sense reveals for the first time the capacity to create with others new forms of political life: revolutionaries are “agents in a process which spells the definite end of an old order and brings about the birth of a new world” (OR, 42, emphasis added). This configuration of revolutionary freedom as an intersubjective, relational, political agency to create new political structures with others—to enact the “birth” of a new world—is even more shocking and unprecedented when claimed by femininity, which is associated in Western modernity either with reproductive necessity and commodified objects of sexual exchange, in the private sphere, or with consumerism, labor, and philanthropy in public life, but never with political agency or revolutionary praxis.¹⁶ Because such agency is relational, created through and for action, it does not require or presuppose a common gender identity.

At the same time, Arendt stresses the fragility of the convergence of revolution with positive freedom, collective praxis, and the inauguration of new forms of political life. It is this fragility that links revolutionary hopes with melancholy. She shows how, in the course of the nineteenth century, the notion of revolutionary freedom was divorced from political action and novelty and associated instead either with the concept of historical necessity (of which the Hegelian dialectic of necessity and freedom [OR, 53] is the most famous philosophical articulation) or with its opposite, with the liberation of natural, prepolitical equality and liberty. When freedom is transformed into historical necessity or displaced into the realm of natural violence or evolutionary force, revolution falls under the “sign of Saturn” (OR, 49) and gives rise to melancholic despair: “‘The revolution devouring its own children,’ as Vergniaud, the great orator of the Gironde, put it” (OR, 49). This connection between revolution and melancholy shows the loss of freedom and the abdication of agency—that is, the power to inaugurate the new beginning—to historical necessity, natural development, or systemic contradictions in the capitalist mode of production. Melancholy is an effect of forgetting that revolution was not a historical necessity or organic development, but rather an inaugural act, “the foundation of freedom.” (216).

When suffragettes reinterpret the right to vote as the right to revolt, they not only contest their exclusion from existing liberties but also demand a positive right to freedom understood as the engagement in transformative praxis inaugurating new gender politics. Although dependent on the struggle against women’s exclusion from the political, the freedom implied by the right to revolt exceeds negative contestation because, according to Arendt, it manifests itself primarily as the capacity to create new relations in political life. Thus, in order to understand the implications of suffragettes’ redefinition of the vote as the right to revolt, we have to analyze the double aspect of their militancy: its iconoclastic side, negating women’s exclusion from the political, and its creative side, inaugurating the unforeseeable. Associated more frequently with suffrage militancy, the iconoclastic side manifests itself, in a manner evocative of the iconoclastic impulse of the artistic avant-garde, as destruction and disruption: as the “breaking” of silence (in particular, the press blackouts of suffrage coverage); as the contestation of derogatory signs of femininity (the political activist as a hysteric); as the interruption of male political discourse; as the shattering of the shopping windows, the dest...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: On Loss, Invention, and the Dilemmas of Feminist Aesthetics
• Part I: Revolutionary Praxis and Its Melancholic Impasses
• Part II: Female Bodies, Violence, and Form
• Part III: Toward a Feminine Aesthetics of Renaissance
• Notes
• Index