“A Grievous Necessity”: the Subject of Marriage in Transatlantic Modern Women’S Novels: Woolf, Rhys, Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston
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UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI Date:___________________ I, _________________________________________________________, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in: It is entitled: This work and its defense approved by: Chair: _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ “A GRIEVOUS NECESSITY”: THE SUBJECT OF MARRIAGE IN TRANSATLANTIC MODERN WOMEN’S NOVELS: WOOLF, RHYS, FAUSET, LARSEN, AND HURSTON A dissertation submitted to the Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (Ph.D.) in the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the College of Arts and Sciences 2004 by Kristin Kommers Czarnecki B.A., University of Notre Dame 1991 M.A., Northwestern University 1997 Committee Chair: Arlene Elder ABSTRACT “A GRIEVOUS NECESSITY”: THE SUBJECT OF MARRIAGE IN TRANSATLANTIC MODERN WOMEN’S NOVELS: WOOLF, RHYS, FAUSET, LARSEN, AND HURSTON My dissertation analyzes modern women’s novels that interrogate the role of marriage in the construction of female identity. Mapping the character of Clarissa in The Voyage Out (1915), “Mrs. Dalloway’s Party” (1923), and primarily Mrs. Dalloway (1925), I highlight Woolf’s conviction that negotiating modernity requires an exploratory yet protected consciousness for married women. Rhys’s early novels, Quartet (1929), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939), portray women excluded from the rite of marriage in British society. Unable to counter oppressive Victorian mores, her heroines invert the modernist impulse to “make it new” and face immutability instead, contrasting with the enforced multiplicity of identity endured by women of color in Fauset’s Plum Bun (1929) and Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). Hurston’s last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), indicts American race and gender relations in the story of a white woman’s modification of her identity within an abusive marriage. In each novel, marital crises reflect the experience of becoming “modern,” of attaining female selfhood in sexually, socially, and racially complicated milieus. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would first like to thank Alison Rieke and Amy Elder for their unfailing support of my work. Their scholarly expertise, their warmth and friendship, and above all their deep love of literature continue to inspire me. I am also indebted to Maggy Lindgren, Wayne Hall, and Marty Wechselblatt, whose courses, conversation, and kindness guided me throughout my studies at the University of Cincinnati. Very special thanks goes to Drew Shannon for countless hours spent listening to my ideas and assuaging my angst. Special thanks also to Traci Curl for her friendship and, due to her own Ph.D., her understanding of the challenges of doctoral work. I would like to express my gratitude to my parents, Donald and Nancy Kommers, for their support in this and all of my endeavors. Most of all, I wish to thank my husband Paul for his love, encouragement, and sacrifices over the past five years. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ………………………………………………………………………2 Chapter One – Clarissa Dalloway’s Modern Marriage ………………………….17 Chapter Two – “Cut to an Echo”: Jean Rhys’s Immutable Modernity ………….65 Chapter Three – Jessie Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen, and the Multiplicity of Modern Identity ………………………………………………113 Chapter Four – Modified Female Identity in Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee …………………………………………………..173 Conclusion …………………………………………………………………….215 Works Cited ……………………………………………………………………222 2 Introduction In October 1928, Virginia Woolf was preparing the Cambridge lectures on women and fiction that would become the text of A Room of One’s Own the following year. In October 1928, Zora Neale Hurston apprenticed herself to a voodoo priestess in New Orleans as part of her research on African-American folklore. On the surface, two more dissimilar women and experiences could hardly be found, yet Virginia Woolf and Zora Neale Hurston do warrant comparison. Both were vanguards of their literary coteries. Both sought to articulate human experience through literary innovation, creating complex female characters and narratives. Both located similar expressions of intense emotion. In her fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), for instance, Woolf writes that war veteran Septimus Warren Smith is overcome after hearing his wife utter the word “time.” In his mind, “The word ‘time’ split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white imperishable words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time; an immortal ode to Time. He sang” (Mrs. Dalloway 78). In Hurston’s short story “The Gilded Six-Bits” (1933), Joe May is devastated to find his wife with another man. “The great belt on the wheel of Time slipped and eternity stood still,” Hurston writes. “The shapeless enemies of humanity that live in the hours of Time had waylaid Joe. He was assaulted in his weakness. Like Samson awakening after his haircut. So he just opened his mouth and laughed” (Hurston Reader 213-14). Woolf and Hurston’s choice of the same metaphor to convey inner conflict, with characters crying out when faced with time’s magnitude and brutality, is one of many parallels between Anglo and African-American modern women’s literature. My dissertation, “A Grievous Necessity”: The Subject of Marriage in Transatlantic Modern Women’s Novels, examines works by Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Jessie 3 Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston as they explore the construction of women’s identity in marriage throughout their novels and stories. In many ways emancipated in their own lives, they nevertheless focus in their narratives upon women’s entrapment in marriage. The juxtaposition of literary innovation with repressive social tradition is a hallmark of transnational women’s modernism and the means by which they dissect matrimony, the “grievous necessity,” the foremost requirement of patriarchal discourse. My title comes from Helga Crane’s opinion, in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), of the social importance of marriage for women. The writers I explore, of English, Anglo-Caribbean, African-American, and Danish-West Indian heritage, bridge cultural, racial, and international divides in locating marriage as a crucial site of modernist efforts at establishing women’s subjectivity. Each narrative underscores the discrete nature of consciousness. Together they highlight the crosscurrents among culturally constructed gender roles and domestic tropes, demonstrating, in Paul Gilroy’s words, that “the distinctiveness of the modern self might reside in its being a necessarily fractured or compound entity” (46). Just as Jennifer De Vere Brody “mines the intersection of the supposedly distinct fields of Victorian studies and African American studies” in her book, Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture (1998 6), my thesis knits together the academically distinct yet intriguingly corresponding realms of Anglo and African-American modernism.1 The term 1 Scholars note the divisions between Anglo and ethnic/non-Western literary studies and acknowledge that the latter generally receives short shrift. Houston A. Baker, Jr., believes the Harlem Renaissance “has frequently [and erroneously] been faulted for its ‘failure’ to produce vital, original, effective, or ‘modern’ art in the manner, presumably, of British, Anglo-American, and Irish creative endeavors” (xiii). Baker states that African-American writers of the time produced work just as innovative as that of Joyce, Eliot, or Pound, and establishes, in Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), a definition of modernism particular to African-American writers. Bonnie Kime Scott’s anthology, The Gender of Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), expands upon traditional concepts of modernist writing by including writers of color, thus challenging ‘language-centered interpretations of modernism favored in the canonization process” (5). Her thesis relates to Fauset, whose novels are stylistically traditional but thematically progressive. In The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), Paul Gilroy laments 4 modernism denotes a period of artistic innovation and cultural experience from roughly 1910 to 1950. Stream-of-consciousness, nonlinear storytelling, and explorations of human psychology are characteristic of literary modernism, spurred by seismic shifts in society effected by the end of Victorianism, World War I, and the Great Migration of African-Americans moving from rural to urban areas. Certain women modernists, such as Woolf and Hurston, have garnered significant scholarship, while others have only begun to receive the recognition they deserve, particularly women of color like Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen, whose male Harlem Renaissance counterparts have traditionally received much greater acclaim.2 Still other women modernists, including colonial British-West Indian writer Jean Rhys, are not easily categorized and often remain on the margins of academia.3 Studying Anglo and African-American women writers together establishes a more comprehensive modernism, illuminating the unity between seemingly disparate