The Sea Has Many Voices: British Modernism and the Maritime Historical Imagination Maxwell Uphaus Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 © 2015 Maxwell Uphaus All rights reserved ABSTRACT The Sea Has Many Voices: British Modernism and the Maritime Historical Imagination Maxwell Uphaus This dissertation reorients the study of British modernism towards the ocean by uncovering modernism’s engagement with a set of ideas about the historical significance of the sea that I term “maritime foundationalism.” A key component of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British nationalism and imperialism, maritime foundationalism held that British history and identity were fundamentally maritime and that the sea, in turn, propelled Britain’s historical development and the course of history in general. Reading works by Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot alongside contemporary historical, geographical, and scientific texts, I trace how British modernism developed by incorporating, modifying, and contesting this pervasive maritime- historical ideology. Even as modernist works build on notions of the sea as the foundation of the empire and conveyer of its history, they also disrupt these notions by representing the sea in more unsettling ways, as a testament to the dark sides of maritime-imperial history or an element that threatens to engulf history altogether. Each of my chapters details the literary effects of this interaction of maritime foundationalism and more melancholy conceptions of the sea’s historicity at key points in the intertwined histories of modernism and empire between the 1890s and the 1940s. “The Sea Has Many Voices” thus shows how competing constructions of the sea shape modernism’s historical imagination—the way it defines its present and situates it in relationship to the past. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Hurry Up and Wait: Kipling, Conrad, and the Fin-de-Siècle Sea 28 Chapter 2: From Progress to Parenthesis: The Sea and History in The Voyage Out and To the Lighthouse 89 Chapter 3: “We Cannot Think of a Time that is Oceanless”: T. S. Eliot’s Seas and Imperial Retreat 161 Coda: Finished with the Sea? 224 Bibliography 236 i Acknowledgements As the hymn says, hither by thy help I’ve come: First and foremost, it is my pleasure to thank the members of my dissertation committee: Sarah Cole, Matthew Hart, and Nicholas Dames. Each has been an unfailing source of challenge, advice, and assistance during my time at Columbia, and they have guided this project from the beginning with firmness, acuity, patience, generosity, wisdom, and enthusiasm. I am also grateful for the insightful feedback of Eleanor Johnson and Jennifer Wenzel, from which (I hope) the project has greatly benefited. I am indebted to members of the Columbia 20th/21st century graduate colloquium and the New York/New Jersey Modernism Colloquium, especially Lindsay Gibson, Lucas Kwong, Emily Hayman, Hiie Saumaa, and Peter Murray, for reading and commenting upon drafts, suggesting paths to follow, and providing much-needed support. Beyond Columbia, my thanks are due to the organizers of and my fellow participants in seminars and panels at the Modernist Studies Association and the Northeast Modern Language Association, in and through which much of my thinking for this project unfolded; in particular, I would like to thank my fellow panelists from MSA 16 in November 2014, Matthew Eatough, Laura Winkiel, and Jed Esty. Many excellent teachers and mentors at three institutions, and equally many friends both inside and outside the academy, have contributed fundamentally to the success of this project, such as it is, and to that of the larger project of which it represents the (momentary) culmination—more than I can thank fittingly and by name here. Three must stand for many: Joshua Swidzinski, Travis Riddle, and Peter Luebke, all of whom have been both intellectual and professional models and welcome comrades on the road. ii At the base of it all, there are my mother, father, and sister, for whose love and support I am enduringly grateful, and my wife Audrey. To her, in closing, I am glad to voice my love and profound gratitude for uncer giedd geador. iii Introduction About midway through Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, Jacob Flanders and a friend make their way home “boastful [and] triumphant” after a night of revelry. As the two young men trade Greek quotations and imagine themselves familiar with “every sin, passion, and joy,” Woolf describes their conviction of occupying the center of the universe and the summit of human experience through a significantly maritime simile: “Ages lapped at their feet like waves fit for sailing” (101). To these embodiments of masculine British prewar privilege, Western history stretching back to ancient Greece seems as continuous, as compliant, and as affirmative as a calm sea. In their eyes, they can range over this historical span with the ease and authority of sailing on a halcyon day, and the currents of these wave-like ages all lead towards them, their place, and their moment. Woolf quickly goes on to hint, furthermore, that such a sense of seaborne supremacy is not merely metaphorical. The proprietor of a coffee stall, “[t]aking Jacob for a military gentleman,” begins talking about “his boy at Gibraltar” (102), the great British naval base at the mouth of the Mediterranean—where Jacob’s brother, who has gone into “the King’s Navy” (24), will later be stationed (171). The novel suggests that Jacob’s assurance of a sea of history—a maritime history—linking him to the Greeks has something to do with his country’s command of the actual sea route between Greece and Britain. Such a link between the sea, and Britain’s command thereof, and a progressive, legitimating view of history surfaces often in Jacob’s Room. At the end of the novel, it is above all the sea power—“the fleet…at Gibraltar”—controlled by the Admiralty officials and Cabinet members who meet in Whitehall’s “tethered grey fleet of masonry” (240) that enables them, as they see it, to “[decree] that the course of history should shape itself this way or that way” (241). 1 According to such “men in clubs and Cabinets,” “actions” like those of “battleships ray[ing] out over the North Sea” “are the strokes which oar the world forward” (216). Not only does the deployment of sea power, in this view, epitomize historically consequential action; historical progress itself is imagined as maritime—the forward movement of a ship. As it connects teleological historical authorization and the maritime, Woolf’s figure of “[a]ges…like waves fit for sailing” thus distills a powerful belief, with which her novel repeatedly engages, of the sea’s fundamental importance to British history, even history itself.1 My dissertation traces the role of this ideological connection of the sea and history in British literature between the 1890s and the 1940s. Woolf was far from the only British author in this period to discern a set of ideas about the historical importance of the sea and seafaring at the center of the nation’s self-conception. Nor was she the only modernist author to use these ideas as key aspects of her literary practice—core elements of her works’ historical imagination. This dissertation will show how the depictions of the maritime in the work of writers belonging by either birth or adoption to the British Empire reflect the sea’s rich historical significance in early twentieth-century British culture.2 I argue that as it draws on this contextual cultural significance, 1 A note on terminology: I follow Samuel Baker in using “maritime” or “the maritime” to designate “the broad scope of involvement with the ocean,” including both “the marine,” or “what pertains to the sea in its independent nature,” on the one hand, and “the nautical,” or “what pertains specifically to seafaring in its social and technological aspects,” on the other (5). Unlike Baker, however, I try not to “use ‘sea’ and ‘ocean’ interchangeably”; as often as possible, I refer to “sea” when that element is being thought of as facilitating imperial expansion and historical continuity (along the lines of the ideology I define below as “maritime foundationalism)” and “ocean” when the element’s resistant, non-human dimensions are being emphasized. In other words, my use of “sea” versus “ocean” lines up with the binary in oceanic conceptions described in more detail below. 2 “British Empire” is defined in this dissertation in its most expansive sense, as designating the empires of both colonialism and colonization, as well as the so-called “informal empire” dominated by British economic interests. Much recent historical scholarship has emphasized the economic and conceptual cohesiveness, during the modernist period, of a “British world” comprising Britain and its territories of significant overseas settlement—or, as it tended to be called at the time, “Greater Britain”; see Bridge and Fedorowich; Magee and Thompson; and Belich. In particular, many of these scholars have emphasized the sea’s practical and ideological centrality to “Greater Britain.” I seek to incorporate this scholarship while still keeping in view the violence that characterized British seaborne expansion into both the settler and the colonial empires. Since my emphasis is on the British as, in J. G. A. Pocock’s words, “an imperial, oceanic or global people (or peoples)” (Discovery 19), I refer throughout to 2 the sea in British modernism serves a historiographical function: it acts as a way of exploring the course and nature of history and of defining and questioning contemporary identity in the light of this historical exploration.3 Consequently, their treatments of the maritime constitute one of the principal means whereby modernist works participate in the debates over the nature of British history, and thus the orientation of British identity, unfolding over the whole of this period— from J.