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Copyright by Catherine M. Bacon 2011 Copyright by Catherine M. Bacon 2011 The Dissertation Committee for Catherine M. Bacon Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Beyond Sexual Satisfaction: Pleasure and Autonomy in Women’s Inter-war Novels in England and Ireland Committee: Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Supervisor Lisa Moore, Supervisor Mia Carter Caroline Eastman Jane Garrity Beyond Sexual Satisfaction: Pleasure and Autonomy in Women’s Inter-war Novels in England and Ireland by Catherine M. Bacon, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2011 Dedication To my supportive family and loving friends without whom I could not have done this. Acknowledgements I first want to thank both of my supervisors, Lisa Moore and Elizabeth Butler Cullingford for their continued dedication to my growth as a scholar. I also want to acknowledge my good friends and colleagues Laura Smith and Tim Turner whose support and friendship in my life during this whole process has been invaluable. Finally I want to thank all the members, past and present, of Lisa’s dissertation writing group for their rigorous scholarly standards and creative feedback: Caroline Wiggington, Michelle Lee, Layne Craig, Amena Moinfar. Molly Hardy, Naminata Diabate, and Nandini Dhar. v Beyond Sexual Satisfaction: Pleasure and Autonomy in Women’s Inter-war Novels in England and Ireland Publication No._____________ Catherine M. Bacon, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2010 Supervisors: Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, and Lisa Moore My dissertation offers a new look at how women authors used popular genres to negotiate their economic, artistic, and sexual autonomy, as well as their national and imperial identities, in the context of the changes brought by modernity. As medical science and popular media attempted to delineate women’s sexual natures, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Winifred Holtby, Kate O’Brien, and Molly Keane created narratives which challenged not only psychoanalytic proscriptions about the need for sexual satisfaction, but traditional ideas about women’s inherent modesty. They absorbed, revised, and occasionally rejected outright the discourses of sexology in order to advocate a more diffuse sensuality; for these writers, adventure, travel, independence, creativity, and love between women provided satisfactions as rich as those ascribed to normative heterosexuality. I identify a history of queer sexuality in both Irish and English contexts, one which does not conform to emergent lesbian identity while still exceeding the limits of heteronormativity. vi Table of Contents ! !"#$%&'(#)%"*+,-.+/%&.$"+0.1)$.+2%$+3.4'56+35#)125(#)%" 77777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777 8! + 9-5:#.$+;".*+<$.."-%'1.+<.$5")'=1+#%+>)661)&.+,-)1#6.1*+#-.+?'..$+@6%A.$1+%2+ !"##$%&'##"()*77777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777BC! + 9-5:#.$+,A%*+DE$#)1#)(+%$+$.2%$=)"F+%'#6%%G1H*+,-.+!=:.$)56+I$)J)6.F.+%2+3.4'56+5"&+ E$#)1#)(+K=5"():5#)%"+)"++,)%!-./%"0%12)).%1'.3)27777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777LM! + 9-5:#.$+,-$..*+E.1#-.#)(+I6.51'$.+5"&+/%&.$"+9.6)N5(O+)"+P5#.+;QR$)."Q1+4-2$% !-5)##)7777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777 8BS! ! 9-5:#.$+@%'$*+K"F6)1-+T.1N)5"1+5"&+!$)1-+0.J%#)%"*+,-.+/5"):'65#)%"+%2+3.4'56+ 0)1(%'$1.+)"+/%66O+P.5".Q1++,)%6'*'.3%+'/)777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777 8UB! + 9%"(6'1)%"*+,-.+VK"%$=%'1+>.#.$%F.".)#OQ+%2+W%=."Q1+3.4'56)#O 7777777777777777777777777777 8CX! + R)N6)%F$5:-O7777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777 8CC! + Y)#57777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777 B8B! vii Introduction: The Modern Desire for Sexual Satisfaction This project developed out of a feeling of frustration with a character in an Anglo- Irish Big House novel, Molly Keane’s The Rising Tide (1937). Diana is not the central character, but she stands out from the rest; as she ages, she grows in strength and self- possession and, at the end of the novel, she is granted her wish to live with the woman she desires in the house that she loves. In order to reach that happy ending, however, Diana has to sublimate her desire for her sister-in-law into gardening. This may not have frustrated Diana but it frustrated me. Why go to the trouble of writing her as a desiring character, just to deny her any sex? I felt that there was a connection between this contradictory character (rebellious, subservient, masculine, passive, desiring, asexual) and Keane's satire on and apparent nostalgia for the final days of the Irish Ascendancy. My impulse was grounded in a belief that our national and sexual identities are deeply and intimately intertwined, but it was also rooted in a twenty-first century perspective on sexual desire and the importance of sexual satisfaction. While I have retained the former notion, I have had to question the latter, or at least complicate it. As I went looking for positive representations of women’s sexual desire (homosexual or heterosexual) in women’s Inter-war novels in both England and Ireland what I repeatedly found instead was a resistance to the idea that sexual satisfaction was necessary for women’s happiness. Both the existence of and the resistance to this notion of sexuality is illustrated in the story “Delicate Monster” published in a collection of short novellas entitled Women Against Men (1933) by the popular and prolific Inter-war author Storm Jameson. Annoyed at her sexually promiscuous friend Victoria, the narrator discusses the “philosophy!which was coming into repute in 1910” that “the only way to live a full life [...] is to have as many love affairs as possible and to yield to the most causal impulse 1 rather than run the risk of being taken for a puritan” (15). The narrator explains she has no problem in general with this way of life, but she dislikes “the move to make a new religion of it.” She claims Victoria “wants to persuade us that no other life has value. Health, happiness, civilization itself, depend on all able-bodied persons leading ‘full’ or as it may be, ‘dark and sacral’ lives.” Jameson’s narrator is satirically describing a shift in opinions about sex that took place in the early twentieth century, in part because of the dissemination of psychoanalytic and other sexological theories.1 These new theories of sexuality coincided with changing attitudes about traditional gender-roles that resulted from the First World War—spurred in part by women filling in for absent men in what had been considered masculine work. At the same time women were gaining ground politically. While full enfranchisement would wait until 1928, in 1918 women over thirty were granted the vote in England. This was followed in 1919 by legislation that opened up previously prohibited professions to unmarried women, and in 1923 and 1925 women gained equal terms in divorce and equal guardianship over their children, respectively. Seen in light of women’s continued emancipation, the new “sex philosophy” might be understood as an acknowledgement of women’s “positive desire” (Haste 62) and their right to sexual fulfillment. For some, scientific acceptance of the existence of women’s sexual desires was an empowering platform from which to advocate for social change. Women such as Stella Browne and Dora Russell went so far as to critique the traditional institution of marriage while still claiming women’s right to sexual satisfaction, but for many marriage was the only acceptable condition for sexual 1 For a discussion of the changes in sexual ideology in the Inter-war years see Jeffrey Weeks, Sex Politics and Society 199-224. 2 pleasure.2 In Rules of Desire: Sex in Britain: World War I to the Present Cate Haste notes that while sex outside of marriage may have been increasing during this time, “powerful constraints, frequently backed by punitive sanctions, were used to control sexual behaviour” (70). The enthusiasm for non-monogamous experiments waned by the thirties, and Haste argues that by that decade “feminist ideals of equality in personal relationships” were channeled by “countervailing social pressure” “to fit the ideal of a marriage ‘partnership’” based on traditional sex roles (63). In Banishing the Beast Lucy Bland also argues the that the “recognition” of “female sexual desire” ultimately led to women’s sexuality being “channeled into pleasurable, reproductive and marital heterosexuality" (309).3 Issues of motherhood and its role in the future of the nation were also at the head of the “women's agenda” in the Inter-war years. Lucy Bland attributes this focus on motherhood in part to eugenics’ rise in popularity. As European nations were struggling to define themselves in the aftermath of Word War I and global imperial power was changing hands, eugenic theories were becoming popular—even with some feminists. Women were figured as the bearers of the nation’s future and some women were empowered by the new interest in patriotic motherhood. For example, birth control activists found the rhetoric useful for their cause.4 Yet, eugenics
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