The Liminal Space of Character Interiority in Modernist Literature

By

Erica Calderon

A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English

Sonoma State University

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

in

English (Literary Criticism)

Committee Members:

Dr. Thaine Stearns, Chair

Dr. John Kunat, Reader

May 12, 2021 Copyright 2021

By Erica Calderon

ii Authorization for Reproduction of Master’s Thesis

I grant permission for the print or digital reproduction of parts of this thesis without further authorization from me, on the condition that the person or agency requesting reproduction absorb the cost and provide proper acknowledgment of authorship.

Permission to reproduce this thesis in its entirety must be obtained from me.

Date: 5/12/2021

Nam

Erica Calderon

iii The Liminal Space of Character Interiority in Modernist Literature

Thesis by Erica Calderon

ABSTRACT

Through a poststructuralist lens, this thesis deconstructs character interiority in modernist literature to locate the subjective experience of the modern individual amid the cultural and social shifts of the early twentieth century. By doing so, this thesis identifies a pattern of characters who struggle to express their internal identities that disrupt social conformity externally. This pattern appears in H.D.’s HERmione, Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. By writing from the mental interiors of their characters and portraying the external boundaries of their identity formation, these three writers create what this thesis refers to as a “liminal space” or a threshold between character interiority and exteriority. Each of the novels depict social constructs, such as gender, the body, the constraints of time, and even language, as inhibiting the individual self-expression of each character. In turn, the authors render their characters’ private identities as existing without a physical presence and thus occupying a liminal space of existence. Most importantly, the three narratives critique ideals of the traditional roles for women, which restricted women to private domestic spheres, and they explore the anxieties and hindrances associated with the early twentieth-century emergence of the figure of the “New Woman.” Within the context of modernism, H.D., West, and Woolf not only revolutionized the culture of art and language but the social outlook on the human experience and psyche through their innovative treatment of character interiority. These three modernists demonstrate their commitment to how language transcends verbal expression and relates to an individual’s inner, most private self.

MA Program: English

Sonoma State University

Date: May 12, 2021

iv Acknowledgments

This project would not have been possible without the guidance of my brilliant and supportive advisor, Professor Thaine Stearns. It has been a great pleasure learning from Thaine during my time as a graduate student. I am grateful for Thaine’s enthusiastic and inspirational lectures on modernism that have influenced the foundational argument of my thesis. Most of all,

I am thankful for all of the time Thaine has dedicated to helping me work through my ideas and providing me with resources and advice so that I could achieve my academic goals.

I would also like to thank Professor John Kunat for his commitment to my thesis project as the second reader and for helping me grow as a writer. From my time as an undergraduate to a graduate student, John’s words of encouragement and his passion for literature have made a lasting impression on me and my work.

Additionally, I am thankful to Professor Anne Goldman, Professor Chingling Wo, and

Professor Kim Hester Williams for the invaluable support they have given to me throughout my entire academic career at Sonoma State.

And, of course, I am very grateful for my wonderful cohort and our seminar discussions that have greatly influenced my thinking and writing.

Finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my friends and family, whose unwavering love and support during this time kept me going, even on the most challenging of days.

v Table of Contents

List of Figures vii

Introduction 1

Chapter One 11 Jenny’s Story: The Narrative Voice of Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier

Chapter Two 29 Liberating the Private Self from the Bounds of Society: H.D.’s HERmione

Chapter Three 52 An Inner Reflection on Approaching Death: Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

Conclusion 74

Works Cited 77

vi List of Figures

Introduction

Figure 1. Bonnie Kime Scott. “A Tangled Mesh of Modernists,” 1995………………………...4

Chapter One

Figure 2. EJ Kealey, “Women of Britain Say ‘GO!’,” 1915…………………………………..13

Figure 3. Wyndham Lewis, A Battery Shelled, 1919……………………………………….....24

Chapter Two

Figure 4. Good Housekeeping Magazine, Johnson’s Kleen Floor advertisement, 1910………32

Figure 5. The Little Review, advertisement for Diane of the Green Van, 1914………………..32

Chapter Three

Figure 6. Pablo Picasso, Girl Before a Mirror, 1932………………………………………….61

vii 1

Introduction

In the early twentieth century, modernist writers asserted the interiority of characters to

posit an understanding of how the cultural and social changes that shaped the modern world

affected the subjective experience of the modern individual. This thesis focuses on H.D.’s

HERmione, Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves as exemplary instances of character interiority amid a broader social narrative. Each of these modernist texts exemplifies how its author used different types of narration to shape the mental interiors of their characters and explore the psychological component of human existence.

In HERmione, H.D. alternates between first- and third-person points of view to articulate the synthesis of the titular character’s internal and external selves. In so doing, H.D. creates a disorienting effect for both Hermione, the main character, and the reader. As a result, H.D. shows how the repeated rejection of Hermione in her social world complicates her identity formation.

In The Return of the Soldier, West employs a first-person account of a woman’s private response to the First World War as she struggles to navigate the domestic sphere. Jenny, the novel’s narrator, is silenced by the other characters and their traditional gender roles and, in turn, retreats inward to explore and reflect on her identity.

Finally, in The Waves, considered to be Woolf’s most experimental novel, Woolf breaks away from traditional modes of storytelling and interlaces the soliloquies of six different characters. Through the characters Jinny and Susan, Woolf illustrates the importance of the private identities women formed during this time, as they were sexualized and visualized as mothers and wives in the external world.

Although distinct in their narrative styles, each text establishes a vantage point from the private, psychological perspectives of the characters. The characters in each novel face 2 challenges and experience anxiety associated with manifesting their internal identities externally.

The authors posit that one’s private identity will struggle to have an external representation outside of the internal self, especially if that identity breaks from social conformity. In turn, the three narratives depict a liminal space, or a threshold, between character interiority and exteriority, where the characters’ identities are deferred from manifesting. Within this liminal space, the writers uncover the factors outside of the self that inhibit individual self-expression.

By revealing these obstacles, and by foregrounding the internal narratives of their characters,

H.D., West, and Woolf render the multidimensional elements of humanity. Consequently, each writer avoids depicting how their characters conform to social constructs, such as gender, the body, the constraints of time, and even language. Experimenting with character interiority in this way allows the three authors to test the boundaries of identity formation and question how individuals can sustain their individuality in a world constructed by social mimicry. Most importantly, the three narratives critique ideals of the traditional roles of women, which restricted women to private domestic spheres, and they explore the anxieties and hindrances associated with the early twentieth-century emergence of the figure of the “New Woman.”

H.D., West, and Woolf wrote their narratives in the frame of literary modernism, a period spanning 1910 to roughly 1945. And because they experimented with form, narration, and the aesthetics of language to attend to matters of gender and the subjective experience of the modern individual, their novels exemplify modernism. Indeed, for many scholars, the term “modernism” and its key characteristics are difficult to define succinctly. In broad terms, literary modernism has become known for its disruption of genres, break from traditional forms, and experimentation with language. Within the context of modernism, the three authors not only revolutionized the culture of art and language but the social outlook on the human experience 3 and psyche through their innovative treatment of character interiority. These three modernists demonstrate their commitment to how language transcends verbal expression and relates to an individual’s inner, most private self.

The modernist movement, according to Peter Nicholls in Modernisms, traces back to the work of nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire, who rejected Romantic ideals and argued for “modernity as subject matter of the new arts” (Nicholls 7). Nicholls notes that

Baudelaire also made a distinction between “bourgeois modernity” and “aesthetic modernity.” In addition to Baudelaire, other writers, like Fyodor Dostoevsky, responded to and critiqued the idea that bourgeois culture grounds itself in social mimesis. In turn, these writers began to form an aestheticism and a concern for the internal rather than the external, such as public spaces, eventually resulting in what Nicholls refers to as the “various modernisms” of the twentieth century (Nicholls 7).

By invoking a plural definition of modernism, Nicholls’ framework indicates how H.D.,

West, and Woolf’s novels can be considered innovative in their own right while contributing to a collective sentiment of newness that pervaded the period. Many of the “modernisms” Nicholls references emerged from the collaborative efforts of artists who aimed to create new aesthetic forms. For example, Imagism, which along with Vorticism “proved to be moments rather than movements,” was formed by Ezra Pound, H.D., and Richard Aldington in 1912 (Nicholls 163).

At the center of this collective modernist movement, however, Nicholls, like many other scholars, locates the “Men of 1914”—Pound, Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce who,

Nicholls believes, made “various contributions to a common modernism” (Nicholls 163).

Nicholls’ claim implies that the “Other Modernisms,” which Nicholls associates with the work of

H.D., Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf, radiate from this center of the “Men of 1914.” In fact, 4

Nicholls claims that the “Other Modernisms” were “not simply another kind of modernism

(‘feminine’ modernism) but rather a deliberate and often polemic disturbance within the canonical version” (Nicholls 193). While Nicholls acknowledges the work of H.D. and Woolf

(he does not mention Rebecca West throughout his book) as a departure from the work of the

“Men of 1914,” his claim that they deliberately disturbed “Anglo-American modernism” reduces their literary achievements to merely a reaction to the work achieved by Pound, Lewis, Joyce, and Eliot.

Perhaps a more effective way to situate H.D., West, and Woolf within the modernist movement is through Bonnie Kime Scott’s “A Tangled Mesh of Modernists,” which does not center the “Men of 1914” and yet generates the same effect as Nicholls’ exploration of the various modernisms (see fig. 1).

Figure 1. Bonnie Kime Scott. “A Tangled Mesh of Modernists.” Refiguring Modernism:

Women of 1928, 1995, p. xxiii. 5

Scott’s visual representation of the relationships formed between modernists depicts a mutual exchange of creativity and at the same time shows how each artist worked autonomously.

Therefore, while it is important to address how other artists influenced the work of H.D., West, and Woolf, it is critical to study their novels as products of their own ingenuity.

Through a poststructuralist lens, this thesis deconstructs the narrative structure of

HERmione, The Return of the Soldier, and The Waves to reveal how character interiority engages the social discourses, ideologies, and constructs of modernism. Inspired by Derrida’s 1966 lecture, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” the theoretical framework, implemented in the following chapters, functions as a methodology to analyze how the structural language—that is, the narrative point of view—of each text contradicts itself and to show how the mental/physical binary falls apart when privileging a reading of each character’s individuality.1 In his lecture,

Derrida explains that by considering the structural components of a structure the structure becomes decentered (Derrida 213). Derrida’s concept of “decentering” liberates “play,” a substitution of signifiers, from restrictive limitations and allows for a variety of discourses to emerge and circulate throughout the text. The theoretical concepts proposed by Derrida are crucial when looking at how character interiority either reflects or rejects the social framework.

In other words, allowing the structure of the text to fall apart, different textual elements surface and create a new understanding of the world inside and outside of the novel.

From a poststructuralist reading of the novels, this thesis analyzes character interiority with a feminist lens. In their novels, H.D., West, and Woolf feature heroines whose internal

1 In The Concept of Modernism, an examination of the different constructions of the modernist paradigm, Astradur Eysteinsson addresses the benefits and drawbacks of embarking on a poststructuralist reading of modernist texts. Eysteinsson notes, “we can extract from the variety of poststructuralist work two major concerns that relate to the issues we have been discussing in terms of modernism: the crisis of language and representation and the crisis of the subject” (Eysteinsson 47). Eysteinsson also points out, however, that invoking Derrida’s theory of deconstruction deems “the central thrust of modernism to be an incessant language game, playing one skittish signifier against another. This makes modernist studies risk reverting to the New Critical idea of the work as a self-bounded whole, vibrating with unresolved internal tensions” (Eysteinsson 48). 6 narratives and identities run counter to the societal expectation that they will conform to the traditional, feminine gender role. The authors also demonstrate how their characters resist and challenge the patriarchy while they are simultaneously limited through its power and control.

Because of these constraints, the liminal space of identity becomes crucial in the characters’ liberation from social expectation.

One way to think about the heroines in H.D., West, and Woolf’s modernist texts is how they represent a departure from Victorian literature. Canonically speaking, nineteenth-century

English and American novelists, including Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and

Henry James, center many of their narratives on the portrayal of the marriage plot, love, and courtship. Even when these authors consider “the woman question” in their work, the heroines of their stories are still tied to ideas of love and are often depicted as the object of male desire. For instance, in Henry James’ 1878 novella Daisy Miller, Daisy is portrayed from the male perspective of the main character, Winterbourne, who pines after Daisy’s affection while also judging her liberated attitude. Daisy is depicted as a young, unmarried American woman who goes out of her way to openly challenge and resist social conventions related to her womanhood.

At the end of the novella, James kills off his heroine. The narrative builds up to Daisy’s death through a succession of moments when she chooses to exercise her freedom rather than obey the other characters’ commands for her to conform to the social standards of an unmarried woman.

While James anticipates the New Woman through Daisy’s behaviors, her private thoughts, emotions, and perspective remain unaccounted for. The three writers in this thesis address this absence of the private mind. Unlike Daisy, whose external characteristics of the New

Woman are filtered through the judgment of society and the male gaze, the heroines in H.D.,

West, and Woolf’s novels represent the transition from True Womanhood into the New Woman 7 through their own perspectives as they form identities unrelated to marriage, motherhood, men, and domesticity.

This thesis also employs a historical lens to identify the various facets of modernism’s social framework, which, in turn, informed the research process. The following chapters utilize historical and secondary texts, ranging from modernist paintings to early-twentieth-century advertisements, to support analytical claims about the characters’ cultural milieu and the language used to construct their interior monologues. Additionally, examining the novels through a historical lens warrants the inclusion of biographical information about the authors and other works they created during this period. Read alongside the primary texts, the authors’ letters, diary entries, essays, novels, articles, short stories, and memoirs reveal important strands in their philosophical perspectives on the world and the modernist movement. By interconnecting these historical elements, the social scope of each modernist novel expands, creating a better sense of why character interiority was a source of experimentation for the authors as they respond to changes brought about by the First World War and modernity.2

The three novels included in this study depict a modernist concern for the relationship between an individual’s private, inner life and physical reality. Beginning with Rebecca West’s

The Return of the Soldier and closing with Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, the sequence of the following chapters hinges on two factors. First, the chapters appear in chronological order based on when each novel was written. This timeline is crucial when considering how external

2 Scholars have long debated the meaning of the ill-defined term “modernity,” especially as it concerns the modernist movement. For example, Astradur Eysteinsson asserts, “modernist aesthetics [. . .] do not directly reflect social modernity.” Eysteinsson continues, “I find it more to the point to see modernism as an attempt to interrupt the modernity that we live and understand as a social, if not ‘normal,’ way of life” (Eysteinsson 6). In contrast to Eysteinsson's proposition that modernism interrupts modernity, William Everdell, in The First Moderns, questions “if ‘modernity’ means anything at all beyond a change in the pace of change.” Everdell goes on to say, “there can be no question that there are changes in the way people think and in the way their cultures work that can be considered one by one, that many of the changes depend on each other, and that many of them together can be called ‘Modernism’” (Everdell 9). 8 influences like World War I affected identity formation. Second, the novels appear in the order in which their subject matter progresses the innovative treatment of character interiority. Together, the three novels capture the severe suppression of women’s individualities in the early twentieth century and emphasize the multidimensional elements of their identities, despite their identities often lacking any external, social representation.

The first chapter of this thesis begins by interrogating the narrative voice of Rebecca

West’s The Return of the Soldier. West establishes a boundary between the private self of Jenny, the narrator, and the external world she observes and the events she recounts. The other characters, who represent domesticity and the war, uphold this boundary by limiting the expression of Jenny’s personality and inner thoughts and desires. Without an outlet to express her individuality, Jenny retreats inward and reflects on her alienated position in the domestic space.

Jenny’s character escapes the traditional, feminine gender role since she is neither a wife nor a mother and therefore does not fit into the domestic household. Instead, West positions Jenny as an individual outside of the social collectives that indirectly and directly support warfare. As depicted in the novel, these social collectives include women who upheld traditional domestic values and the men and women who bolstered the patriarchy. Jenny, however, like many women during this time, is still dependent on traditional household dynamics. According to the narrative, she does not have an occupation or a life outside of Baldry Court, resulting in her appropriating the guise of domesticity through Kitty and her marriage to Chris. Isolated and trapped by this domestic space, then, Jenny’s mental interior becomes the only place where her individuality remains safe from judgment and rejection. There are moments when Jenny’s narrative veers from the central plot of Chris’ war trauma and provides glimpses into her private personality, shaping her character beyond the one-dimensional narrative voice. Therefore, despite Jenny’s lack of 9

agency and the alienation she experiences, her character interiority anticipates a shift from

conventional, domestic femininity.

The second chapter of this thesis analyzes how H.D. challenges the boundary between

mental and physical spaces by portraying the main character’s attempts to synthesize her internal

and external identities. Hermione’s interior identity, or private self, is represented through

fragments of her thoughts and reactions to external events. After dropping out of college,

Hermione reflects on her social role and concludes that she is a failure. This feeling of failure

also connects to her disinclination to marry George, her desire to remain autonomous, and her

lesbian relationship with Fayne. Consequently, her anxiety forces her to introspect as a way of

coping with societal expectations and control. Hermione remains misunderstood by the other

characters and society, suggesting that individuals who defied social norms, especially women,

had difficulty finding their place in the early twentieth-century culture. Hermione expresses a

desire to create as an artist, while those around her try to force her into domestic spaces that

make her uncomfortable. By depicting Hermione’s mental interior clashing with the discomfort

of her body, the social environment, and in interpersonal relationships, H.D. shows how

expressing individuality is a cycle of the individual pushing back on social conventions and then

society pushing back on, or rejecting, the individual.

This study concludes with an examination of how Woolf’s The Waves condenses the internal and external spaces into one layer of reality through her characters’ soliloquies. By implementing Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, the thrust of this chapter’s argument hinges on the narratives of Jinny and Susan as they reflect on their mortality and their developing interior identities that oppose their permanent, feminine gender roles in the social sphere.

Woolf’s choice to only represent the internal voices of her characters liberates them from social 10 expectation. For example, as a wife and a mother, Susan feels trapped in one lifestyle. By the time she becomes middle-aged, she feels as though death is the next event of her life. Jinny, on the other hand, chooses to live autonomously but realizes, during her midlife, that she will die alone. Woolf, however, does not focus on Jinny and Susan’s external, social roles. Instead, Woolf explores how Jinny and Susan’s private identities define their individualities, even as they are hindered from external expression by social factors. As a result, Woolf emphasizes the humanity and multidimensional identities of Jinny and Susan through their mental interiors, suggesting that their gender only serves as an external function of serving the patriarchy. Woolf also shows that in the face of old age, Jinny and Susan’s internal selves are essentially ageless and genderless, while their bodies succumb to death.

Connecting these three modernist novels illuminates a significant trend that captures the modern anxieties associated with the dynamic transition between the nineteenth-century ideals of

True Womanhood and the New Woman of the twentieth century. H.D., West, and Woolf document how social factors prevented women from gaining full access to their autonomy and expressing their individualities externally. These social factors included World War I, the lack of financial independence afforded women, the sexualization of women’s bodies, and the social expectation that women should conform to the traditional feminine stereotype. These hindrances, however, did not stop women from developing individual identities outside of social conformity.

It is at this liminal intersection of the mental and physical spaces where H.D., West, and Woolf use character interiority to build a multidimensional perspective on the elements of women’s identities and a humanity that transcends gender, age, and the body. As a result, the three authors present new ideas about gender issues and identity formation. 11

Chapter One

Jenny’s Story: The Narrative Voice of Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier

The narrator of Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, Jenny, oscillates between an observational gaze and an internal reflection on the physical world during the First World War.

From the vantage point of isolation on the home front, Jenny’s gaze focuses on the homecoming of her shell-shocked cousin, Chris Baldry, and his love affairs, as they search for a cure for his amnesia. Yet, Jenny’s reflective nature subverts the notion that the narrative forms around Chris and the effects of the war and positions her mental interior as the subject of the text. In a reflection on the novel, West wrote, “I had been obliged to tell the story in the first person, in the character of Chris's cousin Jenny, in order that I could the more vividly compare and contrast the effect Margaret produced on Chris's household with the effect she produced on Chris” (“On The

Return” 68). Despite West’s intentions to employ Jenny’s character as a narrative device to detail an account of war trauma, her display of Jenny’s interiority is innovative and culturally significant.3 The portrayal of Jenny’s private, inner life shifts her away from the narrative’s central plot and situates her character in a liminal space of existence in a society defined by

3 West’s innovative depiction of character interiority in The Return of the Soldier speaks to her avant-garde style and contribution to the modernist movement. At various times, however, around the novel’s publication, West found herself defending her work. For example, in a letter to Sylvia Lynd, West writes, “I had a weekend with Violet [Hunt] and Ford {here} during which Ford explained to me elaborately the imperfection of The Return of the Soldier compared to any of his works—a statement which I profoundly agree but which oughtn’t be made, because it rouses emulation” (Letters 40). West understood that new ideas do not stem from perfection or emulation. West suggests that by writing what she wanted and not comparing herself to her peers, she was able to create both a successful novel (selling 1600 copies within two weeks of its release, according to West in this letter) and a novel that provided a new perspective. 12 opposing gender roles—a society in which Jenny does not fit.4 Whereas the other women in the novel, Kitty and Margaret, represent the cult of domesticity, and Chris symbolizes the war and the patriarchy, Jenny’s character escapes categorization. Her autonomous nature and refusal to engage in the dominant social discourses of matrimony and maternity at the time push her toward the margins of society, thus forcing her to retreat inward and simultaneously manifest her existence through the other characters’ experiences. By decentering Jenny’s role as the narrative device of Chris’ story, this chapter highlights the private interior of her individuality as it conflicts with the locale of her physical existence, illuminating the complexities of the psychological component of the human experience and individualism during a period of great change and tragedy.

During World War I, there was a firm line drawn between men and women. Men were expected to fight on the front lines, while women acted as placeholders in the absence of men in the workplace and simultaneously fulfilled their domestic duties. Most prominently, however, was the notion that women should directly support the war. War propaganda used representations of the domestic woman in a vulnerable state as a tool to entice men to enlist in the army. Namely, in 1914, a poster reading “Women of Britain say ‘GO!’” circulated among the masses, illustrating a false sense of women’s endorsement of the war. The poster features a woman and her two children in the confines of the home as soldiers march past their window (see fig. 2). The

4 Some scholars, however, choose to lean into a reading of Jenny’s character as a narrative device to uncover a deeper understanding of the novel’s relationship to a culture imbued in Freudian theory and developing medical science. For example, in an article of how memory functions in the novel, Elizabeth Covington states, “Jenny’s reticence and ineptitude ultimately protect the privacy and the dignity of Chris’s memories and his medical condition. As such, she epitomizes the “modernist” medical narrator by combining the unreliable narrator [. . .] with the amateur case historian” (Covington 66). Covington’s argument hinges on the idea that Jenny wavers between two types of narration, turning Chris’ memories into her own and portraying Chris as a “romantic war hero, thwarted in life and love, rather than a patient debilitated by a war injury.” (Covington 69). As demonstrated by Covington’s article and this chapter, the range of intriguing elements of Jenny’s role as the narrator provides numerous interpretations of her character. 13 woman’s gaze, coupled with the capitalized word “GO,” gives the impression that the woman and her children feel secure by the soldiers' presence, highlighting Britain’s ploy to influence young men’s subscription to patriotism.

Figure 2. EJ Kealey, “Women of Britain Say ‘GO!’,” 1915

The narrative structure of The Return of the Soldier hinges on a similar foundation. West depicts

Kitty as forlorn in her domestic space and desperate for Chris’ attention upon his homecoming.

Yet, the cure for Chris’ amnesia is for him to return to the war, which Kitty supports and, in turn, sustains her position as a proponent of war. Amid this contrasting depiction of men and women in the novel is Jenny’s character, who stands out as a social outlier and serves to undermine the 14 novel’s main structure.5 Indeed, Jenny is part of the domestic space at Baldry Court, but, unlike the other characters, Jenny’s character resists placement in a traditional gender role and is constructed through her psychological interior. Unmarried and childless, Jenny’s character captures the essence of individualism in the early twentieth century, especially as it pertained to women.6 At various times in the narrative, Jenny expresses her comfort and acceptance of not

having children or a husband, which affirms the notion that her identity defies gender

stereotypes, and she embraces her individuality.7 From Jenny’s private perspective and the inner

expression of her individuality, however, West exhibits the denial of an individual’s agency by

external influences if they were independent of the social collective that supported the war.

5 Modernist scholar Mara Scanlon also explores this idea by analyzing Jenny’s gender identity in relation to her role as a “reader” in the novel and not as a “detached observer.” Scanlon states, “So powerful is Jenny’s promiscuous identification with Chris that it affects not only her emotions and sympathies, fostering a love for Margaret, but in fact her gender identity itself, which is shown to be quite slippery, to the point that her femininity is compromised or rejected” (Scanlon 75). Throughout her article, Scanlon teases a queer reading of the novel, highlighting moments when Jenny conveys an attraction to Kitty or Margaret. However, Scanlon only perceives this attraction through Jenny appropriating Chris’ masculine passions. By focusing on how Jenny’s gender identity is skewed by her position as a “reader,” Scanlon portrays Jenny as a passive character, merely mimicking and absorbing the normative gendered characteristics of the other characters. In contrast, this chapter posits that Jenny deviates from traditional gender roles and expresses her own unique individuality, even though she struggles to manifest it externally and can only express it in a psychological and unspoken capacity. 6 In her book Refiguring Modernism: The Women of 1928, Bonnie Kime Scott argues that West was not concerned with individualism, an -ism, as Scott notes, found at the center of West’s contemporary Dora Marsden’s work. Instead, Scott claims, West “retained a strong belief in the methods of political movements and socialist cooperation” to elevate the Women’s Suffrage Movement (Scott 45). By the time Rebecca West was seventeen years old and living in London, “she was already a published feminist activist” (Scott 36). West was involved with the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), “attended suffrage rallies, and experienced a baton charge in the city streets” (Scott 36). Scott’s outline of West’s active participation in the Suffrage Movement shines a light on her political perspective that influenced much of her work. However, while Scott makes a distinction between individualism and the work of social collectives that West believed in to support her message, this chapter argues that through Jenny’s character, West anticipated an even greater shift in gender roles and dynamics. Jenny’s character faces a world based on a gender dichotomy that suppresses the expression of her individuality and humanity. In turn, West depicts Jenny as self-reliant and introspective and a force to break the gender barrier. 7 West’s characterization of Jenny as gender nonconforming connects to the work of West’s contemporary Mina Loy. Namely, the ideas present in Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto”directly relate to The Return of the Soldier. Although written in 1914 but published posthumously, Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” critiques the submissive nature of the feminist movement at the time and calls for an “absolute demolition.” One of Loy’s first calls to action reads, “The first illusion it is to your interest to demolish is the division of women into two classes the mistress, & the mother every well-balanced & developed woman knows that is not true, Nature has endowed the complete functions—there are no restrictions” (Loy). In many ways, West answers this call to action with Jenny’s character. Neither a wife nor “mistress” nor mother, Jenny breaks the barrier between the two classes for women Loy references. Loy’s text, coupled with West’s depiction of Jenny, interestingly illuminates the psychological realm of humanity rather than focusing on gender constructs and speaks to the limited scope of options women had in the early twentieth century. 15

Consequently, as an autonomous individual, Jenny’s mental reflections form a response to this new world while also acknowledging the challenges she faces to manifest her agency and individuality externally.

The moments when Jenny’s inner thoughts and emotions take precedence over the central plot complicate her narrative position and signify her desire to detach from the disharmony in her physical reality. As the novel’s narrative voice, Jenny describes the task of piecing together the different layers of the external world—those ranging from the isolated domestic space at Baldry

Court to the front lines of the war—as a burdensome “weight” that she wishes to drop (The

Return 57). Such breaks, then, in the narrative structure, which highlight Jenny’s mental interiority, define the features of her character that are distinct from her function as the linguistic sign of Chris’ life. For example, Jenny recounts, “My mind refused to consider the situation any longer and turned to the perception of material things. I leant over the banister and looked down at the fineness of the hall” (The Return 58). The unconscious act of Jenny’s perception turning away from the emotional events involving the other characters excavates a secondary space in the realm of the novel where Jenny’s individuality remains autonomous. Jenny recognizes that the unavoidable “situation” of Kitty and Margaret’s domestic struggles and Chris’ war trauma negatively influence and hinder the expression of her individuality, prompting her to mentally detach. While Jenny’s detachment from “the situation” can indicate her failure to fit into the gendered social sphere, since she is neither a wife nor mother and does not mimic the traditional woman, it serves to demonstrate a direct rejection of the social constructs that perpetuate and uphold traditional values of domesticity and the war. Such a rejection places her individual perspective at odds with the other characters’, as West characterizes Jenny as separate from any normalized social structures. The portrayal of Jenny’s autonomous nature and her refusal to 16 conform to social expectations, in contrast to the stereotypical gender roles assumed by the other characters, suggests that West was interested in exploring individualism as a rejection to the war.

However, by illustrating this rejection from Jenny’s private interior, West calls attention to the complicated physical placement of individuals who were still reliant on traditional social and household dynamics. This notion is especially apparent with how the text renders Jenny’s body.

Throughout the narrative, descriptions of Jenny’s bodily presence become obscured by the other characters’ perspectives as well as the rigid domestic atmosphere that furthers her isolation. One detail in particular that West incorporates to emphasize Jenny’s incorporeal existence at Baldy Court is a scene for each character looking into a mirror, except for Jenny.

The striking exclusion of Jenny’s reflection raises questions about the relationship or disconnect between her verbose, private mental interior and her unacknowledged corporeal form. To a certain extent, the other characters do not register Jenny’s presence either. Namely, when Chris enters their house upon returning home from the war, Jenny observes, “He did not see me, in my dark dress, nor huddled Kitty, and with the sleepy smile of one who returns to a dear familiar place to rest, he walked into the hall” (The Return 23). In direct contrast to Kitty who is seen but not physically acknowledged, Jenny’s appearance fails to capture Chris’ attention. Regardless of his amnesia, Chris should recognize his cousin, whom he has known all of his life. The ingenuity of the text confirms this point and even serves to interrogate the validity of Chris’ condition concerning his own desire to abandon his duty as a soldier. While Jenny attributes her invisibility to her “dark dress” during her first encounter with Chris, West postulates a forbidden interlacing of Chris’ representation of the war and Jenny’s overt lack of a domestic veil over her individuality (i.e., not having a husband or children). As Jenny’s mental narrative points out,

Chris’ failure to perceive her presence places her body “in the shadows,” illustrating the 17 suppression of individuals who had no stock in the war or the feminized space of domesticity

(The Return 23). In other words, from the perspective of the patriarchy, Jenny’s status as a mere cousin of the patriarch in her life and a guest in Kitty’s home and her inability to participate in the war make her social value undetectable by Chris, and ultimately, the overarching social structure of collectivism that supported warfare.

The suppression of Jenny’s individuality through her bodily presence evolves into a hindrance to her faculty for speech. For instance, when Chris finally acknowledges her, Jenny responds, “‘Oh, Chris, I am so glad,’ I stuttered, and then could say no more for shame that I was thirty-five instead of twenty” (The Return 23). Chris’ altered perception engenders Jenny to feel

“shame” about her physical identity. No longer the youth that Chris imagines in his mind,

Jenny’s aged appearance becomes a source of tension for both of them. As a result, she refrains from expressing herself externally and instead retreats inward.

Jenny’s silence due to Chris’ war trauma signals toward a much larger issue within the social framework of the early twentieth century. As an individual, Jenny represents only herself.

However, her dependence on Chris and Kitty and their home position her in a state of reliance on the guise of domesticity to fit into the mimetic nature of society. Therefore, Chris’ ability to silence Jenny—speech being the only means to express her individuality externally— reinforces the idea that the dominant discourses at the time functioned as oppressive forces and prevented women from freely exercising their autonomy. Jenny’s silence, though, is only external. It is through her internal narrative that West elevates the voices of the oppressed.

The language used to construct Jenny’s narrative functions as a method of characterizing her as independent of the domestic space and highlighting her escape from the social hierarchy at

Baldry Court, but it also crosses the bounds into the rhetorical territory of the war. The paradox 18 created by this dual use of language creates a textual impasse. Either West was being careful not to write an overtly anti-war text, or she was simply cautioning toward the psychological effects of war trauma that permeated an entire society, even those who were not soldiers. Nonetheless,

Jenny’s appropriation of war rhetoric stems from her trying to see the world from Chris’ perspective. She understands that her bodily presence confuses him for many reasons and thus attempts to reconcile that friction in her mind. Jenny notes, “Even to me he would give no trust, because it was Jenny the girl who had been his friend and not Jenny the woman. All the inhabitants of this new tract of time were his enemies” (The Return 29).

Jenny uses the binary opposition friend/enemy to determine her placement in Chris’ life and home. Even though Chris has lost his memory, he still holds onto the war mindset of coding the world in terms of harmless and threatening encounters. In turn, Jenny’s individuality becomes skewed by the war. Jenny views Chris’ perception of her as a threat as an erasure of her humanity and directly correlates her threatening nature to her womanhood. As a case in point, the connotative meaning of the word “girl” indicates an aspect of innocence that runs in direct opposition to the concept of independence alluded to by the phrase "Jenny the woman." While

Jenny is not wholly reflective of the “New Woman,” her autonomy threatens the patriarchal order and the cult of domesticity that directly prop up the war. West was sure to preserve a traditional culture through the other characters, but she allows Jenny to stand out as an anomaly.

Surrounded by a society ingrained in conventional gender roles and violent rhetoric, Jenny’s interiority represents how individuals responded to the external world, especially as it concerned the shaping of their individuality and placement in society.

Jenny’s divergence from and simultaneous imitation of the feminized role in the domestic space hinges on her relationship with Kitty. Kitty’s duty as a wife and mother (despite the loss of 19 her child) functions as a vehicle for Jenny to negotiate the presence of her body in the traditional household. In many ways, Kitty represents the “True Woman” ideal and navigates her role as a homemaker “ensphered” in a “little globe of ease” (The Return 5). Jenny thereby extends her identity to encapsulate and mirror Kitty's feminized features to improvise her own gender performance in the domestic space.8 Jenny’s attachment to Kitty gives her a social safeguard and becomes her way of manifesting her existence externally. Despite the functionality of her connection to Kitty, Jenny’s subjectivity contrasts with the objective reality of the household.

That is to say, Jenny’s outlook on life is highly philosophical, and she dreams of spaces outside of domesticity.9 In contrast, Kitty becomes engrossed in her role as Chris’ wife and spends much of her time visiting her dead son's nursery, where she confronts her trauma.10 The fundamental polarities between Jenny and Kitty force Jenny into a state of isolation within the isolated domestic space at Baldry Court, which robs her of her agency. As she experiences isolation and the limitations of language, Jenny’s mental interior becomes a sanctuary space where she can detach from her physical reality and explore her identity.

8 In a contemporaneous review of The Return of the Soldier, Dora Marsden refers to Kitty as “an object for sympathy” and describes Jenny as “youngish, pretty, and elegant too, one gathers, who for some unaccountable cause is domiciled with the young couple” (Marsden 118). Even Marsden was perplexed by the household dynamic West portrays in the novel, especially concerning Jenny's curious role. Because of Jenny’s nontraditional characteristics of a narrator, Marsden concludes that Jenny functions as a “proxy” for West. Marsden furthers this claim by criticizing how Jenny’s role as narrator conveys the impersonal and that of “scientific investigator” while also fulfilling the role of “artist.”According to Marsden, Jenny’s wavering ability to tell the story in one style causes the story to have no “exhilaration” and “produces an effect of very startling and disquieting misery” (Marsden 118). Despite her negative critique of the novel, it is evident that Marsden also recognized Jenny’s individuality as more than just the novel’s narrative voice. 9 West herself was dissatisfied with domesticity. In 1916, forced to stay home for a period due to an illness and unable to work, West wrote to Sylvia Lynd, “I hate domesticity. I don’t want to stay here” (Letters 26). 10 In “Reading Kitty’s Trauma in Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier,” Rebeccah Pulsifer discusses Kitty’s trauma in terms of how it runs parallel to Chris’ shell-shock. Pulsifer also identifies Jenny’s “narrative ambiguities” as provoking a negative perception of Kitty (Pulsifer 41). Pulsifer claims that Jenny is jealous of Kitty’s relationship with Chris and “enviously condemns Kitty’s expensive elegance” (Pulsifer 42). Pulsifer’s criticism of Jenny and Kitty’s relationship centers on a reading of Jenny as a narrative device and not as a character. Pulsifer’s aims to emphasize Kitty’s misrepresentation and the fact that her trauma is covered up by Jenny’s biased and inconsistent storytelling. While Pulsifer’s claim succeeds in elevating Kitty’s narrative, it villanizes Jenny, which is problematic when considering how West positioned the novel among first-wave feminism. 20

Jenny’s social alienation demonstrates the instability of her role as the narrator of Chris’ story and engages the discourse of individualism, substantiating the subversive nature of her character. There are curious splits in the narrative when the other characters move ‘off-stage,’ and Jenny experiences a visceral sensation of isolation that crosses the bounds between the internal and external. Such moments illustrate the emerging modern individual’s struggle to synthesize their identity that deviates from social norms with their physical reality. In one particular instance, after Kitty follows Chris to assist with his re-familiarization of their home,

Jenny views herself as a removable attachment of their marriage: “[Kitty] braced herself with a gallant laugh. ‘How you’ve forgotten,’ she cried, and ran up to him, rattling her keys and looking grave with housewifery, and I was left alone with the dusk and familiar things” (The Return 25).

Exhibited here is Jenny’s inability to blend into the marital structure that dominates the household. In a way, the tone emanating from this passage expresses Jenny’s mockery of Kitty’s role as a wife. Given the context of Kitty chasing after Chris, words like “grave” paired with

“housewifery” construct a critique of traditional marriage ideals that restricted women to the domestic sphere.11 Through Jenny’s character, then, despite being depicted as lonely, West pinpoints the evolving middle ground between gender roles where individuals participated in identity formation that countered the collective social identity that influenced and was influenced by the war. Jenny’s identity captures a rejection of social expectations and anticipates a

11 West’s critique of traditional marriage ideals in The Return of the Soldier connects to her earlier text “Indissoluble Matrimony,” published in 1914 in BLAST. “Indissoluble Matrimony” portrays an unhealthy, ten-year marriage between George, who is miserable and resentful, and Evadne, who avoids addressing their marital issues while she focuses on her independence and intellectual endeavours. After an argument and George threatens her with a knife, Evadne leaves. George follows her with the hopes of catching her having an affair to have grounds for divorce. However, he finds Evadne at the river swimming, not having an affair, and they begin to fight. Ultimately, as the title connotes, West suggests that marriage is a societal trap that is nearly impossible to break free of, both legally and physically. In the case of The Return of the Soldier, Kitty emits desperation for Chris to remain her husband, though he makes clear his disinterest in her. West uses this foundation to criticize the woman’s role as a wife by rendering Jenny’s character as a woman who values her individuality. Both texts demonstrate West’s aim to define the woman’s role and her ability to form an identity outside of the domestic space and marriage. 21 modernization of the woman’s role in both the public and private spheres. However, as Jenny’s interior narrative depicts, individuals who were not fully independent retreated inward to cope with society’s rejection of their individuality. For Jenny, isolation provokes her to consider the world beyond Baldry Court and the war and to discern her desires that manifest from her individualized perspective.

In a moment of solitude, following Kitty’s refusal to go on a walk with her, Jenny reflects that her “vision” of life is “solitary,” which correlates her social position to the concept of individualism (The Return 63). By choosing to walk alone, Jenny demonstrates her ability to exercise her independence, further severing her connection to the domestic space and also to

Chris and Kitty. West’s choice to privilege Jenny’s “solitary vision” rids her of any social lenses influenced by war and domesticity and undermines the narrative structure that relates to Chris’s war trauma. To illustrate, replete with nature imagery, Jenny’s “solitary vision” captures the beauty of the landscape:

I went out alone into a soft day, with the dispelled winter lurking above in high

dark clouds under which there ran quick fresh currents of air, and broken shafts of

insistent sunshine that spread a grey clarity of light in which every colour showed

sharp and strong [. . .] The lines of bare elms darkening the plains below made it

seem as though the tide of winter had fallen and left this promontory bare and

sparkling in the spring [. . .] I wished I had someone with me to enjoy this artless

little show of the new year (The Return 62-3).

Jenny’s perspective, pivoting on Romantic ideals of the nineteenth century, shifts away from the devastation in the external political- and social-scapes and focuses on the aesthetics of nature.

She allows the intricacies and beauty of the in-between phase of the seasons, which mirrors a 22 similar sentiment to her own identity, to consume her vision. Echoing the past and looking toward the future, Jenny’s “solitary vision” constructs a world void of trauma and destruction.

Her vision also illuminates the idea that art and creativity are external outlets for her to express her individuality. Despite deeming herself not an “artist,” Jenny’s creative impulse shines through moments like this, when she appreciates nature or daydreams of the occult (The Return

66-7, 70). It is through these glimpses into Jenny’s private personality that West invokes an individualistic frame to reject violent rhetoric and even domesticity that bolstered warfare. By doing so, West prioritizes an awareness of how complicated identity formation was for individuals who navigated the world on their own.

West uses art and culture to intensify the social divide between Kitty and Jenny, especially in the domestic space. Amid the growing tension in the Baldry household, Jenny continuously taps into her well of creativity to express her individuality when language is either inaccessible or inadequate. One instance, in particular, occurs when Chris rejects Kitty’s affection, prompting Jenny to play the piano to account for the emotional void in the room. Jenny explains, “I went to the piano. Through this evening of sentences cut short because their completed meaning was always sorrow, of normal life dissolved to tears, the chords of

Beethoven sounded serenely” (The Return 29). This brief exhibition of Jenny’s musical talent conveys her personal interests that are unrelated to the negative, violent culture surrounding the war. Jenny’s action of sitting at the piano and playing Beethoven out of her own volition shows that she is interested in the aesthetics of art, which, in turn, shapes her character beyond the one-dimensional narrative voice. However, as Jenny expresses her pleasure of playing and listening to “the chords of Beethoven,” Kitty forces her to stop due to Beethoven’s German nationality, which, for Kitty, directly reminds her of Britain’s enemy in the war. The striking 23 quality of the contrast between Kitty and Jenny’s perspectives at this moment defines the rejection and suppression of those who struggled to fit into social collectives. From Kitty’s point of view, Jenny playing Beethoven is insensitive to Chris the soldier who was just out on the front lines fighting against the Germans. Jenny, though, was primarily interested in the “serene” sound of the music. While Kitty focuses her attention on her husband and the war, Jenny chooses to detach from the situation around her and prioritizes herself, even if that means settling for an internal reflection as she experiences an external rejection.

As a result of Kitty restricting Jenny’s external self-expression through “the chords of

Beethoven” and hindering the manifestation of her agency, Jenny plays a different song to appease Kitty but turns inward to reflect on the condition of the world, aiming to situate and understand how her physical presence fits among the changing social and natural spheres. Unlike

Kitty, who invokes a superficial sense of concern about the war, Jenny thinks about it intellectually. West characterizes Jenny’s intellect as a facet of her private identity to demonstrate the severity of her isolation and the suppression of her individuality in the external world.

Switching from Beethoven to a joyous sarabande by Henry Purcell, an English composer, Jenny considers, “As I played I wondered if things like this happened when Purcell wrote such music, empty of everything except laughter and simple greeds and satisfactions [. . .] Why had modern life brought forth these horrors that make the old tragedies seem no more than nursery shows?”

(The Return 29-30). Through the musical implications of Purcell and Kitty’s satisfaction, West posits a critique of the optimistic illusion and sentiment veiled over society to protect it from the horrors of the war. Kitty’s subscription to such an illusion and inability to have an intellectual conversation with Jenny causes Jenny to initiate an internal dialogue about the “horrors” of

“modern life.” Jenny’s thoughts move beyond the war as she criticizes humanity’s passion for 24 greed demonstrated by society's determination to push forth fast-paced developments of industrialization and urbanization that destroy the natural landscape. She notes that towns and buildings have replaced the flowers and trees. Jenny thinks to herself, “Perhaps it is that adventurous men have too greatly changed the outward world which is life’s engenderment”

(The Return 30). The structure and complexities of Jenny’s interior thoughts exemplify the lack of acceptable language available to individuals during this time, especially single women, whose ideas formed on the basis of philosophy and self-reliance. Yet, as West shows, no one was exempt from enduring the changes induced by modernity and the war.

The “horrors” of “modern life” West references in The Return of the Soldier through

Jenny’s narrative were explored by other modernist artists as well. Artists like Wyndham Lewis and Richard Aldington produced art, including prose, poems, and paintings, reflective of their firsthand experiences in the war. For example, Wyndham Lewis’ 1919 painting A Battery Shelled depicts what appears to be three officers whose countenances represent a cruel indifference that is contrasted with the indistinct features of the soldiers who are battling against smoke from exploding shells on a dark and dismal battlefield (see fig. 3). Lewis’ painting emphasizes the cause of war trauma soldiers endured, while West focuses on the aftermath and symptoms of the war through her different characters’ perspectives.

Figure 3. Wyndham Lewis, A Battery Shelled, 1919 25

West’s invocation and representation of wartime horrors in The Return of the Soldier also extend toward Richard Aldington’s two-stanza poem “Battlefield,” which he wrote from the frontline of the war in 1917 and then directly had it published in The Egoist. Jenny’s narrative provides a philosophical perspective on how humanity at large perpetuates such harmful changes in society. Aldington’s poem comes to a similar conclusion. In the first stanza, Aldington writes,

“The wind is piercing chill // And blows fine grains of snow // Over this shell-rent ground; //

Every house in sight // Is smashed and desolate” (Aldington). The succession of images in this stanza first centers on Aldington’s personal experience in the war, as he engages his senses to capture the challenge of enduring the cold weather. He then provides the image “shell-rent ground” to describe the condition of the battlefield. Most interestingly, however, is the final image in that stanza that emphasizes the impact the war had on civilians. By depicting “every house in sight” as “smashed and desolate,” Aldington shifts his perspective to capture those of the innocent bystanders who were gravely affected by humanity’s violent and greedy behavior, which is very much what Jenny’s character defines in West’s novel. Despite Jenny not going into great detail about the war, like those depictions present in Lewis’ painting and Aldington’s poem, her character conveys a strong anti-war sentiment.

The anti-war language embedded in Jenny’s internal narrative further certifies the suppression of her individuality in the external world while also showing how her individualist representation is used to critique society’s structure around war and violence. For example, as she reflects on Chris’ homecoming and his experience living with shell-shock, Jenny realizes that his amnesic condition protects him from returning to the war:

Even though I lay weeping at it on the dead leaves I was sensible of the bitter

rapture that attends the discovery of any truth. I felt, indeed, a cold intellectual 26

pride in his refusal to remember his prosperous maturity and his determined

dwelling in the time of his first love, for it showed him so much saner than the

rest of us, who take life as it comes, loaded with the inessential and the irritating

(The Return 65).

Jenny’s character, at this moment, is split between two narratives, which implies how complex individualism was during the war. Externally, Jenny expresses sorrow for Chris’ rejection of his life with her and Kitty through her tears and lying helplessly on a pile of dead leaves. Her sorrow reflects a desire for Chris to regain his memory, though that means he will return to the war. It is in this way that Jenny’s emotional display directly connects to Kitty’s grief and gives into the social energy surrounding the war. However, Jenny’s private thoughts and internal rumination defy her emotional display by praising Chris for “his refusal to remember” his life embedded in the war and using the discourse of love as a counternarrative to society’s focus on global violence. As she turns her attention away from the war, she removes Chris from that narrative as well by equating his desire for love with sanity. In other words, while the rest of society concerns itself with “the inessential and the irritating”—adjectives used to categorize the war—Chris’ memory loss allows him to pursue a fulfilling life absent of violence and trauma. Similarly, West labels Jenny’s internal reflection as a “cold intellectual pride,” which calls attention to her logical perspective as a defining feature of her individuality. Yet, by only associating this “cold intellect” with Jenny’s mental realm, West exhibits how external factors hindered and rejected the manifestation of her intellect as a woman and the outward expression of her anti-war sentiment.

The portrayal of Jenny’s character as introspective and alienated from society highlights the lack of agency she has in her physical reality. This is most evident in the way that she reflects on Chris and Margaret’s romance as a method of keeping him home since she feels powerless to 27 accomplish such a task. As a case in point, Jenny considers “And his soldierly knowledge was as deeply buried as this memory of that awful August. While [Margaret’s] spell endured they could not send him back into the hell of war. This wonderful kind woman held his body as safely as she held his soul” (The Return 71). Nurturing the anti-war sentiment that pervades the novel, West uses Jenny’s rejection from society and her internal narrative to position Margaret as an external tool to defy the war, not overtly, however. It is Margaret’s love, or “spell,” that protects Chris, not Margaret’s rejection of his duty as a soldier. Consequently, Jenny becomes the only character who rejects the war and is simultaneously rejected by society as her social role evades the patriarchal order.

The construction of Jenny’s character through an individualistic frame subverts both the social norms related to domesticity and war while also elucidating the challenges individuals faced during this time when engaging in identity formation. Through the other characters, West explores the idea that gender constructs form a supporting foundation of warfare. In turn, West uses Jenny’s character to excavate a middle ground between the two gender roles to highlight society’s humanity, rather than demonstrate Jenny blending seamlessly into the social collective.

However, West also shows that society rejected individuals like Jenny, who had no stock in the war or the feminized space of domesticity. As a result of this rejection, Jenny experiences the limitations of both language and the body, suppressing the manifestation of her individuality.

While Jenny’s character anticipates the modernization of the woman’s role in both the public and private spheres, her character’s interiority highlights the struggle single women faced to express themselves externally. This notion is substantiated by Jenny’s final dialogic phrase in the novel.

When Chris is finally “cured” of his shell-shock and Kitty asks, “‘How does he look?’” Jenny responds, “‘Oh. . . .’ How could I say it? ‘Every inch a soldier’” (The Return 90). Jenny’s 28

utterance to Kitty confirms that the dominant rhetoric of wartime controls and restricts her

external self-expression. In contrast, in her mental interior, Jenny expresses her anti-war

sentiment with phrases like “the hell of war.” Effectively, West created a text that criticizes social

constructs that support violence and destruction and shows how individuals whose identities

defied categorization were rejected by society, as they were perceived as a threat to the

patriarchal order. The Return of the Soldier emphasizes the need for more accessible language and spaces for individuals to synthesize their private, internal identities with the external world—a synthesis West’s contemporary H.D. works toward in her novel HERmione, as explored in the next chapter. 29

Chapter Two

Liberating the Private Self from the Bounds of Society: H.D.’s HERmione

The titular character of H.D.'s HERmione, Hermione Gart, grounds and manifests her existence by mediating the intricate relationship between her psychological interior and physical exterior.12 To achieve this labyrinthine effect, H.D. alternates between representing fragments of

Hermione’s interior monologue and a third-person point of view that describes the distorted images of Hermione’s reality. In turn, a rift is created between the mental and physical spaces that Hermione struggles to navigate.13 As Hermione’s character develops, however, the mental/physical binary set forth by the narrative structure falls apart. Moments of tension between Hermione's private self and the layers of her exterior, such as her physical appearance, relationships, tangible objects, and external appraisals of her character, are shown to shape her individuality. Yet, H.D. implements language that defies any sense of cohesion of individuality and instead produces a narrative that mimics the discourse of the mind as it is challenged by social norms. H.D. describes Hermione as experiencing a crisis of the self at the intersection of her artistic, physical, professional, psychological, sexual, and social identities.14 Hermione’s self-identity crisis begins when she returns to live with her family after failing to graduate from

12 A significant factor in the discussion of any of H.D.’s texts is either distinguishing it from or associating it with the Imagist movement—a subcategory of Modernism. Very famously, in 1912, Ezra Pound sent a few of H.D.’s poems in a letter to Harriet Monroe of Poetry and tagged the bottom of the page with ‘H.D. Imagiste’ (Pondrom, “H.D. and the Origins” 87). Cyrena Pondrom notes that “H.D.’s early poems were models which enabled the precepts of imagism to be defined” (“H.D. and the Origins” 86). Despite her influential power and ties to the movement, H.D. began to branch out and experiment with prose and other forms of avant-garde styles of writing, especially when writing became personal as she used the medium to explore her identity and important moments of her life. In a reading of H.D.’s poetry that goes against the tenets of imagism, Peter Howarth explains, “the experimental narrative technique of her novel-autobiographies searches for an underlying symbolic pattern for the traumatic years 1915-22” (Howarth 159). HERmione falls into this category Howarth describes. 13 Regarding the narrative style of HERmione, Susan Friedman states, “The reader, like the narrator, becomes immersed in the repetitive discourse of Hermione’s troubled consciousness. But, at other times, the narrator invites the reader to identify with her position of distance and authority as she inserts authoritative commentary into her narrative” (Penelope’s Web 107). 14 Susan Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis note, “HER concerns a quest for identity which centers on the interrelated questions of vocation, marriage, and sexuality” (Friedman and DuPlessis 209). 30

Bryn Mawr College. Subsequently, Hermione embarks on an introspective journey in search of her life’s purpose while also devoting a substantial amount of time and mental energy to sustain her tumultuous relationships with her two love interests, Fayne Rabb and George Lowndes. She also experiences emotional distress from clashing with her parents—all the while trying to escape the inhibiting grasp of societal expectation and control. Hermione’s retreat inward, then, during her interactions with what exists outside of the internal self, highlights the division between the mental and the physical that she feels she must reconcile. This chapter deconstructs the narrative structure of HERmione through the mental/physical binary as it appears in various forms—mind/body, interior/exterior, personal/social—to explore how Hermione’s character mediates the synthesis of her inner life, the part of her that does not have a physical representation (verbal or otherwise), and her multilayered, external reality, as she engages identity formation that deviates from social mimicry.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the woman’s role in both the private and public spheres shifted significantly, resulting in a divided representation of the mind and body. The antiquated life of a True Woman, a woman who upheld traditional values and ideals of domesticity, was no longer accepted as a prescriptive lifestyle for all women. In contrast, the

New Woman of the twentieth century embraced modernity and explored and practiced autonomy in social spaces outside of the domestic interior.15 Regarding the function of the True

Woman-New Woman dichotomy in H.D.’s work, Annette Debo states, “In HERmione and

Asphodel, the True Woman ideal is manifested by Hermione’s mother, Eugenia Gart, who is

crafted by H.D. to conform to the True Woman characteristics of piety, physical purity,

submissive nature, and domestic dedication” (Debo 187). To a certain extent, H.D. frames

15 For an in-depth discussion of the defining characteristics of the New Woman, see Patterson, Martha H. The American New Woman Revisited: A Reader, 1894-1930. Rutgers University Press, 2008. 31

Hermione, who functions in opposition to her mother, in terms of the New Woman: “[Hermione]

must get away from Eugenia sitting in the dark like a great moth, dimity dressing jacket, feet

crossed on a low pouf thing, hands knitting, hands, hands” (HERmione 80). Despite Hermione’s

desire to break free from the cult of domesticity, she becomes trapped in the middle of the two

different social positions that support the mind/body binary. She feels like a failure after

dropping out of college while also fearing that she will become a physical symbol of domestic

life like her mother, especially if she marries George. Hermione’s internal fears manifest into a

distorted lens through which she views her external reality, resulting in a warped perception of

her corporeal form. Early twentieth-century literary journals most prominently depict the cultural

climate Hermione was up against and elucidate her struggle to experience a unified self. More

specifically, the content, tone, and advertisements of literary journals, such as The Little Review

and Good Housekeeping Magazine, capture the polarity of the two socially constructed selves for

and imposed on women. In the 1910 edition of Good Housekeeping Magazine, for example, the opening advertisement features a woman, on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor as her young children watch, exhibiting the woman’s body as a tool to mother children and carry out daily housework (see fig. 4). In direct contrast, The Little Review encouraged women to use their

minds by spotlighting the literary work of women writers like Leona Dalrymple (see fig. 5). The

contrasting examples indicate a source of Hermione’s anxiety and discomfort concerning her

social position as it conflicts with her private self. 32

Figure 4. Johnson’s Kleen Floor Figure 5. An advertisement for Leona advertisement from a 1910 edition of Dalrymple’s novel Diane of the Green Good Housekeeping Magazine. Van in a 1914 edition of The Little Review.

When considering the mind/body binary as a form of social discourse, the physical body

assumes a position of privilege due to its visible presence in contrast to the interior, invisible, and

often private mind. Amid the disorienting opening pages of HERmione, Hermione acknowledges

a division between her own body and mind that, in turn, causes her to experience chronic

emotional tension and trauma. Hermione tells herself, “I am Hermione Gart. I am going round

and round in circles. Her Gart went on. Her feet went on [. . .] Her Gart. I am Her Gart. Nothing

held her, she was nothing holding to this thing: I am Hermione Gart, a failure (HERmione 4).

The meaning of the alternate use of first- and third-person points of view in this example is 33 twofold.16 First, switching between the two types of narration highlights the inseparable nature of the private interior and the physical exterior as they construct one’s reality. For example, the internal repetition of Hermione’s name, her social label, “I am Hermione Gart [. . .] I am Her

Gart,” expresses her desire to stabilize her identity, while her external behavior, “Her feet went on,” exhibits her physical movement forward through space and time. Second, the synchronous effect of both points of view demonstrates Hermione’s troubled attempt to unify her inner mind with her external body and feel whole and complete and not as though she is a “failure.”

Hermione’s negative assessment of herself occurs when she returns home after failing to finish her studies at Bryn Mawr and panics because of the mental disconnect she feels from her body.

Unlike many other social spheres that privilege the body rather than the mind, or the battleground of World War I where the human body was reduced to nothing more than a defense mechanism against deadly weapons, the milieu of academia prioritizes the mental interior.

Consequently, Hermione experiences a rupture of her sense of self when she shifts environments.

She abandoned a space where her self-identity reflected her mind and then moved to a domestic and familiar place where her physical appearance and behaviors are intrinsically tied to the perception of her individuality and sense of self.

Hermione’s struggle to experience a unified self during a sudden shift of social setting indicates that the mind/body binary is only upheld by social structures that shape and are shaped by the locale of existence. In the novel, H.D. shows that the body and mind coalesce to mediate the various components of individuality as they interact with the external elements of reality. For

16 Sanna Melin Schyllert offers an extended analysis of H.D.’s narrative style, specifically the interchangeable use of first- and third-person points of view, in the article “‘Are you giving yourself to make a self’: Sacrifice, Pronoun Shifts, and the Creation of Self in H.D.’s Prose Works.” Regarding HERmione, Schyllert argues that despite the entanglement of first- and third-person points of view, Hermione’s two selves—the subject and the object—never actually merge. Schyllert suggests, “Hermione tries to create or rather recreate her self in an internal monologue” (Schyllert). While Schyllert’s argument is both compelling and well supported, it fails to acknowledge the relationship between Hermione’s psychological interior and her physical exterior that accounts for her unified existence. 34

Hermione, though, it is not as simple as erasing the dividing line between the two entities and viewing herself holistically. Between her academic failures and her physical discomfort at her family’s home, she becomes increasingly displeased with both her mind and body, creating an unstable self.

H.D. was not just well aware of the social discussions that framed the mind and body as binary oppositions, particularly those that were circulated in mass-produced literary journals, but she contributed to them as well.17 In fact, in much of her writing, both fiction and non-fiction,

H.D. addresses the mind/body binary by focusing on moments when the two entities fuse together. Namely, in her 1919 essay Notes on Thought and Vision, H.D. theorized that the over-mind (H.D.’s term), a form of consciousness, filters the human experience at the intersection of the mind and the body. The essay ends with these lingering questions: “Where does the body come in? What is the body?” (Notes 51). The questions raised in Notes apply directly to Hermione’s distorted perception of her physical body when she catches a glimpse of her reflection. As a case in point, as she enters her family’s springhouse, “Hermione shivered, seeing a face reflected in the water that was almost as unpleasing to her as the thought of

Minnie” (HERmione 11). Hermione’s shivering, paired with the ambiguity of the noun “a face” to describe her reflection, reveals the detachment she feels from her own body. Hermione's psychological detachment from her body is largely due to the social structures that privilege either the private interior or the physical exterior. Thus far in Hermione’s life, two options have been made available to her based on social expectations. Either she was to attend and graduate from college and/or marry a man. Situated between what is socially acceptable and her inner,

17 In the third chapter of The Cambridge Companion to H.D., “H.D. and the ‘Little Magazines,’” Cyrena N. Pondrom outlines H.D.’s publication history in early twentieth-century literary journals. Pondrom notes that these innovative literary journals, like The Egoist and The Little Review, enabled H.D. to publish some of her more experimental prose and poetry work. The summation of H.D.’s writing career across various journals highlights her creative genius and positions her as one of the women in the early twentieth century who participated in social spaces that recognized women as thinkers. 35 unspoken desires, which she has not yet had the freedom to explore, a young, unmarried

Hermione anxiously tries to reconcile her inner life that clashes with the unrecognizable image she sees reflected in the water.

In an examination of her reflection, Hermione notes, “Forehead too high, hair too lank, eyes that stared and stared, blobs of inconsequent blackness” (HERmione 11). This fragmented list of her physical features makes it difficult to discern if she views herself in a negative light because of her recent “failures'' or if she has internalized a set of unrealistic beauty standards that she uses to judge her physical identity. In any case, the distortion of her body signifies the anxiety she feels internally. The entanglement of Hermione’s psychological interior and her external reflection at this moment undermines the narrative structure of the text that articulates the division of the interior and exterior spaces. By observing and simultaneously reflecting on her external features, the mind and body division is momentarily erased. Therefore, the aporic meaning of the text concerning the mental/physical binary emphasizes the importance of the gap between the two spaces where the discontinuity of Hermione’s identity occurs, which gives her the motivation to create an individual path of meaningful existence.18

Moreover, the reflective imagery in HERmione exemplifies Hermione’s desire to ground the various components of her internal identity as she searches for solace and purpose in a reality that continuously orbits her socially-perceived static self. In one of the novel’s opening scenes, as

Hermione sat alone in the woods with nothing more than her anxious thoughts, she “tried to concentrate on one frayed disc of green, pool or mirror that would refract image. She was nothing. She must have an image no matter how fluid, how inchoate” (HERmione 5). The

18 The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms defines “aporia” as “an interpretative dilemma or impasse involving some textual contradiction that renders meaning undecidable” (22). In HERmione, the narrative structure divides Hermione’s mental interior and her physical reality. However, the text contradicts itself when the imagery conveys a vague sense of unity between the two spaces. 36 indeterminate, ornate language used in this scene perpetuates the chain of signification concerning Hermione’s cycle of acting as both the subject and object of her reality. For example, the adjective “fluid,” used to describe Hermione’s image, could depict the physical properties of the “frayed disc of green, pool” where Hermione searches for her reflection. Yet, the fluidity of her image could also signify the ephemeral qualities of her identity that shift and change in the interior of her mind but do not necessarily manifest externally. Hermione often experiences moments like this, moments when aspects of her identity, such as discovering her romantic interest in women, begin to take shape while her physical form and behaviors remain static.

Unable to find the appropriate language to facilitate an interaction between her “inchoate” self and the external world, Hermione settles for establishing a fluid image of her physical body to represent and ground her existence. The dual meaning of Hermione’s fluid image collapses the boundary that divides the inner self from the tangible world, unifying subject and object momentarily. The cycle Hermione finds herself in, which alternates from subject position to object position, never actually ends, since viewing her physical form is only made possible through a reflection—a mere representation of the self. Hermione’s determination to “have an image,” indicated by the phrase “she must,” reveals how important it is for her to be seen and to ground her sense of self while she mentally navigates a reality fraught with defeat and discomfort.

To accentuate the disconnect between Hermione’s mind and body and the discomfort she experiences, H.D. incorporates aspects of the unconscious mind.19 It is through unconscious

19 In Psyche Reborn, Susan Friedman establishes that H.D. was familiar with psychoanalytic theory, including those concerning the unconscious mind, well before 1933 when she first met with Freud, who Friedman refers to as the “guardian of beginnings” (Psyche Reborn 17). In the chapter “Hieroglyphic Voices,” Friedman expands on how “Freud’s translation of unconscious hieroglyphs provided [H.D.] with a model of meditative quest that systematized the flow of associations and contributed to her development of an epic form based on reflection rather than action” (Psyche Reborn 55). While Friedman bases her analysis on H.D.’s later poetic works, like Helen in Egypt, HERmione exemplifies H.D.’s exploration of a very general understanding and definition of the unconscious mind before she became an analysand and explored the “hieroglyphs” of her own unconscious with Freud. 37

behaviors that Hermione forms coping mechanisms to deal with her unabating anxiety. One

complex instance, in particular, occurs when “The Grange shadow lengthened, came near, it

would cut her feet off. Imperiously, without letting Her say another word to Minnie, her ankles

dragged Her forward [. . .] Her pushed through the screen door” (HERmione 22). Hermione's discomfort with her sister-in-law Minnie is evident when she walks away from her in the middle of their conversation. However, before she goes inside, Hermione acknowledges that the expansion of industrialization—the lengthening shadow— will eventually consume the natural landscape of her family’s home, and “Gart would fall” (HERmione 22). Hermione’s thoughts about how social changes will affect the physical location of her family indicate that she recognizes the unstable nature of the physical world and that she is not just experiencing an isolated mental rupture based on her own failed attempts to stabilize her life.

In any case, the fragmented narrative mimics the overwhelming flood of anxiety associated with Hermione’s sense that she has no discernable life direction. As a result,

Hermione allows her mind to disconnect from her body, leaving her in a state of silence that enables her ankles to “imperiously” control her physical movement. While Hermione’s unconscious behavior conceals her private identity, her intuitive reaction to avoid the encroaching shadow in the atmosphere demonstrates a mental process that connects her inner desires with her physical reactions. Due to this moment of tension, Hermione admits, “I’m not at home in Gart. I’m not at home out of Gart. I am swinging between worlds, people, things exist in opposite dimension. She waded through more darkness, into another light patch” (HERmione

25). Again, H.D. alternates between fragments of Hermione’s interior monologue and a third-person point of view to depict Hermione’s private emotions and physical behaviors as two separate structures of her being. Rather than give in to this mind/body binary, though, that 38 divides the representation of Hermione’s character, privileging the tension that stems from the interplay of the two narrative points of view creates a space for Hermione to explore her individuality. The discomfort produced by the disharmony between her mind and reality becomes a reason for her to reject social conformity and embrace her distinctive identity.

Accordingly, Hermione’s physical movement from darkness to light symbolizes the transitional phases of her life and her evolving identity.

As Hermione confronts the rupture between her unstable, psychological interior and her static, corporeal form, she engages with objects that form another external layer of the mental/physical binary. Similar to the mind/body binary, the friction produced by the clashing of

Hermione’s inner self with the material world generates moments for her to evaluate herself through her own internal lens rather than force her individuality to conform to social expectations and mimicry. Nonetheless, it is quite curious how Hermione’s distress leads her to fixate on objects that are essentially meaningless to her. These things, that captivate Hermione, occupy a space of existence and non-existence and ultimately leave her pondering on what they, what she, and what humans, in general, represent in a reality that shapes and is shaped by presence.20 For Hermione, the action of being present is made possible by reconciling her private and external selves into one unified whole. There are three scenes, in particular, that feature things in the physical world, which Hermione uses to stabilize her wandering and anxious mind and reflect on the different pieces of her identity as they intersect, especially in social

20 The term “thing” is borrowed from Thing Theory to give a weighted presence to the objects that induce Hermione’s emotional reactions. It is also the term H.D. uses throughout HERmione. See Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory.” 39 situations.21 The first scene depicts Hermione working under her mother’s jurisdiction and using the office supplies around her to meditate on her life. The second scene chronicles Hermione’s emotional anxiety that manifests as physiological stress at George’s mother’s house as she focuses on a statue in the room. Interestingly, both of these scenes are veiled with a spiritual overtone, which complicates Hermione’s facilitation of the interior/exterior relationship and the essence of her existence.22 Finally, the third scene to feature a detailed account of Hermione's

fixation on objects takes place at her former colleague's house where she meets Fayne for the

first time. Hermione's social interactions during the gathering are reduced to a mere backdrop of

the setting while her focus is centered on the objects in the room. The three scenes epitomize the

interior/exterior binary H.D. uses to frame Hermione’s reflective narrative as she weaves

together the pieces of her life and identity.

While the details concerning Hermione’s time at college and her career aspirations are

sparse, her narrative hinges on the rippling effect of her choice to abandon her education. After

leaving Bryn Mawr, Hermione has nowhere to go and a dream of moving to Europe, so she

returns to live with her family—all of whom reinforce the societal belief that she is a failure for

not achieving academic or professional success. Hermione's internalized shame of being labeled

21 H.D. treats the objects in HERmione in a similar fashion to how she treats the objects in Tribute to Freud. H.D. understood the importance of objects beyond their utilitarian use. For instance, in one entry of Tribute to Freud, H.D. reminisces about her father’s magnifying glass as “a sacred symbol.” She goes on to connect the significance of her father’s objects “on his study table” to the “old, old sacred objects” in Freud’s office (Tribute 25). In another entry, H.D. compares the realness of her memories of her brother to the “clay objects that fill the cases around the walls, that are set in elegant precision in a wide arc on the Professor’s table” (Tribute 35). H.D. builds a connection between her inner thoughts and the tangible items in the room in the same way that Hermione connects her emotions to the objects she encounters. 22 Many scholars have examined H.D.’s frequent use of otherworldly references in her poetry and some of her novels, but few have paid attention to the spiritual element of HERmione. In an examination of H.D.’s war writing, Elizabeth Anderson observes, “[H.D.’s] spiritual interests ranged from Moravian Christianity to astrology, from spiritualism to the cult of St Teresa. In H.D.’s writing, these varied modes of spiritual practice, expression and beliefs are consistently taken up in relation to questions of creativity and materiality; encounters with the divine are enmeshed in the material world” (Anderson). The fascinating connection Anderson builds between spiritualism and materialism in H.D.’s work supports the reading of the spiritual references associated with objects in HERmione present in this chapter. 40 a failure causes her to have an empty vision of her future. She thus searches for characteristics of her identity in the physical world by consciously engaging with her surroundings, including physical objects, to define her life's purpose. Take, for example, when Hermione helps her mother complete trivial household tasks: “she had catalogued the papers, printed their numbers on the slips of cardboard, small filing cabinet, her job, doing it automatically.” She then reflects,

“It was easier to do these things than not to do them. She was hypnotized by these things. How long would she go on this way? I am a failure. She must pull herself out, pull herself out of something” (HERmione 79-80). The function of the office supplies—emphasized by the second use of the word “things” in this scene—holds a dual meaning. On the one hand, the objects

(papers, slips of cardboard, filing cabinet) function as universal signifiers of the workforce that prompt Hermione to question and evaluate her professional identity. On the other hand,

Hermione’s mother associates the objects with the upkeep of the domestic space. Hermione takes responsibility for the monotonous tasks, as they are referred to as “her job,” but by not fulfilling a larger purpose—her purpose—she suddenly becomes aware of the division between her desire to create as an artist and the traditional roles put in front of her by society—and at this particular moment in time, her mother.23 However, the sudden shift in narration to the first-person, marked by the phrase “I am a failure,” actually links her inner thoughts and discomfort concerning the idea of social conformity with the physical objects.

Moreover, the image of Hermione being “hypnotized by these things” serves as the scene’s turning point and depicts the complicated middle ground of the interior/exterior binary established by the narrative structure. The use of the ambiguous word “things” in connection to

23 Considering the aspects that make HERmione a roman à clef, H.D.’s contempt for stiff social structures that hinder creativity is reflected through Hermione’s behaviors and emotions, as exemplified here. For instance, in 1958, nearly five decades after the events of HERmione took place, H.D. reflects, “I had been forced into the wrong groove. Is every groove wrong? I resented the years preparing for college that might have been spent with music, drawing. Poetry?” (End to Torment 12). Similarly, Hermione feels like she is being pulled in two separate directions, rupturing her sense of self and reinforcing the unstable condition of her life. 41

Hermione’s altered mental state draws attention to the objects as intermediaries between

Hermione’s psychological interior and the social sphere. She is concentrated on the task at hand but becomes trapped inside of her mind, contemplating “how long she would go on this way.”

The repeated question, “how long she would go on this way,” by both Hermione and her mother, symbolizes the cyclical nature of her socially-perceived academic and professional failures and the stagnancy of her lifestyle. As she carries out the mundane task of filing paperwork, she panics about the condition of her life and her future goals. Hermione concludes that “She must pull herself out, pull herself out of something.” Similar to the indeterminacy of the noun

“things,” the noun “something” indicates that Hermione is not exactly sure what it is that is holding her back.

One way to view Hermione’s emotional reaction to the objects is in the context of T.S.

Eliot’s “objective correlative.”24 In his 1921 essay “Hamlet and His Problems,” Eliot explains,

“The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion” (Eliot 93). In Hermione’s case, the objects in her mother’s domestic space with which she engages, and that represent the opposite of her vocation, contribute to the emotional anxiety she experiences. In an atmosphere that promotes a conventional lifestyle,

Hermione uses this brief moment of interior/exterior tension to continue molding her individuality, allowing it to manifest externally, and to break free from social mimicry that stifles her creativity.

24 H.D. and T.S. Eliot were involved with the same group of modernist writers, including Richard Aldington and Ezra Pound, and contributed to many of the same publications, such as The Egoist. According to Barbara Guest, “[H.D.] counted [Eliot] among her friends from the old days, and whenever a visiting poet from the United States came to see her, or whenever she specially wanted to brighten a group in for tea, she would invite Eliot” (Guest 220). Eliot even publicly praised H.D.’s work and adapted her translation of Ion into his play Family Reunion. Given the context of their friendship, H.D.would have read Eliot’s essay on Shakespeare’s Hamlet after its publication in 1921 in Eliot’s collection of essays The Sacred Wood. 42

There is also an element of desire in the way that Hermione interacts with the things around her. She focuses on their stillness to fulfill her want of expressing and channeling her private mind to the physical world as these things mark specific moments in time. To illustrate, during her first meeting with her soon-to-be mother-in-law, Lillian, Hermione hardly communicates verbally with Lillian or George. Instead, paying close attention to the statue on the piano in the room, she “looked at the praying boy of whoever it was and things whirling in her head, making coloured patterns like frost flowers on windows, became static, but static in colour not simply frost flower but the thing in her mind (whirling pinwheel) became fixed, became static” (HERmione 106). This passage is quite curious as it is replete with abstract images and metaphors, showing Hermione’s distorted perception of her reality. It is as though Hermione, like the reader, is trying to make sense of how her innermost thoughts and emotions function beyond the confines of her own mind. To stabilize the “things whirling in her head,” caused by the stress of her social environment, Hermione fixates on the statue. The ambiguity of the noun “things” to describe the contents of “her head” signals the mental images associated with her perception. In other words, referring to “things” in a mental interior can only relate to the idea of a mental concept, or the signified, that represents the visible world. However, the manifestation of a linguistic sign to reflect her mental images at this moment never comes to fruition, resulting in

Hermione focusing on the statue as a sign of her inner self.25

Further, Hermione compares the pattern making of the mental images—these things in her head—to the patterns created by “frost flowers on windows.” The frost flowers fog the windows hindering any sense of visibility in the same way that the images whirling in her mind

25 There is a striking parallel between the emotional significance of the statue in HERmione and H.D.’s rumination on the definition(s) of “signet” in Tribute to Freud. H.D. writes, “Signets—as from sign, a mark, token, proof, signet [. . .] Sign again—a word, gesture, symbol, or mark, intended to signify something else” (Tribute 66). H.D. is, of course, considering her own artistic signature, or “signet,” but it seems to serve a similar purpose as the statue. H.D. categorizes both a signet and the statue as symbols used to represent the self. 43 cause her to have a blurred vision of her physical reality. The statue, then, as it stabilizes her

“mind (whirling pinwheel),” defies the mental/physical binary by serving as a mediator between

Hermione’s private interior, the part of her that remains unspoken, and her social environment, which sends her mind and emotions into a spiral.

Furthermore, the subject-object relationship formed between Hermione and the praying boy statue serves to unify her mind, body, and physical reality, thus showing that the division of the mental and physical spaces does not exist, despite the text pushing this either/or dichotomy.

Namely, the moment Hermione decides to leave Lillian’s home, she says out loud, “‘Now I must be going’ and another part of her mind, apart from that mind, had prompted her as apart from the wings somewhere, had whispered so that she had automatically reached out a ouija-board thin hand and picked up the statue” (HERmione 111). On the surface, this scene depicts a rupture of

Hermione’s two selves. Her external dialogue announces her physical departure, while “another part of her mind” controls the movement of her hand. Yet, by committing the unconscious act of using her “ouija-board thin hand” to pick up the statue, a tangible item in the physical world, she experiences a moment of unity of mind-body-reality.

The spiritual phrase “ouija-board” used as an adjective to describe Hermione’s hand implies that it is merely a vehicle used to fulfill her inner desire of communicating with the external world similar to how a ouija board is used to communicate with spirits.26 In fact,

Hermione’s action of picking up the statue elicits a response from Lillian, who says to Hermione,

26 H.D.’s use of the phrase “ouija board” engages with the discourse of spiritualism that was prevalent in the early twentieth century. In a letter to Havelock Ellis in 1933, during her time as Freud’s analysand, H.D. admitted, “I want to know the ‘colour’ of people I deal with, their particular ‘ray’ in the spectrum. I wobble dangerously on that very-fine line between science and occultism, and there Freud will help me” (H.D., Analyzing Freud 18). H.D. was interested in understanding human characteristics that cannot be explained by science, and so by incorporating elements of spiritualism into her work, such as “ouija board,” she can explore the invisible realm of human nature. The Oxford English Dictionary indicates that the first use of “ouija board” was in 1890. Therefore, it was a relatively new game in the 1920s when H.D. was writing HERmione. The OED defines Ouija as “a board with letters, numbers, or other signs around its edge, at which a planchette (movable pointer, upturned glass, etc.) points supposedly in answer to questions from users, esp. attenders at a seance” (“Ouija”). 44

“‘And my dear child you must take that with you’” (HERmione 111). Lillian’s acknowledgment of Hermione’s fascination with the statue provides an observational view of how Hermione and her actions are perceived. In a way, the insertion of Lillian’s perspective serves as a mirror for

Hermione to see herself through an objective lens, producing a tension between Hermione’s internal and external selves. For Hermione, the presence of the unchanging, physical object—the statue—marks this stressful moment in time. Hermione reflects, “and fiance and mother became linked forever with that boy with lifted hands standing on a piano” (HERmione 106).

Consequently, while Hermione's social anxiety prevents her from verbal self-expression, the thingness of the statue enables her to bridge the gap between her private mind and external reality, which allows her to forge personal connections.

Additionally, Hermione uses the objects in her spatial reality as social buffers to position herself at a distance from other people in social situations. The buffering of the privacy of her mind and emotions is exemplified by her behavior at her former colleague’s home, Nellie

Thorpe. Upon arriving at Nellie’s home for an intimate social gathering with Fayne and Nellie’s sister, Jessie, Hermione overhears Nellie say to the others, “‘and at the end, Hermione failed completely’” (HERmione 49). Nellie’s insulting comment excludes Hermione and causes her to withdraw into her mind while her body remains present in the physical space. This sudden rupture of Hermione’s self is mediated by the objects in the room. For instance, immediately following Nellie’s “blunder,” “[Hermione] regarded the new acquaintance across a table and regarded a centerpiece. The thing was fringed, had hieratic center still demonstrably quattrocento through untidy scatterings of teacups. The fringe was linen thread knotted with peculiar deftness.

Hermione pulled at it. ‘Oh, what a pretty teacloth’” (HERmione 50-1). Rather than interact with

Fayne, Hermione’s attention shifts entirely toward the object positioned between her and her 45

“new acquaintance.” She first refers to the object as a “centerpiece,” then “the thing,” and when

she finally breaks her silence, she says “teacloth.” The succession of words used to describe the

object shows that in Hermione’s mind the teacloth becomes a “thing” that serves as a barrier

between her and Fayne, but in her physical reality, she recognizes its function as a “teacloth.”

This trace of signifiers to describe the teacloth demonstrates Derrida’s concept of “play.” By

creating this chain of signifiers that transcends her mind into verbal expression, Hermione

confronts the mental/physical binary that shapes her perception.

Following Nellie’s negative preface to her presence, Hermione has an epiphany: “The

people in the room were assorted, out of different boxes, yet all holding to some pattern, they had

the same trademark of nonentity” (HERmione 55). The epiphanic quality of this moment belies

Hermione’s long-standing belief that she was a failure for not completing her education or having a conventional life direction. After hearing Nellie’s harsh criticism about her character and experiencing an artificial sense of hospitality in her home, Hermione realizes that the measurement of success everyone around her subscribes to has created a social pattern of conformity, as everyone has “the same trademark of nonentity.” Hermione’s perspective of humanity at large is dismal, but it demonstrates a moment of clarity about her own character as she learns to embrace her individuality.

Hermione's intimate and familial relationships are the outermost layer of the external world that ruptures her sense of self, which foregrounds the ways in which the personal/social binary serves as a structural element of the novel. Indeed, her romantic relationships with George and Fayne pose a significant challenge to her ability to integrate her inner life and emotions with her reality. Part one of the novel chronicles Hermione’s apprehension about marrying George in addition to her mother’s overt disapproval and judgment of their engagement. As Hermione 46 combats the negativity surrounding her relationship with George, she meets Fayne, whom she grows to cherish until, in part two of the novel, Fayne reveals her romantic love for George.27

The florid terrain of each connection provides evidence of the disharmony between Hermione’s romanticized vision of those connections and their actuality in the novel. However, amid the many interactions she has with George and Fayne, there are moments of tension that push her into a deeper understanding of the significance of her individual existence as opposed to viewing herself as an attachment of someone else.

First, Hermione’s complex marital engagement to George overwhelms her with stress as it becomes entangled with how others perceive her and how it affects the course of her life.

Hermione eventually decides that she does not wish to marry George but cannot articulate that to him. In turn, H.D. describes the two characters as continuing a volatile relationship that eventually ends in torment. Upon detaching emotionally from George, Hermione makes herself vulnerable to Fayne to establish an intimacy, which also ends in grief. The sudden loss of both of her love interests and her ultimate discord with society serve as grounds to read Hermione’s character as fragmented and a social outcast Yet, it is the moments when her mental interior disagrees with the social layer of her reality that create a foundation for her to find harmony and unity within herself, to feel whole, and to disregard social expectations and rhetoric that have deemed her a failure.

In the first part of the novel, George’s actions run counter to the idealized version of his character in Hermione’s mind, causing her to recognize that marriage is a hindrance to her

27 In an analysis of HERmione as a roman à clef, Susan Friedman describes the dynamic between H.D. (Hermione), Frances Gregg (Fayne), and Ezra Pound (George) as an “erotic triad.” “The origin of H.D. Imagiste,” Friedman explains, “lay not in the heady, intellectual crosscurrents of Pound’s London, but in the erotic triangle of three poet/lovers meeting in the fields, forests, and drawing rooms of Pennsylvania” (Penelope’s Web 104). The love triangle between the three artists had a significant impact on H.D. and her life in Europe. However, in HERmione, it seems as though when the triangle connects via Fayne and George’s intimate bond, Hermione becomes overwhelmed with anxiety, breaking any ties she had with the others. 47 autonomy and personal identity.28 Hermione initially views George as an entity outside of herself

that will give her life meaning and help her escape from Pennsylvania. Before meeting George

for a romantic trip to the forest, she goes over a list of her desires, including “She wanted George

with some uncorrelated sector of Her[mione] Gart, she wanted George to correlate for her, life

here, there. She wanted George to define and to make definable a mirage, a reflection of some

lost incarnation” (HERmione 63). The “uncorrelated sector” of Hermione’s mind suggests that

her desire for George is somehow unnatural or out of character for her. Yet, the following phrase,

“she wanted George to correlate for her,” indicates that she views him as the missing link to her

incomplete existence—this, however, is just a fantasy in her mind. In the reality of the novel, she

faces the conflict between her internal desires and the true nature of their relationship. As a case

in point, once they were in the forest, “George had broken charm, chanting in harlequin nasal

those words out of New England, ‘Naw this is the forest primeval’” (HERmione 67). From

Hermione’s perspective, George is reduced from a savior to a “harlequin” due to his inability to

keep up a charming persona and the illusion that they are in the English Forest of Arden and out

of Pennsylvania.

George breaks the “charm” of their relationship and thus Hermione is forced to return to

her mind where she ruminates about her decision to marry him. “When I marry George Lowndes,

when I marry George Lowndes” Hermione repeats to herself, while her mother questions, “‘And

when exactly are you going to marry George Lowndes?’ Eugenia spoke ironically” (HERmione

97). There is an intense divide at this moment between Hermione and her mother that is

28 In a strange turn of events, in 1958, H.D. regards Pound as a victim of marriage. H.D. learns that upon his release from St. Elizabeth’s, Pound will be released into his wife’s custody, causing H.D. to question, “Custody? Marriage?” Her doctor, Erich Heydt, commented that Pound’s marital status might be reason enough for him to “want to break away.” This moment occurs decades after their broken engagement, yet H.D. wonders, “Did he want to break away from me? Of course he did. Was I hiding suppressed memories of that infinitely remote equivocal ‘engagement’? (End to Torment 47). It is interesting that after all that time and distance, H.D. still grieved having not married Pound. However devastated she was, though, H.D. acknowledges that their breakup led to “a forceful effort toward artistic achievement” (End to Torment 48). 48

represented by the personal/social binary. On the one hand, Hermione’s internal repetition reads

as though she is trying to convince herself that there is value in marrying George. On the other

hand, Eugenia’s judgmental perspective places Hermione in a position to defend her marital

plans. Somewhere in the entanglement of her relationships and engagement to George, Hermione

feels like she has lost her sense of self and purpose in life as the ground between her mental

interior and reality becomes muddled. It is through this conflict, though, that she resolves,

“People are in things, things are in people. I can’t be called Lowndes” (HERmione 112).

Hermione’s disinclination to subscribe to the marital lifestyle and alter her identity underscores her autonomous nature that she uses to find solace in her individualized position in society.

Despite Hermione’s decision to remain unmarried, she and George continue with their tumultuous relationship, which culminates when Hermione’s personhood is misunderstood by

George, leading to an external rupture of her internal emotions. Hermione’s concrete perception of her identity is never fully revealed, but by George saying to her, “‘You are so decorative,’” she senses that he appraises her character based on her external behaviors and appearance and yet does not accurately perceive the complex nature of her mind. Following George’s comment,

Hermione considers, “There was something stripped of decoration, something of somewhat-painful angles that he would not recognize” (HERmione 172). Interestingly, Hermione does not outwardly contest George’s appraisal of her individuality. Instead, she ponders the meaning of the word “decoration.” The ambiguous word “something” used to identify the missing element of “decoration” suggests that she is referring to the mental component of her existence. She acknowledges that George perpetuates the separation of the mental and physical spaces by not recognizing the “somewhat-painful angles” of her mental interior. However,

George's inability to recognize Hermione's private identity causes her to see herself in a way that 49 gives her a sense of unity, as she is the sole proprietor of the mental/physical relationship that shapes her being.

Moreover, the breakdown of communication between Hermione and George results in

George invading both Hermione’s mind and body. To illustrate, after George forces himself on

Hermione sexually and then apologizes, “‘I didn’t mean Hermione to hurt you,’” she begins to cry and says to him, “‘I’m so strong. I feel so strong, so right. Nothing can ever hurt me. Then—’

Humiliation choked Her[mione]. Tears choked and humiliated Her[mione]” (HERmione 175).

The inversion of Hermione’s emotions—her internal emotions reflected externally through the physical behavior of crying—shows that George’s assault establishes for Hermione a middle ground between her inner life and external reality where a completed form of her individuality is represented. Although, her individuality is in a constant state of flux. Further, her emotional release grounds her in the moment and privileges her reality over her interior monologue. As her vulnerability materializes, so does her desire to leave George in the past.

Navigating her various relationships requires Hermione to consider the extent to which external perceptions of herself define her identity as they operate against her own self-image. A prime example of this occurs when Hermione confronts Fayne about her relationship with

George, and Fayne reveals, “Yes. I love him, Understand this, Hermione. I love him. If I say I love George, it isn’t this flimsy thing you call love.” Fayne ends the conversation by saying,

“‘You are as George says heartless” (HERmione 218-19).29 Hermione’s exploration of her sexual identity ends in tragedy. She ends her relationship with George with the hope of pursuing a romantic connection with Fayne, only to lose both of them to each other, leaving Hermione in a

29 Susan Friedman and Rachel DuPlessis point out that “in opting for conventional romance with George, Fayne has renounced her lesbian self and rejected the love through which Hermione had found her erotic, spiritual, and artistic identities” (Friedman and DuPlessis 212). While Friedman and DuPlessis’ analysis of Fayne suppressing her lesbian identity is a convincing argument, they credit Fayne for Hermione finding her own self-defining identities, which is a flawed interpretation of her character. It is only after she escapes from George and Fayne that Hermione finds herself alone in the woods and realizes that she is the creator of her own life and existence. 50 state of isolation. Fayne’s accusation that Hermione is “heartless” functions as an external appraisal of her character in the same way that George’s calling her “decorative.” Hermione starts to realize that these external judgments of her personhood are simply signifiers in a long chain of signifiers that society uses to position her among the masses. Hermione questions the very definition of what it means to be “heartless”: “I am heartless Hermione, Hermione

Less-a-heart. What is Hermione Less-a-heart?” (HERmione 219). This tension, then, stemming from the conflict between her relationships with other people and her relationship with herself, opens up the world for her in a new way—Hermione can recognize the constructs of society that suppress her identity, and she abandons any sort of rhetoric that fashions her into a “wax doll in a toy shop” (HERmione 151). Therefore, her relationship with Fayne serves as yet another rupture between her mental interior and physical exterior that leads her to reconnect with herself.30

Hermione’s self-identity crisis results in a moment of relief when she realizes, as her feet leave “her wavering hieroglyph” in the snow, that she has autonomy and can create her own life.

(HERmione 224). “Last summer,” when she was labeled a failure, “the Creator had been white lightning brandished against blackness. Now the creator was [Hermione’s] feet, narrow black crayon across the winter whiteness” (HERmione 223). The linguistic sign Hermione was never able to formulate to represent her private identity manifests into a visible image, or “hieroglyph,” that symbolizes the unity between her mind and body. The novel ends, however, by rupturing any sense of unification Hermione experiences at this moment: “Practical and at one with herself,

30 In regard to H.D’s self-concept, Peter Nicholls suggests, “in contrast to the ‘Men of 1914’, who, as we have seen, share Freud’s early negative view of narcissism, H.D. grasps it as an ideal construction of the self, one which might free her from ‘whirling’ and ‘swirling’ of hysteria” (Nicholls 197). Nicholls’ perspective of H.D. (and Hermione) is highly presumptuous. He psychoanalyzes H.D. based on the portrait she paints of herself in HERmione. While Nicholls recognizes Hermione’s retreat inward as an escape from the external world, ascribing that behavior to narcissism completely ignores Hermione’s troubled path of feeling like she is a failure due to the social rhetoric and structures that reinforce her harsh view of herself. His comment also diminishes the moment of self revelation at the end of the novel that provides both the reader and Hermione a sense of relief from the tension she has endured to reach that point of catharsis. 51 with the world, with all outer circumstance, she barged straight into Mandy in the outer hallway.

‘Oh, Miss. [. . .] I done left Miss Fayne all alone in your little workroom’” (HERmione 234).

Fayne’s unwanted and unplanned appearance disrupts the process of Hermione’s self unification by posing a new, external challenge to her mental interior that she must reconcile. As Susan

Friedman notes, “The story is really two stories, a birth and a rebirth, in which the second undoes the first to suggest the endlessness of the process of becoming” (Penelope’s Web 101).

H.D.’s exploration of this endless “process of becoming” through Hermione’s character rests on the concept that an individual’s inner life will never fully manifest externally due to the limitations of language and social expectations. H.D. also posits that individuals will simultaneously be affected by the unpredictability of their multilayered, external reality, thus creating a conflict between the psychological interior and physical exterior. In HERmione, H.D. captures the difficulty of mediating the conflict of these two spaces and ultimately foregrounds the chasm that forms as a result of conflict as the site that creates and carries individuality.

Further, Hermione’s narrative shows that mental images and inner thoughts and emotions exist just as much as physical representations of the self. By recognizing and emphasizing the significance of the private, psychological interior, only then can society and humanity become more empathetic toward each individual’s struggle to break conformity and embrace their individuality. 52

Chapter Three

An Inner Reflection on Approaching Death: Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, a novel she initially conceptualized as a “playpoem,” captures the psychological process of facing mortality through six different characters’ soliloquies, as they go from childhood to old age.31 By the end of the novel, all six of the characters are dead, evoking a sense of finality associated with the reduction of the self to a corporeal form and highlighting the ephemeral quality of life.32 Woolf couples the characters’ soliloquies with vignettes of the sun rising and setting above a body of water over a day to depict the passing of time.33 Otherwise, the novel is nearly void of external dialogue, imagery, or narration, which condenses the internal and external spaces into one layer of reality. The submersion into the depths of the characters’ inner reflections and emotions concerning the nuance between life and death exhibits the self as an entity primarily of the mind, separate from the physical body.

Notably, the contrast between the characters Jinny and Susan, who represent differing social positions and lifestyles, and their emotional reactions to death from the middle of their lives to their old age details the visceral experience of viewing the totality of one’s life. Susan aspires to raise a family in a natural setting and avoid the cultural shift of urbanization, whereas

31 In the early stages of writing what would become known as The Waves, Woolf recorded in her diary, “Yes, but the Moths? That was to be an abstract mystical eyeless book: a playpoem” (Diary 203). 32 Erin Penner perceives this fact as Woolf “draw[ing] on the elegiac milieu to prod her reader to seek out what has been lost” (Penner 44). 33 While this chapter will not focus on the language of the interludes, it does rely on their function of pushing time forward in the novel. Therefore, it is pertinent to explore the range of scholarly interpretations on their meaning. For example, perceiving the interludes as rather metaphysical, Emily Hinnov states, “the interludes remind us that we are all of momentary importance in this cosmos of chaos over which we have no control” (Hinnov 215). Whereas, Claudia Olk focuses on the interludes’ form and function concerning the Impressionist movement. Olk argues, “the Interludes are not mere visual analogues to Impressionist paintings.” Rather, Olk claims, the interludes “offer an ekphrastic emulation of perception, which reflects on systems of representation. Aesthetic vision in the Interludes becomes a model of how language creates the aesthetic object” (Olk 165). Both Hinnov and Olk provide insight into the experimental interlacing of the natural, objective interludes and the characters’ private soliloquies. 53

Jinny flourishes in the heart of London and prioritizes her autonomy over fulfilling social expectations such as getting married or having children. The movement of time transforms their goals and desires into finite and fleeting moments that then become memories. By the time the sun had “sunk lower in the sky,” and Jinny and Susan’s hair had turned grey, they both described a sense of shock and distress about how quickly their youth dissolved into old age (The Waves

182).34 In turn, they each offer a philosophical perspective about life and death based on their individual experiences. This chapter positions Jinny and Susan’s soliloquies in a philosophical conversation about mortality to illustrate how the passing of time causes internal abjection, as the gap between life and death diminishes, and to explore Woolf's thoughts on how the body only represents the self upon death, whereas during one's lifetime that is influenced by social and cultural discourses and structures, the self that inhabits the mind composes the entirety of one's identity.

The theoretical framework of this chapter pivots on Kristeva’s theory and definition of abjection in Powers of Horror. Kristeva writes, “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (Kristeva 4). In the case of The Waves, the movement of time “disturbs identity” and “does not respect borders,” leading the characters to feel abject, or a sense of horror, about their foreseeable deaths. Jinny and Susan also experience a sense of abjection to their bodies, especially as they begin to age. According to Kristeva, confronting a corpse causes the subject to stand “at the border of [their] condition as a living being” (Kristeva 3). Although Jinny and

Susan are not described as coming in contact with dead bodies, they equate their aging bodies

34 Katherine Sedon explores a similar reaction to aging among the characters in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway in the article “Moments of Aging: Revising Mother Nature in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.” Both this thesis chapter and Sedon’s article elevate the midlife narrative that too often gets pushed aside. However, unlike the characters in The Waves who experience abjection in regard to mortality, Sedon resolves that "Clarissa perceives death as an embrace" when faced with the loss of her youth and a desire to escape the aging process (Sedon 168). 54 with death which “disturbs identity” and leads to what Kristeva refers to as abjection. Woolf draws on this abjection from inside the minds of the characters as time functions as an external influence.

Reading Jinny and Susan’s narratives alongside one another requires first acknowledging the childhood rivalry Woolf establishes at the beginning of the novel that sets their narratives apart from the other characters’ and then the subsequent polarity between their adopted lifestyles, beliefs, and attitudes. The incident that sparks the rivalry occurs when they are children, playing outside with their friends, and Susan spies Jinny kissing Louis behind a garden hedge. Despite

Susan’s strong reaction of jealousy and overwhelming sadness, both Jinny and Susan recount the incident, which addresses the contrast and value of subjectivity and the characters’ separate identities.35 For example, upon seeing Louis “very still” behind branches and leaves, Jinny narrates, “‘Is he dead?’ I thought, and kissed you, with my heart jumping under my pink frock like the leaves, which go on moving, though there is nothing to move them” (The Waves 13).

Louis’ body is held in a liminal state, momentarily, as Jinny questions the condition of his existence. The horror induced by seeing his motionless body prompts Jinny to kiss him almost as a method of checking his vitals to alleviate her abjection. Yet, a young Susan perceives the kiss as a romantic gesture: “I saw them, Jinny and Louis, kissing. Now I will wrap my agony inside my pocket-handkerchief. It shall be screwed tight into a ball” (The Waves 13). The severity of

35 The central argument of this chapter relies on a reading of Woolf’s characters in The Waves as unique individuals with distinctive identities and mental realms, pushing against a prevailing opinion among scholars that the characters’ separate narratives represent a shared, unified human consciousness. For example, Emily Hinnov claims, “[the characters] create a composite character in that their multiplicity of perspectives offers a complete organic vision, even in difference” (Hinnov 215). In addition to Hinnov, Woolf scholar Tamar Katz, who aims to complicate the subject position in The Waves in their article “Modernism, Subjectivity, and Narrative Form: Abstraction in The Waves,” asserts, “The novel builds up speed and power, in particular, through its final merging of all the characters in Bernard” (Katz 247). Katz is correct—at the end of the novel, Bernard recounts the death of the other six characters (including Percival) and assesses their individual characteristics, but that is simply a function of subjectivity, not necessarily a "merging" of characters. While Woolf does capture the underlying psychological component of human existence through the six characters, treating them as separate entities in an analytical perspective allows for a cultural and historical reading of the period and elevates the facet of individuality in human consciousness. 55

Susan’s agony from feeling like she has lost Louis to Jinny is so grave that it makes her want to

“eat grass and die in a ditch” (The Waves 15). Susan’s acceptance of death as a means to end her grief works in direct opposition to Jinny’s horrified reaction to Louis’ lifeless body.

Although the tension produced by this conflict in their childhood does not manifest externally and their thoughts remain in the privacy of their minds, the rivalry between Jinny and

Susan persists throughout their friendship. Specifically, while at boarding school, Jinny judges

Susan for her yearning to return home to her father and farm, and Susan becomes irritable with

Jinny’s relentless spontaneity and desire to capture the attention of her peers and teachers. The contrast between Jinny and Susan mirrors the traditional/modern woman binary that grew from the Victorian era and carried over into the twentieth century, which Woolf uses to frame Jinny and Susan’s interior monologues. Woolf, however, does not put forth rhetoric that condones nor condemns one lifestyle over the other. Jinny and Susan are not even depicted as embodying the opposing feminine roles as Woolf only presents their inner reflections.36 Rather, Woolf portrays the two socially constructed positions for early twentieth-century women as factors that influence their perceptions of mortality and explores that mental space as a junction of their diverging paths. Woolf, then, does not allow stereotypical gender roles to define individuality despite their

36 The terrain of this particular argument has been explored by other scholars who have differing opinions. For example, Chloë Taylor uses Kristeva’s theory of abjection concerning motherhood to analyze the women in The Waves and their relationship to language in the article “Kristevan Themes in Virginia Woolf's The Waves.” Taylor claims, “Susan represents the woman who fully identifies with the mother and rejects language, or the paternal, while Jinny represents the phallic woman who fully assimilates herself into the symbolic, rejecting the maternal and embracing the role defined for her within the patriarchy” (Taylor 61). Taylor admits that her focus pulls away from a feminist critique of the novel, as she repeatedly gives in to the idea that Jinny and Susan, in particular, willingly accept their social roles. The argument Taylor posits is innovative and springs directly from Kristeva’s work, especially on Woolf. Yet, like many other scholars, Taylor reduces the function of the multidimensional elements of Jinny and Susan’s characters by categorizing them so rigidly in the patriarchal order. By doing so, Taylor erases a significant conversation about the psychological component of human existence and its relationship to the external world, specifically the modern social and cultural changes at the turn of the twentieth century. 56 ability to shape one’s way of life.37 Instead, she elevates the inner voices of oppressed women whose self-expression was limited. Woolf’s language and experimental narrative design of The

Waves challenge the ideals of womanhood by using both the mental interior and the concept of death as equalizers (which also applies to the display of opposition between men and women in the novel), as she is interested in representing the psychological component of human existence, especially as it pertains to the nuanced relationship between life and death.

At the end of the novel, death occurs but perceiving death as a consequence of life becomes the action, as opposed to the acts of living and dying. Therefore, the significance of

Jinny and Susan’s voices, especially compared to those of the other characters’, transcends the novel’s narrative and addresses the many cultural and social shifts of the early twentieth century.38

As time forcefully moves Jinny and Susan from young adulthood to the middle of their lives, they become greatly aware of and horrified by the external signifiers that mark the end of their youth. The abjection they experience leads them to ponder on both the physical and mental spaces life has placed them.39 Susan, “rather squat, grey before [her] time,” reflects, “At night I

37 Christine Froula embarks on a similar interpretive journey in the chapter “A Fin in the Waste of Waters,” in their book Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity. Froula argues, “The Waves pursues a feminist poltics’ furthest goal: its own demolition (not to be confused with antifeminist projects toward the same end).” Froula continues with the explanation, “The feminist politics that produces The Waves is ultimately identity politics, marked by self/other oppositions and attendant scapegoat dynamics, but seeks women’s freedom from identity and its politics” (Froula 177). Reading Jinny and Susan as both gendered and non-gendered subjects is a matter of contextualizing their narratives amid the larger cultural and social backdrop in which they function while also allowing them to represent Woolf’s vision of humanity—or what Froula refers to as the “universal.” 38 Many critics of The Waves use Jinny and Susan as foils to the other characters' narratives, especially Bernard’s, or overlook them entirely. One such critic, Maureen Chun, describes Jinny and Susan, in relation to the other characters, as “less conspicuous or compelling as overtly feminized, unliterate characters.” Chun goes on to say that “[Jinny and Susan’s] experiences—pointedly lacking in the struggle for literary expression and a symbolic order to things — subtend the struggles of the four others and remind us that the latter, too, have their moments of dreamless peace and satisfaction in embodiment” (Chun 67). Chun’s estimate of Jinny and Susan’s characters yields to the dichotomous coding system society used to categorize women, which fails to recognize Woolf’s elevation of the oppressed, early twentieth-century woman in The Waves. Running counter to Chun’s argument, this chapter aims to complicate Jinny and Susan’s narrative by separating them from the other characters’ and highlighting their individuality rather than their socially-perceived and -constructed femininity. 39 In a critical summation of The Waves, Jane Goldman describes the reflective nature of the novel as its way of “explor[ing] the solitary self in existential crisis” (Goldman 73). 57 sit in the arm-chair and stretch my arm for my sewing; and hear my husband snore; and look up when the light from a passing car dazzles the windows and feel the waves of my life tossed, broken, round me who am rooted” (The Waves 192). The settled nature of Susan’s conventional lifestyle—sewing, her static marriage, living in a stable home— paralleled to the “dazzle” of the moving cars causes her to mourn the lack of mystery and options left in her life. She feels

“rooted,” which suggests both a sense of stability and comfort as well as stagnation. By allowing her external vision of the fast-moving and ever-changing world to influence her internal emotions in a negative way, Susan succumbs to the horror induced by time’s movement in a forward motion, as it brings her closer to death. The rooted position Susan assumes conflicts with “the waves” of her life. With no time or space left to achieve upward social, financial, or individual mobility, Susan views the movement of life, “the waves,” around her as separate from the identity that has rooted her as a wife and mother. Susan’s life choices have anchored, or

“rooted,” her body and life to a domestic space on her farm with her family, which makes her realize that there are no other facets of her life to be discovered beyond what exists in front of her. Despite only being middle-aged, Susan sees death as the next and final event of her life; as she expresses, “I possess all I see” (The Waves 190). Yet, Susan’s deep reflection on her life demonstrates an internal evolution of her individuality and simultaneously proves that the external features of human existence are merely a facade.

The contrast between Susan’s mundane life and the thought of limitless adventures represented by the cars driving past her windows signifies the loss of her youth. However, it is the absence of her children at that moment that reinforces the impermanence of her existence and causes her a sense of horror. For Susan, becoming a mother gave her a sense of purpose and infused her life with meaning. Consequently, when she reaches the middle of her life and her 58 children have grown up, she experiences an emotional void, which charts the slow decline of her

“natural happiness” she once associated with motherhood. For example, as a young mother,

Susan thinks to herself, “I am blown like a leaf by the gale; now brushing the wet grass, now whirled up. I am glutted with natural happiness; and wish sometimes that the fullness would pass from me and the weight of the sleeping house rise, when we sit reading, and I stay the thread at the eye of my needle” (The Waves 173). The specification of Susan’s happiness as “natural,” as opposed to artificial or plain, highlights her elated emotional state as an intrinsic byproduct of maternity. By making such a distinction, Susan’s private thoughts suggest that the primary function of having children is to fulfill a prescriptive requirement of domesticity that upholds traditional social values, not intended solely to produce personal gratification, which, in Susan’s case, becomes a secondary function. “Natural” also denotes that her happiness can decay or change over time since it is not artificially produced and especially since she associates the feeling with child-rearing that is a fleeting duty of motherhood. Susan’s apprehension, though, of such a harsh reality, indicated by her “wish sometimes that the fullness” of natural happiness

“would pass from [her],” illuminates an underlying desire to retain her autonomy.

It is through Susan’s internal emotional duality, rather than images of her mothering children, that Woolf underlines the trap of motherhood. Susan sacrifices her life as an individual to raise her children, only to reach the middle of her life with an empty home and vision of her future. As Susan wavers from enjoying motherhood to fantasizing about social realms outside of the cult of domesticity, she realizes that while her life will continue through her children, their growth as individuals reminds her of her mortality and marks the passing of time that pushes her closer to her impending demise. 59

In relation to Susan’s mournful perspective of her lost youth, Jinny, too, during her middle-aged years, experiences a moment of terror realizing her youth has vanished. This moment for Jinny is sparked by the rapid movement of the cultural and social symbols that intersect in London’s busy Tube station. The fast-paced environment, in contrast to the idleness of her body, prompts Jinny to reflect on the implications of her age amid a lively cultural backdrop. Jinny observes, “The great avenues of civilisation meet here and strike this way and that. I am in the heart of life. But look—there is my body in that looking glass. How solitary, how shrunk, how aged! I am no longer young. I am no longer part of the procession” (The Waves

193). Jinny’s desire to celebrate the vibrancy of the Tube station and life itself is overpowered by her reflection in the mirror that reminds her of her mortality.40 The phrase “but look” indicates that the reflection of her physical appearance comes as a sort of shock to her. In her mind, Jinny feels like herself, the youthful person who lives autonomously and without consequence. Yet, her body succumbs to time’s ability to bring her closer to death. As a result, Jinny deems her body as unrelated to her mental interior that defines her self-identity. By separating her mind from her body, Jinny is only reminded of her lost youth when her reflection confronts her, suggesting that she views an acceptance of mortality as a hindrance to a fulfilled life. Further, the conjunction

“but” positions her body in direct opposition to “the heart of life”—presumably London and society. The conflict between Jinny’s internal and external selves calls attention to the isolating and insufficient aspects of the social construction of beauty that condemns physical signs of aging and fails to recognize an individual’s interior life and identity. In other words, the adjectives used to describe her physical appearance, “solitary,” “shrunk,” “aged,” mark her as an

40 Jinny’s physical signs of aging she notes in the mirror cause her to perceive a reduction of her body to a corpse. Kristeva gives insight into this abject response: “The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object” (Kristeva 4). Given Kristeva's explanation, it is clear that through Jinny’s character, Woolf explores how the body can be closer to becoming a corpse than reverting to its infancy and an individual will still feel abject based on the fact their internal self reflects the identity they formed in their youth. 60 entity outside of “the procession,” the people around her who progress their lives by striding forward, as it breaks the visual mimetic pattern of modern society. While the text shows Jinny’s identity in a fragmented state, an external, objective view of her does not exist. Rather, the narrative captures Jinny’s internal lens projected outward to express her abjection about aging and the loss of her youth.

As Jinny’s character reflects, the fleeting quality of age complicates the relationship between the mind and body and continuously destabilizes self-identity. Similar to the moment at the Tube station when Jinny sees her “aged” reflection, Woolf uses mirror imagery throughout

Jinny’s narrative to chronicle such a destabilization and to break the barrier between the mind and body.41 For example, while away at boarding school, Jinny broods, “‘I hate the small

looking-glass on the stairs [. . .] It shows our heads only; it cuts off our heads. And my lips are

too wide, and my eyes are too close together’” (The Waves 41).42 This moment shows that

Jinny’s physical reflection has always been a source of tension for her. Her hatred toward the

mirror and simultaneously the defining features of her face—her lips and eyes— highlights a

larger issue she has with being reminded that her physical form does not accurately reflect the

person she is inside of her mind. Woolf was not the only modernist artist to explore the

41 In the article “Virgina Woolf’s The Waves: To Defer that ‘Appalling Moment,’” Lisa Lucenti offers an extended analysis of mirrors in the novel. First, Lucenti points out that the reader assumes the “I” position when confronted with mirror imagery. Lucenti then asserts, “the mirrors ultimately point to a certain indeterminacy at the heart of the novel, a certain figure that, perhaps, cannot be read. Unreadablilty is partly a function of the madness, the ex-centricity of life itself—our failure to locate the absolute center of being, or truth, or even of this text” (Lucenti 91). Lucenti’s proposition that the mirror imagery functions to decenter both the meaning of the self and the text adds to the notion that Woolf is chronicling the destabilization of Jinny’s character. The mirror imagery also breaks many barriers—particularly those between character and reader, text and reader, and the character’s interior mind and physical body. By achieving such an effect, Woolf allows her characters to occupy and function in a realm between the internal and external. 42 Jinny’s reaction to her reflection in the looking-glass at school is reminiscent of one of Woolf’s childhood memories in “A Sketch of the Past.” Woolf remembers “a small looking-glass in the hall at Talland House” and feeling ashamed when she would look at it and see her face. As a result of her experience as a child, Woolf reflects, “the looking-glass shame has lasted all my life, long after the tomboy phase was over” (Woolf 67-68). Woolf lists a few reasons why she was so ashamed to observe her reflection, including a traumatic event of sexual assault when she was just a girl, but concludes that she has not found the “truth” (Woolf 69). It is interesting because, like Woolf, there is no clear explanation as to why Jinny despises her appearance, especially considering that her appearance captures the attention of both men and women throughout her narrative. 61

disconnect between the body and one’s self-identity. Around the same time The Waves was

published, Pablo Picasso painted Girl before a Mirror (see fig. 6).

Figure 6. Pablo Picasso, Girl before a Mirror, 1932

The most noteworthy feature of Picasso’s painting is the color contrast between the image of the woman and her reflection in the mirror. The light color palette used to depict the woman standing in front of the mirror accentuates her facial features and gives shape to her body, while the dark hues of her reflection in the mirror distort her image and suggest that she views herself through a negative lens. Carla Gottlieb points out, “The spectator is reminded of the frightening Vanities in which a woman, viewing her countenance in a mirror, sees herself not the way she looks but as old and withered, or as a skeleton” (Gottlieb 1). It is quite curious, though, which representation of the woman Picasso intended his twentieth-century audience to accept as the true representation of the self. Similarly, in The Waves, Woolf makes the reader question what defines the self as she only represents her characters through an internal lens. Both Picasso and Woolf elucidate the complexity of the private mind amid the growing modern world by depicting the vulnerabilities of their subjects in moments of private thought. These modernist artists especially 62 achieve this by focusing on women during this time whose bodies and minds were placed in the middle of a clear-cut dichotomy of traditional and modern.

Like the woman’s body in Picasso’s painting, Jinny’s body holds a dual meaning. On the one hand, despite her age, Jinny abhors her physical reflection. Seeing her reflection awakens an inner awareness of the ephemerality of life as she watches and chronicles her fading youth.

Jinny’s reflection also forces her to confront her physical attributes that she believes go against the feminine beauty ideal, resulting in a lapse of self-unity. On the other hand, Jinny perceives her body as a form of social communication. For instance, while on a train, a young Jinny notices a stranger observing her body, and rather than approach him, she grants her body the freedom to communicate with the man on its own terms. Jinny’s interior monologue reads, “He smiles at my reflection in the tunnel. My body instantly of its own accord puts forth a frill under his gaze. My body lives a life of its own” (The Waves 63). There is an interesting breakdown of Jinny’s identity into three fragments at this moment. First, the stranger sees only a representation of

Jinny’s body. Jinny claims that the man smiles not at her but her “reflection in the tunnel,” implying that “his gaze” objectifies her existence. Instead of accepting this objectification under the authority of the male gaze, Jinny liberates her body and allows it to put “forth a frill.” Her body, then, functions as a separate entity from her reflection that captivates the stranger’s gaze, as she does not let him claim her physical form. Finally, Jinny’s inner self that narrates and acknowledges the nuanced situation establishes itself as a distinct part of her identity by expressing that her “body lives a life of its own.” While Jinny detests her physical reflection, she acknowledges that her youthful appearance allows her smooth entry into society. Whereas, when she sees her “aged” reflection in the Tube station, time’s gradual yet unwelcomed alterations to her physical identity horrifies her. Jinny’s mental impressions of her physical existence that span 63 from her youth to the middle of her life elucidate the idea that the abjection she experiences from seeing her reflected image actually protects her from confronting her own mortality and thus allows her to continue establishing meaning in her daily life regardless of her age and inability to blend into “the procession.”

In addition to contemplating the external signifiers of their lost youth in their middle-aged years, Jinny and Susan descend deeper into their internal reflections on the nuance between life and death by engaging in interrogative discourse that aims to identify the essence and function of the self in their respective realities. Susan admits, “I have reached the summit of my desires,” but she also questions how her wavering mental state fits into her indestructible domestic life: “Where can the shadow enter? What shock can loosen my laboriously gathered, relentlessly pressed-down life? Yet sometimes I am sick of natural happiness, and fruit growing, and children scattering the house with [. . .] trophies. I am sick of the body, I am sick of my own craft, industry and cunning” (The Waves 190, 191). Susan acknowledges that “the shadow,” an unimaginable form of destruction, and the unidentified “shock” that could threaten her lifestyle have no direct entry point into the bounds of her quintessential, traditional life. Susan conveys that the foundation of her “laboriously gathered” life is cemented into a world that not even in her mind can she imagine dismantled. A few thoughts before, however, Susan observes her towering children who cast “shadows on the grass” (The Waves 190). The keyword here is

“shadows,” which directly relates to the “shadow” Susan questions. Susan’s children cast actual shadows on her, as they are taller than she is, but their young lives that amount to all she has sacrificed in the name of motherhood overshadow her individuality as well.

The phrase “I am sick of” that Susan repeats expresses her lamentation and harbored regret for surrendering to a domestic lifestyle and substantiates the notion that her autonomy and 64 individuality live in the shadow of her identity as a mother and wife. Namely, Susan’s “natural happiness,” a byproduct of maternity, becomes burdensome to her, as well as “fruit growing,” and her children’s mementos that litter her home, all of which remind her of her responsibility as a homemaker. Susan also claims that she is “sick of the body,” which illustrates her abjection to aging. In her mind, she reduces and disconnects from her own physical form by using the article

“the,” as opposed to “my,” to describe the noun “body.” Time has not only aged her appearance, but it has anchored her body into a finite position in her life and society at large, while her mind is free to wander. Woolf’s choice to exhibit Susan’s mental disconnect from her body, as a character whose base characteristics are constructed from remnants of the true woman ideal of the nineteenth century, undermines the traditional/new woman dichotomy that society used to categorize and control women, especially by either sexualizing their bodies or viewing the body as a tool to prop up conventional household dynamics.

Despite a lack of options for Susan to reshape her physical reality, the changing and evolving nature of her inner thoughts, emotions, and desires foreground the private part of her that defines the essence of her individuality. However, due to the realization that her fixed physical position in the world hinders the expression of her individuality, Susan responds with a feeling of abjection that complicates her ability to discern the difference between living and dying. That is to say, she questions to what extent is she living if she is not happy, especially given her age. While her children will grow up and continue her legacy, Susan mourns the self that she lost in her youth and questions the meaning of her existence as she experiences the limitations of domesticity and the relentless motion of time.43

43 Chloë Taylor posits a similar argument: “That maternal in [The Waves] is not simply "celebrated," as in the perhaps happier philosophies of Irigaray and Cixous, but, rather, as theorized by Kristeva, is described in its necessary ambivalence and threatening abjectness as well” (Taylor 75). 65

Throughout Susan’s narrative, Woolf implements both natural and social constructions of time to blend Susan’s mental interior with her physical reality as a way of chronicling the movement of her thoughts and her abject response to aging. For example, in her youth, not yet a wife or mother, Susan asks herself, “who am I,” and then proceeds to ruminate on the malleability of her identity in relation to the seasons and the calendar:

I think sometimes (I am not twenty yet) I am not a woman, but the light that falls

on this gate on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May,

November; the mud, the mist, the dawn. I cannot be tossed about, or float gently,

or mix with people. Yet now leaning here, till the gate prints my arm, I feel the

weight that has formed itself in my side. Something has formed, at school, in

Switzerland, some hard thing (The Waves 98).

The lyrical tone of this passage, namely, that which hinges on the contrast between the phrases “I am not a woman” and “I am the seasons,” identifies Susan’s desire to see beyond her gendered role in society and understand the meaning of her existence in terms of the natural world, as she recognizes the fluidity of nature in opposition to the rigidity of society. This notion is especially pertinent to the burdensome “weight” at her side that she traces back to the social construct of education, which is one way that society shapes identity. “Not twenty yet,” Susan already feels the “rooted” sensation—the “hard thing”— that becomes so prominent in her later years when her identity solidifies as a mother. Lisa Lucenti notes, however, that Susan’s critical view of the patriarchal society is ironic since “she comes to fund those same institutions through her reproduction of children for the State” (Lucenti 82). Lucenti’s argument is especially timely from a twenty-first century perspective. However, the argument that Susan’s mind and body were placed in a traditional/modern woman dichotomy by the patriarchy that affected her life choices 66 is also true. Trapped between her youth and her anticipated future of domesticity, a young Susan notices her agency dissolving into the realm of the social sphere as time ages her and moves her from one milestone to the next. Therefore, Susan’s reflective thoughts on the subtle gradation of life and death in her middle-aged years reveals both the suppression of her private self that formed in her youth in favor of positioning her body in an irreversible state of motherhood and the horror she experiences from realizing that time cannot revert her back to the self that was simply one with the seasons. This split, then, between Susan’s mental interior and the condition of her physical reality, complicates the manner in which one looks back at their life and extracts meaning, which captures the purpose of Susan’s narrative.

Diverging from Susan’s rumination about the dichotomy of motherhood and autonomy as it pertains to the constructed meaning of her life and circling back to the grim subject of mortality, Jinny’s interior monologue—from the vantage point of her midlife—questions the significance of her independence as she imagines it translating into isolation during her death.

After seeing her “aged” reflection, Jinny thinks to herself, “Millions have died. Percival died. I still move. I still live. But who will come if I signal?” (The Waves 193). Woolf historicizes and individualizes death by positioning Jinny’s existential presence between the “millions” who have died, presumably the lives lost in World War I and to the influenza virus that led to the nineteen-eighteen pandemic, and Jinny’s own foreseeable death.44 In relation to the unexpected nature of death represented by Percival and the “millions,” Jinny’s character points to the internal and external conflict of facing mortality. She expresses an inner desire to live without consequence and free from the constraints of society. Yet, she also recognizes the hindering

44 According to an article in the Emerging Infectious Diseases, a journal published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “an estimated 20 to 100 million lives were lost worldwide” to the influenza virus of 1918, accounting for more deaths than World War I (Chorba and Breedlove). 67 nature of the looming and unexpected qualities of death that threaten a permanent disintegration of her existence.

Much like Susan, who realizes that she cannot change the course of her life, Jinny has a temporary lapse of comfort with her autonomous lifestyle that induces abjection, prompting her to view death as the next major event she will experience. By engaging in this thought experiment, she identifies a lack of intimate relationships in her life and wonders who will answer her dying “signal.” Jinny’s thoughts continue with a response to her own question: “It is true; I am not young—I shall soon raise my arm in vain and my scarf will fall to my side without having signalled” (The Waves 193). The sentimentality of this passage emanates from Jinny’s acceptance of the isolation she will experience when she dies. In this sense, Jinny parallels the gradation of autonomy and isolation with living and dying, emphasizing the notion that time serves as a destructive force to the self that inhabits the mind and simultaneously ages the corporeal form to death. As a result of accepting death as an unexpected force that lingers in the ether of the external world, Jinny resolves, “Let the silent army of the dead descend. I march forward” (The Waves 196). Jinny makes a conscious decision to disregard any thoughts related to death and to embrace the small moments of her life, including those that encompass her old age, which is an aspect of modernism that Woolf was especially interested in exploring in much of her literary work.45

In Jinny’s young adult life, she perceives ‘the moment’ as just one among many in an endless chain, not acknowledging until her middle age that the moments of one’s lifetime are finite and fleeting. As a case in point, during Percival’s farewell dinner before he goes to India,

45 Namely, in Woolf’s 1927 novel Mrs. Dalloway, a middle-aged Clarissa’s stream of consciousness reveals, “what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her [. . .] somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived” (Mrs. Dalloway 9). Clarissa and Jinny share a similar sentiment about life and the moment in relation to death’s approach. Both characters acknowledge that despite their age, they are alive at the moment and express an appreciation for that fact. 68

Jinny, “not yet twenty-five,” muses on the illusion that life and youth are everlasting: “Days and days are to come; winter days, summer days; we have scarcely broken into our hoard. Now the fruit is swollen beneath the leaf. The room is golden, and I say to him, ‘Come’” (The Waves

141). Below the overlay of the repeated word “days” is Jinny’s desire to live in a cycle of her youth and the excitement she experiences from seeing Percival at this particular moment.46 The metaphorical phrase, "now the fruit is swollen beneath the leaf," symbolizes the youthful quality of Jinny's identity that she aspires to fix in time and space. The word “now” in that phrase underscores the present moment with her friends as containing her vitality and ageless beauty that enables her to express her adoration for Percival with the simple gesture, “come.” There is a striking parallel between the gesture/phrase “come” that she makes as a young adult and the phrase “signal” she refers to in her midlife. Woolf establishes the word “come” as Jinny’s signature utterance in her youth but then inverts the utterance to “signal” in Jinny’s midlife to depict the transformation of her desire for casual companionship to a perceived need for someone to be by her side during death.

The passage of time disrupts Jinny’s forward-facing gaze toward the “days and days” to come with distressing reminders of her mortality. Most notably along this gradation of life and death is Percival's passing, which charts Jinny’s abject response to mortality when she reaches her midlife. While Percival’s farewell dinner marks their last meeting, it is not until Jinny becomes middle-aged that the unexpected nature of Percival’s death, along with the “millions,” that occurs in her youth and the brevity of his young life cause her to reflect on her own anticipated demise. Woolf postulates, through Jinny’s resolve to “march forward” in her middle

46 Tamar Katz amplifies the notion that Percival’s character is intertwined with symbols of youth, especially during the dinner scene: “The speakers use the occasion of Percival's triumphal departure for India as an opportunity to imagine their own youth as a heroic form of power and possession” (Katz 244). 69 age and her youthful perception of endless moments, that the aged body does not reflect one’s mental interior that defines individuality. In turn, Woolf provides a critique of society’s tendency to overlook a person because of their grey hair and aged appearance. By only presenting the mental interiors of her characters, Woolf excavates a space of human identity that remains private, yet is the most significant part of the human experience.47

The synthesis of Jinny and Susan’s youthful visions of the future and their midlife narratives illustrates how the passing of time turns their lived moments into memories and thus provides the foundation for how they will perceive the act of dying in their old age. As both

Jinny and Susan see death on the horizon and experience abjection, they retreat inward. While

Jinny reflects on her autonomy and concludes that recognition of mortality is a hindrance to a fulfilled life, Susan ponders on the notion that she will somehow continue living through her children. Rather than depict their moments of death from an objective point of view, however,

Woolf uses the external image of “the sun was sinking” to symbolize the characters’ final, private impressions of life as they approach death (The Waves 207).48 By implementing a narrative structure that consolidates the internal and external spaces of reality, Woolf shows that death is just as much a psychological process as a physical one and exhibits the act of perceiving death, an internal process, as the significant event of one’s life rather than the external act of

47 It is important to note that Woolf’s narrative approach in The Waves essentially leaves her characters void of speech. In a compelling article that analyzes the function of linguistics in the novel, Julie Vandivere asserts that for the characters, “Words ultimately, then, become shimmering substances of color and heat, elements that could not be more poorly suited to serve as the building blocks of self or reality” (Vandivere 224). Vandivere’s argument sustains the foundation of the novel’s narrative structure and reinforces the notion that the private self captures the entirety of one's individuality. 48 Woolf’s choice to explore the depths of character interiority and create a narrative devoid of external images, other than the interludes, highlights the significance of private thought that typically comes second to the body. Claudia Olk explains, “Privacy serves as a category to describe the text as well as a mode of narration that balances the impersonal with the personal and the external with the internal without pretending to arrive at a final synthesis. [The Waves] draws on the notion of privacy to express the need of the individual to remain inviolate” (Olk 172). Olk’s connection of privacy in the novel and “the individual to remain inviolate” runs parallel to the main argument of this chapter. The characters’ interior monologues serve to reflect their abjection toward mortality, as death and time function as external threats to the self. 70 dying. Most importantly, to capture the nuance between life and death, Woolf reverses Jinny and

Susan’s youthful gazes aimed toward the future by depicting them as looking back at the totality of their lives in their old age. In what becomes their final moments in the novel, Jinny and

Susan’s narratives are positioned in a dialogue about a deep, emotional yearning to continue living. While the dialogue represents their inner thoughts and is not an actual conversation, their voices complement one another and elevate the proposition that the body is unrelated to individuality that resides in the mental realm, especially in old age. Upon distinguishing between their aged bodies and their private, unverbalized identities, Jinny and Susan’s interior monologues present a fragmented perspective of life’s final impressions.

In the final sequence of the novel to include all of the characters’ soliloquies, Woolf applies poetic diction to convey Jinny and Susan’s nostalgia for life as they face their mortality—functioning as the first layer of the action of perceiving death.49 One passage, in

particular reads, “‘In this silence,’ said Susan, ‘it seems as if no leaf would ever fall, or bird fly’”

to which Jinny’s interior monologue responds, “As if the miracle had happened [. . .] and life

were stayed here and now’” (The Waves 225). Here, Jinny and Susan’s fragmented thoughts

weave together more seamlessly than at any other point in the novel. While there is no break in

the narrative structure, the language between the two characters in this scene flows as if it is a

dialogic conversation.50 However, their poetic visions transcend even the language of private

49 Claudia Olk makes a similar point about the general function of language in The Waves: “In creating its world through language, The Waves refers to a level of imagistic thought, which marks language as devoid of conventional form and meaning” (Olk 171). 50 Despite the quotation marks and the dialogue tags “said” applied throughout the novel, Maureen Chun notes that the characters’ soliloquies mimic neither verbal speech nor the language of inner thought. Chun suggests, “It is only in these arguably unspoken soliloquies, framed by an uninhabited landscape, that Woolf shows us words themselves as imagistic rather than linguistic, the narrative as a kind of scrim through which we may perceive the secret language of a consciousness that inheres in the real world beyond narrative” (Chun 56). Yet, there are moments like this cited example, when Woolf places the characters’ “unspoken soliloquies,” to use Chun’s term, in a dialogue to produce an emotional effect that speaks to a much larger facet of the human experience. 71 thought, highlighting the mental realm’s invisible yet existential presence. Most illustrative of this point is how Jinny extends Susan’s private impression on the silence with the phrase “as if” to imagine “the miracle” of life continuing and breaking the cycle of death.

Despite their diverging paths, Jinny and Susan share a reluctant attitude toward accepting death and wish to preserve their emotions and memories in the present moment. Moreover, the function of nostalgia veiled over this scene is twofold. First, it reinforces the inversion of the youthful gaze and the abjection caused by the passing of time. Jinny and Susan’s interior monologues in their old age convey their visions of the past rather than the future. They look back on their lives and their established identities in a reflective manner rather than look forward with anticipation toward their final moments. Second, the nostalgic undertone emphasizes the intangibility of life and the subsequent chain of desires that Jinny and Susan engage with to continue creating a meaningful existence, to find the tangible “self” that has only ever existed in the mental realm, and to avoid death’s destruction. Yet, as Jinny and Susan’s narratives have illustrated, the body functions as a deadly anchor that fails to represent the internal self and eventually yields to death.

As Woolf gives shape to the act of perceiving death and avoids describing the external moment of life’s closure, she uses Jinny and Susan’s interior monologues to discern between the aged body and the ageless individual—the self who occupies the private, mental interior. To illustrate, amid noting that her body had been used as a tool during her years as a homemaker and mother, Susan reflects on the body’s inability to represent one’s individuality and lifetime:

“Lying deep in a chair with one person, [. . .] you see one inch of flesh only; its nerves, fibres, the sullen or quick flow of blood on it; but nothing entire” (The Waves 215). Susan suggests that the body is purely anatomical when viewed externally, as it cannot account for the entirety of a 72 lived life. The fact that Susan’s rejection of her body happens so emphatically in her old age highlights her abjection toward the passing of time and its joint relationship with mortality. After living a full life, she is left with only memories and realizes that death will reduce the self to a mere corpse.

Similar to Susan's reaction to the body in her old age, Jinny observes her aged reflection one last time and concludes: “Now I turn grey; now I turn gaunt; but I look at my face at midday sitting in front of the looking-glass in broad daylight, and note precisely my nose, my chin, my lips that open too wide and show too much gum. But I am not afraid” (The Waves 222). The conjunction “but” demonstrates Jinny’s determination to distinguish between her aged, “gaunt” body and the self, who defines her individuality and is “not afraid” to face death. This final severing of the mind from the body, for both Jinny and Susan in their old age, attests to the notion that as time passes and causes abjection, an individual will start to view the body as unrecognizable and unrelated to the self.

Extending from their thoughts on the aged body, Jinny and Susan’s final mental impressions reveal the internal horror associated with facing mortality, as it marks the ephemerality of life and the permanence of death: “‘After our fire’, said Jinny, ‘there is nothing left to put in lockets.’” “‘Still I gape,’ said Susan, ‘like a young bird, unsatisfied, for something that has escaped me’” (The Waves 233). Again, Woolf places Jinny and Susan’s soliloquies in dialogue, creating a sense that they somehow connect in thought. Jinny points to the fact that once she dies, her body will be cremated with “nothing left to put in lockets.” Her comment is rather striking, as it affirms the notion that the body surrenders to the passing of time and reduces the self. As Jinny looks forward with terror, realizing that her life will become a permanent

“nothing,” Susan looks back on her life with regret, acknowledging the unfulfilled sensation she 73

experiences. The simile “like a young bird” connotes Susan’s internal identity that did not age in

tandem with her body. Further, the ambiguous noun “something” that has escaped Susan calls

attention to the aspects of her identity she could not explore throughout her life. Through Jinny

and Susan’s final impressions, Woolf underscores the notion that closure in life is nonexistent, as

one’s lifetime is composed of a signifying chain of desire to find meaning that is fleeting and that

inevitably ends with death.

Finally, the condensed reality Woolf creates in The Waves speaks to the complexities of private thought and individuality, especially with concerns to the external threat of mortality.

Working only within the depths of her characters’ private minds and dismissing external imagery, Woolf portrays the internal self as the defining feature of individuality and deems the physical body a mere representation. This is especially true for Jinny and Susan’s characters, who Woolf frames in terms of opposing feminine roles to position them in society, yet uses their mental interiors to emphasize their humanity. Their gender has an exterior function in the patriarchal order, but as Woolf shows, Jinny and Susan’s internal selves are multidimensional.

Through the disharmony they experience between the internal self and the external world, their rejection of time, age, and the body—all of which function as external boundaries—becomes indicative of their abjection toward mortality. While the internal self remains ageless, the physical body begins to submit to death, causing the characters to recoil inward and reflect on the meaning of their lives. As Woolf intertwines life and death inside the mind as a reflective process, she simultaneously emphasizes the tragedy of the private self’s inability to manifest externally. 74

Conclusion

Throughout Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, H.D.’s HERmione, and Virginia

Woolf’s The Waves, language functions as an obstacle to each character’s expression of the self.

As seen in The Return of the Soldier, the discourse of both domesticity and the war dominates social communication, which excludes Jenny, a single woman, and makes language wholly inaccessible to her. The only way Jenny can express herself externally is if she appropriates one of these discourses, as they are maintained and used by the other characters, Kitty, Margaret, and

Chris. Consequently, West shows that the external world prevents Jenny from verbally expressing her artistic thinking, anti-war sentiment, intellect, and contentment with not being a wife nor mother, causing her to introspect.

Similarly, in HERmione, language forms a barrier between Hermione and society.

Hermione experiences language as inadequate to express her emotions and desires that conflict with society’s expectation of her to conform to traditional gender stereotypes, pursue an education, and find success in a conventional career. The portrayal of language as an inadequate medium for expressing identity and Hermione’s subsequent anxiety about feeling misunderstood by those around her exposes society’s inability to accept and show empathy toward individuals who deviate from the mimetic social framework. Language obstructs the external development and social approval of Hermione’s individuality since she cannot put her emotions, thoughts, and desires into words and is thus judged only on her actions, which results in her becoming labeled as a “failure.”

In The Waves, language shapes thought, but Woolf calls attention to its boundaries by omitting character dialogue. These boundaries are especially pertinent to Jinny and Susan’s soliloquies. In their private thoughts, both characters express their vulnerabilities, fears, 75 emotions, and desires. Externally, however, Jinny and Susan cannot verbalize their internal identities as such an honest expression would violate and undermine their social roles (e.g.,

Susan's role as a mother). Like The Return of the Soldier and HERmione, The Waves shows how the limitations of language hinge on society’s demand for uniformity and sameness to support systems of power and social and economic developments. In turn, H.D., West, and Woolf reconsider the shape, use, and expression of language. Since their characters struggle to use language externally, the writers speculate the ways in which language is accessed and used in the mental interior to shape identity and express individuality.

For the female characters in these novels, language is not the only limitation. The three authors also depict the body, a form of social discourse and corpse, as limiting the expression of self. As a form of social discourse, the female body is sexualized, judged, and perceived as a symbol of motherhood and domesticity. These social expectations of women and their bodies restrict the external representation of their gender nonconforming identities and even their humanity. For example, in The Return of the Soldier, Jenny’s objection to conforming to the social constructs of maternity and matrimony cloaks her personhood and thereby causes her to be socially invisible. Likewise, in HERmione, Hermione realizes that society and her family equate her physical identity with traditional ideals of womanhood, leading her to feel anxious and uncertain about how her unconventional behaviors and lifestyle choices will be perceived. In The

Waves, Woolf asserts the limitations of the body in a similar way as seen in The Return of the

Soldier and HERmione. Woolf also explores how notions of the body as a corpse deems the external representation of the self as fleeting and one-dimensional. Jinny and Susan, during their old age, struggle to come to terms with their bodies aging while they feel ageless internally. For 76 women in the early twentieth century especially, the body was yet another boundary controlled by society, preventing them from experiencing a unified self.

As the novels included in this study demonstrate, the quality and aim of newness created a foundation for modernists to develop an aesthetic response to the positive and negative interactions between individuals and a dynamic and artificial social sphere. Through these narratives, it is evident that economic and social growth in the early twentieth century depended on systems of imitation, muting individuality and pushing it into the shadows of private thought and reflection. Given this context, H.D., West, and Woolf depict their characters as fragmented and multidimensional. These fragments of character identity certainly represent more than just internal reflections and emotions. Other elements such as memory, the historical and mythological pasts, and even the occult were incorporated by these writers as fragments of identity formation, leading to questions and a need for further examination on how the psychological interior expanded alongside the expansion and development of modern society. 77

Works Cited

Aldington, Richard. “Battlefield.” The Egoist, vol. 4, no. 7, 1917, p.105.

Anderson, Elizabeth. Material Spirituality in Modernist Women’s Writing. United Kingdom,

Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.

Anderson, Margaret C. The Little Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, Chicago. 1914.

“Aporia.” The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. 4th ed. Bedford/St.Martin’s,

2018.

Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1–22.

Chorba, T., & Breedlove, B. “Concurrent Conflicts—the Great War and the 1918 Influenza

Pandemic.” Emerging Infectious Diseases, Vol. 24, no. 10, 2018.

Chun, Maureen. "Between Sensation and Sign: The Secret Language of The Waves." Journal of

Modern Literature, vol. 36, no. 1, 2012, p. 53-70.

Covington, Elizabeth. “The Return of the Soldier and Re-Appropriated Memories.” Journal of

Modern Literature., vol. 37, no. 3, 2014, pp. 56–73.

Debo, Annette. “A Woman’s Age: Nation and Women.” The American H.D. University of Iowa

Press, 2012.

Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, sign, and play.” Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, 3rd ed.,

edited by David Lodge and Nigel Wood, Routledge, 2003, pp. 210-224.

Eliot, T. S. “Hamlet and His Problems.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism.

London, Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1920, pp. 87-94.

Everdell, William R. The First Moderns. The University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Eysteinsson, Astradur. The Concept of Modernism. New York, Cornell University Press, 1990. 78

Friedman, Susan Stanford. Penelope's Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.'s Fiction. Cambridge

University Press, 1990.

——. Psyche Reborn: the Emergence of H.D. Indiana University Press, 1981.

Friedman, Susan, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. “‘I had two loves separate’: The Sexualities of

H.D.’s HER.” Signets: Reading H.D. University of Wisconsin Press, 1990, pp. 205-232.

Froula, Christine. Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity.

Columbia University Press, 2006.

Hinnov, Emily. “‘To Give the Moment Whole’: The Nature of Time and Cosmic (Comm)unity in

Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.” Virginia Woolf and the Natural World, edited by Kristin

Czarnecki and Carrie Rohman, Clemson University Digital Press, 2011, pp. 214-220.

Goldman, Jane. The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge University Press,

2006.

Gottlieb, Carla. “Picasso's ‘Girl before a Mirror.’” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,

vol. 24, no. 4, 1966, pp. 509–518.

Guest, Barbara. Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and her World. New York, Doubleday &

Company, Inc., 1984.

Howarth, Peter. “Avant-gardisms: Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, H.D. The Cambridge Introduction

to Modernist Poetry. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 158-165.

H.D. Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle. New York, New Directions

Publishing, 2002.

——. End to Torment. New York, New Directions Publishing, 1979.

——. HERmione. New York, New Directions Publishing, 1981.

——. Notes on Thought and Vision. San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1982. 79

——. Tribute to Freud. New York, New Directions Publishing, 1974.

James, Henry. Daisy Miller. 1878. Reprint. New York, Penguin Random House, 2007.

Katz, Tamar. “Modernism, Subjectivity, and Narrative Form: Abstraction in The Waves.”

Narrative (Columbus, Ohio), vol. 3, no. 3, 1995, pp. 232–251.

Kealey, EJ. “Women of Britain Say ‘GO!’” Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, London, 1915.

Kristeva, Julia. “Approaching Abjection.” Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated

by Leon Samuel Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982.

Lewis, Wyndham. A Battery Shelled. 1919. Imperial War Museum, London.

Loy, Mina. “Feminist Manifesto.” The lost lunar Baedeker: poems of Mina Loy. New York,

Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996.

Lucenti, Lisa Marie. “Virginia Woolf's The Waves: To Defer That ‘appalling moment.’”

Criticism, vol. 40, no. 1, 1998, pp. 75–97.

Marsden, Dora. “The Work of Miss Rebecca West.” The Egoist, vol. 5, no. 9, pp. 114-119.

Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Olk, Claudia. “The Poetry of Aesthetic Vision in The Waves.” Virginia Woolf and the Aesthetics

of Vision. De Gruyter, 2014.

"Ouija, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2020.

www.oed.com/view/Entry/133342.

Patterson, Martha H. The American New Woman Revisited: A Reader, 1894-1930. Rutgers

University Press, 2008.

Penner, Erin. “Competitive Elegy in The Waves.” Character and Mourning: Woolf, Faulkner, and

the Novel Elegy of the First World War. University of Virginia Press, 2019.

Picasso, Pablo. Girl Before a Mirror. 1932, Museum of Modern Art, New York City. 80

Pondrom, Cyrena N. ““H.D. and the ‘Little Magazines.’” The Cambridge Companion to H.D.,

edited by Nephie J Christodoulides and Polina Mackay, Cambridge University Press,

2012, pp. 37-50.

——. “H.D. and the Origins of Imagism.” Signets: Reading H.D. University of Wisconsin Press,

1990, pp. 85-109.

Pulsifer, Rebecah. “Reading Kitty’s Trauma in Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier.’”

Studies in the Novel, vol. 45, no. 1, 2013, pp. 37–55.

Scanlon, Mara. “Gender Identity and Promiscuous Identification: Reading (in) Rebecca West's

The Return of the Soldier.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 40, no. 3, 2017, pp.

66–83.

Schyllert, Sanna Melin. “‘Are You Giving Yourself to Me to Make a Self?": Sacrifice, Pronoun

Shifts and the Creation of Self in H. D.'s Prose Works.” The Space Between: Literature

and Culture 1914-1945, vol. 15, 2019.

Scott, Bonnie Kime. Refiguring Modernism: Women of 1928. Indiana University Press, 1995.

Sedon, Katherine. “Moments of Aging: Revising Mother Nature in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs.

Dalloway.” Virginia Woolf and the Natural World, edited by Kristin Czarnecki and

Carrie Rohman. Clemson University Digital Press, 2011, pp. 163-168.

Taylor, Chloë. “Kristevan Themes in Virginia Woolf's ‘The Waves.’” Journal of Modern

Literature, vol. 29, no. 3, 2006, pp. 57–77.

Tower, James Eaton. Good Housekeeping Magazine, Vol. 51, No. 2, Phelps Publishing Company,

1910.

Vandivere, Julie. “Waves and Fragments: Linguistic Construction as Subject Formation in

Virginia Woolf.” Twentieth Century Literature., vol. 42, no. 2, 1996, pp. 221–233. 81

West, Rebecca. “Indissoluble Matrimony.” BLAST, vol. 1, no. 1, 1914, pp. 98-117.

——. “On The Return of the Soldier, with a Prefatory Note by G.E. Hutchinson.” Yale

University Library Gazette 57.1–2 (Oct. 1982): 66–71.

——. Selected Letters of Rebecca West, edited by Bonnie Kime Scott. Yale University Press,

2000.

——. The Return of the Soldier. 1918. Reprint. Penguin Classics, 1998.

Woolf, Virginia. “A Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being. 2nd ed., Harcourt, Inc., 1985.

——. Mrs. Dalloway. 1925. Reprint. Harcourt, Inc. 1981.

——. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 1st American ed., Vol. 3, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

——. The Waves. 1931. Reprint. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 1978.