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Vulgar Ambitions: Social Class and Self-Culture in Modern British Literature

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Vulgar Ambitions: Social Class and Self-Culture in Modern British Literature Vulgar Ambitions: Social Class and Self-Culture in Modern British Literature Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Gregory Owen Smith, M. A. Graduate Program in English The Ohio State University 2011 Dissertation Committee: Sebastian D. G. Knowles, Advisor Mark Conroy Thomas S. Davis Copyright by Gregory Owen Smith 2011 Abstract This dissertation argues that the phenomenon of popular self-culture, which emerged during the early twentieth century in response to desires for improvement from Britain‘s growing lower middle class, was a point of interest within modernism‘s preoccupation with class, culture, and the common reader. In line with the New Modernist Studies‘ emphasis on returning to the historical moment to expand modernism across traditional lines of demarcation (including high and low culture, class, and types of readers), I argue that the concept of self-culture can be a fruitful way to approach issues of narrative construction and readership that complicate these conceptions of modernism. My contribution to this conversation is to focus on how self-culture as a popular trend in the early twentieth-century proved to be an enticing topic for modernist authors and middlebrow readers alike. On the one hand, many modernist writers featured self- educating characters in their novels. Many of these characters fail in their pursuit of individual edification for a number of reasons related to modernist social commentary on class difference, the pessimistic view of progress during and after World War I, and even the stylistic issues stemming from self-culture‘s association with realist writing in an era of experimentation. On the other hand, mainstream readers who may or may not have been interested in avant-garde literature were just as interested in the kinds of self-culture stories and autodidacticism that many modern writers used as narrative lynchpins in their works. It was one issue at the time that, ii despite its apparently class-specific educational focus, actually appealed to readers and writers on completely opposite ends of the cultural spectrum. Analyzing work from H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and George Orwell, I show how self-culture became common ground for modernism and the masses alike, and as such serves as an important and enduring marker of middlebrow culture in and around the writing which could not ignore it. iii To M. E. iv Acknowledgments Everyone who had a hand in helping this project come to light, or who helped keep me positive during those grayer days of writing, deserves very special thanks. Portions of this dissertation were developed from conference presentations. I would like to thank the Modernist Studies Association, the International James Joyce Foundation, and the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 for their outstanding panels and panelists, all of which provided important insight into nascent versions of these chapters. Likewise, I was able to travel and write some of this dissertation with the help of funding from these generous sources: the Mary Lundie Stewart Vorman Scholarship fund, the College of Arts and Humanities of Ohio State, the OSU Department of English (both for travel funds and for fellowship time), Project Narrative, and the Scholarship Committee at St. Gregory of Nyssa Orthodox Church. Thanks to all of the professors who have shown me how rich a life there is in literature, especially W. Paul Elledge, whose love for London infected me, Mark Wollaeger, who introduced me to Joyce, and Sean O‘Sullivan, whose Hitchcock and Mike Leigh class opened my eyes to British film. Murray Beja was an outstanding boss for the two years I worked for him and the Joyce Foundation, and he continues to be an invaluable mentor. Other professors and staff around the Department have been remarkably helpful throughout this process: Aman v Garcha, Scott DeWitt, Cindy Selfe, the Digital Media Project staff, Jared Gardner, David Herman, Brian McHale, Jim Phelan, Kathleen Griffin, Raeanne Woodman and Kitty O‘Brien. Thanks to Valerie Lee and Richard Dutton, department chairs, and Nan Johnson and Chad Allen, directors of graduate study, during my time at Ohio State. My graduate student colleagues and friends have lent their support to this project and to my general well-being throughout its construction: thanks to Anne Langendorfer, Alexis Martina, Nick Hetrick, Aaron Seddon, Amanda Gerber, Lis Ravert, Erin Kelly, Meghan Burke Hattaway, Eugenia Gonzalez, Seth Reno, the affiliates of Project Narrative, and the members of the Modernist Studies Group. A very special thank-you goes to my long- suffering dissertation committee, comprised of Mark Conroy, Thomas Davis, and Sebastian Knowles. With grace, skill, and professionalism, they read countless drafts, answered endless questions, and generally shepherded me through a process that certainly would have left me wayward on my own. Special thanks go to my Graduate Faculty Representative, Sarah I. Johnson, who stepped in to read and help with the dissertation defense. My director, Seb Knowles, deserves a wealth of gratitude for his commitment to my success throughout the years and across a position change with commitments that should have precluded him from directing dissertations like this. I was humbled when he said he would keep me on. He kept me on track throughout the whole process with timely communications, incisive commentary demonstrating his considerable editorial skill, and a generous sense of humor. As with the rest of my committee, I have enormous respect for him personally and professionally. Thanks to my family and friends, many of whom still think I have been writing a novel (warning: you are going to be disappointed with vi this). Your love and support has always been appreciated, even when I couldn‘t explain exactly what I was doing. Thank you, Grandma, for helping me learn how to read with your Little Golden Books. Thanks, Mom, for giving me creativity; thanks, Dad, for teaching me perseverance. If I have failed in the former, the proof of the latter is in these pages. Finally, to Mary Evelyn: this and everything I will ever make, do, or have—it is all yours and all for you. vii Vita 2001................................................................Oakwood High School 2005................................................................B.A. English, History, Vanderbilt University 2007................................................................M.A. English, The Ohio State University 2005 to present ..............................................Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University Publications ―Literature and Digital Illumination‖ (With Lis Lindeman Ravert). Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. 2008 Summer; 12 (3). Fields of Study Major Field: English viii Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Dedication .......................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgments............................................................................................................... v Vita ................................................................................................................................... viii List of Figures ..................................................................................................................... x Introduction: ....................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: No Time to Waste: Efficiency and Self-Culture in H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett ....................................................................................................................... 18 Chapter 2: Leonard Bast, Clerk-Autodidact ..................................................................... 73 Chapter 3: Aesthetic Sympathy and Aesthetics, Simply: Social Ideology and Literary Representations of Self-Culture in Virginia Woolf .................................................. 111 Chapter 4: ―Cultured Allroundmen‖: Joyce‘s Autodidacts ............................................ 165 Chapter 5: Going to the Dogs: Self-Culture‘s Culminating Reversal in George Orwell 211 References ....................................................................................................................... 256 ix List of Figures Figure 1. Atlas Newspaper Advertisement (from the Times, 12 June 1911) .................... 82 x Introduction: ―Devoted to the Impartial and Deliberate Discussion of Important Questions […] and to the Promotion of Self-Culture and General Education‖ “I am not saying that reading and discussing the Great Books will save humanity from itself, but I don‟t know anything else that will.” - Robert Maynard Hutchins (qtd. in Beam 73) “Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books for ever.” - Ezra Pound (99) Everyone is an autodidact. All learning that is self-motivated is a kind of self-education, and all genuine learning is at least somewhat self-motivated. This is nothing new. The cultivation of the self is a concept as basic and as old as humanity‘s recognition of the
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