Activist Modernisms: Human Rights and Anti-Totalitarianism in Mid-Twentieth Century Literature

University of Mississippi eGrove Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 2019 Activist Modernisms: Human Rights and Anti-Totalitarianism in Mid-Twentieth Century Literature Mary Ellen Gray University of Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Gray, Mary Ellen, "Activist Modernisms: Human Rights and Anti-Totalitarianism in Mid-Twentieth Century Literature" (2019). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1616. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/1616 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of eGrove. For more information, please contact egrove@olemiss.edu. ACTIVIST MODERNISMS: HUMAN RIGHTS AND ANTI-TOTALITARIANISM IN MID- TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE A Dissertation presented in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English The University of Mississippi by MARY GRAY May 2019 Copyright Mary Gray 2019 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT The period after World War II saw the emergence of a new discourse of human rights, with the signing of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the postwar period and throughout the twentieth century, human rights would often be viewed as a set of self-evident, monolithic, and timeless values that had merely reached their full realization after the horrors of the war. This study examines a body of literature from the 1930s and 40s, the wartime moment just before the foundation of the twentieth century universal rights ideology, to explore the process by which theories of human rights are formed from among a multiplicity of possible human rights philosophies. The texts in this study - from the work of wartime journalists Rebecca West and Martha Gellhorn, to the anti-fascist spy novels of Eric Ambler, and the writing of communist dissidents like Arthur Koestler – respond to the rise of fascism and totalitarianism and the mass displacements and genocide that occur as a consequence. These writers create narratives to understand and contend with the historical ruptures of their time. These narratives theorize human rights by providing differing answers to the underlying questions of those rights, including the ultimate authorities in which rights are grounded and the ideal kinds of community for nurturing rights. Creating rather than inheriting human rights ideals, these texts from the dawn of the era of human rights reveal the ways in which human rights are always historically situated, always imagined and negotiated, rather than being eternal truths that need only to be revealed. ! ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Ian Whittington, for his guidance and support, as well as my committee members, Drs. Dan Stout, Leigh Anne Duck, and Sue Grayzel. In addition, I would like to thank my family and friends for their patience and encouragement during this process. ! iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT …………………………………………………………………………………… ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ……………………………………………………………………... iii INTRODUCTION: WAR, FASCISM, AND THE PRODUCTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS……………………………………………………………………………………….. 1 CHAPTER ONE: THE FAMILIAR AND THE FOREIGN: HUMAN RIGHTS, THE NATION, AND THE RISE OF FASCISM ……………………………………………………………… 41 CHAPTER TWO: BARE RIGHTS: HUMAN RIGHTS BEYOND THE NATION-STATE IN ANTI-FASCIST WARTIME FICTION …………………………………………………........ 85 CHAPTER THREE: THE MORAL OF THE STORY: NARRATIVE, PEACE, AND JUSTICE AFTER THE HOLOCAUST ………………………………………………………………… 128 CHAPTER FOUR: THE PERILS OF REVOLUTION: HUMAN RIGHTS AND SOVIET TOTALITARIANISM ………………………………………………………………………... 174 CONCLUSION …………………………………………………………………………......... 221 REFERENCES ………………………………………………………………………………. 227 VITA …………………………………………………………………………………………. 236 ! iv INTRODUCTION: WAR, FASCISM, AND THE PRODUCTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS In “Greenhouse with Cyclamens,” her study of the Nuremberg trials and the aftermath of the Second World War in Germany, writer and journalist Rebecca West observes the chaos of the postwar atmosphere and the inability of notions of right and wrong to attach themselves neatly to historical realities. After making the ironic observation that, for all the horrors the Germans have perpetrated, the German system seems to be better suited to accommodate postwar refugees than British society would have been, she notes wearily that “here, as so often before, we see that history takes no care to point a moral” (182). And yet West is far from ceding the need for a historical morality. Like the other wartime writers in this study, West finds it an urgent objective to draw meaning from the history of her time – to understand the failures of morality and ethics that underlay the catastrophes of the war. However, West and her contemporaries see this historical chapter as a moment of deep uncertainty which does not yield up a meaning on its own. Rather, West understands that the moral of the story – a moral that will revolve around the deeply unsettled matter of human rights – will have to be imagined and negotiated by the players in the twentieth century drama, the various individuals who will write down and interpret their experiences of war and the rise of fascism and totalitarianism. Rebecca West is among a group of wartime writers, including Rex Warner, Phyllis Bottome, Martha Gellhorn, and Arthur Koestler, whose socially-engaged and often genre- defying writings represent an understudied chapter of twentieth century literature. In works that take a thorough and critical look at the troubled history of their own time and often combine the ! 1 tools and objectives of journalism with the form and narrative strategies of the novel, these writers make an often overlooked contribution to both literary modernism and twentieth century human rights literature. Modernist critics have traditionally emphasized the social and political aloofness of high modernism, while more current modernist studies often focus on redefining the boundaries of modernism in both time and space. However, the late modernist writers in this study represent another facet of modernist literature by revealing the significance of late modernist writing to a discussion of twentieth century human rights thinking. Furthermore, these wartime texts are unique within the body of human rights literature, with the capacity to pull back the curtain on the development of contemporary human rights ideology in the years leading to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Some studies of human rights literature have examined the potential of writing – particularly novels – to promote human rights, while others have focused on literature’s capacity to fill in the gaps or expose the flaws of traditional ways of thinking about rights. This study contributes to the literary human rights discourse by suggesting another way in which literary studies and human rights can intersect. I argue that mid-century anti-totalitarian texts can be seen as case studies in the formation of narratives of human rights. The writers in this study do not so much critique rights traditions, call attention to rights abuses, or name specific rights to which people are entitled. Rather, they attempt to conjure whole a theory of human rights, addressing this subject matter’s most fundamental questions. The writers interrogate the origins and ideological foundations of human rights, the sources of authority upon which those rights depend, the ways in which individuals can achieve visibility and recognition as human persons (or fail to do so), how individuals are reconciled with larger communities, and the ideal kinds of communities for sheltering human rights. The exploration of these fundamental human rights ! 2 questions in writing of the 1930s and 40s provides valuable insight into the process by which human rights are imagined and formulated. The historical situatedness of these texts is significant to their unique place in the conversation about literature and human rights. The years of the Second World War and their immediate aftermath have often been represented as a pivotal time of social crisis and horror that ultimately led to the realization of universal human rights, as announced by the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, both a breakthrough moment in history and the fulfillment of the oldest promises of the Western liberal tradition. However, this perspective of the wartime moment within the legacy of human rights is largely retrospective. In reality, the mid-century period was a time of great uncertainty that lacked a dominant framework for thinking about rights. The 1948 declaration, presented as the culmination of contemporaneous ideals, emphasized universal human rights – a philosophy in which every human has inalienable rights simply by virtue of being human, independent of any cultural or political institutions. However, as many human rights critics argue, the universalist sentiment was more aspirational than fully realized, and was often impracticable. Furthermore, it was frequently undercut by the continued presence of traditional liberal ideology, which did not quite accommodate universalism, as well as the great social and political importance of the nation-state. Mid-century writers, therefore, do not work from a solid and established belief system, but rather labor to construct such a system, pulling from competing strands

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