Ideology, Production, and Reproduction: Virginia

IDEOLOGY, PRODUCTION, AND REPRODUCTION: VIRGINIA

WOOLF, MARIE STOPES, AND H.D.

Andrew John Moffitt

A thesis submitted to the Department of English Language and Literature

In conformity with the requirements for

the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Queen’s University

Kingston, Ontario, Canada

(August, 2021)

The literary works of Virginia Woolf, Marie Stopes, and H.D. share an interest in the crossovers between human, ideological, and cultural reproduction during the interwar years.

However, an extended study on their contrasting views about life and art in the aftermath of

World War One is yet to emerge. My project examines how the bid to reproduce Britain’s militaristic state ideologies or produce feminist-pacifist alternatives appear in the work of each writer. While Stopes’s fiction and sex manuals voice the need for British people to breed a nation of renewed, patriotic and colonial subjects, Woolf and H.D. encourage resistance by demanding that their public rethink the exclusionary norms of race and sexuality that Stopes endorsed as a means of returning Britain to a state of post-War normalcy. Addressing critics such as Georg

Lukács and Theodor Adorno, I argue that Woolf and H.D.’s goal of breaking the homogenous values of mass-produced art not only speaks to debates surrounding the political utility of modernism but also both writers’ belief that experimental aesthetics can inspire pacifist action.

By defining Stopes’s work as ideologically reproductive in its use of sexuality to reiterate hegemonic concepts of nationality and gender, I present opposition in Woolf and H.D when they expose and then challenge how disseminating gender-normative ideals through literature often prepares the human body for exploitation during war.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my primary supervisor, Gabrielle McIntire, for her thoughtful and thorough feedback on my thesis. Professor McIntire’s kindness and academic rigour have been central to my completion of this project. I also extend my sincere thanks to my second reader,

Margaret Pappano, whose valuable insights on my work expanded my thoughts and ideas into areas that refined and enriched this dissertation. A number of faculty members at Queen’s

University English Department have been central to how this project has shaped itself over the last five years, and I would like to extend my thanks to Yael Schlick, Patricia Rae, and Molly

Wallace. Special Collections and Archives at Waterloo University granted me valuable access to their Marie Stopes collection, without which my research for Chapter Three would not have been possible, and to that end, I would like to thank Martha Luzon for her assistance. To my dear friend and colleague Suyin Olguin, whose words of encouragement, kindness, and wisdom were always at hand to guide me through even the most difficult of times during this project, I offer to you my utmost gratitude and affection. Thanks to my parents, Anne-Marie and Philip Moffitt, who have always urged me to pursue my aspirations with conviction and have provided me with ceaseless support throughout my life and education. Finally, I am deeply indebted to my partner,

Kamon, who has provided me with the most selfless of emotional and indeed financial support over the last five years. For this I will be forever grateful, thank you.

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Acknowledgements ...... iii

List of Figures ...... v

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1: Writing the “Pure Self”: Ideology and Irony in Virginia Woolf’s “Phyllis and Rosamond,”

Night and Day, and “A Sketch of the Past” ...... 16

Chapter 2: Unmasking Militarism and Producing Pacifism in Woolf’s “A Society,” “Thoughts on Peace

in an Air Raid,” and Jacob’s Room ...... 63

Chapter 3: Rosemary’s Baby: Sex, Eugenics, and Colonialism in the Plays and Sex Manuals of Marie

Stopes ...... 115

Chapter 4: Destroy After Writing: Trauma and Literary Non(re)production in H.D.’s Autobiographical

Prose ...... 164

Conclusion ...... 224

Works Cited ...... 234

List of Figures

Figure 1. Lucy Kemp-Welch, “Remember Scarborough” (1915). The Imperial War Museum. .. 91

Figure 2. Unknown artist, “Men of Britain! Will You Stand for This? (1915). The Imperial War

Museum...... 91

Figure 3. S. Burgess, commemorative souvenir (1916). Dated Sunday Sept. 3rd 1916 with

“Thanks of Every Woman and Child in England.” The Imperial War Museum...... 92

Figure 4. From Wise Parenthood: a Practical Solution to Married Love. 5th ed., Putnam’s, 1919,

p. 25...... 123

Figure 5. Unknown Artist. “Women of Britain Say – GO!” (1914). The British Library...... 152

Figure 6. Joseph Simpson. “Your Motherland Will Never Forget” from Canada in Khaki (1916,

Canada). The British Library...... 152

Introduction

For a novel, after all, is a statement about a thousand different objects—human, natural,

divine; it is an attempt to relate them to each other. In every novel of merit these different

elements are held in place by the force of the writer’s vision. But they have another order

also, which is the order imposed by convention. And as men are the arbiters of that

convention, as they have established an order of values in life, so too, since fiction is

based on life, these values prevail there also to a very great extent.

–. Virginia Woolf. “Women and Fiction”

… let us not teach

what we have learned badly

and not profited by;

let us not concoct

healing potions for the dead,

nor invent

new colours

for blind eyes

–. H.D. “The Walls do not Fall”

This dissertation examines themes of production, reproduction, and ideology in modernist literature to trace how artists of the interwar years produced aesthetics that scrutinized consolatory worldviews in the wake of mass human loss. In her plays and sex manuals, Marie 1

Stopes presents marital eroticism as a way for British people to repair their country’s population and family structures, both of which the upheavals of World War One had brought into profound uncertainty. Stopes was a deeply patriotic and gender-normative thinker, who used her work to stress the need for Britain to maintain its status as an authoritative global leader after the War.

Virginia Woolf and Hilda Dolittle (H.D.), on the other hand, developed an interrogative, experimental, and politically-charged aesthetic that upheld the destructive aftereffects of the conflict to generate in their public the will for change. Both writers use defamiliarizing techniques such as irony and literary enquiries into trauma to nurture within their readers the ability to rethink a culture that dangerously normalized its militaristic customs. While Stopes welcomes social normalcy in her work by reiterating the race, gender, and sex discourses that preceded the War, Woolf and H.D. produce literary forms that refused to reproduce, on a fictional level, these violent systems of thought and human interaction. Woolf and H.D.’s work is what I call ideologically nonreproductive because it does not (re)construct a comforting image of post-War existence but instead highlights the trauma, loss, and disorientation that the hetero- nationalism of Stopes’s sexology attempted to redress. Stopes’s post-War texts re-install the need for binarized, destructor/reproducer roles between men and women. While her romanticized sexology provided a solution for wartime trauma, it also maintained the need for maternal subservience to the state and re-imposed the very feminine duties that often sustained and gave meaning to World War One to begin with.

For Stopes, reproduction was both biological and ideological in nature. Not only did she regard childbirth as a way for women to replenish their country’s population, but also the means by which they could support the patriotic and highly androcentric values of imperial Britain.

With its emphasis on marital eroticism, constructive birth-control, and eugenics, Stopes’s fiction

mirrors what her sexology presents as women’s responsibility of using sex to reinforce Britain’s patriarchal institutions along with the sociosexual virility of its male citizens.1 In contrast, Woolf asserted from the beginning of her career that women should challenge heteronormative constructs with the aid of feminist critique and unbind their intellects from Britain’s restraining prototypes of female embodiment. Even though Woolf herself chose not to have children, she does not dictate to her readers how they should approach maternity but instead upholds the need for them to transcend what Stopes offers as an essentializing crossover between women’s reproductive and creative potentials. In Chapter One, for instance, I argue that Woolf’s early work explores the need for women, and female artists in particular, to surpass the socioeconomic restraints that early-twentieth century Britain placed upon their lives, work, and productivity. In her early short story “Phyllis and Rosamond” (1906) and second-published novel Night and Day

(1919), Woolf explores what she calls in her memoir “A Sketch of the Past” (1976) exceptional

“moments of being” that underlie the prosaic “cotton wool” of women’s lives within the home

(70, 72). In these early works, I flag a nonreproductive critique of heteronormative ideology not through the heroines’ refusal to have children but in their ability to nurture excess mental faculties that their society’s masculine ideals of feminine labour do not direct towards the task of reproducing, on the level of lived experience, Britain’s male-privileging customs like capitalist kinship. In doing so, I argue that Woolf encourages her readers to consider the period’s

1 While Birth-control advice became widely available during the 1920s, it was sought on an individualistic rather than state-condoned basis. As Steven Brooke explains, government-established maternity clinics were not permitted to supply contraceptives advice, which forced birth-control clinics to operate beyond the influence of local government (48). For this reason, Claire Davey upholds the need for an “‘individual’ perspective” on birth-control (342) and notes that poorer sections of society often preferred methods such as abstinence or coitus interruptus due to the costs involved in securing prophylactic devices. Most historians agree that birth-control within marriage did little to further woman’s liberation. Kate Fisher argues that husbands rather than wives were responsible for decisions regarding the couple’s contraceptive use: a power dynamic that “privileged male action and prized female passivity” (189). Evelyn Faulkner agrees with Fisher’s analysis and argues that Stopes’s readers largely accepted conventional gender roles within marriage, including “male sexual aggressiveness and female passivity” (58). 3

insistence upon women’s subservience to male authority not as an embodied truth but a socioeconomic condition that arises as a result of Edwardian England’s oppressive norms of gendered behaviour. Since Woolf’s extraordinary “moments” are immune from the labour of early twentieth-century Britain, they evoke glimmers of a more authentic self that women can transform into empowered intellectual and artistic identities. In my comparison of all three texts,

Woolf’s modernist-feminist aesthetic produces the capacity for innovative thought by piercing the desensitizing normalcy of patriarchal lifestyles and how they often lulled women at this time into a state of unthinking complacency.

I uphold the idea that nonreproduction was for Woolf and H.D. an intellectual endeavour because it allowed both writers to oppose Britain’s aggressive interwar values without having to adopt the identity of nurturing mother that proliferated during their lifetimes or risk public censure by openly rejecting it. While Donna Krolik Hollenberg argues that a “declining mortality rate and the mass acceptance of contraception” led female writers like H.D. to “exploit” their

“double birthing potential” and choose “either creativity or procreation” (Hollenberg’s italics,

11), my own discussion moves away from this either/or logic and suggests that women need not see their artistic productivity in terms of a biological function nor literary creativity as a stand-in for it. I argue that there is far more subversive, pacifistic influence in woman’s bid to question maternal roles in times of war rather than using them to motivate their artistry. While Stopes places Eurocentric notions of race and gender at the centre of post-War global stability, and which were central to Britain’s reparation at this time, Woolf and H.D. pose these ideas in terms of a new, politically-loaded inquiry into the complicity of embodied identities like motherhood in acts of war. I contend that this resolve was specifically important for female artists during the interwar years due to the drive across Britain to reimpose confining male-female hierarchies after

the ruptures of World War One. I follow Lesley Hall, who explains that Susan Gilbert and

Sandra Gubar’s account of a “sex war” during the 1920s (43) overlooks the period’s renewed focus on sexual consensus between men and women, and present my historical backdrop as concerned with reknitting the sexes into a congruous group fabric to remedy the physical and emotional ordeals of the battlefield.2 As Susan Kingsley Kent notes, British culture in the post-

War era abounded with “reactionary images of masculinity and femininity” to encourage

“harmonious marital relationships” and to offset the “political upheavals caused by the Great

War” (140). As Woolf and H.D. examine, though, this romanticized, mind/body union between male and female selves often hindered women from producing their own artistic visions. When I speak of heteronormative structures in my dissertation, I refer to the customs or institutions that predated the War and offered British people a comforting vision of normalcy that nevertheless re-established conservative, male-privileging ideologies like the public/private spheres system.

The issue of nonreproduction thus emerges throughout my argument as an artist’s desire to withhold the patriotic, mournful, or romanticizing cultural forms that were rebuilding militaristic society during the 1920s and 30s. For Woolf and H.D., it was the loss of these literary traditions that generated the capacity for people to rethink the belligerent society they occupied and perhaps even imagine a more peaceful alternative to take its place.

In Chapter Two, I argue that Woolf’s anti-war agenda emerges through an accent upon loss in her pacifist essay “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” (1940). In a process that Slavoj

2 In No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (1988), Gilbert and Gubar argue that the social advances that women made between 1914 and 1918 created a “crisis” of “male dispossession and female self-possession” (34), where men perceived women to be infringing upon their domains, including that of literature. Hall, however, contends that Gilbert and Gubar’s account of “a crisis of masculinity characterized by intense misogyny” (Hall 54) does not accurately describe the interwar period as a whole. Instead, she argues that men in particular sought to repair male-female relationships through a renewed interest in marital love and monogamous eroticism. 5

Žižek calls ideological “unmasking” (Sublime xxv), “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” engages in a form of pacifism that is ideologically nonreproductive when the narrator of this essay refuses to construe the bodies of unknown others as dangerous antagonists. In this important pacifist treatise, the nonreproduced surplus of Britain’s nationalistic rhetoric refers to the human beings that its military violently eradicates—but then “masks”—to prevent its citizens from questioning the ethicality of modern warfare. Woolf’s essay traces the above process to raise a situation where, under extreme nationalism, German soldiers embody their nation’s antagonistic values to such an extent that their British counterparts can only approach them on an intellectual level with the annihilating capability of mechanicalized weaponry. Patriotic commemoration, however, makes the bodies of British soldiers free from this erasure when memorials like the elegy render them what Judith Butler refers to as “grievable” subjects (Precarious 32), or those who freely engage in warfare because the nation grants them cultural visibility despite the prospect of their bodily undoing. I argue that Woolf uses terminological clashes in “Thoughts on Peace in an Air

Raid” to undermine Žižek’s masking process and highlight a transgressive site of shared vulnerability, where artists can produce a more peaceful vocabulary for their public to understand the complexity of human existence. The essay invites pacifist activism by asking readers to regard otherness not as something that requires aggressive eradication but a locale where thinkers can foster productive, peace-motivated dialogue among diverse people and places.

However, as an essay that Woolf wrote on the brink of yet another global catastrophe,

“Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” demonstrates how Western culture had, by the 1940s, largely failed to change its attitudes towards the disposability of men’s lives as soldiers. When I analyze the essay alongside Jacob’s Room (1922), I argue that both texts exemplify the ongoing

need for a pacifist-feminist writer whose political and creative agency emerges after she refuses to reproduce artistic solutions for wartime loss. In the second half of Chapter Two, I contend that

Woolf presents Jacob’s Room as a “mask” for her protagonist’s missing body and, in doing so, exposes how commemoration requires death as a recurring site of patriotic cultural production.

Jacob’s Room compels its readers to consider a crucial problem about masculine identity: if commemoration arises after times of collective trauma to memorialise the lives that a community loses, then militaristic states like those of Jacob’s Britain can continually demand male sacrifice because there will always be art forms such as the elegy to redress these losses. For this reason, the attention that modernist critics tend to place upon Jacob as a missing combatant reiterates the very male-privileging discourse that Woolf in fact criticizes throughout her work. In Chapter

Two, my own analysis shifts away from Jacob and towards his mother, Betty Flanders, whom I characterize as a figure of nascent political instrumentality and someone who can use feminist thought to confront how the British military commemoratively rewrites men’s deaths to guarantee their ongoing conscription into the army. Through Betty, I flag in Jacob’s Room new room for a literary creator whose work does not remedy the violent habits of war. Woolf’s characterization of Betty encourages readers to imagine a more peaceful system of international diplomacy that no longer requires commemoration to offset the slaughter of its own citizens.

I thus seek to place World War One at the centre of how Woolf and H.D. understood ideological and human reproduction, arguing that the widespread use of maternity in propaganda during the conflict prompted both writers to scrutinize the role of motherhood in furthering

Britain’s belligerent diplomatic practices. Nevertheless, I also resist the idea that not bearing children automatically absolves people from what Lee Edelman calls the “reproductive futurism” of ideological systems like militarism, heteronormativity, and white supremacy (Edelman 19).

Without meaningful political action, I assert that a person’s endeavour to refuse parenthood does little to enact change upon a structural or democratic level. My view here aligns with that of

Woolf, who argued in A Room of One’s Own (1929) that women should “go on bearing children, but, so they say, in twos and threes, not in tens and twelves” (148). For Woolf, motherhood was not an oppressive role in itself yet often had the effect of curbing women’s political, intellectual, and artistic productivity when patriarchal society upheld it as the main channel of activity for them. As the narrator remarks in Woolf’s anti-war polemic Three Guineas (1938), feminists should ease, though not necessarily denounce, childcare as a “burden” that European societies at this time tended to “[lay] upon women alone” (361). Like Woolf, I uphold reproductive autonomy and the choice of whether or not to have children, how many, and to what ends as a fundamental right within any functioning democracy. However, I also maintain that feminists need not completely reject childrearing nor embroil family life within the conservative status quo. Instead, as feminists, we should grant women and men the power to self-define their own reproductive lives free of the class and racially-inflected archetypes of parenthood that Stopes centres throughout her work. Following recent additions to queer and feminist theory, I contend that critics who embrace nonreproduction as a form of embodied resistance often lock childless people into a dialectic with more dominant sexual normativities while also reinstating the misogynistic and homophobic concepts of sterility that propel them. I defend the value of artists whose main goal is to confront how public discourses frequently implicate embodied identities in unethical diplomatic plans, which, in terms of the literary context at hand, refers to the way in which Stopes embroils heterosexuality within programs of male enlistment, conservative post-

War reconstruction, and settler colonialism.3 Woolf and H.D. denounce European warfare by scrutinizing the linkages that militaristic propaganda establishes between the human body, state ideology, and patriotic allegiance: three branches of interwar politics that Stopes merges in her work when she disseminates a fanatical view about physical beauty and the unquestionable primacy of the British race.

In Chapter Three, I thus reconsider the progressiveness of Stopes’s plays and sex- manuals, the latter of which provided family planning advice for post-War married couples, because her texts openly support Britain’s militaristic and imperial missions by advertising heteronormative eroticism as a vehicle for racially-eugenic group breeding. In The Race (1918),

Stopes uses the theatre to advance her view on reproduction as a way for women to minimize the losses of World War One. Through the character of Rosemary Pexton, Stopes synchronizes the life-giving potential of mothers with the death of their soldierly counterparts and suggests that women must safeguard the genealogical benefits of middle-class British men by having procreative sex with them prior to their partners’ enlistment. As feminist critics, we can therefore approach The Race to illuminate the highly contradictory and myopic nature of women’s sexual liberation at this time: a movement that Stopes was largely responsible for pioneering in Britain.

The Race empowers women as mothers when it construes reproduction as a form of national service. However, Rosemary’s endeavour to reverse her lover’s death with a replacement child centres this power within a militaristic system that can only ever cause more death. Since

3 Indeed, with the advent of progressive family laws in countries like the US, UK, and Canada, critics must now acknowledge the potential complicity of mainstream queer liberation in the othering strategies of their countries’ foreign policies. As Jasbir Puar compellingly argues, even LGBTQ+ folk are not exempt from the “homonationalism” of Western liberal agendas such as the Israeli government’s use of sexual marginality to reiterate Islamophobic rhetoric and aggression against Palestinian others. Puar contends that such “homonationalism” solidifies self-other distinctions by tying “the recognition of homosexual subjects, both legally and representationally, to the national and transnational political agendas of U.S. imperialism” (9). 9

Rosemary’s baby merely offsets the horrific casualties of male conscription, the play remains uncritical as to how her maternal contribution might provide the manpower for further globalized aggression. Indeed, Stopes’s play Conquest (1917) intertwines Britain’s racial development with what Stopes saw as the country’s need to emerge as the leader of post-War geopolitics, which is a concern that she also focalizes within her sex advice. In response to recent re-evaluations of her career within academia and public discourse, I contend that Stopes’s concern for trans-global eugenics is problematic, both for thinkers in Stopes’s time and today, because it reinforces the colonialist and Eurocentric values that form the basis of modern warfare. In Chapter Three, then,

I return to my assertion that reproduction at this time not only concerned family planning.

Stopes’s plays embrace what Walter Benjamin calls “efforts to render politics aesthetic” (241) during the interwar period when they conflate all distinctions between what Stopes saw as the intrinsic worth of human beings and the white supremacy of Britain’s colonial identity. Across her career, Stopes employed mechanically-reproducible culture to disseminate a highly prejudicial worldview, one that potentialized oppression against the class and race identities who impaired her preferred human aesthetics.

For this reason, while critics such as Layne Parish Craig and Aimee Armande Wilson equate post-War innovation with the emergence of reproductive choice, I offer a more nuanced account of sexual politics at this time and maintain that critics cannot separate matters of interwar reproduction from the lingering militarism of the 1920s and 30s.4 I trace the highly politicized nature of motherhood during the War, including the crossovers between female

4 Parish Craig sees contraception as “a structural metaphor” for conveying the connection between “reproductive and artistic freedom” in Woolf’s Three Guineas (127), while Armande Wilson uses a “modernist conception narrative” to describe how the prospect of both biological and creative autonomy allowed modernists to “participate in the political realm” (26). When discussing Mrs. Dalloway, Parish Craig briefly notes the “[government’s] oppression of women, who…were doomed to breed soldiers to kill and be killed” (67) but does not use this observation to initiate an extended analysis of nonreproduction as a form of pacifist dissent. 10

childrearing and male conflict, to explain Woolf and H.D.’s bid to extrapolate their creative processes from an identity that they associated with the continuation of global violence. When

Armande Wilson considers the need to examine the “historical, political, and social situatedness of the maternal body” in modernist texts, she acknowledges how motherhood during this period formed a complex relationship with state power, including Britain’s attempts to relegate women as mothers to “the supposedly changeless private home” (30). However, I dispute Armande

Wilson’s account of the 1920s as a period that resisted endeavours to bring “maternity and female sexuality into the public sphere” (30). Instead, I argue that the literary, medical, and theatrical institutions of the British public sphere were in fact where Stopes’s hugely popular writings on sex and reproduction constructed these interconnected facets of female identity.

Woolf and H.D., on the other hand, expose the highly orchestrated nature of motherhood at this time to unshackle women’s political agency from the militaristic enterprises of male authority.

Their work seeks new ways for women to speak in the midst of war without reproducing the gender discourses that underlie modern conflict, whether this meant engaging in pacifist activism without the obligation of nurturing an infant or writing about motherhood without having to use their narratives to idealize Britain’s repopulated future.

In Chapter Four, I argue that H.D. counters Britain’s shift towards a climate of patriotism, colonialism, and gender normativity during the 1920s when she builds upon her own experience of losing a child in her autobiographical fiction. My analysis of H.D.’s work undermines Ezra

Pound’s familiar “make it new” maxim of modernism by locating creative insights within an unresolved, traumatic past rather than emphasizing the strident progress of modernity. In

Asphodel (1919 [1992]) and Palimpsest (1926), H.D. examines how post-War reconstruction had failed to confront either the causes or aftereffects of World War One but had merely lulled

European people into a passive state of group normalcy. While Lawrence Rainey lodges a mostly personal critique against H.D. for what he sees as her snobbish refusal to engage in public address, I offer a counter-argument by explaining the importance of nonpublication for her in light of the era’s mass-media discourses of collective victimhood and suppressive, consumer- driven hedonism. H.D.’s reluctance to publish Asphodel allows feminist critics to trace the highly complex, and interconnected, issues of biological and cultural reproduction during the interwar years. While Stopes predicates women’s power on their willingness to reproduce new citizens to carry their nation’s revived peacetime values, H.D. loads intense creative effort in nonreproduction or even death. However, I do not cast H.D.’s technique as solely personal, melancholic, or regressive in nature. Rather, I contend that nonpublication encouraged H.D. to find more authentic ways for speaking about traumatic experiences like miscarriage while also protecting her ordeal from Britain’s public-sphere urges to transform it into fuel for exculpating propaganda against German others. In its resistance to archetypes of nationalistic parenthood,

H.D.’s experience of forestalled motherhood during the War incited her to rewrite the standards of feminine expression that were available to her and to use these narratives to thwart the period’s gendered vocabularies of patriotic service to the militaristic state.

My decision to place the experimental work of Woolf and H.D. alongside Stopes’s investment in conservative issues like heteronormative kinship thus stems from the need to examine a period that held starkly binarized attitudes towards women’s roles as literary, economic, and ideological producers. To date, though, there has been no attempt to synthesize the views of these writers in an extended or nuanced manner despite the interest that each shows in the connection between human and textual (pro)creativity during times of social upheaval.

While, as I explain in Chapter Three, Donald Childs takes a comparative approach towards the

work of Woolf and Stopes, I contrast how the two writers viewed women’s rights due to the way in which Stopes embroiled female sexuality within dogmatic narratives of patriotic nationhood.

H.D.’s semi-autobiographical fiction, on the other hand, is closer to Woolf’s in terms of its leftist allegiances and avant-garde formalism. However, H.D.’s own experience of losing a child during the War brought her to engage with maternity on a more intimate level. On account of their contrasting experiences of motherhood, I uphold that Woolf and H.D. share a concern in pacifist dissent yet differ quite distinctly on matters of individual style and content. Where H.D. provides a moving account of personal trauma, she lacks the analytical tone of Woolf’s pacifist inquiry when the latter uses irony to disrupt Britain’s symbolism of militaristic nationalism and group mourning. Rather than comment upon motherhood in a personal capacity, Woolf presents it as a restrained socioeconomic duty through characters like Betty Flanders in Jacob’s Room (1922) and, in doing so, transforms what Stopes offers as a quasi-religious calling into an ideologically- inflected role with the sole aim of using maternal care to reverse male death upon the battlefield.

Even though there is little concrete evidence to suggest that either Woolf or H.D. openly engaged with the other’s career in a personal or professional capacity, I compare them as two writers who interrogated the trauma of war but contrast their distinct, stylistic approaches towards how they engaged with their public. H.D. does not mention Woolf’s work until after the latter’s death in 1941, when she describes “a wave of joy and hope” upon hearing the news due to having “carried” Woolf within herself “almost [her] whole life” (“She Is Dead” 131-2). H.D.’s unconventional eulogy for Woolf suggests a sense of cathartic release at now being able to fully recognize the latter’s work as an unspoken influence on her own. The idea of H.D. silently

“carrying” Woolf in an in utero manner reflects the former’s frequent use of stalled birth as a metaphor for creativity, where, as we will see in Chapter Four, H.D.’s experience of losing a

child influenced a narrative style that traversed conditions of conception and delivery, production and reproduction, silence and testimony. Rather than openly acknowledge their contemporariness, H.D asserts that she internalized Woolf’s distinct otherness throughout her career: she refers to Woolf as someone “fitted in myself” and to whom she wrote “stalactite- shaped running verse that, on a page, looked broken, a stalactite with the ridges and furrows”

(“She Is Dead” 132). H.D. portrays her relationship with Woolf not as one of open exchanges but concealed or chaotic synergies, which reflects her characteristic use of noncommunicable or repressed stimuli to create a psychologically-burrowing style of modernist lyricism. H.D.’s most intense creative states often emerged after she deprioritized the economic rewards or public exposure of open communication to fashion instead a modernist poetics that redefined what it meant to narrativize memories of personal loss. I contrast this contemplative and often privatized shelter of individuality with Woolf’s more direct yet scrutinizing manner of engaging with the economic and communicative provisions of interwar culture. At the same time, however, I show how both writers voice a shared desire to resist the androcentric worldviews that Stopes’s fiction and contraceptives campaigns popularized as they were each writing. Woolf and H.D.’s work experiments with the literary form to renegotiate women’s relationship with authorized templates of expression and scrutinize the conservative role that these identities played in rebuilding, though not changing, the ideological makeup of post-War society.

Overall, resistance in the work of Woolf and H.D. belongs to those who remain skeptical towards changes in post-War society and use this distrust of reactionary progress to reconsider its accompanying ideologies like militarism, colonialism, and heteronormativity. Their work lacks what we find in Stopes’s sexology as a collection of categorical directives on how reforms to

Britain’s post-War institutions will enhance its citizens’ lives. Rather, Woolf and H.D. disclose

how these institutions often failed at nurturing human fulfilment upon an individual level or organizing ethical state policies. While Woolf and H.D.’s texts initially stimulate thought upon an individual level, then, they also encourage collective movements such as pacifism by impelling readers to question ineffective, state-endorsed customs and protocols, which, in the

1920s, included the consolatory yet ultimately palliative nature of group mourning. Although I acknowledge the trauma of World War One as the reason why Stopes published comforting visions of peacetime stability in her work, I problematize how she addresses this upheaval without pursuing systematic change beyond Britain’s colonial institutions or middle-class bedrooms. Woolf and H.D. do not prescribe a direct solution for wartime destruction like Stopes but nevertheless focalize the need for society to prevent further catastrophes by investigating the customary, yet modifiable, ideological values that coordinated a person’s sense of self and nationhood at this time. Where their texts refuse to reproduce a consolatory vision of post-War life, they demand that readers produce a new mindset for understanding the aggressive developments of modernity; where they denounce the exploitative ideologies like patriotic maternity that gave Stopes’s sexology its mass appeal, they allow readers to consider how rejecting reconstructive identities and values might change the future of society for the better.

Chapter 1

Writing the “Pure Self”: Ideology and Irony in Virginia Woolf’s “Phyllis and

Rosamond,” Night and Day, and “A Sketch of the Past”

When the endless servitude of women is broken, when she lives for and by herself, man –

heretofore abominable – having given her her release, she too will be a poet! Woman will

find some of the unknown! will her world of ideas differ from ours? – She will find

strange, unfathomable, repulsive, delicious things; we will take them, we will understand

them.

— Arthur Rimbaud, letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871

Women’s Life and Labour in “Phyllis and Rosamond”

In her memoir “A Sketch of the Past” (1976), finished shortly before her death in 1941,5

Woolf looks back at her second-published novel Night and Day (1919) and remarks upon this text as her attempt to explore the two “sorts of being” that she believed characterized human life

(70). In this chapter, I apply a feminist incentive onto Woolf’s remark and define a woman’s inner “being” as a source of non-produced labour power that masculine ideals of femininity in

Edwardian Britain did not direct towards the task of serving the country’s male-privileging economy. The characters in Woolf’s fiction often access unused intellectual faculties from within the depths of their subconscious minds that bring them to scrutinize the authenticity of their

5 Although Woolf completed the last entry of this memoir on the 17th of November 1939, it was not published until 1979 in Jeanne Schulkind’s edited collection, Moments of Being. 16

everyday behaviour. For Woolf, beneath the mundane duties of daily life were epiphanic

“moments of being” (“A Sketch” 70), or unfamiliar ideas that can breach the surface of prosaic sense-data when a person momentarily drops their customary habits of thought and activity.

When these startling moments emerge in Woolf’s fiction, they comprise a level of experience that underlies the extrinsic and largely depersonalized procedures of one’s professional errands within either the public or private sphere. As Jane Goldman argues, Woolf’s “moments” are politically disruptive because they disturb “oppressive social and familial relations” through their ability to “intervene in life, and change it” (5-6). Expanding upon Goldman’s claim, I situate these occurrences at the centre of Woolf’s vision of a renewed feminist and democratic futurity.

At their core, Woolf’s “moments” allow women to reconsider the ideological makeup of pre-War

Britain, including its public and private institutions such as the home, and evade the influence that these places frequently exert upon their creativity. Towards my conclusion, I use what

Woolf introduces in her short story “Phyllis and Rosamond” (1906) as Phyllis’s “pure self” to describe this underlying core of being, which I interpret as a potential mode of expression that a woman’s socioeconomic duties within Edwardian England have not yet developed into a legitimate style of productivity. As semi-autobiographies, Night and Day and its precursor

“Phyllis and Rosamond” establish the task of the female writer as devising the literary schema by which they can narrate this normally-latent core of self. Woolf equates her idea of a “pure self” with an unwritten surplus of meaning within male-penned literature and, through an ironic critique of masculine narratives, presents this surplus expressivity as a supply of nonideological insight that she believed women writers must access as a way of transforming the representational content of modern-day reality.

In the year prior to publishing Night and Day, Woolf interrogated a similar model of

artistic and economic critique in a short story called “Solid Objects” (1918). Critics agree that this story encapsulates the modernist agenda at large through John’s hobby of searching through

London’s “waste land” of “household refuse” for worthless yet aesthetically-pleasing items to display in his apartment (99).6 As someone who quits his job as a member of parliament to partake in this artistic enquiry, John represents a stand-in for the avant-garde artist, or a person who prefers the innate decorativeness of found things over the mass-produced goods of modern capitalism. His quest into London’s forgotten, anti-consumer underbelly unearths an object world with immunity from the homogenizing aftermath of mass-manufacturing: a journey that brings John’s behaviour to encapsulate what Andreas Huyssen calls modernism’s critique of “the invasion of capitalism’s technological instrumentality into the fabric of everyday life” (p. 11).

John’s fondness for valueless miscellany “of no use to anybody, shapeless, discarded” (“Solid”

98) lies in their lack of both commercial and use value. The objects that he finds have little-to-no practical role, nor do they possess worth for anyone except himself. When he discovers a “piece of china” that resembles a “starfish,” for instance, he marvels at how this object has been

“shaped, or broken accidentally” rather than the result of conscious design or an assembly-line

(98). John regards this object as wholly unique and remarks that there is not “another in existence” (99). As its most cherished quality, the starfish exhibits a glimmer of autonomy

6 Most notable is Douglas Mao’s Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (1998), where Mao uses Woolf’s short story to describe modernism’s interest in capturing a “serenity beyond ideology and interest” (11). By shunning his career in politics, Mao argues that John embodies the “intense aesthetic devotion…of the original Bloomsbury group” (27) and favours a style of artistic production that “supplants the instrumental” (29). Loraine Sim agrees with Mao’s evaluation of the story and identifies in John “qualities of both the child and artist” because of his preference for objects that are “not instrumental but aesthetic and affective” (Patterns 49-50). Sim argues that John reacts against “the dictates of capitalism and instrumentalism” that “[impede] objects from obtaining the status of particular things: radiant, auratic, unique” (Ordinary 67). Bill Brown similarly analyzes Woolf’s story by differentiating between the “thingness” of a produced object and its “objectness.” For Brown, John grasps the “thingness” of an object by divorcing it from “social or economic use” and embracing its “undignified mutability” and “capacity to be other than it is” (2). 18

against a plethora of reproducible commodities that have the same “purpose” and “character” for an undifferentiated throng of consumers (99). As John unearths each of these unique objects, he descends further into a usually-latent substrata of individual experience. In doing so, John reaches an extended state of intense nonideological “being” because the useless refuse of capitalist production that he unearths, or the items that other Londoners overlook as a meaningless excess of the consumer sphere, suddenly acquires new significance and radically transforms how John conceives of his surrounding environment.

Nevertheless, while “Solid Objects” is perhaps Woolf’s most well-known account of modernism’s anti-capitalist technique, I offer one of her first short stories, “Phyllis and

Rosamond,” as a precursor to the later text and how it portrays the suppressive aftereffects of ideological systems like those of industrialized Britain. Although “Phyllis and Rosamond” has received much critical attention as a semi-autobiography about Woolf’s inability as a young woman to engage in any kind of behaviour that her male elders did not condone,7 I argue that we can also read it alongside Woolf’s more technical writings like “Solid Objects” to uncover the defining feminist crux of her literary agenda. “Phyllis and Rosamond” provides an important account of what Woolf saw as the challenges but also transformational potential of women’s artistic productivity. In “Phyllis and Rosamond,” Woolf pre-empts “Solid Objects” with a feminist enquiry into how gender-normative mechanisms of economic productivity in Britain often restrain women in ways that are self-effacing and self-destructive. Although the titular sisters in this story are limited in their ability to escape the intellectual fetters of London’s upper-

7 While Nene Skrbic sees the characters of Phyllis and Rosamond as “fictional embodiments” of the Stephens sisters (96), Lauren Elkin argues that the story contrasts “the world Woolf and her siblings came from with the one they moved to” and notes that the two title characters are themselves “modelled on Vanessa and Virginia Stephen” (113). Anna Snaith similarly notes that Woolf based “Phyllis and Rosamond” “on her own experience” but also “a representative English, upper-middle-class woman’s life in 1906 through a conceptualized and an actual crossover between fact and fiction” (130). 19

class neighbourhoods of Kensington and Belgravia, Woolf shows how, like John, they must evade the polite-society workings of these places by nurturing an aspect of their personalities that their community’s mechanized norms of feminine labour usually render a forgotten surplus of domestic life. While seemingly detached from the pacifist and anti-totalitarian polemics of her later work, the revelatory “moment of being” that Phyllis experiences at the end of the story stands as a fundamental element of Woolf’s inceptive modernist-feminist method. When Phyllis suddenly drops her habitual patterns of behaviour in the liberated homes of London’s

Bloomsbury, she unearths a normally-unrealized fragment of her identity that is not yet interpellated into the story’s male-commanded ideological narrative. Akin to the mindset that

John develops when he revalues the homogenizing consumer sphere, Phyllis’s “pure self” punctures the dulling headspace of her drawing room world and potentializes an alternative, yet currently undetermined, set of social and artistic aspirations for inhibited young women like her to pursue.

Before I continue with my analysis of “Phyllis and Rosamond,” it is important to address why Woolf confines her idea of latent female potential to those involved in high society entertaining, thereby overlooking other women at this time who were partaking in the arduous labour of factories and similar places of industry. Even though Woolf engaged with working people throughout her life,8 her fiction neglects the inner “being” of these people in favour of a select minority of advantaged peers. Woolf compensates for this omission by accepting that many women in Edwardian Britain simply could not decline vital, salaried occupations in the

8 One can note her account of visiting the Wilton Carpet Factory in 1903 (see “The Wilton Carpet Factory,” A Passionate Apprentice: the Early Journals 1897-1909, edited by Mitchell A. Leaska, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1992), her tour of northern industrial towns with Leonard in 1913 (see Woolf’s letter to Duncan Grant, 16 March 1913), and her work in the Women’s Co-operative guild with Margaret Llewlyn Davies throughout her life. 20

public sphere in order to spend their days at home, musing upon “being” like her chosen heroines.9 Woolf recognizes the strenuousness of public-sphere employment in a personal capacity when she writes about her tour of the Wilton Carpet Factory in 1903, describing the weavers here as being occupied in “long hours over hard work, from which their attention can never stray, though the depths of their minds are unstirred” (Passionate 201). While Woolf betrays a reluctance to enter these working minds in her fiction, in doing so she refuses to infringe upon agencies towards whom she could never relate on a personal level. Nor does Woolf attempt to assume the reality of working-class lives within a highly unequal class system that she could only ever view from above. Instead, as will become apparent throughout this chapter,

Woolf maintains faith in a group of women who do not leave their intense mental energies

“unstirred” by succumbing to the demands of mundane and repetitive labour like that of the highly-engrossed carpet weavers. As Woolf’s colleague and brother-in-law Clive Bell argues, an artist’s capacity to be truly creative depends upon them having “security, leisure, economic freedom, and liberty to think, feel, and experiment” (178).10 Bell’s defense of Britain’s cultured elite exempts these artists from having to spend “long hours over hard work” like the Wilton carpet weavers and even justifies the domestic help that Woolf employed and relied on throughout her career. However, Bell also contends that his artistic leisure class perform a valuable social role in that they can use their “economic freedom” to delve beneath the prosaic

9 In “Character in Fiction” (1924), for example, the narrator describes women in “Doulton’s Factory” who “make twenty-five dozen earthenware pots every day” and “mothers in the Mile End Road who depend upon the farthings which those women earn” (45). 10 This idea of segregation as a guarantor of modernist creativity has naturally led critics to denounce the movement as being conceitedly detached from everyday affairs. Linda Hutcheon, for instance, argues that modernism betrays a “fear of contamination by the consumer culture burgeoning around it” and, for this reason, questions whether such an elevated artform can ever be truly political (28). Hutcheon characterizes modernism through an “elitist view of aesthetic formalism and the autonomy of art,” which she contrasts with postmodernism’s willingness to renegotiate “the different possible relations (of complicity and critique) between high and popular forms of culture” (27). 21

surfaces of everyday life and unearth revolutionary ways for their public to perceive of the industrialized world.11 In this way, both he and Woolf uphold the need for discriminating artistic labour and suggest that one’s capacity to access a substrata of normally-unrealized sensation hinged upon their ability to shun the distractions of menial work. My claim here is not to say that modernists sought a complete removal from the world beyond their exclusive salons nor even a release from rigorous employment.12 Nevertheless, it does maintain that they embraced the equally as onerous task of practicing aesthetic formalism while using their new creations to forge a transformed, and what I define as a politically-motivated, relationship between private and consumer spheres.

Rather than pull my analysis towards biography, though, I situate Woolf’s aesthetic within its historical moment and characterize what could be perceived as the elitism of her worldview as an indicator of the wider modernist project that was occurring at this time. While

“Phyllis and Rosamond” certainly does resonate with events in Woolf’s own life as a young woman, I also want to prioritize its importance as an inquiry into Britain’s repressive economic systems by noting the remarkably similar terminology that Woolf uses to describe her eponymous heroines’ domestic habitat with that of John’s London in “Solid Objects.” The similarities between both stories become most prominent when Phyllis talks to “a distinguished judge” at a drawing-room party, who, after telling her various “facts” about “impersonal subjects” around her, brings Phyllis to realize “that the world was full of solid things, which were independent of her life” (23). Woolf repeats the adjective “solid” six times throughout “Phyllis

11 Bell calls this disparity “a means to good” because it allows modernist thinkers to show the masses a deeper level of “emotional significance…just behind the drab world of practical utility” (179). 12 While writing To the Lighthouse, for instance, Woolf recalls collapsing with exhaustion at one of her nephew’s (Quentin Bell’s) birthday parties, feeling “used up & riding on a flat tire” (Diary, vol. 3, 38). Woolf compares this feeling to the “labour” of Mrs. Dalloway and how each word she wrote for this novel was “distilled by a relentless clutch on [her] brain” (Ibid 39). 22

and Rosamond” to describe what Louis Althusser calls “a plurality” (243) of ideological matter that structures the story’s heteronormative setting.13 The “solid things” that constitute the sisters’ privileged social environment include Phyllis’s “solid and gouty” suitor Mr. Middleton (20);

Phyllis’s “naked and solid” view of love and marriage in Bloomsbury (26); the “solid woman”

Miss Sylvia, who herself questions whether the Hibbert sisters are “solid all through” (27); and even “solid [grains]” of Phyllis’s own “self” (26). These “solid things” represent the social customs, identities, and principles that organize how the sisters interact with their world as unmarried women within Edwardian Britain. More broadly, they mark the intersecting concepts of gender, sexuality, and the self that regulate the thoughts and actions of interpellated women within patriarchal orders like that of upper-class London in the early twentieth-century. Since

Phyllis does not become aware of these objects until she speaks to the authoritative judge,

“Phyllis and Rosamond” suggests that people tend to take these “solid things” for granted because they represent the socially-inculcated features of one’s acclimatized headspace and the manner in which they go about their daily lives. As intellectually stifled young women, the sisters share John’s assignment of making “solid” a level of experience that is exempt from

Britain’s bifurcated economic spheres system and its devalued vocational prospects. They must find the same overlooked excess of capitalist ideology that John does, use this purified domain of

“being” to uncover a latent supply of expressivity, and then utilize this unrealized source of self to produce a more liberating set of socioeconomic aspirations.

As bourgeoisie women, Phyllis and Rosamond materially benefit from Britain’s stratified

13 Althusser argues that ideology has a material, lived dimension. For Althusser, Ideological and Repressive State Apparatuses are responsible for applying and policing the “plurality” of ideology at the level of individual experience. While Repressive State Apparatus primarily use power to disseminate their authority, the latter uses ideology to control the masses through institutions like the Church, schools and culture: “literature, the Arts, sports, etc.” (Althusser 243). 23

class system but at the cost of an unquestioning loyalty to its male-privileging setup. The judge at Phyllis’s party represents a member of Karl Marx and Frederick Engle’s “ruling intellectual force” (Marx and Engels 59), or one of the men who produce and apply ideological definitions onto what Phyllis sees as an object world of “impersonal” alterity (“Phyllis and Rosamond” 23).

Since the judge only explains this world to Phyllis instead of allowing her to describe it for herself, the “solid” matter of British life is wholly “impersonal” for her because it precedes how she comes to encounter it on an individual level. Phyllis’s worldview derives not from her own experiences but second-hand judgements that a select group of men authoritatively pre-write.

Analogous to Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s account of the dictatorial thinker “who confers meaning” onto “the meaningless object” so to influence how people comprehend the object world around them (7), Britain’s male rulers in “Phyllis and Rosamond” predetermine the

“solid things” that organize the country’s way of life, its binarized norms of gendered labour, and what the sisters can understand about their surroundings. The sisters are incapable of forming their own judgements about the nation and beyond due to their knowledge of it being regurgitated from a pre-established male hypothesis. As a means of exposing this dependency,

“Phyllis and Rosamond” presents the sisters’ framing narrative as little more than a male- determined consciousness that constitutes the knowable content of their daily lives and prevents either woman from intellectually transcending the limits of their indoctrinated worldview.

At the start of “Phyllis and Rosamond,” Woolf ironically mimics a male narrative voice to reveal the sisters’ entrapment within this masculine value system and its pre-written course of heterosexual bondage. Providing an early example of one of the overbearing “gentlemen who specialize in women” from Woolf’s famous feminist polemic A Room of One’s Own (1928) (39), the narrator carefully “divides” each of the five Hibbert sisters “into camps,” with the two eldest

inheriting a more “stalwart pugnacious frame of mind, which applies itself to political economy and social problems” (18). However, despite the natural ability of the elder sisters, the narrator pre-empts what A Room of One’s Own calls men’s need to maintain their “superiority” over women (44) by rendering each sister subordinate to their sexual partners and all-but invisible without the legal or romantic attachments to these same men. Regardless of the “stalwart” sisters’ capacity to partake of activities in Britain’s administrative forums, the narrator informs his readers that they inevitably succumb to the draw of the home when they “marry professors” and relinquish their talents to the story’s central trope of economically-driven hetero-eroticism

(18). Although Phyllis and Rosamond’s elder sisters are capable of working “not unhappily” within the public sphere (19), the narrator subsumes their lives into those of their husbands when, after he announces their impending marriages, the “stalwart” sisters completely disappear from the rest of the story. The narrator confines his perspective on women to the value judgements of kinship and the final goal of wedlock, which mediates the sisters’ visibility through the sole transaction of securing male sexual attention. Evoking Sara Ahmed’s description of a heteronormative “mode of directionality” (Queer 43), matchmaking in this story narrows the scope of Phyllis and her sisters’ lives to a system of marital alliance that trumps all other modes of expression. The narrator latches each sisters’ behavior onto the self-effacing tasks that his culture deems important feminine accomplishments and an identity that is wholly inseparable from the governing privilege of the sisters’ potential husbands.

Throughout “Phyllis and Rosamond,” the story’s economy of marital alliance exerts a comprehensive effect upon the sisters’ inner and outer sense of self. Similar to Georg Lukács’s description of a factory worker’s “rational” operations that reduce his mind “to the mechanical repetition of a specialised set of actions” (Lukács, History 88), Phyllis and Rosamond do not

regard genuine affection as a deciding factor behind their goal of matrimony but rather a pragmatic and repetitive series of “abstruse calculations” (Woolf, “Phyllis” 21). By describing the sisters’ craft of securing partnerships as “a very delicate and complicated piece of work”

(19), the narrator reduces Phyllis and Rosamond to talented, yet highly submissive, domestic labourers who are unable to appreciate anything beyond the task of fulfilling their matrimonial assignments. The sisters’ daily “work” is a wholly schematic and automated process that consists of “depositing two or three cards” at each residence they visit, talking “about the weather for precisely fifteen minutes,” and then traveling “at a foot’s pace” by carriage “at that hour round the statue of Achilles” (23). As Lukács recounts of the factory worker, time for the sisters loses its “qualitative, variable, flowing nature” and “freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable ‘things’” (Lukács, History 90). After spending their day partaking in carefully “delimited” appointments, the sisters return home at “six o’clock’ and then immediately embark on other engagements by eight (Woolf, “Phyllis” 23). For Lukács, this industrialized repetition of behavior fragments a worker’s psyche: it causes “his psychological attributes” to become “separated from his personality” as “statistically viable concepts,” which he then integrates into the “specialised rational systems” that he works for (Lukács, History 88).

Likewise, Phyllis and her sister occupy a suppressively “rational system” that splinters their daily experience into a quantifiable list of errands with the sole aim of bolstering their community’s heteronormative mores and mechanics. As a way of preserving the logistics of its unequal and bifurcated economy, Edwardian London narrows the sisters’ individuality to the semi-automatic function of achieving romantic attachments within the devalued private sphere. Like the industrial labourer, Phyllis and Rosamond inadvertently support the story’s prevailing, highly unequal, and severely anesthetizing economic setup because it grants them little opportunity to

envisage a mode of being independent of their “specialised” daily activities.

Ultimately, Phyllis and Rosamond represent the female workforce in a private sphere system that truncates their lives to a rigorous itinerary of mundane chores. Within their domestic workplace, the sisters do not experience natural growth, understanding, or fulfilment but rather

“a life trained to grow in an ugly pattern to match the staid ugliness of its fellows” (“Phyllis and

Rosamond” 24). By merging the sisters’ minds into a restrained group consciousness, pre-War

Britain construes purely technical standards of gender performativity a cognitive truth of the sisters’ embodied selves. I define this control as economic in nature because it renders the

Hibbert sisters unable to register any kind of sensation beyond the undertakings of the drawing- room and its removal from more lucrative, public sphere ventures. While I acknowledge that

Woolf’s comparison between the women of London’s leafy suburbs with Lukács’s less-fortunate proletarian might seem discordant, it reveals how the country’s hierarchies of economic output bind both groups of people to wholly reproductive roles, where those with little ability to change

Britain’s norms of economic output are also powerless to challenge the class-based ideological mechanisms that they inherit upon birth. Women like Phyllis and Rosamond can only maintain these structures by operating, through controlled feminine labour, the very “specialised rational systems” (Lukács, History 88) that subjugate them. Since wellborn men are the prevailing intellectual force of Phyllis and Rosamond’s England, the story shows how the mechanized nature of the sisters’ workplace brings them to uphold the private-sector basis of a larger, male- privileging culture and economy. Even though they have access to Britain’s administrators as the daughters and future wives of these figures, Phyllis and Rosamond’s complete interpellation into the duties of domestic support prevents either sister from envisaging an alternative way of life or set of class-gender assignments that would discharge the full range of their abilities.

For this reason, although I uphold that it is not Woolf’s intent to encourage a working- class consciousness in her fiction, I exemplify in “Phyllis and Rosamond” how she welcomes a female-empowered subculture that counters the suppressive weight of capitalist-patriarchal influence from a different yet no less noteworthy site of resistance. If John of “Solid Objects” represents the modernist artist as someone who accesses as their central mission a realm of purified experience, then “Phyllis and Rosamond” demonstrates, at an earlier date, the similar importance that women realize their unique creative proficiencies by evading the dehumanizing customs of the private sphere. Borrowing from Steve Garlick, the section that follows highlights the “(mostly submerged) place of gender” (p. 61) in Horkheimer and Adorno’s account of an

“affective biopolitics, in which the multiple potentialities of human sensibility become regulated according to the requirements of capitalist exchange relations” (Garlick 64).14 “Phyllis and

Rosamond” exposes the restraining manner in which patriarchal customs undervalue women’s productivity and then offers these (de)valuations as an ideological hindrance for female artists to overcome. Beyond the sisters’ highly regulated lives within Kensington is an unrealized surplus of productive capacity and one that Woolf excavates within her culture’s dominant patriarchal ideology itself by flagging the lack of an adequate socioeconomic mechanism to foster Phyllis and Rosamond’s dormant potential. In Chapter Two, I argue that Woolf identifies this potential as emerging feminist-pacifist thought that combats the exclusionary patriotism of post-World-

War One mourning rituals. In the following discussion, I trace its early guise in Woolf’s

14 Garlick uses theories of affect to examine how society’s control of embodied potential exerts “damage” upon human bodies. These “Damaged bodies,” he argues, “are simplified bodies… [that are] no longer able to register the complexity of the world in which they participate”: a simplification that primes them for “biopolitical strategies of control” (94). Garlick sees masculinity as “a technology of embodiment that limits the potential of men’s bodies to affect and to be affected,” which allows them to exert “control or domination over nature and one’s world” (96). Although Garlick emphasizes “The work of art” as a means of “re-enlivening bodies” and disclosing “possibilities for a different world” (96), his book does not address the feminist implications of this act and, as a work of social theory, lacks examples of artists who embarked upon this artistic endeavour. 28

awareness of how modernist productivity authorizes women to capture latent powers of creative agency that they can transform into alternative styles of literary recording and then use them to insurgently rewrite the male-dominated values of modernity.

The Family in Night and Day and “A Sketch of the Past”

While in “Phyllis and Rosamond” Woolf centralizes her feminist critique within the repressive Edwardian houses that hindered women’s lives, in Night and Day she begins to excavate transformational space within Britain’s restraining capitalist-patriarchal economy. As

Ralph Denham, one of the novel’s characters, remarks, while modern capitalism “rigidly” divides life “into the hours of work and those of dreams,” people tend only to use the “lower gifts” of “work” because Britain’s monetary economy brings them “to agree there is little virtue, as well as little profit, in what once seemed to us the noble part of our inheritance” (129-30). For

Ralph, there is little use for “fierce and potent” (129) depths of thought in pre-War Britain because the country foments only those aspects of the mind that generate financial “profit” under its norms of productivity. Adding a feminist analysis to Ralph’s remark, this section uses terminology from “A Sketch of the Past” to examine Katharine Hilbery’s experiences of these

“demands” as the psychological “cotton wool” (“A Sketch” 71) of her life under the gender normative socioeconomic force that is her family. In “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf defines this

“cotton wool” as the actions and thoughts that a person does not “[live] consciously” on a day-to- day basis: “One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner; writing orders to Mable; washing; cooking dinner; book-binding” (70).

As a woman whose family duties tend to dominate her lived experience, Katharine’s main quest

in Night and Day is to access unrealized mental scope by freeing a normally-inhibited part of her mind from the unthinking pursuit of her household tasks. As one of the aims of capitalist exploitation is to accumulate an excess of money from which industry owners exclude their workers, Night and Day draws a comparison with the domestic sphere of Britain during the early

1900s. More than just withholding capital, though, the country’s patriarchal culture also bars women from accessing the unused mental faculties that their work within the home generates as an unrelated and non-essential skillset. Through the character of Katharine Hilbery, Night and

Day asks its readers to consider aspects of women’s minds and identities that Britain’s structural, capitalist-patriarchal systems of productivity usually neglect. As its fundamental aim, the novel directs readers to account for as-yet unrealized thoughts or sensations in women that are capable of profoundly altering modern experience and allowing a new, post-patriarchal set of ideological protocols to emerge.

I turn to Night and Day in this section because, unlike the Hibbert sisters, Woolf grants

Katharine Hilbery an opportunity to delve beneath the prosaic surfaces of her life within the late-

Victorian home. In doing so, Woolf exposes the inability of this place to fully circumscribe

Katharine’s mind and identity. While Elizabeth Outka views the novel’s “mingling of the

Victorian and the modern” as a “defining quality of its particular cultural moment” (p. 56),15 I see it as Woolf’s intent to disclose through Katharine’s inner dialog what she perceived as a

“modern” sense of womanhood that pre-War Britain submerged beneath its quasi-“Victorian” narratives of family life. However, it will also become apparent in this chapter that Woolf upheld

15 Outka argues that the novel emerged at a time when “the culture more broadly struggled to transition from the mores and traditions of the Victorian age to the new styles and challenges brought by modernity” (56). She characterizes the novel as a “transition to the modern” and positions it within “a middle ground defined by melding rather than by progression” (56). 30

the need for external, mostly depersonalized places or customs to give what she saw as a person’s “pure” identity the chance for tangible shape. In “A Sketch of the Past,” an account of

Woolf’s youth in pre-War Britain, Woolf locates this opportunity within the progressive communities of London’s Bloomsbury. Along with Night and Day, Woolf asserts in “A Sketch of the Past” that women can achieve creative insights by renegotiating how their sense of self interacts with Britain’s pre-existing gender norms, places, and economic responsibilities.

Ultimately, both texts prioritize the individual’s quest as a potential artist in excavating productive capacity and then using modernist recording techniques to outline how this arising creativity can inspire cultural, personal, or feminist change.

The genealogical backdrop of Night and Day binds Katharine’s opportunities for self- expression to the Hilbery family unit along with the prominent, male-centred institutions and principles that her relatives control. Similar to Woolf’s own understanding of being “descended from a great many people, some famous, others obscure … very communicative, literate, letter- writing” (“A Sketch” 65), Katharine’s ancestors consist of “conspicuous judges and admirals, lawyers and servants of the State” as well as “the rarest flower” of this tribe: one very “great writer, a poet eminent among the poets of England, a Richard Alardyce” (32). The lives of these men are central to the economic, legal and cultural infrastructures of Britain’s national course and identity. At their most powerful, they are the “light-houses firmly based on rock for the guidance of their generation” or, even when not as illustrious, “steady, serviceable candles” with the remarkable ability to “[illuminate] the ordinary chambers of daily life” for people in pre-War society (32). Like the “distinguished judge” in “Phyllis and Rosamond,” these men are the idea- makers who define British life on account of their position atop the country’s watchtowers of political and cultural leadership. With a privileged access to the cornerstones of the British

establishment, the Alardyce-Hilbery family define the shape and contour of normal existence for

British people through an act of selectively obscuring modes of perception that might

“illuminate” an alternative historical route for the country to take. Akin to Michel Foucault’s definition of the family as a “mechanism of constraint” that sustains paternal authority (106),16 the Alardyce-Hilbery title has both biological and ideological prowess. As the narrator recounts, the family secured their position among the ruling class of England because they “married and intermarried” while conspicuously “breeding distinguished men” (32). To borrow from Ahmed, the “reproduction” of the Alardyce-Hilbery “family line” propagates not only offspring but also pre-existing “values, capital, aspirations, projects, and styles” (Queer 74, 86).17 The family disseminates its hereditary resources across the country as a way of shaping British life while also tying Katharine’s expressivity to the task of defending these same assets through the

Hilbery’s strict rules of feminine conduct. Woolf’s aim with Katharine is thus to highlight empowering depths of “being” within patriarchal systems like the family through the power of

Katharine’s mind to escape the hold that the Hilbery lineage exerts over her ancestral past, professional present, and sociosexual future.

Throughout the novel, Katharine lives according to what she calls “tradition,” or a

16 Within the system of alliance, Foucault includes the institution of marriage, which, he argues, consists of the “fixation and development of kinship ties” and the “transmission of names and possessions” (106). For Foucault, one of the “chief objectives” of alliance is not only to organize economic inheritance but also to control human relationships (106). He argues that the family plays an important role in augmenting patriarchal authority because it “conveys the law and the juridical dimension in the deployment of sexuality” while also transmitting “the economy of pleasure and the intensity of sensations in the regime of alliance” (108). 17 As a critical race theorist, Ahmed is interested in how heteronormative norms of reproduction and the family structure mark the grounds “for the reproduction of normative whiteness” (Queer 127). She argues that the prohibition against both homosexuality and miscegenation allows Western societies to sustain whiteness as “a demand to return to a line, where the return takes the form of a defence” (Queer 128). Ahmed sees whiteness as a “possession” that necessitates “this demand to return, which takes the form of a defense against an imagined loss of a future line” (Queer 128). See also Spivak’s definition of the family structure as a “reproductive heteronormativity that supports nationalism,” with nationalistic ideology as a “temporizing narrative” or “already-thereness” into which a subject enters through reproductive acts (42). 32

behavioural code that her older relatives have established to help women like herself “reduce any moral difficulty to its traditional shape and solve it by the traditional answers” (327). Katharine refers to this family convention as a “book of wisdom” that she consults when facing conundrums like whether to choose Ralph Denham or William Rodney as a romantic partner

(327). As a textual inventory of predetermined behaviour that lies “upon her mother’s knee” and

“the knees of many uncles and aunts” (327), Katharine’s conduct as a member of the Hilbery family derives from an inherited fiction that augments its command over group members by carefully specifying how they should act in given situations. As the narrator notes, scored within the Hilbery “book of wisdom” are “The rules which should govern the behaviour of an unmarried woman … written in red ink, graved upon marble” but also “scored upon her heart”

(328). Like Judith Butler’s discussion of “the internalization of an interior moral directive which gains its structure and energy from an externally enforced taboo” (Gender Trouble 64), the

Hilbery “rules” represent a set of purely discursive gender norms that attempt to control the inner and outer precedents of Katharine’s identity. Akin to the narrator of “Phyllis and Rosamond,” who produces a restrictive “outline” of the two sisters when implanting them within the story’s male-commanded narrative (17), customary expectations of the sexes in Night and Day fix

Katharine within Britain’s heteronormative way of life by dictating that she internalizes what

Edwardian culture deems acceptable feminine conduct. In this way, the Hilbery “rules” ensure that Katharine remains accommodated within her family’s privileged social class but at the expense of having a limited range of expression beyond the prewritten activities of this elite territory. By presenting the values that govern Katharine’s life as a textual mandate, Woolf displays a directory of ideological attitudes that engender women’s submissiveness to family beliefs via the crossover between an external “tradition” and what Katharine sees as her essential

personality. Katharine’s main quest throughout Night and Day is thus to undo this “book of wisdom” and widen her embodied potential in the process: an objective that transfers to the novel’s readers as the task of imagining an alternative “tradition” to guide women who, like

Katharine, find themselves torn between their society’s gender normative directives and an underlying opportunity for self-governance.

In Night and Day, Woolf therefore asserts that gendered behaviour is not an embodied phenomenon but an outwards response to the environmental demands of one’s daily life and labour.18 Like the Hibbert sisters, Katharine’s responsibilities within the Hilbery residence on

London’s Cheyne Walk make up her surface character by stipulating she perform a specialized set of household chores: “Ordering meals, directing servants, paying bills, and so contriving that each clock ticked more or less accurately in time, and a number of vases were always full of fresh flowers” (40). Though Katharine’s duties involve meticulously arranging bills and clocks, she must also scatter perishable flowers among these symbols of capitalist exchange. The flowers trivialize the work that Katharine does at Cheyne Walk while softening the standardizing self- censure that epitomizes this place. At the end of a normal day, Katharine’s most visible accomplishments are transitory ornaments of feminized consumerism and homemaking: an image that conveys how external errands, objects, or protocols determine female livelihood by

18 While Judith Butler sees gender as a “stylized repetition of acts” (Butler’s italics, Gender Trouble 140), other Marxist critics have defined it in terms of economic exploitation. Frederick Engels, for instance, calls domesticity a “private service” that excludes women “from all participation in social production” (Engel’s italics, 137). While Engels recognizes that “large-scale industry” provides women with a “road to social production,” he also acknowledges that capitalist ideology subjects them to a double-bind: “if she carries out her duties in the private service of her family, she remains excluded from public production; and if she wants to take part in public production and earn independently, she cannot carry out family duties” (137). More recently, Roswitha Scholz presents gender “in relation to the mechanisms and structures of value dissociation” (135). The impediments of “domestic life and children,” Scholz argues, cause women to “struggle harder” in “the professional hierarchy” and obtain “significantly lower” salaries than their male counterparts” (126). Similarly, Gonzalez and Neton contend that, in a “sex-blind market,” women “are defined as ‘those who have children’” and therefore a “commodity labour power with a cheaper price” (16-17). 34

accounting for the relative value of work that differently-sexed bodies perform in distinct locations. Even though the narrator describes Katharine’s housework as “a very great profession,” the speaker also sequesters her job behind a façade of homeliness by acknowledging that her career has “no title and very little recognition” within the outer, public domain (41). The fact that Britain leaves Katharine’s “profession” untitled represents how pre-War society erases female influence from the governing sphere, which awards men the opportunity to oversee all naming there such as its monetary appraisals and administrative methods. As a nonprofitable form of employment, Katharine’s depreciated and nameless occupation contributes towards

Britain’s larger, capitalist superstructure by bringing enterprises like commerce and industry to retain dominance and a higher comparative worth. The narrator recounts that Katharine “lived at home” and “did it very well too” (41). In what the narrator of A Room of One’s Own calls a constraining “system of life” (113),19 Katharine’s home is a place that collapses all distinctions between the quality of the “work” that she does within its four walls and the quality of her overall life itself. While Suzanna Zink defines the home in Night and Day as “a space which embodies and perpetuates certain ideas of value and gender ideologies” (81), it is worth highlighting the oppressive duality of Britain’s private-sphere (de)valuation. Katharine’s work has an inferior status only in relation to the public sphere that excludes women yet also depends upon their absence to dialectically enhance the projects of men. Her household management is not only a restrictive duty but also a price tag, one that elevates the industries of men by

19 The narrator of A Room of One’s Own argues that domestic places do not merely shelter those within them but also fixedly determine women’s intellectual scope. While the patriarchal traditions of British society like higher education provide men with “safety and prosperity,” women’s ability to access this same world of public activity suffers from both their “poverty and insecurity” as well as their “lack of tradition” outside of the home (31). While “ancient fists” pour “gold out of a leathern purse” into male-exclusive domains like the universities of Oxford and Cambridge (11), the narrator’s female ancestors were unable to provide “anything comparable” due to the impossibility of them “[scraping] together thirty-thousand pounds” while simultaneously caring for “thirteen children” (30). 35

devaluing the assignments that Britain’s economic authorities deem women like Katharine capable of performing.20

Woolf was personally aware of how men’s attitudes towards the private-sphere affected women’s creative potential. In The Feminine Note in Fiction (1904), British literary critic

William Courtney describes how writers like Jane Austen construct “small canvases” in their work and “limit themselves” to characters that they “reproduce through experience” rather than

“active exercises of imagination” (xxxii-xxxiii). Reviewing Courtney’s book in The Guardian,

Woolf remarked that it posed “many questions” relating to the current state of women’s artistry but ultimately did little to address them (Woolf, “Feminine Note” 128). Her dissatisfaction acknowledges Courtney’s manner of depreciating women’s writing simply by reiterating entrenched stereotypes about their domestic lives, which explains why Courtney discourages artistic proficiency in the same writers that he denigrates. Yet it is also important to situate

Woolf’s response to Courtney as part of her wider intent to devise a mode of literary production that exceeds the gendered distinctions of human labour and to recognize the modernist dimensions of this act. “It is … possible,” her review continues, “that the widening of [women’s] intelligence by means of education and study may give her that sterner view of literature which will make an artist of her, so that, having blurted out her message somewhat formlessly, she will in due time fashion it into permanent artistic shape” (“Feminine Note” 128). On one level, the task of “widening” female intelligence beyond the margins of the home speaks to a long history of women’s endeavours to gain educational rights at the same level as men. Under modernism,

20 Maya Gonzalez and Jeanne Neton similarly argue that patriarchal-capitalist mechanisms do not directly reap the value of work that women perform within the domestic sphere and thus define unpaid, unrecognized, or “dead” activity of the home as a source of surplus labour (4). Since “at no time does labour-power roll off an assembly line,” Gonzalez and Neton note, the production of workers depends upon women’s unvalued labour within the home as mothers and caregivers. 36

however, it also becomes a way for artists to tailor new literary forms by scrutinizing the economic systems that hinder a person’s creativity, an issue that I would compare to John’s departure from the masculine world of politics and into the unfamiliar heights of aesthetic reverie. Woolf’s proposal that women should study literary techniques as a method of converting their “formless” ideas into “shape” also evokes John’s preference for density over imprecision and the obtuse, which the narrator notes in a “lump of glass” that beguiles him because it is “so definite an object compared to the vague sea and the hazy shore” (“Solid” 97). Echoing

Katharine’s love for “the exactitude, the star-like impersonality” of mathematics (Night and Day

42), Woolf asserts in her response to Courtney the right of women to pursue abstract, non- essentializing vocabularies of expression that subvert the familiar trappings of domestic experience. Indeed, the concept of mathematical “impersonality” evokes the artistry of Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell, whose post-impressionist paintings favoured geometric structure over what her husband, Clive Bell, derided as the “descriptive” or “romantic” techniques of preceding traditions (Bell, “English” 193). In what we might call a rejoinder against Courtney’s remarks,

Night and Day strives to make “definite” facets of Katharine’s life that exist beyond the “small canvases” of her experience at Cheyne Walk. Like John’s act of revaluing the overlooked waste of London’s homogenizing commodity scene, the novel encapsulates Woolf’s aim of broadening how her readers understand the nature of conscious being along with the material spaces that comprise modern existence.

In Night and Day, Woolf flags these excesses of consciousness in Katharine’s mind to stall how the repressive, private-sphere mechanisms at her home in Cheyne Walk usually function. When Katharine fantasizes about obtaining a “magic watch” that allows her to stop time, she considers “moments spent in an entirely different occupation from her ostensible one,”

which includes “the taming of wild ponies upon the American prairies, or the conduct of a vast ship in a hurricane round a black promontory of rock” (41-2). By reclaiming control over her own sense of time, Katharine’s “magic watch” frees her from Lukács’s “exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum” of household management and empowers her to ponder “complete emancipation from her present surroundings” (Woolf, Night and Day 42). At this moment of intense reflection, Katharine transgresses the boundaries of her daily life and is able to envisage a completely different social role from the one that her family rulebook stringently allocates to her.

Katharine adopts the earlier-noted guise of Horkheimer and Adorno’s enlightenment thinker, or he who authoritatively brings the “meaningless” object world under the control of the human mind (Horkheimer and Adorno 7), and withdraws from the male-established outlook that supervises Britain’s hierarchical networks of gendered behaviour. In doing so, she pictures an alternative realm of “being” where she discovers and names for herself a new periphery of “solid things” that frame her knowledge and expression. Through Katharine’s imaginative escape, she indicates the capacity for women to develop unique ideas about life in the moments when patriarchal customs momentarily fail at directing women’s minds along specific, gender- normative channels. While Katharine seemingly has little interest in following her ancestors and forging this emerging perspective into a new literary tradition, her idea of finding a new

“occupation” resonates with Woolf’s intent of widening women’s intelligence beyond even the most rigorous of ideological spaces. Among the mundane “cotton wool” of these routine locations, Woolf locates untapped imaginative potential that emerging thinkers can transform into “permanent artistic shape” once they devise a mode of social, cultural, or economic production to sustain it. Beyond the opaque landscape of Katharine’s daily errands at Cheyne

Walk are latent depths of individualistic experience, or glimmers of ingenuity that epitomize the

transformational ambitions of modernism and the creative allowances that it grants artists who are willing to rethink the durability of the world around them.

In detailing the need for women to evade the “small canvases” of their material lives,

Night and Day provides a partly autobiographical account of the society in which Woolf and

Vanessa Bell spent their early years.21 In her memoir “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf remembers her young-adult residence at Hyde Park Gate, London as “a section of upper middle-class

Victorian life, like one of those sections with glass covers in which ants and bees are shown going about their tasks” (147). As in Night and Day, where Katharine’s home also represents a constraining workplace, Woolf outlines a restrictive domain of productive labour by amalgamating a man-made and organic environment. For Woolf, while the family members who inhabit this “section” are natural specimens—like “ants” or “bees” with an apparently instinctive work drive—their behaviour is the outcome of a wholly artificial situation. Rather than a seamless part of nature, Woolf imagines Hyde Park Gate as domed with glass and presumably standing within a larger building such as a museum. The supposed transparency of this place thus betrays its purely ideological character: while Woolf’s terrarium might appear as a natural terrain of human activity, it actually serves the purpose of allowing Victorian society to command and scrutinize the behaviour of those who live within it.

When Woolf describes the relatives who lived at Hyde Park Gate, then, she paradoxically asserts that they were both native to this place as well as a manufactured product of its affected protocols. She describes her step-brother George Duckworth, for instance, as “a fascinating fossil” or “mould” of the Victorian age (151) but also one of a group of men “shot” through this

21 An evaluation of the story that Julia Briggs and Suzanne Raitt share. See Briggs, “Into the Night: Night and Day (1919) in Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (2005) and Raitt’s introduction to the Oxford University Press 1992 edition of the novel. 39

“machine” and hardly a “natural human [being]” at all (153). Woolf’s description of Hyde Park

Gate as a kind of human assembly-line completes her image of Victorian society as a mechanism so fine-tuned that it disguises itself as a self-governing ecosystem. Adopting an idea akin to

Douglas Mao’s “synecdoche of endangered nature,” where the non-human world falls “victim” to “the sway of science and expansionist capitalism” (8), Woolf recounts a culture that blurred the distinctions between human discourse and natural otherness as a way of legitimizing its wholly ideological beliefs and formalities. As Woolf recalls in her memoir, Hyde Park Gate was both a “ruthless machine” as well as an animalistic predator that held her “against its fangs” and tried to suppress her artistic desires (157). When looking back upon her early Times Literary

Supplement reviews, for example, Woolf notices the lingering stereotypes of Victorian femininity such as a stunting “politeness” that resembles in tone the act of “handing plates of buns to shy young men and asking them: do they take cream and sugar?” (150). As both machine and animal, the residence of Woolf’s youth was somewhere that purposefully feigned an innate or natural disposition in order to rationalize male service as an essentializing basis of female expression. Similar in essence to Katharine’s devalued household errands, Hyde Park Gate was a material blockage to Woolf’s creative freedom and a glass-ceiling of acceptable conduct that she and Vanessa had to shatter when developing their unique artistic styles and reputations.

While a number of factors in Woolf’s biography expediated her artistic freedom, including the death of her father, Leslie Stephen, in 1904 and the financial independence that came with a £2,500 inheritance from her aunt Caroline Amelia Stephen, “A Sketch of the Past” portrays Woolf’s ability to evade her family’s household customs as a guiding factor in how she developed her innovative style. Although Woolf describes Hyde Park Gate as a “ruthless” machine that held her and Vanessa “tight in its framework … with innumerable sharp teeth”

(152), Woolf also asserts that, unlike their other relatives, the two young sisters were not native to this apparatus but “rebellious bodies” who were “inserted” into it and then kept there by the demands of family life (152). Woolf presents the place of her youth as one of many gaps and fissures, where a certain “rebellious” body might find artistic space by locating moments of caesura among its supervised rules of conduct. Woolf confirms this idea when she recalls how

Hyde Park Gate “did not exert any special pressure” on herself and Vanessa until “about half past four,” meaning that “From ten to one” they “lived in the world in which we still inhabit”

(148), by which Woolf means late-1930s England. The Victorian protocol of Woolf’s youth was one of “many different parts,” with Woolf remarking that she and Vanessa “were not called upon to take part in some of those acts” but “were only asked to admire and applaud when our male relations went through the different figures of the intellectual game” (153). By equating strategies of hourly labour with those of gender performativity, Woolf’s memoir implies that

Hyde Part Gate did not exert a totalizing hold over her and Vanessa’s lives despite the

Duckworth’s attempts to control their behaviour. Woolf here recognizes a breach in the logistics of exploitation because, like the industrial employee, the social machinery at Hyde Park Gate only required some of her “specialised actions” (Lukács, History 88) to ensure the output of its specific, male-privileging product. “A Sketch of the Past” thus reveals how late-Victorian society’s rigid manner of organizing female existence left an unused remnant of the sisters’ identities that was not yet “reduced to an isolated particle and fed into an alien system” (Lukács,

History 90). Woolf exemplifies in her memoir how she began to revolt against this “alien system” by nurturing excess mental faculties that the Duckworks inadvertently discounted when rigidly determining her and Vanessa’s daily schedule. The society of Woolf’s youth granted her material comforts but at the cost of artistic stifling: a culture that she interrogated by shunning

the performative duties of male pandering and gaining a newfound sense of creativity in the process.

Woolf flags this leftover source of creativity in “A Sketch of the Past” to show how, as young women, she and Vanessa recognized a breach within Victorian Britain’s “intellectual game” that allowed them to question its allocated role of subservient hostess. The pre-War societies in “Phyllis and Rosamond,” Night and Day, and “A Sketch of the Past” all impel women to use only those “parts” of their minds that shape their productive capacities in contrast to those of men. In Night and Day, Woolf uses mathematical terminology to expose how these devaluing attitudes affect Katharine’s mind when the narrator describes the young woman’s thoughts within the home as fractions of a whole. While “pouring out tea”—an act “in common with many other young ladies of her class”—Katharine uses only “a fifth part of her mind,” which the narrator remarks are those “parts” that make her a “mistress” of this overtly feminized

“situation” (3). The domestic splintering of Katharine’s mind then becomes what Lukács calls “a permanent ineluctable reality” of her “daily life” (History 90), with the narrator noting that this tea ceremony is occurring “for the six hundredth time, perhaps, without bringing into play any of her unoccupied faculties” (Night and Day 3). In this opening scene, Katharine uses only those personality traits that her polite-society denizens regard as worthwhile feminine accomplishments. As a result, there is a remainder of “unoccupied” mental processes that are valueless under the terms of female life at Cheyne Walk and therefore unworthy of Katharine’s attention. If, under Lukács’s theory of industrial life, a worker’s daily existence “is reduced to an isolated particle and fed into an alien system” (History 90), I characterize the aim of Woolf’s fiction as capturing the “moments of being” that evade this exploitative use of labour and how it binds Katharine’s fragmented existence to the mechanicalized laws of her daily workplace. In

Night and Day, Woolf reveals an aspect of Katharine’s personality that she has not yet commodified nor “fed into” the Hilbery value system as traditional feminine labour. Since the gender norms that organize Katharine’s society do so along highly delineated standards of

“tradition,” Katharine’s “unoccupied faculties” mark a part of her mind without a corresponding mode of employment from which upper-class London extracts labour power. Importantly, then, by fracturing her heroine’s expressivity into separate functional assignments, Woolf unveils a residue of Katharine’s self that is not “for sale” within the private-sphere market she works for and available for her to develop through an alternative, more autonomous form of female service.

By atomizing Katharine’s identity into specific, functional duties, Night and Day thus exposes the workings but also potential downfall of Britain’s heteropatriarchal traditions. As

Katharine’s suitor Rodney remarks, marriage is imperative “for all women” because “without it,” he claims, they use just “half [their] faculties” and are “only half alive” (64-5). Rodney narrow- mindedly sees the most valuable parts of women as those they refine through matrimony, which reiterates the misogynistic premise that men somehow complete them through marriage as one

“half” of a fully-realized, reproductive entity. However, by equating women’s lives as an entirety with an event that he can only deduce by half-measures, Rodney neglects to acknowledge how redirecting their unused “faculties” towards an alternative set of pursuits might allow women to undermine the kinship drive that he necessitates and how it often hinders their future prospects within Edwardian England. In other words, by refusing to marry chauvinistic men like Rodney, women can redirect these leftover skills towards an alternative “mode of directionality” (Ahmed,

Queer 43) and free themselves from Edwardian England’s dulling “cotton wool” of female labour. Indeed, after Katharine puts “the thought of marriage away” and suppresses those aspects of her brain that supposedly make her truly “alive,” she not only envisages herself as “another

person” but also sees a situation in which “the whole world seemed changed” (144). By shunning the particular “faculties” that pre-War Britain “[calls] forth in actual life” to supplement its dualistic model of gender performativity (144), Katharine momentarily escapes this same order and undermines the restraining manner in which it usually coordinates her mind. By exploring her unused cognitive processes, Katharine sheds the character whom Cheyne Walk requires her to become and comprehends instead “the things one might have felt, had there been cause; the perfect happiness of which here we taste the fragment; the beauty seen here in flying glimpses only” (144). While Katharine’s manner of conceiving reality in this scene is transient and volatile, it is a vision that excavates valuable intellectual scope for her by loosening her mind from what she calls “the constraints” of the “real world” along with its unchanging varieties of domestic experience (145). In this intense “moment of being,” Katharine obtains greater control over her mental capacity and accesses what the narrator of A Room of One’s Own calls an understanding of reality that exists in “shapes too far away for us to discern” (144) because they outlie the limits of habitual experiences. Though a turbulent moment of visionary “shapes,” it is this very surplus of as-yet unformed sensation that Woolf’s fiction potentializes: one of the “two sorts of being” that allow women to make “solid” new possibilities for the types of people they can become and the kinds of art they can produce.

Modernism and the Demand for Production

In Night and Day, Katharine encounters a place that nurtures female potential when she visits the office of suffrage activist Mary Datchet. With terminology that evokes the title of A

Room of One’s Own, Katharine describes “a room [where] one could work” and “have a life of

one’s own” (284). As some categories of women in Britain received the vote in 1918,22 the year before Woolf published Night and Day, Mary’s office represents a site of autonomous female labour that instigates wider social change. Although Mary considers her “unpaid” services here as being hardly capable of “[winding] up the world for its daily task,” it is the immunity of her office from male value judgements that allows Mary to fully “roost upon her work” (76). Unlike

Katharine’s unnamed yet highly regulated “profession” within the home (41), Mary can self- define her productivity in her office because this place is independent from both the constraining vocabularies of Edwardian domesticity as well as the mechanized “windings” of the profit-driven public sphere. Mary’s room as a material space that fosters personal growth similarly recalls

Phyllis’s experience of going to Bloomsbury and finding a place where one can “grow up as one liked” (24), or Woolf’s own recollection in her memoir “Old Bloomsbury” (1921-22) of moving to this same part of London in 1904 and experiencing an “extraordinary sense of space” (185).23

Yet for each of these women, their awareness of liberating “space” gathers import only in comparison to an antithetical environment that surrounds it. In “Old Bloomsbury,” Woolf reflects that the “shadow” of Hyde Park Gate permanently “falls across” her recollection of

Bloomsbury, leading her to conclude that “46 Gordon Square could never have meant what it did had not 22 Hyde Park Gate preceded it” (p. 182). Woolf’s commentary suggests that it was not life in Bloomsbury alone that fostered her artistry but the dual experience of living within two very different cultural domains. Woolf reiterates this belief when she describes Bloomsbury as

“A small concentrated dwelling inside the much larger and looser world of dances and dinners”

(emphasis added, “Bloomsbury” 192), which, like “The Feminine Note in Fiction, uses

22 The Representation of the People Act (1918) enfranchised all men over 21 and women over the age of 30 who owned property. Full voting rights were granted to women in 1928. 23 Published alongside “A Sketch of the Past” in Schulkind’s edition of Moments of Being (1971). 45

terminology that mimics John’s preference for a robust world of aesthetics in contrast to one of nondescript society life. Like Katharine’s ability to recognize a “margin of imagination” in

Mary’s office due to it being “aloof and unreal and apart from the normal world” (92-3), Woolf fixes her empowering female spaces within larger, more regularizing systems as a way of expanding upon the range of what constitutes “normal” life for Edwardian women. As with

Woolf’s account of her young adulthood, Katharine’s “margin of imagination” does not exist in a vacuum but arises after she experiences an alternative mode of productivity with Mary and then uses this encounter to expand upon the “being” that she usually has access to at Cheyne Walk.

Woolf thus accepts the need for women to find creative and intellectual potential “inside”

(“Bloomsbury” 192) Britain’s prevailing mechanisms of production rather than shun the material world altogether like John in “Solid Objects.” In “Phyllis and Rosamond,” it is not until Phyllis travels to Bloomsbury, where she converses with its liberated youth, that she grasps a core of excess mental scope. At Sylvia Tristram’s progressive soirée, both Phyllis and Rosamond acquire new insights into “the manner in which their own department of business was transacted”

(25). By moving beyond the dulling “cotton wool” of Kensington’s drawing-rooms, the sisters broaden their understanding of the affected performances and customs that usually constitute their lives in these places. In the “room” and “freedom” of Bloomsbury (24), marriage for Phyllis is no longer an inseparable facet of her socially-formed mind but “a robust, ingenuous thing which stood out in the daylight, naked and solid, to be trapped and scrutinized as [she] thought best” (26). In this instance, there is no “distinguished judge” to relay to Phyllis the meaning of the world around her. Rather, Phyllis momentarily adopts the male-allocated privilege of determining subject and gains the ability to see partnership not as an innate quality of her individuality but an external, “solid” belief that she reappraises within a place that does not

suppress her intellectual capacity. In wedding-obsessed Kensington, Phyllis asserts that she “can never see marriage alone as it really is or ought to be” because “It is always mixed up with so much else” (28). Kensington integrates the goal of marriage into the psychological “cotton wool” of Phyllis’s daily life and surroundings to such an extent that she accepts matchmaking as an inherent trait of her existence. During her disruptive “moment of being” in Bloomsbury, though,

Phyllis sheds the “mass of artificial frivolities” that make up her marital responsibilities and begins to “lay hands on the solid grain of pure self which, she supposed lay hid somewhere”

(26). In Bloomsbury, Phyllis seeks a part of her subjectivity that her routine “day’s work” does not identify nor deem valuable and, like John’s act of “burrowing in the sand” for a “full drop of solid matter” to bring “to the surface” of his new reality (“Solid” 97), starts to make this hidden and unvalued fragment of self “solid” within an alternative, female-empowered subculture. If only for a moment, Phyllis attains like John an impulse to become self-governing, to shun the automatizing demands of her household duties, and discover in the process fragments of a new identity that she can apprehend and define solely on her own terms.

Through Phyllis’s emerging “pure self,” Woolf minimizes male power by exposing the aspects of women’s minds that Britain’s economic and ideological formalities did not oversee.

Unlike John’s complete withdrawal from the world when he quits his job as a politician and becomes an aesthetic recluse, “Phyllis and Rosamond” implies that women require places of work, consumerism, and productivity like the salons of Bloomsbury to give their “pure selves” the opportunity for engendering personal or even wider feminist change. Phyllis’s journey towards self-discovery symbolizes Woolf’s modernist objective, wherein women require the medium of productive labour or consumable art for their newfound powers of insight to become more than just a latent supply of unexpressed “being.” The concern that I identify here relates to

the modernist project at large. As Fredric Jameson explains, although early modernist writers like Joseph Conrad shunned nineteenth-century realism in favour of more expressive recording techniques, they also adopted an “aestheticizing strategy” that was nevertheless “the result of a process of abstraction and reification” (Jameson, Political 218).24 For Jameson, the pioneers of modernism still enmeshed the movement within an expansionistic system of modern economics.

Rather than completely desist from commodifying their impressions of life and reality, Jameson argues that modernist writers simply re-marketed the external world by investigating unfamiliar terrain within the European cultural landscape. In this way, Jameson upholds that modernism did not wholly reject capitalism but merely provided a “utopian compensation” for it by excavating what he calls “a new representational space” within the mechanically-reproduced text (Political

219). As Woolf contends in “Modern Fiction” (1921), modernist writing abandons literature that

“never embraces or creates what is outside itself and beyond,” which she saw as a technique akin to “being in a bright yet narrow room, confined and shut in, rather than enlarged and set free” (p.

10). Woolf’s fiction prioritizes aspects of the self that transgress the recognizable frontiers of an established setting or worldview. Even though Woolf’s modernism rejected the confining literary techniques that preceded it, her work still mapped consumable aesthetic territory within British culture but in a way that widened how her readers conceived of their contemporary, and largely male-dominated, worlds. Just as Phyllis requires the more progressive rooms of Bloomsbury to give her “pure self” the chance for expression, Woolf needs the modernized, though nevertheless economically-motivated, publishing industry to make her feminist aesthetics intellectually and politically meaningful on a public scale. While Woolf’s work might prioritize regions of human

24 Jameson typifies modernism per its roots in impressionism, which he describes as the technique of using intense, mental stimuli as a “semi-autonomous activity” that “[recodes] or [rewrites] the world and its data” as a creative end in itself (Political 218). 48

experience that are not fully accommodated in the extratextual world of social reality, she still has to reproduce these excesses of “being” through literature in order to produce the potential for feminist reform.

It is worth pausing here to consider the wider ramifications of Jameson’s discussion in terms of the many European empires that proliferated as modernism began to emerge. As a movement that he characterizes as being intensely exploratory or even imperialist, Jameson implicates modernism in forces like colonialism, where the writer has to mentally or, as in

Conrad’s adventure fiction, physically conquer exterior territory so to incorporate this new

“representational space” into the West’s cultural inventory. When analysing Lord Jim (1900), for example, Jameson argues that Conrad solicits an escape from capitalism while, at the same time, enlarges its breadth and influence. Jameson arrives at this claim by identifying the sea in Lord

Jim as an “empty space” that is beyond the material arenas of “work and life” but also the geographical medium that makes global expansion possible: “the very element by which an imperial capitalism draws its scattered beachheads and outposts together, through which it realizes its sometimes violent, sometimes silent and corrosive, penetration of the outlying precapitalist zones of the globe” (Political 201). Jameson characterizes the origins of modernism as a quasi-colonial drive to seize upon unexplored otherness as a form of “compensation”

(Political 219) for the aesthetic territory that Western culture had already conquered by the turn of the twentieth century. However, I would note a resistance to Jameson’s neocolonialist approach in Woolf’s work due to her refusal to intrude upon narrative terrain of which she had little to no personal experience. Woolf’s fiction is overwhelmingly white, English, and middle- class. While this subject matter might spark accusations of withheld diversity, I interpret it more as her attempt to disturb Anglo-centric ideas and identities, which, as I argue in Chapters Two

and Three, emerges as a highly cynical rewriting of British values like heteronormativity or exclusionary nationalism. By fixing her perspective within the rooms of Britain’s privileged upper classes like London’s Cheyne Walk, Woolf interrogates the places where her country’s class, gender, and race ideologies often found their roots. While Jameson’s reading of Conrad depicts impressionistic manoeuvres as an aggressive “penetration” of otherness (Political 201), critics can more accurately characterize Woolf’s perspective as delving into one’s own psyche to initiate a transformative dialogue between the mental processes within and how they shape or are shaped by the external world. As we see with Woolf’s heroines, the “new representational space”

(Jameson, Political 219) that Woolf excavates within her fiction stands within an intimate, and often mundane, frontier of female experience. Instead of journeying outwards, Woolf situates her narratives within these familiar settings in order to rewrite how Britain’s socioeconomic customs typically prepared them for women’s minds to inhabit. Indeed, as I argue in forthcoming chapters, even though my analysis of surplus expressivity in modernism prioritizes the hinterlands of artistic insight, Woolf does so to expose the limits of ideologies like militarism and empire by signalling the content they either failed or refused to recognize: the dead bodies of war, nonnormative sexualities, or erasable foreign enemies.

While Woolf flags unwritten gaps within Britain’s capitalist and militaristic worldview as a source of transformative creativity, she also asserts in “Solid Objects” that published literature can never escape ideology nor be devoid of economic influence.25 At the end of the story, John

25 As Jameson notes, modernism transforms the natural “realm of the image” into an “art-commodity which one consumes by way of its own dynamic, that is, by ‘perceiving’ it as image and as sense datum” (Political 218). While the original “image” itself might be beyond human affect, the published text requires its author to translate this “image” into a recognizable account of the object realm. Jameson asserts that people can only understand reality in “textual form,” which means that literature always “entertains some active relationship to the Real” as an “intrinsic or immanent subtext” (Political 66). Since Jameson’s “Real” is “not a text, for it is fundamentally non-narrative and nonrepresentational,” what people understand of reality emerges through an act of “prior (re)textualization,” where the writer transforms reality in its fullness into a specific literary shape (Jameson’s italics, Political 67). 50

eventually forgoes all connections with socioeconomic reality when his colleague Charles, accepting John’s rejection of public life, leaves him among his “Pretty stones … for ever” (101).

At this striking coda in the story, animate and inanimate worlds converge: John becomes closed off from the rest of humanity, at one with his found things, and thus cancels out the relationship between himself as a thinking individual and the objects that he perceives. Loraine Sim sees

John’s conduct at the start of the story as pre-emptive of this final scene. When John burrows

“down into the sand” looking for precious items to acquire (Woolf, “Solid Objects” 96), Sim argues that his actions “[prefigure] the manner in which his mind will become mixed and inseparable from the solid object he is about to discover” (Patterns 52). To add to Sim’s observation, John represents an artist who transcends the necessary acts of production that make art a meaningful yet publicly consumable medium. Rather than risk defacing his cherished items with the uniformity of London’s outside consumer sphere, John chooses to relinquish both himself and his treasures to a vacuity of forgotten things. By the end of the story, he embodies what Frank Kermode describes as the artist who captures “the Image as a radiant truth out of space and time” but in the process becomes “cut off from other men” (p. 4): poets like Matthew

Arnold, whom Kermode characterizes as a writer who could only find creative fulfilment in “the permanent and luxurious escape of death” (18).26 Unlike John, Woolf’s aesthetic is not concerned with completely shunning economic production but finding an unused capacity of creative potential to circulate throughout the very patriarchal-capitalist systems that she critiques.

26 Kermode argues that this concept of the “Image” and the artist who perceives it originated with Romantic poets like Keats and then re-emerged in the modern era. He provides the work of Walter Pater as an example, arguing that Pater regarded the true artist as they who reaches an intense state of “sensibility or insight” as an “organ of moral knowledge” (26). However, Kermode acknowledges the “complex and tragic” paradox of this poetic vision because produced art can never fully “resolve the tension between the growing absorption of the dream and the desire for society and the pleasures of action” (37, 45-6). Yeats’s idea of a complete “Union of Being” between these two forces ultimately ends the poet’s “exile” because, if reached, the artist would become at one with his or her image and transgress the limits of physical life: a constancy that human beings can only ever achieve in death. 51

In “Phyllis and Rosamond,” the sisters need to access the same nonideological potential as John but then transform it into a real, ideological feature of their lives in order to actualize more empowering styles of work and expression. More than just a tale of individualistic self- discovery, “Phyllis and Rosamond” carries a wider feminist message by proclaiming the need for woman to interrogate male ideologies and then use the unwritten gaps that they discover upon this enquiry to produce their own political or artistic ideas.

At the centre of “Solid Objects” is thus Woolf’s belief that politically-engaged writers should resist the urge to isolate themselves from society as sanctified defenders of a purified, trans-ideological reality. Instead, she upholds through John the futility, indeed extremism, of feigning a solipsistic collapse in one’s art and indicates her intention of making her own work available for consumption, interpretation, and even scrutiny on a democratic level. John’s decision to disengage from public life is symptomatic of arrogant male exceptionalism and an artistic style to which Woolf did not subscribe: she was attuned to the need for communicating with her public, not only out of a concern for her own reputation, but also as a way for her to make a sustainable living. At one point in her diary, for example, she worried that a cool reception of her novel Orlando (1928), should it go to the less-lucrative “Biography” shelves at bookshops, would have a dire financial outcome for herself and her husband, Leonard: “I doubt therefore that we shall do more than cover expenses … Thus I must write some articles this winter, if we are to have nest eggs at the Bank” (Diary, vol. 5, 198).27 What Woolf does seek to excise from her work, however, is a prescribed feminine tone that would make her profitable but

27 Mao recognizes that Virginia and Leonard Woolf were in a precarious financial situation during the 1910s and only began to enjoy a comfortable upper-middle class life “thanks to a rise in sales of Virginia’s books” (34). For a useful account of the commercial success of Woolf’s work, see Julia Briggs’ Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (2005), where Briggs ends each chapter by documenting the sales of Woolf’s books. 52

at the cost of ceding to stereotype. Woolf refers to this restrictive inflection in “Professions for

Women” (1931) as that of “The Angel in the House,” whom Woolf sees as a figure who tells her to “flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex” and “Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own” (141). Aware of the fact that censorship often prevented her from writing about “the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say” (“Professions”

143), Woolf sought to carefully navigate Britain’s male-supervised literary scene while also disregarding its gendered value judgements.28 Woolf unwrites the era’s stunting and stereotypical tropes of female expression by writing characters like Katharine Hilbery who transcend the intellectual limits that comprise their household labour or romantic dealings with men. Likewise,

Woolf’s published texts engage with the economic provisions of the publishing industry but also use experimental modernist narratives to expand upon the terms of communication that this heteronormative culture often enforced upon women.

For Douglas Mao, the fact that modernist writers could only challenge what they saw as dated styles of literary production through production itself lent the movement what he calls its

“vital hesitation or ironic idealism,” where “all doing seems undoing, all making unmaking in the end” (11). I agree with how Mao portrays modernism as a constructive “undoing” of dominant sociocultural values but add a feminist critique to Mao’s idea of “ironic idealism.” As a reoccurring feature of her literary style, Woolf’s work does not overwrite Britain’s restrictive gender norms with fictional remedies. Instead, she uses irony to “undo” these ideologies by

28 Woolf was aware of and opposed censorship throughout her career. In April 1929, she published a short anti- censorship essay “The Censorship of Books” in The Nineteenth Century and After (also published in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 5, edited by Stuart N. Clark, Hogarth Press, 1986, pp. 36-40) and agreed to speak in defence of Radclyffe Hall at the obscenity trial for The Well of Loneliness in November 1928 (Briggs 220). Her founding of The Hogarth Press in 1917 also determined her relationship with censorship. As Celia Marshik notes, although the Press “permitted her to bypass editors, it also intensified her sense of prohibition by making her and Leonard legally responsible for the works they published” (125). 53

flagging the latent modes of expression that pre-War culture either failed or refused to recognize in women. As Linda Hutcheon notes, irony emerges on a literary level when a reader’s interpretation of the text clashes with its historical context, which introduces what she calls “an action and interaction in the creation of a third” or “actual ironic meaning” (Irony’s 58).

Hutcheon’s definition of irony as “differential” (Irony’s 64) speaks to Woolf’s style in that her modernist fiction signals unrealized potential in women that the antithetical context of patriarchal-capitalist Britain during the early 1900s did not yet accommodate. Likewise, in

“Phyllis and Rosamond,” Phyllis glimpses her “pure self” only once she situates her regular, domestic worldview within the contrasting environment of modern Bloomsbury. Like

Hutcheon’s definition of irony, Phyllis’s new understanding of life in Bloomsbury is

“differential” because it emerges via the story’s two, coexisting settings and the loci of their respective behavioural norms. As Hutcheon remarks, “the power of the unsaid to challenge the said is the defining semantic condition of irony” (Irony’s 57). Following Hutcheon’s logic, I argue in this chapter’s final section that “Phyllis and Rosamond” and Night and Day capture an

“unsaid” core of female existence through an ironic critique of both Britain’s pre-War heteronormative lifestyles as well as the recording techniques that male writers typically used at this time for capturing women’s lives. In these early texts, Woolf reveals a non-produced excess of unlived female potential that escapes the period’s binarized gender roles and marks the locale where feminist thinkers might produce ideas that reform or restructure the modern world.

Anomy and Irony as Feminist Critique

In “Phyllis and Rosamond” and Night and Day, Woolf situates her characters within

economically privileged and gender normative settings but only to uncover how these places, along with the narrative styles that usually record them, contain an “unsaid” surplus of disruptive female capability. However, since this capability represents a kind of “being” that pre-War society has not yet transformed into a livable reality for women, Woolf captures it in these texts with strikingly enigmatic terminology that imposes heightened interpretive demands upon her public. As a latent supply of thought and personality, Phyllis’s “pure self” marks a breach in

Britain’s traditional standards of gendered expression yet arises without any kind of indication as to what kind of modern womanhood it might inspire. In this way, Woolf’s work is not concerned with correcting the flaws within Edwardian society but engaging with this culture ironically to reveal the limits of its governing norms. Although “Phyllis and Rosamond,” like most of Woolf’s fiction, withholds a consolatory solution for Phyllis’s sense of unfulfillment, it is still politically engaged because it shows her readers the rifts in Britain’s capitalist-patriarchal structures and the site where reformed yet “unsaid” lifestyles might arise as an alternative. At the end of “Phyllis and Rosamond,” Woolf descends into Phyllis’s inner, nonideological subjectivity as a way of participating in ideological reality. As its central aim, the text flags this remainder of “pure self” to multiply the different ways in which women might connect with the world around them, understand the provisional nature of its values, and reconceive of their society’s future course.

By ironically adopting a male narrative voice in “Phyllis and Rosamond,” Woolf undermines masculine authority with the “differential” (Hutcheon, Irony’s 64) ideals that Phyllis discovers while in Bloomsbury. Even for the omniscient speaker in this story, Edwardian Britain places severe restraints upon his narrative scope: the narrator refers to the domestic workplace

“metaphor” that he uses to describe the two sisters’ lives as an analogy that is not “appropriate and complete in all its parts” (18). The narrator’s metaphor “fails” (18) when Phyllis and

Rosamond venture into Bloomsbury, which highlights Woolf’s belief that literature cannot symbolize life in its totality when it comprises of conflicting values, perspectives, or places.

Since the narrator’s account of the Hibbert sisters is a purely interpretive act, he must omit other ways of allegorizing the young women’s lives and then reduce these alternatives to Hutcheon’s

“unsaid” residue: a lurking subtext of “differential” meaning that silently opposes the narrator’s own “metaphor.” By visiting Sylvia Tristram in Bloomsbury, the sisters not only evade their restrictive “professional arena” at Kensington but also the devaluing symbolism of femininity that the narrator constructs for them to embody (18). In what Paul de Man calls an ironic

“interruption of the narrative line” (177), the sisters transcend the narrator’s stunting domestic

“metaphor” when they leave Kensington and, in doing so, obtain a newfound ability to reassess the authenticity of their typical behaviour. Similar to Woolf’s own attitudes towards

Bloomsbury, which she describes as an “angle” of her life that she approaches “through Hyde

Park Gate” (“Old Bloomsbury” 181), “Phyllis and Rosamond” presents any socioeconomic setting or textual discourse as a limited terrain of beliefs that one can leave and then re-examine from an ironic position of detached objectivity.

The locational shift in “Phyllis and Rosamond” from Kensington to Bloomsbury thus introduces a powerful moment of feminist critique that undermines male narrativity and the command it often exerts over women’s lives. After Phyllis and Rosamond temporarily inhabit

Bloomsbury, they begin to inspect their “professional arena” of the home with heightened powers of critical insight: they adopt “a strange new point of view” about Kensington and begin to see the roles that they typically perform there “of a different quality entirely” (25). With their new vantage point in Bloomsbury, the sisters gain a new mindset with which they can interrogate the self-censuring and gender-normative principles that, until this moment, have dictated the

scope and quality of their lives. Like Katharine’s systematic method of pouring tea, the sisters come to regard love as nothing but a technical skill that is “induced by certain calculated actions” such as “glances of the eyes, flashes of the fan, and faltering suggestive accents” (26). From their newfound and detached perspectives, the sisters recognize their behaviour in Kensington as the result of wholly artificial protocols that grant them a finite inventory of perception, movement, and speech. As an area of both personal and creative freedom, Woolf locates within Bloomsbury an excess of female “being” not only in the material spaces that lie beyond the drawing-room but also the narratives styles that writers used during the early 1900s for recording women’s minds and experience. By revealing the limits of her narrator’s “metaphor,” Woolf challenges male literary traditions in “Phyllis and Rosamond” by identifying the dearth of material that these traditions had access to when documenting women’s lives. The story sets the groundwork for

Woolf’s later modernist-feminist aesthetic by asking readers to follow Phyllis and Rosamond in re-evaluating Britain’s prevailing literary culture with recourse to the “unsaid” people, places, and potentialities that its conventional recording techniques precluded or deliberately ignored.

At a similar juncture in Night and Day, Katharine, when tediously conversing with Ralph

Denham about his family and profession, separates her mind from this dreary situation and imagines herself “looking up through a telescope at white shadow-cleft disks which were other worlds” (315). From this heightened outlook, Katharine feels “possessed of two bodies, one walking by the river with Denham, the other concentrated into a silver globe aloft in the fine blue space above the scum of vapours that was covering the visible world” (315). Though a far more exalted experience than that of the Hibbert sisters, Katharine similarly employs the viewpoint of a detached spectator who observes her prosaic “department of business” (“Phyllis and

Rosamond” 25) from above. By escaping the restraining “metaphors” that normally instruct their

daily affairs, the heroines in both of these works undergo Paul de Man’s ironic “detachment in relation to everything, and also in relation to the self” (177).29 They uncover an unfamiliar, objective mindset and use this new consciousness to break away from the patriarchal tropes that dominate their usual sense of personhood. As a result of her mental escape, Katharine’s attitude in this scene with Ralph becomes de-textualized: though she occupies a point of view congruous to the narrator of “Phyllis and Rosamond” and his ability to examine her movements within the

“visible world” of the underlying narrative, she also surpasses these perspectives and peers into the unknown frontiers of “other worlds.” Like Phyllis and Rosamond’s ability to transcend the stunting domestic motifs of Kensington, Katharine’s visionary “detachment” (de Man 177) unwrites masculine authority by trivializing the heterosexual romance of the action below and drawing her mind into a realm of being that does not yet have “solid” presence within “the visible world” where women live, work, and create. Using a technique that I compare to

Hutcheon’s “differential” feature of irony, Night and Day, while seemingly invested in Britain’s upper-middle class structures, uses Katharine’s unspoken thoughts to underplay the knowable places, family values, and heterosexual relationships that remain predominantly “said” within the novel’s main pre-War setting.

However, while Katharine’s “detachment” from Edwardian society is invigorating and potentially freeing, for Phyllis it causes her to feel intense alienation. At the story’s close, Phyllis fails to integrate her emerging “pure self” into an existing system of productivity: she calls this inner part of her personality a “closely guarded place” that allows her to “criticise” both

29 Like the buffo in Italian comic opera, de Man argues that the ironic author can disrupt “the narrative illusion” through “the aparté, the aside to the audience, by means of which the illusion of the fiction is broken” (178). In other words, they can position themselves “outside” of a particular tropological system by interrupting the narrative and then commenting upon its composition. However, de Man also maintains that this ironic aside can be permanent and that “at all points the narrative can be broken” (179), which means that the ironic writer can position him or herself in a permanent state of disruption and undo the systematic tropes that structure everyday reality. 58

Kensington and Bloomsbury but feel that “neither gave her what she needed” (28). At this powerful moment of the story, Phyllis finds herself caught between two conflicting ideologies because she feels that her “pure self” does not belong in either of the story’s contrasting socioeconomic settings. In what Émile Durkheim calls “anomy,” Phyllis’s awareness of her

“pure self” causes her to split from the “cohesion and regularity” of her upper-class community along with the “state of opinion” that previously bound her to its governing ideologies

(Durkheim 5). Since Durkheim’s “opinion” is “a collective thing, produced by collective elaboration” (Durkheim 5), the forces that usually “guard” Phyllis’s “pure self” are Edwardian

Britain’s shared gender norms and restrictive heteronormative worldviews. From Durkheim’s sociological standpoint, then, the “cohesion” of these attitudes normally provides Phyllis with a sense of belonging but at the expense of having to submit to her community’s self-censuring marriage rituals. Akin to what Mladen Dolar calls a “‘pre-subjective’ materia” that a person

“wipes out” when they respond to an ideological calling (Dolar’s italics, 77), Phyllis suppressed her “pure self” when she internalized the values of upper-class Kensington along with its wholly constructed axioms of gendered behaviour.30 After Phyllis repenetrates her “pure self,” this part of her subjectivity opens “like some chill gust of air” and leaves her feeling “dejected” and

“depressed” (“Phyllis” 28). Phyllis is perturbed because the heteronormative mores of her upbringing no longer satisfy the instinctive, inner void that her interrogation of Britain’s marriage economy has brought to the surface of her mind. Ultimately, she feels “fit for far better

30 Dolar calls this “materia” an “irreducible gap” within all interpellated people and the necessary “motor of any ideological edifice” (92). Dolar thus addresses the shortcomings of Althusser’s theory of interpellation by accounting for a person’s willingness to acknowledge an ideological hail. However, he also argues that a subject’s ideological turn is reversible based upon how deeply they internalize the initial command. In The Psychic Life of Power (1997), Butler agrees with Dolar, arguing that Althusser’s theory is “too inclusive” and “leaves no room for a non-materializable ideality, the lost and introjected object that inaugurates the formation of the subject” (Psychic 125). 59

things” (28) but, as a woman still cornered within polite-society London, cannot begin to formulate nor find a substitute lifestyle to turn towards.

While Katharine’s willingness to transform her experience of departing the “visible world” into a vitalizing modernist narrative reflects, on one level, a gap of thirteen years in

Woolf’s career and her work in turning Phyllis’s “pure self” into a novel-length study, I contend that Woolf’s reluctance to do the same in “Phyllis and Rosamond” carries noteworthy political intent. In what Ahmed calls “a description of how it feels not to be at home in the world, or a description of the world from the point of view of not being at home in it” (Living 13), Phyllis’s dejection at now feeling unaccommodated within patriarchal Britain is politically and intellectually engaging for readers precisely because the solution for this experience remains unwritten. Despite eventually falling back upon the familiar, Phyllis has already brought the

“cohesion and regularity” (Durkheim 5) of her world into profound uncertainty. At the story’s closure, she finds “relief” in the knowledge that “she need not think” because “Lady Hibbert had arranged a full day for them tomorrow” (29). Although Phyllis stitches up her pre-subjective

“crack” (Dolar 77) and revokes the need to consider an alternative social calling, this event demonstrates that even the most powerful of ideologies cannot engender a person’s entire identity. Instead, ideological interpellation leaves traces of a withheld ideological choice: a different way of life that made Phyllis’s initial act of turning towards domesticity logically possible, but an option that the “artificial frivolities” (“Phyllis” 26) of Kensington’s drawing- rooms then rendered imperceptible. As Althusser argues, ideological directives must continuously maintain a person’s “submission to the rules of the established order” and “the conditions” by which this order reproduces itself (51, 233). Phyllis’s momentary departure and then return to her drawing-room life outlines this reproducibility. The story affirms that her

usual, domesticated life in Kensington is not a fixed truth about her existence but a mandate that requires her to repetitively turn towards its call. Here, then, we uncover what Butler calls “a structural risk” that besets all ideological rulings because their “reproduction becomes the site where a politically consequential break is possible” (Frames 24). In other words, a re-informed person or group of people might turn away from the calling, refuse to comply with “the conditions of its production” (Althusser 233), and generate an alternative set of values or endeavours to more authentically nurture their sense of self.

By creating characters whose framing narratives contain an ironic surplus of “unsaid” potential, Woolf asks her readers to recognize the possibilities for personal growth within even the most constraining of socioeconomic environments. Rather than situate Katharine Hilbery or the Hibbert sisters within a comfortable narrative setting, Woolf calls upon her public to conceive for themselves how an alternative, female-empowered ideology might emerge to more effectively guide the women’s lives and productivity. While this act of transferring interpretive labour onto the public reflects Mao’s portrayal of the modernists as artists who hesitated to

“initiate social change” through the content of their texts alone (11), I would add that it also encapsulates Woolf’s refusal to disseminate an idealized vision of female existence in her work for her readers to accept in passive obedience. Woolf invites an anomic skepticism towards prevailing discourses like gender normativity as a way of urging her public to reassess these ideas and how they often limited women’s scope for self-fulfilment. The texts in this chapter interrogate patriarchal-capitalist principles and the literary styles that endorse them by re- emphasizing the role of the modernist thinker as someone who works within, yet is not fully interpellated by, Britain’s suppressive norms of life and labour. Woolf’s modernism is not concerned with escaping these systems like John in “Solid Objects” but engaging with them

ironically and reproducing through literature an as-yet non-produced capacity for feminist change. Woolf shows how emerging worldviews that break the totality of Britain’s structural hetero-patriarchal setup can ignite a communal re-imagining of its ideological content. Amidst the surplus modes of intellectual being that intersperse pre-War Britain’s customary ways of life,

Woolf’s fiction unmasks the gaps where her country’s dated standards of personal conduct fell short and, as a result, where more freeing, female-inspired alternatives might arise.

Chapter 2

Unmasking Militarism and Producing Pacifism in Woolf’s “A Society,”

“Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” and Jacob’s Room

The ‘alien’ is a frightening symbol of the fact of difference as such, of individuality

as such, and indicates the realms in which man cannot change and cannot act and in

which, therefore, he has a distinct tendency to destroy.

—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

… listen not to the bark of the guns and the bray of the gramophones but to the

voices of the poets, answering each other, assuring us of a unity that rubs out

divisions as if they were chalk marks only; to discuss with you the capacity of the

human spirit to overflow boundaries and make unity out of multiplicity.

—Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

“Shooting total strangers”: Intellectual Adaption and The Ideological Frame

In Jacob’s Room (1922) and “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid (1940), Woolf depicts

World Wars One and Two as moments of rupture in British history but also events that might transform how the country perceives of both native and foreign lives. This chapter presents

Woolf’s analytical and detached attitude towards the traumatic losses of both wars as a main component of her pacifist methodology. Rather than use her work to redress wartime death,

Woolf leaves these deaths unresolved to highlight the absence of a feminist agency that might

counter the unethical use of human bodies to settle European disputes. As pacifist treatises, both texts feature what Slavoj Žižek calls ideological masking, where elegiac culture distorts the deaths of both allies and antagonistic others in order to discourage those in mourning from turning away from Britain’s violent call to arms. By producing an experimental and non- consolatory post-War elegy in Jacob’s Room, Woolf unmasks the deceptive effects of militaristic commemoration and invites her readers to rethink the normalcy of militaristic culture. In her essay “Character in Fiction,” Woolf then centralizes this unmasking technique within her wider modernist aesthetic. In my interpretation of “Character in Fiction,” I characterize the aim of

Woolf’s fiction as encouraging readers to overcome the limits that traditional literary styles like the elegy impose upon their understanding of post-War reality. I argue that this technique allows readers to imagine the possibility for new sociopolitical systems like feminist-pacifist diplomacy to emerge and then restructure the modern world. Overall, my discussion defends the experimental, defamiliarizing tone that Woolf uses in each text by placing this modernist style at the centre of her anti-war agenda. As its key objective, Woolf’s pacifist work withholds consolatory solutions for the trauma of warfare and invites readers to contemplate a feminist future that can deter Britain’s aggressive diplomatic policies by refusing to offset the country’s reoccurring acts of violence.

Before I begin my analysis of commemoration, I will discuss Woolf’s earlier short story

“A Society” (1920) to exemplify Woolf’s view of Britain as an intellectual arrangement that prejudicially accommodates who or what the country’s leaders deem to be legitimate bodies and values. In this story, Woolf presents Britain not only as a geographical location but also as a mode of thought: a set of ideological borders that extend into global territory and incorporate new sites of knowledge into the nation’s colonial worldview. The story describes a group of

women who refuse the domestic trappings of motherhood in favour of public-sphere scrutiny. In doing so, the characters locate a major cause of war in the long-held command that men have exerted over Britain’s institutions, diplomatic customs, and foreign policies. While Naomi Black rightly characterizes “A Society” as a probe into “women’s claim to control their children and their children’s future, as well as to free enquiry and, more broadly, intellectual activity” (181), my analysis widens Black’s observation beyond the characters’ personal and family affairs by pairing the story with “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid.” I use the theme of restrictive nationhood in each text to elicit the characters’ concern not only for Britain’s own children but also the foreign others who live beyond the country’s shores. As an anti-War text, the story presents expansionistic male thought, including its need to violently surmount foreign otherness, as a primary cause of politicized aggression and an ideological force that severely curbs women’s intellectual scope. I present the texts in this chapter as resources by which we can comprehend the cultural mechanics of international conflict, including the exclusionary and largely male-defined values that determine a person’s right to life within global politics. Woolf’s anti-war work is not only literary art but also a way for readers to examine the flaws of modern globalization. Her fiction asks individuals to reconsider their allegiances to dominant ideologies like militaristic nationalism by exposing to them where these ideologies fail; that is, where they stipulate unquestioning loyalty across society despite condoning acts of systematic death and bloodshed.

In presenting Britain’s rulers as an intellectual force in “A Society,” Woolf traces how the country’s governing men must retain a state of oppressive ideological normalcy even after the monumental upheavals of war. Akin to Horkheimer and Adorno’s theory of Enlightenment thought as a form of “patriarchal” or even “totalitarian” power (2-4), male intellect in this story

manages the identifiable scope of the nation by unifying Britain’s values and productive output under an “ideal” that is an encompassing “system from which everything and anything follows”

(Horkheimer and Adorno 4). Woolf’s short story describes a group of young women who refuse to “bring another child into the world” (119) until they fully understand this “system” along with the militaristic, economic, and artistic customs that govern its citizens’ lives. Pre-empting what the narrator of A Room of One’s Own accredits to the “reprehensible poverty of [her] sex” (26),

Woolf presents excessive childrearing in “A Society” as a constraining duty that, once limited, allows the characters to achieve greater powers of insight, analysis, and mobility within the public sphere. The narrator, Cassandra, who is also a member of this group, recounts how each character intercepts a different locus of civil authority: some go “to the British Museum; others to the King’s Navy; some to Oxford; others to Cambridge”; they hear “modern music in concert rooms,” go “to the Law Courts,” and see “new plays” (120). Each of these architectural spaces represent everyday zones of activity for British people and places that the country’s educational institutions support when they nurture the masculine figures who come to regulate them. For

Castalia, one of the members of the society, the male brain is central to how Britain’s leaders construct and administer the nation’s public sphere. Britain’s universities teach men to “cultivate

[their] intellect” and adopt a profession that maintains the country’s male-centric landscape: “He becomes a barrister, a civil servant, a general, an author, a professor. Every day he goes to an office. Every year he produces a book” (129). As a relentless deluge of masculine ventures, intellectual work and its products in “A Society” represent not only mental ability, but also a source of human control. As a way of life that predates the disorder of World War One, an event that perforates the story before it finally reverts to peacetime customs after the Armistice of

1918, the story’s male-conceived culture marks a semblance of normalcy that its male leaders

predefine for their subjects to fight for, uphold, and then return to once they have victoriously defeated their adversaries.

Since, as Castalia recognizes, British men utilize their intellects to preserve Britain’s male-defined orthodoxy, Woolf’s account of intellectual labor as the nation’s state enginery betrays an impetus for expansionistic policies such as war and colonialism. The women in “A

Society” understand the scope of male ability in terms of spatiality or territorial mapping: they marvel at how “man flies in the air, talks across space, penetrates to the heart of an atom, and embraces the universe in his speculations” (125). The characters affirm patriarchal activity upon its need to encompass far-reaching zones of enquiry and ensure that no idea remains threateningly beyond men’s academic capture. In a forceful act of brainwork, the male-construed civilization in “A Society” is one that reaches far into the cosmos but also microscopically inwards, grouping these disparate regions of inquest under a single masculine lens. In what

Horkheimer and Adorno call the totalitarian power of “adaption” in Enlightenment thought, where “Whatever might be different is made the same” (8), this kind of logic makes external matter fully knowable, which fuels practices such as imperialism by flattening all intricacies of the world and enabling the forced synthesis of foreign matter, no matter where it originated, into

Britain’s colonial endowment. While the members of Woolf’s society “go through a vast tangle of statistics” about England like its population and class structure, they formulate their findings with an awareness of the country’s growth into “The British Colonies … our rule in India, Africa and Ireland” (125). The women in “A Society” complete their study of Englishness with recourse to its imperial outposts, aware that the demographic innerness of the British Isles is inseparable from its territorial outer-ness. To borrow from Judith Butler, Britain’s internality depends on something “outside” of it to “make the very sense of the inside possible” (Frames 9). Woolf

predicates the power of Britain’s leadership upon foreignness as something that its Empire seizes upon and then incorporates into the nationalistic frame. Through this colonialist process, Britain builds its culture by augmenting what is “inside” the country’s imperial borders as a constantly growing intellectual and geographical legacy.

It is for this very reason that Woolf describes Oxford and Cambridge as ships conquering the globe in A Room of One’s Own. Using terminology that evokes an imperial mission,

Oxbridge is “like a sailing-ship always voyaging never arriving, lit up at night and visible for miles, far away across the hills” (11). The fact that Oxford and Cambridge never arrive at their destination betrays the notion that these universities are dependent upon a constant excess of academic space to conquer and then internalize within their scholarly confines. Similar to

Woolf’s portrayal of the patriarch in this same essay as someone who holds “great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, inferior to himself” as one of the “chief sources of his power” (45), Britain fortifies its superiority over anything non-white and non-male by designating them subordinate and therefore annexable into the restrictive bounds of colonialist- patriarchal law. The narrator remarks: “How is he to go on giving judgement, civilizing natives, making laws … unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?” (46). As Woolf’s contemporary Bertrand Russell argues in Why Men Fight (1917), the idea of the “superior excellence of one’s own group” is a major cause of war because it provokes

“the feeling that only the good and evil of one’s own group is of real importance, and that the rest of the world is to be regarded merely as material for the triumph or salvation of the higher race” (14-15). In “A Society,” Woolf shares Russell’s view of globalized aggression being

“embodied in imperialism” (Russell, Why 15) when she presents Britain’s perspective through its need to encompass and overwrite foreign domains that are extrinsic to the nation’s own

philosophy of existence. Educational institutions in “A Society” are not only fraternities that nurture Britain’s commanding men but also venues for partaking in intellectual assault, where, through the power of “adaption” (Horkheimer and Adorno 8), the universities forcefully accommodate other cultures into the nation’s own ideological fabric as a way of strengthening

Britain’s colonial identity.

However, since Britain’s ruling men can only seize upon otherness by first recognizing it as something exempt from their oversight, “A Society” also exposes the tenuousness of the country’s global mindset. The women recognize that Britain’s rule over its colonies generates a constant proximity with foreign others, which suggests that the country must legitimize alternative lifestyles but as people or values to overcome. Although World War One brings the risk of overseas hostility, then, the War also potentializes a victory for Britain that would rejuvenate its international standing after the British army surmounts the threatening presence of an opposing worldview. While Poll, the character whose task it is to “read all the books in the

London Library” (118), can use male-penned histories to list the wars that Britain has already fought and incorporated into its vocabulary of state, the current struggle remains an enigma to her: “I don’t know what they’re going to war for now,” she admits (128). At this point in the story, Woolf introduces the War as a dubious moment of unknowability. Since the Triple

Alliance threatens the country’s geographical and political independence, Woolf does not recount the conflict but instead leaves it as a blank space of three asterisks on the page to convey the inability of male authority and, by extension, the women who live under its jurisdiction, to yet make cognitive sense of the War. In its startling newness, World War One is not yet in textual form like the past struggles that Poll can list. Instead, the War represents a break of unknowable crisis that breaches both the story’s narrative as well as Britain’s frame of national

identity. “A Society” thus implies that the soldiers who are defending their nation at this time are not merely fighting for a geographical entity. In service to their country’s intellectual prestige, these men are also fighting for the right of their leaders to later fill in the unwritten events that bridge this tumultuous wartime past with Europe’s reconstructed peacetime future.

When the story resumes after both the end of the War and the text’s empty gap, Woolf demonstrates how Britain as victors transform World War One into a self-serving account of history and society. The post-War part of the story begins with Cassandra noting that “The war was over and peace was in the process of being signed” (128). Cassandra’s wordy, passive construction in this sentence renders the peace process utterly abstract and without a knowable agency, which reflects how the country’s decision-making powers alienate the women from all legislative rulings. As a result of this continued exclusion from Britain’s political sphere, the characters return to their status as intellectual outsiders. With the Armistice comes a renewal of patriarchal governance along with the inability of these women to determine their country’s onwards course. By the story’s end, Britain has returned to a state of regularity, where the androcentric ideals that coordinate the country’s governance will remain troublingly intact until the next cataclysmic event. One of Castalia’s closing remarks is therefore a desperate and disturbingly predictive plea for the lives of all people who live under hostile male rulers: “let us devise a method by which men may bear children … For unless we provide them with some innocent occupation we shall get neither good people nor good books; we shall perish beneath the fruits of their unbridled activity; and not a human being will survive to know that there once was Shakespeare” (129). By imagining a situation where her country’s leaders accept their share of childrearing, Castalia locates the cause of war in men’s unchecked power within the nondomestic realms of political and intellectual action. Accordingly, Castalia suggests that the

human race can only avoid total extinction if these same men agree to abandon their relentlessly

“unbridled” enterprises across the globe. Since Castalia establishes this concern upon her awareness of an impending global catastrophe, she implies that Britain’s invasiveness is not unique to this country alone but a trait of male leadership in general. If the nature of masculine

“activity” lies in its “unbridled” nonrestraint, then to oppose it requires an equally as combative force such as further male aggression. Due to Castalia’s account of an inescapable homosociality, she thus recognizes the necessity that women help reform masculine behavior by providing men with an alternative set of ventures that will benefit not only individuals within their own borders but all inhabitants across the globe.

In “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” however, Woolf shows how Western militarism not only justifies the erasure of foreign people but also celebrates this violence by evacuating the bodies of unknown others of all fragility. As an essay that Woolf wrote in response to the outbreak of World War Two, the narrator explains how Europe has once again incited its men to kill unknown aliens by construing these people as dangerous antagonists who require death under the name of patriotic service. Based upon Woolf’s own experience of living through

German air raids, the speaker lies in bed at night to the sound of bombs dropping around her home and asks herself why men continually resort to violent warfare as a form of honorable activity. She finds a potential answer in a quote from a fictional British soldier: “To fight against a real enemy, to earn undying honour and glory by shooting total strangers, and to come home with my breast covered with medals and decorations, that was the summit of my hope…It was for all this that my life so far had been dedicated, my education, training, everything” (ellipsis in original, 250). The force of the above passage hinges upon the terminological clash that Woolf creates between the idea of fighting a “real enemy” and shooting “total strangers.” Woolf

establishes this dissonance to indicate the way in which the British government utilizes horrific warfare without acknowledging the human lives that war will inevitably obliterate. The narrator’s quotation exemplifies how Britain promotes the completeness of its national order by demanding that men expunge any way of life that undermines it, thus highlighting what Žižek calls “an antagonistic split” that traverses the beliefs and attitudes of the British population

(Sublime 142). As members of an opposing political territory, the German “strangers” in the above passage embody an “insupportable, real, impossible kernel” (Žižek, Sublime 45) that subverts Britain’s nationalistic worldview and its discriminative criteria of citizenship. In response, Britain’s traditions of education and military training must construe the whole population of this foreign land as a singular “enemy” to prevent German views from undermining the integrity of their own.31 As Žižek explains, the power of ideology to distort a set of incompatible beliefs produces what he calls a “social fantasy,” or the false supremacy of one’s own ideological dogma, which, Žižek argues, marks a “counterpart to the concept of antagonism” and is “precisely the way the antagonistic fissure is masked” (Sublime 142). In terms of transnational combat, Žižek’s theory implies that war brings clashing ideologies into a turbulent adjacency, which means that each side involved must acknowledge a conflicting state doctrine while maintaining their own principles at the same time. In “Thoughts on Peace in an

Air Raid,” Woolf similarly examines how British soldiers accommodate German “strangers” but

31 Žižek uses Lacanian terminology to equip his theory with a psychoanalytical framework. As Lacan’s Real signifies the fullness of language before processes of symbolization carve it into a knowable representation of reality, it also represents a place where opposing ideological discourses exist in an impossible state of unity. Žižek explains that “opposite or even contradictory determinations is what defines the Lacanian Real” (Sublime 193), allowing two antonyms to “build a harmonious totality” and give to “the other what the other lacks—each fills out the lack in the other” (Sublime 193). In contrast, the Symbolic world of socio-political reality is “differential” and where the “positive presence” of one ideological concept is “nothing but an objectification of a lack in its opposite element” (Sublime 194). In other words, one discourse gathers symbolic meaning based upon what it is ideologically not. 72

only after masking them as a source of expellable difference: an ideological process that balances the inconsistency of having two adversaries occupy a single domestic frame.

By exposing ideology’s falsifying lens, however, the narrator of “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” not only unravels the binarized nature of British and German identities but also establishes this division as the driving force behind exclusionary nationalism. The airman from neither country can exist without the other’s antithetical identity: concepts of adversary and ally, foreigner and compatriot, self and other are mutually dependent, which means that the British pilot requires his “enemy” to give his own sense of nationhood a genuine, delimited existence.32

Without his German foe, the “education” and “training” that organizes the British airman’s life would become ineffectual because there would be no dangerous foreignness for these customs to confront. When the narrator remarks that “Up there in the sky young Englishmen and young

German men are fighting each other” (216), then, she deliberately magnifies the discord that authorizes but also thwarts both nations’ ideological stances. Rather than the British heroes encountering their antagonists, both defenders and attackers collide with “each other” in a cloudy realm of non-signification that obscures any allied or belligerent position. Indeed, even though the narrator recognizes that “the young Englishman” is “fighting up in the sky to defeat the enemy,” he faces not the bullets of German “strangers” but a “spate of words from the loudspeakers and politicians” that have “whirled [him] up into the sky and [keep] him circling there among the clouds” (216-17). On account of the provocative “words” that inflame the violent tendencies of men, warmongering rhetoric from politicians and the mass-media trap both

32 As Žižek argues, ideology is always oppositional and must necessarily “assert itself by means of delimiting itself from another ‘mere ideology’” (Žižek, “Spectre” 19). In “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” Woolf shows how Britain “requires” its antagonist as “another corpus of doxa” in the figure of the German so that the British airman can “distinguish his own ‘true’ position” from this subversive outsider (Žižek’s italics, “Spectre” 20). 73

Germans and Britons within a hazardous domain of masculine activity, where the only escape for either soldier is to kill their fellow prisoner or fall to the earth themselves as sacrificial icons.

What Castalia calls the need for an “innocent occupation” to help men protect the lives of citizens across the globe appears in this essay as an enterprise that does not depend upon deadly skirmishes between two conflicting nationalities. Although the speaker of “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” acknowledges Nazi attempts during the 1940s to “destroy freedom” across the globe (216), she examines how European idea makers in general coax young men into carrying out brutal political goals while putting their own lives and those of unknown “strangers” on the line for abstract notions of national belonging.

Commemorative Culture, “Grievability,” and the “Masking” of War

Since “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” implicates both ally and belligerent alike in the potentially lethal ventures of their respective countries, we must ask why the British airman willingly gives himself to war despite the prospect of his violent end. To ensure that men like him repeatedly carry out acts of authorized bloodshed, the military upholds a male-privileging culture that prevents British soldiers from refusing conscription or identifying the precarity that they share with their eradicable adversaries. As the soldier in “Thoughts on Peace in an Air

Raid” suggests, military traditions replace dead enemy bodies with the “medals and decorations” that he receives as a reward for causing these same deaths. The items supplant the gruesome aftereffects of the frontline with patriotic objects that give Britain’s national identity a culturally visible presence. British soldiers can return home after battle only because these medals eclipse the German enemy’s corpse and render him what Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak call a non-

subject whom Britain “unbinds, releases, expels, banishes” to delimit the country's exclusionary ideological terrain (5). The government enacts this erasure as a way of preventing a figure whom the nation eliminates to disturbingly undo its prejudicial norms of citizenship, statehood, and memorialization. In Butler’s own account of commemoration, mourning observances in the West designate racialized others imperceptible so to deflect import onto their “grievable” counterparts and authenticate these lives as nationalistic “[icons] for self-recognition” (Precarious 34).

Following Butler, I assert the co-dependency of “grievable” and “ungrievable” soldiers during times of conflict in that both deaths support the same act of nation-building but in a dialectical way. Namely, the body of an “ungrievable” German opponent must remain invisible so as to make visible his “grievable” British correlative. As we see in “Thoughts on Peace in an Air

Raid,” Britain’s symbolism of militaristic victory utterly depends upon the erasure of foreign belligerents whom the country precludes from its commemorative signs and rituals. In contrast, the country’s military commanders must guarantee that battle never negates the homegrown soldier’s privileged status. Crucially, his ongoing prestige through commemoration stands as a reward for military sacrifice and one that incites other “grievable” men to accept similar life- threatening demands of battle even though they might not live to see the war’s end.

“Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” thus predicates the airman’s willingness to engage in battle on the honorific stature that the British military promises him even though he may die while shooting enemies on his country’s behalf. Due to this patriotic entitlement, the narrator questions whether disarming men would provide an adequate remedy for male warmongering, remarking of this situation that “Othello’s occupation will be gone; but he will remain Othello”

(218).33 In the narrator’s reference to Othello’s descent from a model commander in the Venetian army to the jealousy-racked and murderous lover of Desdemona, the speaker implies that, while demobilizing individual men might obstruct an official channel for their violence, the aggressive instincts that education and tradition fosters within male subjects will persistently influence their behavior (218). In other words, although demobilized soldiers may no longer be fighters in a vocational sense, there remains a cultural idea maker who keeps these men upon the patriarchal stage where they can uphold their violently “unbridled” engagements. For our young pilot, then, as long as the desire for belligerent action permeates the system within which men like him perform, there “will remain” an ideological formula that shapes Western notions of manhood despite the absence of their bodies. In the “medals and decorations” of war, along with the commemorative rituals that disseminate these items, the narrator recognizes an always-available equipment of combative performativity that predates and forms the conscript’s behaviour as a masculine player within an androcentric, war-driven world. Although Butler argues that this system “presumes the grammatical ‘subject’ prior to the account of his genesis” (Psychic 111)— the vocabularies of gender that pre-exist male socialization and determine acceptable standards of masculinity in the West—I reverse Butler’s rationale to account for the same gender norms that outlive the airman and will continue to prompt the interpellation of other men after his death.

Military commemoration grants these men as grievable subjects a presumptive self even if war makes possible the violent erasure of their bodies: a status that their ungrievable antagonists do not, indeed must not, share as it would overturn the exclusionary rights of being a male British citizen.

33 A reference to Othello’s loss of pride and sense of self after Iago tricks him into believing Desdemona’s infidelity: “Farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone” (3.3.357). 76

Woolf thus addresses in “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” how world politics in the

1930s and 40s reached a situation where European governments saw foreigners not as equals worthy of life but embodiments of a conflicting worldview whom they could only apprehend intellectually as targets of their explosives. While this statement resonates with the horrors of

Nazi antisemitism—an issue that Woolf certainly would have addressed had she lived to experience its outcome—I also associate it with warfare more generally and how nationalistic sentiment brings soldiers to aim their weapons not at their “enemies” but the mere “strangers” who carry the values of an antagonistic geopolitical territory. At a pivotal and deeply poignant moment near the essay’s closure, the narrator fractures this logic of embodied antagonism by moving her German “stranger” out of the clouds and transforming him into an acquaintance upon

British soil. Though British guns have “brought down” the German plane somewhere “behind the hill” of the text’s English landscape, the narrator remodels this act of anti-aircraft fire into one of welcoming accommodation (219). The narrator reminisces that the German “landed safe in a field near here the other day. He said to his captors, speaking fairly good English, ‘How glad

I am that the fighting is over!’ Then an Englishman gave him a cigarette, and an Englishwoman made him a cup of tea” (219). The speaker here fractures the antithetical logic of us-versus-them that has until this moment permeated her narrative to make visible someone who usually exists within her frame of reference as an expendable non-person who dies “behind the hill” of public awareness entirely. At the essay’s finale, the harrowing experience of falling from the sky and landing upon enemy soil is not one of endings but growth and futurity: “if you can free the man from the machine, the seed does not fall upon altogether stony ground. The seed may be fertile”

(219). While Woolf, in a characteristic political move, does not openly disclose what kind of discourse might sprout after society liberates these men, she encourages her readers to thwart

nationalistic rhetoric by imagining a more peaceful future for all once they strip their adversaries of masking descriptors.34 This claim is not to say that Woolf downplays the unique horrors of

German atrocities: she died before knowledge of Nazi concentration camps came to light and had first-hand experience of the Luftwaffe’s air raids on European civilians. Nevertheless, by referring to Adolf Hitler as “Aggressiveness, tyranny, [and] the insane love of power made manifest” (217), the narrator implies that people might undermine state-condoned violence by recognizing the precarity of those who stand at the other end of their gun. As its fundamental aim, the essay encourages those whom ideological “tyranny” often manipulates to form empathy towards foreign strangers and use this recognition of shared fragility as the groundwork of an improved transnational community.

By lifting the mask of German antagonism in “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,”

Woolf’s essay invites ethical work at the tumultuous site where divisive nationalistic ideologies dissolve, where grievable and ungrievable bodies achieve discordant unity, and where people must find mutual, non-combative ways of recognizing otherness in order to secure a more peaceful future for all. If militaristic rituals function by transforming death into a production of culture—one that replaces dead bodies with tokens of heroic valour— then “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” proposes an end to this procedure itself so that Britain can build a more harmonious future. After rejecting physical disarmament as a viable option, the narrator echoes

Castalia’s appeal in “A Society” by proclaiming that women must “help the young Englishmen to root out from themselves the love of medals and decorations” and encourage them to create

34 At the essay’s finale, then, we reach what Patrick Deer describes as a “subversive sense of unity” that introduces “language of another kind of creativity” (96). See also Judith Allen’s account of the essay’s use of “contradictory perspectives” such as “varied voices, multiple conversations and conflicting viewpoints” to offer readers a “different perspective” on war (88). Rebecca Walkowitz similarly analyzes the essay’s use of contradiction, which demonstrates a “complicity between Germany and Britain,” which she argues functions to “show and resist the kinds of ‘thinking’ that is encouraged by ‘fighting’” (99). 78

“more honourable activities … to conquer their fighting instinct” (218). The narrator here imagines a situation where women instigate a new form of loss by eliminating Britain’s commemorative masking rituals: a loss that men then overcome with new activities or ventures that are not dependent upon violent bodily erasure. The speaker authorizes women to produce a creative resource that will supplant men’s annihilating bullets and “compensate [him] for the loss of his gun” (218). In “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” modern feminism emerges as an intellectual theory that might counter the perpetual mass-massacre of young men across

European countries. As a mode of thought that instigates the desire for change by unmasking the losses of patriarchal governance, Woolf’s modernist-feminist texts refuse to restoratively heal the wounds within Britain’s militaristic body politic. Instead, her fiction potentializes a usually absent form of artistic productivity that rewrites the aggressive values of European civilization along with the cultural panaceas that this culture used to offset its own incessant combativeness.

Mourning, Materialism, and Male Loss in Jacob’s Room

While planning To the Lighthouse (1927) in a 1925 diary entry, Woolf considered “a new name” for her novels and how she might advertise them to her reading public: “A new – by

Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?” (Diary, vol. 3, 34).35 I argue in this section that Woolf hesitates on using the term “elegy” due to her wish to write about loss while also resisting what

35 Although a number of Woolf scholars focus upon this diary entry, they use it to initiate a wider discussion of the elegiac form rather than a close reading of the sentence itself. Individual scholarly references to this diary entry are too numerous to cite in full, but some notable works include: Jane Goldman, “From Mrs Dalloway to The Waves: New Elegy and Lyric Experimentalism” (The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, edited by Susan Sellers, Cambridge University Press, 2010); David Kennedy, Elegy (Routledge, 2007); Christine Froula, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde (Columbia University Press, 2005); Randall Stevenson and Jane Goldman, “‘But What? Elegy?’: Modernist Reading and the Death of Mrs Ramsay” (The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 26, 1996, pp. 173-186. 79

M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham call the elegy’s “most common present usage” as a

“lament” for “the death of a particular person, usually ending in a consolation” (104). Although

David Bradshaw notes that the above diary entry refers specifically to Woolf’s longing to exorcise “the ghosts of her parents” after their deaths through the characters of Mr. and Mrs.

Ramsay in To the Lighthouse (xxi), I propose that the elegiac tone of Woolf’s work transends biography in its concern for repudiating post-War consolation by unmasking the traumatic losses of World War One. Following Jane Goldman’s remark that Jacob’s Room marks the first of

Woolf’s “formally experimental” new elegiac novels (Introduction 17), I analyse this text with the above 1925 diary entry as a point of departure to highlight the wider, pacifist motive behind

Woolf’s experiments with an elegiac style. In opening a terminological gap in her diary with a dash but then doubting whether her elegy adequately fits it, Woolf implies an excess of stylistic content that, in Jacob’s Room, signifies the novel’s refusal to fill the psychological or even physical voids that consolatory elegies usually repair. Through the character of Betty Flanders,

Woolf uses this site of physical and cultural deficit to potentialize a female artist whose instrumentality arises once she dissociates herself from male loss and refuses to elegiacally mask their deaths. By shifting her elegy away from the commonplace reality of wartime death, Woolf explores in Jacob’s Room new room for a literary form that does not relentlessly overcome the violent habits of male pursuits: a technique that allows her readers to imagine a more peaceful, post-patriarchal system of international diplomacy to organize and enhance their communities.

At a striking instance towards the end of the novel, the narrator notes the curious willingness of British men to support their country’s militaristic agenda even though it severely risks their lives. When describing the fate of a sinking battleship during war, the narrator watches as “a dozen young men in the prime of life descend with composed faces into the depths of the

sea; and there impassively (though with perfect mastery of machinery) suffocate uncomplainingly together” (p. 216). The young men embrace their deaths with “nonchalance” in this scene (216) because the narrator masks the horrific event with words of celebratory remembrance. Even though these men “impassively” drown, their ability to master with stoicism the “machinery” of modern warfare provides them with a disembodied sense of heroic agency.

The narrator moves on to describe this “mastery of machinery” as one of the “actions, together with the incessant commerce of banks, laboratories, chancelleries, and houses of business” that

“oar the world forward” (216). Akin to how the narrator in A Room of One’s Own portrays male political enterprises as ships conquering diverse intellectual and economic space, the

“machinery” that helms patriarchal Britain does so by posthumously conserving the status of its ruling citizens. Each of the men at this juncture in the novel “suffocate uncomplainingly together” because the land they die for also grants them a part to play in its civil voyage. The drowning men are among those who command Britain’s administrative “oars” yet in a manner that exploits their inability to emotionally recognize or challenge the danger of this role when the nation-as-ship steers dangerously close to foreign hostility. I thus take issue with George

Haggerty’s analysis of the young men’s passivity here as “a measure of their inability to comprehend what is happening to them” (p. 61) and assert that the disturbing neutrality of the soldier’s “nonchalance” undermines any claim to their ignorance. Rather, Woolf presents men’s deaths during war as a price that they must pay for social entitlement and an ability to collectively manage the country’s progress. Instead of a sign of incomprehension, the passivity of male deaths within Woolf’s work is a disturbingly customary feature of life within war-driven society, where men can engage in “actions” with governing value as long as they agree to bear the pain that this man’s world rife with carnage might demand of them at any moment.

My analysis of Jacob’s Room offers a rebuttal to Haggerty’s argument that the supposed ignorance of the drowning sailors is “exactly what we might also say about Jacob” (61). I contend that men in militaristic states like Jacob’s Britain are never fully oblivious about the prospect of their deaths. Alternatively, the military inures a constant knowingness in soldiers and civilians that its wartime traditions will recast the “destroyed young lives” of conflicts like World

War One (Haggerty 61) as sacrificial icons of patriotic valour. Jacob’s Room illustrates how

British masculinity norms prepare men for their potential loss on both a textual and extratextual level. Though the novel frequently portrays the male body as a site of delicate ephemerality, it also offsets this fragility with an armour of stereotypical manliness that disguises the vulnerable bodies that live and breathe underneath. Watching the King’s College Chapel procession, for instance, the narrator remarks “how airily the gowns blow out, as though nothing dense and corporeal were within. What sculpted faces, what certainty, authority controlled by piety, although great boots march under the gowns” (30). Akin to the earlier noted analogy between intellectual and militaristic enterprises in A Room of One’s Own, the “orderly procession” at

Cambridge (30) strikingly mimics uniform-clad troops marching across the Western front, where seemingly autonomous “boots” and “gowns” displace the physical beings who actually wear this clothing. One of Jacob’s lovers Fanny Elmer uses a similar image when she notes that Jacob

“seems to be set in smoke” (160), but then immediately follows her account of bodily transience with a menu of typical male activities. As Fanny conjectures, since men realize that they will soon “lose” their beauty, they compensate when they “chase footballs, or drive cricket balls, dance, run, or stride along roads” (160). For Fanny, the male body is one that perpetually faces a sudden undoing, which brings her to eerily foresee the aftereffects of the Western Front and how it will claim Jacob’s life amidst the “smoke” of artillery-fire in four chapters’ time. However,

Fanny also counteracts men’s frailty with conventional signifiers of masculinity that exude a robust symbolism of physical rigour. Due to Fanny’s contrasting ideas about male identity, she asserts that men like Jacob “take their station among us half contemptuously” (161). Though they occupy a privileged “station” amidst the greater population, British gender norms “half” predicate their existence on the constant threat of a violent downfall. Like the elegiac form of the novel itself, the symbolic signs of manhood supplant their actual bodies: a situation that marks the text’s foremost concern as the literary (re)production of Jacob’s identity as a material stand- in for the very flesh it signifies.

For this reason, Jacob’s Room assures its readers that Jacob, the elegiac subject of the novel, is never really lost at all. Although Jacob’s death upon the Western Front might have negated his body, his textual individuality endures when Woolf re-invokes it to satirize the acts of mourning that secured Britain’s return to normalcy after the upheavals of World War One. My account of the novel therefore disagrees with Allyson Booth’s remark that readers “do not realise

[Jacob] is dead until the last page of the book” (p. 44). Booth’s logic here undermines the materiality of the text itself as the main target of Woolf’s anti-war critique. From the outset and throughout, in fact, Woolf portrays Jacob as a spectral and startlingly mysterious figure who alludes his friends and family along with the readers themselves. Though the novel’s title evokes a bildungsroman that attests to the lived space of Jacob’s physical body, the opening scene introduces him as decidedly missing. The only sign of Jacob’s existence is Archer’s ghostly call of “‘Ja—cob! ‘Ja—cob’” as he attempts to unsuccessfully find his brother on the beach (1). At this initial stage of the book, Jacob is nothing more than a vacant signifier reaching out to an ungraspable nothingness. More conspicuously, Jacob’s surname directly refers to John McCrae’s hugely popular wartime elegy “In Flanders Field” (1915) to mark the location of his already-

decomposing body. Booth misreads the novel because she discusses Jacob’s demise retroactively, calling it “stunningly fresh” and noting how the narrator “[positions] readers in a way that makes ducking the shock of his death impossible” (45). Rather than a “fresh,” surprising, or purposefully delayed event, the novel fixes Jacob’s downfall from the start to place human loss and literary presence as simultaneous rather than belatedly “counterpoised” concepts as Booth claims (45). Though Booth describes Jacob’s room at the end of the novel as an “empty coffin” that is “neither durable … nor confined to a single site”—a technique that she interprets as a sign of “the narrator’s scepticism about the ability of conventional cemetery artefacts to mark absence” (45)—my chapter goes beyond mournful “artefacts” within the narrative to consider Jacob’s Room itself as the “single site” that guarantees him a form of posthumous subjectivity. In Jacob’s Room, Woolf is less concerned with exploring the metaphorical signs of

Britain’s public mourning rituals than mirroring upon the level of her text how this culture uses the literary corpora it manufactures to answer the deaths that the country’s own militaristic protocols cause.

I thus argue that critical responses to Woolf’s novel should move away from Jacob’s loss and emphasize instead an absent feminist agency who might halt the relentless process of producing art to reconstitute male death.36 The main issue with prioritizing Jacob’s loss is that it justifies a male-privileging rationale of ideological reproduction, where Jacob’s dead body is

36 Most critics agree that Woolf centralizes Jacob to repudiate patriarchal values that glorify and perpetuate war. Alex Zwerdling, for instance, sees the novel as a satirical critique of Jacob and the “‘patriarchal machinery” that “[guarantees] him a powerful position in society” (904). Tammy Clewell calls Woolf’s novel a “prosaic elegy” that attacks Jacob “as an embodiment of patriarchal attitudes that lead to a war many believed at the outset would end all wars” (32). In his more recent 2018 book, George Haggerty continues this characteristically heavy-handed discussion of Jacob and argues that the novel is “about loss” and seemingly “nothing else” (51). Though Alex Oxner discusses absence in her recent 2014 article, she similarly centralizes Jacob as “a spectral, unknown figure, despite his elevated status as the novel’s protagonist” (212). Christine Froula comes closest to a female-focused reading of the novel, where she identifies the makeup of interwar society as one which “excludes women/mothers, leaving fathers to create public culture and values and to induct male children into that culture” (72). 84

nothing more than a signifier of human deficit that is in need of a commemorative or, as I discuss in Chapter Three with Marie Stopes’s views on motherhood, biological substitute. Current debates about resistant mourning betray a similar problem.37 As Jacques Derrida argues, the

Freudian notion of melancholia, where the mourner “incorporates” a loved one into his or her psyche, is a better response to death because it “[keeps] the dead alive, intact, safe (save) inside me” instead of “a living part of me, dead save in me” as happens during the supposedly more successful act of introjection (Derrida’s italics, “Fors” xvi-xvii). For Derrida, melancholic incorporation respects the alterity of the lost person: he or she remains “a foreign body preserved as foreign” and “excluded from a self that thenceforth deals not with the other, but only with itself” (“Fors” xvii). In this way, melancholic incorporation has ethical value in that the mourner does not “cannibalise” the dead through “an interiorizing idealization” or “[take] in itself or upon itself the body and voice of the other, the other’s visage and person, ideally and quasi literally devouring them” (Derrida’s italics, Memories 34). On a public level, however, should a community preserve the memories of shared loss as Derrida describes, they might actually compromise the transformative ambitions of resistant mourning by exposing a traumatic gap within the collectivity that validates the demand for its repair. Although brandishing the battered

37 In his seminal text Poetry of Mourning: From Hardy to Heaney (1994), Jahan Ramazani defines the modern elegy as characteristically preoccupied with preserving loss. “Unlike their literary forebears or the ‘normal mourner’ of psychoanalysis,” he notes, modern elegists “refuse such orthodox consolations as the rebirth of the dead in nature, in God, or in poetry” (4). Patricia Rae discusses how the work of post-War “anti-elegists” such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon are distinctly “self-conscious about mourning practices” (“Between” 308) and refuses to overcome the traumatic reality of wartime death. More recently, R. Clifton Spargo identifies in maintaining loss “an ethical crux” (4), wherein extended mourning instigates a “retrospective concern for the other as if it were anticipatory or potentially preventative” (4). Although a seemingly “unrealistic response” to loss, such stubbornness has a social use in its desire to protect the living from a similar fate: an “ethical protest against a dominant cultural pathology that trivialises death” (Spargo 21). The anti-elegy provides mourners an activist role in their attempts to rethink or even refuse a restructuring of cultural and political reality after devastating loss. The main paradox of such a position is that this kind of negative mourning may actually allow political or cultural reformation, which Rae identifies as the “fundamental principle of the anti-elegy”: it could be “the “failed” mourner,” she notes, “who will ‘succeed’” (“Modernist Mourning” 19).

and bloodied bodies of dead soldiers in poetry like that of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon might be an effective way of disclosing the hidden realities of battle, these texts still do display a horrific site of injury that could potentially spark the desire for consolatory repair rather than systematic change. As Patricia Rae notes, the “anti-elegies” of Owen and Sassoon work by

“questioning nationalistic and imperialistic justifications for war” and “take aim not only at consolatory words, but at the individuals, institutions, and public rituals deploying them”

(“Between” 311). Despite what Rae identifies as the revolutionary intent of resistant mourning, though, I acknowledge the nature of public “questioning” as a matter of reception and maintain that highlighting death upon a communal level might initiate its opposite, and more conservative, response. Historians such as Jay Winter remark upon the “backward gaze of so many writers, artists, politicians and everyday families” in the post-World War One period who used “A complex traditional vocabulary of mourning … largely because it helped mediate bereavement”

(p. 223). Loss during the post-war years was a pervasive condition among European people and their cultures. While it certainly did trigger avant-garde responses in literature, the adverse effect still held true and often initiated a nostalgic desire for normalcy.38 We should also note that, while the global west widely reads the “anti-elegiac” poetry of writers such as Owen and

38 Elizabeth Marshland notes the “limited scope” of experimental writers in this period, defining the protest poetry of men such as Sassoon and Owen as “miniature” compared to the “mass appeal” of patriotic art forms (189-90). Likewise, Jay Winter argues that “the rupture of 1914-18 was much less complete than previous scholars have suggested” and characterizes the post-war years as an “ongoing dialogue and exchange…between those [artists] who self-consciously returned to nineteenth-century forms and themes and those who sought to supersede them” (Sites 3). Samuel Hynes similarly notes that “It is not true…that a general wartime enthusiasm for war and its values was overwhelmed and replaced at the war’s end by a total disillusionment that informs and defines English culture of the Twenties” (283). Rather, Hynes argues that both “a conservative culture that clung to and asserted traditional values, and a counter-culture, rooted in rejection of the war and its principles” existed simultaneously during the interwar period (283). See also Richard Wall and Jay Winter’s argument that “the full effect of the war was to restore pre-war social forms rather than to undermine them” (4). Their account of the War as “more a conservative rather than a revolutionary force” (4) echoes Arthur Marwick’s argument that post-War social “change” in British society occurred primarily “within” (33) the boundaries of a traditional social framework: “while society had changed, the State had not” (350). 86

Sassoon, these countries are yet to abandon war as a form of foreign policy. Instead, Western governments have made the manner in which they eradicate antagonistic life more technologically efficient. With the advent of weapons of mass destruction and drone bombs, one might ask whether the twenty-first century world has simply replaced the methods of warfare that Owen and Sassoon condemn with those that abstract human labour from the place of its intended slaughter.

In response to the fraught issue of post-War mourning, then, Woolf highlights Jacob’s loss only so that she can imitate and expose how militaristic culture re-writes dead male bodies as a precondition of British war-making as well as its central flaw. Since Britain requires male death to sustain its aggressive political agendas, elegiac art addresses the glaring contradiction of needing to repeatedly sacrifice the country’s cherished men to the gunfire of the battlefield.

Pierre Macherey and Étienne Balibar’s theory of textual “presentation as solution” (Macherey and Balibar’s italics, 8) aids this chapter’s account of the elegy as an ideological tool in that the patriotic or heroic nature of this type of literature “solves” the issue of a soldier’s death as an insurmountable glitch within Britain’s structural networks of male privilege. As a pre-existing literary form, the post-War elegy answers this trauma in advance and assists what Foucault calls the “production of discourse” through “exclusion” or “prohibition” (“Order” 52) when it routinely precludes the gruesome truths about war such as the horrors of the Western Front. The elegy as a textual memorial diminishes the extent to which civilians suffer the psychological aftereffects of losing their loved ones to war and discourages these mourners from scrutinizing one of the country’s foremost methods of foreign diplomacy. Jacob’s Room asserts that young men like Jacob not only provide the manpower for battle but are also sites of potential bereavement, where elegies will arise to later justify these sacrifices. Woolf reveals how male

death provides the impetus for a production of culture that defends men’s loss and emerges exactly where the political machinery of Western democracy horrifically fails. As an indicator of the novel’s feminist-pacifist technique, Jacob’s Room unmasks this failure to reveal a new source of creativity that emerging thinkers and artists can appropriate once they refuse to

(re)produce in their work an ideological “solution” (Macherey and Balibar 8) for the faulty practices of Britain’s militaristic leadership.

“Meagre Objects”: Tradition and the Masculine Talent

Jacob’s Room does not hold a typically “anti-elegiac” attitude towards its protagonist’s death because his loss is not Woolf’s main concern. Rather, the novel highlights the need for a feminist creator whose agency emerges after she refuses to obfuscate the casualties of militarism.

My analysis of the novel thus distinguishes between loss as a temporal entity like Jacob the dead soldier and absence as a lacking yet potential feature of British culture like modernist-feminist artistry. As Dominic LaCapra argues, the idea of loss includes persons or situations that “are specific and involve particular events, such as the deaths of loved ones on a personal or on a broader scale” (p. 700). In contrast, LaCapra establishes absence as a “transhistorical” phenomenon that “does not imply tenses (past, present, future)” (700), which he associates with

“ultimate foundations in general, notably to metaphysical grounds” (701). LaCapra follows

Freud in establishing absence as a primary condition of human development, where, according to

LaCapra, children imagine the lack of the maternal phallus as a kind of castration that they overcome after they adopt “(the name of) the father and the institution of the symbolic” (703).

Though invested in a phallocentric framework, LaCapra differentiates between these pre- and

post-symbolic states of being to recommend that communities who are healing from trauma preserve the specified and historical dimensions of loss. If a society were to conflate historical loss with absence, LaCapra contends, this society would also mourn a state of idealized, pre- symbolic wholeness that they never actually experienced in tangible form.39 LaCapra finds this kind of situation troubling because he believes it warrants a kind of melancholic extremism, where the lack of an imagined person, ideal, or event is “absolutized and fetishized such that it becomes an object of fixation and absorbs, mystifies, or downgrades the significance of particular historical losses” (702). What Derrida calls the ethical force behind traumatic

“incorporation,” LaCapra would associate with a melancholic denial of social progress, where people do not strive to eliminate trauma from their communities but, instead, accept it as an enduring feature of their personal and political identities. For LaCapra, to render traumatic loss timeless is to make it a permanent and therefore structural feature of one’s existence, which normalizes its effects while deterring people from avoiding similar losses in the future.

Although LaCapra’s theory helps traumatized societies avoid “the typical projection of blame for a putative loss onto identifiable others” (707), the main drawback of his argument is that he evacuates transformational power from his idea of absence. Since LaCapra bases his account of social reality upon a “metaphysical” core of symbolic castration, his theory overlooks the dialectical relationship between loss and absence as well as the feasibility that structural absence might be the cause of traumatic loss. I argue that absence occurs in war-driven

39 LaCapra provides the example of post-apartheid South Africa and post-Nazi Germany, arguing that these racially- fraught societies had to deal with loss without assuming “there was (or at least could be) some original unity, wholeness, security, or identity which others have ruined, polluted, or contaminated and thus made ‘us’ lose” (707). To avoid this kind of political scapegoating, he argues that traumatized societies should always deal with loss temporally; that is, they should respond to “specific” and “particular” events by reactivating, reconfiguring or transforming them “in the present or future” (700) but without assuming a state of “transhistorical” or mythical social completeness. 89

jurisdictions like those of Jacob’s Britain when militaristic culture ousts from public intelligibility all agencies or beliefs that are incongruous with its belligerent political aims. For this reason, I ask whether marginalized figures such as pacifist-feminist thinkers might undermine the re-emergence of militaristic struggles by refusing to repair the losses that modern warfare persistently generates. Across Woolf’s work, I do not see absence as something imprisoned within a “metaphysical” realm beyond the bounds of human activity but a very real source of artistic potential, one that newly-empowered producers can use to devise more ethical visions of public life. I interpret Jacob’s Room in this way to show how societies that are repeatedly traumatized by wartime loss can ask whether a new, yet currently absent, value system might combat the cause of these fatalities. Rather than adopt “successful” mourning and reactivate soldiers’ deaths in the present through commemoration, the methodology I am describing here challenges war by exposing the reality of avoidable injury across modern nations and their male-privileging, yet paradoxically male-sacrificing, diplomatic protocols.

In Jacob’s Room, Woolf feminizes the novel’s absent voice from the outset in her portrayal of Jacob’s mother, Betty Flanders. At this early stage of the novel, Betty is writing a letter to Captain Barfoot in Scarborough whose contents suggest retreat: “there was nothing for it but to leave” (3). While Jacob is still a young boy at this point, Betty’s letter resonates with symbolic meaning on the need for a pacifist figure who is able to discourage men from engaging in their hostile advances across the European continent. The destination of Betty’s letter confirms this idea of retreat because, as Masami Usui argues, it refers to the Raid of Scarborough in 1914: the first German attack on the Home Front that killed 122 civilians.40 After the allied defeat during this attack, as Julia Briggs notes, propaganda posters in Britain presented women as either

40 See Masami Usui, “The German Raid on Scarborough.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany, vol. 35, no. 7, 1990, p. 7. 90

helpless victims of the offence or Britannica figures driving men towards the front (p. 84) (see figures one and two). Since Betty plans to send her note to the naval captain Barfoot, it exudes a sense of withdrawal by asking men to “leave” scenes of warfare rather than heroically march towards them. The date of Betty’s letter— “the third of September” (3)—is also of historical significance and refers to the day when Leefe Robinson shot down the first German airship over

British soil in 1916. Afterwards, the government utilized this event in various “souvenirs” such

Figure 1. Lucy Kemp-Welch, “Remember Figure 2. Unknown artist, “Men of Britain! Scarborough” (1915). The Imperial War Will You Stand for This? (1915). The Museum. Imperial War Museum.

as handkerchiefs (see figure three) to ignite morale and public support for the war effort. Betty’s letter thus illustrates how Britain’s propaganda machine converts female casualties into

Figure 3. S. Burgess, commemorative souvenir (1916). Dated Sunday Sept. 3rd 1916 with “Thanks of Every Woman and Child in England.” The Imperial War Museum. ideological fuel for activating male heroism while also entangling civilian women in the ongoing violence of battle. Although Betty’s message suggests retreat, combative British society renders her symbolic gesture towards peace utterly futile. As little more than a pawn in the masculine game of war, Betty signals the need for a pacifist agency with complete severance from militarism and its violent aftereffects: a figure whose difference empowers her once Britain relinquishes its need for feminine rallying cries as both the impetus and remedy of men’s aggression.

Indeed, in this opening scene, Woolf presents Betty in a pre-emptive state of mourning, 92

with her tears erasing the words upon her letter: “pale blue ink dissolved the full stop; for there her pen stuck” (3). In a tragically circular motion, Betty will use the same handkerchief that celebrates militaristic victory to wipe away the tears caused by militaristic failure. Her creative act is hopelessly “stuck” because the prevailing culture at this time dissipates any ideas that undercut its central wartime aims. When she rises to post her letter, the artist Charles Steele, who is painting Betty as a feature of his landscape, aggressively berates her for rising: “Here was that woman moving, actually going to get up—confound her” (4). When Betty moves outside of a narrative scene that paints her solely as a grieving mother, she becomes an absence within the masculine outlook that recognizes her only in terms of a mournful and passively static femininity. As a figure who can only react to male loss but not counteract it, Betty demonstrates how society’s ability to prevent the mass extinction of life during war is contingent upon a voice that, rather than retroactively pursue dead male bodies through acts of grief, can ask why this politically-authorized death must occur in the first place. Britain’s patriarchal social economy binds Betty’s identity to its self-induced sources of loss, whether that be her missing children or a phallic command of LaCapra’s androcentric “institution of the symbolic,” and so disempowers her from any kind of truly generative endeavour. As a woman, Betty’s role is to reinforce the status quo by raising men like Jacob and Archer—those who will later serve the combative nation-state—and then grieve when war violently takes these lives away.

By presenting Betty as a nurturing yet ultimately powerless voice of difference, Jacob’s

Room expresses a certain ambivalence towards the female-led peace movements that were arising in Britain at this time. While organizations like the Women’s International League for

Peace and Freedom condemned the horrors of World War One, the proponents of these movements also tied their activism to traditional ideals of femininity that placed women’s

supposedly innate maternal instincts at the core of human care and protectionism. As Jill

Liddington notes, the War and its immediate aftermath intensified a traditional, quasi-Victorian

“strand” of “maternalist feminism” that recommended women “undertake quiet peace propaganda, particularly through their influence as mothers within their own domestic sphere”

(Liddington’s italics, 6). Several prominent thinkers emerged out of this movement, each one reiterating the belief that women should participate in public affairs due to their proclivity towards human nurturance as mothers. In An Address to the Mothers of Men and Militarism

(1915), for instance, Frances Hallowes corroborates Liddington’s account of maternalist- pacifism when she insists that women “realize deeply the worth and preciousness of life” (47) and must serve humanity under this guise as “women doctors, nurses, teachers and social workers” (69). Hallowes asks women to fully embrace their maternal instincts and use them to develop what Catherine Marshall called in 1915 feminine “habits of mind” that might “help

[mothers] to build up a better system of international relations” (111). In more recent feminist theory, too, maternal activism continues to inform female-penned reactions to war. Most notable is Sara Ruddick’s emphasis upon the “conventional and symbolic association” of maternity as

“incompatible with military strategy but consonant with pacifist commitment to non-violence”

(“Preservative” 116). The World-War One campaigns of Hallowes and Marshall epitomize what

Ruddick refers to as “strategies of protection, nurturance, and training” as “a distinct discipline”

(Maternal 23-4) that counters patriarchal leanings towards globalized aggression and violence.

Though a more contemporary version of pacifism, Ruddick does not completely sever women’s anti-war activism from a biologically-defined model of mothering. While both men and women can share her “distinct discipline” of conserving life, Ruddick presents this activity by shifting a traditionally-conceived feminine role onto men, which, problematically, discounts the possibility

of peacefulness in masculinity or fatherhood. Instead, Ruddick sees men as inherently deficient and suggests that they must “borrow” qualities of nurturance from their female companions. In

Ruddick’s view, the bodies who perform maternal care may change, but her gender-infused vocabulary of peacefulness does not. Ruddick’s concept of protective motherhood is a feminized duty that women must refine, and men impersonate, as a defining feature of their pacifist advocacy.

In contrast, although Woolf creates male and female characters with seemingly binarized personality traits, she sees these attributes as largely the result of socioeconomic divides such as women’s inability to manage, enter, or train within the public-sphere. As the women in “A

Society” indicate, femininity in Woolf’s work is not something that is intrinsically incapable of operating within Britain’s existing institutions nor unable to understand how these systems function. Rather, femininity for Woolf represented a socially-constructed force of difference due to its long-held absence from influencing governmental policy. I do not mean to suggest that women like Betty Flanders possess an embodied ability to resist war. Instead, I highlight through

Betty an overlooked point of view that might rectify the dangerous male-female imbalance within global politics of the interwar years.41 Indeed, at the novel’s opening, Archer also demonstrates a proclivity towards care when it is he who dolefully searches for Jacob as a young boy on the beach. Wider British society, though, dictates that he and his brother must later suppress any kind of nurturing instinct when they come to “cultivate their intellects” for aggressive public-sphere activity. By refusing to offer Betty’s motherhood in itself as an

41 Woolf’s comment in A Room of One’s Own highlights her view on this issue: “The most transient visitor to this planet…could not fail to be aware…that England is under the rule of a patriarchy. Nobody in their sense could fail to detect the dominance of the professor. His was the power and the money and the influence. He was the proprietor of the paper and its editor and sub-editor. He was the Foreign Secretary and the Judge…With the exception of the fog he seemed to control everything” (43). 95

effective response to war, Jacob’s Room critiques a theory of pacifism that sees generic

“woman” as preservative and protective by virtue of their status as potential mothers. Not only does this inference overlook the fact that many mothers across history have actually spoken out in support of war,42 it also does little to challenge male aggression but simply establishes it as one side of an essentializing human coin. If maternalist-pacifist dialogue installs women as more peaceful due to their reproductive capabilities, it simultaneously chains women onto male loss and implants both sexes in a destruction-reconstruction continuum that fails to address the causes of wartime death. Moreover, as Chapter Three of this dissertation explores at length, maternalist- pacifist thought risks establishing a value system that discriminatively protects one’s own bloodline. The reliance of Ruddick’s theory on Western kinship norms potentially overlooks the plight of racialized others and might even reinforce the very exclusionary nationalism that anti- war advocacy should oppose.43

Though British women at this time did not generally form LaCapra’s “specific” or

“particular” victims of the War, Woolf presents their absence as independent or empowered agents from Britain’s ideological machinery as a major reason why militarism continuously

42 The British government and its centralized propaganda office at Wellington House often used motherhood both culturally and politically in recruitment posters and atrocity reports to sustain and motivate the War. As Susan Grayzel notes, maternal imagery within wartime propaganda augmented the image of “women as the nation”: female figures as “suffering” and “pure” symbols of home yet also “passive, ultimately sacrificial victims…. being fought to protect and preserve” (Grayzel, Identities 85). Though this male-constructed image of femininity as a site of “national honor” (Grayzel, Identities 52) often undermined women’s agency by rendering them propaganda pieces in themselves, it is still possible for historians and cultural critics to counter what Nicoletta Gullace calls “the much-celebrated history of feminist pacifism” (179) because of British mothers’ roles in sustaining the war effort by persuading their sons and husbands to enlist. 43 Ruddick’s theory of maternalist-feminism has not gone without attracting dissent. Nira Yuval Davis, for instance, recognizes an “essentialist tinge” in Ruddick’s work and critiques her “attachment of life preservation to the kinship system” (185). Jean Keller shares Yuval Davis’ concerns by noting “a latent ethnocentrism” in Ruddick’s work where, the white American mother stands in for “mothers in general” (834). More recent additions to maternalist- feminist thought address the shortcomings of Ruddick’s work. Most notable is Andrea O’Reilly’s edited collection on Mothers, Mothering and Motherhood Across Cultural Differences (2014), which seeks “to demonstrate and celebrate the diversity of mothers and mothering that are denied in, and by, normative images and narratives of ‘good’ motherhood” (2). 96

organizes the country’s diplomatic policies. Woolf exposes absence in Jacob’s Room not as a permanent state of lack but a form of withheld political capacity, one that underlies the novel’s male-commanded sociocultural canvas and how its binarized gender economy moulds female identity into a purely supplementary wartime role. While Woolf paints Betty Flanders as little more than an embodiment of female nurturance who is “stuck” in a tragically circular relationship with her son’s death, she does so to highlight a nascent feminine identity: a different ideological voice that Britain’s men of war disregard in order to control the country’s political course. In what Butler identifies as a “future for genders that do not yet exist” because “they have not yet been admitted into the terms that govern reality” (Undoing 219), Betty Flanders is a figure of pacifist ability but an agency whom Britain’s male-privileging conventions of education and professional development are yet to foster into a viable persona. Betty’s presence in the novel as little more than Jacob’s tearful mother advances Woolf’s vision of an inaugural feminist and artistic futurity: a vacant yet potential ability for women to devise a unique ideological protocol that currently exists beyond Britain’s unequal norms of gendered productivity.

In overwriting Betty’s agency with her son’s posthumous narrative, Jacob’s Room mimics the role of literature as an ideological mechanism that often augments Britain’s male- captained social experience. Like the narrator in “Phyllis and Rosamond,” who composes a fictive cage that ultimately fails to contain the two sisters, Woolf identifies the restrictive way in which men circumscribe existence in Jacob’s Room when Jacob’s friend Timmy Durrant bemoans the severely limited scope and contour of “the world shown to him at lunch time” in

Shaw and Wells’ “serious sixpenny weeklies” (43). Durrant critiques these “elderly” authors who write about a “world capable of existing” yet do so in a reductionist and selective manner: he describes them as “scrubbing and demolishing” in their work and then offering their readers

nothing more than a “meagre object” (43-4). To adopt Jameson’s analogy of the writer-as- sculptor, Wells and Shaw represent the authority figures who create the literary forms that mediate how a reader understands their relationship between “private and public, between individual and socio-economic realities, between the existential and history itself” (Marxism

406). For Jameson, these content-makers work like sculptors to produce an account of existence that is the “place of the concrete,” where they selectively “remove all extraneous portions” of representation that do not fit within the context of their preferred ideological beliefs (Marxism

406, 404). Jameson’s metaphor is useful to place here because it describes how censorship or absent literary techniques often repress content that might transform how a reader comprehends of their lived environment.44 In Jacob’s Room, Durrant’s idea of the Edwardian six-penny

“world” as a “meagre object” reflects a similar view of life as a demarcated, material thing that emerges only after a prior act of textual delineation. For Durrant, the literature that these authors write applies a “black outline upon what we are; upon the reality” (30). Shaw and Wells’s books negotiate how readers approach non-textual exteriority by omitting subject matter that is incompatible within their text’s framing “black outline” and patriarchal “reality” at large. To borrow again from Jameson, even before the sculptor starts “carving” out his text, it is “already in the marble block” though as content that the writer has not yet shaped into a particular narrative (Marxism 404). The “serious” British writer chips away at the external world in its totality and ends up with a finite worldview, one that Jacob’s Room presents as supportive of militarism because its “black outline” excludes all ideas that contradict how this culture destructively rewrites itself.

44 As Jameson remarks in The Political Unconsciousness (1981), literature often presents “the illusion or appearance of isolation or autonomy” by rendering opposing literary voices “stifled and reduced to silence, marginalized, [their] own utterances scattered to the winds” (71). 98

In his later job as a civil servant, Durrant seemingly meets his fate when he becomes one of these privileged male producers, yet in a role that Woolf declares to be as restrictive as the ideological products that these men create. The narrator groups him among the “bald, red-veined, hollow-looking” heads at Whitehall who, “with fixed marble eyes and an air of immortal quiescence … decreed that the course of history should shape itself this way or that” (169).

Whitehall’s self-serving masculine ideals restrict these statue-like officials to a severely narrow standpoint, their sights “fixed” upon creating a route for the country that unfurls only within the scope of these same myopic eyelines. Woolf fixes both sculptor and sculpture in marble to show how these men formulate an idea about British life that supports a severely exclusionary, pre- defined outlook. Intrinsic to the masculine point of view are self-imposed blind spots that preserve Britain’s resolute historical fiction by overlooking or de-textualizing alternative ways that people might perceive the modern world. Jacob’s Room upholds these omissions as sites of female censorship but then undermines the permanence of these absences when they become unexplored creative territory that male content makers simply do not incorporate into their fixed

“meagre objects.” Beyond the male-determined “course of history” is an alternative social route that the “hollow-looking” men of British authority choose to foreclose. Likewise, beyond

Britain’s “meagre” literary tradition lies an expansive modernist-feminist technique that women writers can use to transform modern art and its ability to re-determine a viewer’s understanding of the post-War world.

During the Greece episodes of Jacob’s Room, Woolf uses classicism to symbolize the malleable nature of Europe’s largely male-defined artistic tradition. Critics tend to agree with

Angeliki Spiropolou’s appraisal of this part of Jacob’s life as a “problematization” of Greek culture and its “implication in the perpetuation of traditional power hierarchies, be that gender,

class, intellectual, institutional or imperial” (62).45 To add to Spiropolou’s observation, the narrator challenges these principles when she describes the ancient ruins as monuments that modern viewers can reassess in the changing present. Although the Greek ruins stand with

“extreme definiteness,” they sporadically change colour under variable light to become sometimes “a brilliant white, again yellow, and in some lights red” (143). The narrator does not fix classical tradition within an unapproachable past but exemplifies its spillover into the present, which enables the current-day onlooker to alter how they understand cultural history with the help of modernity’s new “lights” of critical inquiry. The Greece sections of the novel thus imply that people approach the meaning of art depending upon the shifting historical context that surrounds it. In this way, Jacob’s Room shares T. S. Eliot’s account of tradition as a collection of

“existing monuments” that “form an ideal order among themselves” but are “modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them” (368). For Eliot, artists can

“alter” tradition when they introduce their work alongside this “ideal order” and, in doing so, readjust “the relations, proportions, values of each work of art towards the whole” (368). At a similar point during the Greece chapter of Jacob’s Room, the Parthenon rests in “silent composure” while “new love songs [rasp] out to the strum of guitar and gramophone” and surround it with altered contextual overtones (144). The Parthenon remains an objective presence while more recent art forms expand and alter the creative terrain within which this piece of

45 While Spiropoulou argues that masculine Greek values of the past “are largely responsible for what is wrong with the present” (62), Christine Froula connects this part of the novel to “the violent conflicts of ancient Troy and contemporary Europe” by identifying “the shaping influence of the classical heritage or ‘Greek myth’ inculcated in public-school English boys from childhood” (64). Most discussions of the novel thus form a critical link between ancient Greek culture and modern European warfare. Emily Delgarno, for instance, argues that “The war in which Jacob dies is an event prepared by an education which teaches young men a destructive myth about their relationship to ancient Greece,” one “compounded by their relative ignorance of Greek texts” (56). She sees this cult of destructive masculinity as founded upon the suppression of women: “The myth of Greece that celebrates ‘manly beauty’ in effect segregates men from women, who remain in Woolf’s figuration the outsiders” (57). 100

classical civilization stands. Woolf thus introduces in her image of the Parthenon an empowering idea of artistic reform, where the always-evolving practices of analytical judgement privilege and surpass the historical definitiveness of the monument itself. Like Walter Benjamin’s theory of modernist art as a medium that can turn “spectators into collaborators,” inducing them to

“produce” meaning along with the artist (“Author” 777), Woolf characterizes her audience as active participants in an artistic heritage with volatile form and significance. Important for the claims of this chapter, the Greece episodes of Jacob’s Room invite Woolf’s readerly

“collaborators” to undermine the fixed nature of Jameson’s “marble block” and then adopt what

European culture usually suppresses as the source of their creative inspiration.

An artist’s ability to readjust an existing cultural tradition fortifies how Woolf conceives of the transformative power of emerging modernist-feminist production. In contrast to the violent overtones of male productivity when it uses art to supplement war, Woolf empowers women to modify Britain’s faulty artistic practices like militaristic commemoration in order to materialize the ideals or aesthetics that these customs usually render absent.46 Jacob himself acknowledges the incomplete nature of Western tradition when he calls the Greeks “sensible men” due to their reluctance “to finish the backs of their statues” (144). Though the Greeks might be “sensible” in finishing only those aspects of their work that are immediately discernible to the naked eye, the short-sightedness that they share with the “fixed marble eyes” of Whitehall leaves a leftover surplus of marble that is not yet sculpted. In this image of a hidden artistic posterior, the novel

46 Though Gilbert and Gubar critique Eliot’s vision as “a reaction-formation against the rise of literary women” (156), their reduction of Eliot’s essay to rigid binaries of tradition and modernity, male and female artistry largely overlooks the feminist potential that arises from viewing these notions as complementary or two sides of the same “monument.” As Jewel Spears Brooker explains, Eliot’s view of tradition in fact rejects binaries and focuses on “the past and present together, of the timeless and the temporal together” (220). In her feminist interpretation of Eliot’s essay, Spears Brooker argues that Eliot expresses a “respect for the past” but “consistently makes the present his point of reference” in a manner that “authorizes and empowers the newcomer, male or female” (223). 101

flags an aspect of reality that the “sensible men” of Europe have not yet carved into form and thus survives as an ever-present source of creative potential for modernist women to secure.

Jacob observes when he looks upon these statues that preceding “carving” rituals have left a margin of deficiency because “the side of the figure which is turned away from view is left in the rough” (144). Although the past that Jacob identifies here is predominantly male-defined, he licenses emerging thinkers to re-interrogate an ongoing Western tradition that often endangers his life. As Juliet Dusinberre suggests in her analysis of Woolf and Eliot, Jacob’s Room establishes in this instance “a lucid interaction between the voices of the past and the individual poet in the present” to discover “a tradition that might belong to women” (5). The novel does not absent this past like LaCapra’s claims for a “metaphysical” foundation of reality but instead presents it as one trapped in a state of deferred inception. Jacob’s Room shows how male- commanded ideologies maintain pre-eminence merely by obfuscating artists who refuse to reproduce consolatory worldviews in their work along with the masking effects of the commemorative text-as-corpus. By highlighting the capacity for absent feminine “sculptors,” though, the novel discloses room at the margins of Jacob’s textual Room where figures like Betty

Flanders or Fanny Elmer might operate. The novel potentializes a future for women writers where they can use modernist forms to profoundly alter how their public perceives of the fraught relationship between public and private, collective and personal, textual and non-textual realities within post-War Britain.

As the novel ends, however, Jacob’s Room leaves this future undisclosed for its readers themselves to consider. After Jacob’s pre-empted death, his friend Bonamy occupies Jacob’s now uninhabited room and marvels at the “confusion” that he sees (247). At this final stage of the story, Bonamy represents an agency whom the novel tasks with reorganizing the chaotic

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mess of post-War society, a role that he epitomizes by standing between two potential directions.

He places himself in “the middle of Jacob’s room” and looks out of the window on one side at a scene of failure or futility beyond: “The omnibuses were locked together at Mudie’s corner.

Engines throbbed, and carters, jamming the breaks down, pulled their horses up” (247). Like

Durrant’s “black outline” that limits how people understand reality to a fixed “meagre object,”

Jacob’s window directs Bonamy’s gaze onto the stasis and deadlock of the War’s aftermath.47

The stationary traffic on the street below symbolizes how the War has interfered with the “oars” that usually drive Western culture, which Woolf evokes in this scene through the image of a civil transportation that an “impassive policeman at Ludgate Circus” rigidly controls (216). The horrors of World War One have severely undermined the progress of British life. Now, the country has the option of either resuming the flow of its dealings as normal or diverting its traffic down an alternative route. Woolf mirrors the novel’s opening and introduces this possible detour through the figure of Betty Flanders. On the other side of the room, and in marked contrast to the stationary vehicles outside, Betty suddenly “bursts” into the text and leaves Jacob’s bedroom door open in the process (247). Betty’s momentous entry into this male-centred setting provokes

Bonamy to turn away from the window, along with the impasse that it frames, and towards the doorway that she has newly revealed. Betty holds “out a pair of Jacob’s old shoes” (247) and establishes the possibility for a new turning that can lead Britain along an unfamiliar path. By taking possession of her son’s footwear as the novel ends, Betty offers Bonamy the ability to step away from Jacob’s now forgone pursuits and approach an unknown future of female direction on

47 The narrator’s reference to Charles Edward Mudie here reinforces this suggestion, with Mudie’s circulating library representing for Woolf all that was irksome about “elderly” Victorian men of letters and the unshakable grasp they held over the public dissemination of literature. As Michael Whitworth notes, Woolf “loathed the library and all it stood for” (79). As Woolf recorded in her diary and personal correspondence, the content of Mudie’s circulating library tended to be a “mass of sweet sensation warranted not about the war…a sort of pap-slop…made digestible and sweet for invalids” (quoted in Whitworth 79). 103

the other side of her son’s textual walls. The finale of the novel is not so much about the sudden impact of Jacob’s loss, as Booth suggests, but the vacant passage that has appeared after his death. As a site of potential change, Betty’s doorway invites readers to leave Jacob’s room, forgo the comforting desire to commemoratively reorder this place, and instead explore the unwritten space that lies on the other side of this departure.

Nevertheless, even though Betty’s entry into Jacob’s room unveils an important source of female potential, she seeks Bonamy’s support in her act of leadership: “What am I to do with these,” she asks him while holding out the shoes (247). While Betty’s question sheds her voice of authority, she creates in the process a crucial moment of change, where Bonamy as a stand-in for the reader can decide for himself the route that his as-yet-unknown post-War journey will take.

The progress that Betty proposes must be undetermined in nature because it strays from all known patriarchal conventions and paths. Although I find compelling Haggerty’s claim that this moment in the story introduces the prospect for post-War “reconciliation” and “puts [readers] in a position to be able to begin that process,” I uphold that this procedure need not centre upon what Haggerty sees as “the enormity” of Jacob’s demise (63). Haggerty remarks that “Betty

Flanders turns with [Jacob’s shoes] to Bonamy because she seems to understand what friendship means for her son,” which I see as a too-regressive way of approaching the novel’s ending (63).

Instead, I recommend that we move our attention away from the doleful undoing of this homosocial companionship and onto the third figure of Betty Flanders. As the novel itself indicates in its extended critique of the failures of male idolatry, Betty provides a far more radical vision of an effective social futurity and one that need not fall back upon an elegiac longing for male communality. After all, it is not Betty who “turns” here but Bonamy. Betty presents Bonamy with the choice of either facing the sterile, gridlocked streets outside or

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embracing the alternative option of an elusively unanswered question. Importantly, Betty’s female-voiced enquiry into war indicates Woolf’s larger intent of transforming her readers into

Benjamin’s “collaborators” with the ability to imagine new possibilities for the world they occupy. As Christine Froula notes of the novel’s finale, although Woolf “strategically [shatters] any illusion of narrative omniscience” she does so to invite “engaged, writerly reading” (75). As with Jacob’s bedroom door, Woolf leaves the future of her text “open” for readers themselves to

“write.” Critics can thus expand upon the “reconciliation” that Haggerty mentions in this final scene to account for a reformed relationship not only between Bonamy and Jacob but among a much wider, extratextual network of author and reader, man and woman, text and world. While

Woolf highlights through Betty an alternative course for post-War Britain to take, it is the task of those reading the novel to devise for themselves how emerging feminist voices like Betty’s might provide an effective solution for the ongoing issue of violence against humanity.

Compliant Reproduction: “Character in Fiction” and “The Sentimental Journey”

By leaving the potential remedy for militarism “open” at the end of Jacob’s Room, Woolf asks her readers to work together with the text as a tool to negotiate a response to Betty

Flanders’s important question. The novel replaces the need for individual readers to extract a knowable solution for war with the demand for collaborative interpretation among a network of feminist-pacifist thinkers. To borrow from A Room of One’s Own, there is no “nugget of pure truth” (4) within the pages of Jacob’s Room but an ongoing call for intellectual thought and scrutiny. In what Sara Ahmed describes as a “struggle for more bearable worlds” (Living 1), the novel calls for a kind of labour on behalf of its readers that involves mental effort: it presents a

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“sweaty concept” about the world that purposefully withholds an easy, utopian fix for its problems (Ahmed, Living 13).48 By mirroring Ahmed’s technique, Woolf does not deprive her readers of their own critical mindsets nor divorce her narrative from the loss that European people at this time were still processing. Instead, Woolf asks her public to embark on

“strenuous” or “trying” intellectual work (Ahmed, Living 13) and produce their own analytical response to post-War reality in its flawed form. Woolf offers Jacob’s Room as a lens by which her readers can review, interrogate, and then perhaps even challenge how the “fixed marble eyes” of patriarchal authority usually formulate British culture. Though the detached, ironic tone of Woolf’s work might withhold a recognizable account of interwar life, it is by disengaging from realism that Jacob’s Room encourages British people to reconsider their allegiances to the country’s prevailing institutions and customs like the military. As a defining feature of her modernist politics, Woolf alienates her public from the commemorative militarism that her work examines and does so as a means of encouraging them to conceptualize an alternative and more peaceful post-War way of life.

Woolf explains her defamiliarizing approach towards literature in her essay “Character in

Fiction” (1924) when defending Jacob’s Room against the techniques of Edwardian novelists like Arnold Bennett.49 In “Character in Fiction,” Woolf critiques Bennett’s style of

48 Ahmed proclaims that the real job of the feminist intellectual is to describe the burdening feeling of the body as a social outsider. For Ahmed, the physical experience of nonconformity is often what allows people to generate most knowledge about the world they inhabit. Ahmed argues that “A sweaty concept might come out of a bodily experience that is trying,” but recommends that feminist thinkers should “stay with the difficulty, to keep exploring and exposing this difficulty” and challenge the universality of masculinist and heteronormative constructs of being (13). 49 This essay is a longer version of “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” which Woolf wrote as a response to Arnold Bennett’s critique of her method of characterization in Jacob’s Room. “Character in Fiction” was first published in a July 1924 edition of The Criterion. As Julia Briggs notes, the essay began as a paper Woolf delivered to the “Cambridge Heretics” on 18 May 1924 (124-5). Briggs confirms that many contemporary reviewers found Woolf’s deliberately ruptured text offensive and jarring. For instance, The Daily News called the novel “very pretentious and very cheap,” and The Pall Mall Gazette argued that it lacked any “perceptible development of any kind” (quoted in Briggs108). The New Age dismissed the novel as “little flurries of prose poetry [which] do not make art of this rag- 106

characterization in his novel Hilda Lessways (1911), where, according to Woolf, Bennett attempts to make his readers “believe in the reality of Hilda” simply by “describing accurately and minutely the sort of house [she] lived in, and the sort of house she saw from the window”

(48). Like the deadlocked view of London that Bonamy sees from Jacob’s bedroom, Woolf notices a fault in how Bennett presents Hilda’s life not by examining her inner consciousness but by listing a meticulous description of the scenery that lies beyond her home. In contrast to

Bennett’s materialist approach towards literature, the narrator of “Character in Fiction” describes the subject of her own essay—a fictional stranger called Mrs. Brown whom she watches in a train carriage—with “Myriads of irrelevant and incongruous ideas” that “tumble” onto her page in a “pell-mell” fashion like “a draught or a smell of burning” (49). Echoing Fanny Elmer’s view of Jacob as someone who “seems to be set in smoke,” Woolf does not stabilize human character in her essay but instead strives to capture the authentic yet ungraspable complexity of modern life and experience. The narrator’s view of Mrs. Brown is complex, unfathomable, and fleeting:

“I had no time to explain why I felt it was somewhat tragic, heroic, yet with a dash of the flighting, and fantastic, before the train stopped, and I watched her disappear, carrying her bag, into the vast blazing station” (42). The narrator lists fragmented glimmers of Mrs. Brown’s life to emphasize her authorial viewpoint not as a reconstructive architect of stable realities but an impressionistic perceiver: someone who reorganizes her uncoordinated sense-data into an unsystematised mosaic of self and being. While writers like Bennett might find the narrator’s transient ideas about Mrs. Brown unstable and incoherent, they make up Woolf’s vision of

bag of impressions” (quoted in Briggs 108). Bennett’s review of Jacob’s Room in a March 1923 article entitled “Is the Novel Decaying?” was most scathing. In particular, he isolated Woolf’s inability to write character by complaining that they “do not vitally survive in the mind” (quoted in Briggs 108).

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human life as an assemblage of sensory particles that exceed the Edwardians’ preference for narrow materialism. The essay thus defends modernist experiments with form by describing an aesthetic that liberates the author’s mind and style from a dated, bricks and mortar realism. As a component of her elegiac style, Woolf embraces the loss of the Edwardian method along with the framing “black outline” (Jacob’s Room 30) that she believed this kind of literature often imposed upon a reader’s understanding of modernity. By rejecting Bennett’s stabilizing techniques,

“Character in Fiction” directs its readers to find meaning in the “incongruous ideas” that resist

Britain’s lingering Edwardian traditions and, through this process, uncover transformative ways for them to perceive of the post-War world.

Both “Character in Fiction” and Jacob’s Room thus challenge Georg Lukács assumption in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1958) that modernist aesthetics diminish the opportunity for political change because, Lukács asserts, they fail to exemplify a positive connection between material reality and a person’s subjectivity. Lukács renounces modernist writers due to what he sees as their preference for “man’s inwardness” and “the ‘bad infinity’ of purely abstract potentialities,” which, he contends, these writers emphasize at the expense of recording “actual human persons inhabiting a palpable, identifiable world” (Meaning 24-5). For

Lukács, modernist writers like James Joyce uphold a dangerous ideology of historical stasis, where, as a shared feature of their style, they present their characters as disconnected from an objective reality that only exists through the solipsistic impressions of a solitary narrator.50

50 Lukács upholds the need for authors to prioritize a character’s sociohistorical environment and use this setting to demonstrate its capacity to effect individual or group betterment. For this reason, he would likely fault Woolf’s method of isolating her characters from wider society and framing post-War life with a sense of uncertainty, ominous progress, or unresolved trauma. Lukács epitomizes the modernist philosophy through Martin Heidegger’s concept of Geworfenheit ins Dasien, or “thrownness-into-being,” which Lukács defines as a theory that strips the “origin and goal” from human existence and reduces history to a static, metaphysical construct of the mind (Meaning 21). 108

Nevertheless, I would argue that the “incongruous” perspectives of Woolf’s narrators still carry political intent but by rejecting the notion that authors should enforce their view of an

“identifiable world” upon their compliant public. Woolf’s narrator in “Character in Fiction” corroborates this intent when she remarks: “But, I ask myself, what is reality? And who are the judges of reality? A character may be real to Mr. Bennett and quite unreal to me” (“Character”

43). By refusing to render Mrs. Brown fully “real,” “Character in Fiction” dispossesses literary realism of its ability to expound reality and so hinder a reader’s ability to draw their own assessments about post-War society. As a companion piece to Jacob’s Room, the essay’s defamiliarizing method reflects the elegiac yet scrutinizing tone of Woolf’s overall modernism, where, by welcoming the loss of ideological stability, Woolf divests interwar culture of its ability to encapsulate or atone for the profound complexities of modern existence. Indeed, by situating a member of the ruling class at the centre of Jacob’s Room but then ironically unmasking his death, Woolf shows how even the most powerful of social discourses cannot fully resolve the tragic expendability of the male body. Rather, as Woolf’s characterization of Betty Flanders implies, these discourses merely disempower agencies like feminist-pacifist thinkers from defining what constitutes the “identifiable world,” its militaristic protocols, and the accompanying need for an exploitable source of young men to later commemorate.

It should also be noted at this point that Lukács, as a Marxist critic, would also denounce

Woolf’s preference for a distinct yet satirical literary perspective that rarely departs from the upper-middle-class vantages of which she was personally acquainted. Readers will recall

Woolf’s portrayal of the “battered woman” in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), whom Peter Walsh perceives auricularly as “a frail quivering sound, a voice bubbling up without direction, vigour, beginning or end” (79), or the working-class children in The Years (1937), who sing

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“unintelligible words … so shrill, so discordant, and so meaningless” (408). However, although the way in which Woolf presents London’s poor in these examples may seem flat or even derogative, they represent the authentic markers of experience that Woolf and her more advantaged characters would come to understand of the class-segregated city at this time. As a woman of privilege, and someone who could only ever observe Britain’s working figures from an elite perspective, if Woolf were to render these unknown people textually “identifiable”

(Lukács, Meaning 25) she would only replay the very capture of human life that her work as a whole seeks to challenge. “Character in Fiction” respects the alterity of human otherness by rejecting a prying authorial viewpoint that can thoroughly know the inner lives of diverse individuals or appropriate their dialogue. As I contend in Chapter One, while Woolf recognized the trials and hardships of working-class people from an early age, it is also clear throughout her work that she did not wish to act as a mouthpiece for them in either a fictional or political capacity. My analysis throughout this chapter has flagged the pervasiveness of oppression based on class, gender, and nationality throughout Western society. Adhering to this claim, it would be inappropriate for Woolf to silence working class figures with her own voice and, in doing so, minimize their own opportunities for speech or politicization. As she proclaimed when addressing members of the National Society for Women's Service in 1931: “For the first time in history you are able to ask [questions]; for the first time you are able to decide for yourself what the answers should be” (“Professions” 145). Woolf does not voice imposing “answers” about issues that were beyond her chosen sphere of inquiry. Instead, the narrators in her work consistently tread close to the rooms of educated men—the very pinnacle of Britain’s hierarchical social arrangement—but use an ironic or scrutinizing tone to disempower these very spaces.

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As with the ending of Jacob’s Room, then, “Character in Fiction” carries political intent because it rejects the idea that writers should depict “a palpable, identifiable world” for their readers to digest with an uncritical ease. The essay’s main qualm with the Edwardian novel is due to its reliance upon sociohistorical realism, which the narrator implies when she asserts that readers of Bennett’s novel must “do something” in the world “outside” of his text like “join a society” or “write a cheque” in order to “complete” it (44). For the narrator of “Character in

Fiction,” since Bennett’s novel sustains such a genuine allegiance to the external world, readers must figurately subscribe to the institutions or customs that comprise this place. Instead of fostering a reader’s desire to interpret or even scrutinize their texts, Woolf contends that

Edwardian novelist like Bennett simply beg their readers to finish the final chapter and then continue on with their lives as normal: “the restlessness is laid, the book finished; it can be put on the shelf, and need never be read again” (44). The narrator’s account of the Edwardian tradition betrays a sense of readerly passivity, where, like the overlooked London waste of “Solid

Objects,” the text epitomizes everyday reality so closely that readers will eventually forget the book as nothing more than an inert remnant of the very environment it captures. As a result of

Bennett’s shallow Edwardian realism, Woolf suggests that readers become politically discharged: authors like Bennett accomplish everything within the text itself, which leaves their public with little desire to think about the wider social context that the book actually records.

While Woolf inspires social change in fiction like Jacob’s Room, she does so not by prescribing how this change should unfurl but through an indirect and satirical tone that minimizes her public’s conformity to Britain’s structural, and indeed her own, ideological biases. In a bid to transform her readers into Benjamin’s “collaborators,” Woolf asks her public to reassess the limits that patriarchal or militaristic culture often exerts upon human thought, life, and character.

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Jacob’s Room strives to promote this new readerly consciousness by flagging the traumatic losses of war that the period’s consolatory traditions masked or reinterpreted as a symbol of heroic male sacrifice.

In “Character in Fiction,” Woolf names Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-1767) as a forerunner of this particular method. Unlike Bennett’s work, Woolf calls this text “self- contained” within its own fictional bounds, by which she means that readers do not need to “do something” in the outside world after finishing the book but only engage with the specific and individualistic narrative that the text itself offers (44). In Tristram Shandy, the narrator remarks that “everything [is] inside the book, nothing outside” (44). For Woolf, Sterne’s novel offers a self-sufficient and detached image of reality that does not depend upon the sociohistorical context beyond Tristram’s individual viewpoint. In “The ‘Sentimental Journey’” (1932), an essay-length analysis of Tristram Shandy, Woolf remarks that Sterne’s narrative actually moves closer to life by discounting “The usual ceremonies and conventions” of writing books in favour of a more authentic chronicle of the human mind (81). The novel does not present what Woolf calls a “guide-book” rendition of the French landscape—one so broad that it appears as a

“hammered high road” of collective experience—but a narrative where “small things” bulk

“larger than big” to create a “nonsensical minutiae” that is more “precise” than “the most important matters of state” (“Sentimental” 83-4). Akin to the style that Woolf adopts in Jacob’s

Room, Tristram Shandy unsettles established worldviews about France during the eighteenth- century by replacing the country’s familiar “matters of state” with the seemingly minute, idiosyncratic, or even disorienting perspectives of Tristram’s mind. Woolf thus regards Sterne’s novel as a precursor to modernism in that it challenges what constitutes knowable reality by recording new or usually-unexplored representational terrain from the perspective of the

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individual perceiver. Woolf’s definition of Tristram Shandy can apply to any work of art that intervenes in life by interrogating its makeup and not, to borrow a phrase from Horkheimer and

Adorno’s critique of positivistic realism, duplicating “the world over again” as “an ideological doubling, a compliant reproduction” (13). If the world exterior to Woolf’s fiction is one that cultivates traditions of war, then her texts oppose this culture precisely by disengaging from its ideological “doubling.” Like Tristram Shandy, Woolf’s fiction creates a slippage between the narrator’s defamiliarizing perspective on life and the reader’s preconceived judgements about modern existence. Adding a political motive to Sterne’s technique, Woolf’s work prompts her readers to reassess the efficacy of existing recording strategies along with the inadequate remedies that these styles often provided for traumatic, but ultimately avoidable, events like the politically-authorized bloodshed of war.

I offer this defense of Woolf’s aesthetic to assert that even the most experimental of texts can hold political intent by forcing readers out of a state of complacency about the world. Rather than a “bad infinity” of subjective futility (Lukács, Meaning 24), Woolf’s style of writing captures an account of human existence that is not-yet recognizable to a mass readership. If

Bonamy turns towards Betty Flanders at the end of Jacob’s Room to potentialize a more peaceful post-War culture, it remains crucial that Woolf does not prescribe to her readers how this future might appear. To emphasize the full capacity of her public’s intellectual labour, Woolf highlights agencies, voices, and ways of seeing that novels as ideological forms usually do not reproduce precisely because their recording strategies are not yet part of popular literary culture of the

“palpable, identifiable world” (Lukács, Meaning 25). As Jacob’s Room demonstrates, modern life is often a fragmented and distorted experience of turmoil and loss, with literature being an attempt to engage with this disorder without blunting a reader’s capacity for generating

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analytical thought. Woolf’s work shares what Adorno identifies in avant-garde art as a “pleasure taken in dissonance” (“Reconciliation” 160) in that it shuns consolatory responses to post-War reality and encourages readers to make sense of the resulting discord in all of its complexity.

Readers of Woolf do not receive “a complete and satisfactory presentment” of characters like

Mrs. Brown but instead a vision of “the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure”

(“Character” 54), or the very features of life that mark a contrast between the expanses of human sensibility and what Tinny Durrant recognizes as the “meagre objects” of Edwardian literary tradition. Woolf’s work does not provide comforting fixes for the ruptures of modern life but exposes all of its trauma, which affords readers the ability to rethink European politics and how the cultural forms that it reproduced merely placated the upheavals caused by its own ideological protocols.

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Chapter 3

Rosemary’s Baby: Sex, Eugenics, and Colonialism in the Plays and Sex

Manuals of Marie Stopes

There have, I am sure, from what I have learned from sufferers, been many needlessly

heartbroken wives who suspected infidelity when they found their men on returning from

the war were no longer eager for intercourse, perhaps no longer even capable of

consummating sex union with them. Those who were humble of heart wept secretly at

their own failure to hold a dear husband; the harsher and more self-sufficient upbraided.

Both were needlessly apprehensive of rivals, the man was utterly theirs, but with his

manhood filched by circumstance.

– Marie Stopes, Enduring Passing

More than ever to-day are happy homes needed. It is my hope that this book may serve

the state by adding to their numbers. Its object is to increase the joys of marriage, and to

show how such sorrow may be avoided. The only secure basis for a present-day State is

the welding of its units in marriage.

– Marie Stopes, Married Love

Introduction: The Sexualized Consciousness and Literary Outsiders

At the end of her World War One play Conquest: Or, a Piece of Jade (1917), Marie

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Stopes’s hero Gordon Hyde travels from New Zealand to the British parliament with his plan for an international government alongside his fellow peace activist-cum-romantic and creative muse

Loveday Lewisham. Gordon proclaims to Loveday: “And you, you are not only my friend but my Goddess, my vision, you I have been adoring, and from you I have been drawing my inspiration!” (94). In Stopes’s understanding of post-War society, women as lovers and mothers of men are largely a quiescent source of “inspiration” from which their male partners draw eroticized impetus for their public-sphere enterprises. As a remedy for wartime upheaval, Stopes romantically fuses her female characters onto their war-weary compatriots in a way that imitates the prototypes of life-giving femininity and destructive masculinity that often define Western militarism. In what Susan Kingsley Kent calls a metaphor of “sexual peace” during the late

1910s and 20s, Stopes resolves social turmoil through “a model of marital accord,” where she places a “new accent on motherhood” along with “sexual compatibility between husband and wife” to rectify the discord that their contrasting experiences of Home and Western Front had greatly exacerbated (Kingsley Kent 108). Before analyzing my primary texts, I use the first section of this chapter to identify Britain’s post-War culture of heteronormativity as a driving force behind the eugenic and racialized discourses that were surfacing across Europe at this time.

Then, I go on to show how Stopes infuses these issues into her fiction, and to argue that the intense, sexualized jingoism of her plays offers a reasoning for the ironic or alienating techniques that Woolf places at the centre of her modernist-feminist technique. In The Race (1918), Stopes synchronizes maternal reproduction with soldierly destruction and suggests that women should respond to World War One by offsetting the damage that it will inevitably exert upon the British population; while in Conquest, Stopes presents heterosexuality as a colonial force and the means by which white couples can enforce upon the world a militaristic state of global accord. In both

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instances, Stopes perceives of women not as political agents in their own right but mere harbingers of human nurturance and procreation. In doing so, she uses her sex manuals and plays to augment women’s task of reversing the damage that global conflict exerts upon Britain’s men, imperialistic campaigns, and structural heteronormative mores. For Stopes, reproduction was both biological and ideological in nature: while her view of maternity empowered women by giving them the opportunity to restore their country’s post-War population, she also enmeshed this power within the task of reiterating the patriotic and highly androcentric values that organized interwar British society. As feminist critics, we can therefore approach Stopes’s work to explicate the highly complex nature of female sexual liberation that was occurring at this time.

Although Stopes gave women the opportunity to speak about their erotic desires and identities, she also demanded that they use these voices to espouse Britain’s prevailing class and race structures instead of devising their own political or artistic visions.

In turning to Stopes’s fiction in this chapter, I situate her methodology among theoretical debates regarding the politicization of art in an era when mass cultural production and fanatical ideological beliefs radically merged. Throughout her work, Stopes takes what Lukács prioritizes as “the dialectic between the individual’s subjectivity and object reality” to an extreme by endorsing the right of Britain’s political structures to engender her readers’ full bodily and intellectual potentials (Lukács, Meaning 24). By conflating what she saw as her public’s capacity for self-fulfilment with the conservative goals of state institutions, Stopes gave the British people an opportunity for personal as well as group development but at the cost of an unflinching conformity to her draconian notions of gendered identity. For Stopes, the eugenic marriage of male and female selves was a kind of nationalistic service, with Britain itself acquiring an idealized, quasi-religious status that rendered citizens unquestionably bound to its state interests.

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While my analysis of Woolf in the previous two chapters upheld her belief in the ability of literature to emancipate a reader’s mind from the values of male-privileging nationalism,

Stopes’s work sees the individual as wholly subordinate to Britain’s nationalistic ideologies and colonial objectives. If we extend Adorno’s critique of Lukács onto Stopes, her work fits “the realm of art categories which refer to the relationship of consciousness to the actual world, as if there were no difference between them” (Adorno, “Reconciliation” 159). As a strategy for generating patriotic loyalty, Stopes’s work has the aim of integrating its readers’ minds and bodies into their socio-political environment rather than asking these readers to develop a detached, objective consciousness about the society they inhabit. In this way, Stopes’s work justifies what we see in Jacob’s Room as Woolf’s desire to enlarge her readers’ awareness of their extratextual surroundings when her defamiliarizing narratives disrupt rather than reinforce

Britain’s established, and mostly war-bent, systems of meaning.

I thus demonstrate as a recurring claim within my project that art can still be politically engaged even if it maintains an aesthetic distance from what people understand to be the typical nature or content of their lives. In what Woolf refers to in Three Guineas as the need to develop an “outsider perspective” on life (311), avant-garde aesthetics invite political action by estranging their audiences from the world and encouraging them to question the immutability of

Western lifestyles. Stopes, in contrast, diminishes the capability for her publics’ politicization by rendering them a catechized hoard of sexualized bodies who use her texts as scripture for reaching abstract notions of human betterment and a glorified return to national prestige. In this chapter, I situate the rampant androcentrism of Stopes’s work at a counterpoint to Woolf and

H.D.’s emerging feminist aesthetic and how the latter writers reduce the patriarchal nation-state to an entity from which women and men can intellectually disengage. In devising new ways for

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their work to participate in sociohistorical reality, Woolf and H.D. scrutinize the reproductive contracts that Stopes endorses on a biocultural level when she tethers her characters to the duty of obliging their male lovers within both the bedroom and public life at large. By redefining female identity in their work, Woolf and H.D. untether women’s expressivity from the harmful ideologies of sociosexual dependency and racialized nationhood that Stopes reveres across her career. With the newfound creative autonomy that arises as a result, Woolf and H.D.’s work counters rather than supplements these narratives and asks readers to reconsider how they engage with Europe’s pernicious global politics as reproducers, whether that be in a biological sense as parents or an ideological sense as operatives of Britain’s colonial agenda.

“And how do you manage not to have children?”: Reproduction in Post War Britain

While feminist critics of the last thirty years have paid much attention to Stopes’s hugely influential birth-control advocacy, there is a noticeable lack of engagement with her literary and theatrical pieces. As vehicles for her radical political views, Stopes’s fictional works are valuable for modernist studies in that they sanctify an aspired-for ideological order akin to Walter

Benjamin’s account of “efforts to render politics aesthetic” within right-wing movements like fascism (241). Deeply patriotic in nature, Stopes’s plays infuse the theatrical form with an overt message of eugenic reproduction, thus embracing what Benjamin would certainly call “ritual values” (241) when they advertise demographic moulding to their audience through a highly routinized program of family planning. However, due to Stopes’s explicit appeal for a culture of revived sexual relations among British men and women, only one of the six plays that she published during her lifetime secured a public performance. Our Ostriches (1923), a courtroom

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drama that Stopes thinly veils as propaganda for her contraceptives campaign, was first staged at the Royal Court Theatre London in 1923 with a run of ninety-one critically well-received performances (Green 209). Unlike Conquest and The Race (1918), Our Ostriches was more palatable for Britain’s conservative theatregoers in its concern not for unleashing the erotic identities of women but publicizing the value of birth-control as a practical solution for overcrowded urban slums. Although Christina Hauck notes the play’s derogatory manner of excluding working-class people from “public discourse about their own sexual and reproductive behaviour” (117), it is the absence of direct references to the bedroom activity of these individuals that made Britain’s cautious literary censors authorize the play.51 Despite their overall lack of public viewings, though, Stopes’s plays are noteworthy because they mirror her birth-control agenda and show how Stopes embroiled her contraceptives campaign within political crusades of the 1920s and 30s that sought the emergence of a white master race. The texts under analysis in this chapter are remarkably complex. While the characters unsettle traditional notions of sexual behaviour, Stopes also funnels their newfound eroticism into pre- standing and largely war-serving institutions like patriarchal kinship and the British empire.

Stopes renders her plays the medium of a reactionary and racially-motivated objective. Her work implicates the sexual body in the task of reproducing an aggressive, (hetero)colonialist

51 Censorship was a pervasive cultural phenomenon during the interwar years. Rachel Potter describes it as an intense “network,” wherein various institutions, including publishers, customs officers, policemen and printers were responsible for enforcing the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 (4). Adam Parkes also notes how “The first three decades of the twentieth century are remarkable for the regularity with which works of modern literature were censored,” explaining how “novels by D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Radclyffe Hall were the objects of celebrated obscenity trials” (vii). Celia Marshik defines modernism in terms of its relationship to censorship and obscenity, arguing that the literary movement was “profoundly transformed by its emergence during a period of repression” (6), which Potter calls modernism’s “confrontational dynamic” (3). See also Michael Levenson’s portrayal of the avant-garde in chapters one and two of Modernism (2011) as a movement centred around shock and “provocation” (20).

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worldview that is wholly dependent on the maternal labour of its submissive female subjects.

Stopes’s apparent empathy for the working-classes in Our Ostriches elsewhere adopts a distinct eugenic tone that ties reproductive heterosexuality to a profoundly exclusive program of racial improvement. In her first and only published novel Love’s Creation (1928), for instance,

Stopes presents World War One not as a time of unrest but an event that prompts demographic repair and revival through the selective intimacy of the country’s more affluent citizens. In a chapter of the novel called “The Greater Unit,” protagonist Kenneth proclaims to his lover Rose

Amber that “the war, instead of being as many think, the crash and break-up of our civilization and good old order, is really the re-arrangement of the units of life at the beginning of a higher phase—a new and better order” (152). Kenneth appends national reform to the carnage of warfare due to what he sees as the War’s ability to enact a cultural reset over Britain’s bygone days of cultural and physical degeneracy. Since Kenneth envisages of his revitalized post-War community primarily through his and Rose Amber’s more prosperous coupling, he overtly entrenches his concept of a “better order” in prejudicial eugenic discourse. Kenneth remarks to

Rose Amber: “Look at the diseased city dwellers among us, down-trodden, stunted creatures filling the slums in every country in the world. How did they get there? Largely by the supposition that we are separate individuals” (150). Instead of focusing upon the plight of working lives within class-fraught 1920s England, Kenneth melds humanity into a massified aggregate and offers reproduction as a bodily act that invites group renewal but at the cost of those who do not meet his discriminating qualifications. Kenneth deflects his attention away from the individual victims of Britain’s industrialized society and towards the larger body politic, where the “miserable, dwarfed specimens” that he sees across London’s streets are not a source of compassion but lesions that need to be forcefully purged like “diseased tissues, fleshy sores in

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the body of the Greater Unit” (150). Love’s Creation thus insists upon the callous erasure of these pollutants in order to maximize the regenerative benefits of Kenneth’s carefully picked couples, or those he believes can initiate “the beginning of a glorious phrase when the cells re- arranged form part not of a crawling ground worm, but a winged, beautiful creature” (152). Like

Stopes’s work in general, Love’s Creation appropriates organicity as an instrument of hostile political objectives. For Kenneth, racial engineering is at once a natural phenomenon—with the nation’s biological “cells” instinctively emerging from a temporary state of chrysalis—yet also ideological because Kenneth can only envisage this metamorphosis through classist intolerance and scrupulously arranged intercourse among his own caste of reproducers.

Before I elicit the eugenic motivations that drive Rosemary’s wartime pregnancy in The

Race, it should be noted that Stopes’s sex manuals profess the aim of educating women on their capacity for erotic pleasure but as a medium for strengthening Britain’s “Greater Unit” of middle-class individuals. While Stopes’s first-published sex manual Married Love (1918) corrects the “ignorance of woman about her own body and that of her future husband” through advice such as reaching mutual orgasms, pre- and post-coitus bodily hygiene, and sleeping arrangements for wedded partners (56), its sequel Wise Parenthood (1919) posits this new sex consciousness as a form of service to the state. Stopes dedicates the book “to all who wish to see our race grow in strength and beauty,” which, from the outset, imbues her sex manual with the underlying goal of strengthening and refining the British population. In a particularly uneasy passage of the book, Stopes complains that “our race is weakened by an appallingly high percentage of unfit weaklings and diseased individuals” and blames this situation on the fact that

“the birth-rate for the upper and educated classes on this basis is only 119 [per thousand married men], while that of comparatively unskilled workmen is 213 and over” (Wise 24-5). Stopes

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recruits those who can “bring forth children for the race” from a privileged minority and even publishes a list of professions to highlight where Britain needs to increase its population the most

(see figure four) (Wise 24). Overall, the advice that Stopes publishes in Wise Parenthood is

Figure 4. From Wise Parenthood: a Practical Solution to Married Love. 5th ed., Putnam’s, 1919, p. 25. exclusively for those families who are able to purchase her recommended contraceptive methods: the cervical cap, a bathroom with clean running water for vaginal douching, and separate bedrooms where the husband and wife can sleep when not lovemaking. There is little guidance in

Wise Parenthood for the “down-trodden” slum dwellers of Kenneth’s London—those who would certainly benefit from the post-War improvements that Stopes urges—but only those

“wise” enough to breed in an appropriate manner, by which Stopes means those with a household income to afford modernized homes, post-secondary education for professional careers, and the significantly-priced prophylactic devices that her books sponsor.52

Stopes’s classist attitudes have followed her into both academic and public debates,

52 Even though condoms cost as little as one seventh of the cost of a cervical cap, Stopes discouraged their use. She believed that condoms “[reduced] the closeness of contact” between the couple and prevented “the highly- stimulating secretion of man’s seminal fluid” from “[penetrating] and [affecting] the woman’s whole organism” (Wise 45). As Stephen Brooke notes, “Even when birth control information was available, birth control methods 123

where she remains a highly controversial figure. As I do not deem it productive to judge Stopes through the prism of twenty-first-century morals, though, I summarize these unresolved debates to highlight the importance that we situate her work within a complex era of traumatic upheaval and reform after World War One. Recent academic studies on Stopes are the most forgiving of her views, with Claire Debenham overlooking her investment in eugenics by arguing that her advice was in fact “accessible to working-class men and women” due to the presence of her clinics in poorer urban areas and the correspondence that Stopes held with many working people

(4). Although Debenham does not mention that the birth-control methods that Stopes recommended were often too expensive for poorer families to afford, she asks critics to regard

Stopes’s support for eugenics as “self-perpetuating interpretations of Marie’s life which unfortunately do not do justice to her nuanced beliefs and work” (129). Stephen Garrett similarly excuses Stopes’s leanings towards eugenics by asserting that this kind of rhetoric was “of the time” and acceptable to a wide number of European and North American people (lxi), a judgement that Stephanie Green corroborates when she argues that “Stopes cannot be charged with extremism” because her opinions were “commonplace” during the interwar years and even drew approval from Winston Churchill (219).53 Despite the manner in which these historians and critics accurately contextualize Stopes’s work, however, the general public has shown less

often remained out of the economic reach of many working-class people” (46). Cervical caps, for instance, needed to be fitted by medical professionals and cost between three and seven shillings (Brooke 46). Given that the average wage at this time was between three to four pounds per week, Brooke concludes that birth-control “was not an inconsiderable expense” for most married couples (47). According to the British National Archives, a three-pound weekly wage in 1920 would equal around £87 in 2017 and the cost of a cervical cap anywhere up to £10 (or a day’s wage for a skilled tradesman). 53 However, Churchill is also not immune from public scrutiny, with the contemporary media rebuking his support of colonial injustice in India. See Dackevych, Alex. “Winton Churchill: Hero or Villain?” BBC News, 9 June 2020, www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-52969447. Accessed 21 Aug. 2020; Limaye, Yogita. “Churchill’s legacy leaves Indians questioning his hero status.” BBC News, 20 July 2020, www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-53405121. Accessed 21 August 2020. 124

willingness to forgive her dubious attitudes towards racial improvement. Her alma mater

University College London, for one, is currently reconsidering how they commemorate her work because of its racially-tinged views on eugenics, while, for the same reason, the British media has criticized the Royal Mail for its decision to release a postage stamp in her honour.54 On the above issue, The Guardian cites Stopes’s worrying decision to send Adolph Hitler a copy of her poetry collection Love Songs for Young Lovers in 1939: the year World War Two began but a time before the horrific reality of Germany’s “Final Solution” became apparent. While this chronology by no means absolves Stopes’s misguided attempts to rub shoulders with the German dictator—a person whom Woolf had already characterized publicly as “Aggressiveness, tyranny, the insane love of power made manifest” (“Thoughts” 217)—I note the uncertainty as to whether her gift actually endorses the Nazi party or merely indicates what Garrett calls her “arrogant and imperious” style of self-advocacy, one that she often aimed at figures of infamy (lxv). “Love is the greatest thing in the world,” Stopes informs the Führer, “so will you accept from me these

Love Songs for Young Lovers that you may allow the young people of your nation to have them?” (quoted in Rose 219). Stopes’s short letter does not make it clear whether she is celebrating the pioneering eugenics programme of the Nazis or simply pleading with Hitler to

“allow” German citizens the same sexual freedoms that she advocates for Britons. Stopes’s letter implicitly suggests that Hitler’s suppressive regime is doing Germans an injustice: she tells him that the youth of his country “must learn from the particular ‘till they are wise enough for the universal” (quoted in Rose 220). It is Stopes’s poetry, not Hitler’s leadership, that can

54 Bingham, John. “Royal Mail criticised for stamp honouring ‘racist’ Marie Stopes.” The Telegraph, 14 Oct. 2008, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/3194345/Royal-Mail-criticised-for-stamp-honouring-racist-Marie-Stopes.html. Accessed 19 November 2019; McKie, Robin. “Top university split in row over erasing ‘racist’ science pioneers from the campus.” The Guardian, 13 July 2019, www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/13/ucl-inquiry-row- historical-racism-science-pioneers-rename-college-buildings. Accessed 19 November 2019. 125

disseminate this crucial romantic wisdom. While I do not feel it accurate to place Stopes’s perspective on the same level as that of the Third Reich, then, I show in this chapter how the human aestheticism that she commends across her fiction feeds into the same institutions such as the military and empire that characterized right-wing sentiment of the interwar period. Her work signifies what I would define as a diluted version of the wider racialized tensions that were surfacing at this turbulent moment in European history.

My dissertation takes most issue with Stopes’s work in how it binds women’s artistic and political influence to the imperative of sexually fulfilling men. I argue that this subject requires further scrutiny because critics have misread Woolf’s references to Stopes’s work as a sign of agreement with her beliefs.55 Most critics focus upon the allusion that Woolf makes to Stopes in the Mary Carmichael figure of A Room of One’s Own, where they identify this fictional character’s novel, Life’s Adventure, as a stand-in for Stopes’s Love’s Creation through the reference that Woolf makes to the latter’s pen name: Marie Carmichael Stopes.56 However, if the narrator’s reading of Life’s Adventure in A Room of One’s Own is a retelling of Stopes’s novel, then Woolf’s version is everything that Stopes’s counterpart is not. There is no “Chloe liked

Olivia” (A Room 106) moment of emotional and intellectual bonding between women in Love’s

Creation like there is in A Room of One’s Own. As in most of her non-fiction, Stopes establishes marriage and heterosexual sensuality in her novel as the main focus of self-expression for both sexes.57 While Love’s Creation does contain a scientist figure in the character of Lilian Rullford,

55 Woolf does not comment upon Stopes in a personal capacity, but notes in her diary that she met her in January 1939 around the same time as meeting Sigmund Freud (Dairy, vol. 5, 202). 56 See Jane Goldman, The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 97; Holly Henry, Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: the Aesthetics of Astronomy (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 186, n. 21; Elizabeth Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (the University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 88. 57 Stopes makes her views on lesbianism most clear in Enduring Passion (1928). In this sex manual, Stopes associates lesbianism with “depraved women” and the “homosexual vice,” commenting that “It is so much practiced 126

she dies in a freak bicycle accident near the beginning of the narrative. The plot that follows then moves away from the theme of female intellectual development towards the romantic interests of

Lilian’s widow and Amber Rose (the deceased scientist’s sister). For this reason, when Donald

Childs argues that Woolf “misremembered the title of Carmichael’s 1928 novel Love’s Creation” in A Room of One’s Own (Childs 69) I assert that Woolf knowingly changed it to prioritize female Life over heterosexual Love and to voice an inquiry into Chloe and Olivia’s intimacy free from the peeping eyes of men “behind [the] red curtain” in their lab (A Room 106). By closely likening the two writers, Childs embroils Woolf’s work in a scheme of heterosexual propagation that uncritically embraces Stopes’s highly contentious birth-control campaigns. Childs defines

Woolf’s references to literary parenthood in A Room of One’s Own as a type of “eugenicly responsible literary breeding” (Childs 58), which inappropriately conflates textual production with embodied reproduction while assuming that “homosexuality produces nothing stable or enduring” (Childs 68). As I argue at the end of this chapter, Woolf’s statement in A Room of

One’s Own that “the union of man and woman makes for the greatest satisfaction, the most complete happiness” (127) refers to her view of androgynous creativity within the mind of the individual artist rather than an interpersonal exchange between a heterosexual couple. Upon a closer analysis of Stopes’s writings, the idea that “literary creativity must be heterosexual”

nowadays, particularly by the ‘independent’ type of woman, that I run the risk of being attacked because I call the thing by its incorrect name” (Enduring 41). Stopes discounts lesbianism as implausible to consolidate her view of British society as comprised solely of straight couples: the only “real union” she sees as conducive for social growth (Enduring 41). Through her awkward and wordy attempt to provide a scientific rendition of it, Stopes degrades lesbian love to a semantic oddity whose definition noticeably diverges from her poetic and flowery portrayal of heterosexuality in her other writings. For Stopes, “One of the physical results of such unnatural unions’ reactions is the gradual accustoming of the system to reactions which are arrived at by a different process from that for which the parts were naturally formed” (Enduring 41). Lesbianism is for Stopes not a natural proclivity for women to embrace but an alien “system” towards which the female body becomes falsely directed. “If a married woman does this unnatural thing,” she asserts when speaking of lesbian sex, “she may find a growing disappointment in her husband and he may lose all-natural power to play his proper part” (Enduring 41). 127

(Childs 68) becomes highly suspect under the lens of 1920s sex reform. At its core, Child’s concept of heterosexual creativity undermines the autonomy of women artists and their ability to invent cultural or political discourses independent of male investment. Although my reading of

Stopes accepts heterosexuality as an immutable life choice, it also asserts that women need not bind their art to this largely socially-determined identity nor its concomitant maternal duties. The

“progressive embodiment” that Childs speaks of in modernist texts (65) problematically brings

Woolf’s work to supplement rather than critique how heterosexuality in interwar Europe often prepared the human body for unethical transnational enterprises like war and colonialism. I thus stress that critics should dissociate Woolf’s work from any kind of reproductive analogy and expound instead its clear aim of freeing women from patriarchal lineages in order to grant them a wholly individualistic, female-empowered point of view.

Indeed, although Stopes’s sex manuals did free a choice group of women from the girdles of Edwardian morality, Woolf clearly did not agree with the male-privileging terms of this deliverance. Of explicit references to Stopes’s books, one letter to Molly MacCarthy in 1923 most succinctly encapsulates Woolf’s misgivings:

I’ve been talking to the younger generation all the afternoon. They are like crude hard

green apples: no halo, mildew or blight. Seduced at 15, life has no holes and corners for

them. I admire, but deplore. Such an old maid, they make me feel. “And how do you

manage not—not—not—to have children?” I ask. “Oh, we read Marie Stopes of course.”

Figure to yourself my dear Molly—before taking their virginity, the young men of our

time produce marked copies of Stopes! Astonishing! (Letters, vol. 3, 6)

The main critique that Woolf mounts against the “younger generation” who read Stopes is their loyalty to an over-simplified and male-centric worldview. While Woolf reveres these young

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women for the ease with which they navigate the changing post-War world, she laments the influence that Stopes’s message exerts upon their minds and bodies when they interact with the opposite sex. Woolf’s jocose yet concerned tone in her letter betrays her view on the naivety of

Stopes’s readers and how their behaviour is merely an affectation: Woolf sees them as being

“crude” but also “hard” or even manufactured, much like the nature-machine hybrids that Woolf uses to present the acquaintances of her youth in “A Sketch of the Past.” Adopting terminology that she later introduces in “Modern Fiction” (1925) to critique the stunted literature of

Edwardian “materialists,” these youths lack the kind of indeterminable “halo” that gives life its complexity— it’s “unknown and uncircumscribed spirit” (“Modern Fiction” 9)—and instead choose to see a straightforward world through the rose-tinted glasses of Stopes’s romanticized cosmology. Whether Woolf actually spoke to these youngsters or is simply using this anecdote to epitomize her sense of a widening generational divide, her bewilderment stems from the fact that sex and pregnancy are no longer subjects around which these young women must tiptoe. With

Stopes as their guide, they can now approach these issues with an intrepid and almost dismissive knowingness. Since Woolf did not have children herself, her letter suggests that she is not so much intrigued by the way in which these women delay or even rebuff motherhood but how they so effortlessly downplay this duty for the benefit of their concupiscent boyfriends. There is little potential for this “younger generation” to interrogate Stopes’s eroticism because, while it is

Stopes who holds the pen, her male readers ultimately interpret the text and use the advice that it gives to shape women’s sexual behaviour. I thus centre Woolf’s unease with Stopes’s work in how it replaces Victorian constraints with a sexual identity that is no less bound to male interest, a concern that explains Woolf’s desire to shape a wholly autonomous image of female selfhood and an extended modernist oeuvre that reflects their newfound sovereignty.

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However, Stopes’s heteronormative mentality was not unique to her alone. As the popularity of her sex manuals show,58 Stopes’s romanticized directives corresponded with an era of crisis for many grieving individuals within interwar Britain and provided the solution of intimacy for a generation whom the physical and emotional wounds of war had scarred.59 As the remainder of this chapter asserts, though, Stopes’s advice left the gender and race-related causes of what would become World War Two dangerously unchecked. While The Race and Conquest do attempt to outline public-level fixes for the tumultuous aftereffects of war, they focus only on aftereffects and so bolster the foundational, sexually-charged gender roles that make the labour of warfare in Western countries a recurring necessity for both men and women. In an age of democratic turmoil across Europe, Stopes’s plays do little to challenge Britain’s imperialistic rationale of geographical and intellectual expansion across the globe: a situation that Woolf established as a major cause of war in texts like “A Society” and Jacob’s Room. By following what we saw in Chapter Two as a “compliant reproduction” (Horkheimer and Adorno 13) of male-privileging values, Stopes’s theatre embraces the working gender and race subjectivities upon which militarism and imperialism rest. In my analysis of Stopes’s plays, then, I highlight space for another mode of literary production where women need not commit their

(pro)creativity to the task of revitalizing Britain’s compromised androcentric routines after the

War. Instead, as we see in Woolf and H.D, women can use modernist-feminist techniques to negotiate an alternative and more ethical world for themselves, their children, and their male

58 The conservative nature of Stopes’s work on sex and reproduction secured her a wide readership, with Married Love alone selling 2,000 copies within the first two weeks and more than a million by 1939 (Wilson 51). 59 Juliet Nicolson and June Rose also emphasize the timing of Stopes’s work as contributing towards its popularity. Nicolson argues that British women’s desire to experience sexual fulfilment was a direct result of the loss and upheavals of war, where “many widowed or sorrowing, or indeed jilted women craved the warmth and sexual companionship of a man” (125). Rose, too, remarks that the infamy of Stopes’s work reflected changes in British mores during the War, where “sex between a girl-friend and soldier on leave from the Front became, if not acceptable, widespread” (111). 130

peers to inhabit in the future.

War and Symbolic Exchange: Reproduction and Return in The Race

In the opening act of The Race, heroine Rosemary Pexton predicts the death of her fiancé

Ernest during World War One and so devises a plan to secure both of their biological destinies.

She proclaims to her father: “I may become a mother, even if we are man and wife only one day, and then he is killed! It is for that reason I must marry him before he goes. Don’t you see? I must have the chance of being the mother of his child!” (29). Rosemary “must have the chance” of being a mother because Stopes regards it not only as a natural proclivity for young women like

Rosemary but also a form of militaristic service with the aim of securing the health and prosperity of war-torn Britain. Much to the dismay of her morally censorious parents, however,

Rosemary bears the task of securing her nation’s future even as an unmarried woman. On the day before Ernest leaves for the Front, he and Rosemary conceive an illegitimate heir: a highly controversial move that encapsulates Stopes’s belief in the need to sacrifice pre-marital chastity in the face of the battlefield’s damaging losses. The Race thus brings dialogue about “war babies,” acceptable relations between men and women, and fears of population decline directly into the theatrical arena. As Susan Grayzel notes, Britain’s fear of a demographic crisis brought on by the War relaxed the nation’s opinions towards illegitimacy. Grayzel explains that the

“primary identity of the father as soldier made both these women and children somehow acceptable” and “more deserving and more moral than the others, sexually promiscuous young girls” (Woman’s Identities 100-101). By remodelling motherhood as a national duty, The Race dramatizes women’s job of defending their nation’s inheritance against the casualties of war but

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in a way that nevertheless disenfranchises them from public policy and how it often mobilizes their children for aggressive political aims. While Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier

(1918) disengages from an unaltered post-War order through the novel’s exploration of shell- shock, The Race reinvests life into Britain’s peacetime future but in a manner that secures the inevitable violence of war for men as soldierly destroyers and women as maternal restorers.

Subtitled Ernest’s Immortality, the play asserts that Rosemary’s maternal offering simulates her fiancé’s posthumous homecoming from the trenches and safeguards the re-entry of his genetic identity into the nation’s bloodline. In what Jean Baudrillard calls a symbolic “wage” for

Ernest’s sacrifice, I contend that Rosemary’s baby appropriates their father’s unlived future and, by promising Ernest’s “return” along with a revival of the country’s post-War population, provides him with an equalizing payment for his war efforts that Rosemary as a reproducing woman provides in the event of his tragic nonreturn.

Even before enlistment whisks Ernest away to his premature end at the beginning of Act

Two, the play shadows Rosemary’s desire to bear his offspring with post-War fears of social upheaval and a declining birth-rate.60 The play’s opening scene anticipates D. H. Lawrence’s

Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) and Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934) by presenting what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar identify as a “crisis” of “male dispossession” during the

War years (34).61 Sir Lawrence, local Squire and embodiment of the aristocracy, remains unmarried and without an heir for his “old family” (20). Rosemary’s father worryingly asks Sir

60 The British population had been steadily in decline since the 1870s but experienced a sudden drop during the war years (Pugh 89). 61 Gilbert and Gubar argue that woman’s entry into the male domain of society and culture from the late Victorian period onwards created a “sexual struggle” between men and women. “Besides educational advances,” they explain, “the years between 1914 and 1918 saw the entrance of massive numbers of women into the work force,” which, they argue, caused men to feel “assaulted on the home front as they were on the military front itself” (34). Gilbert and Gubar contend that this “sex war” emerges in male-authored modernist texts through the recurring image of male impotence or disinheritance that fiercely independent or even masculinized women overshadow. 132

Lawrence, “How is [your family] to be kept going?” (20), which voices Stopes’s concern about the need to maintain an elite national lineage and genealogical stock through upper-class marriage and childrearing. However, the rest of the play offsets Gilbert and Gubar’s account of a wartime “crisis” between the sexes when it shifts towards issues of maternity, childbirth, and the heterosexual unions upon which these undertakings depend. Through Rosemary and Ernest’s relationship, The Race reveals a yearning to reverse the disruptive changes that modern conflict requires of a nation’s people, where the death or injury of over three million soldiers of the

Empire matched the same number of women moving into work within the public sphere (Pugh

20). Indeed, while the year in which Stopes published her play saw the British government grant the vote to property-owning women over thirty and offer them new guarantors for their professional development,62 it also enacted policies that re-emphasized the importance of maternity such as the 1918 Maternal and Child Welfare Act.63 Although Gilbert and Gubar are correct in recognizing how some female writers of the modernist avant-garde were set on asserting their right to an artistic capital that was usually held by men, Stopes’s interest in reversing a crisis of male socioeconomic and bodily hardship reveals this revolt to be only one strand of feminist activity amidst a more diffuse milieu of gender traditionalism.64 In my reading

62 These changes included the right for women to stand as Members of Parliament in 1918 and the 1919 Sex Discrimination (Removal) Act, legislation that opened up new professions that the male establishment usually disallowed them. As Kingsley Kent argues, however, the legal gains women made “were offset by losses in other areas of concern to feminists” including “faith in the feminist program in the war’s aftermath, when the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of men gave such pointed relief to society’s emphasis on maternity” (114). 63 This act appointed committees for maternity and child welfare, including provisions for “home helps, lying-in homes, food for expectant and nursing mothers and children, crèches and day nurseries, convalescent homes and hospital treatment for children up to five years” (Pugh 18). 64 Grayzel argues that “Despite changes in cultural ideas and even in behaviour…marriage and motherhood were still understood to be…the norm for many women” after the War (Women 111). Nicolson agrees with Grayzel, remarking that marriage “remained a barrier” to most jobs because “managing a home and bringing up children still took priority for women over a remunerated profession” (172). Arthur Marwick similarly notes that for “the vast mass of women after the War there was no immediate and substantial change” and that any social amendment that did occur were restricted to “marriage and…traditional occupations such as domestic service” (31). 133

of Stopes’s play, I counter Gilbert and Gubar’s assessment of interwar literature, arguing that

The Race does not proclaim the need for women to hijack the privileges of their warrior companions but rather that they help these men “keep going” through a wilful return to the home and the duties of constructive childbirth.

For this reason, although The Race honours female sexual freedom and maternal empowerment, it also allocates biologically-conceived roles to its characters while remaining uncritical as to how these binary duties supplement international combativeness. Disappointed that “men have all the real things to do,” Rosemary declares an eagerness “to come and really work” with Ernest on the frontline (33). Although she articulates a yearning to achieve vocational fulfilment on the same terms as her fiancé, Rosemary also accepts her fate as an operative of womanly support who merely buttresses the “real” jobs of men rather than initiate her own professional undertakings. As Ernest notes, the binary nature of gendered labour in

Britain prevents Rosemary from getting “mixed up in any of [the War’s] work abroad” (33), which means that she can only subsidize masculine “work” upon the Western Front with domestic and maternal duties back home. The most urgent job for Rosemary is her child-bearing responsibility, which she presents as her assignment of reversing the potential loss of Ernest’s body from mass-produced German weaponry with a descendent that is no less manufactured.

Using language that suggests a female-controlled human assembly line, Rosemary proclaims to

Ernest the imperative for there to be “ten thousand copies of you” and that she “keep the things you stand for going into the world” (34). Rosemary’s language here not only builds an uncomfortable crossover between the human form and a mechanized aesthetic but also speaks to

Stopes’s eugenic concern for group engineering, where the “ten thousand copies” of Ernest’s body infuse Britain’s population with discriminative ideals of class and physical ability. Evoking

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dialogue from the start of the play that asserts the need for Britain’s upper-class population to be

“kept going” through elite heterosexual couples, motherhood for Rosemary is not merely a personal endeavour but also a way of benefiting the demographic fortitude of British society at large. In The Race, what Gilbert and Gubar would call Ernest’s “dispossession” is not an opportunity for feminist revolution but a major cause for Rosemary’s concern. The “self- possession” (Gilbert and Gubar 34) that Stopes captures through Rosemary is not her attempt to profit from Ernest’s loss but instead counteract it with conventional feminine offerings to the patriarchal state.

The Race thus upholds maternity as a form of national service for Rosemary despite her ability to gain employment in the public sphere as part of the larger war effort. While women’s newfound professions in munitions factories provided the weapons that expedited male death upon the battlefield, The Race shows how they also faced the inverse task of counteracting this loss through future-directed acts of reproductive labour.65 Through Rosemary, the work that

Stopes advertises for her female readers involves conserving the physical and administrative clout of Britain’s male subjects in the face of their deaths upon the Western Front. The play maintains a rigid system of male-female relationality that is contingent upon concepts of destructive masculinity within the public realm and its necessary, yet equally as industrious, underbelly of feminine nurturance in the private. Unlike Woolf’s proposal for an “outsider perspective” on war (Three Guineas 311), Rosemary has scant opportunity for withdrawing from the patriarchal nation-state because Stopes correlates its existence with unchangeable biological

65 As Sarah MacDonald remarks in her “Simple Health Talks” (1917) for women entering into industry, even though women were making weapons for battle they must above all else preserve their wellbeing as “future mothers of the race” (138). By seeing women both as potential destroyers of life in their production of weapons yet also reproducers of the human race as possible mothers, MacDonald’s advice directly implicates women within a death- birth cycle of feminine labour that supports the war effort on two accounts. 135

differences and the assumption that Rosemary reaches her full potential only when she synchronizes her body with the government’s wartime aims. Rosemary’s maternal role is little more than a physical mediator that intersects the destructive exterior of war with the sanctified interior of Britain’s domestic order. Overall, her task is to ensure that Ernest’s subjectivity keeps

“going” (The Race 20, 34) despite the likelihood of his death upon foreign soils while he fights for a future that he will not personally encounter.

In defiance of Ernest’s likely nonreturn, I define the reward that Ernest receives for his wartime labour as Rosemary’s promise to copy his genetics and incorporate them into the country’s peacetime heritage. Stopes does not concern The Race with contesting the initial need for male death upon the front line but simply justifying these massacres through the necessity that women secure a condition of post-War health and national prestige. The Race thus reflects a wider concern during the War years on the need to grant men a communal payoff for the struggles of battle and therefore ensure that soldiers like Ernest did not die in vain. In prime minister Lloyd George’s “home fit for heroes” campaign of 1918 (Lewis 101), we find a similar kind of non-monetary benefit in the shape of a preserved or even enhanced social position for troops after commission within a homeland that they so valiantly purified of foreign influence and aggression. What is important to highlight about this non-monetary style of reward is that it induces militaristic service despite the high chances of a soldier’s untimely death when fighting: a sudden end that corrupts the economic rationale of going to war as an exploitable form of industry. As Baudrillard argues, all employment under capitalism is a “deferred death,” where the worker gives his or her life to industry and receives the “symbolic exchange” of their wages in return (39).66 However, the likelihood of a man’s “violent death” on the frontline undermines

66 Baudrillard argues that capitalism transforms humans “into slaves” and condemns them “to the indefinite 136

the “slow death” central to capitalist exploitation and its use of the body as a prolonged source of labour-power (Baudrillard 39). If there is no worker to collect the earnings from their work, then there is little incentive for others to engage in this occupation; the “exchange” of men’s lives for service to the militaristic state becomes a deal that its fundamental duties might unexpectantly revoke: a hidden clause that violently reverses men’s entry into the capitalist-patriarchal order and so compromises the turnings of others. For the British military to ensure that men repeatedly accept wartime service, then, the armed forces must offset the prospect of their operatives’

“violent deaths” with the guarantee of posthumous idolatry in a rejuvenated homeland. When confronted with a soldier’s tragic nonreturn, civilians of the Home Front affirm a group of beneficiaries who outlive the combatant and enjoy the glorious peacetime future that their male companions heroically fought for but cannot personally enjoy. Rosemary’s baby supplants

Ernest’s inability to experience the outcome of his work on the Western Front and, as Stopes’s idealized eugenic child, safeguards the regenerative rewards of Ernest’s heroic return. The Race supports Britain’s exploitation of men upon the battlefield because women like Rosemary promise to raise and nurture the child who receives the benefits of military duty in his or her father’s place. As a patriotic mother, Rosemary conserves the uncollectible stipend that militaristic states expect their soldiers to earn obediently but then relinquish for the benefit of future generations.

The concept of a soldier’s return to normalcy is a common yet divisive motif within

abjection of a life of labour” (40). He contends that capitalism protects peoples’ lives through concepts like the suicide taboo only because they are “a parcel of capital” from which industry can continuously extract value-as- labour (175). Herein lies the kernel of capitalist exploitation. The “slow death” of work repeatedly “[gives] the slave life through labour” but in a way that “always profits power, the dialectic of power which plays on the splitting of the poles of death, the poles of exchange” (41). Because the master gives the worker life through work, “The slave remains the prisoner of the master’s dialectic, while his death, or his distilled life, serves the indefinite repetition of domination” (41). By continuously labouring for the master and receiving “life” or “wages” in return, the worker supports a system of exploitative power that ties his or her body to an unequal economic exchange. 137

World War One fiction. Rebecca West, for example, predicates her novel The Return of the

Soldier (1918) upon a critique of idealistic notions of homecoming. When soldier Chris Baldry rejoins his wife and cousin in England after fighting on the Front, his residence is not a “home fit for heroes” but a completely isolating and alien environment: “a hated place to which, against all his hopes, business had forced him to return” (117). Throughout her novel, West presents Chris’s re-arrival home not as a natural or coveted reward for his service but a mandatory act that the country’s militaristic leaders install as part of the procedural “business” of warfare. Through her analysis of shell-shock, West shows how “the yoke” of female “embraces” (117) cannot sufficiently compensate for a conscript who has lived through the horrors of war. As his cousin

Jenny recounts, once the façade of “home” fades, Chris “would go back to that flooded trench in

Flanders … to that No-Man's-Land where bullets fall like rain on the rotting faces of the dead”

(118). Jenny melds the sphere of violent wartime labour with that of protective homeland and so negates the way in which militaristic customs substitute trenches for a haven of peacetime security. For Jenny, the regenerative water of growth and futurity is the “rain” of gunfire that rips through the bodies of the men who should ultimately benefit from Britain’s revived domestic sanctuary. The non-monetary exchange of dugouts for a renewed relationship with his wife Kitty back home is for Chris an inadequate symbolic payment. The traumatic “brown rottenness of

No-Man's-Land” (48) has imbalanced this transaction to the extent that, instead of embracing the reward of an enhanced domesticity with Kitty, Chris’s shell-shock causes him to forget all about his current marriage and fall back in love with his long-lost lover, Margaret. The Return of the

Soldier thus debases the spousal harmony that Stopes celebrates in her work when West replaces fidelity and a stable future with that of Chris’s extramarital affair, his relapse into the past, and the prospect of re-enlistment after his precarious recovery at the novel’s end. As Jenny remarks,

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Margaret takes Chris “into the quiet magic circle out of our life, out of the splendid house”

(emphasis added, 101). Chris’s “return” home is one that takes him “out” of all acceptable measures of upper- class behaviour: away from his marriage with Kitty, a stable family life, his inherited estate, and the promise of an ongoing lineage that these privileges grant. Evoking

Woolf’s outsider terminology from Three Guineas, West alienates her returnee from the glorified values of his native soils and, in doing so, questions the worth of what exists inside these borders as a suitable reward for male enlistment.

In opposition to The Return of the Soldier, then, The Race replicates what Lee Edelman calls “reproductive futurism,” which Edelman describes as the politically-sanctioned act of overcoming death to “authenticate a social order” through the image of the child (3). While

West’s novel refuses this pinion of futurity at any point—the novel opens after the loss of Chris’s son with “Kitty revisiting her dead” in the now-empty nursery (47)— Stopes uses the concept of a dead father returning through his child to repair “a politics of the Symbolic” and supersede negativity “in the direction of a constantly anticipated future reality” (Edelman 8-9). Though ostensibly a form of progress, Edelman sees the heteronormative emphasis upon birth as a means of entrenching conservative values into future generations, which, in The Race, becomes a precise, quasi-mechanistic replication of the people and relationships that the War destroyed.

Rosemary professes that her fetus is not “another fresh individual” but “Ernest himself”: she proclaims to her mother that she has lost “only the grown-up part of [Ernest]” because a new version of him “is coming back to [her] as a helpless child” (Stopes’s italics, 70). Rosemary here verifies a violently cyclical relationship between the sexes, where war skims off older generations of men only for women to replace them with new maternal offerings. Her baby embodies the endurance of Britain’s patriarchal system and supports the country’s post-War

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advancement even in the absence of those fathers who upheld their country’s male-dominated society before they participated in the event that threatened its undoing.

In The Race, Rosemary’s endeavour to “authenticate” Britain’s social order speaks to

Stopes’s concern for eugenics and what she saw as the need for a group of promising young mothers who ensure that the land their partners leave remains populated with the prized genetics of these same men. As Rosemary proclaims to her mother: “Heredity does matter, and it seems to me of supreme importance that Ernest’s child should be in the world. For the sake of our race all fine young men such as Ernest should have children” (Stopes’s italics, 45). Rosemary directly assigns her maternal capacities to the job of ensuring the return of Ernest’s hereditary values into the nation’s genealogy after his death. Problematically, Rosemary’s view of motherhood assigns women the task of renewing their country’s post-War image not through empowered thought or action but male-dependent deeds of sex and reproduction. In this way, the eugenic leanings of

The Race follow a wider intent within post-War Britain to safeguard or even rejuvenate the health of its people during the late 1910s and 20s. As Richard Soloway notes, Britons at this time widely believed that more educated or physically strong men like Ernest were being disproportionately killed in battle, with eugenicists complaining that the War was most affecting the highest sections of the British population in terms of economic standing, health, and education (Birth Control 167).67 While statistics for the War dead generally support this view,68 it is also true that the deaths of upper-class men held much more ideological sway for classist

67 Solway thus notes in eugenicist thought of this time strategies of “highly selective pronatalist financial inducements such as family bonuses or allowances, expanded maternity benefits and tax remissions, especially for officers and non-commissioned officers” (“Eugenics” 375). 68 Writing for the BBC, historian Dan Snow notes that, while the majority of casualties were from the working classes, the upper-classes were disproportionally affected. 12% of casualties during the War were ordinary soldiers, while 17% were from the officer class (Snow). This discrepancy is most likely due to the fact that officers had the task of leading their men “over the top,” which exposed them to the initial enemy gunfire (Snow). Eton College alone, for example, lost 1,000 former pupils (Snow). 140

eugenicists like Stopes, which explains why she chooses to highlight the losses of high-born men like Ernest over those from lower ranks of society. As Virginia Nicholson notes, since public schools and universities often instilled within their students the patriotic ideals of fighting for one’s nation, voluntary enlistment was often a sign of social standing (Nicholson xiii). The connection that Stopes maintains between heroic male duty and a willingness to die for one’s country thus prioritizes those whom the British establishment had already versed in the elite ideals of embracing noble sacrifice for the benefit of king and country. Despite being published after the Military Service Act of 1916, a law that introduced mandatory conscription to all men,

The Race deliberately accentuates the plight of those to whom battle was a privileged duty rather than a form of exploitation and does so to justify its call for post-War selective breeding.

As an overarching issue, The Race therefore extracts the ability for social reform from public institutions like healthcare or education and loads it instead within the supposedly inert genetics of those who already enjoy a high level of socioeconomic prestige. Rosemary protests to her mother that “all the fine, clean, strong young men” like Ernest “go out to be killed” while

“the cowardly and unhealthy ones who remain behind can all have wives and children” (51).

Rosemary reiterates Baudrillard’s “symbolic exchange” of wartime labour, where she condemns the unwarranted reward of sex and a family for those who do not fight and sees women as mere objects that the militaristic state passes between men to atone for its brutal wartime practices.

Most at issue here is how this belief locked women into aggressive eugenic discourse that prevented them from starting their own political movements without the input of their sexual partners or the need to achieve abstract goals of racial purity. The play preordains the meaning of women’s lives on heterosexual childrearing, with classist and Anglo-centric matters consistently framing the expressivity of the reproducing body and the human forms that mothers will come to

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create. Unlike Woolf’s ironic technique of unmasking nationalistic commemoration or, as we will see in Chapter Four, H.D.’s critique of maternal patriotism through the testimony of her traumatic stillbirth, Stopes’s work utterly handicaps women’s ability to reach sexual or sociopolitical enrichment without the accompanying goal of jingoistic advocacy. Her plays and sex manuals provide a message of romantic unity but at the cost of demanding that women look for no further fulfilment beyond the duty of serving Britain’s militaristic government along with

Stopes’s own gender, race, and class-based prejudices.

“Gendered Nationalism”: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Nationhood

While Stopes presents heterosexuality as an embodied identity, there is still an ideological motive behind her concept of straight kinship in its ability to reform or refine the

British population through the bedroom activity of elite citizens. Taken in this light, the main drawback with Edelman’s concept of “reproductive futurism” is that it describes childrearing as the result of mostly unconscious impulses rather than the deliberate intent of thinking adults and, as we see in The Race, their resolve to help their countries reach a state of national prestige.

Although I agree with Edelman’s account of the Lacanian Symbolic as a political entity, or “the framework within which we experience social reality” and where “differing political perspectives vie for the power to name, and by naming to shape” our collective existence (7), I take issue with the way in which he binds human cognition to the hegemonic “drives” that supposedly organize this external, mostly discursive system. Since, for Edelman, “social reality” is always heterosexist and reproductive, he establishes the “temporalization of desire” as a political force that mobilizes future-focused childbirth by overriding what is nonreproductive and

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therefore unsignifiable under the terms of this particular “framework”: the death drive, which he defines as a “pressure both alien and internal to the logic of the Symbolic” as well as “an inarticulable surplus that dismantles the subject from within” (9). By identifying within ideology what Sigmund Freud sees as a bodily urge “to re-establish a state of things that was disturbed by the emergence of life” (Freud 709), Edelman makes no distinction between the “drives” that regulate signification and those of human behaviour, thus construing a person’s “desire” to have children as nothing more than their “desire” to overcome what he calls an “excess embedded within the Symbolic through the loss, the Real loss, that the advent of the signifier effects” (9). In this chapter, Edelman’s “surplus” of heteropatriarchal discourse is not psychologically ingrained but the result of distinct physical loss: the non-returning troops of war whom the sexual activities of Rosemary’s worthy couples must supersede with replacement children. While Stopes’s plays and sex manuals certainly do exclude non-heterosexual people from Britain’s “anticipated future reality” (Edelman 8-9), Stopes’s work also exposes what Edelman’s queer politics overlook:

Rosemary’s performance of her biological role not because of an “inarticulable surplus” within her mind but a highly contemplative desire to surmount real, perceptible trauma on a personal and collective scale. Throughout my dissertation, I uphold the historical causes of traumatic

“excess” as the tangible, non-returning casualties of war like the bodies of dead soldiers. Doing so permits artists of any sexuality, Woolf and H.D. included, to investigate the causes of loss instead of allowing it to trigger a procreative impulse as Edelman would assume in his attempt to pathologize heterosexual lifestyles.

For this reason, I do not wish to dismiss reproduction as a whole nor suggest that it invariably supports conservative politics. Rather, I recognize that ethically-engaged parenting

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can improve the future of democratic society from the level of the individual.69 This chapter’s main issue with Stopes’s vision of “reproductive futurism” is not in its celebration of maternal endeavours themselves but in how Stopes ties maternity to Britain’s patriarchal objectives and her racialized ideals of the model Anglo subject. Stopes’s third sociological text Radiant

Motherhood: a Book for Those who are Creating the Future (1921) makes explicitly clear the link between maternity and what Stopes foresaw as Britain’s ethnic renaissance. The book advocates for an “endowing of motherhood, not with money but with the knowledge of her own power,” which Stopes defines as women’s role in “the voluntary procreation and joyous bearing of her children” (216). Similar to Julia Kristeva’s account of the “genius” of mothers in their capacity to “remake the human condition” (“Female” 403), Stopes imbues maternal “power” with an ability to better the British populace through both the eugenic inheritances of mothers’ bodies as well as the mores that they impart in their children during education and upbringing.

For Kristeva, however, while the “unique, innovative creations” of mothers when rearing their young allow them “to pierce through an increasingly automated world” with “paradoxical occurrences, unique experiences, and remarkable excesses” (“Female” 400), Stopes rejects such individualism in recourse to the ideologically-inflected goals of the British people and their imperial mission. In Radiant Motherhood, for example, Stopes tasks mothers with initiating a

“wonderful rejuvenescence and reform of the race,” where the genetic rewards of discriminating maternal labour help Britons to “step from [their] present entanglements on to a higher plane”

(216). Across her work, Stopes does not focus her view of mothering upon the “paradoxical” or

69 As Whitney Monaghan and Hannah McCann note on this issue, when young activists like Greta Thunberg challenge notions of an apathetic futurity by “demanding systematic change and a reorganisation of the world,” they profoundly disturb “the way that children are commonly invoked in political discourse to reinforce the status quo” (Monaghan and McCann). 144

“unique” experiences that women can provide their children through individual care. Instead,

Stopes celebrates a concept of blood and breeding that she fixes within the universal as a glorified epitome of Britishness. In Mother England (1929), a selection of letters that Stopes published between her and her readers, Stopes’s longing for “a higher plane” of national growth betrays her support for the British Empire, with Stopes asserting to one of her recipients the need for women to “obtain the knowledge of how to bear in health and joy” so that they can help reap

“the scions of an Imperial Race that might even yet flower from our ancient stock” (191).

Stopes’s understanding of maternal activity cripples her readers’ ability to generate their own ideas about social change. Her work re-articulates a monolithic archetype of “motherhood” and embroils individual acts of reproduction in Britain’s imperialist and race ideologies. Although

Stopes’s reformed attitudes towards parenthood grant her readers greater opportunity to decide the circumstances under which they have children, her sex advice does little to counter how

Britain’s militaristic structures like the empire might use this offspring to advance the country’s oppressive political agendas such as worldwide expansion and war.

In The Race, Stopes limits Rosemary’s productivity to the task of reproducing a population who, as the operatives of Britain’s militaristic policies, continuously harm people both inside and outside of the nation’s borders. Rosemary freely commits her body to Britain: she exclaims to her mother that it “serves my country, just as much as Ernest’s did, only in a different way” (50). Rosemary sees both male and female selves as inextricably bound to the duties of nationalistic sacrifice, where the service that each body performs is “different” in terms of its procreative or destructive function yet similar in that they equally support the state’s violent diplomatic protocols. In Stopes’s idea of the female body “serving” the nation, Rosemary exemplifies what Anne Sisson Runyan and V. Spike Peterson call a “gendered nationalism”

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(142) that organizes the constitutional, geographic, and racial boundaries of Western countries.

Evoking Flora Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis’s earlier theory of women as “a special focus of state concerns” (6), Runyan and Peterson characterize female citizens in territories of acute misogyny as mere “reproducers of the nation,” where certain legal policies, which I would note in the United States’ removal of contraceptive protections from the Affordable Care Act (2010) in July 2020, “subject” them “to an array of controls over their bodies and their beings” with the sole aim of upholding exclusionary concepts of gender and nationhood (143).70 When the country in question nurtures militaristic customs like that of Rosemary’s Britain, its narratives of gender duality render women helpless to oppose the carnage of its predominantly male rulers.

Rosemary accepts the state’s command over her body, remarking to her mother that “A soldier gives his body to death, a woman gives hers to bring life” (50). For Rosemary, women as life- givers neutralize the death of wartime labour by replenishing the losses that militarism causes on a domestic and international scale. While generic “woman” in Rosemary’s view is she with the absolute and intrinsic duty of reproducing children, her male counterpart is a soldier pure and simple: a dichotomy that equates the supposedly natural position of mother with a male assignment that military conventions wholly determine. Not only does Rosemary’s statement authorize the continual exploitation of male citizens as warriors, but it also sheds women of their productive capacity by demanding that they repetitively patch the traumatic failings of men’s

70 The effects of what Rick Wilford calls “male-crafted conceptions of nation and national identity” (1) continues to interest feminist critics. As V. Spike Peterson explains, since “group reproduction” is “fundamental to nationalist practice, process, and policies,” state discourses must engage in policies aimed at “controlling women’s bodies, policing sexual activities, and instituting the heteropatriarchal family/household as the basic socio-economic unit” (“Sexing” 58-60). For Spike Peterson, women inadvertently support this reproductive ideology both biologically and culturally as mothers by “inculcating beliefs, behaviours, and loyalties that are culturally appropriate and ensure intergenerational continuity” (“Gendered” 44). Lois West similarly sees nationalism as “an inherently ‘gendered’ phenomenon,” with women serving the state “based on the facts that [they] are primary caretakers and economically and political marginalized” (xiv). 146

governance rather than devise their own responses to war.

Woolf’s work, in contrast, addresses how Stopes collapses women’s agency into men’s aggressive transnational enterprises. As Chapter Two of this dissertation argues, Betty Flanders in Jacob’s Room is a figure whom Britain’s gender discourses of war trap upon an androcentric canvas, forever bound within the walls of Jacob’s textual room, and only able to act in a way that mournfully contributes towards her son’s posthumous identity. Anticipating her later anti-fascist polemics in Three Guineas, Woolf examines through Betty the need for women to achieve complete political autonomy, where they help men avoid war “by refusing to join [their] society; by working for [our] common ends — justice and equality and liberty for all men and women —

[from] outside … not within” (309). In what Sara Ahmed calls a critical “angle or point of view” that is exterior to male power structures (Living 13), Woolf predicates the feminist-pacifist foundation of her work upon the necessity that female artists use their “outsider” perspectives to withdraw from Britain’s pre-World War Two structures and gain a politicized mindset in the process. Although Stopes does portray an optimistic image of post-World War One normalcy in her plays, I scrutinize her vision of peace because she embroils it within schemes of controlled sexuality and exclusionary nationalism that will only ever cause further war. In Conquest, Stopes advocates for regularizing gender identities as a means of upholding stabilizing yet imperialistic strategies of global expansion. Through the characters of Loveday Lewisham and Gordon Hyde,

Stopes depicts reproducing people as the bearers of a colonial ethnicity that they transport into overseas locales as a way of forging an intrusive network of international security. However, anti-war activism can never be truly peaceful when it amplifies its message at the expense of those whom central powers like Britain consider racially or sexually abject. I thus exemplify through Conquest the diffuse atmosphere of nationalistic sentiment that was emerging across

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Europe at this time and pacifist attempts to combat it, with progressive thinkers like Woolf and her husband Leonard critiquing how theories of international governance, which usually operated under the guise of pacifism, authorized the violent erasure of people who threatened Britain’s colonial agenda.

“Will England Lead the Way?”: Order, Peace, and Colonialism in Conquest

In The Race, Rosemary’s ideology of nationhood is one that she abstracts from human control. When Rosemary’s midwife Nurse Winch mentions her patient’s unique state of mind while pregnant, she remarks that Rosemary is “listening with her wide, wonderful eyes, to God’s unfolding life, from the whispering of the buds on the trees to the messages from her lover” (64).

Ernest’s death during the War permits Rosemary to invoke a God-ordained ideal of Anglo breeding that permeates both human and natural worlds. Nurse Winch’s spiritualized conception of the race binds the lovers within a life-death unity that hinges the potentiality of one partner upon the other’s deceased or reproducing body. Stopes later affirms this metaphysical element of

Britain’s population when Rosemary remarks that her pregnancy has taken her mind and body

“forwards into the religion of the future, the religion of the race” (50). Rosemary establishes her homeland as both a timeless “religion” with immortal permanency but also a political system that men must toil and die for, which straddles the play’s notion of the British race within both human and nonhuman realms of being. In what Horkheimer and Adorno denounce in totalitarian art that assumes “a special, self-contained sphere removed from the context of profane existence”

(13-14), The Race, much like Stopes’s nonfiction, shields British identity from human influence yet also formulates it around the labour that these same people carry out upon the battlefield and

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between the sheets. While Woolf sees the patriarchal nation-state as an entity that female outsiders can intellectually withdraw from, Stopes quashes this ability in an unquestioning patriotic servitude when she removes the nation’s ideological form to a “context” far beyond the capacity of people to interrogate its aesthetic determinants of citizenship. The nationalism that

Stopes renders universal in The Race is the same ideology that Woolf narrows in Jacob’s Room and Three Guineas to an exclusionary strategy of cultural framing. Woolf encourages her readers to occupy a viewpoint “outside” of Britain’s ideological and geographical borders (Three

Guineas 309) by asking them to confront the persons, events, or ideas that the state deliberately

“masks” with prejudicial narratives of group belonging. Unlike Stopes, Woolf invites peace by unmasking foreign otherness, disrupting unifying concepts of patriotic membership, and using the loss of these nationalistic loyalties to generate the desire for pacifist change.

Indeed, Rosemary’s idea of “God’s unfolding life” as a reproductive category betrays its status as a wholly human-controlled identity. When Rosemary professes the “supreme importance” that “all fine young men such as Ernest should have children,” she bases her assertion on the condition that “the others should not” (Stopes’s italics, 45). As we see frequently across Stopes’s work, Rosemary’s concept of human aesthetics simulates a “special, self- contained” quality (Horkheimer and Adorno 13-14) merely by ostracizing the “others” who do not match her exacting physical standards. For Rosemary, Britishness is a dialectic that is inseparable from those whom she defines it against: the “cowardly and unhealthy” weaklings of the Home Front or, as Stopes remarks in Wise Parenthood, “vicious and feeble-minded” lower classes whom she accuses of breeding “recklessly” (25). To borrow the terminology of Butler and Spivak, the racialized ideal that Stopes enforces upon the nation can only establish its

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aesthetic substance with recourse to an “interiorized outside” of excluded bodies (16).71

Rosemary’s God-ordained vision of the race is not actually a self-governing truth but an impermeable membrane of acceptability that functions simply by excluding people who do not fit her specific bodily criteria. Ultimately, it is this reoccurring embargo upon what Stopes saw as unclean otherness that problematizes her belief in a “wonderful rejuvenescence and reform of the race” in post-War Britain. As Woolf perceives when she recognizes those who are “shut out” of the public arena “because [they] are Jews, because [they] are democrats, because of race, because of religion” (Three Guineas 304), any kind of nationalism that functions through what

Butler and Spivak call “the drawing of [a] line” (34) facilitates eugenic violence against the banished others who attempt to cross this boundary, or even just live authentically within its purview, and tarnish the state’s enclosure of idealized legitimacy.

In Conquest, then, Stopes undermines the play’s own pacifistic message when she places heteronormative and imperialist expansion at the centre of her idea of post-War global stability.

Set in the British Dominion of New Zealand upon the outbreak of World War One, a military recruitment officer in the opening scene calls New Zealanders “more British than the folks in the

Old Dart” because they contain a “hybridity” of English, Scotch, Welsh, and Irish blood: “a fine

Blend of all the flavours of different Britons … the very essence of Britain” and the “epitomes of

Empire” (Stopes’s italics, 27).72 In establishing New Zealand as an overseas locale of patriotic

71 The terminology Butler and Spivak use here evokes what Homi Bhabha describes as “a continuous narrative of national progress” that creates the “boundaries of the nation” through a “process of cultural production” (4). See also Yuval-Davis’s account of the nation as a narrative maintained through “processes of exclusion and inclusion” or an ideological “delineation of boundaries” (“Gender” 23). In terms of the interwar period, Hannah Arendt explains the emergence of nationalism by noting how World War One “exploded the European comity of nations beyond repair” (267). Arendt accredits this “completely new element of disintegration” to the rise of right-wing politics within Europe, wherein stateless individuals became “a powerful weapon of totalitarian politics” through Fascist attempts to solidify racialized ideas of the national self (269). 72 As the Recruitment Officer explains, the term “Old Dart” refers to the “pet name” that New Zealanders give to the “Old Country” of Britain (26). 150

sentiment, the Recruitment Officer rallies loyalty to the British Crown and its militaristic agenda through a reproductive genealogy that pivots upon an Anglo-centric core of white culture and identity. In what Spivak refers to as a “reproductive heteronormativity that supports nationalism”

(42), the play’s opening account of colonialism resides in normative sexualities because the

Recruitment Officer posits Britishness as the source of an identifiable bloodline that has subsequently proliferated across the globe. In Conquest, the mother-country is a place for the play’s imperial subjects to defend precisely due to its status as the birthplace of New Zealand’s post-settlement traditions. As a motivating feature of his enlistment campaign, the Recruitment

Officer blurs New Zealand’s culture with the country’s British ancestry in a way that makes

Stopes’s presentation of World War One precariously somatic. The “epitomes of Empire” in

Conquest are not only fighting to protect an overseas territory but also the source of their embodied identities. From the outset, the play enables a crossover between ideology and biology because any attack on the Old Dart, its principles, or colonial lineage is also a retaliatory attack on the bodies who are genetically bound to Britain through its history of global expansion.

Throughout the play, Loveday Lewisham symbolizes Stopes’s investment in heteronormative imperialism. Freshly arrived from England during the War, Loveday sweeps into New Zealand and awakens a “triumphal song of the Empire” that she hopes “will cross the waves in a thousand hearts and echo in the very centre of our lands” (19-20). Through Loveday, the patriotic “song” of Britain crosses oceans yet always rebounds upon the homeland as the

“centre” of imperial authority. In providing a symbolic link to the now-vulnerable source of New

Zealand’s Anglo descendance, Loveday triggers masculine zeal towards Britain by embodying the gendered recruitment techniques that proliferated at this time. The Recruitment Officer, for instance, establishes his campaign for enlistment upon an image of the Old Dart as a feminine

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personality who is “fighting for her life” (26). As images of idealized femininity, both the Old

Dart and Loveday elicit Susan Grayzel’s account of “women as the nation” in Britain’s wartime propaganda: a rhetoric that functioned by tapping into traditional ideals of protective manhood

(Woman’s Identities 85) (see figures five and six). The Recruitment Officer propels local men to fight by directing their gaze towards a symbolism of susceptible and maternal homeliness: he remarks of the Old Dart that “it’s not only her life, it’s our life, too, she’s fighting for. Like a mother fightin’ for her young” (26). In this umbilical connection between the Old Dart and its imperial offspring, fighting abounds. As a regime of motherly dominance whose apron strings are cross-continental armadas of imperial onslaught, the Old Dart’s vulnerability not only lies in

Figure 6. Unknown Artist. “Women of Figure 5. Joseph Simpson. “Your Motherland Britain Say – GO!” (1914). The British Will Never Forget” from Canada in Khaki Library. (1916, Canada). The British Library.

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the threat of hostilities from other nations, but also its need to harbour patriotic support from

New Zealand’s colonial subjects. Indicative of Stopes’s pro-Empire stance more broadly,

Conquest endorses a loyalty to the Old Dart that certifies Britain’s infringement upon New

Zealand’s autonomy along with the Recruitment Officer’s bid to preserve an extra source of exploitable manpower in the process.

Herein lies a major inconsistency within the “mother-country’s” imperial logic because the only way for her to preserve global power is to “fight” for a group of younger nations that she has already dominated with naval force. Under the pretense of preserving moral principles across the globe, the Recruitment Officer proclaims that the Old Dart is “fightin’ for the world

… for decency, truth, for liberty” (26). The fact that Britain can only combat global aggression by “fighting” for countries over which it has no real claim embeds the need to dominate space into the very core of Britain’s constitutional perspective. Through the Recruitment Officer’s image of a righteous imperial parent, Conquest establishes the Old Dart’s aggressive encroachment upon other countries as the sole means by which it maintains forced worldwide harmony. In what Homi Bhabha refers to as “a process of hybridity,” Britain in Conquest sustains a firm-hold of peace in overseas territories by “incorporating new ‘people’ in relation to the body politic” and “generating other sites of meaning” in foreign dependencies (Bhabha 26).

Since Conquest founds a colonial power as the seat of “decency, truth, [and] liberty,” the play replicates Britain’s status as an expansionistic force that achieves power simply by overwriting

“other sites of meaning” with values that are always Anglo-centric in focus. The Old Dart motivates its pacifist agenda in this play through acts of intellectual or even physical duress, where Britain imposes upon other countries its own notions of “truth” in order to minimize the risk of international dispute. Rather than acknowledge how the provisions for maintaining this

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global structure also risk instigating further war,73 Conquest merely spins Britain’s militarized regime into a form of protective motherhood that operates by annexing foreign territories as appendages to its trans-global identity.

Stopes was not the only writer at this time who visualized an international government with Britain at its centre to help establish global accord. The publication of her play pre-empted the founding of the League of Nations at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919: a group that US president Woodrow Wilson devised for avoiding future conflicts through arms reductions and open diplomacy among world leaders. Stopes, however, based her own approach towards world peace on H. E. Hyde’s polemic The Two Roads: International Government or Militarism: Will

England Lead the Way? (1916). H. E. Hyde argues that world leaders can obstruct the “road” towards extreme warmongering through “an International Law Court” that “[interprets] the Laws of an International Parliament, with the necessary force behind it to uphold its decisions” (7). In

Conquest, Gordon Hyde is a theatrical rendition of this writer. Like H. E. Hyde, Gordon Hyde advocates for “a super-parliament to which [countries] shall send a small number of representatives” and where they will “make international laws … to prevent any nation flying at another’s throat” (Conquest 44). To avoid such encounters, both The Two Roads and Conquest authorize weaponized retribution as the “force” by which their “super-parliaments” execute their jurisdiction.74 In Conquest, Gordon remarks that his “super-parliament” has “complete control of

73 William Mulligan explains that a “global rivalry” developed in the 1880s and 90s which was “exacerbated” when “European powers started to scramble for territory in Africa and Asia” (2017, 40). Leading up to the War’s outbreak, Mulligan explains that “imperial expansion corrupted and undermined the balance and restraints of European politics…transforming the ambiguities, checks, and restraints of international politics into a clear-cut, zero-sum game of winner and losers” (41). 74 In The Two Roads, H. E. Hyde argues that the world requires an “international Armament sufficiently strong to enforce the decisions of the Judges of the Law Court” (17) because “a certain degree of militarism is a necessity to the freedom and independence of any Nation—and to allow it to flourish unchecked in neighbouring states will serve no good purpose” (131). 154

all the armies and all the armament factories in the whole world” and can eradicate illegal weaponry because “Any individual or group of individuals violating that monopoly and attempting private manufacture of armaments shall be subject to instant death” (44-45). Stopes’s notion of an international government in Conquest is similar to The Two Roads in that it recommends warfare to combat the prospect of another, larger-scale war. Unlike Leonard

Woolf’s solution in International Government (1917) of upholding a “Covenant Against

Aggression,” where under no circumstance must any country give “any Constituent State an ultimatum, or a threat, of military or naval operations” (378-9), both Hyde figures believe that member countries within the super-parliament should accumulate weaponry to use as a political wager when engaging in their transnational exchanges.75 As became devastatingly apparent in the Allied bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, though, the approach of both Hyde figures undermines the capability of the world to find consensus or peaceful ways of handling their geopolitical diversity. Instead, the theory of each of the Hydes offers a select group of authoritative nations a militaristic state of exceptionalism where they can inflict “instant death” upon bellicose rulers and, as a result, the civilians who become mere collateral damage.

Like The Two Roads, then, the condition of international peace that Gordon and Loveday envisage in Conquest does little to challenge Britain’s self-appointed status as an invasive global commander. Their ideas echo the expansionism at the basis of Western colonialism by

75 For this reason, while Leonard Woolf’s theory would characterize him as Martin Ceadel’s pacifist—someone who opposes war in all situations—the Hydes are “pacificists” because they accept the use of armed force as a means of maintaining coerced global stability (Ceadel 17). For Bertrand Russell, pacificism is an ineffective “short cut to universal peace” and, like Woolf, argues that an International Council should instead use “arbitration” rather than aggression to settle any kind of disturbance (Justice 100). Russell rejects “armed intervention” on behalf of “neutral states” as an inadequate remedy for hostilities, calling it a “doubtful hypothesis” (Justice 100). “Unless almost all the Powers sincerely desire peace,” he notes, “an alliance among the more bellicose Powers might be strong enough to flout all the others, and in that case the only result of the Council would be to make the war world-wide” (Justice 100-101). Instead, Russell argues that pacifists must strive for “producing in all civilised nations such a horror of war that public opinion will insist on peaceful methods of settling disputes” (Justice 102). 155

preserving the right of the Old Dart to “lead” in a “new enlargement of law and freedom,” which

Gordon believes is “the only way to bring security to the world” (93). By affirming their pacifist message upon the need for Britain to distend into foreign territory, Gordon and Loveday rehash a credo of imperialist sovereignty that reinforces Britain’s stronghold over existing or potential dominions as one of its inalterable rights. Like Stopes’s sex manuals, their vision of post-War peace defaults upon a familiar, imperialistic worldview and thus provides a reassuring coda to the play’s audience through the image of a Britannic “home fit for heroes” that can once again dominate global relations. In The Two Roads, too, Hyde’s explicit denial of what he calls a

“Brotherhood of Man” across nations chillingly resorts to the destructive nationalism that drives and legislates colonial enterprises. Instead of invalidating divisions among the human race, Hyde upholds white ascendancy as the means by which Britain can maintain a balance of power across the world. In a particularly unsettling passage, he argues that Britain must

ensure to our children that supremacy which the White man has so long held over the

Coloured Races. If through any cause or series of causes this supremacy is once upset,

then an era of humiliation and misery will surely be the fact of the White Race. It is idle

to prate of the Equality of Man when it is obvious that such a state does not exist … To

allow the Coloured Races to upset our supremacy would mean that the White Races

would have to accustom themselves to a much lower standard of living than we enjoy at

present” (47).

The Two Roads betrays a vision of the future that the Western world founds upon inequality among people of colour. In establishing white children as the beacons of post-War peace, Hyde amplifies the symbolic and physical clout of whiteness as a monopolizing veneer of power that simply disguises colonial rule as global harmony. Hyde’s idea of organized nationalism therefore

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strengthens Butler and Spivak’s discussion of an “interiorized outside” of excluded bodies. The

Two Roads is so intent on upholding a self-proclaimed “standard of living” for Caucasians that any divergent skin colour that upsets this balance has the potential to become a target of politicized aggression, which renders highly suspect Stopes’s objective in adopting Hyde’s work as the creative impetus for her play.76

In Conquest, Stopes echoes H. E. Hyde’s emphasis upon worldwide stability as white supremacy through her presentation of the only Māori character in her dramatis personae: Roto.

All the audience learns of Roto is that he is a “Queen-Māori,” or a member of the indigenous population who “fought on the side of the English, under Queen Victoria” during the Second

Boer War in South Africa between 1899 and 1902 (Conquest 31). The play furthers Roto’s support for Britain’s imperial history when he attempts to enlist on behalf of the Old Dart despite being sixty years old. However, Roto’s willingness to fight reflects the mentality of only a small number of Māori people who remained loyal to Britain during the War, which narrows the attitudes of a whole ethnic group to a select few who endorsed the colonial mission. As Monty

Soutar notes, when Britain permitted Māoris to participate in the War voluntarily in 1914, a mere

2,500 out of a population of 63,000 actually enlisted (99). By offering Roto as a patriotic supporter of the Empire, Stopes therefore overlooks a wide majority of Māori individuals who refused to support a colonizer’s expedition mostly upon the grounds that this same regime had confiscated their land for rebelling against the Crown in the 1860s (Soutar 100). As Māori leader

Te Puea Herangi remarked of the native outlook: “much of their country had been stolen. Why

76 In The Two Roads, Hyde notes that Britain will soon “be left only the weeds and the physically unfit” to propagate its forthcoming offspring (150), which directly replicates a concern Stopes frequently relays in her sex manuals and plays. He predicates a large part of his pacifism upon reversing “the effect the continuance of the War is likely to have on the physique of the Nation” (150) and, like Stopes, highlights “the awful slaughter” of “All that is bravest and best of our manhood” as a major threat to the country’s status and security (150). 157

should they want to fight for the people who had stolen their country?” (quoted in Davis 232).

When the government introduced conscription to the Western Māori tribe in 1919, just 74 out of

552 agreed to fight, with the rest facing jail sentences for their refusal (Soutar 102).

Throughout Conquest, the indigeneity of Roto is subordinate to an imperialistic agenda that consistently buries his Māori identity beneath the central romance narrative of Gordon and

Loveday. At one moment in particular, Roto’s silencing becomes an outright feat of what James

Young calls content and subject appropriation, where Loveday reuses an idea from Roto’s culture by performatively embodying his minority position (Young 6-7). Gordon recounts a

Māori legend about “a goddess of wisdom [who] lives in these hill tops and is a tree by day and a white woman at night” (14). The play later reveals this apparition to be Loveday herself when she transforms into a “goddess of the woods” and inspires Gordon of his anti-War scheme while in a dream-like trance (46). Loveday’s ability to speak on behalf of the indigenous population grants her an illegitimate share in New Zealand’s pre-colonial heritage and mimics how Britain overwrites the agency and visibility of indigenous civilizations with oppressive colonial discourses. As Gordon’s “goddess,” Loveday suffuses New Zealand’s foreign landscape and justifies European occupancy there by excavating a dormant source of “whiteness” that underlies the settlers’ newer histories. Appearing as a “white figure, with [her] forehead and head half covered by a floating white veil” (39), Loveday emerges from the woods to tell Gordon how “it is the time for a Briton to arise who can slay with his great thought all the enemies of the future”

(40). The ethnic spirituality of New Zealand speaks through an English woman, which renders

Loveday a personification of the Old Dart and how it adopts the dialogue of a racialized few in order to “veil” its colonial occupancy as a form of noble leadership. Gordon’s assignment of ascending to “slay” global aggressors thus mimics how European settlers used intellectual and

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naval force from the 1640s onwards to superimpose upon Aotearoa treaties of political takeover.77 Although Loveday’s appropriative message is one of peace, Stopes also entangles it within colonial operations that sap and then transmute the symbolism of New Zealand’s native people as a patriotic rousing call that is no less invasive than the War it seeks to counter.

For this reason, if the character of Gordon is, for Stopes, a theatrical epitome of The Two

Roads, then Conquest directly implicates women like Loveday in a heteronormative, racist, and androcentric model of nation-building that upholds international security by shifting the world’s white characters onto centre stage. The play does not provide Loveday with her own means of establishing peace but ties her instrumentality to Gordon’s when it is he who ultimately delivers their joint plan for international peace to the cabinet minister in London. Loveday admits to

Gordon at the play’s finale that “It was I in the woods. Chance gave me a moment’s inspiration!

Which you worked into reality” (94). In prioritizing this male-female coupling, Conquest presents Loveday not as a creative agent in her own right but a passive muse of masculine activity. By the end of the play, Loveday is unable to form her own concept of “reality” but merely offers her femininity as a vessel from which Gordon extracts his own ingenuity.

Justifying Woolf’s critique in A Room of One’s Own, Stopes locks both characters into a dualism where Loveday provides Gordon with “something that [his] own sex [is] unable to supply”: a feminized vitality that brings Gordon “to refresh and invigorate” his mind and then utilize it within the political institutions from which Loveday is largely excluded (A Room 112). For

Woolf, this kind of dialogue leaves men in charge of government policy outside of the home and licences what we saw in Chapter Two as the destructively “unbridled” nature of their intellect

77 The Treaty of Waitangi on 6 February 1840 made New Zealand part of Britain’s New South Wales colony in Australia and then a separate Colony of New Zealand on 1 July 1841. 159

(Woolf, “A Society” 129), where the only force that counters male activity is the devalued stimulant of female nurturance or their romantic encouragement. I thus argue that Diane

Gillespie mischaracterizes Stopes’s heroines when she describes how they inspire men “out of their own strength and abundance of both intellect and emotion, not by their beauty or conventional spirituality” (105). As we see in Conquest, Loveday’s “intellect and emotion” is wholly dependent upon her male partner: without Gordon as a carrier for her message, she is powerless to enact a similar level of public change. Akin to her announcement in Married Love,

Loveday and Gordon are “each organs, parts, of the other. And in the strictest scientific, as well as in a mystical, sense they together are a single unit, an individual entity” (Stopes’s italics, 186).

Loveday and Gordon are not two, self-sufficient parties but a homogenous body and mind incapable of acting independently of each other’s differently-sexed body. In countries under patriarchal authority like Stopes’s interwar Britain, I would argue that this union does not encourage feminist equality but instead builds a power relation between the sexes where men appropriate female creative power and then dissolve it into their own ideological visions.

I thus present A Room of One’s Own not as a celebration of Stopes’s rewriting of female sexuality but a rebuttal against the multiple kinds of male bondage that her work also necessitates. While Stopes hinges female intellect upon the virility of their male bedfellows,

Woolf creates a theory of androgynous creativity where the artist’s mind reaches “natural fusion” between the forces of masculinity and femininity on its own accord (127). The narrator arrives at this idea by rejecting gender difference as a model of creativity. Instead, she argues that the androgynous mind can surpass the divisive political agendas of the two sexes and, in doing so, accomplish a heightened state of artistic impartiality. As with the narrator’s view of Charlotte

Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), the novel is “sex conscious” (129) and cannot achieve a similar level

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of intellectual or artistic clarity because Brontë “[alters] her values in deference to the opinion of others” (97). Since, for Woolf’s narrator, Jane Eyre is so intent on asserting the “hates and grievances” (76) of Jane’s life under Rochester’s gaze, she notices an external authority that undermines Brontë’s creative autonomy. The speaker in A Room of One’s Own upholds that Jane

Eyre does not offer an unadulterated account of Jane’s life but one that a masculine agent affects and restrains. In this way, both Brontë and Stopes hang their texts upon male influence because, whether in reverence or dissent, masculinity is the sole aim and focus of their artistic statements.

A Room of One’s Own, in contrast, does not predicate creative agency upon any kind of liaison between male and female bodies nor does it even assert that artists must openly reject such unions. In her notion of androgynous incandescence, the narrator recognizes “two powers” that are internal to the brain itself— “one male, one female”—and argues that these two forces usually “live in harmony together, spiritually co-operating” until political turmoil such as the suffrage campaign pulls them apart (128). To return to what I earlier identified as Child’s mis- reading of Woolf’s essay, Childs mistakes Woolf’s theory of androgyny for Stopes’s mandate of heterosexual synthesis. Unlike Woolf, Stopes disallows people from existing separately as creative entities but instead sees them as one half of an incomplete, reproductive body.

Alternatively, for Woolf, the true artist’s mind does not fixedly reflect biological anatomy but attains unity on its own, which allows female creators to free themselves from having to embrace, as the root of their artistic inspiration, the heteronormative binary that Stopes promotes throughout her plays as a pretext for her birth-control agenda. I would thus argue that androgynous writing is not so much a way for women to escape their gender, as Elaine

Showalter suggests in her much-contended reading of Woolf’s literary androgyny as a “flight”

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from the realities of her own womanhood.78 Woolf’s concept of gender harmony within the self allows women to resist the stunting, binarized rules of what constitutes a feminine style while also dispelling the need for them to adopt the identity of a nurturing lover from which men often draw their creative potency.

Overall, the main issue with Conquest is that it establishes both creative and personal aspects of the female self as characteristically predisposed towards masculinity, procreativity, and the heterosexual power dynamics that facilitate women’s continued exploitation at the hands of war. By producing texts that reproduce a hegemony of nationhood, sexuality, and gender,

Stopes’s plays are analogous to her sex manuals in voicing the need for demographic repair through highly regulated deeds of sex and childbirth. As the texts under analysis in this chapter show, Stopes attempted to command how her public interacted with the bodies and worlds they inhabited, which preserved the right of power structures like militarism, nationalism, and colonialism to appropriate women’s sexuality and direct it towards unethical political ends. If critics draw a relationship between the work of Stopes and Woolf, then, they should regard the latter’s attitudes towards Stopes not in terms of an embrace of her sex reform but a highly critical reaction to the bodily control that accompanied it. While I do not deem this concern to indicate

Woolf’s outright dismissal of male-female affection, it indicates her belief that writers need not tether their work to a pre-defined sexual identity that extreme political campaigns can so easily manipulate. As Woolf remarks when reading the love poetry of John Donne, “Lovers can, if only for a short space, reach a state of unity beyond time, beyond sex, beyond the body” (“Donne”

355). For Woolf, the true artist is not he or she who evinces through their work conventional

78 See “Virginia Woolf and the Flight into Androgyny,” A Literature of their Own: British Woman Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 263-97. 162

beliefs about the sexualized body, but someone who constantly expands upon where the mind can go, what the mind can create, once it departs from these external directives and the repressive ideologies like militarism that they often serve.

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Chapter 4

Destroy After Writing: Trauma and Literary Non(re)production in H.D.’s

Autobiographical Prose

Sheets, bed, a tomb. But walking for the first time, taking the first steps in her life,

upright on her feet for the first time alone, or for the first time standing after death

(daughter, I say unto thee), she faced the author of this her momentary psychic being, her

lover, her husband. It was like that, in these moments. She touched paradise.

—. H.D., Bid Me to Live

Say Claribel,

Say asphodel,

No flower of death,

But fragment breath

Of Life

—. H.D. “Rosemary”

Introduction: Public and Private Allegiances in H.D.’s Life Writing

In 1959, H.D. wrote to her agent Norman Holmes Pearson asking him to destroy all copies of her unpublished World War One memoir, Asphodel ([1921-1922] 1992): “If carbons

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ever turn up, please destroy them” (quoted in Spoo, x).79 In this chapter, I establish H.D.’s bid to erase all traces of Asphodel as a central tenet of her prose technique, arguing that Asphodel’s haunting absence from public visibility inspired the formal developments of her later memoir,

Palimpsest (1926), and H.D.’s aim in this text of expressing the emotional turmoil of war without succumbing to the jingoism of atrocity propaganda. As a fictional account of the stillbirth of her first baby in 1915 due to the stress of hearing about the sinking of the Lusitania,80

H.D. provides in Asphodel a written testimony of her loss but then withholds it, which creates within her oeuvre what Cathy Caruth might call a traumatic “record that has yet to be made”; an unspeakable “gap” that represents the shock of the event itself (“Introduction” 6-7). As a

“phantom novel” (Spoo ix) or what one of H.D.’s most important critics, Susan Stanford

Friedman, calls a “repressed story” (170), Asphodel embodies the traumatic incident that it recounts because the text’s absence from public ownership mirrors the psychological condition of H.D as an American newcomer in Britain who lacked the appropriate language or support systems for talking about her ordeal. Overshadowed by words that incite its erasure, Asphodel epitomizes the “missing” of H.D.’s experience, “the fact that, not being experienced in time, it has not yet been fully known” (Caruth 62, italics in original). Throughout this chapter, I present

H.D.’s inability to adequately narrate her trauma in terms of a protest with creative and political

79 H.D. composed Asphodel in 1921-1922, but it was not published until Robert Spoo’s 1992 edition for Duke University Press. H.D. housed the one original copy of her manuscript that survived Pearson’s cull at Yale University’s Beinecke Library with the author’s words “DESTROY” brandished across its title page (Spoo, “Introduction” x). 80 Unlike the air-raid setting of Asphodel, the German sinking of passenger liner the Lusitania in 1915 is the event H.D. attributes to her actual miscarriage. The attack killed 1,198 civilians and brought her home nation of the United States into the War. In Magic Mirror, in fact, H.D. suggests that her husband, Richard Aldington, was partly responsible for her stillbirth due to the manner in which he delivered the news of the ship’s fate: “a few days before [the baby] was due he burst in upon Julia of [Madrigal], with ‘don’t you realize what this means? Don’t you feel anything? The Lusitania has gone down” (underscoring in original, 55). However, H.D. also corroborates the bewilderment of her trauma when she questions the veracity of this particular memory, telling herself “Surely, this was fantasy” (Magic 55). 165

meaning. As a woman who lost her maternal identity due to the violence of militarism, H.D., through her fictional guise Hermione, retains loss on both a personal and textual level in

Asphodel to protect her encounter from war-serving templates of female victimhood. While

Stopes predicates women’s power on their willingness to patch Britain’s war wounds with ameliorative bodies or texts, H.D. focalizes within Asphodel the emptiness of loss, the unresolvable reality of human destruction, and emotional pressure of an inescapable past to re- determine her place as a grieving individual in a world that she believed modern progress had too-hastily mended. In an era when many European communities sought normalcy to counteract the ravages of warfare, I define H.D.’s concerns with death and literary nonreproduction as a deliberate mode of artistry. H.D. refuses to reproduce Asphodel throughout interwar culture as a way for her to foster individualistic powers of creativity at the unresolved site of this “missing” testimony (Caruth 62). Via the traumatic aspects of her life that lacked a suitable narrative form to express them, H.D. accesses through her published and nonpublished work resistant ways of speaking as a woman in the aftermath of war. In Asphodel and Palimpsest, H.D. finds a voice that defies the anesthetizing social routines of the 1920s and the risk of further carnage that these lifestyles potentialized.

By analyzing H.D.’s prose in this final chapter, I liken its concerns to those of Jacob’s

Room as the bid to unmask the effects of political aggression and question why this style of diplomacy must routinely characterize global relations. While modernist scholars have discussed

H.D. extensively in terms of her interest in psychoanalysis and Hellenism, I unite both issues in my interpretation of her autobiographical prose and uncover the anti-war message that drives her journey into the disorientating yet redemptive refuge of a lost classical past. This chapter provides a reading of H.D.’s aesthetics through the context of World War One. I present H.D.’s

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struggle with the conflict as the reason why she uses antiquity in her prose and poetry when she addresses the destructive overtones of a rapidly developing modernity. What I call a nonreproductive critique of militarism thus appears throughout this chapter as H.D.’s wish to confront how the drive for women to reproduce both children and patriotic culture during the interwar years often implicated them in the task of (re)constructing an unaltered post-War society. As a writer who investigates the War’s carnage through the agony of stillbirth, H.D.’s approach towards maternal loss scrutinizes the ideological basis of motherhood and the exploitative way in which militaristic propaganda frequently embroiled childbearing in global warmongering.

While Woolf creates fictional characters like Betty Flanders to examine how wartime

Britain tended to lock women into the role of restorative mourner, H.D. explores her own experiences of motherhood in Asphodel to critique mass media archetypes of maternity and rewrite how women might understand their role as civilians in times of war. As we see in

Chapter Three, Stopes hinges women’s relationship with the Home Front upon their need to reinvest life into Britain’s classist and expansionistic state institutions. However, as an American by birth whose maternity the European War violently rescinded, H.D. as Hermione rebuffs the sexualized rhetoric of patriotic belonging that writers like Stopes lauded at this time. Like Woolf,

H.D. maintains an outsider perspective in her prose that she compounds through her own sense of trauma and situation as a relative newcomer in Britain, arriving in the country just four years prior to the War’s outbreak in 1911. In what Annette Debo characterizes as a distinction between

H.D.’s “personal mind-set” and the “malleability” of her citizenship (7-8),81 I argue that

81 H.D. lost her US citizenship and became a British subject by law in 1913 when she married Richard Aldington (Debo ix). However, Debo notes that she “always considered herself an American” and repatriated again at the age of seventy-two (Debo ix). 167

Asphodel disrupts the patriotic unity between self and nation when Hermione displays an irreconcilable contrast between her inner narrative and the nationalistic forces that attempt to shape her expression. Ultimately, we find in Asphodel a voice of dissent through H.D.’s use of trauma, death, and nonreproduction to liberate women’s expressivity from the culturally- enforced demand that they supplement men’s violent styles of international governance.

Hermione’s traumatized, outsider status grants her a unique worldview that removes her from pre-standing ideas about maternal identity and how the British media frequently embroiled motherhood in its gender-infused vocabularies of militaristic service.

In its absence from public visibility, Asphodel ostensibly justifies Woolf’s criticism of the detached modernist artist in “Solid Objects,” where, akin to how John refuses to engage with the world beyond his collection of unique treasures, H.D. formalizes intense mental stimuli in her text only to then sequester it within the inaccessible archives of privatized nonpublication.

However, where I would mark a discrepancy between John and H.D. is the latter’s use of

Asphodel to initiate an extended inquiry into how artists can best utilize public address while securing creative autonomy and the authenticity of their personal experiences. In terms of H.D.’s oeuvre, I present this compromise as her endeavour to textualize her traumatic thought-processes while she also resisted the period’s prewritten scripts of female victimhood and how they would debase the raw intimacy of her stillbirth. Though Asphodel as a withheld testimony replays what

Dori Laub describes as trauma’s “radical otherness to all known frames of reference” (84), I argue that the “otherness” of H.D.’s memoir preserves her loss as an ongoing source of thought and self-reflection. Since, as Laub explains, traumatic encounters are often “not transmittable, and integratable, at the time” (84), H.D. embraces repression throughout Asphodel to highlight the dearth of linguistic resources that were capable to account for the complexities of losing an

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infant before his or her birth. Hermione imbues her experience of child loss with utter ambiguity and uncertainty: she tends to refer to her unborn baby as an “it,” which differs from how atrocity discourses of the time either transformed the unfamiliar horrors of conflict into stable and war- serving narratives, or, as we see in Stopes’s The Race, invested children with the need for women to secure a knowable peacetime future. While Barbara Guest dismisses H.D.’s stillbirth when she describes H.D.’s response to her loss as mere “hysteria” (73)—a view that problematically reiterates what I discuss as a tendency to ignore or pathologize the transformational potential of death—I uphold that H.D. loads her stillbirth with intentional, symbolic and creative importance. More than just “hysterical thinking” (Guest 73), H.D.’s fiction frequently returns to the theme of stillbirth to register the effects of wartime turmoil: an enquiry that she centres within experimental techniques such as stream of consciousness prose, grammatical shifts, and references to a lost classical past. By silencing Asphodel and the story of disrupted motherhood that it recounts, H.D. steeps her memoir in noncommunication but as an impasse where she nurtures creative expressivity. The absence of H.D.’s memoir influenced her search for a modernist form that was suitable for capturing the chaos of war and critiquing a

European culture that was responsible for repeatedly marring the world with unthinkable human catastrophes.

For this reason, while Spoo establishes Asphodel’s account of H.D.’s early relationship with Annie Winifred Ellerman (Bryher) as the main reason behind H.D.’s decision not to publish her memoir,82 my approach highlights the text’s references to fears of stirring political divisiveness as another reason for its absence. Although Bryher does appear in the final part of

82 For Spoo, the “candid lesbian theme” in Asphodel is “one reason that H.D. wanted typescripts of the novel destroyed” but also why “the two women [were] reluctant to put a match to all copies” (“Introduction” xiii). 169

the novel in the character of Beryl de Rothfeldt, most of the plot describes H.D.’s uneasy marriage to British poet-cum-army officer Richard Aldington (or his fictional guise Jerrold

Darrington) and does so to examine the fraught connectiveness between motherhood and militarism that proliferated at this time. While Susan Stanford Friedman argues that H.D. subjects Asphodel’s “narrative capitulation” to the “repeated disruptions” of lesbian love (175), my own inquiry focuses upon how miscarriage similarly disrupts heterosexual discourse in that it sunders the reproductive exchanges between husband and wife, soldier and civilian, Western

Front and Home Front. In this chapter, I do not deliberate upon the personal nature of H.D. and

Bryher’s relationship. Instead, I argue that Asphodel, despite being unpublished during H.D.’s lifetime, resonates with her politically-loaded endeavour to scrutinize ideas about maternal loyalty to the militaristic state. Like Jacob’s Room, H.D. makes explicit in Asphodel how British culture throughout the War frequently inflected a woman’s bid to produce literature with the role of motherly restorer. Asphodel thwarts this process by revoking the ability of the British media to transform either H.D.’s testimony or her unborn child into a warmongering account of female victimhood. The text’s ambiguity revokes the kind of logic that propels fighting: it names yet withholds its perpetrators, dissolves witness into silence, and makes the loss of Hermione’s baby synonymous with the loss of patriotic motherhood itself and how military conventions often render this role complicit in aggressive, revenge-inciting diplomacy.

Traumatic Memory and the Anamorphic Object

Echoing Asphodel’s overall dispersal of stable wartime motifs, Hermione’s experience of carrying but not having her baby causes her to encounter the unsettling feeling of traversing two

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procreative states. While Hermione describes her loss using stark and enigmatic terminology, she also voices relief at not having to raise a newborn during the War: “Thank God she had suffered to the sound of guns and the baby wasn’t…dead…not born…still born” (ellipses in original, 114-

15). Using the negative “wasn’t” to introduce this terrible incident, Hermione imbues her unborn child with negativity. She then amplifies the confusion of her ordeal when she replaces subsequent auxiliary verbs, the words that would either affirm or negate the baby’s physical status, with the fragmented gaps of ellipses. Akin to Caruth’s account of trauma as “a crisis to whose truth there is no simple access” (“Introduction” 6), Hermione’s miscarriage evades the expected “temporal structure” (Caruth, “Introduction” 8) of childbirth because he or she is simultaneously “dead” but also tragically “born,” never alive but paradoxically not “not born.”

While a physical body might attest to the infant’s corporeality, the genderless and nameless figure in Hermione’s memory is also a vacancy who did not live beyond initial delivery nor the inception of his or her personal history.83 Hermione invests her stillborn child with temporal as well as grammatical indeterminacy: she binds the baby’s unwritten life within the past yet allows him or her to provoke a raw, affective now and mournfully foreclosed future. In what R. Clifton

Spargo calls a “retrospective concern for the other as if it were anticipatory or potentially preventative of loss” (4), which Spargo presents as a mourner’s unwillingness to end their burden of care towards a loved one, the minor comfort that Hermione feels in having saved a life from the violence of gunfire suggests an ongoing sense of maternal protectionism and an inability to fully sever her attachment towards the infant. The unborn child occupies a hauntingly dubious place between the past, present, and future; he or she collapses temporality and robs

83 While Hermione does not confirm her child’s gender in Asphodel, H.D.’s later memoir Palimpsest suggests it was a girl when nurses ask Raymonde whether she is “disappointed” she has lost a baby daughter (111). 171

Hermione of all adequate lexicons through which she can effectively “access” (Caruth 6) and understand her ordeal. Like the conceived yet unpublished status of Asphodel itself, Hermione’s absent child is a ghostly presence that is both “born” and “not born,” a testimony that H.D. makes yet suppresses within the “wasn’t” of melancholic privacy, and a memory still in need of an adequate symbolic or literary form to grant it stable meaning.

However, I do not see Hermione’s response to her trauma as a process that is wholly beyond her control. Rather, I suggest that Hermione’s reaction is a result of her decision to reject the period’s atrocity narratives and how these discourses would provide meaning for her experience but also empty it of all personal significance. Media hype rather than individual response formulates how the other patients in the hospital react to the news of Hermione’s stillbirth, which Hermione explains when she remarks that these women “found out that she had had a baby in an air raid just like Daily Mail atrocities” (116). As a publication that was, indeed still is, a patriotic and reactionary tabloid, the Daily Mail replaces the physical and linguistic void of Hermione’s miscarriage with a sensationalizing textual surrogate. Through H.D.’s critique of the Daily Mail, one that reappears throughout her work, Asphodel demonstrates the manipulative clout that wartime media possessed at this time in its ability to transform even the miscarriage of a foreign-born woman into fuel for advancing Britain’s war effort. Hermione does

“have” a baby in this case but only within the frame of a depersonalized Daily Mail story that stands in for her own horrific encounter. As Nicoletta F. Gullace notes, Britain possessed a “vast machinery for the production and distributing of propaganda” and used images of “gendered violence” not only to affect civilians’ understanding of the war but also “to justify military,

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foreign, and domestic policy” (715).84 When Hermione, along with other mothers on the ward, sees German aeroplanes flying over London, the Daily Mail imbues the planes with a politicized symbolism that mutually circumscribes the gaze of each woman: “We all marvelled saying

‘baby-killers, watching one, two three, all flying in a new formation. ‘Those beasts. Baby killers.’” (117). Both transfixed yet horrified by this sight, each woman discounts the destructive potential of the “baby-killers” by focusing instead upon the emblematic meaning that the Daily

Mail applies to them along with the women’s wider knowledge of wartime reality. The aeroplanes’ pre-planned “formation” reflects the contrived nature of atrocity stories themselves and mimics how the Daily Mail gives coherent structure to the War’s chaos but at the cost of reducing Hermione’s ordeal to the newspaper’s jingoistic formula.85 In what Gabriele Schwab calls the “colonizing power of words” when individuals use collective discourses to disclose their trauma (41), the Daily Mail “commodifies” Hermione’s miscarriage and then uses it to disseminate an “exculpating [narrative] of perpetration” that justifies the country’s involvement in the ongoing conflict (Schwab 6). In Asphodel, Britain’s mass media shapes Hermione’s personal experience around the ideologically-exacerbated divisions of combat. While the Daily

Mail’s stories might provide a narrative structure for Hermione’s loss, they also come with an indoctrinating control that converts the ungraspable complexity of her stillbirth into a

84 Elizabeth Brunton notes that such language was “common” within the Daily Mail and lists headlines such as “Women Mutilated and Babies Bayoneted” and “Babies Killed in Raid” as examples (73). See also Grayzel’s account of how European propaganda depicted maternal rape as a way of persuading able-bodied men to volunteer in the army (Identities 63-66) and Kingsley Kent’s discussion of “violence and cruelty” against women as a means of structuring “imaginings and representations of the war” (25). Gullace corroborates these views by arguing that “Between 1914 and 1918…images of the violation of women, real and symbolic, took on a heightened international significance (714). 85 Gullace notes that atrocity stories were often a way for the British government to “market the war” (714) and were frequently “called into question” by “interwar scholars” interested in the way these stories “shaped the public mind” (716). For this reason, she argues that “the accuracy of atrocity reports is less relevant to the cultural history of the war than the fact that they were widely disseminated and commonly believed” (716). 173

recognizable yet highly propagandized military drama.

In Asphodel, the Daily Mail thus represents what Žižek calls an anamorphic object. As a medium of indoctrination, the newspaper “undermines the distinction between objective reality and its distorted subjective perception” when its atrocity stories influence how wartime

Londoners comprehend the current disarray of European affairs (Žižek, “Melancholy” 659).86

For Žižek, since ideology provides a “set of unwritten rules that effectively regulate our speech and acts,” anamorphic objects such as the mass media strengthens an interpellated subject’s allegiance to a particular ideological reality by transforming what might be “confused and chaotic” about life into a stable truth (“Melancholy” 657, 659). Akin to his discussion of

“masking,” Žižek explains how stabilization is “one of the succinct formulations of ideology” because it solves all that is contradictory or inexplainable within a diverse and doctrinally- antagonistic world: “A face that looks grotesquely distorted and protracted acquires consistency; a blurred contour, a stain becomes a clear entity if we look at it from a certain biased standpoint”

(“Melancholy” 659). In the context of war, Žižek’s theory implies that anamorphic objects replace the clashing belief systems that often emerge during times of globalized conflict with a localized awareness of the event and a rhetoric of biased nationalism. While Hermione’s

“standpoint” regarding the German aeroplanes is one that the Daily Mail twists to fit its warmongering narrative, then, it also wavers precariously between an adopted patriotism and

Hermione’s understanding of the machines’ ambiguous or “distorted” meaning: “Gods, men, flying high, flying low, ‘ours’ were as brave of course, better, braver, better altogether, but not so tight, not so hard, not so devastating” (118). The Daily Mail both influences yet also

86 In this way, Hermione’s account of wartime publishing pre-empts what Žižek calls in “The Spectre of Ideology” (2012) a “society of the spectacle,” where “the media structures our perception of reality in advance” and renders it “indistinguishable from the aestheticized image of it” (10). 174

disorientates Hermione’s attitudes towards the War. While she asserts that the British and

German planes are different, Hermione’s description of them as being both “Gods” and “men” renders their discrepancies highly unstable and fluctuating somewhere between a knowable human context and the inapproachable heights of a quasi-religious dogma. Hermione’s initial use of the comparative “as” to liken the bravery of both planes reveals a moment of ideological failure, where the anamorphic object slips to reveal a discordant twin-patriotism. However,

Hermione quickly rectifies her blunder with the defensive, jingoistic alliteration of British planes being “better, braver”— somehow not as “devastating” despite their similar goal of mass slaughter. Even though Hermione is an American watching this aerial scene, the Daily Mail disseminates a wholly coercive and nationalistic rhetoric that draws Hermione to the newspaper’s side despite her foreign-born status. Like Woolf’s use of enigmatic terminology in

“Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” to destabilize the signifiers of national belonging, there are no real differences between belligerent or defensive forces in Hermione’s view but only the impressions that she and the other civilians in the hospital apply to each side via the pro-War lens of the Daily Mail. As an ideological form, the newspaper erodes distinctions not only between mass-produced planes and the men who fly them, but also between what are objective qualities of the bombers and what are subjective responses that the media’s abstract political symbolism prearranges as a form of intellectual command.

By uncovering the anamorphic distortion of war, Asphodel challenges militaristic protocols at the psychological site where their accompanying cultural forms fail to redress

Hermione’s loss. Despite the Daily Mail’s ability to provide a rationalizing template for

Hermione’s trauma, she fails to reach catharsis through the newspaper’s atrocity stories and instead feels “like a wild bird with her mind-wings beating, beating, and her feet caught, her feet

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caught, glued like a wild bird in bird-lime” (113). In this “bird-lime” image, H.D. typifies

Asphodel as an inscription of unreconcilable trauma. Even though Hermione’s “mind-wings” are actively trying to break free of her suffering, the text remains “caught” in an endless process of failed symbolization that resists the release of public testimony. While H.D.’s repetition in this sentence represents Hermione’s attempt to comprehend her sense of entrapment or “master what was never fully grasped in the first place” (Caruth, Unclaimed 62), the “wild bird” that illustrates

Hermione’s creative agency remains “glued” in an incomplete state of not being able to understand her experience. In H.D.’s later memoir Magic Mirror (1956 [2012]),87 she accredits this speechlessness to the fact that she “could not analyse” the memory of her miscarriage at the time: she remarks that “She only knew it was there. She only knew that she was desolate and empty” (69). Although H.D. can substantiate the incident, she does not possess the appropriate language to give her memory external form, nor does she have the capacity to address her stillbirth as anything else than an ongoing place of verbal lack. For this reason, although

Elizabeth Brunton argues that Hermione finds solace in atrocity narratives because their

“external identifications” make her stillbirth “narratable” (73), I see Hermione’s initial approach to these stories as the most unsettling aspect of her encounter. Hermione’s ability to access these narratives, yet still feel “caught” within her unresolved emotions, betrays how easily mass media fictions seize upon personal anguish without addressing these ordeals in a lasting or authentic way. Even though the Daily Mail provides a clarifying logic for wartime death, its “external identifications” ultimately fail at bringing Hermione’s “mind-wings” into an expressive relationship with the outer world. Returning to Žižek, H.D. presents Hermione as a woman who

87 Written in Switzerland towards the end of H.D.’s life; published posthumously by ELS Editions as a collection of autobiographical fiction along with Compassionate Friendship and Thorn Thicket. 176

“possesses” the anamorphic object “but has lost [her] desire for it because the cause that made

[her] desire this object has withdrawn, lost its efficiency” (“Melancholy” 662). The deeply personal nature of Hermione’s miscarriage means that these anamorphic narratives cannot efficiently account for the emptiness that her loss signifies: as mere placebos for a “confused and chaotic” existence, they indicate “nothing but the positivization of a void or lack” (Žižek’s italics, “Melancholy” 660). Since Žižek’s anamorphic objects cannot solve Hermione’s damaged relationship with the external world, their masking effects merely exacerbate the unsettled trauma that still seethes beneath them. While Hermione recognizes her ability to adopt the Daily

Mail stories as a palliative for her pain, they do nothing but oppressively smother the unnarrated

“void” of her stillbirth and fail at allowing her to conclusively overcome her trauma’s resistance to stable meaning.

However, I do not suggest in this account of failed anamorphism that H.D. steeps her work in inescapable trauma nor conceives of her artistry solely through the guise of victimhood.

Indeed, although Žižek recognizes that his anamorphic approach towards ideology reduces what humans understand of reality to a “historically specific set of discursive practices and power mechanisms,” he also acknowledges the “ethical” implications of this melancholic attitude because it allows “an intervention into social reality that changes the very coordinates of what is perceived to be possible” (“Melancholy” 671-72). Following Žižek, I define the as-yet inexpressible “void” that Hermione associates with her miscarriage not in terms of a complete withdrawal from public discourse but how H.D. developed new vocabularies for more authentically capturing the tumultuous developments of wartime society. During her therapy sessions with the Austrian psychiatrist Dr. Erich Heydt following the War, for instance, H.D. recounts how she escaped the initial speechlessness of Asphodel and used the healing process

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that Heydt initiated to produce more works of literature. Looking back on her relationship with

Heydt in Magic Mirror, H.D. describes experiencing a “spread of wings” that allowed her to

“[emerge] into a new life, rising from the darkness, when she told Eric [sic.] of the Lusitania …

And exactly, the day she began the old story to Eric, she started recording of the new story” (67).

Though H.D. does not specify which “new story” of hers she began “recording” at this time, she uses similar terminology to describe her first drafts of Bid Me to Live [A Madrigal] in 1939, explaining in a letter to Holmes Pearson in 1959 how this later memoir “Phoenixed-out of

Asphodel that was put far away & deliberately forgotten” (Between 247). Though H.D. presents

Asphodel in her letter to Holmes Pearson as the ashes of a prior testimonial erasure, she commands and controls the suppression of this text “deliberately” in order to stimulate further literary deeds. The “bird in bird-lime” of Asphodel transforms into the majestic phoenix that arises from the darkness of textual extinguishment and into new heights of artistic expression. In

H.D.’s description of death and visionary rebirth in this letter is both an image of her drafting process as well as an account of how she synchronized these revisions with her endeavours to process the War through psychiatry and writing itself. As the dates in her correspondence with

Holmes Pearson show, H.D.’s literary technique was rarely straightforward nor systematic but involved numerous rewritings or even effacements until a final version found its “wings.” By

“forgetting” Asphodel but then using it to “phoenix” subsequent textual forms, H.D. demonstrates how she makes and remakes narratives not only as a way of searching for emotional wellbeing but also the means by which she resisted the anamorphic influence of the

British mass-media.

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“Birth Appropriation” and Women’s War Writing

My claim that H.D. “deliberately” suppresses her work as a creative process counters

Lawrence Rainey’s appraisal of her as a writer who concealed her work from her readers primarily due to her disdain for the masses. Rainey characterizes H.D.’s work as “bereft of a genuine public” and circling instead “among a cénacle of friends and hangers-on in wealthy

Bohemia” like “bonbons at a dinner party” (148). While Rainey’s inventive use of simile certainly resonates with the private and exclusive nature of the modernist salon, it problematically discounts H.D.’s awareness of the ideological baggage that accompanied publication during her lifetime, including her fear that disseminating a story of maternal loss risked inflaming divisive militaristic agendas like those of the Daily Mail. Nevertheless, Rainey insists that to assume H.D. was engaged with issues beyond the sheltered walls of her clique is to approach her texts “in ways inconsistent or incommensurable with the logic of their original production” (166).88 While it is certainly important for modernist critics to avoid interpretative anachronisms, I would note that Rainey himself disregards the historical context of H.D.’s work when he overlooks the anamorphic victim culture of the War years and how it influenced the

“original production” of texts like Asphodel. My analysis of H.D.’s work does not accept

Rainey’s inference that she resisted publication simply due to her view of the public as an uncouth horde of consumers who were “unworthy of being addressed” (Rainey 154). Rather, I

88 Rainey argues that the only reason why H.D. has become well-known is because of the need to study marginal identities in Western universities. He claims that “H.D. has become a canonical figure for the kinds of values that have earned the opprobrious label of ‘political correctness’ largely by purifying her work of the material complexity in which it was formed, a task concretely accomplished through the neglect of bibliographical, textual, and editorial considerations in assessing her work’s genesis and development” (165). He argues that H.D. was not concerned with widespread publication, nor disseminating views about gender, sexuality, or race because she was free of the economic need to publish. 179

see H.D.’s hesitancy in publishing some of her work as the method that she used for examining the linkages between public and private exchange and how the illegibility of individual pain often forces victims to silence their traumatic memories. As H.D. remarked herself in her letter to

Holmes Pearson, she estranged Asphodel from the public as a way of authenticating the turmoil of her loss and to use this “forgotten” testimony to renegotiate the terms of post-traumatic communication in Bid Me to Live. Although Rainey’s analysis of H.D. does provide a precise account of print culture during the early twentieth-century, he also anchors her work within a shallow formula of modernist arrogance and discounts the issue of media-provoked gender stereotypes that female writers at this time often faced when publishing their work as civilians in war-dominated societies like Britain.

For this reason, if construing Asphodel as politically engaged is “incommensurable with the logic of its original production,” I define the withdrawal that Rainey critiques in H.D.’s work as the “logic” that she used for examining the period’s constraining ideas about female creativity.

In “Before the Battle” (2014 [1940]), a short story that H.D. wrote during the Blitz of World War

Two,89 the unnamed narrator explains her concern for creative autonomy when discussing the conundrum of her artist daughter, whom, although unnamed, the story models on H.D.’s second child, Perdita Macpherson Schaffner.90 In this short story, the narrator reveals how the risk of

“misconstruction and misapprehensions and actual criticism” accompanies any decision to publish and, should her daughter succumb to these attitudes, her daughter would “die” (146).

89 Edited by Annette Debo. First published by the University of Florida Press in 2014 along with a re-print of H.D.’s poetry collection, What Do I Love (1950). 90 Born Frances Perdita Aldington. Perdita’s father was Scottish music critic and composer Cecil Gray, with whom H.D. began a relationship in 1918 while she was still married to Aldington. However, the relationship was short- lived and Gray did not play an active role in Perdita’s upbringing. Barbara Guest notes that Gray only met his daughter once in 1947 when she was twenty-eight years old (96). In 1950, Perdita married John Schaffner, a literary agent (Guest 289). 180

Though hyperbolic in tone, the speaker’s comparison between the public’s “misconstruction” of her daughter’s work and the death of the artist is noteworthy because she associates it with “the fact that she had feared to die herself in 1919, when the child was born” (146). The speaker then clarifies that her fear of death during her daughter’s delivery was due to the lingering effects of a

“personal memory” that “nature had forced her to repress … in a sort of black agony” (146).

While the speaker’s anxiety relates on one level to H.D.’s near-death experience when delivering

Perdita,91 the term “black agony” also elicits Asphodel’s repressed story of miscarriage, which suggests that H.D.’s persisting trauma dominated Perdita’s birth with the threat of further

“misconstruction” should it fall victim to the same anamorphic ideologies. The speaker refers to death in this sentence not only as an indicator of maternal mortality but also the death of women’s creativity in the face of appropriative public-sphere discourses. In “Before the Battle,”

H.D. compares her apprehension about disclosing trauma with those of publishing literature. For the speaker, women writers at this time often had to confront pre-existing attitudes about their artistry that could cause the public to misinterpret their work and therefore “kill” the artist’s original intent, experience, or life story.

As Woolf implies in her essay “Professions for Women” when describing how interwar gender norms often forced women writers to “sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others,” “Before the Battle” explores how women at this time faced the dual task of maintaining creative autonomy while also appeasing “the extreme conventionality of the other sex” and the authority that these figures held across Britain’s cultural establishments (Woolf, “Professions”

141). For the narrator of “Before the Battle,” women’s tendency towards artistic self-effacement

91 During her second pregnancy, H.D. was suffering from the pneumonia epidemic of 1919, commonly referred to as the “Spanish Flu,” that killed 20-40 million people worldwide—almost as many people as the War (Guest 110). 181

relates to their need to mitigate men’s fear of generative power in mothers, which she indicates when claiming that “men would like a child” and so “get jealous when something like a child, a book, comes to a woman who can have a child anyway” (148). In what Mary O’Brien calls

“birth appropriation,” “Before the Battle” suggests that men overcome the way in which nature estranges them from procreation by curbing women’s powers of innovation through attitudes the speaker defines as an intuitive “hate” for “the things women do” (“Before” 148).92 In the speaker’s awareness of men’s “jealous” belittlement of her daughter’s talent (149), she implies that women’s (pro)creative influence threatens male ascendancy in its ability to alienate paternal identity from sociocultural lineages: “Because a woman is biologically much more evolved than a man,” the speaker remarks, “then [men] think, why should a girl have everything?” (148-9).

“Before the Battle” presents what we saw in Chapter Three as Kristeva’s “genius” of mothers in terms of their potential to reclaim human and sociocultural development from the grasp of paternal authority. While I would note that Kristeva’s approach conflates individual men with abstract notions of governmental rule, it is a useful image for addressing H.D.’s anxieties about female productivity in the face of the appropriative forces of Britain’s anamorphic mass media.

The speaker establishes maternal capability as an innate source of feminine power but one that drives men to hinder women’s creativity through patriarchal institutions that render their children and art pawns in an ideological chronology of male oversight. In this story, H.D. links reproductive autonomy with artistic freedom, asserting that the most effective way for women to

92 O’Brien argues that the male reproductive function separates them from “natural genetic continuity,” which means they must create “artificial modes of continuity” so as to maintain dominance over the natural order. Patriarchy for O’Brien is therefore “the power to transcend natural realities with historical, man-made realities,” whereby men overcome their “alienation from procreation” through “institutional forms of the social relations of reproduction” such as privatized domestic labour (76). For this reason, O’Brien claims that patriarchal formations appropriate both “woman and her reproductive labour power” as a means of commanding socioeconomic production as well as its workforce (80). 182

realize their artistry is to evade the male appropriation of their (pro)creative labour and how this practice organized the material basis of Britain’s cultural economy as H.D. was writing.

Rainey’s analysis of H.D. thus neglects to consider how the “extreme conventionality”

(Woolf, “Professions” 141) of interwar gender relations often amounted to views that risked construing her creative agency either as a passive victim of foreign brutality or an inept, unpatriotic mother. In Asphodel, Hermione does not speak openly about her stillbirth because she fears that society will either appropriate this ordeal or mis-construct it as fuel for a gender- normative agenda: “No one would ever know for there were no words to tell it in. How tell it?

You can’t say this, this…but men will say O she was a coward, a woman who refused her womanhood” (ellipsis in original, 113). As we see in Stopes’s advocacy for dutiful childbearing,

Hermione remains aware of attitudes towards women as mothers at this time that, regardless of

Hermione’s personal background and nationality, might convert her miscarriage into a misogynistic narrative of female deficiency. Hermione “can’t say” her true feelings about her stillbirth because her memory resists the patriotic, heteronormative, and militaristic fixations of her new homeland, which means that she requires alternative “words” for expressing both her loss and sense of self rather than these incompatible notions of British “womanhood.” In the next section of this chapter, I position H.D.’s concerns regarding communicability among Woolf and other feminist writers who sought new ways of “telling” their views about male violence but in a way that also resisted the period’s demand for a male/female, destroyer/reproducer binary of gendered productivity. If, as “Before the Battle” suggests, the lifeforce of patriarchal lineages depends upon men appropriating women’s labour and then directing it towards the reproduction of male systems like militarism, then H.D. retains the traumatic memory of her stillbirth to generate a style of writing that rebelliously obstructs the idea of regenerative motherhood and the

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role that this identity played in reconstructing Britain’s post-War future.

“Men and Guns, Women and Babies”: Nonreproduction and Death as Pacifist Revolt

Hermione’s absent testimony about her unborn child reflects the work of other feminist thinkers of the interwar period who, when challenging the “appropriation” of woman’s maternal labour for militaristic end-goals, explored the issue of human nonreproduction. In Militarism versus Feminism (1915), for instance, C. K. Ogden and Mary Sargent Florence present a woman’s refusal to reproduce the manpower of battle as the means by which they can generate anti-war sentiment across society. Ogden and Sargent Florence argue that, by not having children, women can both strip military leaders of the human resources that they need to carry out international offensives and obtain new avenues for sociopolitical engagement beyond the home. Unlike the maternalist-pacifist thinkers that I introduce in Chapter Two, Ogden and

Sargent Florence see motherhood under militarism not as something capable of diminishing violence but the very reason why war continuously blights modern society: they argue that maternity keeps women in “perpetual subjection” by “[exhausting] all her faculties in the ceaseless production of children that nations might have the warriors needed for aggression or defence” (4). In Militarism versus Feminism, reproductive demands create a suppressed consciousness in women that prevents them from intellectually combatting male hegemony and the control it exerts over global politics. Akin to the narrator in Three Guineas, who argues that non-working or domesticated women are “the weakest of all classes in the state” because they

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“have no weapon with which to enforce [their] will” (168),93 Ogden and Sargent Florence contend that the imperative for women to supply the physical needs of destructive international policies like war stifles their minds and proficiencies. Their message is not so much concerned with the sexual behaviour of individual women, thus allowing them to differentiate their essay from the heterosexual power dynamics that organized the period’s contraceptive discourses, but rather the collective, intellectual resources that might arise once women as a whole minimize or rethink their maternal duties. Ogden and Sargent Florence uphold that feminists should reject traditional ideas about motherhood—a role that they believed conditioned women to “gaze blindly at the carnage or hasten the blood that flows, as ministering angels, to heal the wounds that the heroism of man has dealt to his brother”—and instead work towards establishing “a new international organisation” for the “substitution of co-operation and understanding for violence between nations” (63-4). By rejecting the period’s role of nurturing mother, Ogden and Sargent

Florence’s essay undermines the assumption that women’s relationship with politics need always be embodied and therefore locked at a regenerative antithesis to the violence of men. Instead,

Militarism versus Feminism encourages women to recognize childbearing not as an innate or autonomous function but a task that European leaders inflected with the objective of preserving the world’s unethical political agendas.

Since Ogden and Sargent Florence establish maternal revolt as a future-focused act of stripping the British military of its required feminine labour, I recognize a similar intent in

Asphodel in H.D.’s use of death and literary nonreproduction to deprive militaristic propaganda

93 This logic stems from the narrator’s account of how working women can oppose war by “[refusing] to make munitions”: a form of leverage that “the daughters of educated men” (those who do not engage in industrial production) do not possess (Three Guineas 167). Echoing Ogden and Sargent Florence, the narrator remarks in a footnote that “one method by which [educated women] can help to prevent war is to refuse to bear children” (Three Guineas 370, n. 10). She associates the falling birth-rate of the 1930s as evidence of them heeding to this “advice” (Three Guineas 370, n. 10). 185

of the testimony that would fuel its aggressive nationalism. By refusing to instill her unborn child with anamorphic narratives of wartime victimhood, H.D. leaves her child’s death unresolved so that she can interrogate the cultural mechanics of modern warmongering. When Friedman praises Asphodel’s portrayal of “women’s procreative power as counterweight to men’s violence, as regenerative” (184-5), then, she overlooks the fact that military traditions at this time often annexed women’s “power” by centring their productivity within the burden of reversing and therefore supplementing the losses of war. Rather than adopt Friedman’s account of pregnancy as emblematic of the “(re)birth of both individual and society” in H.D.’s work (185), I emphasize the capacity for women to achieve creative insight by resisting the period’s stereotypical ideas about feminine revival, or the very beliefs that tasked them with directing their “procreative power” towards the “(re)birth” of normalcy during peacetime.94 Hermione examines this situation in Asphodel when she asks herself “Was there nothing else in the world? Men and guns, women and babies” (115). In establishing women’s “babies” as a counterpoint to men’s “guns,”

Hermione locates motherhood as one side of gendered activity, where the children that women birth are the adverse of mass-produced weaponry and function to offset the damage that these same weapons cause. H.D. demonstrates through Hermione’s remark how militaristic states fix both sexes within a pendulum of violent erasure and corrective reparation, which means that a woman’s inability to bear children corresponds with the failure of their male peers to heroically defend their country’s borders. By questioning whether anything exists outside of this binary, I

94 Donna Krolik Hollenberg follows a similar approach to H.D.’s work with what she calls a “childbirth metaphor” (4). Remarking upon a “declining mortality rate and the mass acceptance of contraception,” Krolik Hollenberg argues that female writers began to “exploit” their “double birthing potential” and choose “either creativity or procreation” (11). In my approach to H.D.’s work, however, I pull my discussion away from this either/or logic and suggest that women need not see their artistic productivity in terms of a biological function nor literary creativity as a stand-in for it. I argue that there is far more subversive, pacifistic influence in woman’s questioning of maternal roles in times of war rather than using these roles to motivate their artistry. 186

argue that Hermione’s quest for “procreative power” (Freidman 184) involves using the trauma of her stillbirth to surpass Britain’s oppressive destruction/reconstruction counterpoints and, in doing so, renegotiate her exchanges as a woman with male jurisdiction. Since, as Hermione’s observation about motherhood implies, militaristic protocols designate women life-givers to uphold Britain’s binarized categories of wartime labour, there is subversive power in maintaining what the narrator of Three Guineas calls an “indifference” towards war (Three Guineas 310), which, I argue, H.D. achieves by embracing the obverse of all reproductive assignments: the profoundly unsettling potential of death. As a testimony that refuses to offer its central trauma as impetus for heroic male activity, Asphodel dispossesses the “claque or audience that encourages war” (Woolf, Three Guineas 214) when H.D. transforms the crisis that would usually inflame atrocity propaganda into an image of Hermione’s self-reflection and her refusal to rectify the effects of mechanized violence.

In this chapter, then, I move my analysis of H.D.’s work away from maternity as a form of embodied creativity because this approach risks echoing the tropes of (re)generative womanhood that abounded in Britain during the 1910s and 20s. Accordingly, I challenge

Friedman’s claim that “The conventions of dominant discourse” as H.D. was writing provided

“no language in which to speak as a pregnant subject” (187). Friedman’s assertion overlooks the fact that British society accepted if not revered maternity at this time as a necessary counterbalance to the carnage of war. As we see in Chapter Three, Stopes’s hugely popular writings on motherhood glorified maternity with highly poetic as well as pseudo-scientific language in order to advertise its importance not only in terms of a spiritualized calling but also a civil duty. In Radiant Motherhood, for instance, Stopes asserts that “The radiance of the highest form of motherhood is that of the transfigured saint, hallowed by suffering comprehended and

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endured, transmuted into a service beyond and above the lower desires of self” (19). By embellishing motherhood with religious overtones but also affirming the racial benefits that it can award mankind, Stopes charges her “language” of pregnancy (Freidman 187) with an innate sacredness while, at the same time, demystifies it as a form of public-sphere “service” through the practical sex advice that she gives to expecting partners.95 While I do not present Asphodel as a total denial of motherhood, I regard Hermione’s complex attitudes towards her pregnancy as an inquiry into the kinds of maternal “language” that proliferated at this time and that allowed her to

“speak” of her experience (Freidman 187) but in a highly depersonalized manner. As we read

H.D.’s experimental and interrogative prose, it becomes apparent that there is no easy way of approaching the politically-loaded issue of maternity during the War years. What I establish as a central concern, however, is H.D.’s bid to re-imbue reproduction, in both a human and literary sense, with women’s ability to spark change within modern society. My argument thus adds a political incentive to Brunton’s claim that the dead child in modernist fiction encapsulates “fears for the future” and a “locus for the anxieties of the day in a changing and incomprehensible world” (55). While Stopes overcomes post-War “anxieties” like national decline when her work promotes the need for eugenic repopulation, I suggest that H.D. reaffirms these same anxieties as a way of dispossessing Britain of the bodies or nationalistic ideals that it required for re- establishing a pre-War state of affairs. Although Hermione’s miscarriage attests to the emotional and physical agony of occupying a belligerent world, her narrative also upholds the tangible

95 In Radiant Motherhood, Stopes continues to structure her reproduction advice around eugenics. In one instance, she notes that “the most desiring of parenthood are to-day those who are forced by circumstances into the position of the ancient slave and allowed to rear but one or two children,” while, on the other hand, society allows “the very lowest and worst members of the community, to produce innumerable tens of thousands of stunted, warped, and inferior infants” (211). Suppressing maternity among these groups of people, Stopes argues, would allow the “better classes… to enlarge their own families, and at the same time not only to save misery but to multiply a hundredfold the contribution in human life-value to the riches of the State” (211). 188

violence that this same world causes in order to undermine what Stopes would present as her task of re-investing life back into Britain’s militaristic systems.

In H.D.’s refusal to regenerate a culture of militarism, her work reflects Woolf’s method of displaying wartime casualties in the opening of Three Guineas to signal how pacifist thinkers might hinder male combativeness. In a photograph of dead bodies that the Spanish government has published to garner international support for the republican cause during the Civil War, the narrator describes a dilapidated city along with “what might be a man’s body, or a woman’s; it is so mutilated that it might be, on the other hand, the body of a pig” (164).96 The narrator’s description of this scene undoes all symbolism that typically organizes Western life by collapsing differences not only between men and women but humans and animals too. By erasing familiar ideological signage, the photograph captures a necessary underside to Francisco

Franco’s fascist takeover, where, through a thorough suppression of Spanish republicanism, his party overwrites the existing people, places, and values of Spain with the replacement of an illegitimate rule.97 In asserting that the photograph is “not an argument” but “a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye” (165), the narrator defines Franco’s brand of totalitarianism as a

96 The Spanish Civil War had personal significance for Woolf because her nephew Julian Bell had enlisted as a volunteer for the Republican Forces. She wrote to Julian Bell on 14 November 1936: “This morning I got a packet of photographs from Spain, all of dead children, killed by bombs” (Letters, vol. 6, 85). Bell was killed while driving an ambulance on 18 July 1937. Writing to Vita Sackville West, Woolf expressed “dull anger and despair” at this news but also frustration at his initial decision to volunteer: “Why must he get set on going to Spain? — But it was useless to argue. And his feelings were so mixed. I mean, interest in war, and conviction, and a longing to be in the thick of things” (Letters, vol. 6, 151). 97 As Helen Graham notes, Franco frequently used “terror against the civilian population,” including “mass aerial bombing,” which was “achieved courtesy of Franco’s German and Italian fascist backers” (71). In what Stanley G. Payne calls a “semi-colonial” relationship (267), Nazi Germany helped Franco’s Nationalist forces overthrow the democratically elected Second republic and received industrial support from Germany for their rearmament strategy in return. Franco then established a “unified and authoritarian government” by regulating the economy, oppressing political adversaries, suppressing the minority cultures of the Basque and Catalan areas, and imposing strict censorship upon the Spanish media (Payne 15). Nevertheless, George Richard Esenwein notes that the Republican forces were not innocent of similar brutality: “the revolutionary left spear-headed a campaign of terror and extermination against the individuals and groups who were perceived to be allied to the military rebellion. And though this largely improvised campaign of bloody purges began to subside within a few weeks, terror repression, and the killing of suspected enemies or ‘Fifth Columnists’ became permanent features of Republican rule” (64). 189

force that cannot tolerate dissent in any capacity and so approaches it instead with the indefensible, brutal meaninglessness of mass bloodshed. If we accept Žižek’s concept of ideology as “a dreamlike construction hindering us from seeing the real state of things” (Sublime

48), then Woolf characterizes resistance in Three Guineas through the act of exposing what lies beneath fascism’s distorting control. In the case of the Spanish Civil War, Žižek’s “real state of things” comprises of the civilians that Franco’s forces violently massacre when ejecting them from the country’s new and extreme standards of nationhood. Three Guineas counteracts this process by divulging how Franco’s restructuring of Spanish society merely feeds off the remains of people who impede his unlawful advances across the peninsula. Woolf’s approach at the start of Three Guineas is ideologically nonreproductive because it refuses to reproduce the myth of fascist legitimacy. Instead, by unmasking the violence that Franco’s forces systematically unleash upon civilians, the narrator exposes the reality of his rule as an ideological lifeforce for

Spain that holds deliberate, politically-authorized death at its very core.

However, by referring to this horrific photograph as nothing more than a “crude statement of fact,” the narrator of Three Guineas also suggests that pacifist thinkers must go beyond simply exposing wartime death and examine how this violence provides the logistics for unethical political regimes. To expand upon my reading of Edelman from Chapter Three, while

Woolf presents death in this photograph as a “negativity to every form of social viability,” it is not an abstract “pressure” within psychological or symbolic processes (Edelman 9) but a loss that

Fascism purposefully causes when imposing its suppressive rule upon Spaniards. Towards the end of Three Guineas, the narrator returns to her analysis of death when she describes “another picture” that appears “upon the foreground” of her text, which, in this instance, shows a man

“called in German and Italian Fuhrer or Duce; in our language Tyrant or Dictator. And behind

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him lie ruined houses and dead bodies—men, women and children” (364). In Woolf’s second photograph, the narrator excavates within mechanisms of state power what Žižek sees in the

“death drive” as a “negative gesture that clears a space for creative sublimation” (Ticklish 159).

In this new photograph, death is the means by which the ruling men of Europe destroy their opponents, foreground their oppressive political beliefs, and then create in its place a substitute jurisdiction to rule the nation’s people. In drawing the above comparison between the palpable outcome of fascist violence and the “negativity” of Freud’s death drive, I accept a crossover between exclusionary political formations and the minds of the people that they interpellate. At the same time, though, I define what Žižek sees as the destructive “clearings” of extreme ideology as a result of substantive repression like war or genocide. Ultimately, Žižek aligns with

Edelman when he accounts for a “primordial ontological void” at the centre of human thought, which, in what Žižek calls an “epistemological limitation of our capacity to grasp reality,” is the reason why he believes people embrace the “masking” effects of ideology (Žižek’s italics,

Ticklish 158).98 In the narrator’s picture, however, I uphold what Žižek calls the “non-all” of

Fascist reality (Ticklish 158) as the result of disclosable political acts, Franco’s violent

98 In The Ticklish Subject (2000), Žižek defends his reluctance to politicize this “ontological void” as a response to contemporary identity politics that Butler popularized through her idea of performativity. Since Butler defines the Lacanian Real as a place of prohibited styles of sexuality or gender, Žižek argues that her approach is “simultaneously too optimistic and too pessimistic” (Ticklish 264): “optimistic” because it locates where minorities can embrace non-normativity yet “pessimistic” because Butler unwaveringly binds these identities to the very power system she tries to subvert. Žižek’s critique is largely a response to Butler’s argument that there is “no way” in Žižek’s framework to “politicize the relation between language and the real” (Bodies 201). As a queer theorist interested in the crossover between language and gender expression, Butler redefines Žižek’s traumatic excess as “always relative to a linguistic domain that authorizes and produces that foreclosure, and achieves that effect through producing and policing a set of constitutive exclusions” (Bodies 201). However, what Butler defines as “constitutive exclusions” are often not a result of active ideological “foreclosure” but newly-emerging conceptions of human identity within the political and consumer spheres. There is a difference between foreign civilians killed by Western governments and previously obscure patterns of gender performativity that gradually become public as Butler’s “linguistic domain” of intelligibility expands through processes like grassroots activism. My dissertation recognizes the potential for more inclusive normativities to account for diverse embodiments while establishing social justice as a reaction against material, rather than abstractly “symbolic,” violence against human lives. 191

suppression of opposing voices, rather than an inert “void” within ideological logic or human understanding in general. By reducing what he calls “a traumatic social division which cannot be symbolized” within ideology to an issue of mere semantics (Sublime 45),99 Žižek does little to address the substantive violence that extremist regimes frequently condone when maintaining the subservience of people to their worldview. Three Guineas, on the other hand, upholds destructive behaviour as a distinct and modifiable quality of the masculine “Tyrant or Dictator” himself to reiterate that “we are not passive spectators doomed to unresisting obedience but by our thoughts and actions can ourselves change that figure” (365). What Woolf sees as the death drive in Three

Guineas is not an unconscious “void” that commands how a person comprehends or relates to social reality but is the result of real and strategic policies. The essay emphasizes this brutality from the outset as an impetus for pacifist change: it operates as a tripartite of text, death, and male authority to reconnect these usually misrepresented truths and expose the plight of the adversaries that European Fascism horrifically abolishes when attempting to cement its rule.

In turning to Three Guineas at this stage in my chapter, I reinstate my view of militarism and the nationalistic discourse that it serves as containing traces of tangible yet nondisclosed violence against civilians both in- and outside of state borders. I apply what Žižek calls the

“creative sublimation” of the death drive to martial techniques and how its accompanying culture

“sublimates” both grievable and non-grievable lives with unifying messages of nationalistic identity in propaganda and the mass-media. Asphodel ruptures these narratives when H.D. preserves the “non all” of Hermione’s unresolved wartime ordeal as a site of individual

99 Since, for Žižek, all symbolic doctrines counteract the fullness of the Lacanian Real, these doctrines require an element of opposition or impossibility to give identifiable form and meaning to their specific ideological worldview. Žižek’s definition of ideology as fundamentally incomplete by virtue of “a traumatic social division” thus permits thinkers to adopt a sceptical approach towards the capacity of political discourses to fully circumscribe reality. 192

resistance beneath the Daily Mail’s “anamorphic objects” of group understanding. My approach links trauma with the concrete effects of politicized aggression and upholds loss as a result of real human behaviour rather than a universal quality of the unconscious. In agreement with

Butler’s critique of Žižek, I contend that the identities or values that Western society forecloses as “the unlivable, the nonnarrativizable, the traumatic” are a result of repression, discrimination, social taboo, or even bodily erasure (Bodies 188). While Butler’s idea here refers specifically to her concern for queer liberation, it also informs her interest in nonviolent politics and the need to recognize the “nonnarrativizable” effects of modern warfare on racialized others.100 As Butler asserts, activists must identify the “incompletion” that political repression or violence embeds within ideologies like heteronormativity because it “[leaves] open the production of new subject positions, new political signifiers, and new linkages to become the rally points for politicization”

(Bodies 193). The unresolved agony of Hermione’s stillbirth renders her loss a blockage to conservative peacetime repair, a memory that H.D. keeps mournfully “open” to question the normalcy of life under militaristic rule. Instead of following Friedman’s account of women’s procreativity as a “counterweight” to male belligerence, I argue that H.D. dismisses birthing metaphors within her work—or the vocabulary that would augment militaristic paradigms of the regenerative mother— and destabilizes the future of post-War Europe by recentralizing the death that its diplomatic customs induce but then ideologically distort.

100 As I discuss in Chapter Two, this change of focus includes Butler’s discussion of grievability in Precarious Life (2004) and, as I introduce in Chapter One, her use of framing metaphors in Frames of War (2009) to describe nongrievability. In The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020), Butler continues her interest in visibility by recognizing “lives [that] are not equally valued” in the West or “considered worthy of grief, or grievable” (28). This most recent work redefines “the unlivable” as those “abandoned to death, on the borders of countries with closed borders, in the Mediterranean Sea, in countries where poverty and lack of access to food and healthcare has become overwhelming” (28). Butler outlines modern activism as the will to regard all lives as worthy of nonviolence, not just those within Western state borders. 193

Aborted Futures and Melancholic Pasts: Rewriting the Post-War World

In Bid Me to Live, H.D. presents the capacity for feminist insurgency through reproductive choice as an act that undermines the maternal ideals upon which patriarchal lineages depend. When H.D.’s fictional surrogate Julia talks about her friend Bella’s abortion, she recalls Bella saying that she “wouldn’t have had any money” if she had decided to have her child and would not have been able to “educate ut” (59). By replicating Bella’s mispronunciation of the word “it,” Julia strips the unborn child of all known subject or even object signifiers. As a figure that exists in mind but not reality, the aborted infant unsettles meaning for both women: while the child’s embryonic status initiated Bella’s thoughts about her future, the child’s nonbirth rendered he or she a genderless and nameless entity who strips the conversation of stable interpretations or outcomes. When Julia confirms that “‘Ut’ was the child that Bella might have had with someone in Paris” (59), Julia then erases paternal authority by reducing the father’s identity to a non-specified “someone” whom Bella precluded from the decision-making process of whether or not to become a parent. As Judith Wilt notes with terminology similar to Julia’s, abortion “leaves two ghosts in its wake: the ghost of the child that might have been and the ghost of the self that might have borne and parented that child” (5). Like the foreclosed identity of his or her parents, the baby that Bella “might have” had lives only through the temporal and linguistic ambiguity of its mother’s testimony; he or she represents an absent history that Bella accesses via the nothingness of an intangible non-birth. Bella’s abortion destabilizes her sense of time by merging the child’s origin in the past with their non-arrival in the present and the future that he or she “might have” lived along with Bella had she chosen that route. Similar to how

Hermione self-possesses all memories about her miscarriage to rupture the expected “temporal

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structure” (Caruth 8) of childbirth, Bella subverts reproductive chronologies and defies the encroachment of masculine narratives upon her life. “But this was dreadful,” Julia remarks,

“Bella had been slashed about by unauthorized abortionists—are any ever authorized?” (60).

While Julia believes that Bella had suffered at the hands of these practitioners, her account of them “slashing” the era’s idealized maternal body also lacerates Britain’s authorized standards of female sexuality along with the guarantee of a “reproductive futurism” (Edelman 3) that accompanies heteronormative parentage. Though Bella’s pregnancy evoked the identities of both child and mother, the two figures that drive Edelman’s “reproductive futurism,” her decision to abort her baby deprived this future of its human assets and allowed Bella to redirect her life within Britain’s ongoing patriarchal chronology.

In Bella’s self-willed denial of her motherhood and Hermione’s endeavour to maintain her unborn child’s traumatic loss, I identify two events that rupture Britain’s post-War future.

Although I do not mean to conflate abortion with the ordeal of experiencing a stillbirth, I argue that H.D.’s approach towards both of these circumstances leaves a political futurity for women

“open” (Butler, Bodies 193) by localizing where women can retract the reproductive guarantors of an unchanged peacetime existence. Like Bella, Hermione uses the object pronoun “it” to describe her miscarriage when she recalls nurses “taking [her] into the cellar—while—it—was happening…before—it—before it arrived. I was going to say. But it didn’t” (ellipses in original,

108). For Hermione, the horrific force of her encounter lies in the fact that it occurred within time yet left no living figure that can attest to the delivery. While Hermione uses the objective

“it” to externalize and potentially dislodge the memory of both delivery and stillborn baby from her mind, as an absent signifier this “it” also disrupts the syntax of the above sentence and evokes an unlived rift in Hermione’s life that profoundly disturbs her understanding of

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chronological flow. Unlike Stopes’s advice that mothers should carefully plan their pregnancies in view of “the racial and national necessity for the Control of Conception” (Wise 11), Hermione regards both stillborn infant and delivery as eerily undistinguishable things over which she has no real command. Without a living person to mark the wonted outcome of her delivery,

Hermione’s unborn baby offers the promise of an arrival but then leaves this event mournfully unfulfilled; he or she licences Hermione’s expected maternal role but then suddenly refuses it. In

Asphodel and Bid Me to Live, then, we find characters who undermine archetypical discourses about femininity and motherhood when their individual experiences of childbearing surpass

Britain’s prewritten vocabularies of gender and parenthood. The babies that Hermione and Bella conceive yet do not deliver cleave these vocabularies of their logical conclusions, which inspires both women to consider how the subversive absence of their children invites new ways for them to approach the unfurling currents of modernity. Bella and Hermione’s narratives represent more than just personal incidents. Moreover, they constitute ideologically nonreproductive moments of critique, where childlessness subverts how each woman understands patriarchal ideology by embedding within Britain’s post-War lineage the testimonies that signify its aborted future.

As a traumatic bar to the heteronormative continuities of life and parenthood within post-

War Britain, Hermione’s stillborn child destabilizes and transforms how Hermione understands her relationship to the country’s ongoing militaristic culture. When Hermione describes soldiers who have recently returned from the Western Front, she uses language similar to that of her stillbirth by remarking how these men perceive of “a world outside or inside the world, part of the world and yet not part of the world” (182). Like Hermione’s previous account of her simultaneously born and unborn child, these ex-servicemen possess a “stillborn” vision of modernity that punctures their previously held ideas about life. Due to their now-incomparable

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knowledge of the Western Front, these soldiers have gained access to an unprecedented frontier of human experience but lack the linguistic resources to express this new “world” of horrific meaning. Since the soldiers’ memories of the War reside “outside” the scope of regular modes of communication, their narratives, very much like Hermione’s stillborn child, are not yet “born” into an existing representational framework such as art, language, or literature. For both

Hermione and the soldiers, the familiar, pre-War world has become an obsolete falsehood from which their ordeals alienate them: “Books were books, part of the old world, part of the people who didn’t understand that the world was dead, its heart had stopped beating, guns, guns, guns

(183). For Hermione, the pre-War era “died” when the pulsating “guns” of the Western Front became the world’s new heartbeat. The start of the War marked a moment of transition for

Hermione that necessitated an alternative set of sociocultural methods to capture the era’s emerging truths. Since, for Hermione, the “old world” and its literary traditions can no longer accommodate the changing realities of traumatic loss, Asphodel suggests that she and the soldiers need to “birth” a more appropriate language or symbolic form for expressing their experiences of the War. Until then, they will each carry an unspeakable vision of modernity that remains stuck in a traumatically liminal state of “stillbirth,” one that separates them from the rest of the post-

War population and the relapse of these people into the “old world” of guns and outdated art forms.

In response to Brunton’s claim that the dead baby in modernist literature reflects fears of a world in decline, my reading of Asphodel recasts this sense of unease as the site of creative productivity. The novel asserts that writers like H.D. must now replace the “books” that can no longer express what Hermione regards as Europe’s “dead” pre-War realities with new artistic forms. Hermione does not feel anxiety when contemplating the demise of the pre-War system

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but a “merciful quiet” that brings her to “realize all” (183). She reaches a state of heightened mental awareness because her mind is no longer preoccupied with the constant sound of the world’s gun-like heartbeat. In this moment of intense clarity, Hermione identifies a stillness from which she contemplates an alternative cycle of intellectual productivity. Hermione uses the image of a solar eclipse to describe this perspective, which she presents as a faint light-source that she sees emanating from the “dead” planet: “The earth was eclipsed and in the eclipse as in ordinary sun eclipse we (Hermione, soldiers on a bench) were permitted to see the odd penumbra, the light that the earth (wasted dead earth) gives out” (183). Though Hermione is ostensibly describing an “ordinary” scientific phenomenon, where the moon blocks the sun’s rays from reaching the earth, her account of this incident is that of a detached outsider who is watching the eclipse from afar: she is not looking outwards into the unknown solar system but upon the strange new darkness of the world in the War’s aftermath. Like an astronomer exploring unknown cosmological territory, Hermione’s trauma revokes familiar ways of knowing the world and thus permits her to detect unfamiliar sources of creative impetus that emanate from the shadows of her inexpressible loss. Akin to Kristeva’s “black sun” metaphor of inventive melancholia, Hermione’s encounter with death and failed signification is one of renewed vision: it “changes darkness into redness or into a sun that remains black … but is nevertheless the sun, source of dazzling light” (Kristeva, Black 151). For Kristeva, though melancholia is an experience of disorientation and withdrawal, it also brings insight by revoking familiar systems of meaning and alienating the melancholic subject from a stable, though normative, relationship with the external world. Hermione’s account of her traumatic past being both “part” and “not part of the world” authorizes her to originate a unique intuition “on the threshold of a crucial experience, on the divide between appearance and disappearance,

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abolishment and song, nonmeaning and signs” (Kristeva, Black 151). Hermione’s trauma profoundly unsettles how she accesses and depicts modern reality. While the confusion of her stillbirth has stripped Hermione’s mind of a symbolic repository that might lead her out of traumatic seclusion, the unresolved memory of her loss is also highly creative and potentially transformative. The unspeakable intensity of Hermione’s loss has exempted her from having to fall back upon the “old world” of inadequate pre-War attitudes, which, although estranging, drives her to find new artforms or lyrical styles that can more authentically capture her sense of place and female identity.

There is subsequently an aesthetic intent in what Rainey critiques in H.D. as the

“solipsistic reverie” of her worldview (156). Through Asphodel, H.D. investigates her trauma as a way of countering a social majority whom she presents as still clinging to dated, and clearly harmful, pre-War values. Neither H.D. nor her fictional counterparts are unaware of this remoteness: Hermione calls her ability to see the world’s “penumbra” a “great privilege” (183) in that it allows her to understand the usually-concealed shadows of post-War reality. Like Julia’s description of her poetry in Bid Me to Live as a “slim volume [that] will attract the usual, very small but very discriminating public” (107), Hermione acknowledges that her experimental aesthetic will interest only those readers who agree to examine an unfamiliar threshold of experience that lies between the states of life and death, new signage and symbolic collapse.

Hermione remarks how “most people (it seems odd) never felt the sudden end of the world when the guns (the world pulse) stopped that soggy autumn day” (183). Though the conflict might have ended on a damp November morning of 1919, Hermione isolates herself from her peers who seek normalcy and fail to recognize how the last gun-shot of battle signalled the end of

Europe’s “old” cultural traditions. Rainey’s approach towards H.D.’s coterie style thus neglects

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to show how the small-scale style of production that she embraced was not purely elitist in nature. As a political technique, Asphodel shows how H.D.’s distrust of anamorphic narratives like those of the Daily Mail influenced her to explore through trauma Jameson’s “unused surplus capacity of sense perception” and to create in the process “a new representational space”

(Political 219) that captures the complex uncertainties of her deeply unsettling ordeal. By retaining Hermione’s unspoken trauma on both a narrative and material level, Asphodel excavates “representational” potential that is “part of” modern experience “yet not part of”

Britain’s prevailing cultural output. The unpublished testimony empowered H.D. to invent transformational ways for her to remember, narrate, and even forewarn her readers about the horrific aftereffects of rupturing events like war.

Apocalypse Later: “Proleptic” Futurity and Temporal Layering in Palimpsest

In Palimpsest, H.D. builds upon her concept of inceptive narratives in the literary practice that she notes in the novel’s title.101 The text opens with an epigraph that defines the palimpsest as “a parchment from which one writing has been erased to make room for another,” which refers to H.D.’s process in this semi-autobiography of exploring the past for memories or images that more dominant narratives of the present have suppressed. While Robert L. Cesario associates the novel’s title with H.D.’s reluctance “to listen to her painful past” and allow “A palimpsestic vision of past and present” to overtake the memoir’s autobiographical protagonist,

Raymonde (Cesario 54), my own approach goes beyond a focus upon the individual by applying

101 H.D. first published Palimpsest with Contract Editions (Paris) and Houghton Mifflin (Boston) in 1926 with a print of 700 copies. 200

Cesario’s idea of merging temporal states onto post-War culture itself. As H.D. elicits through the image of textual layering in her epigraph, Palimpsest examines collective trauma by re- invoking the thoughts and images that modernity has buried to “make room” for newer discourses of sociocultural health. As we see in Asphodel, however, the bid to replace preceding and disturbing events with anamorphic narratives of collective healing is rarely a complete process. Rather, the act of overwriting the past leaves remnants of suppressed stories to perforate the present and invite scrutiny of how stabilizing ideologies merely veil the transgressive excesses of subjective experience. As Thomas de Quincey explains in his essay “The Palimpsest of the Human Brain” (1845), palimpsestic erasure leaves “traces of the elder manuscript” within the scope of preceding writers to decipher, meaning that whatever a previous generation “kills” a subsequent one “may call back into life” or “command to rise again” through a careful scrutiny of the inscriptions that underlie their work (343).102 It is within these hidden subtexts of post-War culture that I locate H.D.’s vision of an emerging modernist aesthetic. Like the memory of her unborn child, H.D. uses the concept of “dead” narratives that rise to the surface of the present to show how artists can reconceive of their relationship with time. In Palimpsest, the past is not a phenomenon that artists should bury beneath the seductive draw of newness but a place of contemplative refuge, where, along with their public, modernists can question and then resist the uncertain routes that their societies are taking into a potentially apocalyptic future.

In this section, I present the palimpsest as a symbol of H.D.’s politically-charged technique and argue that the concern for temporal layering appears as both a theme in Palimpsest as well as H.D.’s creative method at large. The novel subverts traditional, linear narratives of

102 De Quincey explains how the use of the palimpsest was initially economic in nature: a way for early printers to preserve the “costly material” of parchment by discharging existing “writing from the roll” and thus making it “available for a new succession of thoughts” (342). 201

personal and public experience in its form as three separate stories, each set in a different historical period relating to H.D.’s life. The novel opens in Rome circa 75 B.C. to fictionalize

H.D.’s pre-War life in Europe, then, in section two, it moves on to describe wartime London through the figure of Raymonde, and then returns to an ancient context in part three when an unnamed protagonist recounts H.D.’s trip to Egypt in 1923. H.D.’s publication of Palimpsest in

1926 was thus part of an extended creative process that involved Asphodel, wherein the traumatic memories that H.D. “killed” or rendered unspeakable in her former, unpublished memoir “rise again” in this later one to emphasize the necessity that she felt in resisting a rejuvenated post-War future. In my analysis of Palimpsest, I therefore approach what Cesario calls “the moral or political purposes” of recapturing the past “amid an aggression-saturated world” (54) as H.D.’s bid to flag the unsettled aftereffects of World War One in order to impede the potential repetition of conflict.103 Rather than stride into a restored yet emotionally anesthetized peacetime future, H.D. analyzes in Palimpsest the importance of using forgotten histories or even death itself to voice a distrust of unthinking social progress. By scrutinizing an interwar culture that was seemingly keen on forgetting its militaristic past, the novel shows how global violence was at risk of occurring once again as Europe returned to the structural values like expansionistic capitalism that were partly responsible for the outbreak of World War One just twelve years earlier.

While characters like Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway “plunge” into the roaring life of 1920s

London (Mrs. Dalloway 3), Palimpsest burdens those in England’s capital with a sense of

103 For Cesario, the “pacific” nature of Palimpsest lies in how it uses Raymonde’s personal lyric to rupture ideologically-inflected narrative and offer an “[alternative] to historical and social combativeness” (54). Cesario traces how Raymonde’s vision “argues for the instability of narrative temporalities” and establishes “a timeless world” where “she recovers her losses” (55). While Raymonde’s individual pain certainly resonates throughout the novel, my reading suggests that it is more concerned with framing this trauma within a wider structure of post-War normalcy and a concern for the “losses” that this society fails to understand as a collective. 202

emotional lethargy and mindless endurance, a situation that the novel overshadows with the risk of another global catastrophe. In what Paul K. Saint-Amour calls a “proleptic mass traumatization” of society (9),104 narrator Raymonde envisages the potential for further human destruction in her awareness of how Britain has marched away from the War years and into a state of sedated perseverance: “No one any more cared and feet, feet, feet, feet, feet stood the other side of the chasm across which (she had only to let go) she herself could cross and join them. Was this worth it? Feet, feet, feet, feet, feet. Was even London worth it? Drug and drift of obliteration. Drift and anodyne” (115). Throughout Palimpsest, Raymonde uses this repetitive

“feet” refrain to elicit the vulnerability of a social collectivity that are living in a state of impassive normalcy. In a description that evokes the soldiers in Jacob’s Room who embrace their deaths with a collective “nonchalance” (216), H.D. discloses her discomfort with what Earl

Hopper terms “massification” in post-traumatized cultures (94), where a communal “anodyne” of shared values and norms redress the isolated pain of personal suffering but in a way that actually diminishes an individual’s ability to understand the structural causes of their unresolved trauma.105 Like T.S. Eliot’s image of an undead “crowd [flowing] over London Bridge” in The

104 Epitomized in the enigmatic yet ineluctable presence of aeroplanes hovering over Clarissa Dalloway’s London, Saint-Amour claims that the integration of mechanicalized warfare into the fabric of everyday life during World War One led many artists to experience the constant psychological tension of trauma’s unavoidability and the seeming inevitability of “a future-conditioned war” (7). Saint-Amour therefore notes a “a pre-traumatic stress syndrome” that structures modernist texts of the 1920s, where issues such as childlessness and celibacy are “radical defences… for warding off the prospect of a politically and sexually retrograde peace” (8-9). Saint-Amour therefore departs from more traditional approaches to trauma theory—where the past returns to the present as a non- temporalized or unwritten history— by localizing anxiety instead in the sense of a prewritten future of unavoidable violence. It is the anticipation of inevitable stress, he argues, that causes traumatic symptoms in literature of the 1920s. 105 Hopper argues that communities often respond to the “fission and fragmentation” of individual trauma through a “process of fusion and confusion of what is left of the self with another” (Hopper 92-94). He characterises this procedure through “the ‘hysterical’ idealisation of the situation and the leader, and identification with him and the group itself, as well as with its individual members, leading to feelings of pseudo-morale and illusions of wellbeing” (94). However, he also notes that such “massification” risks segregating and ostracizing others because it aggravates the “shared recognition of a boundary concerning who is inside and who is outside, or who should be included and who excluded from a particular social system” (98). For Hopper, then, “Massification breeds nationalism and fascism, which are always understood as a set of properties of interaction of various kinds” (99). 203

Waste Land (line 62), H.D. expresses in Palimpsest a weariness about how 1920s culture has simply buried its war dead and meandered towards a panacea of narcotized wellbeing on “the other side” of the War’s destructive “chasm.” Similar to how Eliot’s speaker asks Stetson if the

“corpse” that he has planted in his garden will “bloom this year” (The Waste Land, lines 71-2),

H.D. suggests in the above passage that society’s initial act of crossing the War’s abyss has germinated seeds of emotional indifference from which further “obliteration” might sprout.

Unlike Hermione’s will to dwell upon the losses of war in Asphodel and transform them into an extended creative method, the collective “feet” of Palimpsest merely numb their past experiences with the “drug” of a myopic, future-focused and “massified” style of living. The palimpsestic form that H.D. adopts in her memoir thus responds to the looming dangers of unmindful modern progress. Rather than instinctively regenerate the present on a personal or group level,

Palimpsest expresses the need for people to interrogate the past for the memories of a recently destructive era, one that the citizens of 1920s London have simply buried to “make room” for a replacement culture that is potentially as calamitous.

By positioning herself on “the other side” of this unthinking mass, however, Raymonde adopts what we see throughout this dissertation as an “outsider” perspective that allows her to re- examine British society with isolated yet uniquely astute powers of critical observation. While

Asphodel partly accredits Hermione’s sense of detachment to her status as a newcomer in

Britain, in Palimpsest Raymonde’s mindset emerges more specifically through her misgivings about the temporality of London society and her rejection of a mass culture that ambles along with it. As with Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), who finds himself “unable to pass” his unresolved memories of the Western Front (12), Raymonde’s refusal to “join” the rest of 1920s

London engenders a point of view that separates her from the period’s prevailing values and

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cultural developments. Raymonde describes her separateness in terms of a resistance to the normal flow of time, where her writing technique uncovers artistic insights by descending beneath the shallow veneers of everyday reality: “Things went on, on, on, on. Life was one huge deep sea and flat on its surface was the business of existence. Verses. That meant diving deep, deep, deep” (160). In what she refers to as “Deep-sea fishing” for her “murex” of creative stimulus (160), Raymonde’s mind works against forces of continuity by extracting sensation from beneath the mundane “business of existence” and its “flat” surfaces of conscious being.

H.D.’s stylistic use of repetition in this passage withstands syntactical linearity, which signifies

Raymonde’s attempt to localize the past within the present by counterbalancing the relentless

“on” of London’s daily activities with her plunges into the depths of concealed thought.

Raymonde’s idea of negotiating her repressed sensations with external protocols like daily

“business” certainly resonates with the symptoms of trauma, where, since traumatic ordeals are often so beyond the survivor’s capacity for understanding them, the memory sinks into the subconsciousness only to repeatedly emerge as the nervous system tries to “master” its contents

(Caruth, Unclaimed 62). While Sasha Colby sees H.D.’s repetitions as “a metaphor for psychoanalysis” and how this emerging science allowed her to access “the quintessential thing, the key moment, through the act of returning” (38), I also highlight the politicized nature of this return, where Raymonde thwarts the “business” of regular life by rejecting modernity’s narrow and future-focused sensory prescriptions. Palimpsest seeks through Raymonde’s “deep-sea fishing” a lyrical form that is immune to London’s onwards momentum: a mode of thought that

1920s culture buries underneath its surfaces of collective experience as a means of driving

British people towards a seemingly normal yet desensitized post-War setup.

In Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus Smith possesses a comparable twin-perspective that amounts

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to his split from the heteronormative values of peacetime London. In a vertigo of fluctuating viewpoints, Septimus is at one moment “very high, on the back of the world” and then, in the next, emerging from the depths of water “like a drowned sailor on a rock” (58). Due to his participation in the War, Septimus feels both detached from peacetime London but also engulfed by its overwhelming culture of normalcy. By conjuring Eliot’s image of the “drowned

Phoenician soldier” from The Waste Land and the reference that this figure makes to an excessive, almost suffocating exuberance of fertility (line 46),106 Woolf presents Septimus’s despondency towards interwar life through his distaste for how the period has commodified sexuality and the promise of renewal via the shallow bondage of self with other. Recalling how

Eliot replaces companionship in The Waste Land with meaningless sex between a “carbuncular” young man and his disinterested mistress (line 231), Woolf populates London with women buying “white ribbon for their weddings” alongside dogs that are “busy with each other” and people “eating, drinking, and mating” (Mrs. Dalloway 23). As with Raymonde’s “feet” that move without thinking intent, the narrator of Mrs. Dalloway characterizes even sacrosanct institutions like marriage with impulsive bodily urges and an animalistic sense of reckless self- regeneration. Mirroring the Phoenician sailor, who drowns in The Waste Land’s much-needed waters of regenerative virility, Mrs. Dalloway suggests a case of too much life in Post-War

Britain. Against the backdrop of mass death upon the Front is the insatiable appetite for unthinking intercourse among a group of “lustful animals” whom Septimus regards as having

“no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that” (98).

Along with Raymonde, Septimus cannot sympathize with the aimless flow of British people nor

106 See Ramazani et al. (editors): “The Phoenicians were ancient seafaring merchants who spread fertility cults across the Mediterranean” (476, n. 3). 206

what he regards as their capricious impulses. Devoid of longevity, permanence, or purpose,

1920s England for Septimus consists of men and women who find relief in shallow sexual encounters yet cannot begin to fathom what kind of community they are rebuilding nor into which future they are “eddying.” As a minoritized figure who resists what Stopes foresaw as the

“wonderful rejuvenescence” of British society, Septimus’s position in the novel is emblematic of the demographic wounds that Stopes purges in her sex writings through an emphasis upon eugenic and heteroerotic breeding. In contrast to the teeming life that he sees across London’s streets, Septimus epitomizes the trauma that his society wishes to bury as well as the desexualized “negativity” (Edelman 9) that threatens its sociodemographic undoing. He is a figure whose disunity unravels the interwar system by tarnishing what Woolf depicts as the eroticized potency of this period with the lingering effects of a war that revoked all promise of bodily endurance.

In both Mrs. Dalloway and Palimpsest, we thus find characters who counter interwar

Britain’s aggregated norms of human interaction and use their segregation from society to forewarn readers of the potential “obliteration” of an unknown tomorrow. When Raymonde remarks upon her mindset after the War, she describes being in “an eternal double kingdom, a half-world, a ghost-world,” somewhere between “Birth and death. Death and birth” (140). By using the terms “birth” and “death” interchangeably, Raymonde embraces the “death” of wartime trauma but to initiate a form of “birth” that revokes all notions of futurity: a creative delivery that she associates with the destruction of militarism yet refuses to offer as a beacon of redemptive promise. Raymonde’s “double” stance is therefore politically engaged because it undermines what she calls “the terrible rhythm” of modernity (140) by accessing a mode of traumatic expression that wider British culture masked when it began to drive people towards a

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re-enlivened era of health and regularity. At the core of Raymonde’s “half-world” perspective is thus a concern that epitomizes both this dissertation and modernism as a whole, where modernist artists like H.D. must negotiate their desire for distance from the homogenizing techniques of

European mass culture with the need to make their work artistically relevant and communicable.

Rather than accept what Rainey calls the “narcotic and claustral” nature of H.D.’s career (156), I present her style through Raymonde’s narrative as a struggle against currents of post-War continuity in order to accomplish a more thorough inquiry into the upheavals of her past. H.D. and Woolf reconsider the inclusivity of Europe’s revived sociocultural scene by utilizing voices of traumatic isolation. Although both Septimus and Raymonde are unable to “cross” the abyss of war and enter into a community of hastily reanimated citizens, their discordant perspectives undermine the period’s blanketing concepts of post-War normalcy along with a populace that was alarmingly inattentive to the repeatable injuries of its past.

As a model for her literary aesthetic, H.D. experiments with palimpsestic layering to collapse the linearity of social experience and expose how a consecutive approach towards life often strengthens existent yet inept socio-political routines. While Freud describes human existence as a psychological “compromise” between “the continuance of life” and “the striving towards death” (709), H.D. unbalances the external forces like sequential time that drive this

“compromise” when she shows how trauma undermines a survivor’s ability to engage with social reality. Indeed, de Quincey anticipates Freud when he uses his idea of the palimpsest to illustrate the workings of the subconscious mind. In his essay “The Palimpsest of the Human

Brain,” de Quincey equates the resurgence of past texts upon a manuscript with the psychological experience of death when he recounts an anecdote about a young woman

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drowning.107 As the young woman sinks to the bottom of the water, de Quincey explains that

“every act, every design of her past life, lived again, arraying themselves not as a succession, but as parts of a coexistence … so that her consciousness became omnipresent at one moment to every feature in the infinite review” (9). Since the woman’s memories unfurl “not as a succession” but “a coexistence,” de Quincey describes a phenomenon where foregone events in the woman’s life breach onwards flow and induce a condition of timeless recall. Death releases the woman’s mind from the need to “compromise” with the linearity of the external world and, in doing so, allows her to re-access memories that overcome consecutive ways of organizing thoughts, events, and emotions. At a similar moment in Palimpsest, Raymonde’s “diving” lyricism merges temporal states when she recalls seeing

shrines beyond shrines, feet beyond feet, faces beyond faces. Faces overlaid now one

another like old photographic negatives and faces whirled one and one, like petals down,

down, down, as if all those overlaid photographic negatives had been pasted together and

rolled off swifter, swifter, swifter from some well controlled cinematograph (157).

Thought and memory for Raymonde unfold in a multi-directional manner: they constantly move

“beyond” the present and “down” into the past yet also “on and on” as Raymonde narrates her experience. Adopting a grammatical style that counteracts the relentless march of London’s

“feet,” Raymonde shifts from the past simple tense when she describes how these faces

“overlaid” each other and “whirled” in front of her eyes to the past perfect tense when proclaiming that they “had been pasted” in this style by an unknown agency. Raymonde’s palimpsestic encounter of unity builds an image of the past within the past, which she then

107 De Quincey also describes this incident in Suspiria de Profundis (1845). See Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Other Writings, edited by Grevel Lindop, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 144-45. 209

seamlessly captures in the continuously evolving now. Raymonde then undermines the linearity of her photographic film simile and the isolated sequence of her thoughts when she evokes the moving images that they project through her “cinematograph” of fluid, coexistent vision. In this moment of intense omnipresence, Raymonde recounts a psychological condition that is analogous to de Quincey’s account of near dying. Through a grammatical dispersal of temporality, Raymonde’s “diving” technique draws her mind towards sensation that is usually submerged beneath modernity’s relentless crusade into the future. As a component of H.D.’s wider modernist-pacifist agenda, Raymonde’s narrative challenges how the era’s collective forces of linearity often minimize the opportunity to individually heal from political upheaval or gather the mental resources for anticipating its potential resurgence once again.

In Palimpsest, then, H.D. returns to the unresolved memory of her miscarriage as impetus for an interrogative literary form that emerges from a place of repression, temporal collapse, and traumatic return. When Raymonde comments upon her difference from “the young people” who have embraced post-War revival, she explains that “Everything in life was blighted, still-born” and that “her like” differ from the mass because, in lieu of engaging in unreflective modern progress, they see themselves as “a still-born generation” (117). Since Raymonde refuses to join these “feet” and shuffle into a normalized yet precarious post-War world, she interposes her creativity between states of wartime death and peacetime life, conception and non-delivery, the traumatic past and a reinvigorated future. I offer this “still-birth” idea as a central feature of

H.D.’s literary technique and argue that it marks her refusal to reanimate Europe’s damaged sociocultural traditions with a (pro)creative remedy for male violence. Accordingly, even though

I focalize the past in H.D.’s style, my understanding of the term “still-born generation” does not suggest the return of a familiar cultural grouping but one “still” caught in a process of delivery.

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By separating the word stillborn into its two components with a hyphen, H.D. adopts the adjective “still” to evoke the stasis of death but, as an adverb, she also implies a sense of something unfinished: a process that “still” requires fulfilment and therefore blurs the lines that separate the past of creative origins and the now of artistic “birth.” While Matthew Kibble sees in the above image of failed delivery H.D.’s longing for a culture of decadence that “flourished in the 1880s and which her own generation had been fighting to keep alive” (541-42), I suggest that her focus goes beyond a definitive stylistic era and into a culture that was never fully “born” into Western civilization to begin with. Although Raymonde notes that “her peculiar and unique inheritance” was “the over-flowered 1890s,” she presents this heritage as one that has already reached full bloom (125). Raymonde discounts the nostalgic urge to return to an “over-flowered” pre-War age and instead localizes her artistic vision in the knowledge that “behind” the urban scene of the 1890s “was another London” of which she “knew nothing” (125). Raymonde seeks an unknown and wholly inceptive historical muse that evades the recognizable surfaces of aesthetic record: a literary space that lies “behind” the present yet is resistant to all existing annals of European thought.

In the next section of this chapter, I argue that H.D.’s defamiliarizing approach towards classicism in her prose and poetry exemplifies her “still-birth” technique by disorientating her readers’ sense of time and place. The final part of Palimpsest and her poetry collection Red

Roses for Bronze (1931) symbolize traumatic repression through the references that each text makes to a concealed, lost, or inaccessible substrata of Greek and Egyptian antiquity. Rather than reproduce derivative stereotypes about these cultures, H.D. imagines their unreachable or as-yet undiscovered depths as a driving force behind her pacifistic modernism. Amidst the aggressive forces of colonial-inspired consumerism that emerged during the 1920s, H.D.’s bid to preserve a

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site of cultural alterity marks her attempt to utterly transform how her public conceived of the post-War future that they were (re)building. Though not necessarily centered in a recognizable past as Kibble suggests, H.D.’s distinctive use of classicism resists the “anodyne” of modern progress by refusing to engage in modernity’s reckless expansion. In contrast to Ezra Pound’s well-known “make it new” maxim of modernism, Palimpsest and Red Roses for Bronze define innovation through a careful scrutiny of the narratives that escape modern developments. Both texts use classicism to reconsider the directionality of post-War civilization while also exposing the hold that this culture’s aggressive excursions through space and time often exerted over the capacity for artistic thought.

Anti-Colonial Journeys into the Past: Palimpsest and Red Roses for Bronze

The final section of Palimpsest examines pre-modern society through H.D.’s semi- autobiographical portrayal of her trip to Egypt with her mother and Bryher in 1924. I characterize H.D.’s account of this journey as pacifist in nature due to the emphasis that she places on Egypt’s hidden, unexploitable past over the expansionistic newness of Western modernity. Rather than seek in ancient Egyptian culture well-known stories, myths, or aesthetics, the unnamed narrator adopts the image of unexplored Egyptian tombs to symbolize the novel’s wider search for creative birth from a region of undisturbed death. The narrator peruses the uncharted depths of Egypt’s forgotten antiquity as impetus for her “still-born” vision of modernist artistry and a site of creative productivity that she introduces as the “dead” other to

Western cultural advancement. The narrator refuses to catalogue the contents of the Egyptian tombs but instead imbues them with a resistance to the clutches of present-day explorers. In this

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way, the final section of Palimpsest corrects the intellectual and financially-motivated acts of appropriative colonialism that were influencing Western-led excavations across Africa during this period. Beyond the scope of prying European eyes, the narrator’s buried Egyptian artifacts inspire her lyricism precisely through the immunity of these treasures to the destructive reach of

1920s capitalism. The tombs represent a latent core of suppressed history that H.D preserves in its fullness to destabilize Eurocentric notions of time and place. The ending of Palimpsest thus expands upon the theme of traumatic memory from Asphodel when it applies the idea of a repressed but re-emerging past onto post-War civilization. The novel encourages readers to eschew forces of unthinking sociocultural progress when the narrator exposes to them a concealed historical other, one that defies the relentless drive of Western powers to either conquer global space or stringently delineate the direction of modern life.

Amidst the rising popularity of archaeology during the 1920s, the narrator of Palimpsest explains how Britain gathers a sense of its own historicity by seizing upon Egyptian culture and then mediating the discoveries through a homogenizing lens of media sensation and consumerism. When the narrator describes a photograph that she sees of the recently-plundered tombs, she recognizes a “badly drying, up-curling little grey print, the very-present, the picture already familiar to every reader of the Daily Mail in misty London. The very photograph, it seemed, that she had already boringly turned a hundred times from on the backs of people’s newspapers on buses, or on the metro” (191). The Daily Mail is, once again, at the centre of

H.D.’s critique of the British mass media and popular culture. In Palimpsest, the Daily Mail produces a fiction of national progress by imposing itself as a mediator between the newly- pillaged Egyptian past and Britain’s monotonously unfolding future back home. At this juncture in the novel, H.D. is most likely referring to Howard Carter’s entry into Tutankhamun’s tomb in

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November 1922. As Michael North notes, this event instigated a moment of modern

“geopolitics,” where “Great Britain [interposed] itself between modern Egypt and its own ancient history” as a way of “offering itself as rightful heir and inheritor of all the glory of the past, no matter where it might have occurred” (19). The Egyptian tombs give Britain a sense of its own present but only through a process of appropriating and exploiting the culture of another nation. As North explains, Carter’s career sparked a mania for Egyptian typology and symbolism within poplar art of the 1920s, which, he argues, signified the West’s attempt to re-supply their products with an aura that the reproducibility of mass-manufacturing had “progressively stripped” (24). The narrator’s view of the tombs as overly-reproduced, worn-out copies of an absent original demonstrates how Britain creates an image of its own “present” by forcibly usurping antiquity and then commodifying it. With the aid of its heroic explorers, nationalistic media, and burgeoning consumer culture, Britain extracts from Egypt an exotic uniqueness while at the same time draining the Egyptian past of all autonomy and alterity.

When the narrator searches Egypt for her own inspiration, she seeks an aspect of

Egyptian history that exists as the “dead,” nonreproduced other to European mass culture.

Shunning all technological aids, she proclaims that “Her soles, the soles of her very feet must see, must feel, as if eyes, octopus-wise, set here, could plunge beneath the sand surface to the subterranean chambers, the minute death-palaces” (191). Unlike Carter, the narrator does not photograph nor even textually describe what she experiences in Egypt but uses a tactile, non- optical mode of perception to explore the country’s hidden realities through the power of her mind alone. Akin to the tentacle imagery that H.D. introduces in her essay Notes on Thought and

Vision (1919 [1982]),108 the narrator sinks her mind into a suppressed underbelly of cultural

108 Published posthumously in 1982. H.D. wrote the book while visiting the Scilly Islands with Bryher in July 1919. 214

otherness where she gains wholly unique insights into the nature of time and human consciousness. In the aforementioned essay, H.D. associates these tentacles with a person’s

“super-feelings,” which she defines as heightened sensory energies that “extend out and about us” like “the long, floating tentacles of the jelly-fish reach out and about him” (19). In both instances, H.D. upholds the task of the modernist artist in using their refined sensory capacities to textualize aspects of reality that lie beyond what is immediately perceptible or within reach of the mundane “very-present.” As the narrator of Notes on Thought and Vision remarks, the modernist writer must use their “super-feelings” to produce a set of impressionistic “sign-posts” that allow their readers to escape the “thousand-times explored old world” of “overworked emotions and thoughts” (24). Notes on Thought and Vision thus denounces “The new schools of destructive art theorists”—which would certainly include Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s will to infuse futurist art with “aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap” (251)—because H.D. believed that these thinkers were too concerned with the militant novelty of modernity instead of a mysterious past that is “never explored, hardly even entered” (Notes 24). Like H.D.’s “still-birth” metaphor, the “subterranean chambers” in Palimpsest direct the narrator’s creativity towards a substrata of repressed knowledge rather than vociferous innovation: a place where the narrator finds “palaces” of artistic inspiration that she refuses to decrypt or visually catalogue. The narrator’s understanding of Egypt is both embodied and anti-expansionist. Unlike the marching, homeward-bound feet of British imperialism or the “destructive gesture of freedom-bringers” in Futurism (Marinetti 251) the narrator roots her involvement with Egypt in the immaterial and non-pilferable. The narrator rejects the “up-curling” grey photographs of the Daily Mail and envisages instead facets of antiquity that modernity is yet to exploit: a nonreproduced site of “death” that lies beneath the

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veneers of everyday being, where she accesses “palaces” of submerged creative power and repels

Marinetti’s “mortal leap” into an uncontrollably kinetic future.

Like H.D.’s attitude towards ancient Egyptian history in Palimpsest, H.D. approaches classicism in her work from the viewpoint of intact loss and placelessness. As Eileen Gregory notes, H.D.’s use of classical allusion differs from modernists like Ezra Pound and T. E. Hulme who often adopted the past to express the “violent potential … of reclamation,” ideological

“purification,” or even “authoritarian political ideals” (12). Instead of “longing for a lost world: manly, large, coherent, and noble” (Gregory 29), H.D. steeps her view of classicism in the repressed and disorienting memories of trauma. While H.D.’s concept of the classical past exists within the scope of the individual mind, she also emphasizes “the missing” of this culture in terms of capitalist exploitation, where, due to the fact that Western society has not yet experienced this past “in time,” it remains a suppressed depth of history that “has not yet been fully known” to modern consumers (Caruth, Unclaimed 62). By preserving her view of classicism as an aspect of history that “was never fully grasped in the first place” (Caruth,

Unclaimed 62), H.D. opposes how many of her peers appropriated classical aesthetics in their work to welcome an age of strict formalism or even human control. In Married Love, for instance, Stopes uses classicism as a prototype for her eugenics program, remarking that, because the British race has “long neglected the culture of human beauty” (120), they require selective birth-control to “mould the whole race into as lovely forms as Greeks created” (125). As we see in Stopes’s distaste for those whom Kenneth describes in Love’s Creation as “fleshy sores in the body of the Greater Unit” (150), the desire to cleanse European civilization of unclean bodies reflects a similar desire within the literary arts at this time to purge the English language of what many modernist figures deemed to be its degenerative excess. Hulme, for example, defines

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humans under classical philosophies like those of Horace as being “very finite and fixed

[creatures],” which he contrasts with how Romantic thinkers like Keats saw them as “a reservoir full of possibilities” (180). Hulme upholds the “fixed” nature of humanity as an important aesthetic duty for artists because he believed that it encouraged them to find beauty in objective truth and knowledge rather than the expressive flights of heightened subjectivity. Hulme notes that, in classical poetry, the writer always focuses their attention upon “the light of ordinary day, never the light that never was on land or sea” (183). For Hulme, the classical writer does not stray into the boundless “super-feelings” of the mind (H.D., Notes 19) but locates creative impetus in what he or she can grasp at the immediate level of external reality.109 As we see in

Asphodel, though, H.D.’s experience of losing her unborn child removed the discernable subject matter from the centre of her lyricism, which forced her to structure her prose around an entity that existed solely within personal memory rather than a shared or universal truth. I thus explain what Miranda B. Hickman calls H.D.’s desire to “shed her reputation as an Imagist” after the

War (10) as a result of the movement’s roots in classical precision and its inability to account for the traumatic experiences that often lay beyond “the light of ordinary day.” While Hulme discourages what he calls his “finite and fixed” human beings from making sense of modernity’s as-yet unfathomable realities, H.D. does not limit her understanding of sensibility to a tightened purview of tangible objectivity. Instead, she imbues the classical past with melancholic unreachability to free her literary style from male-imposed restraints and capture expanses of human expression that lay beyond the period’s authoritarian ideas about modern life.

109 As Eliot remarks on this issue, subjective impulses must have an “object correlative” to make them meaningful for audiences; the poets harbouring these feelings must resist emotionality “without an object or exceeding its object” by channelling them into “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion” (Eliot’s italics, “Hamlet” 947-8). 217

In her poetry collection Red Roses for Bronze, H.D. arranges her view of classicism around the reoccurring theme of a cultural and psychological journey into the depths of irrecoverable loss. The speaker of “In the Rain,” for example, localizes the poem’s setting in a specific yet undisclosed place when she uses the definite article to recount her memory of running “less swiftly / across the square” (216). However, the speaker then renders this location unapproachable with paradoxical terminology of movement. In telling her addressee “Don’t come there” (216), the speaker merges arrival with departure while simultaneously undermining her command with the negative auxiliary “don’t.” The speaker then sustains this sense of placelessness when she proclaims to her companion: “Don’t come near / go here” (220). While the speaker’s use of perfect rhyme in the synonyms “near” and “here” evokes intimacy and closeness, she then prevents this unity with the prohibitive strength of her initial order.

Throughout the poem, the speaker associates this longing for an impossible union with the other with the finality of death. When the poem introduces references to Greek myth, the speaker names her addressee as “Hermes, / Lord-of-the-dead” (220) and tells him that “I was dead / and you woke me / now you are gone / I am dead” (222). The speaker veers from a life dependent on the presence of Hermes to an end that his departure initiates: an unstable fluctuation between two physical states that reflects Hermes’s mythical role as a god of boundaries who transported people to the underworld (Burke 65). While Hermes permits the speaker’s utterance, his arrival consistently evades her. The poem therefore implies a sense of unfulfillable desire through a relationship that oscillates between notions of life and mortality, consciousness and unconsciousness, presence and absence. Unlike Hulme’s account of the “finite and fixed” nature of human existence, H.D.’s use of classicism in this poem allows her to situate creativity beyond all bodily and geographical particulars. Hermes’s presence at the threshold of linguistic capture

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inspires the poem’s central speech act: a state of being akin to death’s undoing of all temporal specificity and a condition from which the speaker impossibly expresses herself.

In “Chance Meeting,” H.D.’s use of death to absent the body from known locations carries political impetus when it releases the speaker from patriarchal society and its concomitant male-female hierarchies. Similar to “In the Rain,” the speaker desires unity between self and other but as a wholeness that mankind has neither known nor explored: a place where “Our hands that did not touch, / might have met once” (232). The speaker overrides the memory of a non-physical encounter with the paradoxical “chance” of this meeting happening at an unspecified point in the past. As with Hermes’s transgression of physical boundaries, the poem enables a departure from corporeal relationships, including their locus within space and time, and into the limitless escape of a pre-social reverie. In “Chance Meeting,” the speaker rejects

Hulme’s confining attitudes towards subjectivity when her mind and powers of expression surpass the objective limits of material reality. She remarks that “heaven is near” and a

“translatable thing” but somewhere that eludes all attempts to enclose it: “it’s here, / it’s there”

(233). The speaker withdraws into an enigmatic zone of imagination and a realm of creativity that she abstracts from the carnage of men. While the speaker suggests that male-produced language supports territorial expansion when it makes “maps for men” or “charts and rudder in a storm” (233), her own method of communication drifts towards spatial uncertainty and resists the impetus to wrangle over familiar ground. The speaker disengages from a world that men have already dominated and so avoids the need to “spoil” or “slay” this place (234). Instead, she offers her addressee the gift of female expressivity prior to sexual divides: she invites him to pull back the “severed curtain / of that ‘then’ and ‘now’” (236) to uncover a realm of timeless conservancy. This sense of equality between the speaker and her recipient establishes the gift of

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feminine thought as a mode of creativity that the world’s masculinized “charts” and “maps” have not yet utilized. The poem instigates the potential for Western culture to move away from male- defined recording strategies and towards those that women conceive of with newly equalized powers of intellectual agency. Like Palimpsest’s depiction of Egypt, the past in Red Roses for

Bronze is one that exceeds the limits of recordability within Western thought. Echoing

Hermione’s experience of trauma, H.D.’s prose and poetry evoke classicism to challenge stable chronologies along with the role that she believed these forces of continuity played in driving the world towards a potentially destructive future.

Conclusion: Death and Nonreproductive Futurism

By inscribing within her poetry the disorientation of trauma and loss, H.D. develops a style of lyricism that frees her speakers’ expressivity from the progress and temporality of post-

War culture. At the end of Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf similarly destabilizes Britain’s shift into the future when Clarissa hears of Septimus’s suicide amidst the festivities of her gathering: “in the middle of my party, here’s death” (156). While Palimpsest presents death as a force that evades the excavating grasp of European colonialism, Mrs. Dalloway brings this site of failure into the

“middle” of the British establishment at Clarissa’s Whitehall soirée. For Clarissa, Septimus is at this final moment of the novel not an identity nor person but negativity personified. Without a name, he becomes sheer “death”: an underside to the duties of the interpellated man and the end of what Baudrillard defines as their “slow death” under modern capitalism (Baudrillard 39). By committing suicide, Septimus withholds the value that Britain’s industrialized society gradually extracts from his body, sundering the interpellating contract between his service for this

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ideological system and its inadequate returns of post-War male privilege. “But he had flung it all away,” Clarissa remarks of Septimus, “holding his treasure” (156). After his sudden end,

Septimus no longer holds utility for Britain’s militaristic or economic end-goals and repossesses his life as a “treasure” that is solely within his own control. He reaches what Baudrillard calls an

“accumulation of life as value” because these external socioeconomic forces can no longer siphon labour capital from his living body (Baudrillard’s italics, 147). By ending Baudrillard’s economic procedure after his suicide, Septimus rejects the symbolic rewards that bind him to

Britain’s ideological call, which, for Clarissa, renders him an un- interpellated non-subject who transgresses the country’s shared linguistic norms. Like H.D.’s style of using imprecise syntactical logic to access a poetic space beyond all historical specificity, Clarissa sees in

Septimus’s suicide an “attempt to communicate” with something that is beyond the bounds of human consciousness: an exchange that she compares with “people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them” (156). As a state of nonbeing that people can only reach through the inexpressible fullness of death, Clarissa’s awareness of this enigmatic

“centre” puts life into perspective for her. In its antinomy to all socioeconomic and linguistic processes, Clarissa refers to death as a condition that is “wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured” (156). Like the unfashionable Ellie Henderson who stands in the corner of Clarissa’s drawing-room, death in Mrs. Dalloway is an unwanted party guest around whom society dances yet never entertains; it is an inaccessible yet unavoidable core of human life that propels the sublimating “chatter” of parties and politics because it also threatens a total departure from these very activities.

In both H.D. and Woolf, death inspires change through its status as an evasive “centre” that renders transient a person’s ability to engage with ideological structures and protocols like

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those of capitalist Britain. Septimus’s posthumous arrival at Clarissa’s party overshadows the novel’s account of 1920s normalcy with death as its integral yet neglected other, or what

Edelman calls the “constitutive lack” that reproductive ideologies like heteronormativity overcome with political lineages that shape “the meaning of our collective narratives”

(Edelman’s italics, 12). Woolf and H.D. similarly present death in their work as an inexpressible force that drives language, political temporality, and human desire but differ from Edelman’s tendency towards universalizing it as symbolic “lack.” Instead, through the traumatic experiences of Hermione and Septimus, Woolf and H.D. externalize death as the result of real, politically-inflicted wounds that need not have occurred in the first place. When Clarissa overhears a conversation at her party about a Bill on “the deferred effects of shell-shock” (155), the novel offers an opportunity for post-War Europe to approach Septimus’s death as a means of reforming the dated medical establishment, something that Woolf was personally attuned to given her knowledge of Britain’s inept psychiatric healthcare system after she experienced a number of mental health issues throughout her life. Unlike Edelman’s hypothesis, Mrs. Dalloway shows that ideological responses to death need not always be reproductive nor conservative.

Rather, the novel demonstrates how communities can use death to affect positive change within social institutions like the military or medical profession. Though future-focused in its “deferred” effect, Mrs. Dalloway roots its exchanges about shell-shock within the upheavals of the past.

Like the prose and poetry of H.D., Woolf’s novel revokes the “reproductive futurity” of an unchanged modernity by exposing the wounds that post-War culture had seemingly bypassed when striving towards the regenerated stability of peacetime hedonism. In Asphodel, Palimpsest, and Mrs. Dalloway, the potential for sociopolitical reform arises once people revisit the trauma of their wartime past and then use the memories of this upheaval to consider how their societies

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might avoid similar catastrophes in the future. While Rainey critiques H.D. for her lack of

“critical and theoretical writings that [articulate] the historical, formal, or ideological grounds for the modernist experiment” (155), I suggest that critics depart from this narrow definition of

H.D.’s oeuvre to consider her autobiographical fiction itself as thoughtful, aesthetic enquiries into the authenticity of human experience amidst crusades of unthinking renewal. Rather than a disinterested solipsism, there is an ethical incentive in H.D.’s commitment to narrating trauma.

Overall, her work scrutinizes the ineffective cultural resources that the British media made available to post-War communities for addressing group suffering and, in doing so, highlights the need for these people to understand fully, and so hinder a repeat of, the loss and trauma of modern warfare.

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Conclusion

There may be no answers to these questions, but at the same time let us never manipulate

the evidence so as to produce something fitting, decorous, or agreeable to our vanity.

Away fly half the conclusions of the world at once. Accept endlessly, scrutinise

ceaselessly, and see what will happen.

–. Woolf, “Tchehov’s Questions”

In this dissertation, I have traced how the production and reproduction of militaristic, colonial, and heteropatriarchal ideologies in the interwar period informed the work of Woolf,

Stopes, and H.D. I have contended that all three writers formulated their fiction, theatre, and poetry through a knowledge of how their work could either break from or reiterate the gender normative values that were ushering Britain out of the devastation of World War One. I have disagreed with critics who define women’s artistry at this time as a regenerative antithesis to the destruction of men. Instead, I have elicited an aesthetic of nonreproduction in Woolf and H.D. that departed from the period’s emphasis upon female creative embodiment as a strategy of repopulation and cultural repair. Woolf and H.D.’s work undermines expansionistic state discourses, including warfare, colonialism, and capitalism, by scrutinizing the templates of productivity that the culture of the interwar period made widely available to women. I have centralized how Woolf and H.D.’s modernism interrogated the norms that interwar culture imposed upon the human body, whether that be the expendability of male soldiers, the coercive fragility of women as civilians, or the racialized criteria that applied a vocabulary of exclusivity and jingoistic pride onto post-War grievability. Woolf and H.D. ask thinking readers to question 224

these norms and, in doing so, subject the ideologies that structure modern existence to potential change. The texts that I have analysed in this dissertation emerge via the traumatic wounds where atrocity propaganda cannot provide solutions, where compulsory standards of heteronormative behaviour reveal their artificiality, and where writers embrace the discomfort of social alienation in order to produce transformative narratives about post-War life.

At the basis of Woolf and H.D.’s work is thus a concern about how women in the post-

War years could produce literature while resisting what Stopes saw as their duty of nurturing patriarchal leadership and its militaristic end-goals. Although Stopes’s plays model reformed erotic relationships between the sexes, they also substantiate her birth-control message on the importance of British women using their marriages to regenerate the class, gender, and race ideologies at the centre of conservative interwar politics. Woolf and H.D., on the other hand, subvert the ideas about feminine regeneration and masculine destruction that Stopes reinforced upon a textual and extratextual level throughout her career. Their work reveals the highly systematic nature of these gender roles during times of war to capture the modes of expression that escape them, including the traumatic non-communicability of stillbirth, the unresolved emptiness of soldiers’ deaths, or the unvalued excesses of female productivity within the home.

In opposition to how Stopes patches post-War trauma with directives of sociosexual repair,

Woolf and H.D. scrutinized the ideological content of interwar life by excavating what its accompanying culture ousted from the fictive worldviews that framed the period’s ongoing sociocultural changes. As Woolf remarks in A Room of One’s Own, it is the task of the modernist-feminist writer to “collect” and “communicate” these usually unspoken ideas about modern life as a way of showing their readers the world “more intensely” or “bared of its covering” (144). Akin to the unmasking analogies that I identify at numerous points throughout

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my dissertation, Woolf and H.D.’s style is transformational because it flags subject matter that

“anamorphic” (Žižek, “Melancholy” 659) culture like the patriotic mass-media rendered unknowable when attempting to shape how the British public apprehended a period of increased militarized aggression. Woolf and H.D. reinterpreted the post-War world by perforating its ideological coverings such as commemorative mourning, which undermined men’s artistic and political authority by highlighting aspects of reality that lay beyond the period’s chosen optics.

From the inception of her career, Woolf signalled emergent thought, behaviour, and creativity that was unique and transformative by nature of its immunity to the restrictive socioeconomic routines of the capitalist home or workplace. Among the epiphanic “moments of being” that occur throughout her fiction, Woolf locates the potential for artistic and political change. In “Phyllis and Rosamond” and Night and Day, the heroines’ surplus mental faculties, which usually exist as an unrealized remainder of productive capability within the home, allow the women to review their places in the world, find release from Britain’s restraining standards of female labour, and grasp the inability of these male-defined norms to fully circumscribe their identities. H.D.’s characters, too, are aware of ideas about women’s experiences under patriarchal culture that remain unspeakable within public life. However, her characters also use these gaps in available communication to widen and develop the vocabularies that they possess for understanding their relationship with Britain’s war-bent establishment. In Asphodel,

Hermione’s miscarriage resists the British media’s simplified views about child loss, which brings her to develop a lyrical style that more accurately traces the contours of her still-healing mind; while in Palimpsest, the “stillborn” narratives of a recklessly advancing modernity bring the unnamed narrator to break away from the expansionistic, neocolonial forces of Western progress. In each of the above instances, the individual unearths a latent fragment of their

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personality that has no anchorage within the institutional systems, artforms, or economic protocols of material reality, which marks in this “pure self” (“Phyllis and Rosamond” 26) an insurgent ability to reconceive of the world and find release from its restraining habits of group conduct.

Woolf’s later work expands upon what she saw as the incomplete relationship between one’s inner sense of self and Britain’s external, socioeconomic mechanisms when her post-War texts present ideological critique as more than just a means of individualistic self-discovery. In

“Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” for instance, what Žižek recognizes as an “insupportable, real, impossible kernel” within ideology (Sublime 76) emerges as the prohibited values and identities of foreign enemies that demarcate yet also undermine Britain’s state boundaries. While eradicable foreignness gives men like Jacob Flanders a dialectical status and privilege, these unknown others also indicate a site of pacifist-feminist enquiry and where anti-war thinkers can challenge the exclusionary naming rituals that govern Western principles of liveability. In contrast to how Stopes builds a wholly exclusive vision of post-War nationhood, one where her reproductive advice empowers only the elite citizens whom she deemed worthy of prosperity,

Woolf asks her public to generate a highly critical mindset about British identity and its unequal categories of human existence. While my claim here is not to ignore Woolf’s own class privilege, her ironic tone differs from how Stopes seamlessly aligns her work’s narrative and thematic content with an aspired-for British demography. Plays like The Race predicate women’s agency on their willingness to overcome the losses of warfare and renew post-War British life without considering the oppressive class-gender duties that were driving this reparation nor their potential to cause further international aggression. Ultimately, it is Stopes’s blind faith in

Britain’s post-War chronology that prompts my definition of modernist-pacifist resistance. In

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Woolf and H.D., reformative action arises not via a restorative newness but by scrutinizing the unresolved violence and nationalism in the aftermath of World War One. Rather than engage in comforting renewal, their work shuns biologically- or culturally-reproductive engagements with militaristic society by emphasizing that which this culture usually ejects from its worldview: the nonreproductive, dead, or traumatic.

Distinct from how Stopes endorses marital sexuality and childrearing to counteract the destruction of European warfare, Woolf and H.D. engage with the horrific aftereffects of militarism without obscuring these repercussions with fictional solutions or remedies. I have shown how Woolf and H.D. expose loss in their work through the unresolved deaths of young men on the Western Front or a compromised faith in Britain’s unifying values of patriotic statehood. However, I have also suggested that the above concerns were not necessarily overt within interwar culture as a whole. Rather, they were the losses that practices like literary commemoration or Stopes’s romanticized sexology tempered with alleviating messages of post-

War normalcy. As an impetus for their interrogative modernist style, Woolf and H.D. load interpretative demands upon their readers by rejecting the consolatory masking techniques that offered people at this time a sense of closure after the War. Unlike Stopes’s plays, which provide sexualized codas for a world still rife with uncertainty and possible aggression, Woolf and

H.D.’s narratives end with a sense of unfulfilled presents, unsettled pasts, and untold futures:

Phyllis and Rosamond remain trapped within their heteropatriarchal “department of business”

(25), Jacob lingers as the hauntingly absent centre of his elegy, and Hermione still refuses to rationalize her miscarriage. Woolf and H.D. ask their readers to consider how the era’s stabilizing discourses simply assuaged its rupturing events like World War One instead of potentializing systematic change that would prevent similar catastrophes in the future. While

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critics like Lukács would criticize this technique in its refusal to guide a reader’s interpretation of the world, Woolf and H.D. still inspire analytical thought but via the dissonances, pitfalls, or states of alienation that characterize modern existence. Their work responds to Horkheimer and

Adorno’s critique of art that “denies its audience any dimension in which they might roam freely in imagination” (100) by refusing to reproduce in their work an idealizing, unchallenging, or nostalgic post-War worldview.

The modernist texts that I have analysed in my dissertation incorporate values, behaviours, and identities that often escaped literary or social visibility during the interwar period. They include the nondomestic lifestyle that Katharine Hilbery imagines for herself beyond the family duties of Cheyne Walk, the ungrievable German Otherness in “Thoughts on

Peace in an Air Raid,” and Hermione’s nonverbalized memory of her unborn child in Asphodel.

However, I have also suggested that Woolf and H.D. do not accept these absences as an unchanging feature of Western politics, or what Butler calls the prohibited “lack” that

“ideological determinations seek to cover” (Bodies 199). Woolf and H.D. flag the causality of traumatic or forbidden “lack” at the hands of hetero-militaristic authority and do so to authorize more inclusive, nonviolent ideologies such as pacifist diplomacy to emerge as an alternative system of beliefs. For this reason, I have challenged, on a number of occasions, Edelman’s account of nonreproductive sexuality in itself as an effective mode of resistance against conservative political forces. For Edelman, queer sexuality opposes repressive systems of political continuity but, at the same time, is an ideological position that requires filling in a quasi- literal, bodily manner. While Edelman recognizes that marginalized people can indeed “cast off that queerness and enter the properly political sphere,” he insists that this movement into the mainstream simply “[shifts] the figural burden of queerness to someone else. The structural

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position of queerness, after all, and the need to fill it remain” (27). Throughout my dissertation, I have questioned why we must apply Edelman’s abstract and theoretical framework onto human lives; why, that is, we must reduce people to “structural positions” and oust some of them from mainstream acceptance altogether. Edelman’s theory of nonreproductive futurism takes a masochistic pleasure in the very symbolic violence that it seeks to challenge. Woolf and H.D., on the other hand, tell us that the regulatory power-play behind Western ideology in fact causes

“The structural position of queerness,” which means that politically-engaged artists should not embody prohibited “lack” as a method of resistance but question its role in organizing corrupt political acts like militarism or homophobia. While my approach here is not intended to minimize the stigma that LGBTQ+ people often experience, it potentializes a thorough restructuring of normative beliefs rather than partake in a form of activism that strengthens the exclusions of these very norms. As impetus for democratic reform, my project has implied that one can engage in reproductive acts such as publishing texts or rearing children while being ideologically nonreproductive. This claim does not mean to say that published writing can ever be pure of ideological effect. However, I do uphold the need for artists to recognize their societies’ unethical ideological values and avoid reproducing these ideologies through the medium of consumable art. The nonreproductive politics that I am describing here are intellectually generative rather than prescriptive. Writers can produce a desire for change by identifying the class, race, or gender-based exclusions within their communities and then employing the unwritten potentialities that arise as a result to inspire more inclusive vocabularies of normativity. Ultimately, it is Edelman’s assertion that queer activists must embody the excluded, nonreproductive gaps within heteronormative culture, and Stopes’s call for the British middle-classes to overwrite what she castigated as nonreproductive pollutants with eugenic

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childbirth, that strips their work of the ability to recommend effective social change.

When Walter Benjamin defines fascism in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction” (1935), he outlines a disturbing situation where human lifeforms and reproducible artforms converge in a process that he calls the aestheticization of politics. Woolf and H.D.’s defamiliarizing perspective on life de-aestheticizes literature by challenging the assumption that fiction should authoritatively determine the appearances, intellects, or sexual behaviour of people in the extratextual world. While Stopes’s plays and sex manuals see reproducing people as material for eugenic group moulding, Woolf and H.D.’s work critiques situations where human bodies or their powers of thought fully align with state ideologies and protocols. My approach to these writers thus defends avant-garde experimentation and emphasizes an important pacifistic message in terms of Woolf and H.D.’s anxieties about continued politicized aggression in the leadup to World War Two. As Benjamin wrote in the midst of interwar extremism: “Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian Gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (“Work of Art” 242). If the value that Western culture loads onto humanity corresponds with wholly ideological standards—the patriotic “grievability” of white soldiers, the classist undertones of Stopes’s family-planning, or the racialized idealism of the maternal body—then this culture also possesses the authority to reject or even destroy those people whom it perceives to be in conflict with the above ideals. What I wish to underscore as I end my dissertation is the resolve that Western societies maintain the raw illegibility of the human body and its ability to transcend pre-written tropes of identity. To assume otherwise welcomes a dangerous state of affairs where competing ideological authorities vie for the right to define who or what remains nameable, and therefore liveable, upon the representational canvas

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of public life. Woolf and H.D. uphold that aesthetics derive from individual producers rather than abstract, transcendent, or idealized concepts of human existence. They inform us that artists have the power to rewrite what it means to be a living individual, to explore instances where the desire for personal expression surpasses the vocabularies available for doing so, and how one’s attempt to speak from this experience, no matter how tentatively, carries the potential to guide political reform.

In this dissertation, I have examined how issues surrounding reproduction affected modernist literature in two ways. On a material level of the publishable text, I have discussed it in terms of Woolf and H.D.’s bid to produce literature that did not reproduce allegiances to forces such as militarism, male privilege, and colonialism. I have also discussed reproduction as a thematic concern, arguing that Woolf and H.D. differ from Stopes’s emphasis on embodied creativity by exposing how gender discourses like patriotic motherhood need not circumscribe a woman’s capacity for creative output. I have combined both approaches to reproduction to trace how Woolf and H.D. closely scrutinized Britain’s collective ideas about gender identity along with the reproducible artforms, propaganda, and labour practices that reified these views throughout interwar life. As contemporary readers, we similarly live in an age where technologies of cultural reproduction mediate our worldview through the lens of media spectacle, and where the bids of opposing ideologies to achieve mainstream dominance has led to increased divisions across Western nations. What we can take from Woolf and H.D.’s work is a technique that disturbs how we as readers understand the world, thus generating within us a thoughtful skepticism about the ability of mass-produced ideologies to conclusively and singularly explain the diversity of modern existence. At a time when Western culture sought unifying strategies of self and community to offset the group trauma of World War One, Woolf and H.D. engaged with

232

the lingering aftermath of this event to signal the need for ongoing political or artistic work.

While Stopes overcomes post-War uncertainties with renewed hetero-colonialist hierarchies,

Woolf and H.D. adopt a style of pacifistic modernism that embraces dissonance, fragmentation, and alienation as its creative incentive. Both writers utilize modernist narratives to produce scrutinizing attitudes about life and then use textual reproduction to communicate their inquiries.

Their work asks questions yet withholds knowable answers; it encourages readers to formulate new ideas about the world while remaining aware of the prospect that emerging ideologies like feminism or pacifism might utterly restructure it.

233

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