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UC Irvine UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Modernism's Suicidal Impulse: Psychic Contamination and the Crowd Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/13j5383d Author Ryan, Katherine Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Modernism’s Suicidal Impulse: Psychic Contamination and the Crowd DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English by Katherine Lynn Ryan Dissertation Committee: Professor Margot Norris, Chair Professor Laura O’Connor Professor Arlene R. Keizer 2014 © 2014 Katherine Lynn Ryan In loving memory of Martin Ryan ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv CURRICULUM VITAE v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION vi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: A “Fire That Purifies”: Psychic Contamination and Suicidal 26 Fantasy in Manhattan Transfer CHAPTER 2: “The pack may howl, but it shall never catch me”: Affective 72 Contagion, Suicidal Inoculation, and the Herd in Woolf CHAPTER 3: “Affected, or Infected, Forever”: Emmeline, Suicide, and 122 Atmospheric Affect in To the North CHAPTER 4: “I stood in the centre of eroticism and death”: Affective 162 Spillways and the Suicidal Logic of Desire in Nightwood BIBLIOGRAPHY 226 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I owe the success of this project to my dissertation committee. I would like to thank my dissertation chair Margot Norris, who believed in this project from the beginning and who aided me in countless ways throughout the dissertation process. I could not have asked for a kinder or more inspiring advisor. I would also like to thank Laura O’Connor for her invaluable advice throughout graduate school and especially for her guidance during this very hectic past year. Without her encouragement and support, this dissertation would not have been written. Arlene Keizer has also helped clarify and strengthen this project in innumerable ways, and I am very fortunate to have had the benefit of her dedication and expertise. I could not have completed this dissertation without the support of my graduate student colleagues at UCI. I am grateful to all those who critiqued early chapter drafts in graduate workshops and who helped me refine my aims for the project as a whole. A BIG thank you to TEAM BOOKS, whose generosity and enthusiasm have served as a constant source of motivation and enabled me to say and do more than I thought was possible. To Erika Palsson, for helping me stay grounded. To Cristina Rodriguez, for keeping me on track! And a special thank you to Anna Finn, my amazing graduate mentor and a tireless reader of my written work. I am indebted to the UC Humanities Research Institute for added fellowship support during my dissertation year and to the university for the Chancellor’s Dissertation Fellowship. Thank you to my friends and family for supporting my decision to pursue graduate school, especially when that decision entailed moving halfway across the country. My parents, Sue and Chris Ryan, have always been my biggest fans, and I thank them for their unflagging belief in my capabilities. I also thank Ginger and Lavoy Gliddon, Ann Ryan, Matt and Kelley Ryan, and the Stuart family. I am grateful to be surrounded by such caring and wonderful people. Last but not least, thanks to Chris and Isaac, without whom the world would blur. iv CURRICULUM VITAE Katherine Lynn Ryan 2008 B.S. in Psychology and English, summa cum laude, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign 2010 M.A. in English, University of California, Irvine 2014 Ph.D. in English, University of California, Irvine FIELD OF STUDY Transatlantic Modernist Literature PUBLICATIONS JOURNAL ARTICLES AND ESSAYS in English Literature (forthcoming) “Milly Bloom as Blind Spot in Ulysses,” The James Joyce Quarterly. “‘Walking Round Downtown Chicago’: The Politics of Midwestern Women in John Dos Passos’ USA,” Midwestern Miscellany. Review of Joyce Studies in Italy, Vol. 12: Polymorphic Joyce, edited by Franca Ruggieri and Anne Fogarty, James Joyce Literary Supplement. JOURNAL ARTICLES AND ESSAYS in Psychology Diener, Ed, Shigehiro Oishi, and Katherine Ryan. “Universals and Cultural Differences in the Causes and Structure of Happiness: A Multilevel Review.” Mental Well-Being: International Contributions to the Study of Positive Mental Health. Ed. Corey L.M. Keyes. Atlanta, GA: Springer, 2013. 153-176. Diener, Ed, and Katherine Ryan. “National Accounts of Well-Being for Public Policy.” Applied Positive Psychology: Improving Everyday Life, Schools, Work, Health and Society. Ed. Stewart I. Donaldson, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and Jeanne Nakamura. New York: Routledge, 2011. 15-34. Diener, Ed, and Katherine Ryan. “Subjective Well-Being: A General Overview.” South African Journal of Psychology 39.4 (2009): 391-406. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Modernism’s Suicidal Impulse: Psychic Contamination and the Crowd By Katherine Lynn Ryan Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Irvine, 2014 Professor Margot Norris, Chair This dissertation examines the early twentieth-century anxiety that disproportionately high rates of suicide indicated a suicide epidemic. A sense of the suicidal impulse as contagious and most likely to spread amidst the crowded urban environment is especially prominent in the period’s scientific discourses, and this anxiety over public hygiene and population control emerges in a strand of modernist fiction that repeatedly portrays the suicidal subject as suffering from an intersubjective contagion rather than intrasubjective anomie. Thus challenging accepted critical narratives of urban suicide as the result of psychic isolation, texts by John Dos Passos, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and Djuna Barnes suggest the necessity for a more epidemiological reading of self- destruction in modernist literature, and particularly point to affect as the source of modernism’s psychic contamination. Departing from early psychoanalytic theories of suicide, and merging fin-de- siècle crowd theories, legal and clinical studies, and recent theories on the circulation of affect, this dissertation analyzes how physical crowding comes to precipitate a breakdown of psychic boundaries, threatening notions of identity and autonomy that the act of suicide sometimes paradoxically reaffirms. Moving from New York, to London, and finally to the culture capitals of continental Europe, an increasingly cosmopolitan engagement reveals affect’s capacities to infect and overwhelm the individual, resulting in suicides that instigate progressively more collateral damage and that articulate the self as highly permeable, likely to be endangered by the contagious psychic and bodily states of others. vi “There should be no more poetry in suicide than there is in madness or in crime.” - S.A.K. Strahan, Suicide and Insanity “the moderns had never written anything one wanted to read about death” - Virginia Woolf, “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” Introduction: The Pathway of an Epidemic In a story that forms one of the early drafts of Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa reflects on a history of thinking about death, one that is mediated primarily by literary representation. Contrasting the “great poetry” of Shelley’s “Adonais” and Shakespeare’s Cymbeline with the unpalatable work of the moderns, she dismisses more recent developments in that history of representation, presumably those surrounding the recent catastrophe of WWI. Her juxtaposition of these works is not surprising, especially given that the excerpts she remembers lament the deaths of men (or women supposed to be men) who, like the soldiers in the Great War, die far too young. What is far more striking, considering what modern readers know about the ending of Mrs. Dalloway, is that both Clarissa’s texts portray a safety in death, which protects rather than destroys the individual by isolating him or her from the sullying influences of the world. From Shelley’s poem, Clarissa recalls the one line that most directly ensures the loved one’s security from contamination, or “From the contagion of the world’s slow stain” (155). In her reference to Shakespeare’s funeral song immediately following, she takes refuge in the idea of death as a removal from the world’s harsh elements (“Fear no more the heat o’ the sun”), likewise invoking the song’s depiction of death as a territory beyond the affects that constitute human interaction (“Thou hast finished joy and moan” [4.2.273]) and their infectious, even lethal, influence (“Nothing ill come near thee” [4.2.279]). Depicted as a form of self-containment that reinforces the boundaries between self and other, death quarantines the individual from a toxic social 1 landscape, and particularly from human interaction that at its best will slightly tarnish and at its worst irrevocably contaminate. Thus, in the legacy of the pre-moderns invoked by Clarissa, it is life rather than its eradication that forms the primary threat to bodily integrity. Her reflection on the moderns is excised in the final draft of the novel, as is the line from Shelley’s poem; yet, Shakespeare remains, and “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun” becomes a common refrain. Clarissa defends her choice of “great poetry” over the works of her contemporaries by thinking that “For all the great things one must go to the past” (155), but her nostalgia for bygone representations, and particularly the safe remove of death depicted therein, is not abandoned by Mrs. Dalloway in its own modernist experimentation. In fact, Woolf’s novel destroys Clarissa’s binary, conflating the troubling depictions of death she abhors (the senseless slaughter of the moderns) with those she appreciates. Exploring the absurdity of death through the eyes of shell-shocked Septimus Smith alongside Clarissa’s contemplations of mortality, the novel conflates her view of modern and pre-modern death. In doing so, it investigates the danger intimated by Shelley and Shakespeare, courting the possibility of contamination as Woolf’s characters traverse London and constantly immerse themselves in the insidious emotional influence of the crowd.