British Modernism, the Artist-Critic, and the Function of Criticism, 1895-1940

Home , Almroth Wright, Dreadnought hoax, Horace de Vere Cole, James Henry (poet), May Wedderburn Cannan, Thomas Mallon

Resisting Tyranny, Resisting Stasis: British Modernism, the Artist-Critic, and the Function of Criticism, 1895-1940

by Patrick Thomas Henry

B.A. in Creative Writing, May 2008, Susquehanna University B.A. in Political Science, May 2008, Susquehanna University M.A. in English, May 2010, Bucknell University M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Fiction), May 2012, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey – Newark Campus

A Dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

May 21, 2017

Jennifer Green-Lewis, Associate Professor of English

Kavita Daiya Associate Professor of English

The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Patrick Thomas Henry has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of 27 January 2017. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.

Resisting Tyranny, Resisting Stasis: British Modernism, the Artist-Critic, and the Function of Criticism, 1895-1940

Patrick Thomas Henry

Dissertation Research Committee:

Jennifer Green-Lewis, Associate Professor of English, Dissertation Co-Director

Kavita Daiya, Associate Professor of English, Dissertation Co-Director

Maria Frawley, Professor of English, Committee Member

Margaret Soltan, Associate Professor of English, Committee Member

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Dedication

To my grandmother, Lois E. Henry, who gave me the Faulknerian dictum to “Read, read, read—read everything!” before any other teacher did.

And to Karen E. Davis, my wife. These words—and all the rest—are for her, with love.

Acknowledgements

In her diaries, Virginia Woolf reserves her highest (and rare bits of unqualified) praise for those writers and friends whose work influenced her books. I am fortunate beyond belief to have mentors whose writing and teaching have inspired me in the same way. I would like to thank my committee co-directors: Jennifer Green-Lewis, whose mentorship has constantly reaffirmed my belief that the beautiful matters in writing, teaching, and critiquing; Kavita Daiya, whose example has reminded me that hidden stories always have a place in our classrooms and our scholarly dialogues. I would also like to thank my readers, Maria Frawley and Margaret Soltan, for graciously dedicating their time to this project—and for offering me a space to think aloud in their offices. My thanks also go out to Thomas Mallon, for his support and guidance as I balanced dissertating and fiction writing at GWU. Lastly, I am especially grateful for the continued support of John Rickard, who directed my M.A. thesis at Bucknell; if John hadn’t suggested that I read Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, and Flann O’Brien, I may never have stumbled, headlong as Alice into the rabbit-hole, into Modernism.

I’ve been privileged to have the companionship and unflagging support of the friends I discovered at GW—especially Leigha McReynolds, Erin Vander Wall, Nora

Alfaiz, and Haylie Swenson. The second chapter would not have happened without my brother Glenn Henry and my sister-in-law Amanda Peck, who offered me their home for a two-week writing retreat in August 2015. I would also never have arrived here, were it not for my grandmother, Lois E. Henry, a retired public school teacher whose one passion is this: to make all her students love reading. One of the small miracles of daily

living is this: that so often, a friend or a relative unknowingly commits an act of grace and kindness—and that is enough, to prove that the work remains worth pursuing.

I’m reminded again of Woolf, who drew inspiration in A Room of One’s Own from a Manx cat crossing a university quad. I could not write without the silent wisdom of my beloved cats—Kaylee (who passed days after I defended the proposal for this project) and our tortoiseshell kittens, Campbell and Teagan. (Campbell: the lymphoma took you from us too soon, just after I had written this note—but your strength and resilience anchored me through revisions.) These dear cats, they always know when the delete key is the only means of revision.

And lastly, but certainly never least: this would be for nothing if it were not for my wife, Karen Davis. Over ten years ago, on a mountaintop overlooking the

Susquehanna River, she agreed to a picnic. And then, just three years ago, in Turkey Run

National Park—another mountain, overlooking another river—she said yes. Because of her, there are always stories (and essays, and novels, and dissertations . . .) left to write.

PTH

Alexandria, VA

Sept. 2016

Rev.: Dec. 2016

Abstract of Dissertation

Resisting Tyranny, Resisting Stasis: British Modernism, the Artist-Critic, and the Function of Criticism, 1895-1940

This dissertation assesses the aesthetic, political, and ideological interventions in the critical nonfiction by British Modernist writers between the years of 1895 and 1940.

This project contextualizes these artist-critics against major historical events in order to demonstrate that criticism issues a necessary challenge to reductive and restrictive regimes of ideological and aesthetic thought. Moreover, this project demonstrates that, firstly, criticism should be esteemed as a creative form and, secondly, that the nonfiction of Modernist writers deserves the same scrutiny as their fiction, drama, and poetry.

The introduction critiques contemporary critical methods like symptomatic reading and surface reading, while offering the methodology of artist-critics as a necessary complement to academic writing. The first chapter examines Oscar Wilde’s testimony in his libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, Regina v. John Douglas;

I argue that Wilde’s testimony employs aesthetic principles to reveal the inconsistencies inherent in the authority of the state. The second chapter analyzes Rebecca West’s journalism and book reviews against the backdrop of the First World War, contending that West’s feminist writings produce a counter-history that complicates academic discussions of Britain’s Great War literature. The third chapter seeks to reclaim literary biography as a genre of critical writing, by reading Virginia Woolf’s Roger Fry: A

Biography as an extended argument for the task of the critic and the function of criticism.

The conclusion, by reading Hugh MacDiarmid’s Scottish nationalism against the events of the June 2016 “Brexit” vote, demonstrates the continued valences of artist-critics’ work beyond their own historical periods.

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Table of Contents

Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgements ...... v

Abstract ...... vii

Table of Contents ...... viii

List of Figures ...... ix

Introduction. Surface and Symbol: The Artist-Critic, Critical Methodologies,

and the Function of Criticism ...... 1

Chapter One. Literary Criticism on Trial: The Disruption of Discourse and

Power in Oscar Wilde’s Testimony in Regina v. John Douglas ...... 45

Chapter Two. The Other “Bloody War”: Rebecca West’s Early Nonfiction,

Disillusionment, and a Feminist Counter-Memory of the Great War Years ...... 112

Chapter Three. Virginia Woolf’s Roger Fry: A Biography and the

Task of the Critic ...... 182

Coda. The Afterlife of Scottish Nationalism; or, Hugh MacDiarmid,

Scottish Letters, and Britain after Brexit ...... 272

Works Cited and Consulted ...... 297

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List of Figures

Figure 1.1: The Marquess of Queensberry’s Card ...... 46

Figure 1.2: “Oscar Wilde at Bow Street” in The Illustrated Police News ...... 61

Figure 2.1: Kitchener’s Army Poster ...... 131

Figure 2.2: “Women of Britain Say—‘Go!’” poster ...... 131

Figure 2.3: WSPU’s Cat & Mouse Act Poster ...... 149

Figure 2.4: Henry Herbert Asquith ...... 149

Figure 3.1: Dorrit Cohn’s Genre and Voice Grid ...... 204

Introduction

Surface and Symbol: The Artist-Critic, Critical Methodologies, and the Function of

Criticism

We must know whether And if not: then what is the task very much on the surface by means of finite signs when one is frightened of the truth –Carolyn Forché, “Book Codes: I” in The Angel of History (1994)

On 19 November 2014, Pulitzer- and Nobel-winning novelist Toni Morrison appeared on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report to discuss, amongst other matters, her perspectives on racism in America. Underlying Morrison’s conversation with the archconservative persona of comedian-host Stephen Colbert, however, were the aftershocks of the recent racial tensions in Ferguson, Missouri. Demonstrators had gathered in Ferguson because Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old, unarmed Black teenager, was fatally shot on 9 August 2014 by police officer Darren Wilson. Local law enforcement insisted that Wilson shot Brown because the youth was attempting to strip

Wilson’s weapon and attack. Ferguson officials refused to budge from this problematic narrative, which fomented discord within the city’s Black community. Meanwhile, white journalists played into the sanctioned story of Brown’s death by harping on racial stereotypes that cast Black youths as dangerous and unstable. The title of Michael

Eligon’s New York Times investigation into Brown, “Michael Brown Spent Last Weeks

Grappling with Problems and Paradise,” betrays the racial bias and the subsequent victim blaming that undergirded public responses to and news coverage of the demonstrators’

demands for justice.1 The unrest was compounded when Governor Jay Nixon (D-MO) asked the Missouri Highway Patrol to oversee police activity in Ferguson; the riots redoubled, and Nixon, fearing an escalation of violence, declared a state of emergency leading into the grand jury proceedings against Wilson. On 25 November 2014—shy of a week after Morrison’s appearance on The Colbert Report—the grand jury opted not to indict Wilson for the murder of Michael Brown.

In her appearance on The Colbert Report, Morrison’s remarks on racism in

America translate an academic critique into something discernible by the lay readers (or viewers) of the media-consuming public. That is, as an artist-critic, Morrison repackages the politically savvy and theoretically nuanced positions of literary scholarship into a discursive register accessible to most listeners. While she never refers to Michael Brown or Darren Wilson by name, her trenchant observations target the institutionalization of racial bias in American politics and pop culture. Morrison urges Colbert’s viewers to understand racism as a social construct elevated to the position of, as Slavoj Žižek might put it, an ideological fantasy. Morrison explains,

There is no such thing as race. None. There’s just the human race—

scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct,

and it has benefits. [. . .] Money can be made off of it. People who don’t

like themselves can feel better because of it. It can describe certain kinds

1 Moreover, Eligon’s treatment of Brown reveals the disparity between the treatment of Black victims and white mass shooters. In a recent article in Modern Language Studies, Makeba Lavan compares the newspaper coverage of Brown—in which Eligon infamously states that he was “no angel”—to that surrounding James Holmes, the white man responsible for murdering twelve in a shooting at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theatre. While the media denigrates Black victims, the same outlets cast white mass killers in a “how did he go wrong?” narrative. As Lavan observes, “Despite committing a heinous crime, the media celebrated Holmes’s scientific acumen, reinforcing a narrative that views white violence as singular acts of troubled individuals: lone bad seeds, often with a history of mental illness” (59).

of behavior that are wrong or misleading. So it has a social function,

racism. But race can only be defined as a human being.

Against the backdrop of Ferguson, Morrison’s remarks expose the racism inherent in the municipal, state, and federal governments’ bungled and evasive responses to the Michael

Brown shooting. Racism justifies the narratives spun and the violence exercised by officers of the law, who act on the misconception that Blackness correlates to violence.

When Morrison refers to those “[p]eople who don’t like themselves,” she could as easily have identified Officer Wilson or Governor Nixon, both of whom deploy the racism- driven account of Brown’s “violence” to perpetuate and defend the state’s authority, to validate themselves as white men.

Of course, fluff pieces on Salon and Huffington Post took no notice of the contemporary valences of Morrison’s exchange with Colbert. These websites surrendered to the viral yearning of click-bait verbs and the puffery of adverbs: “Toni Morrison completely schools Stephen Colbert on the topic of racism,” pronounced Sarah Gray’s headline at Salon. Except, Gray’s headline is far too glib. Morrison had no intention of

“schooling” Colbert, whose parodic persona—riffing on conservative ideologues in the

Bill O’Reilly vein—caricatures the right’s prejudices so as to advance progressive and inclusive values. The Colbert of the Report was a marvel of rhetorical posture and play, and Morrison intended to deflect her comments off the comedian’s façade to “school” her contemporaries: the American public. The studio audience, viewers at home, digital natives tantalized by headlines like Gray’s—these denizens of a public sphere, integrated and networked across multiple media platforms, were Morrison’s intended targets.

Online rags like Salon serve us click-bait headlines to stimulate intellectual salivation: we’re enticed by the notion of the venerable Toni Morrison “schooling” anybody, and we want to savor every slice she takes out of Colbert. And for another, lesser novelist, we could dismiss the interview as pure optics—a sales pitch for the writer’s legacy and The Colbert Report’s cultural relevance. Yet, while Morrison laughed and quipped with Colbert, she was there not as an advertisement for her novels, but as a public intellectual and an artist-critic. Offering a spoken performance of literary and cultural criticism, Morrison distilled a central contention of her book Playing in the Dark:

Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). In this thin volume, Morrison reads shadows and darkness and blackness in Poe, Melville, and Hemingway as manifesting the anxieties of “literary whiteness.” That is, these white male authors and their texts self- deconstruct, exposing the systemic and constructed nature of racism as an ideological fantasy that seeks to deny marginalized Black figures access to the text. Morrison’s point, however, is that literary whiteness must inevitably fail: Black writers, Black readers,

Black scholars, and Black history infuse these texts and offer ways to reinvent and reclaim literature for non-white audiences.

Morrison’s contributions as an artist-critic also include her role as editor of Burn

This Book (2008), a PEN/America title in which contemporary writers spoke out against censorship; an introduction to Huckleberry Finn for the Oxford Mark Twain; her hybrid essay/photo essay Remember (2004), which charts the course of school desegregation after the 1954 United States Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education; a volume of essays, compiled by Carolyn Denard as What Moves at the Margins: Selected

Nonfiction (2008); and more recently, the foreword to BOA Edition’s Collected Poems of

Lucille Clifton (2012). As a lecturer, public speaker, essayist, and novelist, Morrison’s acts of literary and cultural criticism resonate for academic and general readerships alike.

But the nuances and echoes of her work—much like those in the critical nonfiction of her

Modernist and nineteenth-century precursors—challenge and resist those orthodoxies and presumptions that threaten to stagnate (or worse yet, contaminate) Western thought. This is why, in an age of Trump and a resurgence of racist thought in the West, artist-critics remain crucial to public discourse. Furthermore, it is why critics should begin to think and write not only as intellectual cogs in the machinery of knowledge production (an odious phrase). Like artisans and creators, critics should attend equally to the arguments, the ethics, the pleasures, the effects, and the affects of their prose.

That Morrison’s campaign against literary whiteness utilizes a toolkit of rhetorical stances, diction, and literary devices is hardly new: she inherited the mantle of artist-critic from Modernist writers active as creative writers and critics, who in turn succeeded the prolific artist-critics of the nineteenth century, and so on. Yet, despite the long history of this figure, contemporary artist-critics like Morrison are not without their adversaries.

Some contemporary scholars contend that the artist-critic’s methods are complicit in perpetuating the systemic prejudices latent in government, academe, and popular culture.

An example appears in the introduction to the Peripheral Realisms special issue of

Modern Language Quarterly (2012), in which Jed Esty and Colleen Lye chart an ambitious course for inviting the marginalized, realist literatures of colonial and postcolonial nations into academic discourses that hew to Anglo-American Modernist letters. Fundamentally, Esty and Lye contend that, since the 1980s, an industry influenced

by Modernist literary aesthetics has churned out parcel upon parcel of prose, which— much like Morrison’s notion of literary whiteness—redeploy the techniques of white authors while arguing for the ineluctable presence of marginalized ethnic others.

Morrison and Salman Rushdie find themselves the target of a strange critique, one that posits that literary whiteness actually buttresses their critical works. Rooting their reading of the “symbiosis between recuperative historicism and modernist style” in Leo Bersani’s

Culture of Redemption (1990), Esty and Lye offer the following contention, which warrants quoting at length:

In ethnic and postcolonial studies the feedback loop between critical

theory and artistic practice was enshrined in such classics as Toni

Morrison’s Playing in the Dark and Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary

Homelands (both 1992). It centered on the seeming reciprocity between

artistic techniques of radical estrangement (the overcoding of both

historical and social realities) and critical techniques of utopian

transvaluation (in which the exclusionary logics of the past, properly

historicized, could become the basis of the inclusionary logics of the

future). And it produced literary genealogies still regnant in our

classrooms: Morrison’s debt to William Faulkner, Rushdie’s to James

Joyce, J.M. Coetzee’s to Franz Kafka. (274-275).

As a whole, Peripheral Realisms is provocative in its call for renewed attention to non-Western realist literatures. And Esty and Lye are certainly within their rights to identify a utopian impulse in the work of some (but certainly not all) artist-critics of color. How else, after all, can we classify Rushdie’s claim that “those peoples who were

once colonized by the [English] language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it” (64)? In this remark, lifted from “‘Commonwealth Literature’ Does Not Exist,” Rushdie appears to sweep English’s colonial overtures from the table, ignoring how the language’s lexicon of authority, paternalism, and adjudication casts Indians and other colonized people as children unprepared for self-governance. Read from this vantage, Rushdie’s revisionist gesture neglects the language and the literature’s deployment as a form of social control.

Consider, for instance, Rushdie’s aspirational tone against that of the Victorian John

Stewart Mill, who considers the denizens of “rude states like the Tartars and the Arabs” temporally locked in the “childhood of society” and therefore unprepared to read or interpret literature—or to govern their own nations (93, 94).

But our discipline has conditioned us to find the aspirational not constructive, but suspect. As Rita Felski demonstrates in The Limits of Critique (2015), scholarly literary criticism has made a “hermeneutics of suspicion” its default worldview, so it is hardly surprising that Esty and Lye find the artist-critic a dangerous figure. Esty and Lye’s observations, particularly their dismissal of the Morrison-Rushdie camp of artist-critics, is a masterstroke of symptomatic reading, a method for ideological literary critique that

Fredric Jameson modeled in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic

Act (1981). Jameson proposes that critique is a Marxist tool, which enables an archaeological approach to the past: the critic discovers in texts evidence of the past, and from these she or he accounts for the malingering influence of the pseudoscientific discourses, the fearmongering racial theories, and the class warfare that characterized

Western civilization and the mission of empire. “Our presupposition,” Jameson’s

introduction notes, “will be that only a genuine philosophy of history is capable of respecting the specificity and radical difference of the social and cultural past while disclosing the solidarity of its polemics and passions, its forms, structures, experiences, and struggles, with those of the present day” (18). Jameson’s gesture here seems magnanimous, an olive branch to a past constituted of both progress and oppression.

Later, in a more Bakhtinian mood, he contends that narratives exist to negotiate these contradictions inherent in the past, and moreover, that this “distinction, positing a system of antinomies as the symptomatic expression and conceptual reflex of something quite different, namely a social contradiction, will now allow us to reformulate that coordination between a semiotic and a dialectical method” (83). That is, Jameson directs academics to shift their focus from semiotic analysis to a Hegelian dialectic, of opposing ideologies vying for prevalence. Under this rubric, when we read any text, we are encountering the detritus resulting from history’s eternal existential crisis: every word is an artifact that exposes concealed agendas, dominant discourses, national sympathies, and the yearnings of elites and citizens alike.

But what does a “genuine philosophy of history”—let alone a genuine philosophy of any discipline—look like? And does this “philosophy” belong only to credentialed scholars, who can reference Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, Michel Serres, Jacques

Derrida, Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Benedict Anderson, and so on? Intentionally or not, Jameson’s philosophy is exclusionary: only those who approach literature with a

Marxist excavation rig can interpret it, and its only approved operators are those trained in programs sympathetic to Jameson’s preferred methodological apparatus: symptomatic reading.

If we fault Morrison and Rushdie for presuming that literature can be reclaimed by and for marginalized populations, then we must accuse Jameson and most contemporary theorists—regardless of whatever camps they reside in—for trading in the same optimism. Jameson’s comparison between “the present day” and “the specificity and radical difference of the past” plays into a teleological narrative of progress without questioning it. Because of symptomatic reading, because of critique, we have improved on the fraught and contradictory past; we will surpass any such contradictions in the present. It differs little from Morrison and Rushdie arguing that general and academic readerships alike should become aware of, and think in terms of, alternative literary histories.

Nor is the language of reclamation unique to artist-critics. Eve Kosofky

Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling (2003) immediately comes to mind; the book’s fourth chapter, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” suggests that paranoia, a “negative affect,” dominates our critical praxis. Moreover, Sedgwick encourages her readers to give in to the “desire of a reparative impulse,” which “wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self” (14). That is, there is a space in criticism for a generative and generous reading of texts, for interpretive practices that situate literature as a contributor to the public welfare instead of an antagonist in thrall to the shadowy, ineluctable machinations of the state. Despite her surface negativism, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

(1999) seems to allow for such generosity, as her “setting-to-work” mode of deconstruction argues for a dismantling of institutions that, ultimately, reclaims

dispossessed populations and their narratives. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s widely influential

Provincializing Europe (2000) gives approbation to the same coopting of Western, liberal thought that Esty and Lye panned: “European thought is at once both indispensable and inadequate in helping us to think through the experiences of political modernity in non-

Western nations,” Chakrabarty claims, “and provincializing Europe becomes the task of exploring how this thought—which is now everybody’s heritage and which affects us all—may be renewed from and for the margins” (16). Further, by citing Chakrabarty, the contributors to Peripheral Realisms resort to the same reparative impulse when contending for the insertion of non-Western realisms into the canon of twentieth-century world literatures.

If anything, Esty and Lye’s parry against Morrison and Rushdie evinces that symptomatic reading has gone haywire. They profess resistance to the “feedback loop between critical theory and artistic practice,” claiming that the presence of artist-critics perpetuates the authority of white male authors—misogynists and racists like Poe,

Hemingway, Faulkner. (Again, we could take down scholars on the very same grounds: how different is Edward Said’s embrace of W.B. Yeats—a man who passed off some of

Lady Augusta Gregory’s play concepts as his own, an Irish nationalist who loathed violence yet flirted with fascism, and a two-term senator in the Irish Free State?) Yet, the remark ignores the artist-critic’s potential to shift the discipline’s sensibility by performing a critical revision of a writer. That is, instead of viewing artist-critics only as the craftsmen behind pleasant, reparative, and revisionary approaches to literary history, we must recognize that artist-critics are also welcome to perform scathing, symptomatic critiques.

Let us consider the difference between Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s celebrated

TEDTalk “The Danger of a Single Story” (2009) and Chinua Achebe’s essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” (1977). Adichie’s lecture takes a measured approach to Anglo-American literature—she professes that those books “stirred

[her] imagination”—but encounters with African texts rescued her “from having a single story of what books are.” Adichie “confers plenitude,” to lift Sedgwick’s phrase, to

Western and non-Western literary traditions, and she describes each as a reservoir flush with influence and inspiration. On the other hand, “An Image of Africa” pillories Joseph

Conrad, Heart of Darkness, and the novel’s manifest racism and imperialism. If we discount artist-critics based on those “literary genealogies still regnant in our classrooms,” we could tether Achebe’s prose, its precision, and its dramatic reversals to the Henry James of Daisy Miller (1878) or The Turn of the Screw (1898), or to Conrad himself. But this litmus test proves unsatisfying, especially in Achebe’s case. Indeed,

Achebe’s essay proves that neither style nor voice is inherently ideological, that Achebe

(and, by extension, Morrison and Rushdie) is not an imperialist or a racist because he writes a certain style of realist prose. We should hold at fault the offending text—and the scholarly industry that validates it—instead of the artist-critic. “An Image of Africa” does precisely this, when Achebe elaborates on a famously ignored critique of Heart of

Darkness:

The eagle-eyed English critic, F.R. Leavis, drew attention nearly thirty

years ago to Conrad’s “adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and

incomprehensible mystery.” [. . .] For it raises serious questions of artistic

good faith. When a writer, while pretending to record scenes, incidents[,]

and their impact is in reality engaged in inducing hypnotic stupor in his

readers through a bombardment of emotive words and other forms of

trickery much more has to be at stake than stylistic felicity. (784)

Achebe counterattacks Conrad on their common ground, literary realism: Achebe contends that Conrad has violated the realist aesthetic’s contract by chanting a “steady, ponderous, fake-ritualistic repetition of two sentences,” which hypnotizes the reader into accepting a false vision—that dangerous single story—of Africa.

Achebe’s is the critique that a Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism headnote lauds for having “set the terms of debate about one of the most read and taught books in the English curriculum” (1782). The success of Achebe’s argument calls into question the nature of Esty and Lye’s “feedback loop” by illustrating that the scholarly practice of symptomatic reading is itself fraught with a rather precious Foucauldian critical fiction. Its practitioners assume that every cultural production is complicit with the invisible, insidious exercise of state power, and criticism exposes the creative writer’s unknown loyalty to institutions of power. A greater Foucauldian irony ensnares this default setting: the norms and conventions controlling literature departments manifest in symptomatic reading. To critique means to demonstrate, usually to an audience constituted of other critics, the text’s commitment to dominant discourses. By performing symptomatic readings, one learns the shibboleth that grants access to a conversation consisting almost exclusively of other ideological critiques, which often do not (as

Achebe effectively does) consider the actual art or craft of the text.

Perhaps, academic criticism attacks the “feedback loop between critical theory and artistic practice” to unconsciously deflect attention from a fear common to literary critics: that the humanities have become a cerebral echo chamber in an institutional environment that privileges STEM fields, the corporate university, and its investment portfolios. This is the fear: we write to each other, read each other, and yet fail to communicate effectively to the general readership. Outside that circle, our scholarship doesn’t even incite negative reactions. We have few instances of hue and cry on the scale of the British public’s contempt for Roger Fry’s 1910 First Post-Impressionist Exhibition

(actually entitled “Manet and the Post-Impressionists”), the audience riots over Igor

Stravinsky’s ballet Le Sacre du printemps in 1913, or Yeats’s nationalist drama Cathleen ní Houlihan (1902), which the poet would later hold accountable for “send[ing] out /

Certain men the English shot”—the Irish leaders executed after the 1916 Easter Rebellion

(“Man and the Echo” 148).2

“Anxiety,” “fear,” and “crisis”: in critical parlance, these terms are so superabundant that they have become synonymous with surviving the many pitfalls of academe—graduate school, the perilous job market, publish-or-perish, and beyond. Panic is the new normal. In our contemporary moment, when institutional and market pressures render us desperate to prove the humanities’ contribution to the commonweal, literary criticism seems subconsciously aware of symptomatic reading’s limitations as a scheme for political activism and as an implicit assault against works of art. As early as 1966,

2 Earlier, I had noted that Yeats received credit for some of Lady Gregory’s work, of which Cathleen ní Houlihan is one example. Most critics contend that Yeats, at the very least, borrowed liberally from Gregory’s store of knowledge to produce the play’s successful use of Irish peasant language. Others, like Henry Merritt and Andrea Bobotis, suggest that Gregory co-authored the play by pointing to Cathleen ní Houlihan’s old woman as a marked diversion from the sexualized Kathleen/Cathleen figure in Yeats’s early poems.

Susan Sontag rankled at this tendency: “Today is such a time,” she writes, “when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. [. . .] In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art” (7). And symptomatic reading carries out that “revenge of the intellect” against politics and society, sometimes in nonsensical ways. In 2004, Bruno Latour rhetorically asked if critique had run out of steam. He derides the tendency for “instant revisionism” that enables Jean Baudrillard to claim of 9/11 (as Latour paraphrases it) “that the Twin Towers destroyed themselves under their own weight, so to speak, undermined by the utter nihilism inherent in capitalism itself” (228). In their introduction to a special issue of Representations entitled

The Way We Read Now (2009), Stephen M. Best and Sharon Marcus concur, recognizing that the omnipresence of conspiracies, scandals, and schemes have provided the public with a crash course in Foucauldian suspicion. The George W. Bush administration and the Blair government’s systemic deceit of their respective legislatures and voters proves illustrative for Best and Marcus—and it offers, they claim, an alternative set of critical approaches:

Those of us who cut our intellectual teeth on deconstruction, ideology

critique, and the hermeneutics of suspicion have often found those

demystifying protocols superfluous in an era when images of torture at

Abu Ghraib and elsewhere were immediately circulated on the internet;

the real-time coverage of Hurricane Katrina showed in ways that required

little explication the state’s abandonment of its African American citizens;

and many people instantly recognized as lies political statements such as

“mission accomplished.” Eight years of the Bush regime may have

hammered home the point that not all situations require the subtle

ingenuity associated with symptomatic reading, and they may also have

inspired us to imagine that alongside nascent fascism there might be better

ways of thinking and being simply there for the taking, in both the past

and the present. (2)

In lieu of symptomatic reading, Best and Marcus offer a hopeful manifesto for surface reading, which they describe as a “willed, sustained proximity to the text.” It is not Formalism by another name, but a set of reading practices that follow in the legacy of

Elaine Scarry’s Dreaming by the Book (1999). In that text, Scarry adopts an “idiom of instruction” to illustrate how a book’s language, structure, genre, and style enable us to construct a personal understanding of the text. Surface reading, then, examines literature’s manifest (as opposed to allegedly repressed) contents and structures: narratology, genetic criticism, genealogical criticism, material culture studies, and old- fashioned close readings can all conceivably fit under this umbrella. In “The New

Modesty of Literary Criticism,” Jeffery Williams notes that this signals a fundamental shift from the theory and culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Via Best and Marcus’s claim that the critic is seldom a cultural hero and their recognition of “the political realism about the revolutionary capacities of both texts and critics” (15-16), Williams draws out a narrative of moves away from symptomatic reading that includes—in addition to Sedgwick, Latour, and Felski—Franco Moretti’s “distant reading” and his call for a deeper and more expansive perspective on the novel. Williams concludes that the

“modesty” of surface reading—its claims not to critique but to illuminate—stems from a

lingering discontent with the failures of criticism to effect policy and social change. “It remains to be seen, though,” he hazards, “whether surface reading and allied approaches re-embrace a more cloistered sense of literary studies.”

For surface readers, the literary critic is not a word-slinging Indiana Jones, whose travels, investigations, and inquiries unearth obscured cultural artifacts, archives, and histories while thumping those in thrall of totalitarian ideologies. Equally unlikely are the righteous quest narratives depicted in A.S. Byatt’s novel-of-academe Possession (1991), in which the scholars Roland Michell and Maud Bailey discover a draft of a letter between two Victorian poets—which impels them to pursue the letter’s insinuations of a love affair between the poets, reinventing their discipline and elevating Victorian poetry to a public spectacle. Instead, for surface readers, the task of criticism is to illuminate or elucidate, a seeming return to the aim of texts like M.H. Abrams The Mirror and the

Lamp (1953), but with methods that can reach beyond the confines of the text.

If surface reading tarnishes the glamor of criticism, which Williams suggests is a distinct possibility, what might the critic of the future look like? Perhaps future critics would abide by New Yorker book critic James Wood’s description of the book reviewer’s craft as a type of bricolage that cobbles together allusions and illustrative quotations, subtly persuading the reader: a good book critic, Wood claims, has mastered “the art of persuasion,” in which “it’s perhaps more helpful to think in terms of a book you might seriously be interested in and here are the reasons why. And it’s often just a large amount of quotation” (Paulson). Worse yet, the critic’s work could descend into drudgery, the mercenary motivations of the publish-and-perish mentality. This would leave little

distinction between the humanities scholar and the overtaxed, impoverished, solitary, and inconsequential book critic of George Orwell’s “Confessions of a Book Reviewer.”

Surface reading feels like a much-needed dose of reality, but as a collection of critical methods the approach offers a dire, nihilistic prognosis for our discipline.

Symptomatic reading is hardly better, as it presupposes a literature that teems with more spies and shadowy totalitarian agencies than the entire opus of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels. While these terms account for only two broadly construed sets of methodologies, they both hinge on a fundamental misconception of what criticism is, and what it does. It was not until reading the March 2016 issue of PMLA that I found the vocabulary for articulating why these approaches seem wanting. In this issue, Andrew Kopec’s “The

Digital Humanities, Inc.: Literary Criticism and the Fate of the Profession” positions the digital humanities as one possible future for the discipline of literary criticism, and he does so by contrasting the digital humanities to surface reading and formalist critique.

Kopec proposes that, “with key qualifications,” the formalism of John Crowe Ransom and other American New Critics—many of whom were artist-critics—can be enfolded into the digital humanities’ constructive project:

Evident in the vibrant debates over professional “reading,” the impulse to

return to formalism has recently prompted trenchant critiques, many of

which are chronicled by or offered in response to [Marjorie] Levinson’s

2007 PMLA essay [“What Is the New Formalism?” PMLA 122.2]. Yet if

calls to repurpose formalism stem from concerns about the fate of the

profession, it is striking to find few if any references to the digital

humanities [. . .]. That omission makes sense, though, when we consider

that some of the most rigorous practitioners of the digital humanities

oppose “reading” altogether. Indeed, Stephen Ramsay presents the digital

humanities as a “new kind of hermeneutic,” a shift “from reading and

critiquing to building and making.” (325)

The “reading-critiquing” versus “building-making” binary hinges on a logical fallacy, one that views writing as destructive and coding as constructive. The distinction founders if we do not accept the premise that criticism dismantles its source materials, while digital projects heighten and illuminate those same sources. Formalism (in Kopec’s sense of the method), symptomatic reading, and surface reading all rely on some version of this misunderstanding: in analyzing a text, we must remove its façades and disassemble its scaffolding. Yet, all these approaches—including the digital humanities— manufacture new materials. As a form of writing, criticism allows for a creative process in which writers can create arguments, interpretations, and even alternative literary histories.

My intention here is not to undercut symptomatic or surface reading, or the digital humanities, but to register my agreement with Felski’s belief that “[l]iterary studies sorely needs alternatives to [. . .] ‘ideological’ and ‘theoretical’ styles of criticism: a reduction of texts to tools or instruments, on the one hand, and a cult of reverence for their sheer ineffability, on the other” (29). Instead, engagement with the work of artist- critics may allow us to reconceive our discipline as one that produces texts for a literate public. Artist-critics operate across the methodological spectrum described thus far, and they have done so since before academic criticism catalogued these approaches. D.H.

Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) revels in a hermeneutics of

suspicion to challenge authorship and pry open the messages latent in texts: “Art-speech is the only truth,” Lawrence proclaims. “An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters” (8). Cyril Connolly, the novelist and critic who edited Horizon from 1940 to 1949, suggests in Enemies of

Promise (1938) that the text itself provides us with all clues necessary for performing literary analysis: “Style is a relation between form and content,” he announces. “Where the content is less than the form, where the author pretends to emotion which he does not feel, the language will seem flamboyant” (17). (To put this differently, we would do well to keep in mind a paradox from Oscar Wilde’s Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray:

“All art is at once surface and symbol. / Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. / Those who read the symbol do so at their peril” [4].) But if we are to hew to the artist-critic, these writers must function as more than examples in a portfolio of critical methods. That is, if we opt to not break with our discipline’s past, which began with artist-critics, these novelist, poets, and playwrights must demonstrate how our discipline’s history can reclaim its future while resituating the humanities as a public good.

The artist-critic’s habits can influence academic methods only if we do away with the critical fictions latent in our approaches—that our politics are purer or nobler than the public intellectual’s, that our critiques are somehow more objective or authoritative by dint of our scholarly credentials. In doing so, it is also fair to turn our tendency to historical critique on ourselves. As Benjamin and Chakrabarty demonstrate, the danger of historicism is its production of false histories, particularly those that adapt the language

of natural, deep, geological time to describe the rise of “modernity.” Chakrabarty notes that such a presumed “basic code of history” allows “for a particular formation of the modern subject,” one that casts “pre-modern” beliefs—faith in mysticism, the supernatural, and pantheons—as anachronisms incompatible with a modern, Western world order (74, q.v. 72-75). This tendency undercuts the obvious fact that these competing cultural norms coexist. Similarly, literature departments have manufactured, to modify Chakrabarty’s line, a particular formation of the modern critic, in which professionalism distinguishes scholars from creative writers who dabble in editing, who experiment with critique, and who engage in life writing.

Dismissals of artist-critics often neglect the relatively short history of literature departments—let alone “professional” academic criticism. Terry Eagleton offers

Matthew Arnold as the origin of professional criticism, discounting the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century “man of letters” as a wishy-washy writer afraid of political engagement (65). Robert Scholes in The Rise and Fall of English (1998) situates the birth of the English department at the close of the First World War; the rise of English as a discipline owes its success to a rather parasitic—if not Oedipal—relationship to programs in classics, rhetoric, and composition. Likewise, Louis Menand in The Marketplace of

Ideas (2010) attributes the exponential growth of and ideological shifts in the humanities to the increased enrollments—especially of minority students—made possible by a post-

Second World War environment defined by economic prosperity, the Baby Boom, and the G.I. Bill. As the demographics of student bodies transformed, Menand argues, so too did the faculty, the university’s teaching mission, and the canon of texts. Roderick

Ferguson provides a more nuanced depiction of these years in the American context: the

Equal Pay Act of 1963, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Executive Order 11246 of 1965 inaugurated a language of civil rights and social justice, which in turn transformed individuals’ self-identification in the academy and in public discourse (q.v. 30-35).

The rapid development of literary studies precipitates one of the curiosities of our industry: the hurtling speed with which new methodologies become established traditions. From the vantage of symptomatic reading, this breakneck pace comes with an inherent peril, which insinuates itself throughout Ferguson’s generally optimistic book

The Re-Order of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference

(2012). Any innovative critical practices can easily be retooled to meet the desires and agendas of institutions like the university. Ferguson notes the following in his analysis of academe’s recent interdisciplinary turn: “As both agent and effect of institutionalization, interdisciplinarity represents not only an obstacle for and a challenge to dominance but the expansion and multiplication of power’s relays” (36). Ferguson’s remark encourages scholars to recognize the inherent contradictions and instabilities at the conceptual core of the humanities, that critique both resists and complies with power—which resonates with my earlier detection of the faults in Esty and Lye’s dismissal of Morrison and Rushdie.

Our accepted methods are always on the brink of precarity—which is clear enough, with surface reading’s recent challenge to symptomatic reading and the hermeneutics of suspicion. Further destabilizing is the realization that our methods and theories are relatively juvenile. The Formalism of Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth

Brooks dominated during the 1940s and ’50s; Jameson’s The Political Unconscious established symptomatic reading and suspicion as a critical lingua franca in 1983; and

Sharon Marcus’s take on surface reading is scarcely a decade old. (And this gloss doesn’t

even invoke such dominant theorists as Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, Said, Spivak,

Sedgwick, and so on.) The turmoil seems redolent of the “widening gyre” of Yeats’s

“The Second Coming,” in which “the falcon cannot hear the falconer.” But as in the

Yeats poem, there is a prehistory concurrent with the chaos; there is a rough (and often unwelcome) body of critical texts whose “hour [has] come round at last” (80). These are the writings of artist-critics—figures like T.S. Eliot and T.E. Hulme, whose embrace of classicism provided Formalism with its attachment to the text; like Virginia Woolf, whose Times Literary Supplement reviews of war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert

Brooke remain foundational in studies of Great War literature; like E.M. Forster, whose

BBC broadcasts during the Second World War offered a reading public stability, order, and sense; like Iris Murdoch, whose The Sovereignty of Good (1970) advocates the

Platonic notion of “the good” and the inherent value of the inner life, in a West conditioned to accept only empirical facts; and like Chinua Achebe, Toni Morrison,

Salman Rushdie, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose complicated relationships with

Anglo-American novels have reclaimed literature for people of color.

I have no interest here in penning a genealogy of the artist-critic, let alone asserting that this figure is a unique product of the modern period in literature (i.e., the

Restoration to present). If I were to claim that we could trace the artist-critic to Jonathan

Swift or Daniel Defoe, an early-modern studies scholar could easily—and rightly— present as an antecedent those playwrights who also performed as pamphleteers, spies, and informants in the cloak-and-dagger political drama of Elizabethan England. So let’s agree that the history, the presence, and the craft of the artist-critic has a long, convoluted

history that defies archiving; it is not so different from Franco Moretti’s recognition that the history of the novel escapes the confines of any organizational schema. Yet, the artist- critic does represent our discipline’s distant past, the recent past, and an alternative present contemporaneous to the theory-saturated methods prevalent in literature departments. These writers also enact an alternative set of critical practices that could prove essential in reforming literary studies in the twenty-first century by resolving questions of audience/readership and the complaint that academic prose is comprised of labyrinthine sentence structures and obscure jargon. That is, the artist-critic offers her scholarly colleagues three key innovations: to view (1.) criticism as an art, (2.) criticism as a public good, and (3.) criticism as a means of expanding or shifting perspectives.

1.) Criticism is an art. The artist-critic demonstrates the effectiveness of literary devices, figurative language, and narrative sleight-of-hand as argumentative strategies.

In the Aristotelian sense, “rhetoric” refers to the art of oratorical persuasion, deployed at an opportune moment (kairos) and powered by the rhetorical appeals (ethos, pathos, logos). “Poetics” explicate how the arts operate affectively, awing audiences and riling emotions. When W.B. Yeats observes the following in “Anima Hominis” (1918), he elaborates on this distinction:

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with

ourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from

remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our

uncertainty; and smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by

the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders. (405)

Here, Yeats is purposefully playful: he adapts to persuasive ends the cadences of verse and literary devices like alliteration, assonance, and consonance. “[W]e sing amid our uncertainty; and smitten . . .” could easily have appeared in one of Yeats’s early poems, haunting reveries emblematic of the Celtic Twilight. To articulates poetry’s role in a dialectic process of self-discovery, Yeats in “Anima Hominis” resorts to this poetic diction to elevate the essay’s mood and amplify his rhetoric. That is, Yeats’s prose is both rhetorical and poetic.

In modern, public prose, the barrier between rhetoric and prosody dissolves. For

Robert Louis Stevenson, effective prose incorporates both rhetorical technique and literary devices: “Each phrase of each sentence, like an air or a recitative in music”

Stevenson writes in 1885, “should be so artfully compounded out of long and short, out of accented and unaccented, as to gratify the sensual ear” (12). Put differently, evocative prose mimics the metrical feel of poetry. Conversely, academic writing struggles to maintain the appearance of objectivity, authority, and rhetorical control through the use of jargon; this point is granted in Chronicle of Higher Education essays by jargon’s proponents, like Cass R. Sunstein, and by its critics, like Johann N. Neem. But must scholarly criticism be so rigid, so rhetorically impervious to poetic diction? Roland

Barthes suggests otherwise in Criticism and Truth (Critique et Vérité, 1966), contending that critics “are entering a general crisis of commentary” predicated on “the symbolic nature of language, or, if one prefers, the linguistic nature of the symbol” (66). Here is the distillation of Barthes’s argument: language is always symbolic; language is our only written or spoken means for interpreting language; ergo, interpretation is always

symbolic. We have not strayed from Wilde’s glib pronouncement that “[a]ll art is at once surface and symbol” (4): criticism, by dint of its language, is also all surface and symbol.

In Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), a touchstone text for Wilde and other late-Victorian aesthetes, Walter Pater contends that individual encounters with symbols in art and literature generate an intensely personal impression, which provides an original moment of interpretation: “in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly” (3). By extension, criticism fabricates a narrative that recounts a personal encounter with the beautiful, with an object of analysis, and the intellectual and emotional pleasures stirred by that event. However, criticism deploys rhetorical and literary devices to deflect the reader’s attention from the author to the work undergoing critique. Hence, Wilde’s Preface dubs the art of criticism “a mode of autobiography” (3): the critic’s argument evinces only those meanings generated through her or his impressions of a work.

It is important to note here that neither Wilde nor Pater is advocating aesthetic relativism; Pater advocates for study, training, and the “refinement” of the critic’s sensibility through a focused study in artistic techniques and art history, a position that

Roger Fry would later take up in his lectures and essays defending Paul Cézanne. Further, as Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just (1999) makes clear, our perceptions of literature and art are often contingent upon our social conditioning—and often, we are unaware of how this training shapes our interpretive practices. We require repeated encounters with the beautiful in order for our perceptions and interpretations to morph, and the mimetic labor of texts offers alternative representations of the beautiful through

wordplay, figurative language, literary devices, and form. In a well-written text, either

“literature” or criticism, these effects provide evocative glimpses into a network of possible readings. What Jennifer Green-Lewis and Margaret Soltan’s Teaching Beauty in

DeLillo, Woolf, and Merrill contends about the beautiful seems equally possible for clear, well-constructed criticism: “The ecstasy of experiencing beauty would then be the keen and immediate conviction both of the ultimate unreachability of the world’s truth and the conviction of having just had a powerful, if always partial, access to the truth” (32).

Beautiful and descriptive prose should not be incompatible with criticism. Nor should the intensely personal nature of our impressions and reactions be elided from our work as interpreters of texts. The individuated nature of the “impression” suggests that alternative literary forms (i.e., creative nonfiction, narrative, the play) could accommodate, if not complement, the task of criticism. In a recent issue of The Writer’s

Chronicle, Joey Franklin reads Wilde’s mock-Socratic dialogue, “The Critic as Artist,” as evidence that criticism is always a form of creative nonfiction. The potential for merging creative nonfiction with criticism extends beyond the confessional anecdote or the personal essay as analytical tools, which has already been adopted by some postcolonial, queer, and feminist critics. Consider, for instance, Edward Said’s admission of his

Palestinian heritage in the introduction to Orientalism (1978), or Sara Ahmed’s references to the intersections of her private life and aesthetics in Queer Phenomenology

(2006). Recognizing artist-critics’ experiments with form offers possibilities for perspectival sleight-of-hand, generating personae that guide readers through the nuances of a thought experiment. Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist,” which divides its author’s

positions between the characters of Gilbert and Ernest, is an obvious example of criticism in another form.

Similarly, Virginia Woolf illustrates the subtlety and effect of perspectival shifts, when she recalibrates her novels’ stream-of-consciousness into a narrative device in criticism. Woolf’s two most famous long-form essays—A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938)—are actually persona essays. The narrator’s shifting mask in

A Room of One’s Own—“Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary

Carmichael or by any name you please—it is not a matter of any importance)” (3)— gestures toward the universality of the institutional, cultural, and familial pressures that confront women artists. Three Guineas adopts the voice of a letter writer to generate communication between the text and its reader: she intends to give the impression of

“someone warm and breathing,” even if “[c]omplete understanding could only be achieved by blood transfusion and memory transfusion—a miracle still beyond the reach of science” (5, 9). And while Woolf, like Yeats, writes in a lyrical mood, her play with narrative perspective nonetheless amplifies the key contentions of these long-form essays.

2.) Criticism is a public good. By extension, the humanities ought always to be the public humanities. The artist-critic’s public actions enact and complement the arguments in their critical prose.

If criticism is rhetorical (that is, persuasive), then the discipline requires a public that can be persuaded. Similarly, if criticism is art (that is, something that evokes an impression), then its success depends upon a reading public that can experience the pleasures and the intellectual stimulations of the text. Criticism’s capacity to benefit the

public falls to the wayside when scholarship pitches its prose only to academics and specialists. The circumstances are even more dire when, whether we consider ourselves symptomatic or surface readers, we accept as an unalterable reality that academe has circumscribed literary studies.

This is hardly a novel contention. In the preface to Beyond Culture (1965), Lionel

Trilling considers the role of the university in the early years of the Civil Rights era:

“Three or four decades ago the university figured as the citadel of conservatism, even of reaction. It was known that behind what used to be called its walls and in its ivory towers reality was alternately ignored and traduced” (xiv). In the volume’s first essay, “On the

Teaching of Modern Literature,” Trilling expresses his own uneasiness with modern literature courses, which required him to confront the “extravagant personal force of modern literature” (9). In turn, Trilling discovered that his pedagogical methods threatened to calcify Modernist writers—“to accelerate the process by which the radical and subversive work becomes the classic work” (11). Trilling’s solution is simple: he detaches the text from such academic jingles as “a significant expression of our culture” and “the alienation of modern man as exemplified by the artist.” (After decades of

Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault, it strikes the twenty-first-century scholar’s ear as something precious, that Trilling considered these phrases jargon.) Instead, his ideal course constructs a syllabus that guides the students toward Trilling’s interests in morality while coaxing them into performing their own intellectual labor; texts like

Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals and Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents urge students to draw on their own experiences and ask “whether or not we want to accept civilization” (23). This approach reflects Trilling’s obsession with integrity, diligence,

and compassion, which also characterized his earlier foray into fiction, the novel The

Middle of the Journey (1947).

But, pivotal for our purposes, Trilling viewed the students’ personal (albeit socially conditioned) responses to Modernist prose as the central means for extending the literature classroom’s work into public discourse. It was reader response before Stanley

Fish was trumpeting the merits of free associations. However, Trilling would have rankled at the suggestion that his pedagogy was a theoretical gimmick. Arguing that too much falls under the university’s “beneficent imperialistic gaze upon what is called Life

Itself” (10), Trilling seems to anticipate those very anxieties that have given rise to surface reading. Academe’s purview has paradoxically become panoptic but detached; scholars arbitrate on every conceivable sociopolitical issue, but with minimal effect on public discourse. This suggests a rhetorical failure on the part of literary criticism, one responsible for the cerebral echo chamber of much scholarly discourse: the decision (and yes, it is a choice) to write primarily for scholars undermines the accessibility and clarity of academic prose. By targeting such a narrow audience, which in turn perpetuates an industry of hyper-specialized and expensive publications, professional criticism minimizes its potential to inspire public conversations.

Trilling’s emphasis on the individual experience resonates with Woolf’s conception of the common reader as a person who instinctively relies upon her or his impressions (to steal Pater’s term) to make sense of the text. When artist-critics write, lecture, or speak for public venues, they presume that the audience consists of common readers. The impact of this is twofold. Firstly, the artist-critic must employ diction, syntax, and figures of speech that will appear recognizable to the reading audience;

secondly, the artist-critic recognizes that these common readers will derive personal interpretations, either positive or negative, predicated in their own impressions. It is via these two principles, focused on the potential audience, that the artist-critic communicates with the public. When T.S. Eliot delivered the 1932-33 Charles Eliot

Norton Lectures at Harvard (later published as The Use of Poetry and the Use of

Criticism), he began by recognizing that taste in poetry—regardless of scholarly debate— would always hinge on the private and ineluctable sensibilities of the reader; however,

“the critic who remains worth reading has asked, if he has only imperfectly answered,” the question of why we should value certain texts (16). Eliot implies that clear communication becomes possible only if we evade clunky theoretical apparatuses.

Earlier, in the lectures later printed as Aspects of the Novel (1927), E.M. Forster offers the same claim: “How then are we to attack the novel—that spongy tract, those fictions in prose of a certain extent which extend so indeterminately? Not with any elaborate apparatus. [. . .] And who is the re-examiner? Well, I am afraid it will be the human heart, it will be this man-to-man business, justly suspect in its cruder forms” (23).

Many, but certainly not all, artist-critics are content to embrace this “cruder,” more conversational and sentimental approach to criticism. The lecture series, public talk, literary festival, book reading, radio interview, podcast, etc.—all these offer platforms in which the artist-critic can directly communicate with public audiences, without the jargon-wrought frameworks of theory and peer-reviewed scholarship. In the twenty-first century, we hardly require media theorists like Marshall McLuhan or Henry Jenkins to inform us that digital technologies and social media have provided artist-critics with limitless venues.

Even Walter Benjamin’s assertion in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction,” that manufacturing and replication have democratized the production and dissemination of art and literature, seems obvious with the ease of setting up a blog, a

Facebook page, or a Twitter account. The Web hosts a thriving literary scene, in which creative writers can immediately and incisively confront social issues. Digital culture mixes media, creating access to writers simultaneously, across different platforms. For instance, when Marilynne Robinson spoke with President Barack Obama in November

2015, their conversation about literature and civic engagement appeared in the print edition of the New York Review of Books, on the Review’s website, and as a podcast downloadable through the Apple iTunes store. Further, writers like Roxane Gay,

Porochista Khakpour, and Salman Rushdie—to name a few—have deftly deployed

Twitter as a medium for engaging readers, 140 characters at a clip, with public discussions of literary texts, politics, and the discipline. Their best tweets are not unlike a critique in haiku form. Web culture also enables any of these observations—much like

Toni Morrison’s appearance on The Colbert Report—to go viral, influencing readers at the speed of a click, instead of the two-year waiting period that often accompanies peer- reviewed publications.

Of course, artist-critics complement the messages relayed through such outlets in their public works. This anticipates my third and final contention, that artist-critics seek to expand and/or shift the public’s perceptions, beliefs, and values. Though not an example of literary engagement, Roger Fry’s First Post-Impressionist Exhibition in

November 1910 destabilized Britain’s aesthetic sensibilities and urged the public to rethink their socially conditioned reactions to work of art. (Fry’s exhibition is one of the

possible referents for Woolf’s famous claim that “on or about December 1910 human character changed.”) Such public performances of the artist-critic’s values also suggest the need for actual activism. Though Norman Mailer comes to mind more as a brawler than an activist, his 1968 book The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel/The Novel as

History recounts in multiple genres Mailer’s decision to stand with anti-Vietnam protestors during the October 1967 march on the Pentagon.

In our own moment, humanities nonprofits provide artist-critics with similar outlets for advocating the continued relevance of art and criticism in the public sphere, primarily by providing lower-educated and minority populations with opportunities to connect with visual artists, writers, performers, and scholars. One such initiative is the

Washington, D.C.-based PEN/Faulkner Foundation’s Writers-in-Schools program. In this program, PEN/Faulkner partners with Washington and Baltimore schools by providing copies of novels, short story collections, and memoirs by living writers; supplying lesson plans, which use these texts to investigate current debates germane to the students’ experiences; and by coordinating an in-school visit, in which students meet and converse with the studied writer.

Of course, some universities and scholars have already mobilized on the issues of linguistic accessibility and public service. Naomi Wolf and Sacha Kopp have recently written of an initiative at Stony Brook University, which trains academic writers to traverse between the realms of scholarly and public discourse because, as they claim,

“both the mainstream and the academic realms have distortions when not in communication with each other.” Laurie Grobman and Roberta Rosenberg’s edited volume Service Learning and Literary Studies in English (MLA, 2015) also indicates that

service learning has appeared on the radars of some literature scholars and departments invested in the public humanities. But academe can still do more: more communication and more camaraderie, more appreciation for the artist-critic’s public service ethic, remains possible. With the exponential growth of creative-writing MFA programs, academic critics—in theory—have access to poets, novelists, and essayists whose pedagogy and creative writing necessitates communication with professional and public audiences alike.

3.) Criticism expands and shifts perspectives. The artist-critic does not break from the past, but offers a reaction to the past that broadens contemporary public discourse.

Modernist studies has recently sought to complicate (if not denounce) the truism that the twentieth century’s nonrepresentational art forms mark an irrevocable break with the Victorian past. Pericles Lewis diagnoses the various Modernist “crises” as aftershocks from mid- and late-Victorian movements: the en plein air techniques of the

Impressionists transformed how painters visualized their subjects (“a crisis of representation”); the Empire’s abuse of indigenous populations, child labor, and the mistreatment of factory workers undercut the aspirations of a utilitarian-inflected humanism (“a crisis of liberalism”); and Charles Darwin’s voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle

(1831-1836) quaked Britain’s religious discourse and triggered a desire to classify, to categorize, and to document (“a crisis of reason”). In Virginia Woolf and the Victorians

(2007), Steve Ellis spurns the term “Modernism” and suggests that scholarship substitute

“Post-Victorian,” in order to indicate the ideological, epistemological, and aesthetic origins of Modernist thought. That is, for Ellis, Modernism’s much-celebrated “rupture”

with the past is more accurately described as a revision of and response to the world order inherited from the Victorians.

Instead of an irreconcilable divorce, then, the Modernist artist-critics have negotiated something of a fraught—though sometimes amicable—intellectual trial separation from their Victorian past. Modernist theories of influence even situate the writer and her contemporaries in the same conceptual space as their predecessors. T.S.

Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) argues that literary tradition is always in flux, but that “the most individual parts of his [i.e., the poet’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously”

(4). Forster’s Aspects of the Novel imagines “English novelists not as floating down that stream which bears all its sons away unless they are careful, but as seated together in a room, a circular room, a sort of British museum reading-room—all writing their novels simultaneously” (9). Virginia Woolf claims that “masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice” (Room

71). Contrary to Raymond Chandler’s snide remark that “all this immortality makes just a little too much competition” (209), the Modernists’ dismantling of linear, periodized literary history generates a transtemporal body of literature, which can suggest alternative interpretations to different readers in different historical moments and in different social milieus. That is, the Modernist theory of influence accommodates Michel de Certeau’s view of history as a narrative always written for the historian’s, and not the subject’s, contemporary moment.3

3 It is worth noting that Harold Bloom has used these same theories to advance his infamous notion of “the anxiety of influence,” but even this is an example of criticism as a form of

These Modernist theories of influence generate a literary history that remains ever in flux, its parameters and canons and aesthetics shifting as contemporary writers release new works and as the reputations of earlier writers are reassessed. It is why the young

Rebecca West, reviewing books before and during the First World War, can deride novelists and social scientists whose visions run against the realities of women’s domestic situations and their wartime labor in Britain’s cordite factories. It allows Hugh

MacDiarmid’s essay collection At the Sign of the Thistle (1934) to attack the “English

Ascendancy” threatening to homogenize “British literature” and to instead advocate for a literature that recognizes the cultural value and literary merit from the respective “British elements”—the Scots, the Irish, the Welsh, the English, and their colonies (q.v. 11-32). It enables Rushdie to offer a similar contention, that formerly colonized peoples have reinvented English after their own customs, in essays like “‘Commonwealth Literature’

Does Not Exist.” It allows for Morrison’s Playing in the Dark to read Black lives into the aporias of Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and it validates Adichie’s caution against the “single story” of literatures in English.

Reacting to and revising the past—that tendency which caused Esty and Lye to rankle at Morrison and Rushdie—seem fundamental duties of criticism. After all, writing is always reactionary, always a response, whether it is a critical analysis of cultural artifacts or Wordsworth’s emotion recollected in tranquility. However, Samuel Beckett registers a valuable observation in “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce.” After decrying some critics’ tendency to “modify the dimensions of that pigeonhole for the satisfaction

autobiography: as Trevor Cook has convincingly argued in a recent issue of Modern Language Studies, reading Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence (1973) against his letters to Northrop Frye reveals striking similarities to Bloom’s distinctly Oedipal idolization of Frye and Anatomy of Criticism (1957).

of analogymongers,” Beckett sternly comments that “[l]iterary criticism is not book- keeping” (495). That is to say, criticism ought to be critical; it ought to offer and defend a contention that subsequently fosters debate. Lytton Strachey’s exhortation in the preface to Eminent Victorians (1918) resonates with Beckett’s point; Strachey’s insistence that the biographer owes his subject no obligation—“[I]t is his business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them” (10)—informed Virginia Woolf’s own efforts at life writing. The same impulse appears in the lectures of James Joyce, a novelist whose forays into nonfiction are overshadowed by his triumphs in the Modernist novel. Indeed,

Joyce performs such an act of revisionary thinking in 1907, when he delivered in Italian the lecture “Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages”; Joyce takes umbrage with Yeats and the

Celtic Twilight, vocalizing his suspicion of Irish letters’ nostalgia for a folkloric past and contending that the Irish diaspora to England and the United States suggests the true path toward Ireland’s future literary and cultural success.

Before proceeding further, I will issue a caveat: the artist-critic’s effects on readers’ perspectives may not always be progressive. Artist-critics, like Arthur Conan

Doyle in his essays on spiritualism and the occult, can rouse sympathy for superstitions and parlor tricks, easily disproved by any verifiable account of their own day. But this is anodyne in comparison to those artist-critics who approbate hatred, violence, segregation, and imperialism. The totalitarian sympathies of Modernism’s manifesto culture are an obvious, albeit general, example; Ezra Pound’s embrace of fascism and anti-Semitism, as well as his Italian state radio broadcasts, are rather more explicit cases. Yeats, who had his own flirtations with fascism and militant nationalism, demonstrates that the artist- critic can inculcate reactionary and exclusionary ideologies in social elites, who in turn

deploy art as a manipulation tactic. In “Ireland and the Arts” (1901), Yeats champions a community of artists that operates with the ecclesiastical fervor of the Catholic priesthood, a rather odd position for the Protestant poet to stake: “The Catholic Church is not less the Church of the people because the Mass is spoken in Latin, and art is not less the art of the people because it does not always speak in the language they are used to”

(385). What Yeats proposes here anticipates Walter Benjamin’s critique of the Nazi co- opting of the ritualization of art: under this rubric, aesthetics do shift the public’s perception, but through manipulation of affect and through the denial of interpretive agency.

The work of artist-critics can allow literature departments to reconceive the task of criticism, by redirecting the discipline toward an engagement with the reading public.

Moreover, a consideration of the artist-critic’s rhetorical strategies and aesthetically pleasing prose seems necessary in an institutional moment governed by the pressure to appease administrators, to extend the university’s collaboration with governmental and nonprofit agencies, and to demonstrate the humanities’ continued relevance. To repeat

Beckett’s remark, “literary criticism is not book-keeping”: it does not exist to calcify literature into a singular ideological program, nor does it exist to simply tally evidence of the past. The art of criticism ought to exist in and for its reading public, ought to foster dynamic communication and transformative conversations with civilians beyond the pale of academe’s cloisters. And by recalling that artist-critics are not throwbacks, are not anachronistic reminders of life before the literature department, literary studies can find

in the external realm of the public sphere a model for rejuvenating its core within the university.

A Note about This Project: British Modernism, Artist-Critics, and the Function of

Criticism

In lieu of the traditional dissertation introduction, I have elected to pen the previous essay, situating the artist-critic as the purveyor of alternative practices that could reinstate criticism as an essential voice in the public sphere. In its earliest phases and drafts, this project considered the artist-critic as a figure whose work resonated with the ideological agendas and progressive values advanced in much academic criticism. I predicated this intervention as a necessary move, one that challenged Esty and Lye’s dismissal of Morrison and Rushdie, as well as Terry Eagleton’s The Function of Criticism

(1984). This latter text champions the professional critic (based off a disturbingly white, male, and misogynist canon of “professional” critics) in an implicitly racist and sexist dismissal of the amateur and autodidactic “man of letters.” (By extension, Eagleton excludes from his canon of engaged, nineteenth-century criticism anything by women and minorities without access to formal training and/or academic credentialing.)

Moreover, I had intended to explore the ways in which the artist-critics of Anglo-

American Modernism—in spite of their own imperialist, classist, and otherwise prejudicial sympathies—provided colonial and postcolonial artist-critics with a template for engaged civic action, a mission very much in the spirit of Chakrabarty’s

Provincializing Europe.

Initial research (and common sense) proved that, in a rigorously researched form, such a broad assessment of artist-critics would prove unwieldy or worse. Further, I discovered in academic criticism the aforementioned tendency to dismiss the artist-critic as a gushing blurb writer in thrall of popular culture, an interloper unprepared to perform

ideological critique, or a throwback to the free associations and sentiments indicative of criticism before the literature department. Instead of theorizing the artist-critic as indicative of British Modernism and its legacy, the introductory essay pinpoints the one theme that runs through the main body of this project: the function of criticism is to destabilize pre-conceived norms and values, to question our commitments to problematic and stultifying ideologies, and to encourage the public to change its mind. Consequently, each chapter in this project functions as a standalone, long-form essay that investigates the manifold ways in which artist-critics, as public intellectuals, fulfill this task. This includes considering the various genres with which artist-critics perform their ideas; in the case of the current project, this ranges from Oscar Wilde’s testimony during his 1895 libel case against John Douglas, the Marquess of Queensberry; Rebecca West’s journalism and book reviews during the First World War; Virginia Woolf’s life writing, her short biographies in The Common Reader (1925), and her only long-form biography,

Roger Fry (1940); and, in the coda, Hugh MacDiarmid’s essays on poetics and Scottish nationalism.

The widely divergent forms of these modes of criticism proved both a virtue and a curse in the writing process. As each chapter requires a different theorization of either the primary author/text or a significant swath of scholarship, each of the long-form essays by necessity includes a literature review and survey of theory relevant in that context only.

To write of Oscar Wilde’s trial testimony, I dabbled with genetic criticism to illustrate the ways in which incomplete and fictionalized versions of the trial transcript lack the rigor, merit, and incision of the Wilde captured in the actual court stenographers’ shorthand, released as The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde in the United States in 2004. The subsequent

chapter situates Rebecca West’s “juvenilia”—her feminist book reviews, her journalism about women in Britain’s cordite factories, and her novella The Return of the Soldier

(1917)—as a voice necessary in reconsidering the literary history of Britain during the

Great War; to make this point, I consider how a pernicious and narrow rendering of the soldier-poets’ “disillusionment narrative” has constructed a literary history deaf to the experiences of women at the home front. Virginia Woolf’s Roger Fry proved, somewhat startlingly, the most difficult text to situate, as analyzing Woolf’s theories of biography and her agenda in Roger Fry required the dismantling of a critical tradition that views biography as a thinly veiled fiction designed to entrench authorial intent as the only viable interpretive strategy. The only exception is the coda, as MacDiarmid’s nationalist, hybrid poetics is explicitly about literature and critique, and therefore did not require such an exegesis. Of course, the introductory essay proves the virtue of this approach: I could argue against the nihilism and misery of contemporary critical methods, and situate the artist-critic as an alternative to the increasingly insular environment of the literature department in the early twenty-first century.

Here, I will hew somewhat closer to the conventions of the dissertation genre by briefly summarizing the three long-form essays and the project’s coda. Each chapter incorporates the voices of other artist-critics, as a gesture toward the fecund intellectual and sociopolitical environments in which these texts were formed. The first chapter,

“Literary Criticism on Trial,” contends that Oscar Wilde’s testimony in the 1895 libel trial Regina v. John Douglas functions as an act of public literary criticism, one that provides future artist-critics and literature scholars with a model for resisting orthodoxies.

Wilde’s repartee with Edward Carson, the solicitor for the Marquess of Queensberry,

subverts the court’s dependence on the stability of social norms by illustrating the paradoxes and inconsistencies on which conventions are founded. The second chapter,

“The Other ‘Bloody War,’” contends that Rebecca West’s early journalism and book reviews remain salient by injecting a necessary feminist counter-discourse into the political debates of the Great War years. The chapter situates West’s arguments for women’s rights and universal suffrage as a counterpoint to what Cyril Connolly’s

Enemies of Promise (1938) termed the Great War’s “predominately masculine” literature of the “Clever Young Men and the Dirty Deal,” later codified in Paul Fussell’s The Great

War and Modern Memory (1975) and textbooks like the Norton and Longman anthologies of English literature. The third chapter, “Critical Biography: Virginia

Woolf’s Roger Fry: A Biography and the Task of the Critic,” scrutinizes Virginia

Woolf’s application of her theories of biography in Roger Fry. In doing so, the chapter contends that Woolf constructs a vision of Roger Fry as an art critic and cultural figure that provides future artist-critics with a template. Under Woolf’s rubric, the ideal critic appeals to the “common reader” with the intention of ushering such readers to a conceptual space that allows for what I term the “aesthetic labor of self revision”: the difficult mental labor of seeing artworks differently, of admitting when our interpretations are wrong or ungenerous to the work, and of accepting the alternate potentialities contained within the work. Lastly, the essay-length coda, “The Afterlife of

Scottish Nationalism; or, Hugh MacDiarmid, Scottish Letters, and Britain after Brexit,” illustrates the transtemporal power of the artist-critic by illustrating that Hugh

MacDiarmid’s call for a hybrid poetics in British literature anticipates the ideological

faults and local cultural differences that influenced Scotland’s vote against independence in the 18 September 2014 referendum.

Together, the long-form essays in this project, in conjunction with the introduction and coda, contend that the creative nonfiction of Modernist writers are aesthetic objects in their own right, and that these texts warrant the scrutiny that we would apply to their creative writing. But the artist-critics also offer methods for changing criticism in the academy, by redeploying critique as a public good that can, however slowly, alter public discourse by countering intolerance and promoting inclusivity, compassion, and equality. Indeed, the labor of these writers—Wilde and West and Woolf and MacDiarmid—often failed to obtain their immediate ends. Wilde was imprisoned for “posing as a sodomite” and died in penury. West derided the injustices imposed on unwed mothers and later endured those same stigmas after her affair with

H.G. Wells produced a son. Woolf feared that the Second World War would annihilate the aesthetic project that she, Fry, and their Bloomsbury colleagues had espoused. And

MacDiarmid’s fervor, writings, and activism never culminated in an independent

Scotland. Yet, the Wilde trials have become a cause célèbre for gay rights activists countering discriminatory legal practices. West’s arguments seem newly relevant especially in an America that has become obsessed with byzantine regulations that deny women access to reproductive health, birth control, and screening services. Woolf’s

Roger Fry has become a touchstone for critical reappraisals of biography as a critical and pedagogical tool. MacDiarmid’s fervent Scottish nationalism insinuated itself into the kingdom’s political imaginary, contributing to a rhetorical toolkit that could enable the

Scottish Nationalist Party to reconstruct Anglo-Scottish relations. There is, I believe, a

hope that we can take from this: that our success or failure is not a zero-sum game contingent upon immediate results. Instead, the accretion of enough voices, of enough courageous acts of criticism, shall ultimately provide the acts of political resistance and cultural awareness needed to combat the passionate intensity of ideologues and demagogues.

Chapter One

Literary Criticism on Trial: The Disruption of Discourse and Power in Oscar

Wilde’s Testimony in Regina v. John Douglas

MRS. CHEVELEY: Nowadays, with our modern mania for morality, every one has to pose as a paragon of purity, incorruptibility, and all the other seven deadly virtues—and what is the result? You all go over like ninepins—one after the other. Not a year passes in England without somebody disappearing. Scandals used to lend charm, or at least interest, to a man—now they crush him. And yours is a very nasty scandal. –Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband (257)

1. Introduction: The Marquess of Queensberry’s Card

On 28 February 1895, Oscar Wilde arrived at the Albemarle Club, where the porter Sidney Wright passed him a card left by John Sholto Douglas, the Marquess of

Queensberry. Queensberry had addressed the card, “To Oscar Wilde, posing as

Somdomite [sic]” (fig. 1.1). The event inflicted upon Wilde a multitude of slights: the card’s illegible scrawl accused him of “gross indecency” under the 1885 Criminal Law

Amendment Act (CLAA) and implicated his public persona as a pose devoid of substance. Further, as Richard Ellmann has contended, Queensberry’s ragged penmanship may have conveyed an ego-bruising remark, one that stung Wilde with the worst stereotypes of the aesthete as effeminate and effete: “Wilde probably made out the words,” Ellmann suggests, “as ‘To Oscar Wilde, ponce and Somdomite” (Oscar Wilde

438). Regardless of whether it accused Wilde of a superficial pose or effeminacy,

Queensberry’s card provoked Wilde and compelled his swift retaliation. Upon leaving the

Albemarle Club, an irate Wilde penned two letters: one to his lover, Queensberry’s son

Lord Alfred Douglas, and another to his friend, the journalist Robert Ross. Wilde requested that Lord Alfred visit him early the next morning to discuss how to respond to

the threat of Queensberry’s card (cf. Ellmann 438, Belford 249-250). To Ross, Wilde revealed how Queensberry’s allegation vexed him: “Bosie’s father has left a card at my club with hideous words on it. I don’t see anything now but a criminal prosecution. My whole life seems ruined by this man. The tower of ivory is assailed by this foul thing”

(“Letter to Robt. Ross” 129). Wilde had also requested Ross’s presence, but by the time he arrived, Lord Alfred was already with Wilde and urging him to litigate Queensberry for libel. Though Ross and others would have counseled Wilde otherwise, he adhered to

Lord Alfred’s advice: only the courts, Wilde and Lord Alfred believed, could provide redress for Queensberry’s inflammatory card.

Fig. 1.1 The Marquess of Queensberry’s Card. Note the illegible word preceding “somdomite.”

Wilde filed a libel suit against Queensberry on 1 March, a minor action that would culminate in the precipitous end of his provocative career as a critic, playwright, and raconteur. When Wilde prosecuted Queensberry in the libel trial Regina v. John

Douglas, Queensberry’s defense team exposed Wilde’s homosexual relationships, which led to his arrest on 5 April 1895 for “gross indecency” under the 1885 CLAA. Wilde was then tried twice for this crime in Regina v. Wilde: the first trial ended in a hung jury, but the second convicted Wilde to the maximum sentence, two years of hard labor. Most critical orthodoxies read this series of trials as a watershed event inspiring gay right

movements in the twentieth century. This may be the case, but this does not suggest that

Wilde intended (let alone desired) to become an emblem for homosexual rights. In reading Wilde’s trials outside of their historical context, this critical orthodoxy neglects the elaborate manner in which Wilde’s testimony places the discipline of literary criticism in direct conflict with the power of the state, represented discursively in statutes and institutionally by the courts. Instead, Wilde’s critical nonfiction and his testimony under cross-examination perform an elaborate case for resistance to conformity. That is,

Wilde’s work promotes an individualism that disrupts the power of these institutions, thereby exposing the contradictions in and the precarity of institutional discourse. In doing so, Wilde’s performance in the trial illustrates his belief that the duty of the literary critic is to constantly scrutinize authority, revealing and dismantling the exercise of power through discourse.

Of course, Wilde’s failure in Regina v. John Douglas and Regina v. Wilde are integral to both my claim and the conventional argument. My approach differs, however, by questioning the ideologically driven historicism that has colored our discussion of the

Wilde trials; I counter this history by considering the rhetoric in Regina v. John Douglas separately from the publication history of the trial transcripts. In doing so, this chapter follows the lead of Kerry Powell’s Acting Wilde: Victorian Sexuality, Theatre, and Oscar

Wilde (2009) by insisting upon reading Wilde’s performance in the trials as consonant with the sentiment in his letter to Ross: the libel suit was intended not to defend his sexuality, but to preserve the integrity of his (and other’s) creative output. That is, Wilde did not construe Queensberry’s libelous card as an attack on his sexuality; Wilde viewed the Marquess’s behavior as a threat to the artist and the critic’s individualism, a state of

being that “says to man that he should suffer no compulsion to be exercised over him”

(“Soul of Man” 156).1 While melodramatic, Wilde’s diction to Ross is instructive on this point: “The tower of ivory is assailed by this foul thing,” that is, Queensberry’s card implicates the discipline of literature as morally subversive and—by eliciting a public scandal—seeks to impose on literature and criticism the strict code of conduct normalized by the public’s legal and political institutions.

This chapter reads Oscar Wilde’s testimony under cross-examination in Regina v.

John Douglas as a form of publicly performed literary criticism, one that seeks to unshackle the discipline from its complicity in the state’s exercise of power through the judicial system. I have elected to use as my source text Merlin Holland’s transcript of

Regina v. John Douglas, published as The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde: The First

Uncensored Transcript of the Trial of Oscar Wilde vs. John Douglas (Marquess of

Queensberry), 1895 (2003)2 for two reasons. Firstly, this transcript comes from the court clerks’ own shorthand transcriptions, making it the most complete and accurate transcript

1 In adopting Wilde’s definition of “individualism,” I have chosen to use a term that has valences across multiple discourses and across the authors studied in this dissertation. In Wilde’s case (and in particularly in the case of “The Soul of Man under Socialism”), “individualism” also suggests an almost libertarian sense of freedom, one influenced by the work of John Locke and John Stuart Mill on British legal thought: the freedom to define and enact one’s identity without government interference, so long as that behavior brings no harm to others. However, Wildean “individualism” enfolds a further complication: the belief that creative and critical writings should stand beyond the scope of the law, and that the same protection should be afforded to their authors. In “The Critic as Artist, Part I,” for example, Wilde has Ernest voice an extended case for the freedom of the artist, based on an imaginative rendering of Ancient Greek literary culture (q.v. 219). In this chapter, the term “individualism” also conveys this “dangerous” beyond-the- law nuance. Arguably, this principle also compelled Wilde to bring a libel suit against Queensberry. 2 In the United Kingdom and Ireland, the book was published under the title Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (London: Fourth Estate, 2003).

of any of the three Wilde trials. Secondly, with one notable exception,3 Regina v. John

Douglas contains Wilde’s most impassioned and reasoned performances of literary criticism in the public sphere. Following this, I propose that Wilde’s rhetoric exposes the incoherence of moral discourse as codified in the 1885 CLAA. However, by confronting a state-authorized discourse at the hub of its power, Wilde also pits himself against a system that justifies, redefines, and extends its power by co-opting the logic of such counter-discourses as Wilde’s individualism. Guiding this chapter’s reasoning are the theoretical perspectives of Michel Foucault, Roderick Ferguson, Gayatri Chakravorty

Spivak, J. Jack Halberstam, and Martha Nussbaum.

To present these claims, I begin with a brief appraisal of the entwined discourses of homosexuality and morality, codified in the public sphere by the 1885 CLAA.

Secondly, I explore how this discourse shaped a century of public and critical responses to the Wilde trials, and I critique the mistakes in this discourse caused by faulty transcriptions of the Wilde trials. I then advocate for reading Holland’s 2003 transcript of

Regina v. John Douglas as Wilde performing his mode of literary criticism in the public sphere; I make this case by reading the transcript against Wilde’s critical nonfiction and

3 The notable exception occurs in the first of the two Regina v. Wilde trials. This is the celebrated moment in which the prosecutor Charles Gill asks Wilde to describe the “love that dare not speak its name.” Wilde reportedly responds, “The love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. [. . .] It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the “Love that dare not speak its name,” and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope, and glamour of life before him. (Hyde, Trials 201) Strategically, Wilde should not have provided the prosecution with such testimony, which furthered the gross indecency charges against him.

some of his major influences (i.e., Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, and Walter Pater).

From here, the chapter then performs a close reading of several exchanges between Wilde and Queensberry’s barrister, Edward Carson, in which I illustrate how Wildean individualism disrupts, yet fails to supplant, a state-authorized moral discourse that views homosexuality as a threat to the public welfare. Therefore, Wilde’s failure provides critics not with a theory, but with a methodology, one that disengages potential counter- discourses from state authority. In illustrating this claim and its repercussions for the practice of criticism, this chapter opens this dissertation’s longer narrative about literary criticism as a mode of resistance, and Wilde’s failure in Regina v. John Douglas reveals the great dangers to and the potential of our discipline.

2. Situating Wilde in Late-Victorian Political and Moral Discourses

“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.” –Gilbert, in “The Critic as Artist, Part II” (259)

Wilde conveys a message to literary critics, coded in ironies and paradoxes: discover your individualism, refuse the pressure to abide by the state, and deploy your individualism as an alternative mode of being, thinking, and writing. However, the fluidity of this methodology has proven problematic, producing readings that remove

Wilde from the nuanced, yet programmatic, lack of agenda in his writings. (This is not the contradiction it seems: recall that Wilde gives a methodology for critical engagement, not a political platform.) Twelve decades of Wilde criticism, both popular and academic, have trussed the author and his trials to critical orthodoxies and severe misprisions. The most egregious of these is an over-simplification, on which I comment at length throughout this chapter: Wilde as an advocate for sexual liberation. Connected to this, yet less critical for our immediate purposes, is the supposition that Wilde’s testimony

apotheosizes him in the canon of anti-English Irish rebels, the men who brazenly oppose

British imperialism, its institutions, and its discourses. In each case, the acolytes of these positions read Wilde as an actor with a singular purpose and a unified political agenda, producing what Bruce Bashford reads as the four archetypes of Wilde: the “Gay Wilde,” the “Irish Wilde,” the “Materialist Wilde,” and the “Idealist Wilde” (q.v. Bashford,

“When Critics Disagree”).4 These terms, like their users, presuppose a definable agenda in Wilde’s work: for instance, that he either advocated Irish republicanism or that he intended to supplant Victorian moral discourse with his own.

Not all critics find this convincing. For one, Emer Nolan’s scholarship—including books like James Joyce and Nationalism (1995) and Catholic Emancipations: Irish

Fiction from Thomas Moore to James Joyce (2007)—urges us to seek these agendas in more explicitly political Irish writers. Seamus Deane’s introduction to Nationalism,

Colonialism, and Literature (1990) argues that Wilde was not willing to dabble in the anti-colonial “vengeful virtuosity in the English language” exhibited by other Irish writers in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature (10); Edward Said illustrates that it is W.B. Yeats (and, by implication, the Abbey Theatre coalition

4 The last three terms are the simplest to define. The “Irish Wilde” is a critical designation used to expose Wilde’s supposed republican ties; the “Materialist Wilde” investigates his complicity with and opposition to late-Victorian material culture; and the “Idealist Wilde” explores the pronounced utopian streak in his nonfiction. While these designations still seem in vogue with current concerns in Irish and postcolonial studies, the label “Gay Wilde” betrays the dated nature of Bashford’s 2002 survey of Wilde scholarship, “When Critics Disagree: Recent Approaches to Oscar Wilde.” (Nonetheless, much current work on Wilde seeks to align itself with these models.) Wilde’s work—especially the criticism and testimony assessed in this chapter—disrupt distinctions between the creative writer and the literary critic, the private artist and the public intellectual, the individual and the state. With this disruptive potential in mind, I prefer the more theoretically robust term “queer” over the narrower term “gay,” which in Wilde studies reinscribes the narrative that Wilde’s trial marked a rebellion against Victorian sexual and gender norms. Q.v. critics that view this narrative as a back formation based on twentieth-century political movements: Kerry Powell, chapter 5, in Acting Wilde: Victorian Sexuality, Theatre, and Oscar Wilde (Cambridge UP, 2009), as well as Éibhear Walsh, Oscar’s Shadow: Wilde, Homosexuality, and Modern Ireland (Cork UP, 2011).

including Lady Augusta Gregory and John Millington Synge) who hones literature into a political, nationalist weapon (cf. “Yeats and Decolonization”).5 More pointedly, Lucy

MacDiarmid instructs us to disregard the notion of Wilde intentionally rebelling, especially in the series of 1895 trials: “The Irish rebel paradigm is the wrong paradigm for Wilde [. . .]. It’s also clear that Wilde in the dock is not speaking from consciousness of any explicit, labellable, consistent ideology” (“Oscar Wilde’s Speech” 115, 116). Even

Declan Kiberd, often guilty of reductive thinking, seems uncomfortable canonizing Wilde as a politically focused rebel. Admitting in The Irish Writer and the World (2005) that

“Wilde and [George Bernard] Shaw both believed that England should give up its imperial possessions,” Kiberd later confides that Wilde was a better performer of

Englishness than the English, revealed when Yeats “found in Wilde ‘the most finished talker of our time,’ a man who spoke in perfectly formed sentences, unequalled in elegance even among the Englishmen whom the poet knew” (17, 25). Elsewhere, Kiberd suggests two other prisms for reading Wilde’s political ideals: Homi Bhabha’s hybridity and Mikhail Bakhtin’s multiform (or “dialogic”) discourse (cf. Introduction, Irish Writer and the World; “Oscar Wilde as Irishman,” Inventing Ireland). Either term points us to the same conclusion: Wilde performs a faulty mimesis of Englishness, one that draws scrutiny to itself while exposing the internal inconsistencies of the English and Irish (and by extension, of the colonizer and colonized, of the normative and queer) subject positions.

5 The desire for an issue-focused activism drives the contentions in the Field Day pamphlets published by Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said, reprinted as Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1990) and edited by Seamus Deane. Wilde is mentioned only twice in the volume.

If we apply to Wilde his and Walter Pater’s mutual claim, that the artist-critic is a creature who lives and writes in relation to his own age, then we observe in Wilde a

Victorian age impossible to generalize, impossible to summate in a single discursive framework. Yet, this is precisely the critical vogue for situating Wilde in a moral-political discourse that, allegedly, circumscribed the creative spirit in fin de siècle Britain. In other words, these critical accounts concur that Wilde’s trials not only represent, but hinge on and react against, a Victorian discourse that views homosexuality as immoral. This mass of criticism reads as the formation of this discourse the Labouchere Amendment to the

1885 CLAA, which Jeffrey Weeks writes “has usually been seen as an almost accidental event: passed late at night with few M.P.s present in the House of Commons” (15). The

Labouchere Amendment inserted into the legislation the provisions criminalizing homosexual acts between men, which seems at odds with the legislation’s original goal of protecting girls under the age of sixteen from sexual assault and sex trafficking.6

However, Weeks insists that there is a connection and that, amidst other causes for political anxiety, the Labouchere Amendment “has to be seen against a background of a sharpening definition of and hostility towards homosexuality in the late nineteenth century” (15). For Weeks, 1885 is a moment in which British imperial and public values teeter on the verge of collapse. The push by Charles Stewart Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary

Party for a vote on Irish home rule, rumors of homosexual scandals involving officials in

Dublin Castle, and various reform movements’ defense of middle-class sexual mores converged in M.P. Henry Labouchere’s amendment, which sought to codify morality, therefore preserving from degradation (here, implicitly Irishness) a distinctly English set of sexual behaviors (cf. Weeks 14-20).

6 See Parliament, Criminal Law 12-14; Hunt 161, 167-168.

In illegalizing both consensual and nonconsensual sex acts between men, the

Labouchere Amendment to the CLAA provides a moral rhetoric that recurs in Regina v.

John Douglas and Regina v. Wilde. The amendment, which became section eleven of the

CLAA, defines the crime as follows:

11. Outrages on decency.] Any male person who, in public or private,

commits, or is a party to the commission of or procures (a) or attempts (b)

to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross

indecency (c) with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor,

and being convicted thereof shall be liable at the discretion of the court to

be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard

labour. (68)

As a document from the official archive, as a discursive display of power, this legislation chisels in stone a public opposition to homosexuality. Further, through the legal discourse of innocence and guilt, the CLAA provides the courts and the penal system with a terminology for defining and condemning an individual’s “gross indecency,” whether it occurs in the privacy of a home or a public location, such as a hotel or brothel. Wilde scholarship has latched to precisely this formation, contending that the CLAA produced the discursive circumstances that led to Wilde’s exposure and vilification in Regina v.

John Douglas and Regina v. Wilde. Such influential texts as Ed Cohen’s Talk on the

Wilde Side (1993) and Alan Sinfield’s The Wilde Century (1994) extrapolate further on this claim: for these critics, the Wilde trials mark the initial public performance of a prototype for twentieth-century male homosexuals, and the CLAA’s codification and

invention of a public morality establishes the discursive and moral parameters from which gay rights movements sought to break free.

We cannot neglect that Wilde was tried and convicted for gross indecency under the CLAA. We can, however, challenge this neatly (and conveniently) packaged version of events. Even as he argues that the 1885 CLAA establishes the groundwork for modern discussions of homosexuality and morality, Weeks illustrates that the public hue and cry, that the “sexual respectability enshrined in the lower middle class,” has a pre-history that reaches beyond a nineteenth-century legal reasoning ensconced in Sir William

Blackstone. In fact, this norm dates back centuries, to a 1533 anti-sodomy law passed under Henry VIII (18, cf. 11-12). As Matt Cook observes in London and the Culture of

Homosexuality, 1885-1914 (2003), the CLAA hardly inaugurated a new cultural bias against homosexuality: if anything, the Labouchere amendment “tacitly moved the emphasis from unwanted advances to consensual sexual relations” as a cause of social decay (43).7 Considering this extensive history, H.G. Cocks’s Nameless Offences (2003) claims the CLAA only extends the legal opposition to homosexuality that began in Tudor

England. In response, British society cultivated a manner of addressing homosexuality through euphemism; in the long nineteenth century, Britons perfected this discourse of evasive language so as to publicly condemn homosexuality while still taking a vicarious pleasure in public accounts of sexual relationships between men, such as those in newspaper articles or trial transcripts. Of this duality, Cocks writes,

7 Joseph Bristow’s comprehensive literature review in “Remapping the Sites of Modern Gay History: Legal Reform, Medico-Legal Thought, Homosexual Scandal, Erotic Geography” is essential reading on this topic. I refer readers to his work there, which illustrates the number of critical perspectives that are reassessing our critical understanding of homosexuality in nineteenth-century Britain.

A public discourse on the subject of sodomy was possible, but was

necessarily brief and often illegitimate. The trial process and the forms of

knowledge which were possible within it structured this discourse and also

lent legitimacy to press reports of its operations. Part of the reason why

sodomy assumed its status as an open secret was the tension between

liberal ideologies of public transparency and a more coercive desire to

control obscenity in an age of mass print culture. One way round this

dilemma was to separate knowledge of same-sex desire into authorised

and unauthorised forms. The former sought and gained legitimacy, which

was conferred by the reproduction of legal language, while the latter found

few possibilities for legitimate public expression. Yet there were ways of

describing the urban sodomite which made use of an existing vocabulary

linking the city, deviance[,] and modernity. (88)

The law merely reiterates an authorized public stance and, in doing so, reinscribes and perpetuates the ideological fantasy of an explicit link between homosexuality and immoral conduct. “Gross indecency” is only one such term. From there, Cocks proceeds to elaborate on the other, more pleasurable discourse: that which describes the perpetrators for the public. As Cocks attests, this discourse frames male homosexuals as city dwellers, often urbane, cultivated, subtly subversive, and privileged by either wealth, merit, or social class (88-90). This urban, male homosexual was a poser, a person whose identity was ever in flux: “The Victorian sodomite became modern then, as a figure of equivocation, both reported and unseen, flagrantly visible and invisible at the same time”

(90).

“Reported and unseen, flagrantly visible and invisible at the same time”: this phrase could just as easily recall Oscar Wilde and his agenda. Homosexuality in

Victorian Britain operates after the fashion of art, as described in Wilde’s Preface to The

Picture of Dorian Gray: it is both “surface” and “symbol.” In the recent analytical turn represented by Cook and Cocks, the study of anti-sodomy laws reveals the state’s centuries-long struggle to tamp down and eradicate subversive behaviors—even as the public revels in and craves that subservience. If we apply this to Wilde and disavow the mythical Wilde-as-sexual-liberator, the trials’ exchanges about sodomy begin to telegraph other forms of subversion, forms that undercut institutional and legal authority.

That is, Wilde’s homosexuality is a symbol for other disruptive behaviors, like the practice of literary criticism. Michael S. Foldy’s The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1997) alludes to this, by assessing what “constituted Wilde’s ‘deviancy’ within the context of late-

Victorian society” (xi); more recently, Nicholas Freeman’s 1895: Drama, Disaster, and

Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain (2011) contends that the Wilde trials converged with a

“broader discussion about the ways in which criminal(ised) sexualities were formed by the very culture condemning them” (3). One mode of deviance suggests other models; one type of deviance implies many other, equally elusive forms of subversion.

Instructive, here, is Ellmann’s portrayal of Oscar Wilde’s 1883 encounter with Henry

James in Washington, D.C.:

We must imagine Henry James revolted by Wilde’s knee breeches,

contemptuous of the self-advertising and pointless nomadism, and nervous

about the sensuality. [. . .] The images are so steamy as to suggest that

James saw in Wilde a threat. For the toleration of deviation, or ignorance

of it, were alike in jeopardy because of Wilde’s flouting and flaunting.

James’s homosexuality was latent, Wilde’s patent. It was as if James,

foreseeing scandal, separated himself from this menace in motley. (179)

According to Ellmann, James detected in Wilde the potential for a society- rupturing scandal; no doubt, this is Ellmann mapping onto the encounter our historical knowledge of the 1895 trials. However, homosexuality was not the only factor alarming

James: for James, Wilde’s deviance infected his sartorial choices, his bearing, his rhetoric, and his performative persona. All of these concerns are not simply matters of sexuality, but matters of aesthetics and taste. In Wilde, then, deviance and disruption become rhizomic, spreading interminably. Yet, this potential was always latent in

Wilde’s public performances and his writing: the fraught meeting with James occurred two years before Parliament passed the CLAA. Despite this, over a century of Wilde criticism, trial transcripts, and journalism would continue reading the Wilde trials as a cause célèbre about male homosexual desire.

3. Public Reaction to the Wilde Trials in Newspapers and Renderings of the Trial

Transcripts

“Somebody—was it Burke?—called journalism the fourth estate. [. . .] But at the present it really is the only estate. The Lords Temporal have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism. [. . .] The tyranny that it proposes to exercise over people’s private lives seems to me to be quire extraordinary. The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesmanlike habits, supplies their own demands.” –Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (147-148)

Journalism and the Sensation of the Wilde Trials

As we may intuit from Cocks’s claims about the public appetite for stories of homosexual desire, competing political biases entangle the Wilde trials throughout their publication history: the legally sanctioned state discourse, the public’s pleasure in the

trials’ spectacle value, and over a century of politically motivated literary scholarship account for only a few of these. A brief history of the trial transcripts’ previous publications in newspaper and book form intimates a complicated and nuanced relationship between Wilde, the British public sphere, and a transnational public sphere.

(Although my primary text here is the libel trial, the newspaper coverage informed the public of both Regina v. John Douglas and the subsequent criminal trials, Regina v.

Wilde. Publication of the trial transcripts includes various incomplete editions of Regina v. John Douglas and the Regina v. Wilde trials.)

In Britain, period newspapers recounted Wilde’s repartee with his own barrister,

Sir Edward Clarke, and the opposing counsel Sir Edward Carson, alike. The majority of publications exhibited what French papers “saw as the English hypocrisy of professing to be shocked and yet reporting as much prurient detail as they could about the case,” the St

James’s Gazette standing out for its refusal to publish anything but the verdict (Holland xxxii). The Illustrated Police News often provided the most salacious and sensationalized accounts of the proceedings, especially during the criminal trial following Wilde’s unsuccessful libel suit. The 20 April 1895 edition of the gazette features several ink drawings that theatricalize Regina v. Wilde for Victorian readers: a frenzied and all-male public brandishing staves and storming the police carriage transporting Wilde; the courtroom dock where Alfred Taylor, one of Wilde’s alleged lovers, chattered nervously to a dour Wilde; and an ill Wilde with a face not unlike a melting candle, with a physician checking his pulse (see fig. 1.2). Richard Ellmann describes an “atmosphere of near-hysteria” produced during the trials, with the public endorsing the perspective in

“[m]ost of the newspapers [. . .] that Queensberry had rightly brought down the ‘High

Priest of the Decadents,’ as the National Observer saw fit to label Wilde” (475).

“In old days men had the rack,” Wilde opines in “The Soul of Man under

Socialism”; he situates this instrument of torture against Britain’s press, which he insists exerts a “tyranny” over the private lives of citizens and the British political imaginary.

The newspapers’ unified message exhibits a national mood and, in doing so, displays a collective ethic codified in the CLAA. It is an event that blends in the discursive frameworks of journalism and law Foucault’s understanding of a panoptic society and

Benedict Anderson’s concept of the imagined community. For Anderson, “the newspaper implies the refraction of even ‘world events’ into a specific imagined world of vernacular readers” (63), one that promotes a unified national identity, worldview, and ethical code across history. Foucauldian theory renders cryptic Anderson’s insistence that “[t]he very idea of ‘nation’ is now nestled firmly in virtually all print-languages; and nation-ness is virtually inseparable from political consciousness” (135). Indeed, this conception of an individual subsumed into a national political awareness renders law-abiding citizens invisible and perpetrators conspicuous. Interrogating Jeremy Bentham’s vision of the panopticon, Foucault insists that the institution of the prison and its looming threat

“arrange things that the surveillance [of individual behavior] is permanent in its effects [.

. .]; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary”

(Discipline 201). The consequence, for Foucault, is the formation of discipline and academic disciplines, which are “inextricably linked with the establishment of power relations” and “exercised upon the body a double effect: a ‘soul’ to be known and a subjection to be maintained” (295). In the case of Wilde’s trials, journalism collaborated

Fig. 1.2: “Oscar Wilde at Bow Street” in The Illustrated Police News

with the CLAA’s threat of hard labor to discipline the public into viewing as illicit male homosexual relationships. For Wilde, this produced a nation of readers instructed, by the subtle machinations of press and state alike, to view his sexuality, aesthetic theories, and creative writing as vices incompatible with and threatening to British norms.

The “Truth Effect”: Book Publications of the Trials and the “Gay Wilde” Archetype

Though redolent of the threat of prison and the court’s rules, the newspapers’ discourse divorced scandal-inciting glosses of trial testimony from any explicit mention of the procedural context of the courts and the penal system. Subsequent book publishers would provide the public sphere with extended accounts of the trial, usually in the form of transcripts. In 1896, the Leipzig publisher Max Spohr Verlag released what scholars widely construe as the first published transcript of the Wilde Trials, Der Fall Wilde und das Problem der Homosexualität. The publication reflects Max Spohr Verlag’s dedication to the nineteenth-century gay rights movement in Germany and its embrace of

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s statement that the “[homosexual] ‘class of people’ included

‘many of the greatest and noblest intellects of our and other nations” (Robb 182).8 Max

Spohr Verlag, then, sought to include Wilde in the movement’s register of exemplars.

Yvonne Ivory, in her essay “The Trouble with Oskar” (2008), contends that the desire for gay rights champions inspired this publication: “in the minds of many Germans, Oscar

Wilde was inextricably linked with the German homosexual rights movement, just as

Spohr’s list suggests that the German homosexual rights movement was inextricably linked with Wilde” (141).

8 Graham Robb outlines only one set of implications for homosexual rights movements in nineteenth-century Germany. In her book Desiring Emancipation: New Women and Homosexuality in Germany, 1890-1933 (2014), Marti M. Lybeck contends that the movement’s investment in “[r]emaking the self as an autonomous and self-regulating subject” also impacted the women’s movement in Germany, as well as women’s expression of self and desire (5).

The Max Spohr Verlag edition casts Wilde as an exemplary figure in European homosexual rights movements, and his 1895 trials consequently acquired a lightning-rod reputation, in that scholars trace the performance of homosexuality in the twentieth century to Wilde’s behavior on the stand. The impulse to connect Wilde’s trials to the formation of a homosexual subject identity precedes such watershed works as Jeffrey

Weeks’s Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (1977) and Foucault’s An Introduction to The History of Sexuality (trans.

1978). Weeks especially inherits the legacy of the early transcript’s politics, and he brands Wilde as emblematic of the internal struggle faced by homosexuals in the twentieth century: Wilde and his writings are about “a homosexual defying sexual orthodoxies,” and “the consequences of this double life had their deep and long-lasting impact on the homosexual consciousness” (43). In Ed Cohen’s Talk on the Wilde Side

(1993), the trial and the newspaper coverage are indispensible in elucidating “how it was that a certain structural opposition between ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ came to imbue the ways middle-class masculinities were embodied at the cusp of our own century” (6.) Indeed, Alan Sinfield’s The Wilde Century (1994) cements the presumption that Wilde represents an archetype of twentieth-century male homosexuality, which is problematically effeminate: Sinfield expresses his interest in “how an effeminate,

Wildean model of the queer man became established in the twentieth century, and the various consequences for gay men” (vii). This mode of thinking recurs as an undercurrent in Ari Adut’s sociological analysis of the trials, “A Theory of Scandal: Victorians,

Homosexuality, and the Fall of Oscar Wilde” (2005); Adut contends that “scandals forcefully throw into relief the transformative powers of publicity and the dramaturgical

dimension of the public sphere and norm work in society” (214), implying that the fallout of Wilde’s affairs brought homosexuality prominently and undeniably to the forefront of late-Victorian thought. As recently as 2012, Weeks has sought to defend the fluidity of narratives and identities necessary for a queer historiography. Weeks issues the

Foucauldian reminder that “[w]hat seems true has truth effects,” especially when “the

Wilde debacle confirmed this [i.e., a legal attack on homosexuality] not just for contemporaries but to subsequent generations” (“Queer[y]ing” 536).

For Joseph Bristow, these texts—following Weeks’s earlier work and Foucault’s

Introduction—codify a homosexual historiography, in which the trials represent one moment in the process by which “‘homosexuality’ (as well as the kinds of identities grouped around it) became a steadily recognizable modern category in Britain” (118). In investigating this historiography, Bristow illustrates how even the best, activist intentions can themselves become a misguiding critical orthodoxy. Bristow bands with an expanding group of scholars invested in discussing Wilde’s trials in a discursive framework better suited to the substance of Wilde’s rhetoric on the stand and extant textual evidence from the period. The goal is not to discount, but to complicate, the work queer historiography has performed on Wilde. In this vein, Éibhear Walsh’s Oscar’s

Shadow (2011) confronts Terry Eagleton, Alan Sinfield, and others for rendering Wilde’s homosexuality a political and critical expedient—one that often “falls back on a retrograde feminising of the homoerotic and a discourse of the monstrous to represent sexual otherness” (94). Furthermore, Kerry Powell urges readers to avoid the facile strategy of reading Wilde’s trial as an epochal shift in queer historiography. For Wilde, after all, there was a greater victim: his reputation and his art. Powell asserts, “To read

Wilde’s trials and imprisonment as he did—not merely as tragedy, but a sordid, ignoble one with Wilde himself as the mockery of a tragic hero—runs strongly against the grain of much recent and important scholarship” (123). Bristow, Cocks, Walsh, Powell, and their ilk seek to reclaim Wilde, by emphasizing how his performative testimony queers the prevailing discourses of his historical moment and defends the liberties of artists and critics alike.

Legal Fictions: Politics and Aesthetics in Later Transcript Publications

A digression into the literature review is relevant, because the recent critical turn echoes a trend that developed over the transcripts’ publication history. That is, a comparable desire to reclaim Wilde’s reputation as a critic and playwright spurred the editions of trial transcripts subsequent to the Max Spohr Verlag German-language publication. At first, the politics of the German edition gave to a pronounced uncertainty over how to read Wilde’s contentions in the trial. In 1906, the French house Charles

Carrington printed by private arrangement a limited run of The Trial of Oscar Wilde, which purported itself as a transcript derived from the court clerks’ shorthand reports.

(The transcript more closely resembles a polemical essay, which relishes melodramatic flourishes: it regales Queensberry for exercising his rightful “wrath” through “costs and hazards, [. . .] the risk of any pain and grief to himself” [9].) Written by editor Charles

Grolleau, the volume’s fifty-page introduction frets over the tension between Wilde’s celebrity and his complicity in the outcomes of Regina v. John Douglas and Regina v.

Wilde:

Remy de Gourmont said of the famous author, Paul Adam, that he was a

“magnificent spectacle.” Wilde may be pronounced a painful problem. He

seems to escape literary criticism in order to fall under the keen scalping

knife of the analytical moralist, by the paradoxical fact of his apparently

imperious purpose to hew out and fashion forth his life as a work of art.9

[. . .]

That is the reason why he stirs us so deeply.

Those who might be tempted to search in his work for an echo

however feeble, of a new message to mankind, will be grievously

disappointed. The technical cleverness of Wilde is undeniable, but [. . .].

He has brought us neither remedy nor poison; he leads us nowhere, but at

the same time we are conscious that he has been everywhere. (vi-vii)

While admitting that Wilde’s circumstances evoke readers’ pity, the Charles Carrington edition determines that Wilde evades an authorial duty to provide a message through literature, and here, the text commits an inventive misreading of the trials.10 Grolleau furthers his preface’s agenda by transcribing the trials through a hybrid of novelistic flourishes, reportage, and script-formatted dialogue. This constructs an unlikeable Wilde who speaks in a “tone of polite deprecation” while pontificating on “such love as Plato made the basis of his philosophy; [. . .] that deep spiritual affection that was as pure as it was perfect” (56, 58). Yet even in this depiction of Wilde, deconstructing the Charles

Carrington edition’s binary-ridden preface (e.g., “remedy”/“poison,”

9 Cf. Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which Wilde conflates art and criticism alike with “mode[s] of autobiography.” 10 Wilde’s observation in “A Sentimental Journey through Literature” bears noting here: “There are two ways of misunderstanding a poem. One is to misunderstand it and the other is to praise it for qualities that it does not possess” (10). Grolleau’s misreading seems more egregious: he fails to understand Wilde’s paradoxes, and he chastises Wilde for faults that his writings do not commit.

“nowhere”/“everywhere,” etc.) conveys the possibility of sympathizing with him, a minor

(yet significant) shift from his unconditional vilification in British newspapers.

Furthering Wilde’s reclamation were the major accounts of the trials released after 1910. In 1912, Christopher Sclater Millard, Wilde’s first bibliographer and another man sentenced to hard labor for gross indecency under the CLAA,11 anonymously published Oscar Wilde: Three Times Tried (q.v. Holland xxxix). Millard’s transcription contains both an editorial note and a preface in the volume’s front matter. In each instance, Millard protests against Wilde’s malefactors. The note derides the editorial bias in the Charles Carrington edition, observing that this version “contains an abridged report of a portion of Mr. Wilde’s trial, but it is untrustworthy and misleading” (iv). To counter the Charles Carrington edition, Millard offers in the “foot-notes and appendix [. . .] information which is now made public for the first time” (iv). In the preface, Three Times

Tried takes a more vindictive stance, adapting to Wilde’s purposes Thomas Babington

Macaulay’s claim that “[o]nce in every six or seven years, our virtue becomes outrageous” (qtd. at Millard vii). Millard decries the damage that public scruples inflicted on Wilde’s work and his legacy:

It [i.e., British virtue] has never been more outrageous than in its ecstatic

horror over Oscar Wilde. Even now we are only beginning to recover from

that amazing outburst, and to replace Wilde’s books on our unlocked

bookshelves. It has taken over fifteen long years to disembarrass the man’s

11 Christopher Sclater Millard prepared his transcript of the trials and his Wilde bibliographies under the pseudonym of Stuart Mason. Six years earlier, in 1906, Millard and a Catholic priest, Father George Graham, were arrested and charged with having committed homosexual acts with two boys. Millard entered a guilty plea and served a three-month sentence with hard labor. Father Graham, on the other hand, was acquitted; see Hyde, Christopher Sclater Millard 18-19. For more on Millard, consult H. Montgomery Hyde, Christopher Sclater Millard (Stuart Mason): Bibliographer and Antiquarian Book Dealer (New York: Global Academic Publishers 1990).

literature from his life. In the interval his personality has almost been

buried under the mud of the moralists, and his name surrounded by a

vague fog of obscenity in which truths, already sufficiently repulsive, have

been covered by inventions even more hateful. Unfortunately no accurate

record of Oscar Wilde’s trial exists. More or less garbled accounts may, of

course, be discovered in contemporary newspapers, and numerous

references, frequently misleading, in biographies of Wilde [. . .]. (vii)

Here, the text seeks an end greater than the documenting of Wilde’s literary (and biographical) rehabilitation in the British public sphere. Millard’s preface proceeds in this aggressive vein, chastising unsubstantiated accounts of Wilde’s behavior while navigating the precarity of Wilde’s (and his own) sexuality. Even in 1912, the political environment and the British disdain for public homosexuality rendered necessary

Millard’s savvy use of figurative language: by clouding “truths [. . .] already sufficiently repulsive” in “a vague fog of obscenity,” he can appeal to the very “mud of the moralists” that he otherwise disavows. It is a paradox in league with Wilde himself, one that instills free play in an Edwardian and pre-Great War political discourse that still clung to a

Victorian rhetoric of vice and virtue.

In Millard’s Oscar Wilde: Three Times Tried, the editorial work recuperates

Wilde and re-appropriates his use of contradictions as a key armament in the literary critic’s arsenal. Harford Montgomery Hyde followed this trajectory in the twentieth century’s most authoritative transcript of the Wilde trials: The Trials of Oscar Wilde

(1948). Hyde’s interest in re-assessing the trials stems from the varied—and prolific— roles he performed in the public sphere, which included service as a censor in World War

II, a ten-year stint in Parliament from 1950 to 1959, and a post-political career as a biographer, historian, political scientist, and cultural critic. Though not homosexual himself, the thrice-married Hyde’s academic and political work are inextricable from one another. For instance, his writing career included 1948’s Trials and the biographies of

Wilde (1975) and Lord Alfred Douglas (1984), while as an MP he championed the

Wolfenden Report’s (1957) position that the criminalization of homosexuality violated the civil liberties of British citizens.12 Hyde’s version of The Trials, then, has as political an agenda as either the 1906 or the 1912 transcriptions. Nonetheless, Hyde’s Trials presents the first edition with a thorough scholarly introduction and framework; where earlier editions sought to dramatize, Hyde designed a transcription that appeared to contextualize, historicize, and explicate through references to period journalism about the trials and citations from the writings of Wilde’s peers. But, if the Charles Carrington edition was a polemic, Hyde’s proves to be a work of fiction: his Trials contain various tidbits of recorded speech, framed in a narrative that reads like a modern legal thriller.

Nor is Hyde’s interest in Wilde altruistic. In the 1962 Penguin Famous Trials edition,

Hyde reveals that his endeavor, too, is personally charged and is not the purely detached presentation for which the historian strives. For Hyde, Wilde’s rooms at Oxford became a palimpsest:

12 The Committee on Homosexual Offenses and Prostitution investigated extant British statutes in 1957. The Committee’s report—known as “the Wolfenden Report,” after the committee’s chairman Sir John (later Baron) Wolfenden—also proposed reforms to the criminal offenses associated with prostitution. However, this does not unshackle homosexuality from a moral discourse. If anything, the Wolfenden Report’s paratexts institute other disciplines—such as psychiatry—as the arbiter of morality. Consider the claims in Karl Meninger’s introduction that, “[f]rom the standpoint of the psychiatrist, both homosexuality and prostitution—and add to this the use of prostitutes—constitute evidence of immature sexuality and either arrested psychological development or regression” (6). What government institutions cede, they permit another discourse to police. Further, the findings of the Wolfenden Committee did not apply to Scotland, which has a jurisprudence distinct from that of England and Wales.

The accident of my having as an undergraduate occupied Wilde’s old

rooms in college at Oxford brought me into touch with Lord Alfred

Douglas; and, in introducing the trials in the following pages, I have

drawn on the information which he gave me in the course of conversations

and correspondence. (16)

Absent in other transcriptions, Hyde offers a chain of evidence that accounts for his receipt and use of information. That is, to appropriate the spatial metaphor and palimpsest of Wilde’s Oxford rooms, Hyde pursues the remaining traces of the case and its actors, so as to restore Wilde and his characteristic wit to the scene. Hyde’s Trials opens with a foreword by Sir Humphrey Travers, the only member of Wilde’s defense team still living by 1948; draws from Hyde’s correspondences with Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred, as well as

Lord Alfred’s reminiscences of the trial’s aftermath; and includes detailed appendices outlining Lord Queensberry’s pleas of justification, Wilde’s post-trial bankruptcy proceedings, and “the prevalence of male homosexuality in England.”

Yet, despite this scholarly buttressing, Hyde’s 1948 Trials is nonetheless a reconstruction, dependent on previous imaginative re-inventions of the Regina v. John

Douglas and Regina v. Wilde testimonies. He confesses this in the preface to his 1962 edition:

In the first place, sustained by the recent Obscene Publications Act, I have

been enabled to reproduce some portions of this evidence verbatim which

discretion obliged me to paraphrase in the earlier edition. In this

connexion, I must acknowledge my indebtedness to The Trial of Oscar

Wilde, edited by Charles Grolleau and privately printed for Charles

Carrington in Paris. (21)

Walsh heralds the 1948 Trials as “a balanced, honest[,] and unflinching account of the three Wilde trials” (41), but this assessment is too generous. Hyde admits his reliance on an edition published to trump up and sensationalize the trials. This dependence betrays other weaknesses in the transcription, in particular a re-imagining of dialogue available in the papers but absent in either the Grolleau or the Millard editions. Merlin Holland,

Wilde’s grandson, faults this version as an “imaginative reconstruction” and snubs it as little more than an entertainment: “while eminently readable as a dramatic text at its time,

[Hyde’s Trials] should now be regarded as a much abbreviated and inaccurate rendering of the Queensberry trial” (xl). If we pay Hyde’s transcription any attention today, we do so because of this entertainment value. Not surprisingly, it is Hyde’s Trials that inspired the 1960 film The Trials of Oscar Wilde (dir. Ken Hughes), starring Peter Finch; Moisés

Kaufmann’s 1997 play Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde; and the biopic

Wilde (1997; dir. Brian Gilbert), featuring Stephen Fry in the eponymous role.13

4. The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (2003) as Wildean Literary Criticism

ALGERNON: The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility! JACK: That wouldn’t be at all a bad thing. ALGERNON: Literary criticism is not your forte, my dear fellow. Don’t try it. You should leave that to people who haven’t been at a University. They do it so well in the daily papers. –Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (13-14)

Only slight distinctions exist between the earlier trial transcriptions and dramatic literature, which troubles any critic aspiring to read them as being in league with Wilde’s

13 Interestingly, Wilde credits Richard Ellmann’s biography Oscar Wilde as the film’s source text. However, Ellmann’s biography often ciphers Hyde’s ideas. Ellmann acknowledges Hyde’s “benign interest” in the autobiography, and he likewise cites Hyde’s Trials and Oscar Wilde throughout the text.

critical nonfiction. This tendency prompts S.I. Salamensky to assert that, in the case of

Kaufmann’s play, any of these iterations “arranges research material into staged exhibition” with the consequence that one can take “Wilde’s side while re-endorsing the conceptual premises Wilde dedicated his oeuvre and life to fighting against” (“Re-

Presenting” 575). As Salamensky observes, the “re-endors[ed . . .] conceptual premises” are the various depictions of Wilde as an exemplar of the gay rights movement and the presumption that readers of the transcripts (or their adaptations) “are, seemingly, meant to feel for and support Wilde’s freedom to love as he wishes” (585).14 In different language,

Salamensky anticipates Bristow, Cocks, and Powell’s insistence that Wilde scholarship should analyze Wilde’s writings, testimony, and performances as texts in a complicated exchange with one another. That is, Salamensky’s voice adds to the critical call to read

Wilde, his nonfiction, and his trials as at odds with institutional paradigms—be they state-influenced moral codes or critical orthodoxies.

The Reclamation of the Wilde Trials: Merlin Holland and the Shorthand Transcript

Recent archival discoveries have made such a reading possible in the instance of

Wilde’s libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry. By drawing from previously undisclosed documents, the 2003 publication of The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde provides scholars a transcription more impartial than its predecessors. Merlin Holland recalls,

14 Salamensky also detects an unsettling elision in Kaufmann’s play, which purports itself as a deconstructive handling of various Wilde texts and trial transcriptions: “while Wilde’s 1891 novel Dorian Gray is incessantly quoted, The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde’s most groundbreaking linguistic and formal theatrical venture—premiering on the verge of the trials and banned for its resemblance to Wilde’s banter on the stand—makes no appearance as source material, nor as stylistic influence. Formally, Gross Indecency thus appears to spring from a theatre history in which Wilde, the influential playwright, is strangely absent” (584). Gross Indecency’s avoidance of Wilde as a playwright is not a form of play, but neglect.

In 2000, as I was assisting the British Library to prepare its centenary

celebration on Oscar Wilde, a longhand manuscript of the complete

Queensberry trial was brought into the Library to be exhibited. Its

authenticity was not to be doubted and for the first time I looked in

astonishment at the ipsissima verba [i.e., the very words] of what had

transpired in that courtroom. It is those words which are here reproduced.

There are at least eight hands represented in the MS, understandable since

a shorthand writer would have been hard put to take down the proceedings

for more than about twenty minutes at a time. His shorthand would then

have had to be rendered back into longhand and each writer would have

transcribed his own notes. The margin for error is therefore considerable:

mishearings of the proceedings and misreadings of their own notes by

eight different scribes. The consistency was, however, remarkable, though

I have made minor editorial interventions. (xl)

Standardizing the punctuation, labeling the speakers by surname, and formatting the transcript as a dramatic script represent the extent of Holland’s editorial interventions (xl- xli). Ironically, the dramatic form is the most impartial way of recounting the trial: the format prevents Holland from any of the novelistic flourishes and narrations that bowdlerize the previous editions. His observation about the shorthand implies the need for a kid glove treatment of the transcript: that “margin of error” already renders suspect the text’s reconstructive project, by suggesting possible voids and misprisions within the account. Editorial tinkering, of the sort practiced in the previous transcriptions, would only exacerbate any issues inherent in the shorthand transcription. These circumstances—

the constant recording, transcribing, and re-recording of a transcript, necessarily complicated by editorial play—poses an aporia that is, admittedly, of deep interest from a deconstructionist vantage. 15 Instead of creating further incongruities via explanations and narrative buttressing, Holland’s editorship presents a text lifted from the court’s own archives instead of the sordid spectacle offered in Grolleau, Carrington, or Hyde.

Because of its emphasis on restoring the archived version of the trial proceedings,16 literary critics and legal scholars have upheld the soundness of studying the transcripts—especially the 2003 Real Trial transcript. Even before The Real Trial of

Oscar Wilde, Salamensky suggests that the political agenda in most dramatizations and fictionalizations of the trial “renders Wilde, perhaps, a more sympathetic and more easily-applicable hero for present gender politics, [but] it stints the fullness of history and

Wilde’s legacy in forcing his wider artistic and philosophical program into erasure in favor of a mindset at once historically previous to, and—via Kaufman—postdating him”

(586). That is, these adaptations impose historicist back formations on the substance of the trials and Wilde’s program, concretizing a critical fiction with the heft of an

15 Of course, in a critical moment posterior to postructuralism and deconstruction, we cannot claim, as Holland does, that this transcript is a “verbatim” account of the actual trial, an historical event impossible to reclaim; instead, as Derrida contends in Of Grammatology, “what we call language [i.e., speech, in this instance] could have been in its origin and in its end only a moment, an essential but determined mode” that “had succeeded [. . .] in wilfully misleading us” into an acceptance of its permanence (9). The original speeches are irretrievable, and the text becomes a signifier with an absent signified, the trial itself. Cf. Michel de Certeau’s The Writing of History and Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” for historicist analyses on the irretrievability of the original event. Nonetheless, Holland’s intervention provides a version of the transcripts as close as possible to the actual proceedings. The clerks’ shorthand returns us closer to the trial than any of the bowdlerized and politicized editions of the past century. 16 Of course, as such texts as Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) and Derrida’s Archive Fever (1995) suggest, the withholding and eventual release of this transcript by the British government is itself worthy of analysis. The Regina v. John Douglas transcript as a physical artifact becomes embroiled in the larger debate about the production of knowledge and memory. Though deserving of further elucidation, this question is tangential to the chapter’s broader interest in situating Wilde’s testimony as literary criticism that performs the genre’s function in the public sphere.

ideological “truth.” For Salamensky, even the most problematic of the trial transcripts preserves something of Wilde’s “wider artistic and philosophical program,” and his rhetoric in the transcripts grants scholars one stay against misleading critical trends.

Nicholas Freeman displays a more nuanced use of the 2003 Real Trial in 1895, where he cites Holland’s transcript to illuminate the influence on the trial of Wilde’s legal costs, his questionable choice to embark on expensive holidays with Lord Alfred Douglas, and his coy dismissals of the many blackmailers with information about his liaisons (q.v. 82,

95). Conversely, he refers to Hyde’s transcripts for perceptions damning to Wilde, including the behavior of Queensberry’s counsel Edward Carson, a man “thoroughly prepared, highly skilled in cross examination,” and possessed of “qualities, the very antithesis of Wilde’s, [that] made him a fearsome adversary, one who could claim to represent the moral convictions of many Victorians in defending a father’s concern for his son’s welfare in the face of deviance and aberration” (96). Marco Wan complements

Salamensky and Freeman through an insistence that literary scholars need not supplant the trial transcripts with literature. The transcripts themselves, Wan claims, are readable as literary texts due to the success of law-and-literature scholarship and because his testimony stands “as a manifesto of his aesthetic philosophy, one that should be placed alongside the other expositions of his vision of art and literature, such as ‘The Decay of

Lying’ or ‘The Critic as Artist’” (710). For Wan, Regina v. John Douglas becomes the ultimate trial for the belief propounded in “The Critic as Artist,” that life imitates art (q.v.

714-716): after all, Wilde asserts that “[w]hen man acts, he is a puppet. When he describes, he is a poet,” before concluding that “[t]he world is made for the singer by the dreamer” (“Critic as Artist” 233, 234). Wan’s latter point is more compelling than the

“law and literature” justification: reading the transcripts as a “manifesto” 17 aligns

Wilde’s testimony with his written work, and his decision to pronounce this aesthetic philosophy in a courtroom provides, perhaps, the starkest instance of literary criticism disrupting juridical power and alerting us to the insidious, normalizing effect of institutional procedures.

Wildean Literary Criticism, Individualism, and the Morality of Aesthetics

Preparatory to delving into the transcripts, then, we must embark on a brief detour through some of Wilde’s written (and not recorded) thoughts on the discipline of literary criticism, as well as the thinkers against whom he reacts. Wilde holds that literary critics—as a type of artist—are to challenge institution-driven dominant discourses.

Critics can do so, to borrow the words of J. Jack Halberstam, through an individualism

“not connected to a neoliberal ‘Be yourself’ mentality” but a “shifty and ambiguous” one that, as Halberstam elucidates in his reading of the DreamWorks film Over the Hedge

(2006), offers “a new space for the imagining of alternatives” (47, 48).18 In “The Soul of

17 One should note, though, that Wan’s term “manifesto” should be applied with the utmost caution. There are two reasons for being wary here. Firstly, the aesthetic manifesto is more commonly associated with the various –isms comprising Modernism writ large; Wan is somewhat guilty of imposing an additional back formation on Wilde. Secondly, a manifesto—a programmatic statement that explicates or justifies an artistic principle—is incompatible with the contradictory impulse that threads through and complicates much of Wilde’s writing. 18 Here, I offer the gloss of individualism in Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure in lieu of Wilde’s. I do so for two reasons. Firstly, Wilde’s prose meanders and meditates, whereas Halberstam’s vaults through its argument. Secondly, Halberstam and Wilde present compatible visions of individualism as an agenda focused not on becoming (as in much queer theory) but in disrupting. For Halberstam, individualism disrupts such conventions as the nuclear family and class distinctions. Wilde’s version is no different, insisting upon the destructive nature of norms in a caustic diatribe in the opening passages of “The Soul of Man under Socialism”: “The proper aim [of Socialism] is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do the most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really

Man under Socialism,” Wilde brands individualism as a stay against conformity, one seldom welcome in the public sphere.

Indeed, if made subservient to public demands, the discipline of literary criticism performs no small role in obstructing a Wildean individualism. In “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” Wilde situates the individualism promoted through art in opposition to a public morality, vouched by critical orthodoxies. In doing so, he implies a need for an artistic mode of criticism, one that activates (and does not delimit) the spectrum of effects communicated through an artwork. However, Wilde admits that such newness endangers the dominant view:

The public dislike novelty [in literature] because they are afraid of it. It

represents to them a mode of Individualism, an assertion on the part of the

artist that he selects his own subject, and treats it as he chooses. The public

are quite right in their attitude. Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a

disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For

what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of

habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. In Art, the public

accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they

appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them.

They endure them as the inevitable, and as they cannot mar them, they

studied the problem and know the life—educated men who live in the East-End—coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence[,] and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralizes. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins” (127-128). As this argument makes manifest, Wilde’s contentions against normative behaviors—especially the well-intentioned actions—requires more teasing out than Halberstam’s direct prose. For instance, Wilde does not suggest that charity itself is a sin, but merely that charity can render donors blind to the full extent of poverty, while doing little to curb negative stereotypes about the poor.

mouth about them. Strangely enough, or not strangely, according to one’s

views, this acceptance of the classics does a great deal of harm. The

uncritical admiration of the Bible and Shakespeare in England is an

instance of what I mean. (143-144)

Wilde charges “ecclesiastical authority” and canon formation (for which Shakespeare serves as a stand-in) as the promoters of such an “uncritical” consumption of art (144).

The “great deal of harm” occurs when either disciplinarian—be it the clergyman or the tradition-bound critic—silently imposes upon the public uniformity, a stultifying order that Wilde drubs as “monotony,” “slavery,” and “tyranny.”19 Wilde contends elsewhere that literary criticism in this vein “reduce[s]” critics to “reporters in the police-courts of literature, the chroniclers of the doings of the habitual criminals of art” (“Critic as Artist”

230). That is, critics bound to these discursive practices render suspect art that violates the public’s state-authorized principles.

It may seem ironic, at first, that such a disruptive force as art’s “Individualism” finds itself co-opted by custom, but Wilde’s logic seeks to corrode this ideological undergirding, assembled from Arnoldian and Ruskinian aestheticism. Wilde’s critique in

“The Soul of Man” subtly chides his intellectual forbears (theorists like Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin) for making art a tool for socialization. This prompts Wilde’s assertion about utility and artistry: “The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful” (140). For Arnold and Ruskin, the polity, art, and criticism are inextricably bound. Without explicitly demanding an institution like the French

19 Wilde famously proposed that “even in prison, a man can be quite free [from public opinion]. His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at peace” (“Soul of Man” 136). In De Profundis (1897), his letter to Lord Alfred Douglas from Reading Gaol, Wilde complicates this sense of freedom through existential reflections on his rise and fall from prominence.

Academy, Arnold clamors about “the dangers and inconveniences to which our literature is exposed in the absence of any centre of taste and authority,” which would ostensibly train the public to accept literature as “a criticism of life [. . . in which] the spirit of our race will find [. . .] its consolation and stay” (Culture and Anarchy 6; “Study of Poetry”

341). By this dialectic “criticism of life,” Arnold charts a course in which “culture is [. . .] the study and pursuit of perfection; and that of perfection as pursued by culture, beauty, and intelligence, or, in other words, sweetness and light, are the main characters”

(Culture and Anarchy 53). Culture and Anarchy’s (1869) chase after moral and social perfection resonates with Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1843-60). Here, Ruskin implicates the critic as the arbiter and interpreter of an Arnoldian-style “perfection.” Ruskin defines

“the greatest picture” as that “which conveys to the mind of the spectator, by any means whatsoever, the greatest number of the greatest ideas; and I call an idea great in proportion as it is received by a higher faculty of the mind, and as it more fully occupies, and in occupying, exercises and exalts, the faculty by which it is received” (Modern

Painters 8).20 This transmission through art of “the greatest ideas” is essential for Ruskin, as he indicates in an 1854 lecture on the Pre-Raphaelites:

20 Though Ruskin did purport a moral theory of art, his arguments throughout Modern Painters contain contradictions that anticipate Wildean individualism. One may consider the following declaration in volume one of Modern Painters: “But art, in its second and highest aim, is not an appeal to constant animal feelings, but an expression and awakening of individual thought: it is therefore as various and as extended in its efforts as the compass and grasp of the directing mind; and we feel, in each of its results, that we are looking, not at a specimen of a tradesman’s wares, of which he is ready to make us a dozen to match, but at one coruscation of a perpetually active mind, like which there has not been, and will not be another” (Ruskin, Modern Painters 25). It is worth noting, however, that Ruskin’s description of art’s inherent uniqueness bears more resemblance to the neoliberal, “Be yourself” individualism criticized in Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure. This Ruskinian individualism is the prototype from which Wilde devises his disruptive individualism—an abstraction that irrupts its own origins.

When the entire purpose of art was moral teaching, it naturally took truth

for its first object, and beauty, and the pleasure resulting from beauty, only

for its second. But when it lost all purpose of moral teaching, it as

naturally took beauty for its first object, and truth for its second. (95)

In this lecture, Ruskin contends that the Pre-Raphaelites, by emulating the work of

Raphael, have redirected art towards an elevating interest in moral themes. The juxtaposition in Ruskin of “moral teaching” and “truth” registers these terms as synonyms, and these constitute the “greatest ideas” that passed from painting to viewer, from text to reader. I will speak, for a moment, strictly in terms of literature. Under this rubric, the critic teaches the public which texts to read and how to read them. The critic directs readers toward certain morally appropriate literary texts, so as to cultivate the sensibility of individual readers, who in turn constitute a public that will aspire to the

“pursuit of perfection.”21 This logic generates a discursive feedback loop, a self-

(re)cycling process in which literature becomes a moral compass that in turn directs artists and critics to guide the public to an ethical imperative that . . ., et cetera, ad infinitum. It is through this Foucauldian recurring nightmare, in which we ceaselessly buttress a self-imprisoning discursive framework, that critics can “degrade the classics into authorities” (Wilde, “Soul of Man” 144).

Wildean Literary Criticism and the Beauty of Disruption

Hence, Wilde insists on art and criticism that are “beautiful,” not “useful” in the sense dictated in moral theories of aesthetics. As such, Wilde inverts Arnold’s and

Ruskin’s deployment of art as a tool for moral and cultural refinement. Wilde’s ideal

21 Of course, it is no accident that this scheme sounds Darwinian: On the Origin of Species first appeared in 1859, during the period in which Ruskin was writing the volumes of Modern Painters and a decade before the publication of Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy.

critic challenges the canon and the discipline of literary criticism, which “degrade” art by stripping it of individualism, or its capacity to disrupt prevailing discourses. Here, we may think of Wildean individualism as a set of potentialities manifested in the beauty of an artwork; the literary critic either activates or staves off these possibilities. Wilde prefers activating art’s latent disruptive potential, an understanding that he cultivates from his “golden book,”22 Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance

(1873). For Pater, “[w]hat is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects. He will remember always that beauty exists in many forms” (4). Wilde crafts this resistance into a “correct abstract definition” by defying restrictive critical methodologies. For Wilde, it is not by rules and order, by institutions co-opting art and beauty, that mankind improves. It is by having the old norms and institutions displaced, interrogated, and interrupted that culture improves. Criticism’s capacity to disturb discursive practices renders it a mode of creative writing and the hallmark of a “creative age,” as proposed by Gilbert in “The

Critic as Artist”:

An age that has no criticism is either an age in which art is immobile,

hieratic, and confined to the reproduction of formal types, or an age that

possesses no art at all. [. . .] But there has never been a creative age that

has not been critical also. For it is the critical faculty that invents fresh

22 Wilde offers this praise in his review “Mr. Pater’s Last Volume.” Although the 1890 review “Mr. Pater’s Last Volume” focuses on Appreciations (1890), Wilde insinuates through this adulation that one cannot understand Pater’s more recent prose without appreciating the project of Studies. Hence, Wilde states his idolization of Pater’s book. The adapted line appears in Swinburne’s “Sonnet (with a Copy of Mademoiselle de Maupin)”: “This is the golden book of spirit and sense / The holy writ of beauty; he that wrought / Made it with dreams and faultless words [. . .]” (Swinburne 170, ll. 1-3).

forms. The tendency of creation is to repeat itself. It is to the critical

instinct that we owe each new school that springs up, each new mould that

art now finds ready to its hand. (229)

In Wilde’s hands, literary criticism stands as the vanguard of individualism, poised to found “new schools” contrary to institutional discourses; however, the discipline’s position is precarious, as institutions (academies and states alike) can readily subsume criticism into discourses of power. This turn pre-dates yet complements

Roderick Ferguson’s claims about the institutional appropriation of minority cultures and literatures in The Disorder of Things (2012).23 For Ferguson, “the institutions that attempt to recycle those formations as contradictory ones [. . .] harbor the elements of their own negation” (8). That is, an institution may endeavor to assume, sublimate, and redeploy conflicting discourses for an array of cultural and political reasons, but this initiates a process in which those minority discourses begin to work from within to dismantle restrictive power formations (cf. Menand 63-73).24 Dubbing this interplay as

“interdisciplinarity,” Ferguson offers the following claim:

23 Ferguson’s primary focus is the American university as an institution in which dominant and minority discourses serve as interlocutors for each other. His first chapter provides one means by which we can extend his logic to more traditional, power-wielding institutions like legislatures and courts. The method is to view literature as a project that influences the state, particularly by forcing institutions to recognize the interplay of competing discourses. Ferguson illustrates this point by invoking nineteenth-century American writers, one of which is Wilde’s icon, Walt Whitman: “As [W.C.] Harris goes on to say, nineteenth-century literature was the cultural form that addressed that motto [“e pluribus unum”] directly and the racial conditions that contradicted it. It was the job [. . .] of writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Henry James [. . .] to ‘reconcile the opposing interests of the one and the many.’ Put simply, American literature was supposed to finish writing the American nation-state by helping it to resolve the paradox of the many and the one. [. . .] As such, literature worked to promote the archival functions of the American nation-state. In this regard, American culture would help to turn American social institutions into archival economies” (20). 24 Also writing about the context of the American university, Menand outlines the variety of factors that compelled American universities to become more inclusive of women and people of

Instead of representing the confirmation of power’s totalizing character,

interdisciplinarity connotes a site of contradiction, an instance in which

minoritized differences negotiate and maneuver agreements with and

estrangements from institutionalization. The extent to which

interdisciplinary sites work up a critical suspicion of institutionalization is

also the measure by which they alienate the American ethos that surrounds

institutionalization. (37)

Ferguson casts the “site of contradiction”—in Wilde’s case, the courtroom—as a location in which the competing discourses of literary criticism and legal thought intersect. The intention, from Wilde’s perspective, is to prove that literary criticism can challenge our obeisance to institutions, even as it negotiates for the right to co-exist with legal thought in Britain. Playing the witness, Wilde the literary critic strives to render suspect the practices and limitations of the law. Though prior to deconstruction, Wilde’s designs nonetheless resonate with Spivak’s aspiration for a “setting-to-work” version of deconstruction, one that offers “active resistance” to statecraft and a break from “the formalizing calculus specific to the academic institution” (Spivak 430, 431). Of course, the law and the court have an opposite aim. By invoking literary criticism as evidence in

Regina v. John Douglas, Wilde’s barrister Sir Edward Clarke and Queensberry’s Edward

Carson build on the aesthetic theories of Arnold and Ruskin, contracting the discipline to law’s service.

However, as Ferguson warns, “[a] theorization of contradiction also means developing a critical awareness of the potential vulnerabilities that accompany all

color. These include, but are certainly not limited to, the GI Bill, the baby boom, and the civil rights movement.

deployments of difference” (37). This is especially true in interrogating Wilde, who staged his own “theorization of contradiction”—of aesthetic difference, of disciplinary difference, and of moral difference—directly against juridical power in the libel trial against Queensberry. That is, the risks in a court of law differ drastically—even fatally— from those in the academic institutions about which Ferguson writes. Wilde’s decision to interrupt legal discourse with literary criticism, to borrow from Spivak, “risks setting itself [i.e., criticism] to work by breaking its frame” (431). By “breaking its frame,” I refer to the chief repercussions of Wilde’s testimony in Regina v. John Douglas: emancipating literary criticism from subservience to institutional discourses, and the collapsing of law and criticism’s disciplinary boundaries. Wilde exacerbates literary criticism’s traditional liaison with dominant discourses through his repartee with

Queensberry’s barrister, Edward Carson. In doing so, he exposes the restrictions that the carceral threat imposes on the study of literature, and his critique—necessarily doomed to failure—“disturbs” and “disintegrates” the moral and sexual values in Carson’s interrogations. It is Wilde’s failure in this case, the inevitability that his idealized literary criticism should prove incapable of budging the court’s convictions, that indicates the need for literary criticism to challenge dominant discourses.

5. Edward Carson’s Cross-Examination of Oscar Wilde and the Disruption of Moral

Discourse

“In the case of the novel and the drama, arts in which the public does take an interest, the result of the exercise of popular authority has been absolutely ridiculous.” –Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (143)

On the morning of 3 April 1895, Edward Carson began his cross-examination of

Wilde, with the intent of proving that Queensberry’s card was not libelous, because it

expressed the truth.25 Carson’s interrogation of Wilde ensnares him by exposing, and forcing him to respond to, morally suspect passages in literature, including pieces authored by Wilde and other contemporary writers.26 Throughout the two-day cross- examination, Carson poses, in this order, queries about Lord Alfred Douglas; the 1894

Oxford publication The Chameleon, including Lord Alfred Douglas’s “Two Loves” and

Wilde’s epigrams, “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of Young Men”; passages in

Dorian Gray that appeared, however obliquely, to reference homosexuality; the various blackmailers profiting from Wilde’s affairs; and, lastly, Wilde’s liaisons with young, working-class men.27

25 In Great Britain, the burden of proof in libel cases lies on the defense, which must prove that the written insult is true and therefore not libelous. As such, Queensberry’s defense team only needed to prove that Wilde was posing as a homosexual. As the record and history bear out, Edward Carson exposed more about Wilde than the card’s allegation of posing. 26 More specifically, Carson responds to some strange elisions in Sir Edward Clarke’s opening remarks and examination: Clarke’s too-delicate handling of Wilde’s relationship with Alfred Douglas, his strange avoidance of the “vice and virtue” statements in the Preface to Dorian Gray, and his accidental conflation of the artist and work of art 27 The components of Carson’s cross-examination suggest further avenues of inquiry. For instance, Carson queries Wilde about his lovers so as to exploit the contradiction between Wilde’s classist theory of art and his commingling with lower-class men. Carson clarifies his design in introducing the defense’s case, subsequent to his cross-examination of Wilde: [L]et me say a word as regards the position which Mr Wilde takes up in reference to the publications upon which he has been examined and cross-examined, and let me contrast that with the position he takes up in reference to these men who were from time to time introduced to him or picked up by him. As regards literature his standard was a very high one. His works were not written for the Philistines nor for the illiterate. His works could really only be understood by the artist [. . .]. Gentlemen of the jury, contrast that with the position he takes up as regards these lads. He picks up with Charlie Parker, who was a gentleman’s servant [. . .]. He picks up with young Conway, who sold papers [. . .] and he picks up with Scarfe, who I think also was a gentleman’s servant; and when you come to confront him with these curious associates of a man of high art, his case is no longer that he is dealing in regions of art, which no one can understand but himself and the artistic, but his case is that he has such a magnanimous, such a noble, such a democratic soul (laughter) that he draws no social distinctions. (Holland 253-254) Carson achieves a coup for late-Victorian discursive practices, reifying such notions as art’s service to public morals, the extant class system, and—in mocking an “art which no one can understand but [Wilde] himself”—the legibility of institutions and disciplines. Carson

Criticism on Trial: Public Morality and the Language of Criticism in Wilde’s Responses to “The Priest and the Acolyte”

Prior to an adjournment for lunch on 3 April 1895, Carson begins merging literary criticism with the trial proceedings, badgering Wilde into discussing the contents of The

Chameleon (1894), particularly “The Priest and the Acolyte,” an Oxford undergraduate’s contribution about the fatal love affair between the title characters. Asking Wilde to deliberate on the story, Carson endeavors to displace Wilde from a literary, aesthetic rhetoric and into a Victorian moral discourse:

CARSON: You read “The Priest and the Acolyte”?

WILDE: Yes.

CARSON: You have no doubt whatsoever that that was not an improper

contribution?

WILDE: From a literary point of view, I think it highly improper.

CARSON: Do you only disapprove of it from a literary point of view?

WILDE: It is impossible for a man of letters to judge of a piece of writing

other from its fault in literature. By literature, of course, one includes

treatment of subject, selection of subject, everything. I mean, I

couldn’t criticize a book as if it was a piece of actual life. I think the

choice was wrong, the subject wrong, the writing perfectly wrong, the

whole treatment wrong—wrong! (68)

demonstrates legal institutions’ ability to absorb and redeploy the substance of a counter discourse. Of course, he can do so only through eliding Wilde’s responses under cross- examination, which bring these seeming contradictions into play with one another. Not surprisingly, this passage also displays the law harboring some fugitive language, Wilde’s provocative vision of a class-free art and relations not foreclosed by social class.

Wilde asserts that aesthetics alone guide his perspective on proper art: propriety is a matter of form and expression, that is, the treatment of a text’s material and subject.

What renders “the subject wrong,” then, is not the material itself but the authorial decisions coupled with depicting and narrating the account of a passionate, pederastic relationship between the priest Ronald Heatherington and the boy Wilfred. As Wilde suggests in the Preface to Dorian Gray, neither these characters nor their behaviors can render a book either moral or immoral: “The moral life of man forms part of the subject- matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium” (3). For Wilde, a writer’s technical mastery over language, that “imperfect medium,” telegraphs a hidden meaning resonant with an individual reader’s experiences and sensibilities. Art becomes “immoral” when the elements of fiction (e.g., character, plot, setting, figurative language, etc.) direct readers to a didactic, singular conclusion.

The “morality of art,” as the Preface suggests, occurs when readers “go beneath the surface” of the text and “read the symbol [. . .] at their peril” (4).

Wilde implies that art does not dictate but merely suggests a moral, and the moral must manifest itself subtly through the author’s technique. Here, Wilde’s suggestion about morality and technique evinces his debt to Pater’s notion of the artistic temperament. The Preface showcases Pater’s influence, when Wilde declaims,

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of biography.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without

being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated.

For these there is hope.

They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. (3)

In offering diction (“corrupt,” “charming,” “cultivated,” “hope”) that seems more apropos of Arnold or Ruskin, Wilde appropriates a cultural discourse of improvement to indicate that this environment shapes the artistic temperament and, therefore, the individual impressions created in the encounter with art. All criticism, then, is “a mode of biography” or “the record of one’s soul,” an account that complements the focus on individualism in “The Soul of Man under Socialism” and “The Critic as Artist” (Preface

3; “Critic” 237). Criticism succeeds when it, like art, disguises its creator and unsettles communal beliefs: Wilde believes not in an individual “arbiter of the work of art,” but a critic “who is admitted to contemplate the work of art, and, if the work be fine, to forget in its contemplation all the egotism that mars him—the egotism of his ignorance, or the egotism of his information (“Soul of Man” 151). Not unlike Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just, Wilde casts this transformative encounter with art as a prerequisite to effective literary criticism.28 This provokes a process that Scarry terms “self-revision” and that Wilde dubs “intensifying [one’s] personality”: “it is only by intensifying his own personality that the critic can interpret the personality and work of others, and the more strongly this personality enters into the interpretation the more real the interpretation becomes, the more satisfying, the more convincing, and the more true” (“Critic” 245). As an exercise in personality-building, in outlining one’s individuality, literary criticism cannot express a universal moral code of conduct; it can only illuminate a morality already embraced by the literary critic.

28 See chapter three, which analyzes Virginia Woolf’s biography of the art critic Roger Fry, for further explanation of this principle.

Under cross-examination, Wilde’s remarks on “The Priest and the Acolyte” replicate this analytical sleight of hand, swiping away in court the Arnoldian intertwining of art and moral purpose. Wilde’s criticism of same-sex desire in “The Priest and the

Acolyte” stems from the story’s treatment of this subject: it is “badly written”—and therefore “wrong,” as Wilde says on the stand—because its style is a hodgepodge of clichés and bald pronouncements of Father Heatherington’s shameful yearning for

Wilfred. The priest’s regret over kissing Wilfred revels in vapid tropes, phrases, modifiers, and figures of speech:

The priest returned to his poor rooms and tried to sit down, but all in vain:

he tried to eat, but could only thrust away his plate in disgust: he tried to

pray, but instead of the calm figure on the cross, the calm, cold figure with

the weary, weary face, he saw continually before him the flushed face of a

lovely boy, the wide star-like eyes of his new-found love. (Bloxam 33)

In its imagery and obvious motifs, this passage foreshadows the conclusion, in which

Father Heatherington commits suicide from remorse. The priest holds himself culpable for the “abominable crime” of corrupting Wilfred’s innocent nature. He responds by poisoning Wilfred and himself, releasing them from “sin” through a sacrilegious performance of the sacrament of the Eucharist; he had consecrated a chalice with the contents of a “tiny phial,” a trite reference to the end of Romeo and Juliet’s passion (61,

68-71). The story is a blatant object lesson on illicit desires, in the destruction coupled to indiscretion. In its form and function, therefore, the narrative is necessarily “immoral” in the Preface’s sense of the term, because it enacts precisely a popular, public stance

construing homosexuality as deviancy and immorality.29 Naturally, Wilde is attempting to play both sides of the rhetorical game: he wishes to explain that the art is bad, while distancing himself from the story’s material. After all, the graphic portrayal of same-sex desire marks “The Priest and the Acolyte” as immoral in the public’s sense of the term— but not in Wilde’s aesthetic sense of the word.

Of course, in his writings and in the cross-examination, Wilde is being coy. Good art does not lack morality per se, but is devoid of an explicit moral that lends itself immediately to the service of any authority. Instead, critics approach texts, which are “at once surface and symbol” (Preface 4), with the aim of elucidating one of many hidden meanings. Disagreements should occur: “When critics disagree, the artist is at accord with himself,” because a dominant discourse has not succeeded in imposing its mastery over the artwork’s disruptive potential. However, this upsets the law’s compulsion to codify, acted out in courts that have the fraught task of recognizing literature as subversive yet reflective of a national political imaginary (cf. Nussbaum 2-6).30 This leaves Queensberry’s barrister, Edward Carson, with the perilous task of speaking as a literary critic, so as to draw criticism back into the law’s thrall. By invoking Wilde’s declaration that “[t]here is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book” (Preface 3),

Carson attempts to goad Wilde into translating this aesthetic judgment into an outcry against the explicit homosexual relationship in “The Priest and the Acolyte”:

29 Cf. Wilde, “Soul of Man” 142, on “popular prejudices.” 30 In Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (1995), Martha Nussbaum describes her project as follows: “I shall focus, then, on the characteristics of the literary imagination as a public imagination, an imagination that will steer judges in their judging, legislators in their legislating, policy makers in measuring the quality of life of people near and far. Commending it in the public sphere is difficult, since people who think of literature as illuminating about the workings of the personal life and the private imagination believe that it is idle and unhelpful when larger concerns of classes and nations are at issue. [. . .] But I shall argue that here, all the more, literary forms have a unique contribution to make” (3).

CARSON: I think you are of the opinion, Mr. Wilde, that there is no such

thing as an immoral book?

WILDE: Yes.

[. . .]

CARSON: Then, I suppose I may take it that in your opinion the piece

was not immoral.

WILDE: Worse yet, it is badly written. (Laughter.) (69)

Carson continues pressing Wilde to assess the story’s morality and its theology, and he does so through querying Wilde about the “passion” between the priest and the acolyte.31 Wilde shies from the line of questioning, commenting that he is “not responsible for this matter” in the offending story. Wilde refuses to flush out a moral from “The Priest and the Acolyte.” Doing so would impose an Arnoldian and Ruskinian critical authority, thereby “degrading” the text and stripping it of its disruptive potential; such a critical reading would appeal to a popular, public morality, in which “[p]eople [. .

.] are less conscious of the horrible pressure that is being put on them, [. . .] without ever realizing that they are probably thinking other people’s thoughts, living by other people’s standards” (“Soul of Man” 138). If Wilde had behaved prudently (that is, conformed), he could easily have joined in Carson’s charges that “The Priest and the Acolyte” was an

“immoral” and “blasphemous” story. In Wilde’s vision, however, literary criticism ought

31 Curiously, Wilde claims that, in the story, he “understood the passion is not physical” (69), contrary to the textual evidence itself. When the priest first encounters the boy, “he bent forward and gently touched the smooth white brow with his lips,” which seduces the boy, who “raised his little arms, and, clasping his slim white fingers around the priest’s neck kissed him on the lips” (Bloxam 32). Cf. Bloxam, “The Priest and the Acolyte” for further evidence of a physical relationship between the characters.

to revel in dismantling—and not reifying—discourses that impel the public to perform an authorized code of conduct.

Only when Wilde becomes visibly rankled by Carson’s snare does Sir Edward

Clarke register an objection (Holland 69). According to the transcript, Clarke had not

“jumped to his feet,” as Millard had suggested (“Priest” 11): the defense was far too passive in fending off Carson’s parries. Though Clarke dallies in objecting to Carson’s line of questioning, his interjection in this exchange nonetheless alerts the court to the collapse of disciplinary boundaries caused by Wilde’s refusal to authorize the defense’s reading of the story:

CLARKE: My lord, I don’t want to interpose, but surely, after the witness

has expressed his disapproval, it is a very strange thing that he should

be cross-examined as to the contents of a book which he disapproved

of.

JUDGE: No, not as to its contents, but as to his view of the contents with a

view to seeing what was meant by saying that he disapproved.

CARSON: Yes.

JUDGE: I think it is quite relevant.

CLARKE: We are not dealing here with matters of literary criticism or

literary taste.

CARSON: No, we are not. (To WILDE.) And the boy is found by the

rector in the bedroom and a scandal is created? (69)

Notably, Clarke fails to detect the nuance in Wilde’s repartee with Carson; Clarke says that Wilde has “disapproved” of “The Priest and the Acolyte,” and he associates this

discontent with the story’s content—not, as Wilde would momentarily, because it

“violated every artistic canon of beauty” (Holland 70). Registering the implication in

Clarke’s objection, the jurist, Sir Richard Henn Collins, converts Wilde’s aesthetic principles to the court’s service. In demurring that he can speak of books and not life, in indicating that a narrative’s treatment of its subject matter constitutes a portion of its literary merit, Wilde has entered his theory of criticism into evidence, and Justice Collins consequently voices Wilde’s own logic—an emphasis on the treatment of the subject—as a proper basis for a line of questioning. That is, for the law, literary criticism becomes a means of authorizing and justifying procedures. Justice Collins’s behaviors are emblematic of Foucault’s observation that

a general process has led judges to judge something other than crimes [. .

.]. But what is odd about modern criminal justice32 is that, although it has

taken on so many extra-juridical elements, it has done so not in order to be

able to define them juridically and gradually to integrate them into the

actual power to punish [. . .]. Today, criminal justice functions and

justifies itself only by this perpetual reference to something other than

itself, by this unceasing reinscription in non-juridical systems. Its fate is to

be redefined by knowledge. (Discipline and Punish 22)

Here, Foucault refers to power—especially the power of institutions associated with the courts and prisons—as more than an integration and redeployment of opposing

32 In Regina v. John Douglas, Wilde and his team are the prosecution, but Foucault’s perspective on criminality remains relevant for two reasons. Firstly, the tenor of the libel trial—Clarke’s inefficient defense and Carson’s inquiry into Wilde’s private affairs—forced Wilde to adopt a defensive stance as a critic and a witness, alike. Queensberry never sits in the dock during Regina v. John Douglas, and Wilde seems more suspect than the accused. Secondly, this implicit criminality becomes explicit in the subsequent trials, in which Wilde actually serves as the defendant for committing “gross indecency” under the 1885 CLAA.

discourses. In this instance, juridical power co-opts literary criticism, divests it of its disrupting influence, and offers it as justification for the court’s interest in outlining a moral agenda against homosexual relationships. The court in Regina v. John Douglas reconstitutes legal thinking through the praxis of another form of knowledge, literary criticism.

When Law Integrates Literature: Wilde’s Disruptive Testimony as a Defense of

Literature and Criticism

After the exchange regarding “The Priest and the Acolyte,” for the barristers and the jurist alike, literary criticism began to buttress and redefine the court’s power. Carson displays an intuitive understanding of this when he responds to Clarke’s objection—“No, we are not [‘dealing with matters of literary criticism’]”—by immediately returning to the content of “The Priest and the Acolyte.” Carson continues assailing Wilde with questions about the story’s “morality” and “blasphemies,” before attempting two similar strategies: challenging Wilde’s contribution to The Chameleon, “Phrases and Philosophies for the

Use of the Young,” and invoking the Scots Observer’s 1890 review, which lambasted

The Picture of Dorian Gray. On his epigrams in The Chameleon, Wilde responds with savvy and poise, eliciting laughter from the journalists in attendance. For a moment,

Wilde flummoxes Carson with a “philosophical definition of truth” that refuses to be circumscribed by the barrister’s questions: Wilde’s truth is “something so personal that when another person holds the same—that in fact the same truth can never be apprehended by two minds, that is what it means; that to each mind there is its own truth”

(Holland 76). Reminiscent of the Nietzschean perspectivism that would come into vogue with Modernist aesthetics, Wilde’s “personal” truth resists the uniform application of the

law. Further, by evading definition, Wilde upsets Carson’s rhetoric, which enacts the institutional interest in confining Wilde’s subjectivity to recognizable forms. Elaine

Scarry views strategies like Carson’s as key in the state’s project of framing public perception of defendants; as she observes, “Each major speech act by the state in a criminal case comes to define the defendant” (166). However, Wilde complicates the state’s efforts to define him by presenting only paradoxes and poses that render definitions, truths, and narrative accounts fluid.33

This destabilization is Wilde’s key strategy, but, as Sean Latham observes, Carson adapts the same tactic in order to cast Wilde’s responses as containing a latent homosexuality: “throughout the trial Carson cross-examines Wilde about the contents of his work, seeking to transform texts like Dorian Gray not into open confessions but into duplicitous romans à clef that deliberately yet openly conceal the secret of homosexuality” (65).34 Carson invokes a singular and damning piece of evidence that begins breaking down the distinctions between literature and life, criticism and law: the scurrilous, unsigned review of Dorian Gray in the Tory-aligned Scots Observer.35 The review contends that Dorian Gray

is false to human nature—for its hero is a devil; it is false to morality—for

it is not made sufficiently clear that the writer does not prefer a course of

33 See also S.I. Salamensky, “Re-Presenting Oscar Wilde’s Trial.” 34 Here, Latham provides a compelling reading of the repartee between Wilde and Carson. However, inconsistencies and inaccuracies abound in Latham’s monograph The Art of Scandal. As these call the scholarship’s integrity into question, I have generally avoided relying on this text. For instance, Latham refers to The Chameleon as an 1896 publication—which suggests that it was published after the Wilde trials and could not have been admitted into evidence. See Latham 65. 35 Betraying his editorial bias, Millard includes the following footnote about The Scots Observer’s fate: “The Scots Observer was edited by W.E. Henley. It was violently Tory in character, and afterwards became The National Observer, but not even a re-christening could save it from an early death” (63).

unnatural iniquity to a life of cleanliness, health[,] and sanity. The story—

which deals with matters only fitted for the Criminal Investigation

Department or a hearing in camera—is discreditable alike to author and

editor. Mr. Wilde has brains, and art, and style; but if he can write for

none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys, the sooner he

takes to tailoring (or some other decent trade) the better for his own

reputation and the public morals. (63-64)

Carson quotes much of this material, incorporating into the official record the review’s sentiments about Dorian Gray’s threat to heteronormative morality. Wilde, observing that it was “the one [review] I took notice of” (Holland 77), plays into the defense’s effort to render The Scots Observer’s charges as the public sphere’s reckoning of the novel.36

This slight confession facilitates Carson’s interrogation of Wilde on the latter’s letters to the Observer’s editor. In these notes, Wilde accuses the reviewer of “commit[ting] the absolutely unpardonable crime of confusing the artist with his subject-matter,” which occludes the more complicated project in Dorian Gray:

For if a work of art is rich, and vital, and complete, those who have artistic

instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more

strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. [. . .] It will be to each

man what he is himself. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really

mirrors. (115, 117)

In the letters’ recapitulation of the Preface to Dorian Gray, Wilde deftly twines creation, criticism, and reading to what Pater dubs in Marius the Epicurean (1885) “truant

36 However, Wilde took notice of other reviews: in addition to his letter to The Scots Observer, Wilde also wrote to and parlayed with The St. James Gazette and The Daily Chronicle.

reading,” a deeply personal (and necessarily individual) encounter with a text that awakens one’s self-awareness and aesthetic sensibility.

Unfortunately, Wilde’s performance in the dock is less dexterous. Co-opting the letters’ substance, Carson asks if “the sins of Dorian Gray [. . .] may have been sodomy,” thus guiding Wilde into the admission that one could read it in that matter: “That is according to the temper of each who reads the book,” Wilde says, “he who has found the sin has brought it” (Holland 78). Carson manipulates this apparent confession, cornering

Wilde into convoluted statements about the revisions he made between the initial

Lippincott’s Magazine edition and the 1891 book. Wilde claims to have made only one minor change in response to Pater’s concerns about the novel, but Carson urges that

Dorian Gray was “modified and purged a good deal” to cover up Dorian’s homosexual encounters (Holland 78).37 After Carson delivered this barb, the court adjourned for luncheon, sparing Wilde and providing him a momentary respite from the barrister’s scrutiny.

As Gilbert remarks in “The Critic as Artist,” “There is a subtle influence in supper” that can transform one’s awareness. Perhaps Wilde experienced such a benefit during the recess. After the break, when Carson resumes the cross-examination, Wilde has re-trenched himself in the disruptive potential of the Preface’s contradictions, and he repairs his theory’s foundations by retooling Culture and Anarchy’s diction as a counterpoint to Carson’s questions about the “sodomitical novel.” In the exchange, Wilde

37 In fact, as Merlin Holland, Richard Ellmann, and others observe, Edward Carson is correct in this instance. Wilde drastically altered the accounts of Dorian’s escapades between the Lippincott’s and the book publication. It was the heavily revised, book edition that Pater reviewed in the November 1891 edition of the Bookman.

ruptures an Arnoldian desire for a cultivated society with uniform principles and proposes, in its stead, the liberation from such popular opinions:

CARSON: We will say a sodomitical novel might be a good book

according to you.

WILDE: I don’t know what you mean by a sodomitical novel.

CARSON: Don’t you?

WILDE: No.

CARSON: I will suggest to you Dorian Gray. Is that open to the

interpretation of being a sodomitical book?

WILDE: Only to brutes—only to the illiterate; perhaps I should say brutes

and the illiterate.

CARSON: An illiterate person reading Dorian Gray might consider it a

sodomitical book?

WILDE: The views of the Philistine on art could not be counted: they are

incalculably stupid. You cannot ask me what misinterpretation of my

work the ignorant, the illiterate, the foolish, may put on it. It doesn’t

concern me. What concerns me in my art is my view and my feeling

and why I made it; I don’t care twopence what other people think

about it.

CARSON: The majority of people would come within your definition of

Philistines and illiterates, wouldn’t they?

WILDE: Oh, I have found wonderful exceptions.

Feigning ignorance, Wilde rejects Carson’s term “sodomitical novel,” a designation that carries both an implicit moral judgment and, as previously discussed, potential titillation for a scandal-loving public. In doing so, Wilde refuses to contribute to the law’s appropriation of literary criticism, and this also strikes at the use of literary criticism as a means of producing, through readings of literary texts, a de facto moral code of conduct. To further destabilize literary criticism’s function as an arbiter of morality, Wilde conjures Arnold’s figure of the “Philistine.” For Arnold, the Philistine is a member of the petit bourgeoisie or the proletariat classes, one of “[t]he people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich” (39). For Arnold, the pursuit of wealth corrupts and vulgarizes the public, distracting them from moral refinement.

Literature (explicated, of course, by a well-intended critic) complements civil society and state authority by cultivating public morality and sensibility: “It is by thus making sweetness and light to be characters of perfection,” Arnold declaims, “that culture is of like spirit with poetry, follows one law with poetry” (41).

In “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” Wilde shares Arnold’s contempt for materialism, consumerism, and accumulation: under socialism, Wilde argues that these

“conditions will be done away with, and human nature will change” (155). The similarities cease there. Wilde’s testimony (in particular, his invocation of the

“Philistine”) renders suspect Arnold’s “one law” binding literature and culture. Arnold’s use of the term designates certain swaths of the population in dire need of the “sweetness and light” conveyed through literature and criticism; Wilde’s usage nods to the British public sphere, writ large. Wilde’s statement that “the views of the Philistines on art could

not be counted” is nuanced wordplay. The “views” are uncountable as there are no individual perspectives to be counted; the public simply echoes the authorized interpretations of Dorian Gray run in the newspapers.

Intentionally or not, Wilde’s retaliation against Carson’s use of the book reviews recalls Algernon’s sardonic insistence in The Importance of Being Earnest that literary criticism is “do[ne] so well in the daily papers” as to render it unnecessary for any conforming readers (14). Indeed, Wilde’s juxtaposition of Philistines with the “illiterate” and the “foolish” suggests a readership that receives its information about the novel solely from reviews and the popular press. Counting such views would prove unproductive: a census of criticism would reveal the same opinion across the population, perhaps with slight alterations in severity. Wilde’s Philistinism, then, is indicative not of misconceptions that need correcting, but of popularly held notions that re-inscribe the authority of dominant critical and institutional discourses. In this instance, Carson’s label, the “sodomitical novel,” revives the late-nineteenth-century moral outrage induced by homosexual relationships between men. Wilde’s responses link this agenda to

Philistinism, the state of the public’s acceptance of authorized discourses. Only Wildean individualism—that propensity to disrupt the order, logic, and tyranny of prevailing belief systems—can elevate a person from the public sphere’s sway. These few are the ones praised in Wilde’s testimony as the “wonderful exceptions,” what his Preface calls

“the elect” (3).38

38 There is, in Wilde’s use of the term “elect,” a sense of the Calvinist doctrine of a predestined few who shall ascend to heaven. This sense of the term is not incompatible with Wilde’s own attitude toward those artists who produce “good” art; that is, Wilde’s writings imply that such figures, whose sensibilities grant them an awareness of and an ability to portray the contradictions in British society, are exceedingly rare and fated to perform their unique tasks.

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The rhetorical timbre of this exchange recurs throughout the remaining questions on Dorian Gray. Carson attempts to match Wilde’s glibness with sarcastic incredulity:

“Don’t you?” he asks, in reply to one of Wilde’s claims to ignorance. Wilde responds by donning a mock seriousness that he sloughs off, disregarding through wit the somberness of the courtroom. The lines between disciplines further dissolve as Carson begins reading lengthy segments from Dorian Gray and questioning Wilde about the novel’s discursions on the “beautiful personality” and Basil Hallward’s declaration of love to Dorian.39 (For

Wilde, a “beautiful personality” has an effect akin to that which Pater’s Studies grants art: the personality, when encountered, produces an impression that compels artists to create something beautiful.) When Wilde links Dorian’s inspiring role in the novel to that of the dark lady in Shakespeare’s sonnets, Carson initiates a sequence of queries about Wilde’s piece of speculative scholarship, “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” (1889), which theorized that a young man inspired the passion of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Carson contends that Wilde reads the sonnets as “practically sodomitical” (Holland 92-93). Wilde insists that “The

Portrait of Mr. W.H.” proposes the contrary, that the homosexual reading stems from the work of “[Henry] Hallam and a great many French critics”; Wilde’s work “was explaining that the love of Shakespeare to the young man to whom he dedicated them

[i.e., the sonnets], was the love of an artist for a personality” (Holland 93). Wilde’s testimony suggests a non-sexual, homosocial relationship between Shakespeare and his inspiration, stalling the defense’s cross-examination.

39 The passages which Carson cites appear in the 1890 Lippincott’s Magazine edition of the novel. The majority of English publishers reprint the 1891 edition, claiming that Wilde’s addition of seven chapters and his revision of the homoerotic material improve the text. Cf. Robert Mighall’s “Note on the Text” in the 2003 Penguin Classics edition and Joseph Bristow’s “Note on the Text” in the 2008 Oxford World Classics edition. Both the Lippincott’s and book versions have been reprinted in volume III of Oxford University Press’s 2005 The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, eds. Joseph Bristow and Ian Small.

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The “Yellow Book” and Wilde’s Dorian Gray in Court: When Legal Discourse Subverts

Disruptive Literary and Critical Texts

With that line of inquiry blocked, Carson veers back into the material of Dorian

Gray, with attention to the “yellow book that Lord Henry had sent” Dorian, a “poisonous book” whose reader “hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediæval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner” (Dorian

Gray 120, 121; Holland 94-95).40 From Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À Rebours (1884), a novel that he claims to “not admire very much,” Wilde states that he received the

“suggestion” behind the yellow book—that a volume could entrance its readers (Holland

94). Carson revisits his previous queries about sodomitical and immoral books, seeking to establish a link between implicit homosexuality in À Rebours and Dorian Gray. By repeating the same line of questioning with each text, Carson encloses Wilde in the aforementioned feedback loop, in which literary criticism and institutional authority validate one another. The following occurs after the first of Sir Edward Clarke’s objections over this line of inquiry:

CARSON: My lord, I asked him [i.e., Wilde] the question as to whether

this book À Rebours was a book depicting sodomy. My lord, he admits

that is the book he referred to there.

WILDE: No, I don’t admit that. [. . .] I say that the idea of the book was

suggested by À Rebours, but that when I came to quote in the next

40 Though unremarked in this instance, there are slight differences between the Lippincott’s Magazine and the book versions of Dorian Gray. Carson continues quoting Lippincott’s, in which Wilde associates the yellow book with the French Decadent movement—connoting a clear intention to rupture existing moral codes of conduct. In the book publication, Wilde narrows his purview to the Symbolists, who sought such rupture through the use of symbols that obliquely treat questions of existential truth. Huysmans’s À Rebours falls into both of these canons.

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passage of Dorian Gray from this supposed imaginary book, I quote

from chapters that do not exist in À Rebours. It was merely a motive,

that is all. [. . .]

[. . .]

CARSON: I ask you, now, was the book you had in your mind as the book

sent by Lord Henry Wotton to Dorian Gray, was it À Rebours or was it

not?

WILDE: It was not.

CARSON: But you told me a moment ago it was.

[. . .]

WILDE: What I meant was—if you will allow me to say so—I am not

quibbling about the matter—in the book sent to Dorian Gray by Lord

Henry Wotton there is an allusion in the next chapter—

[. . .]

CARSON: I will take your answer one way or the other.

WILDE: Will you kindly allow me to say this—that I would not have

taken the work of a French man of letters deliberately and said, “This

is a book that has poisoned a young man’s life.” I would not have done

it. I should consider that dishonorable, untrue[,] and unjust. I would

not have done it. (Holland 97-98).

Carson provokes Wilde into losing control during this moment in the cross- examination. The exchange ensnares Wilde in a circular logic that binds together literary critical and legal discourses. As Wilde insists in “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” the

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power to thus dominate alternative discourses leads to degradation, and it does so through faulty reasoning that perpetuates institutions’ authority and value systems. This process, as Slavoj Žižek illustrates in The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), stems from the

“senseless character of the Law,” which he reads as a “tautology [that] articulates the vicious cycle of its authority” (35). Consequently, the public becomes “unable to shake so-called ideological prejudices,” such as the fear of the homosexual relationships codified and criminalized in the CLAA (cf. Žižek 49).41 Here, the circular discourse of immorality tamps down the disruptive potential of Wilde’s testimony. Through recursive questions that presuppose a “moral” and an “immoral” response, Carson forces Wilde to engage solely with the question of homosexuality, perceived as a threat insinuating itself through Wilde’s influences, publications, and rhetoric. Even as Wilde denies the existence of sodomitical novels, he must operate within Carson’s discursive framework, one that reifies a statutorily codified morality. Wilde must explain how a novel condones or condemns homosexuality, and he must describe how a novel purifies or poisons its readers: neither Carson nor the court shall accept any response outside of this morality- saturated binary.

As before, Sir Edward Clarke has hesitated to object: he waits until the exchange about À Rebours has strayed into the territory already trammeled by Carson over “The

Priest and the Acolyte” (cf. Holland 97, 99). However, Wilde has already seen his disruptive model of literary criticism co-opted by the court in order to redefine the scope

41 Here, Žižek assesses anti-Semitic propaganda in interwar Germany, to evince how “everyday experiences” fail to disrupt ideological biases promoted through state-authorized discourses. One may also recall Foucault’s arguments about institutions in Discipline and Punish and about knowledge formation in The Order of Things. In the case of Regina v. John Douglas, the language of the 1885 statute and Carson’s diction become means of remotely instituting control over the public’s notions of moral behavior, and this consequently shapes a rhetoric for obliquely referencing (and condemning) same-sex relationships.

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of legal authority, and Clarke’s objection instead grants Carson a platform for articulating his rationale to the court:

CARSON: My lord, I submit to your lordship that it is a perfectly

legitimate question to put on cross-examination. I have asked this

gentleman what work it was that was in his mind when he wrote this

particular passage in Dorian Gray. He told me it was À Rebours. Surely,

my lord, where the issue here is whether Mr. Wilde was posing as a

sodomite, which is the justification pleaded here—I have a right to show

when he was publishing that book he had in his mind a novel, which

according to the extract that I have was plainly a novel which would lead

to and teach sodomitical practices? My lord, surely I ought to be allowed

to ask the witness and to test the witness as to whether the book was of

that description? (100).

In Carson’s argument, literary criticism becomes a legal tool for scrutinizing, judging, and condemning a Wildean individualism: this line of reasoning provides the state with the means of punishing an individual for possessing a knowledge base constituted of

“immoral” texts and for the production of works (creative or critical) built upon that intellectual tradition. That is, Carson’s argument entwines Wilde’s retinue of poses (as reader, artist, critic, homosexual, and citizen) with the texts that he has read and, ostensibly, internalized. All of these attributes go on trial when Wilde breaches the court’s rhetoric and procedures with the disruptive individualism of his literary criticism; all of Wilde’s poses risk punishment and condemnation, which is later inflicted on

Wilde’s physical person through a sentence of hard labor.

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Clarke’s intervention results in a rare instance in which Justice Collins sustains one of the prosecution’s objections. However, Collins does so on a mere technicality, one that preserves the logic of Queensberry’s defense team: Collins believes that Wilde “has repudiated that passage from being in his mind at all,” which renders a comparative literary analysis unsound (Holland 100). However, this does not invalidate Carson’s underlying logic; the court merely views the methodology inaccurate in this circumstance, in so much as nothing concretely unites À Rebours and Dorian Gray.

Justice Collins requires the defense to prove a causal connection, no matter how reductive, before pursuing such a line of questioning.

After Collins intervenes on the prosecution’s behalf, Carson opts to abandon À

Rebours and to pursue, instead, the question of Dorian’s illicit relations with young men, evinced when the painter Basil Hallward confronts Dorian about the social disgraces of the latter’s friends. Carson reads the passage to the court, then examines Wilde as to the interstices of homosexuality and Dorian’s influence over his friends:

CARSON: Do you think that [Basil’s accusation], taken in its natural

meaning, would suggest that what they were talking about was a

charge of sodomy?

WILDE: The passage you have read describes Dorian Gray as a man of

very corrupt influence. There is no statement about what the nature of

his bad influence was, nor do I think there is such a thing as a bad

influence in the world.

[. . .]

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CARSON: You don’t think that flattering a young man, telling him of his

beauty, making love to him in fact, would be likely to corrupt him?

WILDE: No.

CARSON: Wasn’t that the way in your novel that Lord Henry Wotton

corrupted Dorian Gray in the first instance?

WILDE: Lord Henry Wotton—no—in the novel he doesn’t corrupt him;

you must remember that novels and life are different things.

CARSON: It depends upon what you call corruption.

WILDE: Yes, and what one calls life. In my novel there is a picture of

changes. You are not to ask me if I believe they really happened; they

are motives in fiction.

CARSON: I want to ask you a few questions about this letter [to Lord

Alfred Douglas] which was brought to you. (Holland 102-103)

Here, Carson completes the conflation authorized by Justice Collins’s responses to the prosecution’s objections: signs of corruption and homosexuality in Dorian Gray become evidence that Wilde himself must harbor and act on homosexual desires. Carson deflects Wilde’s final attempt to divorce fiction from reality. When Wilde insists that

“novels and life are different things,” Carson retorts that this distinction “depends upon what you call corruption”; Queensberry’s defense implicates fiction as the inspiration for and manifestation of “gross indecency,” making Wilde complicit in (if not legally responsible for) any signs of homosexual behavior in his writings and his life. Therefore, the defense reasons, Dorian Gray—character and novel alike—become ciphers for

Wilde’s homosexuality and its influence on the men in his social circle. Wilde has

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utilized literary criticism as a tool to disrupt the law’s power to consolidate its authority, but Queensberry’s defense team and the jurist have tacitly colluded in co-opting the methods of literary criticism and deploying the discipline to redefine and broaden the scope of the court’s power. With Dorian Gray now representing sufficient proof that

Oscar Wilde either poses as or is a sodomite, the defense can foreclose the disruptive potential of literary criticism by placing it in service of other types of documentary evidence: for instance, Wilde’s letters to Lord Alfred, the discoveries made by

Queensberry’s private detectives, and the affidavits of Wilde’s working-class lovers. In a court of law, the state abuses its power, redefining the scope of its authority by assimilating disruptive discourses. Writ large in the Wilde trials, this tendency illustrates the need to challenge the state’s authority to mold discourse and power to its desires. But the Wilde trial also suggests the need to meet the state not in the center of power, but in other arenas of public life.

6. Conclusion: The Legacy of Wilde’s Failure

In the trial itself, Carson’s bait-and-switch—linking Dorian Gray to Wilde’s correspondences—led to the public revelation of Wilde’s affairs and his homosexuality.

Carson elaborates on the corrupting influence of Dorian Gray, insinuates that Wilde had the same effect on Lord Alfred, and then queries Wilde about his relationships with a range of working-class men. (Of course, Wilde hardly served himself well with his implication-laden joke about Walter Grainger: “Oh, no, never in my life [had I kissed him]; he was a peculiarly plain boy” [Holland 207].) Having failed to defend (and extend) the influence of his disruptive aesthetics and his lifestyle, Wilde and Sir Edward

Clarke had no recourse but to cede their case in the libel suit, thereby vindicating the

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Marquess of Queensberry and agreeing that his insult was categorically true. Regina v.

John Douglas concluded on the morning of 5 April 1895; later that evening, Wilde was arrested at the Cadogan Hotel after making a half-hearted attempt at escape. Regina v.

John Douglas was subsequently followed by a grand jury that indicted Wilde and Alfred

Taylor for gross indecency under the CLAA. Regina v. Wilde began on 26 April, resulting in a hung jury, and the case was retried on 22 May, during which the jury found

Wilde guilty of sodomy. He was convicted and sentenced to two years of hard labor, first in Pentonville Prison and later in Wandsworth Prison.

As Foucault observes, “[p]ublic punishment is the ceremony of immediate recoding” (Discipline 110): after the trials, the press would revise Wilde’s evocative aesthetics from a form of intellectual stimulation to a salacious byword for same-sex desire. The aforementioned newspaper accounts provide one instance of a public re- writing of Wilde’s influence, but the ensuing scandal provoked other elisions of Wilde’s name. Wilde’s failure to prove his libel case against Queensberry offered the public— constituted in the various apparatuses of state institutions, newspapers, and presses—the occasion necessary to re-cast his performance as an aberration of British virtues. Alice

Meynell instructed her publisher, John Lane, to expunge Wilde’s name from all future editions of The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays (1893): “The most important alteration is of course the omission of Mr. Oscar Wilde’s name from the essay in which he is quoted. [. . .] I am sure you will agree with me that the mention of Oscar Wilde by name is impossible” (“Letter” 90).42 Sir Edward Clarke, Wilde’s barrister in Regina v. John

Douglas and the re-trial of Regina v. Wilde, refused to name Wilde in his 1918 memoir

42 The essay in question was “The Unit of the World,” in which Meynell reacts against Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying.” As Atkinson observes in the footnote to this 1896 letter, subsequent editions of The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays removed Wilde’s name.

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The Story of My Life: his two chapters on 1895 address the successes of his parliamentary career, dodging both his connection to the ensuing scandal and his culpability in Wilde’s downfall.

As Seamus Heaney claims about Wilde’s “Ballad in Reading Gaol,” however, his work as an artist-critic possesses an ineluctable quality, one that compels us to become secret sharers in art and criticism’s disruptive potentials: “Wilde summons the guilty thing in the self as well as in society: the poem not only condemns the penal system but also insinuates that each reader is guilty within the cell of his or her secret being” (102).

We all, Heaney implies, hold in our genome a predisposition for what the state calls crime and the public calls guilt. Wilde urges us to disavow that framework, to protest our own complicity with it. So, this recoding that Foucault describes does not benefit institutional authority alone: as Ferguson suggests, the assimilation of competing discourses imbues institutions with the tools necessary to negate that authority.

Wilde’s failure instigates other recodings—productive and generative recodings—through the shifting editorial practices surrounding the trial transcripts, through critical readings that view disruption as crucial to activating an individualism beyond the purview of state power. As Halberstam makes clear, failure (even when coupled with disgrace) differs from oblivion, from disregard. Failures,

like those athletes who finish fourth, remind us that there is something

powerful in being wrong, in losing, in failing, and that all our failures

combined might just be enough, if we practice them well, to bring down

the winner. [. . .] The concept of practicing failure perhaps prompts us [. .

.] to avoid mastery, and, with Walter Benjamin, to recognize that

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“empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers.” All losers are the

heirs of those who lost before them. Failure loves company. (120-121)

Oscar Wilde lost: the historical record bears this out. In his 1895 trials, literary criticism fails to disintegrate institutional authority from within, and his libel suit against

Queensberry displays the manner in which dominant discourses enfold counter- discourses. If Wilde had succeeded—that is, if he had defended himself from

Queensberry’s allegations and expertly manipulated the state with literary criticism—his work would have colluded with the mission of such institutions as the court. This would have validated the feedback loop inherent in Arnoldian and Ruskinian criticism, the very cycle that Wilde had hoped to disrupt. But because of his failure, his testimony under cross-examination conveys the essential task of literary criticism: to resist authority, uniformity, and conformity; to articulate alternative modes of living with the existential and actual crises of one’s historical moment. The subsequent chapters of this dissertation track this inheritance through Modernist artist-critics who keep company with Oscar

Wilde and his insurrectionary literary criticism.

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Chapter Two

The Other “Bloody War”: Rebecca West’s Early Nonfiction, Disillusionment, and a

Feminist Counter-Memory of the Great War Years

“The majority of women one knows are struggling towards something outside the sphere of their immediate human relationships. Of the girls who were at school with me nearly all, married and single, have joined in that splendid—even when it is blind and incoherent and has blood in its eyes—assault on the social system which calls itself the suffragist movement.” –Rebecca West, “‘Autumn’: The Fate of the Drudge,” a rev. of August Strindberg’s Married (170)1

1. Introduction: Wartime Feminism and the Great War Disillusionment Narrative

In a 1913 article in the Clarion, the twenty-one-year-old Rebecca West wrote a polemic on the death of suffragette2 Emily Wilding Davison. West’s account implicates the Liberal government and its misogynistic policies as the source of women’s disillusionment with Britain’s political institutions and civil society. For West, Davison’s passing functioned as a salient metaphor for Britain’s persistent undervaluing of women’s rights: Davison perished from a skull fracture, inflicted when she breached the racetrack at the Epsom Derby and fell under the hooves of Anmer, a horse owned by King George

V. West saw in Davison’s death a public spectacle that rendered visible the physical and epistemic violence that “sex antagonism” (to use West’s term) inflicted on women: a government and society dominated by the wills of men trammeled women, body and soul. To present her case and the charges against politicians like Prime Minister Herbert

1 Throughout this chapter, all citations to West’s essays, journalism, and book reviews refer to the respective page number in The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West 1911-1917 (ed. Jane Marcus; Virago and Viking: 1982), unless noted otherwise. 2 The term “suffragette” usually refers to members of the suffrage movement who embraced militant and activist strategies for securing women the franchise. The term “suffragist” refers to members of the women’s suffrage movement more generally. As West’s writings on the suffrage movement primarily consider the militant wings of the movement, I have adopted “suffragette” as the term of choice in this chapter.

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Henry Asquith and Home Secretary Richard McKenna, West reviews the previous year of Davison’s life—a year in which Davison had been incarcerated for her pro-suffrage activism, force fed while hunger striking in prison, and subsequently manhandled by doctors and prison warders (cf. Davison, qtd. in West, “Life of Emily Davison” 179-181).

West laments, “That is the kind of life to which we dedicate our best and kindest and wittiest women; we take it for granted that they shall spend their kindness and their wits in ugly scuffles in dark cells” (179). West continues, observing that

If we subjected the most infamous woman, expert in murder, to such

mental and physical torture, we should make ourselves criminals. And this

woman [Davison] was guiltless of any crime. Such torture, so unprovoked,

would have turned most of us to the devising of more bitter violence

against the Government. (180)

As West testifies, Davison’s treatment during her incarceration is not tantamount to torture, but is torture. Here, West points out the cruel treatment that the British government inflicts on the women seeking social and political equality, women with

Davison’s attributes of “kindness,” “wits,” and her determined intelligence; such a reality proves demoralizing for women and stultifying to British society. It is little wonder, West notes, that Davison should plan her extreme stunt at a national spectacle like the Epsom

Derby, just a year after the repeated force-feedings:

For twelve months she was brooding over this plan to close a bloody war

by giving her body to death. We belittle her if we think that her great

decision can have made that decision to die an easy one; her last months

before death must have been a time of great agony. To a woman of such

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quick senses life must have been very dear, and the abandonment of it a

horror which we, who are still alive and mean to remain so, who have not

even had the pluck to unseat the Government and shake it into sense,

cannot conceive. (181)

West’s prose in this eulogy bristles with agitation, desperation, and an acute awareness of suffragettes’ disillusionment with the Asquith government. (This agitation, of course, is compounded by the lack of voting rights, which prevents women from “unseat[ing] the

Government and shak[ing] it into sense.”) But a greater, cultural tragedy arises from

Davison’s death: it does not conclude the “bloody war” to earn equal voting rights for women, but instead represents a broader cultural and political program for undermining women’s rights. The Asquith government’s response to the practice of force feeding suffragettes telegraphs much of the entrenched resistance to providing women with the franchise: in the spring of 1913, Parliament passed a piece of legislation branded by suffragettes as the “Cat and Mouse Act,” which allowed the government to release hunger-striking prisoners for convalescence, only to immediately re-imprison them when they had sufficiently recovered. The legislation granted the state the power to toy with suffragettes like a cat tormenting its prey—hence the law’s soubriquet. The potential for a relentless cycle of physical and psychological torture threatened the suffrage movement and its aspiration for an inclusive Britain. More horrifying (as West notes in no small number of her reviews and newspaper articles) is that this legislation was the brainchild of the Liberal party, which once counted amongst its ranks John Stuart Mill, the author of a text central to the suffragettes’ ideology: The Subjection of Women (1861, rev. 1869).

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The young West is representative of the suffragettes’ disillusionment with the promises of Liberal politicians and their utilitarian ideology. Of course, in a context contemporaneous to West’s, the disillusionment narrative is an academic and curricular commonplace. I refer here to accepted notions about the Great War’s influence on British letters. This conventional narrative posits that the atrocities of the Great War irrupted an idyllic, pastoral aesthetic passed from the Romantics, through Tennyson, and to early pro-war writers like Rupert Brooke; war poets like Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen,

Ivor Gurney, Robert Graves, and (albeit at a much later date) David Jones conceptualized the political imaginary’s disillusionment with nationalism, the aestheticized vision of the

British home, and myths of British exceptionalism via irony, metrical innovations, and formal fragmentation. The theory presumes that, by virtue of its slighter form, poetry possessed an immediacy that rendered it capable of portraying war’s horrors. (The theory also implies that prose, which requires more time to compose, could neither properly replicate nor expediently disseminate the war’s imagery.) Early defenders of the war poets, including Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, popularized this assumption in their book reviews and commentaries, and later Modernist critics and editors fortified this position by insisting—as Cyril Connolly does in Enemies of Promise (1938)—that there was a paucity of quality prose emerging during and immediately after the Great War. Likewise,

Connolly glosses another critical fiction (namely, the masculinity of Great War literature) that has coupled itself to the disillusionment narrative in literature classrooms: “Those who had been fooled the most were the young men who had fought and survived the war; the literature of that time in consequence is predominately masculine, revolving around a theme which may be called ‘The Clever Young Man and the Dirty Deal’” (42).

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Cementing this for good (and for ill) is recent scholarship’s tendency to dilute Paul

Fussell’s remarkable study of Great War writing, aesthetics, and cultural memory, The

Great War and Modern Memory (1975): instead of recognizing the breadth of textual productions—poems, diaries, correspondences, and propaganda—in Fussell’s argument, many critical accounts and literature primers cast the male war poets as the key voices in the period’s disillusionment narrative.

The consequence of contemporary literary criticism’s adherence to a narrow version of the disillusionment narrative of Great War literature is threefold. First, it occludes domestic affairs, in particular the suffrage movement, and implies that the systemic perpetuation of such human rights violations is subordinate to the war effort.

Secondly, it posits a false relationship between events, substituting chronology for causality and thereby inventing a version of history in which war-induced disillusionment prompted social change, including the eventual extension of partial voting rights to women in the Representation of the People Act 1918. Thirdly, it neglects the cultural value and contributions of other genres during the Great War—in particular, forms of literary and social criticism. This chapter intervenes by arguing that Rebecca West’s early journalism and book reviews, written throughout the 1910s, present a broader and more capacious disillusionment narrative than that authorized by the conventional Great War narrative. In particular, her reviews and reportage in The Freewoman (1911-1912), The

New Freewoman (1912-1913), and The Daily News (1915-1917) cultivate a feminist counter-discourse that challenges the prevailing gender biases and anti-suffrage politics of the late-Edwardian and Great War periods. In doing so, her nonfiction enables a critique of the dominant narrative, that the Great War was a key influence on Modernist

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writers’ aesthetic and political views; this chapter argues for an expansive reading of literature in the 1910s, one that views feminist writings like West’s as inextricable from broader discussions of Great War literature. This chapter reads West’s feminism and the

Great War narrative through a critical frame that analyzes West’s poetics and the impact of fin de siècle and Edwardian feminisms, while critiquing historicism (and consequently, discipline formation) through theorists including Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault,

Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, amongst others.

Rather than embracing the war effort or naysaying its consequences, the feminism manifested in West’s reviews forces Britain’s political imaginary to recognize the systemic barriers that precluded Edwardian women from the franchise, the right to demonstrate, participation in government, quality education, equal pay for equal work, and legal and economic safeguards for unwed mothers—issues that (with the notable exception of the franchise) remain salient in the United Kingdom and the United States.

This chapter contributes to a resurgence in scholarship on West’s early writings, which was began over three decades ago with Jane Marcus’s publication of West’s nonfiction in The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-1917 (1982). Further, this chapter builds on recent work on West’s early publications by critics including Lyn

Pykett, Bernard Schweizer, Laura Cowan, and others, who contend that West’s writings represent an overlooked and undervalued contribution to early-twentieth-century feminism and the development of Modernist literary techniques. While these scholars argue for renewed attention to West, I contend that her early nonfiction provides an indispensible supplement3 to critical discussions of Britain’s political record during the

3 I use the word “supplement” in Derrida’s multivalent sense of the term. For Derrida, a supplement does not replace another critical orthodoxy; instead, the supplement expands upon a

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Great War. To present this claim, I begin by utilizing critiques of historicism to illustrate how the disillusionment narrative became codified as a critical (and a curricular) truth. I then provide an account of wartime feminism and suffrage activity, highlighting key points in the women’s rights movement and indicating the need to infuse our critical and pedagogical positions with a feminist counter-memory of the Great War years. Following this contextualization, this chapter argues that West’s early writings, including journalism and fiction, posit a feminist narrative that runs contrary to, yet contemporaneously with, the now-standard, masculine disillusionment narrative; she does so by advancing women’s rights as an issue inseparable from the war effort, and she further does so by presenting these positions in prose, and not poetry. The chapter then concludes with close readings of West’s book reviews published in the 1915 to 1917 editions of A.G.

Gardiner’s socialist newspaper, The Daily News; these explications reveal the persistence of women’s disillusionment with the political imaginary and implicate the Great War disillusionment narrative in the perpetuation of gender-based inequality.

2. The Great War, Disillusionment, and Critical Orthodoxies

“A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past—which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all moments.” –Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (254)

“For the modern imagination that last summer [of 1914] has assumed the status of a permanent symbol for anything innocently but irrevocably lost. [. . .] Out of the world of summer, 1914, marched a unique

knowledge base, completes its, and suggests further gaps in the scholarship. The critical power of a supplement resides in its ability to de-center dominant discourses and suggest the need for further study. As Derrida writes, “One cannot determine the center and exhaust totalization because the sign which replaces the center, which supplements it, taking the center’s place in its absence—this sign is added, occurs as a surplus, as a supplement. The movement of signification adds something, which results in the fact that there is always more, but this addition is a floating one because it comes to perform a vicarious function, to supplement a lack on the part of the signified” (“Structure, Sign, and Play” 289).

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generation. It believed in Progress and Art and in no way doubted the benignity even of technology. The word machine was not yet invariably coupled with the word gun.” –Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (24)

Historicism and Exclusivity

West’s early writings are acutely aware of the intersections between Britain’s mistreatment of women and the complexities of Great War politics. However, subsequent scholarship has lacked West’s sense of equanimity. While she cleaved women’s issues to wartime politics, subsequent studies have often divided these two issues. Many studies of

Edwardian feminism conclude with the outbreak of war in 1914, when the Women’s

Social and Political Union (along with several other prominent pro-suffrage organizations) halted their lobbying efforts and directed its membership to support the war. This pause fragmented the feminist movement and shifted contemporary attention to the plights of the soldiers—a move that lends itself to scholarship’s future prioritization of the male war poets and their trauma. In the following decades, in popular and academic writing alike, historicist thinking has pursued this lead and, in championing the disillusionment narrative, foreclosed other possibilities for understanding the home front during the Great War years through the activism of suffragettes and other defenders of minority interests. That is, historicist thought has led scholars to champion the war poets and the disillusionment narrative to define the Great War years—an understandable occurrence, given the explanatory power and vision of poets like Owen and Sassoon.

Here, a critique of historicism will allow us to see how this narrative has become regnant in our classrooms and literature anthologies, at the expense of such informative counter- discourses as West’s feminism.

Assessing historicism as a critical methodology via a close reading of Nietzsche’s

Genealogy of Morals, Michel Foucault hypothesizes a spectrum of disciplinary practices

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that includes genealogy, traditional history, and effective history. Each method on this line requires a distinct attitude toward and use of documentary evidence. Genealogy

“demands relentless erudition” in the compiling of source materials, so as to produce a palimpsest of concurrent and disparate events (“Nietzsche” 140, 142). Traditional history is a rule- and law-based process of exploitation and manipulation, which, for Foucault, presents itself as a teleological narrative of “emergence” (“Nietzsche” 148-150); traditional history is “a single drama” in which “[t]he domination of certain men over others leads to the differentiation of values; class domination generates the idea of liberty; and the forceful appropriation of things necessary to survival and the imposition of a duration not intrinsic to them account for the origin of logic” (“Nietzsche” 150, cf.

148-152). Foucault provides the shortest, yet most salient, definition for effective history:

“The body is molded by a great many distinct regimes; [. . .] it constructs resistances.

‘Effective’ history differs from traditional history in being without constants”

(“Nietzsche” 153).

Of these definitions in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History,” Foucault’s glosses of traditional and effective history are most crucial in considering literary studies’ standard narrative about Great War literature. (I will return to “effective history” later in this section of the chapter.) Traditional history resonates with Walter Benjamin’s contention in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940, 1950) that, for the sake of our own peace of mind, we entwine history with the concept of redemption, thereby producing a teleological narrative of salvation and improvement:

The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to

redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the

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present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation

that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a

power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.

(“Theses” 254)

This construction of history, appropriately dubbed “Messianic time,” presupposes a particular outcome and forces an interpretation of the extant archive that corroborates

(and reifies) that desired conclusion. Benjamin further illustrates the manner in which historicism manipulates narratives of progress to elide difference, thereby preventing social and political moves toward inclusivity: “The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogenous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself” (“Theses” 261).

Benjamin insists that “[h]istoricism gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past”

(“Theses” 262), and it does so by creating a version of events that, uncomplicated by counter-discourses, seems to lead ineluctably to a pre-ordained conclusion. The resulting historical narrative is stagnant, detached from the dynamic of the cultural and political exchanges between nations on the global stage.4 Building on Benjamin’s theory, Benedict

4 Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) provides an interesting counterpoint to Benjamin’s notion of Messianic or homogenous, empty time. An early work of political psychology, Civilization and Its Discontents supplements this reading of historicism’s shortcomings. Freud suggests that the egos of nations cannot be understood without considering the conflicts between countries and their populaces: “In consequence of this primary hostility of human beings, civilized society is perpetually threatened with disintegration” (104). For Freud, the Messianic history would be an idyll, one always already threatened by nations’ recourse to violence. Freud’s understanding of aggression is the political counterpart to the existential violence that Foucault detects in traditional history. “Civilization has to use its utmost efforts in order to set limits to man’s aggressive instincts and to hold the manifestations of them in check by physical reaction-formations,” Freud writes, but “[i]n spite of every effort, these endeavours of civilization have not so far achieved very much” (105).

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Anderson in Imagined Communities associates Messianic or homogenous time with the dual rise of nationalism and the modern nation-state. Nationalism inspires its adherents to read and write history as the account of the nation-state’s inexorable rise to power, prophesying the nation’s primacy regardless of archival evidence to the contrary. Novels and newspapers become the site of a “mass ceremony,” which Anderson claims is inherently “paradoxical”: “It [i.e., reading] is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion” (35). By creating this fictional sense of community, readership proliferates the common values of a dominant, historicist narrative and inculcates those in the political imaginary as the accepted narrative of the nation’s rise to dominance, as well as such individual events as the Great

War. (Even the war poets’ disillusionment narrative, by compelling British society to

“advance” beyond Victorian norms and by arguing for the war’s role in inspiring

Modernist experimentation, contributes to this version of history.) Resulting in what

Anderson labels a state-sanctioned or “official nationalism,”5 this cultural narrative produces an ideology that limits citizenship to those who embrace this narrative and subscribe to the nation’s theories of governance, its myths of its own prestige, and the authority of its various branches or agencies of government.

Historicism—whether we view it as Foucault’s “traditional history” or

Benjamin’s “homogenous, empty time”—creates exclusive communities and, in doing so,

5 In chapter six of Imagined Communities, entitled “Official Nationalism and Imperialism,” Anderson continues to build on Benjamin’s frameworks of “homogenous” and “Messianic” time. Here, Anderson contends that official nationalism perpetuates the teleology of dynastic lineages, which enables the modern nation-state to trace its history along a single, unifying narrative thread.

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creates hierarchies that discourage counter-discourses. Gender, race, and class are often the basis of these stratifications, and historicism manipulates these categories to advance an ideological fantasy. Historicism’s exclusionary tendency manifests itself in works like

John Stuart Mill’s “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties” (1860), in which Mill maligns

Middle Eastern and South Asian nations as “rude state[s]” trapped in “the childhood of society”; according to Mill, these populations are equipped with “rude minds, which live wholly immersed in outward things, and have never, either from choice or a force they could not resist, turned themselves to the contemplation of the world within” (93, 94). In

Provincializing Europe (2000), Dipesh Chakrabarty likens Mill’s historicism, in particular, as “a waiting room” where non-Western peoples are relegated until their civilizations develop beyond Mill’s vision of the “childhood of society” (Chakrabarty 8).

Anticipating this critique, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes in A Critique of

Postcolonial Reason (1999) that the power and privilege authorized by a historicist worldview perpetuates imperialist propaganda—emblematic of this is her famous barb that British accounts of colonialism are about “white men saving brown women from brown men” (278). (That is, Spivak’s formula allows us to see how historicism not only excludes, but disempowers by denying a voice to, minority and subaltern populations— women, LGBTQ persons, and people of color, amongst others.6)

6 Spivak presents this claim in the famous section of A Critique originally published as “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg’s edited collection Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (U of Illinois P, 1988). Considering the practice of sati/suttee, in which Hindu widows sacrifice themselves on their deceased husband’s funeral pyres, Spivak argues that the subalternity of Hindu women manifests itself in the epistemic conflict between British and male Hindu attitudes toward sati. That is, as Spivak notes, the tension over Sati is between the British attitude (“generally understood as a case of ‘White men saving brown women from brown men’”) and male, Hindu defenders of sati (“the Indian nativist statement, a parody of the nostalgia for lost origins: ‘The women wanted to die,’ still being advanced”). Spivak further contends that an examination of these women, silenced by a semantic trick, creates a “domestic

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Narrowly construed, historicism cultivates a set of rules that perpetuates class stratification, gender-based discrimination, and a hierarchy of nations. For Foucault, historicism’s rules masquerade as the “rule of law” in which “humanity installs each of its violences [. . .] and thus proceeds from domination to domination” (“Nietzsche” 151).

Furthermore, historicism creates the illusion of authority and impartiality, which validates and proliferates the prejudices in this mode of thought:

This relationship of domination is no more a “relationship” than the place

where it occurs is a place; and, precisely for this reason, it is fixed,

throughout its history, in rituals, in meticulous procedures that impose

rights and obligations. It establishes marks of its power and engraves

memories on things and even within bodies. (“Nietzsche” 150)

Foucault’s diction—“enrgav[ing] memories [. . .] within bodies”—recalls not Nietzsche but the apparatus in Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” (1919), a machine that tattoos prisoners with the names of their crimes. Like historicism, Kafka’s machine detects a singular facet of an individual’s identity and canvases the body with that detail, until no other features are distinguishable.

Historicism and the Disillusionment Narrative Derived from Fussell’s Great War and

Modern Memory

When historicism guides a discipline like literary criticism, that Kafka-esque violence becomes inflicted on texts, on their represented populations, and then on the political imaginary, via the narratives that become regnant in our classrooms and scholarship. For literary criticism, the explanatory power of historicism resides in its

confusion” that enables scholars and activists to criticize and transgress the limits of the rule of law and social norms. See Spivak chapter three, “History,” specifically 286-299.

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unique capacity to convince readers of causality. The appearance of cause-and-effect proves useful as a pedagogical tool by creating for students a logical interplay between a curated list of literary texts and historical events. In turn, this produces instructional paradigms that control textual selections in anthologies and university course catalogues.

For instance, recent editions of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and The

Longman Anthology of British Literature model their coverage of the Great War after

Paul Fussell’s influential The Great War and Modern Memory,7 beginning with Thomas

Hardy’s poetry and progressing to soldier-poets such as Rupert Brooke, Siegfried

Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen. The goal is to illustrate literature’s transition from pastoral poems and a patriotic mood to an awareness of trauma and disillusionment, which soldiers experienced as a consequence of trench warfare. In particular, Sassoon’s and

Owen’s gritty portrayal of combat may seem incongruent with historicism’s stock narrative pattern, in which all events lead toward progress or improvement; however, the recurrence of Fussell’s model in literature anthologies and scholarship creates a teleology in which the atrocities of trench warfare, military technology, and shellshock lead inexorably to the experiments of literary Modernism.

This is not to discount Fussell’s project; indeed, The Great War and Modern

Memory remains a provocative and insightful book, illustrating the effects of the war on

Victorian and Edwardian aesthetic sensibilities. Moreover, the literature anthologies’ homage to Fussell diminishes his project by divorcing the war poets from two key contexts which govern Fussell’s project: firstly, analysis of the war poets’ lifestyles in the

7 While both anthologies cleave to Fussell’s understanding of the poets and poetry of the Great War, The Longman Anthology does situate the Great War alongside Irish Independence. Rebecca West is notably absent from the Norton, while the Longman includes her novella “Indissoluble Matrimony,” alongside other pieces published in Wyndham Lewis’s Blast.

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pre-war context of Victorian and Edwardian England and, secondly, the vast archive of additional texts (diaries, correspondences, reviews, journalism, state propaganda, and so on). It is because Fussell reads the war poets as inseparable from their Victorian and

Edwardian upbringings that the first chapter begins with Lytton Strachey’s review of

Thomas Hardy’s Satires of Circumstance (1914). Here, Fussell seizes on Strachey’s apocalyptic diction—“His language was dark. He spoke of events remorseless, terrible, gruesome” (3, emphasis in original)—to offer a provocative thesis about Hardy’s poems:

As if by uncanny foresight, Hardy’s volume offers a medium for

perceiving the events of the war just beginning. It does so by establishing

a terrible irony as the appropriate interpretive means. Although in these

poems the killer is tuberculosis rather than the machine gun, their

ambience of mortal irony is one with which, in the next four years, the

British will become wholly familiar. (4)

It is also a mortal irony with which students and scholars of British literature have become intimately familiar: irony and its cousins—sarcasm, satire, irreverence—have become skeleton keys for unlocking Modernist texts. Yet, Fussell does not claim that

Hardy invented irony, or that irony is the sole device dictating the function of British literature in the 1910s and 1920s; Wayne C. Booth and D.A. Miller, for instance, suggest that the novels of Jane Austen offer one of the first modern (i.e., intentional, sustained, and subtle) uses of irony as a literary device.8 Instead, Fussell indicates only one of many

8 Booth opens the first chapter of A Rhetoric of Irony (1974) through a close reading of an exchange between Elizabeth and Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (1813), which teaches us that “every reader learns that some statements cannot be understood without rejecting what they seem to say” (1). In Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style (2003), Miller contends that Austen’s irony complements many of the other techniques that she introduced in the modern novel, including indirect free style as a means of fluctuating between narrative and interior monologue. (James

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trends that would recur in a single cross-section of literature: textual hints that encourage readers to search lines, tropes, and juxtaposed images for irony and reversal. Further,

Fussell’s analysis resists the historical trajectory that anthologies and curricula impose on his interpretation of Hardy, the war poets, and literary Modernism. His glosses interpret textual moments as palimpsests, beautifully evoked in his assessment of sunrises and sunsets in Great War poetry. Fussell assembles a complicated frame that pins together

John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, the Celtic Twilight,9 Evelyn Waugh’s diaries and his

1955 novel Officers and Gentlemen, and the letters, notebooks, and diaries of two British soldiers, S.S. Horsley and William Ratcliffe. Observing that, “by the time the war began, sunrise and sunset had become fully freighted with implicit aesthetic and moral meaning”

(55), Fussell weaves an intertextual, cross-generational reading of the war poets and implies that the poem cannot be read without the context of its precedents (i.e., Ruskin, the Celtic Twilight) and its antecedents (i.e., the opening passage of Waugh’s Officers and Gentlemen):

Emphasized as objects of close attention by the daily rituals of stand-to,

sanctified as morally meaningful by the long tradition of Ruskin, these

sunrises and sunsets, already a staple of prewar Georgian poetry and the

literature of the Celtic “Twilight,” move to the very center of English

poetry of the Great War. They are its constant atmosphere and its special

Wood presents a similar claim in How Fiction Works [2008].) Even here, these thinkers do not claim that Austen invented irony or indirect free style: she merely refined them into a form that proved instructive to nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists. 9 Also referred to as the Irish Literary Revival, the Celtic Twilight’s principal productions included W.B. Yeats’s poetry, J.M. Synge’s plays, and their management, along with Lady Augusta Gregory, of the Abbey Theatre. For an introduction to the politics and ideology of the Celtic Twilight, see Ann Saddlemyer’s collection of letters between the Abbey Theatre’s management, Theatre Business: The Correspondence of the First Abbey Theatre Directors William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, and J.M. Synge (Penn State UP, 1982).

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symbolic method. The most sophisticated poem of the war, Isaac

Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches,” undertakes its quiet

meditative ironies at morning stand-to. The most representative—I

suppose I mean the most frequently anthologized—is Wilfred Owen’s

“Anthem for Doomed Youth,” which darkens to this “period” dying fall:

“And each slow dusk a drawing-room of blinds.” (55-56)

In the subsequent pages, Fussell continues to read the sunrise/sunset trope as a site of textual intersection especial to the Great War poets, a ploy that “signals a constant reaching out towards traditional significance” and that “reveals an attempt to make some sense of the war in relation to inherited tradition” (57).

Fussell’s implicit disdain for anthologies as a “representation” is at odds with the subsequent dilution of his complex framework in the Norton and Longman anthologies, but more remarkable is his claim that the deployment of the sunrise/sunset trope is war poetry’s “constant atmosphere and its very special symbolic method.” It is not, as Fussell wryly demonstrates, a set of symbols or techniques that chart the history of twentieth- century British literature: “We can see this clearly by contrasting some of the memorable poems of the Second War, when there were few static stand-to’s [at dawn and dusk]—it is hard to stand-to at 20,000 feet—and when dawn and dusk had become largely de- ritualized, no longer automatically portentous” (57). In a maneuver useful to formalists and deconstructionists alike, Fussell implies that the textual evidence itself suggests its intersections and latent interpretive possibilities; as such, Fussell resists the impulse to historicize (in the sense of Foucault’s traditional history) and allows for alternative literary and cultural narratives.

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Historicism, the Disillusionment Narrative, and the Rise of a Critical Orthodoxy

Fussell’s playfulness with dogma and tradition has not, however, prevented a single component of his work—namely, the contribution of the war poets—from becoming reduced to a critical orthodoxy. In part, this occurs because the overwhelming body of literature produced during the Great War encourages such a myopic look at the period, and the war poets and Modernist writers provide lenses through which readers and educators can witness the atrocities of war. Abiding by Fussell’s Hardy-to-

Modernism trajectory, the standard narrative begins with pastoral poems that praise

England and the valor of warfare: Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” and pro-war poems by women writers, like Jessie Pope’s “War Girls” and May Wedderburn Cannan’s “Rouen,” feature as exemplars of pre-war idealism.10 The poets and poetry of the war’s early days had an effect not unlike such propaganda as the posters encouraging young men to enlist in Lord Kitchener’s Army; the most famous of these posters carried an illustration Lord

Kitchener, jabbing his finger toward the reader and exhorting him to enlist (see fig. 2.1).

Other posters played on traditional gender roles, with one example (fig. 2.2) illustrating a pair of women and a little boy looking through a window as a regiment marches on— clearly displaying a cultural attitude that women, domesticity, and the family required martial protection.

10 This model proves problematic for a number of reasons, the least of which is its disregard for the opportunities women secured because of the war effort. The formulation promotes the misunderstanding that women supported the war out of a patriotism that blinded them to the traumatizing consequences of battle. This continues to misshape our pedagogy, as anthologies frequently trumpet Owen’s original intention to dedicate “Dulce et Decorum Est” to Jessie Pope as an attack on her principles, as well as Sassoon’s diatribe against domesticity in “The Glory of Women.” However, a number of women writers including West and Woolf produced essays, reviews, and novels that countermand this misprision. Below, in section 4 of this chapter, I implicitly address the consequences of this assumption by comparing Siegfried Sassoon’s “The Glory of Women” to West’s reportage on women laborers in munitions factories in “Hands That War.”

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As the war progressed and irony became “the appropriate interpretive means,” poetry shed the ebullient diction of the pastoral tradition and adopted irony as a means of disillusioning the reading public. In the preface to his posthumously published Poems

(1920), Wilfred Owen notes that “English poetry is not yet fit to speak of [heroes],” and that the value of poetry resides in the caution it provides to posterity: “Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful” (31). Owen’s candor in poems like “Dulce et Decorum Est” and “Anthem for Doomed Youth” render the soldier-poet the mouthpiece of disillusionment; furthermore, Owen’s formal experimentation with alliteration, consonance, and slant rhymes (amongst other techniques) binds formal and aesthetic qualities to the delivery of poetic truth. Book reviewers applied this formula to other soldier-poets, like Owen’s mentor Siegfried Sassoon. Reviewing Sassoon’s The Old

Huntsman and Other Poems (1917) for the Times Literary Supplement, Virginia Woolf lauds Sassoon as such a “true poet” for his capacity to convey the war to readers at the home front: “What Mr. Sassoon has felt to be the most horrible and sordid experiences in the world he makes us feel to be so in a measure which no other poet of war has achieved” (120).11

11 Conversely, Woolf’s 1918 review of The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke: With a Memoir reads Brooke and his poetry as the embodiment of the pastoral, pre-war ideal; Woolf brilliantly turns his death into a manifestation of Britain’s disillusionment with those pre-war values: “No one could have doubted that as soon as war broke out he would go without hesitation to enlist. His death and burial on the Greek island, which ‘must ever be shining with his glory that we buried there,’ was in harmony with his physical splendor and with the generous warmth of his spirit. But to imagine him entombed, however nobly and fitly, apart from our interests and passions still seems impossibly incongruous with what we remember of his inquisitive eagerness about life, his response to every side of it, and his complex power [. . .] of testing and enjoying, of suffering and taking with the utmost sharpness the impression of everything that came his way” (281).

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Fig. 2.1: Kitchener’s Army Poster

Fig. 2.2: “Women of Britain Say—‘Go!’” poster

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Poetry’s power to provoke a reader’s empathy with soldier-poets initiates a process in which the public also experiences disillusionment—a finding that did not escape the war poets’ contemporaries. Several Modernist techniques link the necessity of their methods, either explicitly or implicitly, to post-war life in Britain; T.S. Eliot’s review of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923), vouches for the “mythical method” and insists that “[i]t is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (483). In his introduction to the 1963 Faber paperback edition of

David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937), Eliot further stresses that “[u]nderstanding begins in the sensibility: we must have the experience before we attempt to explore the sources of the work itself” (viii). Eliot’s obsession with method and sensibility extends from the work of Owen’s Preface and Woolf’s reviews: Eliot hints toward the need not simply to remember but to re-live, thereby entrenching the experiences of war in the public’s cultural memory.12 The legacy of this commitment to remember the war lingers still, often in spectral forms. A.S. Byatt remarks that contemporary and postmodern literatures continue to resurrect these writers’ experiences of war. Byatt claims the following about

Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy (1991-1995), which features amongst its characters the army psychologist W.H.R. Rivers and Sassoon: “The novel [i.e., 1991’s Regeneration] is haunted, not as the Second World War ones [. . .] are, by projections of the far future, but by the presence of returning ghosts, most of whom were sons who would not be fathers”

(31). The echoes of Shakespeare’s Hamlet—and, by extension, Joyce’s Stephan Dedalus

12 For trauma theorists, this enables the conveyance of narratives across generations as if the younger generation were experiencing the events firsthand. This can either compel or paralyze subsequent generations. Cf. Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory.”

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in Ulysses—reverberate through Byatt’s remark: the Great War’s narrative is one of disillusioned young men, struggling to replace the comforting paternalism of an irretrievable past.

As Stephen Heathorn argues in “The Mnemonic Turn in the Cultural

Historiography of Britain’s Great War” (2005), the Great War is unique in its fixation on memory as a form of cultural experience: the war becomes the origin point for all subsequent events, which results in the creation of various myths about historical and literary events (q.v. 1103-1105). Arguing that Fussell’s The Great War and Modern

Memory is the “inspiration” for the standard account of Modernism’s emergence,

Heathorn trenchantly appraises Fussell’s legacy:

Many subsequent studies of the Great War’s literary memory have

complicated, but not displaced, Fussell’s essential argument: that the

terrors of the trenches created a profound caesura in culture between what

existed before the fighting and what could exist after; between combatants

and non-combatants; between Edwardian decadence and post-war

disillusionment. (1106)

A brief sampling of the field indicates the authority that Heathorn ascribes to Fussell’s work. Allen J. Frantzen’s Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War (2003)13 reads the idealism of the war’s early soldier-poets as extending not from Victorian literary aesthetics, but to a Victorian re-creation of the chivalric ideal in medieval and

13 Frantzen’s work and current behaviors in academe signal a continued prejudice against women writers, scholars, and activists. In January 2016, a Chronicle of Higher Education feature pilloried Frantzen for comments that he wrote in late 2015 on his personal blog about the “Feminist Fog,” which he claimed was producing “anti-male propaganda.” Medieval and early modern studies have widely—and rightly—criticized Frantzen’s remarks, which replicate the systemic sexism in academic disciplines.

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early modern literatures; by focusing solely on the Great War, Frantzen’s work implies that disillusionment would also influence our cultural perception of chivalric tropes.

Allyson Booth’s incisive Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space between

Modernism and the First World War (1996) performs an interdisciplinary study of

Modernism, and, unlike Frantzen, explicitly contends that Modernism and its reinvention of forms cannot be disengaged from the Great War. “What emerges from this crossing of discourses,” she writes, “is an expansive conception of modernism—literary and architectural—that displays itself as deeply engaged in a broader Great War culture” (4).

Even Janet S.K. Watson’s Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First

World War in Britain (2004) fails to dislodge the critical orthodoxy ushered in by

Fussell’s volume; she argues that the disillusionment narrative is a protean creature, one whose shape morphs as subsequent generations adopt that version of history in order to study (and make sense of) the immediate consequences of the war. The scholarship hews closely to this standard version of literary history, which suggests a need for new interpretive possibilities and closer scrutiny of the archives available in Great War studies. Feminism, and Rebecca West’s book reviews in particular, provide such a way to read Great War literature against the grain.

3. “Strange Battlefields”: Feminism as a Counter-Discourse and Counter-Memory during the Great War Years

“Suffragettes are often denied the justice that one expects from civilisation, such as a fair trial in an open court and police protection from assault. They receive surprises; such as the acquittal of the Pwllheli gentleman on a charge of assaulting a suffragette at Llanystumdwy in face of the sworn evidence of a police constable and several unbiased witnesses. But while they are irritated and obstructed in all these minor ways the woman’s movement wins triumphs in strange battlefields far enough from the political citadel it is attacking.” –Rebecca West, “The Divorce Commission: A Report That Will Not Become Law” (124)

From Historicism to an Inclusive, Feminist Narrative of the War Years

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Some studies have sought to revise our understanding of Great War writings, albeit usually within the parameters of Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory: that is, even when considering the contributions of non-white soldiers and poets, these studies emphasize the contributions of male writers and their connection to a nation-state.

In considering the role of empire in the war effort, postcolonial criticism has proven especially effective in highlighting how Europe’s nations relied upon their colonies and peripheries. For instance, the volume Race, Empire, and First World War Writing (2011), edited by Santanu Das, indicates the broader need to incorporate the experiences of colonized peoples into critical accounts of the Great War. However, as Heathorn observes, such revisions to our standard history of the Great War perpetuate the core tenets of the disillusionment narrative at the expense of domestic (in the political sense) affairs:

Thus over the past two decades, exactly how the Great War came to be

remembered has become a key scholarly concern, eclipsing (or in some

cases, incorporating) earlier preoccupations with war guilt and its political

consequences, or the impact of the conflict on social structure and the

status of women. (1104)

Heathorn’s claim about memory and the war correlates with a recurring theme in

Foucault’s analyses of history, discourses, archives, law, and the power of the state: drawing their authority from the public’s tacit acceptance, government agents and institutions seek to perpetuate their control by re-appropriating or undercutting potential counter-narratives and the development of counter-discourses in the public sphere. It is this circumstance that compels Roderick Ferguson, in The Reorder of Things, to read

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archives as “social formations” and, further, that these are bound in a “mode of power [. .

.] that would ingest various revolutionary formations and, in fact, build its strategies around their dissection” (19, 22).

Of course, individual actors can contribute to the “ingestion” and “dissection” to which Ferguson refers. Arguably, such an instance occurred in 1914 when Emmeline

Pankhurst, at the outbreak of war with Germany, ordered the WSPU to halt its political endeavors, including lobbying for the franchise. With no “sanctioned”14 suffrage movement or canvassing activities to oppose Asquith and the Liberal government’s war effort, Britain’s feminist movement surrendered much of its political capital and found some of its objectives at once co-opted and undercut. (Exemplary of this is West’s Daily

Chronicle article, “Hands That War,” about the women laborers in the cordite factory: they are underpaid, under-protected, and socially undervalued by a paternalist state and industrialists, despite having achieved a feminist objective of the right to their own labor in Britain’s economy. I further analyze this article in section four of this chapter.)

Further, Ferguson’s observation about the archive’s ability to manipulate counter- discourses has broader ramifications on revolutionary ideologies. As Susan Kingsley

Kent indicates in her comparison of pre- and post-war feminism, the Great War’s interruption allowed the resurgence of Victorian ideals of masculinity and femininity:

Prewar feminists had vigorously attacked the notion of separate [i.e.,

gendered] spheres and the medical and scientific discourses about gender

and sexuality upon which those spheres rested. Many feminists after the

14 By “sanctioned,” I refer to official programs or objectives authorized by an institution, be it a governmental agency or a non-governmental organization like the WSPU. Pankhurst’s mandate to place the suffrage movement on hiatus did not, as Rebecca West amply demonstrates, eliminate the need for feminist writers and activists.

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First World War, by contrast, pursued a program that championed rather

than challenged the prevailing ideas about masculinity and femininity that

appeared in the literature of psychoanalysis and sexology. (“Life and

Death” 155)15

Of course, these are but a few examples, which contextualize via wartime feminism Ferguson’s broader claim: that counter-discourses encounter numerous impediments when rivaling state power, a publicly accepted archive, and orthodox values. Resisting the power of a social formation as authoritative as the standard Great

War thesis requires an awareness of how such narratives receive approbation from public and academic outlets alike, thereby perpetuating themselves in public discourse—in the media, in the classroom, in our conferences. By attuning our sensibility toward those histories and peoples elided from the archive, literary critics can disturb the unified narrative presented in its texts, discourses, and artifacts.16 “[A] knowledge of history,”

15 As Kent notes, this formation re-inscribes the notion of different “spheres” for women and men, and it does so—as for the late Victorians—in an often pseudo-scientific language. The divide created a distinction between pre-war (or “old” or “egalitarian”) feminists and the “new” feminists. The conceptual split came with both a benefit and a consequence: it employed gender difference to advance “radically new—and seemingly liberating—views of women as human beings with sexual identities,” but it nonetheless placed the “new” feminists “in a conceptual bind that trapped women in ‘traditional’ domestic and maternal roles, and limited their ability to advocate equality and justice for women” (155, q.v. 154-156). 16 Another of Foucault’s works is instructive on this point. In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Foucault considers disciplinarity and discourses as a constructive act, in which scholarship, history, and presumptions collude in order to form a seemingly unassailable and accurate base of knowledge. It is through this means that disciplines and discourses resist alternative perspectives. Pressuring this, however, reveals this system of knowledge to be a rule- based structure that perpetuates the existence of discourses as “monuments” or institutions: “Archaeology tries to define not the thoughts, representations, images, themes, or preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in discourses; but those discourses themselves, those discourses as practices obeying certain rules. It does not treat a discourse as document, as a sign of something else, as an element that ought to be transparent, but whose unfortunate opacity must often be pierced if one is to reach at last the depth of the essential in the place in which it is held in reserve; it is concerned with discourse in its own volume, as a monument. It is not an interpretive

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Foucault observes, “easily disintegrates this unity, depicts its wavering course, locates its moments of strength and weakness, and defines its oscillating reign” (“Nietzsche” 153).

This disruption enables the formation of what Foucault dubs a “counter-memory,” created through three techniques that oppose the methods of traditional history. The first two techniques, parody and dissociation, countermand mimesis and tradition, respectively, while the third technique, the “sacrifice” of assumptions, challenges the cultural acceptance of traditional history as a form of truth-telling. Together, these techniques

imply a use of history that severs its connection to memory, its

metaphysical and anthropological model, and constructs a counter-

memory—a transformation of history into a totally different form of time.

(“Nietzsche” 160)

Earlier, I introduced Foucault’s term for a methodology oppositional to traditional history: effective history. The ability to form counter-memories (and to therefore disrupt or destabilize dominant narratives) is one of the prime functions of effective history; counter-memories allow for the creation of more inclusive understandings of historical periods (as opposed to singular events) by sidestepping traditional history’s concerns with linearity and causality. Because it is “without [the] constraints” of traditional history’s penchant to dominate and exclude, effective history “should become a differential knowledge of energies and failings, heights and degenerations, poisons and antidotes. Its task is to become a curative science” (“Nietzsche” 156).

discipline. It does not seek another, better-hidden discourse. It refuses to be ‘allegorical’” (138- 139). Cf. Derrida, Archive Fever (1995).

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The intention, then, is restorative: to rejuvenate the archive through attention to those peripheral populations that, as J. Jack Halberstam trenchantly observes throughout

The Queer Art of Failure (2011), are frequently cast as “losers” and “failures” because of their refusal to comply with the dominant social norms and political programs. (As

Benjamin writes more brusquely, historicists “empathize” only with the “victors,” which is incompatible with an effective history: “all rulers are heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victor inevitably benefits the rulers” [“Theses”

256].) Counter-memories regenerate the narratives of “losers” and “failures,” and they splinter traditional history not through a direct interrogation of the archive, but through a lateral move that reveals, interprets, and celebrates actors and populations elided from the primary archive. By way of demonstration, I will illustrate how these methods might operate in scrutinizing the poetry of the Great War. A direct interrogation of this archive would propose as its intervention women’s contribution to the production of our cultural memory of the Great War, and its archive would consist of—to parallel Fussell’s use of soldiers’ literary and private writings—war-focused poems, diaries, letters, and journalism by women writers. Such a study, while fruitful, would likely corroborate the disillusionment thesis and, in doing so, replicate the gender-based prejudices that have compelled critics of West’s novella The Return of the Soldier (1918) to read Kitty

Baldry’s depression as imitative of her husband’s shellshock.

On the other hand, a lateral move would seek out feminism’s political projects, aspirations, and impediments during 1914 to 1918, in lieu of enfolding the feminist project into the morass of Great War scholarship. Further, this enterprise would recognize

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and accommodate multiple forms and histories of feminism.17 The lateral move is inherently deconstructive. Firstly, it decenters the unifying event (in this case, the Great

War) from a place of privileged analysis; in doing so, this move resists the impulse to substitute another event, issue, or controversy in that void. Secondly, it necessitates a perspectival shift and recognition that history is a set of practices and structures, designed to reinforce and privilege certain beliefs.18 Lastly, the lateral move seeks reparation for the micro-aggressions repeatedly inflicted when these overlooked populations have been elided from or dismissed by traditional histories.

Feminism as a Counter-Memory/Discourse—Utopian Feminism

In presenting feminist thought in 1914 to 1918 as a counter-memory (and, therefore, counter-discourse) to the Great War narrative, it is critical to recognize that these terms nod toward multiple forms of feminism and not a holistic political movement.

As Jill Liddington argues, the following query is crucial in any discussion of the era’s feminist ideologies:

[P]recisely whose memories are being drawn upon and whose history is

being honoured? In Edwardian Britain, the Votes for Women campaign

was both complex and controversial: the suffragette WSPU broadly shared

the same values as the suffragist National Union of Women’s Suffrage

17 This is the reason why, in this chapter, I have avoided such traditional designations as first- and second-wave feminism. While these terms are useful in differentiating between many (but not all) pre- and postwar strains of feminist thought, they inaccurately suggest a unified movement with an agreed upon set of political goals. As Sandra Stanley Holton observes, “[N]ew stories [. . .] continue to re-emerge, and the past always proves too untidy for those histories we have already made. Such new stories often challenge existing frameworks, or render uncertain the categories and concepts we apply, or suggest new lines of enquiry” (244). 18 Q.v. Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.”

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Societies (NUWSS), but strategies and tactics—militant suffragette and

constitutional suffragist—were often markedly distinct. (196)19

Rebecca West’s nonfiction provides ample opportunities to perform the lateral move I described above, as well as the recognition for which Liddington calls. A young woman of twenty-two years when Britain declared war on Germany, her attitudes toward different branches of Britain’s feminist and suffrage movements manifests itself as a dynamic play of ideas in her critical nonfiction. Further, West’s duties as a fiction writer, journalist, and editor introduced her to such figures as Dora Marsden, Harriet Shaw

Weaver, and the Pankhursts, while involving her in many of early Modernism’s most influential periodicals and little magazines. The impressionable yet ardent, incisive—and still relevant—feminism of the young Rebecca West embodies and negotiates, amongst others, the utopian and militant elements of the movement.20 The differences between these approaches reside not in their desired outcomes (i.e., legal protections for women, educational programs, universal suffrage), but in their philosophy and methodology.

The utopian impulse is a remnant of Edwardian social theories, and when it manifests in West’s writing, it evinces the influence of figures like H.G. Wells, George

Bernard Shaw, and Arnold Bennett.21 Inextricable from the socialists’ (and, more precisely, the Fabian Society’s) belief in a government that controls and deploys resources for the public welfare, this idealism prompted calls for social welfare programs

19 See the distinction between the terms “suffragette” and “suffragist” in fn 2, above. 20 Here, one could insert another element of the period’s feminism: democratic or egalitarian. However, I have elected not to discuss this attribute here. Firstly, the period’s feminists did not disagree on the question of universal suffrage as a fundamental human right. Secondly, they all contended that the vote and the right to participation in Britain’s public sphere were inalienable from full citizenship. 21 This remains true in her fiction of the period, as well: the taut prose of The Return of the Soldier and the novella’s scrutiny of indicators of class difference (i.e., clothing, houses, vehicles, dining habits, etc.) nods to Wells’s influence, in particular.

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to provide women, particularly stigmatized populations like unwed mothers, with financial and legal safeguards. Wells, for instance, contributed a letter entitled

“Endowment and Freewomen” to the 7 March 1912 issue of Dora Marsden’s The

Freewoman22; here, Wells advocates for “an adequate subsistence for the child and for the mother so far as the child needs her. ‘How much’ depends upon the standard of life prevailing in the community and upon the resources available” (301). For Wells in particular, government involvement was essential in de-stigmatizing working women and unwed mothers; only state support for the relevant agencies and programs can alter the public’s perception of social welfare as “a social service, a collective need, [which] we want to sustain” (301).

Welfare for unwed mothers and their children, however, was not the sole social program and legal protection sought by the Fabians and their ilk. In its idealist form,

Edwardian feminism advanced a belief in the government’s and industry’s moral imperative to provide further opportunities for women to participate in the nation’s public sphere as workers, artists, and intellectuals. In this context, Gillian Sutherland’s In Search of the New Freewoman (2015) investigates the opportunities that formal education and pedagogy provided women. Assessing the careers of over twenty Edwardian women teachers, Sutherland concludes that women’s work in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods was incompatible with extant domestic norms: “the conventional wisdom was plain: ladies either married or pursued paid employment. A tiny 3% of the Oxford

22 The same issue includes a review by West of Harley Granville-Barker’s The Madras House (1909), though her register is more pessimistic than Wells’s: she opens the review with the claim that “[h]umanity is a little lost dog looking for a master” (19). Nonetheless, her review engages directly in sexual politics, conflating the new woman’s independence with the right to sexual pleasure, with a confidence that neither Wells nor his fellow Fabians could muster: “So life ought to be a struggle of desire towards adventures whose nobility will fertilise the soul and lead to the conception of new, glorious things” (21).

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women students remained in paid employment after marriage; proportions in the

Cambridge sample were similar” (34). As Sutherland further points out, the institution of marriage impeded the employment of women; only widowhood and collaboration with one’s husband provided sustainable means of re-entering the work force as educators

(38). Regardless, marriage and motherhood’s status as ideals—perceived as “the crowning achievement of a woman’s life,” as Kent writes (Sex and Suffrage 80)— continued to dictate many women’s behaviors; the marriage question also nettled feminists of the period, as the institution was viewed alternately as compatible with women’s freedom and as a contributor to “the notion of the meek, submissive, powerless woman” (Kent, Sex and Suffrage 81, q.v. ch. 3).

These difficulties were not lost on the female members of the Fabian Society, and these activists sought a resolution. Edith Morley, who joined the Fabians in 1906 and joined the society’s executive board in 1914, made the question of women’s employment the primary concern of the Fabian Society’s Women’s Group. To that end, Morley collaborated with female educators, doctors, and professionals to prepare a thorough study of women’s labor, with the intention of transforming public awareness of women’s labor; George Routledge and Sons published the study in 1914 under the title Women

Workers in Seven Professions. In her foreword to the volume, Morley observes,

We hope and believe that this book may help to arouse deeper interest in

the vigour and energy with which professional women are now striving to

make good their economic position; that it may serve to enlist active

sympathy with their struggle against the special difficulties and hindrances

which beset them, and make plain the value to society of the work they

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can do. We also believe that the information here brought together may be

useful in helping young women to choose and prepare for their life-work.

(xiv)

The foreword’s impassioned plea for recognition hardly secures a political change, and it betrays an idealistic belief that a publication, by broadening perception of women’s labor in the public sphere, will alter social and political attitudes towards women’s contributions. The study’s detachment from personal narratives and its use of statistics to reflect on social conditions, however, recalls a critique that West puts forward in her

Daily News review of a later Fabian’s publication, B.L. Hutchins’s Women in Modern

Industry (1915): “But Miss Hutchins has not escaped from the Fabian tradition of studying social problems from London,” West chides. “The Fabians send out forms from

Tothill Street as Noah sent out doves from the ark, and the form is almost as limited in its power of expression as the dove. It can do little but bring back a statistic in its beak”

(“The Woman Worker” 307). Equally valid against Morley’s ambitious project, West’s charge against Hutchins reminds her contemporaries and scholars of the class privileges that enabled wealthy, London women to pursue these initiatives while lower- and middle- class women labored in industries, school systems, and so on.23

The fault in utopian feminism, however, resides in its tendency to re-inscribe traditional roles for women in its rhetoric; the utopian current in feminist thought often

23 A similar objection occurs during West’s earlier work with Dora Marsden on The Freewoman: “West, though capable of sounding much like Marsden in her youth (she was only 18 when she joined the staff of The Freewoman), arguing, for example, that feminism was ‘something more than a fight for the vote…it is a fight for a place in the sun,’ never lost sight of the importance of votes for women. She objected, however, to the fact that the women’s movement was largely controlled by the middle classes. Coming from a more privileged background than Marsden, it was to West’s credit that she recognized the vulnerability of working-class women” (Fernihough 65).

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harkens back to domestic duties reduced or eliminated by modernization and mechanization, and texts therefore express a yearning for a restoration of women’s domestic productivity. As Lucy Delap writes,

“Utopian thinking” of one kind or another was central to the feminist

movement since it had become widely accepted in advanced circles that

the cause of women’s discontent and malaise was the ending of her

productive role in the household. Text after text lamented the usurpation

of women from their central and productive (imagined) role as the home-

maker, weaver, baker, and brewer. (217).

In practice, the utopians’ concern over marriage and women’s right to labor collapsed the language of the domestic (i.e., private) and public spheres, as in the case of the “marriage contract.” As Kent contends, feminists appropriated this commercial language to infuse their arguments with public significance and “to demonstrate that the private sphere of women—the realm of generosity, compassion, kindness, and decency—had been corrupted by the intrusion of the public, male sphere, symbolized for Victorians by greed, competition, exploitation, and lust” (Sex and Suffrage 85). Not even Morley’s interest in women educators was divorced from this fundamental concern with marriage, motherhood, and domesticity; the Fabian Society Women’s Group couched its call for the employment of women educators not in terms of economic and political equality, but in terms that “[m]any secondary teachers will welcome [. . .] that they need not abandon either the career they have chosen or the prospect of their fullest development as women”

(Morley 37; cf. Sutherland 39). The “fullest development as women” is a euphemism that meshes employment, marriage, motherhood, and sexual desire—consequently implying

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that domesticity is necessary to validate women’s ambitions, their pleasures, and their participation in the public sphere. The failure of idealism, as Fernihough writes about

Dora Marsden’s project in The Freewoman, is that its desire for women’s freedom can become inverted, “seeing the freewoman as the very abstract notion of freedom she ought to escape, divorced from the realities of social and political life” (57). That is, the utopian strain of Edwardian feminism detaches its aspiration for freedom from the extant public institutions that enforced women’s social roles.

Feminism as a Counter-Memory/Discourse—Militant Feminism

Indeed, the militant feminists of this era continued to suffer from those sociopolitical realities, which reinforced patriarchal authority and the legal subjugation of women. Generally, scholars of feminism in the late-Victorian, Edwardian, and Great War eras use the term “militant” generously: the label denotes direct activism in the forms of non-violence (e.g., hunger strikes while imprisoned) and public acts of arson, vandalism, and destruction (cf. Holton 244; Mayhall 3-4, 87; and Smith 34-37). Regardless of the type of activism, however, the state’s retaliation against militant feminists was swift and brutal, as evinced in the case of suffragette and schoolteacher Emily Wilding Davison.

Imprisoned eight times for her activism, Davison performed hunger strikes on seven of those occasions and, as a consequence, was forcibly fed forty-seven times across her stays in jail (West, “Life of Emily Davison” 179). The possibility that a suffragette could die in custody had prompted the course of force-feedings, but a negative public reaction to the practice consternated Prime Minister Asquith and Home Secretary Richard

McKenna. In response, Parliament passed the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill

Health) Act 1913, legislation that permitted the Home Secretary to release a prisoner for

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convalescence if the person’s ill health was “due in whole or in part to the prisoner’s own conduct in prison” (“Prisoners” 1). However, the act merely suspended the prisoner’s sentence, and a prisoner would return to jail immediately upon regaining her health. As

West observes, “The general tendency of the House of Commons during the debate on forcible feeding was to snatch at any remedy that will keep the suffragettes alive” (“Isles of the Wicked” 166)—without considering the cycle of violence that the legislation perpetrated against women.

Parliament’s solution proved to be a legally sanctioned circle of torture, an abuse of legislative, judicial, and penal power that warrants the label “Kafka-esque.” A militant feminist engaging in civil disobedience like Davison, West writes, could find herself entrapped in a vicious cycle: a hunger strike in jail, which leads to a carefully watched recovery, which leads to a return to jail, etc. The act authorized the state to bat around suffragettes, like a cat toying with its prey; the socialist and feminist presses dubbed the legislation the “Cat and Mouse Act” for this reason.24 “It was,” West wrote in 1933, “one of the most unlovely expedients that the English legislature has ever invented, and it is ironical that it should have been the work of a Liberal government” (“Reed of Steel”

255). In retaliation to the act, the WSPU’s newspaper, The Suffragette, released a provocative advert, exhorting voters to oust the Liberal government with the depiction of a fierce cat clamping a woman between his teeth; intentional or not, the cat’s prominent brow and drowsy eyes resemble Asquith’s visage (see fig. 2.3 and 2.4). After

24 In a later article, West reports that the Scots resisted the enforcement of the Cat and Mouse Act by refusing to inform the police of the whereabouts of any individual released to convalesce under the terms of the law. See “Dog-wagging” 192-195.

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Davison’s death25 and the release of Emmeline Pankhurst under the act, West called for a massive, non-violent demonstration to demand immediate change:

We dare not bear the double guilt of the death of Emily Davison and of

Mrs. Pankhurst. [. . .] We must drop this masochist attitude of long-

suffering, which is the mistake of the revolutionary movements, and show

ourselves an angry England. We must have a demonstration in Trafalgar

Square that will tell an astonished government that positively in the

beginning of the twentieth century, in the centre of civilisation, after seven

years of liberal government, there are still people who object to the murder

of women. [. . .] And if the government dislikes the resulting state of chaos

it can give Votes for Women. (“Life of Emily Davison” 182)

West’s impassioned call for a non-violent (yet chaos-inducing) demonstration underscores her fundamental belief that feminists required a united effort in order to change the Liberal government’s policy—an ideal she shared with her socialist and

Fabian influences. But ideals alone could not alter public policy, nor could the civil disobedience of individual, non-violent militant suffragettes. West leveled a similar critique at the violent militants’ isolated acts of arson and destruction; she chided them for the inefficacy of their attacks to shift public opinion. In a 28 February 1913 article for

The Clarion, West reflects on the WSPU-backed arson of a tea-house in Kew Gardens about ten days earlier, which occurred in response to the Speaker’s comments on the introduction of the Parliamentary Franchise (Women) Bill to the House of Commons

25 Davison’s death is usually interpreted as a self-sacrificial demonstration at the 4 June 1913 Epsom Derby. Davison succeeded in entering the racetrack and grabbing the bridle of Anmer, King George V’s horse; the horse collided with her, and she died four days later from a fractured skull. West wrote that Davison’s action was more heroic than dying in prison from a hunger strike, or from finding herself ensnarled in the torturous cycle created by the Cat and Mouse Act.

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(West, “Mildness” 158).26 West’s response sympathizes with the militant suffragettes’ desire for action, while registering concern about Emmeline Pankhurst’s power to command violence and rebuking the militants for the timidity of the gesture. Observing

“that whatever Mrs. Pankhurst desired in the way of vengeance would come to pass,”

West wryly notes that the attack is disproportionate to Parliament’s “villainy”: “One wonders why active young women,” she muses, “should destroy beautiful flowers when the Albert Memorial still stands in Kensington Gardens and there is gunpowder in the land” (“Mildness” 158). She comments that the suffragettes should be “glad to have enemies they can strike on the mouth,” but their selection of targets lacks symbolic resonance and instead seemed an attack on the aesthetic ideals associated with the cultivated space of the English garden: “I have no idea why the public should suddenly show a maudlin affection, such as they usually reserve for the royal family, for the late tea-house” (“Mildness” 159).

Fig. 2.3 (left): WSPU’s Cat & Mouse Act Poster; Fig. 2.4 (right): Henry Herbert Asquith. Compare Asquith’s brow to that of the cat in fig. 2.3.

26 The bill in question was the third attempt to introduce women’s franchise legislation in as many years. Like its predecessors, it was defeated in Parliament. Women would only receive partial voting rights after the conclusion of the Great War.

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While West chided the militants for their quickness to violence and their choice of targets, the militants nonetheless proved essential to stemming government infringement of women’s liberties, often under the guise of “protecting” soldiers and public morality.

“Each of these attempts to suspend civil liberties in the name of protecting the troops from exposure to prostitution,” Laura E. Nym Mayhall writes, “was met with opposition from suffragettes” (127-128). In a distillation of the militant suffragettes’ wartime activities, Mayhall demonstrates that most suffrage organizations resisted attempts by

Asquith’s government to reinstate provisions of the Contagious Diseases Act (viz., those that authorized police officers to determine who was or was not a prostitute) in 1914 legislation granting emergency wartime powers. Further, the suffragettes opposed the

1916 and 1917 efforts by Lloyd George’s government to pass a Criminal Law

Amendment Bill that would have required the compulsory notification of venereal diseases to the office of Home Secretary Herbert Samuel. Throughout the war, the suffragettes also challenged the government’s attempts to control morality through limiting women’s rights to enter public houses or purchase alcohol, and their demonstrations likewise forced the government to provide better financial compensation to soldiers, as well as survivors’ benefits to their dependents (q.v. Mayhall 127-134).

Despite these common objectives, ideological conflicts between suffrage organizations instigated fragmentation within the movement, and the war itself undermined many militants’ desire for radical political change (Holton 207, 210). One example, previously mentioned, is Emmeline Pankhurst’s decision to halt the WSPU’s suffrage campaigning and divert attention to recruitment drives for the military and industrial labor; the decision splintered the WSPU’s leadership, which spurred members

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to join competitors like the United Suffragists or to create separate organizations, like

Rose LaMartine Yates’s Independent Suffragettes (Holton 211; Mayhall 120-122). The

Liberal governments under Asquith and Lloyd George were eager to capitalize on any dissension and coaxed suffragettes to adopt more democratic principles. The Liberal party had become “increasingly concerned both at the defections among its own women supporters, and the stalemate over franchise reform which had arisen from its failure to deal with the issue of women’s suffrage” (Holton 207). It is the nature of power, as

Foucault and Ferguson have both observed, to manipulate such moments of weakness in a “revolutionary formation”—and the Liberal government viewed the contentions between suffrage organizations as a means of dodging that question until after the war.

4. Rebecca West’s Early Writings and Feminism during the Great War

“There is a journalistic curse of Eve. The woman who writes is always given anti-feminist books to review.” –Rebecca West, “Another Book Which Ought Not to Have Been Written” (223)

Rebecca West, The Freewoman, and The New Freewoman

In the absence of unified political action, the critic and the journalist can nonetheless cultivate the discourse of resistance—a clarion voice that West adopted even in her earliest journalism and book reviews. By the time Britain declared war against

Germany on 4 August 1914, the twenty-two-year-old Rebecca West had already published journalism and book reviews in periodicals affiliated with socialist politics, the women’s suffrage movement, and the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). In the pages of Dora Marsden’s short-lived The Freewoman and its successor The New

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Freewoman,27 West pilloried novelists for insensitive and stereotypical portrayals of women. On 19 September 1912, for instance, she criticized H.G. Wells for his novel

Marriage (1912), in which the protagonist “Marjorie, somewhat impertinently, uses her own worthlessness as the basis of a generalisation as to the worthlessness of all women”

(67). The attack against Wells was a calculated risk; as J.R. Hammond observes, Wells had been an ally and avid reader of The Freewoman since its founding, and further, “[h]e had been an occasional contributor to the paper [. . .] and had aired his views on ‘the

Endowment of Motherhood’ and on the suffragette question in its pages” (50). Drubbing

Wells as “the old maid among novelists” and the purveyor of “slow, spinterish gossip” with a “Cranford-like charm” proved an unexpected boon and curse for West (64): her vitriol prompted a fascinated Wells to write in response, thereby earning her an early champion and initiating the romantic entanglement that would dominate the next twenty years of her life.28

27 Analysis of Dora Marsden’s Freewoman and New Freewoman offer another means of expanding our history of British Modernism. In its 1913 to 1914 run, The New Freewoman transitioned Marsden’s editorial from a “feminist” to a “humanist” worldview, one shaped by Harriet Shaw Weaver and Ezra Pound’s aesthetic principles. In 1914, Marsden and company would re-envision The New Freewoman and release The Egoist—the publication that would introduce the reading public to chapters of such milestone works as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Scholars including Lucy Delap (The Feminist Avant-Garde, 2007), Mark S. Morrison (The Public Face of Modernism, 2001), and Bruce Clarke (Dora Marsden and Early Modernism, 1996) have made the case for reading first-wave feminism and the suffrage movement as inseparable from the literary vision of Modernism in the 1910s. 28 Indeed, West never escaped the consequences of her affair with Wells; their relationship continued to veer between passion and antagonism during the remaining decades of Wells’s life. The affair continues to incite scholarly interest; this is best evinced by Gordon Norton Ray and J.R. Hammond, who both published books entitled H.G. Wells and Rebecca West (Ray, 1974; Hammond, 1991). Further, the affair placed West in a position she had not imagined occupying: after defending unwed mothers in her journalism and reviews, West became one herself, when she gave birth to hers and Wells’s son, Anthony, in 1914. Anthony Panther West Fairfield would aggravate his mother long after Wells died in 1946; Anthony wrote several autobiographical novels, including the thinly veiled roman á clef Heritage (1955, pub. 1984), which portrayed the mother figure (modeled after West) as neglectful and cruel. While other scholars have filtered

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West did not reserve this aggressive style of her reviews for novelists alone.

When reviewing nonfiction, she attacked essayists and political theorists for misappropriating biology and the social sciences to advance a determinist ideology that excluded women from participation in the public sphere. In a 12 October 1912 review of three books, West attacks the systemic barriers that preclude women for recognition of their “genius,” and her review intimates this through a coy opening line: “The worst of being a feminist is that one has no evidence,” West writes, because social conditions coalesce to preserve male privilege by denying women the vote and equal pay (70).

However, West’s service to Marsden’s publications was not limited to her scathing reviews. After The Freewoman collapsed because distributors, including W.H. Smith and

Sons, boycotted the periodical (Clarke 3, 91), West proved instrumental in securing

Harriet Shaw Weaver’s financial support for the newspaper’s re-launch as The New

Freewoman. West also served the publication as an assistant editor, until infighting between Marsden and the literary editor, Ezra Pound, created an environment that West found toxic (cf. Gibb 50-53, Glendenning 39-41).

“Where War and Grace Are Closest Linked”: West’s Journalism in The Clarion and

Daily Chronicle

West filled the various voids in her tenure at The Freewoman and The New

Freewoman in the pages of Robert Blatchford’s socialist newspaper The Clarion, amongst other publications. In these newspapers, West’s voice became representative of feminists’ disillusionment with the politics of their day, and she did so by publicly chastising the movement’s opponents: “Clearly,” Anne Fernihough observes, “Blatchford

their readings of West’s early writings through the affair with Wells, this chapter silently responds by reading West’s work in the complex sociopolitical contexts of the 1910s.

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saw West as a freewoman of sorts, having been impressed by an article she had written in

Marsden’s magazine attacking the notorious anti-feminist, Sir Almroth Wright” (65).29

West would later upbraid Wright’s The Unexpurgated Case against Woman Suffrage

(1913) in the pages of The Clarion, where she directly associates Wright’s anti-suffrage politics with the disillusionment of British feminists: “I glory in the idea of Sir Almroth

Wright’s uneasy ghost,” West declaims, “explaining matters to the startled and dismayed members of the Women’s Local Government Board Society” (“Lynch Law” 211).

West’s journalism reveals such public appraisals of anti-suffrage sentiment to be an extension of the ideology championed by Britain’s elected officials; further, she connects the platforms and activities of Liberal politicians to women’s dissatisfaction with their dearth of civil liberties. In other issues of The Clarion, West reported on such matters as Prime Minister Henry Herbert Asquith’s public talks, the pay and treatment of women in British industry, and the political tactics of the suffragettes. Asquith was, for

West, “that type of Englishman who [. . .] must in early youth have heard his Aunt

Matilda say that the dear child bore a striking resemblance to Napoleon and has lived up to it ever since by cultivating general insensitiveness towards life” (“Christmas

Shopping” 137). West likewise branded then-Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd

George as an instigator of “sex-antagonism,” and she further claimed that suffragettes were too “tactful” in not articulating “the plain truth [at Lloyd George’s birthday

29 Wright exemplifies the co-option of scientific discourses into political discourse, and his position on suffrage further reveals that progressive science does not always advance a progressive political agenda. West’s critique of Wright highlights his appropriation of scientific reasoning to supply a determinist argument against women’s suffrage. Wright was forward thinking as a biologist and immunologist—he supported vaccine programs and the practice of preventative medical care—but his knowledge served the interests of Britain’s male-dominated sociopolitical system.

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celebration]—that it is galling for women to be cheated out of their citizenship by such an inefficient person as Mr. Lloyd George” (“An Orgy” 97).

Her politics in The Clarion were barbed yet sympathetic, particularly when championing populations maligned and stigmatized by politicians, laws, and social norms. For instance, a 24 January 1913 article entitled “Socialists and Feminism: The

Fate of the Limited Amendment”30 attacks Home Secretary Reginald McKenna for preventing the pregnant Florence Seymour from marrying the child’s father, the convicted murderer John Williams (cf. R v Williams (John) 8 Cr App R 133). While observing that McKenna’s supporters were all men and that his decision would deny

Seymour’s child “a sum of money [. . .] bequeathed to John Williams, or [. . .] to his legitimate heirs,” West also sketches the ramifications of this decision on Seymour’s reputation, employment prospects, and childrearing:

If he [i.e., McKenna] required any further conviction, let him consider that

a servant who has an illegitimate child loses her situation, that the Board

of Education suspends the certificate of a schoolmistress, that no hospital

nurse or typist would expect for a second to keep her position. [. . .] Thus

the child has been deprived of a start in life. And the social stigma is an

indefensible but quite real consequence of the degradation of the

unmarried mother. The child sees its mother shunned by the godly,

30 This article follows an earlier piece for The Clarion, entitled “The Prig in Power: Whom God Hath Joined McKenna Puts Asunder.” Here, West lashes at McKenna for refusing John Williams the right to marry Florence Seymour. West describes the decision as “villainy,” “an impudent misuse of the powers which his high office in the State gave him,” and “torture” (139). West’s interpretation stems not from any sympathy with Williams, but from concern for Seymour and her unborn child. By blocking the marriage, McKenna denies the child its rightful inheritance under Williams’s will, and he further strips Seymour and the child of the legal protections afforded by the institution of marriage.

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associates itself with her disgrace and grows up to think of itself as a

pariah. The recklessness and solitude of such a position is shown by the

fact that a large proportion of the unmarried mothers in workhouse wards

are themselves illegitimate. For these reasons, I repeat McKenna has

wantonly used his power to inflict serious economic and social damage

upon a woman and child absolutely outside his jurisdiction. (146-147)

West’s vigorous defense of Seymour was not motivated by personal circumstances, but by her faith in the inherent equality of the sexes: the article pre-dates by twenty-three months the birth of West’s son with H.G. Wells, Anthony.31

“Now,” West wrote in 1912, “it is true that the feminist movement will not reach victory until it is more of a working-class movement” (“Labour Party’s Treachery” 108).

That is, West pins feminism’s success to the ubiquitous presence of labor in Britain’s political imaginary. In writing about women’s work before and during the Great War,

West charts industrial labor as one opportunity for women to contend for equal rights: labor, for West, removes women from the isolation of traditionally maternal and domestic roles within the household by placing them in factories, plants, and service jobs in which their contributions were indispensible to Britain’s social welfare.

This political agenda merges with West’s poetics during the Great War. For West, feminism, aesthetics, and literary criticism did not exist in isolation from, but in conjunction with, the British war effort. In a 1916 article for the Daily Chronicle, West

31 Following Anthony’s birth, West “was still playing according to H.G.’s farcical script—this time, representing her as Mrs. Rebecca West whose husband was a roving journalist” (Rollyson 58). Despite the ruse, West collided with many obstacles that faced other unwed mothers, exacerbated by Wells’s order that West keep their affair a closely guarded secret. Her relationships with her mother and sisters grew distant, and West later viewed several of these relatives—especially her sister Lettie and her mother—“as someone who had ruined her life” (Glendenning 53).

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evokes the paradox of aesthetic beauty and the violence of war in a depiction of women’s labor in cordite factories. Describing the scene as one “with hard colours like a German toy-landscape” (“Hands That War” 380), West reflects on the strange intimacy between domesticity, labor, industrialism, and the materiel of war:

When one is made to put on rubber over-shoes before entering a hut it

might be the precaution of a pernickety housewife concerned about her

floors, although actually it is to prevent the grit on one’s outdoor shoes

igniting a stray scrap of cordite and sending oneself and the hut up to the

skies in a column of flame. And there is something distinctly domestic in

the character of almost every process [in manufacturing cordite]. [. . .] The

brown cordite paste itself looks as if it might turn into pleasant honey-

cakes; an inviting appearance that has brought gastritis to more than one

unwise worker.

But how deceptive this semblance of normal life is; what extraordinary

work this is for women and how extraordinarily they are doing it, is made

manifest in a certain row of huts where the cordite is being pressed

through wire mesh. This, in all the world, must be the place where war and

grace are closest linked. (“Hands That War” 381)

In this passage, West’s diction and figurative language reveal the entwinement of domesticity and war in Britain’s political imaginary. The “pernickety housewife concerned about her floors” and the delectable simile comparing cordite to honey-cakes bestows on labor and the war effort the habits of hearth and home. A woman’s attention to cleanliness and domesticity, as in Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House (1854,

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1862), are as crucial in maintaining the order of the home as they are in assuring safe work conditions in the cordite factory.

Yet, West revises the Victorian trope by insisting upon the necessity of recognizing women’s work and intellectual contributions in both the private and public spheres; she subtly insinuates her description of the cordite plant’s employees and their attire, noting that their khaki-and-scarlet uniforms are not “fancy dress, but a military uniform” (“Hands That War” 382). In doing so, she anticipates the issue that drives some

Great War lyrics like Siegfried Sassoon’s poem “Glory of Women” (1918): women’s role in arming Europe’s militaries with weaponry and ideology. Like other Great War writers,

West draws the parallel between the war effort at home and the conditions of the trenches; however, her imagery anticipates and counters the ironic conflation of domesticity and war that marks Sassoon’s “Glory of Women,” from Counter-attack and

Other Poems (1918). Sassoon imagines mothers and wives who “listen with delight / By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled,” and he further associates this pleasure with the shame that afflicted shell-shocked soldiers:

You can’t believe that British troops “retire”

When hell’s last horror broke them, and they run,

Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood.

O German mother dreaming by the fire,

While you are knitting socks to send your son

His face is trodden in the mud. (32)

Sassoon’s poem juxtaposes the imagery of trench warfare—the “dirt,” “danger,” and the dead solider “trodden in the mud”—with the domestic image of the knitting mother.

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These lines, which conclude the poem and complete its ironic reversal, morph innocent pleasures (listening to tales, knitting, etc.) into acts of war. For Sassoon, irony reveals that domesticity is nothing more than a dark adjunct to—and an excuse for—the human costs of war.

Not so for Rebecca West. Her journalism opposes Sassoon’s conclusion that domesticity blindly contributes to the atrocities of the Great War; West views home-front activity—including industrial labor, suffrage activities, and traditional domestic labor— as inseparable from the war effort. Like Sassoon, her imagery in the 1916 Daily

Chronicle article conflates domesticity and the war effort, but West’s ironic juxtaposition de-centers the notion of separate private and public spheres. Her ironic juxtapositions— domesticity and national policy, aesthetic beauty and war—lend themselves readily to deconstructionist scrutiny: West’s article casts women’s labor as central to Britain’s political objectives in the Great War. Doing so undercuts the male privilege that fuels the

Liberal government’s ideology and Sassoon’s jeremiad against women’s social roles: by excluding women from political agency and the franchise, this ideology alienates a demographic essential in winning the war.

Extending this logic, West writes that these female factory workers ought to receive the same recognition as soldiers, but she possesses no illusions about the Asquith

(and, later, Lloyd George) government’s reluctance to recognize women:

And there are two things about the cordite village which the State ought

never to forget, and which ought to be impressed upon the public mind by

the bestowal of military rank upon the girls. First of all there is the cold

fact that they face more danger than any soldier on home defence has

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since the beginning of the war. And secondly, there is the fact—and one

wishes it could be expressed in terms of the saving of English and the

losing of German life—that it is because of this army of cheerful and

disciplined workers that this cordite factory has been able to increase its

output since the beginning of the war by something over 1,500 per cent.

(“Hands That War” 383)

West’s diction manufactures a “semblance of normal life” in which domesticity telegraphs the complex interplay of women’s issues and the war. Dubbing the cordite plant a “village” and then insisting on the reward of military ranks for women,32 she elevates women’s work in the community and home to the same esteem as public service in the British Expeditionary Force, Parliament, or the civil service. Through this subtle conflation, West elaborates one of the central tenets of her ideology: that equal rights for women are inseparable from Britain’s success in both domestic and foreign policy, and that equitable treatment for women is necessary in the war effort.

The Ideals of West’s Journalism and Reviews in “Indissoluble Marriage,” Henry James, and The Return of the Soldier

Her long-form fiction and nonfiction from this period echo the ideals championed in her journalism and reviews. Her contribution to the first edition of Wyndham Lewis’s

Blast (1914), the novella “Indissoluble Marriage,” dramatizes her brand of socialist

32 Other Modernist, feminist writers would likely object to West’s assertion that such masculine trappings as military ranks and academic regalia advance the feminist cause. Virginia Woolf, in Three Guineas (1938), reads such uniforms as symbols of a male privilege that excludes women from membership in various societies, orders, and political or professional offices. Woolf writes that a uniform “not only covers nakedness, gratifies vanity, and creates pleasure for the eye, but it serves to advertise the social, professional, or intellectual standing of the wearer,” therefore underscoring the constructs of class- and gender-based hierarchies (26). Further, these uniforms are an element of exclusionary ceremonies that men “perform [. . .] always together, always in step, and always in the uniform proper to the man and the occasion” (24).

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feminism through the conflict of interest between George Silverton’s “orthodox

Radicalism” and his wife Evadne’s “passionate Socialism” (102). With as much skill as the bumbling Mr. Verloc in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), George pursues

Evadne because he believes that she is conducting an affair with the socialist organizer and parliamentary candidate Stephen Longton. Intending to confront Evadne with evidence of the liaison, George instead finds her innocent and discovers that social conventions create a state of being unnatural for women:

In the material world she [i.e., Evadne] had a thousand times been

defeated into making prudent reservations and practising unnatural

docilities. But in the world of thought she had maintained unfalteringly her

masterfulness in spite of the strong yearning of her temperament towards

voluptuous surrenders. (111)

Although the prose of “Indissoluble Marriage” lacks the finesse of her journalism,

West succeeds in depicting the incongruity between women’s intelligence and the opportunities afforded them in the public sphere. The same attention to female characters propels her argument in Henry James (1916), a book-length review essay of James’s oeuvre that disguises itself as a biography.33 To present her case, West returns to the interest in aesthetic beauty that captivated her in the cordite factory. Writing on The

Portrait of a Lady (1881), West claims that beauty (and Isobel Archer’s beauty, in particular) provides the novel with what Aristotle would term “unity of purpose”: “The

Portrait of a Lady is given a superficial unity by the beauty of its heroine; on the first

33 West’s Henry James is sparse on biographical information. Reading his career chronologically, the book presents a biography of the author’s work, but hardly of the author himself. West’s reading of James’s novels more closely resembles today’s long-form review essay, although West scholarship refers to the book as a biographical account of James’s life.

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reading one cannot take one’s eyes off the clear gaze that Isobel Archer levels at life”

(67). The novel’s aesthetic beauty enables James to create a complicated and inconsistent heroine, and for West, this creates the novel’s object lesson about the social conditioning and norms that manipulate and misshape women’s judgment. In a 1918 review for The

North American Review, Lawrence Gilman credits West with securing James’s posthumous reputation: West succeeds in “selecting an entirely new and unprepared destination for him [i.e., James]—one, to be sure, that was full of light and peace and beauty, but not at all in the location that had been so meticulously planned by the predecessors of Miss West” (765).

It is through this gloss of Henry James that Gilman alights on West’s major work of the 1910s: her novella The Return of the Soldier (1918). “Light and peace and beauty” are also the chief characteristics that Gilman discovers at play in this early, major fiction; as such, what West wrote of the strange beauty in the cordite village could also describe

The Return of the Soldier, perhaps her most eloquent portrayal of the intersection of war’s atrocities and aesthetic beauty. Written between 1916 and 1917, the novel recounts the convalescence of Captain Chris Baldry, whose shellshock has manifested itself as a severe case of amnesia; Chris has forgotten—amongst other events—his marriage to

Kitty and the death of their frail son. As a result of his trauma, Chris’s mind has regressed to a moment fifteen years in the past, when his passions were attached to Margaret Grey, an innkeeper’s daughter. With a climactic scene in which a psychoanalyst restores

Chris’s psyche and therefore guarantees his return to the Western Front, The Return of the Soldier experiments with a plot structure in which the analyst fails to address the underlying causes of the analysand’s shellshock and therefore contributes to his present

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or future anguish. In the closing passage, the novel’s narrator, Chris’s cousin Jenny, experiences the following epiphany upon seeing his recovery:

When we had lifted the yoke of our embraces from his shoulders he would

go back to that flooded trench in Flanders under that sky more full of

flying death than clouds, to that No Man’s Land where bullets fall like rain

on the rotting faces of the dead . . . . (90)

Jenny’s narration suggests that the cure for shellshock will prove more fatal than the disease: the dread in her imagery intimates to the reader that Chris’s death in the escalating war is all but guaranteed. The realization casts psychoanalysis as both palliative and poison: a prime, Modernist example of the work that Derrida performs on the term pharmakon. Further, West’s novella anticipates a recurring trend in 1920 novels about the Great War: by intimating that Chris’s “sanity” is a death wish, The Return of the Soldier anticipates the costs of Septimus Warren Smith’s poor treatment by Sir

William Bradshaw in Mrs. Dalloway (1925).34

The Return of the Soldier’s reputation amongst Great War scholars does not result solely from its frank portrayal of shellshock’s consequences for soldiers and their families. The novella also expands the vision of feminism promoted in West’s journalism and book reviews. In the novella, Jenny Baldry must mediate Chris’s destabilized mental state, Kitty’s lingering trauma over the loss of their son Oliver, Margaret’s reduced and working-class situation, and the management of Chris’s estate. Following this, critics

34 Cf. Cole 30-31: “Woolf and West each gesture towards a dynamic interplay of war and home, where the proximity and distance with respect to war’s most harrowing scenes of violence work in part to reify the discreteness of each sphere, but equally to create opportunities for significant forms of imaginative transgression.” Cole’s reading of Woolf and West is perhaps overly optimistic, and overlooks a key nuance. The characters who possess this capacity are figures like Jenny Baldry and Clarissa Dalloway, whose own “traumas” (e.g., Clarissa’s bout with the 1918 ’flu) are slight in comparison to those of Chris, Kitty, and Septimus Smith.

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including Rebecah Pulsifier, Bernard Schweizer, and Judith Herman have contended that

West preemptively complicates a discussion of trauma and loss that scholarship has traditionally associated with Britain’s soldier-poets. As Schweizer observes, critical treatments like Ann Norton’s Paradoxical Feminism (1997) suspect “that West’s fictional women appear to reflect masculine gender constructions, with frailty, dependence, and sensibility quite high on their list of character traits” (Schweizer, Introduction 28). In The

Return of the Soldier, however, the social conventions governing domesticity and intimacy compel the bereft Kitty to perform these stereotypical traits; socially conditioned, Kitty’s identity—as opposed to Margaret’s or Jenny’s—is inextricable from her role as a wife in a manor house. The novella allows for more capacious readings, which interpret the female characters as independent figures and not echoes of their male counterparts: “Reading Kitty as Chris’s traumatized equivalent,” Pulsifier argues,

“implies that West’s novel exposes trauma’s diverse, gendered sources and records unequal responses to men’s and women’s experiences of trauma” (38). West’s project in her fiction and nonfiction alike seeks the opposite: to illustrate how this emphasis on men overlooks women’s long-standing disillusionment with a government and civil society that actively deny them agency and civil liberties.

5. Inculcating Feminism in the Public Sphere: West’s Book Reviews in The Daily News

“When she [i.e., Emmeline Pankhurst] started the Women’s Social and Political Union she was sure of two things: that the ideas of freedom and justice which had been slowly developing in England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had grown to such maturity that there existed an army of women resentful of being handicapped by artificial disadvantages imposed simply on the grounds of their sex, and that sex-antagonism was so strong among that it produced an attitude which, if it were provoked to candid expression, would make every self-respecting woman want to fight it. In both of these suppositions she was entirely correct.” –Rebecca West, A Reed of Steel (255)

Popular Publishing and the Book Review as Feminist Venues

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If Benedict Anderson is correct in positing that journalism creates the illusion of a unified imaginary community, then the following is true: a free press generates opportunities for the production and dissemination of a counter-memory, challenging the formation of traditional history even as events transpire. This potential has influenced recent studies in feminist media history and Modernist studies. Mark S. Morrison’s The

Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audience, and Reception 1905-1920 (2001) argues in a chapter about The Freewoman, The New Freewoman, and The Egoist that the suffrage movement generated a crucial “counterpublic,” one essential in teaching later

Modernist editors “how to adapt mass advertising tactics to further political, social, and cultural, rather than explicitly economic, goals” (85). Bruce Clarke’s Dora Marsden and

Early Modernism (1995) and Maria DiCenzo, Lucy Delap, and Leila Ryan’s Feminist

Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals, and the Public Sphere (2011) illustrate that the success of feminism (and, in no small part, literary Modernism) depended upon such periodicals and the contributions of female editors, journalists, and authors. Edwardian and Great War-era periodicals, DiCenzo and her co-authors argue, “offer a crucial layer of evidence related to how feminist ideas took shape and became a site of struggle in these years” (15). Edited collections like Kate Campbell’s Journalism, Literature, and

Modernity: From Hazlitt to Modernism (2000) further contribute to this understanding by emphasizing women’s roles in periodicals—even in publishing industries dominated by male editors, writers, critics, and social theorists.

In section two of this chapter, I contextualized West’s work in a more traditional manner, by emphasizing her portrayal in journalism and fiction of women’s lives during the Great War. Here, I evaluate West’s book reviews for The Daily News and, in doing

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so, illustrate book reviews as a form of criticism that shapes the public perception of feminism. This turn builds on the work started by the late Jane Marcus in The Young

Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West 1911-17 (1982), which compiles many of West’s articles and reviews for The Freewoman, The New Freewoman, The Clarion, and The

Daily News.35 In her preface and notes to the volume, Marcus observes that the young

West, “a propagandist of genius” (Preface ix), has remained invisible from most studies of the period’s journalism; a glaring instance occurs in Stephen Koss’s otherwise admirable Fleet Street Radical (1973), a history of A.G. Gardiner’s editorship of The

Daily News during the years in which West contributed to the newspaper. Despite her involvement, West has remained peripheral in the discussion of feminist journalists and critics of the early twentieth century.

Similarly, West’s early nonfiction has remained under-evaluated, even in her own oeuvre. When scholars speak of West’s early work, they analyze such novels as The

Return of the Soldier and The Judge (1922); exemplary of this trend are Bernard

Schweizer’s Rebecca West: Heroism, Rebellion, and the Female Epic (2002) and

Schweizer’s edited collection Rebecca West Today (2006). Even Laura Cowan’s extensive and provocative study Rebecca West’s Subversive Use of Hybrid Genres, 1911-

41 (2015) rapidly glosses the early journalism and prioritizes West’s Henry James and

The Return of the Soldier. In 2008, Laura Heffernan argued, via Raymond Williams, for

35 With the rise of the digital humanities, Marcus’s volume may now appear redundant. For instance, the Modernist Journals Project (a joint venture of Brown University and the University of Tulsa) includes as downloadable PDFs The Freewoman, The New Freewoman, Blast, and The Egoist. As such, the preponderance of West’s journalism and reviews is available in an electronic form. However, Marcus’s volume remains important in its display of West’s landmark, yet under- acknowledged, contribution to the political and aesthetic debates of early Modernism.

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the need to re-insert West into the analytical frameworks applied to literary Modernism in the 1910s and 1920s:

West’s work of the 1910s and ’20s—work that included reportage, critical

study, and experimental fiction—was often left out of this initial canon of

modernist texts and mostly male authors. Accordingly, she is a figure who

might help us in our ongoing quest to, as Raymond Williams puts it, mark

the “radical contrast” between the “struggling (and quarreling and

competitive) groups, who between them made what is now generally

referred to as ‘modern art,’ and the funded and trading institutions,

academic and commercial, which were eventually to generalize and deal

in them.” (309)

Lyn Pykett provides a more thorough assessment of West’s exclusion from the canons of early Modernism and feminist journalism. Writing in 2000, Pykett observes that, “despite her contemporary role in mapping both modernity and modernism for a wide contemporary audience of newspaper and magazine readers, West has (until relatively recently) largely been excluded from histories of modernism” (171). Pykett further argues that West’s history as a journalist and reviewer serves as a counterpoint to

Woolf’s essayistic career, in that each writer moved beyond the socialist and feminist publications of their earlier careers. However, West’s early work is of particular interest, as it runs contrary to the myth of Modernism’s elitist and exclusive tendencies, as well as the practices of most avant-garde artists. While an “avant-garde artist [. . .] eschewed the mass market and wrote for a discriminating coterie,” West embraced mass market venues and “deliberately sought a wider audience (as well as larger financial rewards) by moving

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out from a small circulation ‘coterie’ publication such as the Freewoman to write for

Fleet Street daily newspapers [i.e., The Daily News] and for wide-circulation general interest magazines in Britain and America” (172).

West’s book reviews seek to disrupt those power and knowledge formations in

British culture and literature. Through the book review, West establishes criticism as a means of inserting literature into the public sphere’s debates on cultural values. Writing about West’s later essay collection, The Strange Necessity (1928), Heffernan argues that

West’s literary criticism disavowed the belief that literature remained stagnant, or that its meaning remained fixed across historical divides: in a letter to Richard Ellmann,

Heffernan writes, “West opens up [. . .] an alternative critical practice that views literary value as formed within a social field of negotiations and competitions for cultural value”

(310). Here, Heffernan argues that West’s criticism generates an alternative to the practice established in T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) and T.E.

Hulme’s “Romanticism and Classicism” (1911)—two works viewed as foundational in the formalist school of criticism for their embrace of an “impersonal” approach to literary texts. Inspired by Hulme’s investment in tradition, Eliot’s conservative critical practice situates literature in a dynamic relationship only with other literary texts,36 thereby eliding the biographical and cultural factors inherent in a text. West perceives these elements as indispensible to a text’s function and, as such, modifies literary devices into rhetorical feints in her critiques of novels, plays, monographs, and the sociopolitical realities of her moment.

36 For Eliot, “[h]onest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but the poetry” (“Tradition” 7). This attention on the poetry creates what Eliot terms a “process of depersonalization,” which inspired later formalist and New Critical studies of literature including Cleanth Brooks’s The Well-Wrought Urn (1947) and W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s collaborations, “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946) and “The Affective Fallacy” (1949).

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Addressing West’s early work, Cowan concurs with Heffernan in ascribing to

West the ambition “to transform her contemporary world through subverting conventional journalistic expectations or through blending hybrid elements into essays”

(14). (By “hybrid,” Cowan refers to a critical prose that incorporates literary devices common to poetry and fiction, and vice versa.) Perhaps, though, West’s Edwardian influences are more to credit for this “hybrid” turn than her opposition to criticism in the style of Eliot and Hulme. Bennett’s Journalism for Women, after all, associates journalism with artistic expression, and he suggests to women journalists that, “[i]f the artistic faculty exists [in the reader] but is dormant, to awaken it by means of suggestion; and having awakened it, to show how it may be properly excited to the fullest activity of which it is capable” (8). Stocked with the flourishes of a fiction writer, West’s book reviews provoke, rather than “awaken” or “properly excite,” a reader. In her nonfiction, irony functions as a literary device that goads readers into questioning their prevailing beliefs. Her brash and aggressive tone, coupled with a Modernist penchant for irony and figurative language, disrupts the anti-feminist orthodoxy (and lionizes the feminist project) in texts that she reviewed for A.G. Gardiner’s The Daily News from 1914 to

1917. West’s project results in a feminist counter-memory, one that insists on announcing and dismantling the logic and orthodoxies of “sex-antagonism,” as West terms it, during the 1910s. In doing so, she likewise reveals that women have suffered disillusionment with their government and civil society long before that malaise became associated with the poets and poetry of the Great War.

Irony, Diction, and Disillusionment in West’s Daily News Reviews

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“It is only a slight exaggeration,” Pykett writes, “to say that a re-reading of her reviews from 1911 until the late 1930s enables one to construct a cultural history of the first third of the twentieth century in England, or at least a history of that culture as it appeared to a left-leaning middle-class feminist who was often as much concerned with making a name for herself, entertaining her readers, and shocking both the bourgeoisie and the literary establishment” (182). That is, West’s reviews record a historical alternative to the dominant war narrative, and she does so in a context of domestic affairs contemporaneous to the war effort, including the suffrage movement, women in the munitions factories, and the rising tensions with Ireland.37 The domestic questions of equality and suffrage for women never fall from her purview, and, as such, her critiques of novels and nonfiction suggest that the extension of basic rights and civil liberties to women rivals the importance of the war effort. Irony, as Cowan points out, performs a unique role in this project. In her gloss of West’s early years, Cowan notes that Toril

Moi’s Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985) and Patricia Meyer

Spacks’s The Female Imagination: A Literary and Psychological Investigation of

Women’s Writing (1976) make the case for irony in women’s writing, as irony’s destabilization of firm meanings allows women writers to evade the categories and orthodoxies enforced by male artists, writers, and critics (cf. Cowan 15).

37 West’s reviews contribute to literary history in other ways. Her review of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915, and published under Ford’s original surname, Hueffer) convincingly argues that this novel should elevate Ford to a critical esteem that he was yet to receive. (West was, of course, biased: she counted Ford and his wife amongst her mutual friends with H.G. Wells, and her “Indissoluble Matrimony” appeared alongside an early version of The Good Soldier, under the title “The Saddest Story,” in Blast.) She writes that the novel’s “first claim on the attention is the obvious loveliness of the colour and cadence of its language, and it is also clever as the novels of Mr. Henry James are clever, with all sorts of acute discoveries about human nature; and at times it is radiantly witty” (298). Her claim proved valid, and Ford’s The Good Soldier now stands as an exemplary text in the early Modernist canon.

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West ably demonstrates the power of irony in a riposte to Henry Sydnor

Harrison’s Angela’s Business (1915). Here, West chides both the novelist and the feminist movement in her assessment of a scene set at a club reception attended by its humorless yet disheveled members. Harrison’s caricature “recalls very painfully the phase through which the feminist movement was passing when it was interrupted by the war” (“A Novel” 300)—“painfully,” because the barb strikes at the seriousness that prompted organizations like the WSPU to halt their suffrage campaigning, and because this reneging allows male novelists like Harrison to pen novels like Angela’s Business.

West calls the novel “amusing” only ironically, and her reading of protagonist Mr.

Garrott’s love interests—first, an independent “womanly woman” who controls his actions and then a suffragette who “had tilled and kept sweet the garden of her womanhood” (Harrison qtd. in West, “A Novel” 301)—instead chastises male novelists for using the suffrage movement as a means of re-inscribing traditional gender roles.

West faults novels like Harrison’s Angela’s Business because they misappropriated feminism to reinforce men’s power and to impose limits on women: the women must wait on Mr. Garrott’s decision, a device for plot resolution that associates each woman’s potential for fulfillment to marriage and traditional, domestic virtues.

(This fictional situation is a disempowering bind that, as I have earlier argued, was readily apparent to many feminists of the period.) While Oscar Wilde, for instance, could drub novels like Harrison’s as worthless on aesthetic grounds, West’s poetics view the ideology and the artistry of texts as inseparable. West alludes to this stance in her negative review of Van Wyck Brooks The World of H.G. Wells (1915): “It is evident from his [i.e., Brooks’] guarded references to Mr. Wells’s work, that for lack of a

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personal palate he accepts the current vulgarism that books which aim at the expression of ideas are not art” (303).38

West applies this principle in her readings of other novelists and literary critics. In doing so, she reminds readers that literature, criticism, and the infringements of women’s liberties persisted before and during the Great War—and she was so cautious to write reviews that alerted readers to the ideologies that authors foisted on the reading public. In an otherwise warm review of Arnold Bennett’s These Twain (1916), the third novel of the

Clayhanger Family trilogy, West pauses to remind readers that novelists reify male fantasies about women through the depictions of their female protagonists. Critiquing

These Twain’s portrayal of Hilda Lessways, West writes that

it is plainly her duty to float as a subjective being in Edwin’s

consciousness. If one considers her as a real person one perceives that she

is not so much a study of a woman based upon observation, but a rash

deduction from a couple of hair-pins; but one can accept her as the illusory

image a man might make to himself of the woman he loves. (311)

Here, West recalls the divide between suffragettes on the question of marriage—that is, whether marriage benefits or undermines the push for women’s equality. Her observations suggest that Bennett, in this instance, provides ample evidence for the claim that marriage imposes on women a false consciousness and that, by extension, their social identities become inextricable from the desires and fantasies of men. As she exists in

Bennett’s novel, “woman” is a category constructed and confined by (and for) the

38 Ironically, this both adopts and inverts Wilde’s views on vulgarity as an enemy of aestheticism. Wilde associated vulgarity with unchallenged value systems, which Ruskin and Arnold believed art furthered for the benefit of society; West’s formula embraces Wilde’s disgust with these easy orthodoxies. However, West believes that art must express ideas, thereby disavowing Wilde’s insistence to the contrary in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray.

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pleasures of men.39 Her review of These Twain indicates that a nineteenth-century status quo continues to govern which behaviors and occupations are acceptable for women, while rendering them subservient to male desires and politics.

Books with blatant evidence of anti-feminism and sex antagonism drew West’s most ironic, sarcastic, and scathing comments. In a review of Harold Child’s Thomas

Hardy (1916), West corrects many misprisions that she detects in his reading of Hardy’s novels, exposing Child’s reading of Hardy as an exercise in homosocial criticism that privileges male characters. The volume, as West sarcastically notes, “compels one’s affections not so much by any feats of writing or insight as by the many manifestations that its author loves Mr. Hardy’s genius” (312). In doing so, Child neglects the object lessons in Hardy’s novels and replicates the novelist’s abuse of his female characters.

West protests against Child’s description of Arabella in Jude the Obscure as a “gross village girl,” and she alerts readers to Arabella’s potential to renew social and gender relationships:

Jude was much more likely to become a great man by following the

instinct for vital things that he showed when he married her, than by

giving way to the desire for culture which he expressed in his positively

American respect for the older universities and his longing to read

anything on earth so long as it was not in English. (312)

West challenges the notion that readers ought to sympathize with Jude; here, West associates Jude with the patriarchal institutions that sought to preserve the privilege

39 West’s later review of Bennett’s The Lion Share (1916) elaborates on this theme. In questioning why, in this novel, the heiress Audrey’s only recourse to escape an abusive father was to run from home, West illustrates the manner in which literary tropes and conventions continue to circumscribe the options available to women.

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inherent in institutions like academe and the government formations, limit knowledge and power to “great men.” Hardy’s antagonism toward women, West suggests, “is a consequence of his being a novelist of the people,” and “Mr. Hardy was bound to find love an unsubstantial thing so long as he believed that there were none but flimsy women to love” (313). Child and Hardy commit a common error: they exclude women from positions of social and cultural authority. West’s attack on Child’s reading of Arabella, as well as Hardy’s female characters generally, suggests that society shall not improve unless the state and British culture expanded, so as to accommodate women and recognize their contributions in art, literature, and politics. In doing so, West strikes a

Wollstonecraftian note: feminism is good not only for women, but for men.

In accordance with her views on ideology in art, West viewed a writer’s craft as entwined with the day’s social issues; a failure of technique and style was, for West, as egregious as antifeminist politics, because poor writing undermines what the book hopes to transmit from the page to the reader. For West, D.H. Lawrence is remarkable as a novelist for his “gift of phrase-making,” but West does not forgive him for having

“wasted some of his time in emotional squirmings” that distract his novels from their important task of depicting the effects of public events on private individuals (346).

Further, West writes, Lawrence’s “very beautifully and subtly written” language fails him as dramatist with The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (1914), a dramatization of “The Odour of Chrysanthemums,” for a similar failure of vision. The adaptation lacks the power of the original story, in which a miner’s wife assumes that her husband has gone to the pub, when the man instead died in a pit accident. West’s review contends that the play cannot capture the emotional politics of the wife’s relationship with her husband, nor do the

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characters seem to engage in realistic conversations; Lawrence’s language is symbolic, but without any clear referents. West writes, “For, instead of pulling about speech, he pulled about events and cultivated symbolism instead of soliloquies. Neither conventionalism nor symbolism would come easily to Mr. Lawrence’s rather dour genius, and it seems strange that he should turn to an art-form which requires them [. . . .

O]ne hopes that Mr. Lawrence will not do it again” (348).

Lawrence blunders as a dramatist because, in his play, his use of symbolism occludes “the development of an emotional situation” through the sociopolitical contexts of the play’s events. This critique also manifests itself in her glib remark, that “one hopes that Mr. Lawrence will not do it again.” While imploring Lawrence to return to the novel, she also—via the nebulous “it” and its many possible antecedents—suggests that his future work had best return to its nuanced and complicated depiction of the norms governing relationships between women and men. West implies that the novel, as a dialogic form, is better suited to such dynamic intellectual work than drama. This multiplicity of discourses lends itself particularly well to West’s irony, sarcasm, and multivalent diction. As Cowan notes, “West’s exuberance proclaims the inadequacy of traditional rhetoric and is a constant reminder of the drive to inspire adventurous, vital living that motivates all her works” (15). That is, West’s fusion of rhetorical devices and techniques associated with the “creative” genres of fiction, poetry, and drama reveals the ineffectiveness of the traditional, logical essay in upsetting social conventions and forcing readers to re-examine their beliefs. She aspires to do the same in reviewing nonfiction published in defense of feminism and the suffrage movement. In these reviews, her playful use of figurative language—especially similes, metaphors, and analogies—proves

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as effective, if not more so, than her irony-laden attacks on male novelists and their critics.

West scholars, including Cowan, Heffernan, and Schweizer, view the figurative language in her nonfiction as the most subversive and insurrectionary implement at her disposal: figurative language forces readers to perform a conceptual move that dislodges their minds from the rhetorical moves of the traditional essay and its conventions.

“Metaphors transport the reader into an imaginative space—a generic conflict zone,” as

Cowan writes, “where logic and the imagination encounter each other to foster the transformative potential of art” (15). Her aggressive, unsettling metaphors were a strength that remained with West through the entirety of her long life; Jane Marcus’s eulogy for West in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, entitled “A Speaking Sphinx”

(1983), recounts an interview in which West had referred to Labour’s Michael Foot as “a

‘white slug’ and recommended that he come out from under his rock” (152). “Rebecca

West was a sphinx that wrote,” Marcus concludes (154), and her use of metaphor transforms orthodoxies into riddles, forcing readers to quiz themselves on the validity of conventions, traditions, and popular historical accounts. In doing so, West’s reviews supplement the project shared by the suffrage movement, her journalism, and her fiction: a stark portrayal of women’s disillusionment and disempowerment that challenges, criticizes, and proposes alternatives to the sex antagonism of the British state and civil society.

6. Conclusion: Rebecca West and Feminism after the Great War

West’s nonfiction of the Great War years performs several key functions: firstly, her writings instill in Britain’s political imaginary a counter-discourse, which posits that

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the question of women’s rights is inextricable from the political narrative of the Great

War; secondly, her scrutiny of women’s frustration and disillusionment with the state challenges the critical orthodoxy based on Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, which situates the war poets as the period’s primary object of study; and lastly, her use of figurative language and rhetorical devices forces scholars to reconsider their analyses of the literary techniques usually attributed to the war poets and canonical Modernist writers like Woolf. West’s interest in disrupting histories and conventional narratives would continue throughout her long life, including a disavowal of Eliot’s theories of influence in

1928’s The Strange Necessity and her evocative, poetic, and vividly reported chronicle

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), which hybridized travel writing, ethnography, history, and social criticism on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia.

West’s work demonstrates the value of literary criticism as a form of social activism, and her early writings suggest that criticism’s social justice work is only feasible when a writer seeks to disrupt and subvert the dominant discourses of their moment. The effects of this disruption continue to linger, even decades after the original text communicated its politics with an original audience. For instance, the legacy of the suffrage movement and writers like West continues to influence criticism and creative writing alike, and this influence often manifests itself in surprising texts. To parallel this chapter’s introduction and its use of the historical figure Emily Wilding Davison, I would like to submit a fictional example of this ongoing influence in a usually male-dominated genre, the detective novel recounting the post-Conan Doyle adventures of Sherlock

Holmes. In Laurie R. King’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, the narrator and protagonist

Mary Russell views the social upheavals of the Great War years as the direct cause of her

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equality with Holmes, as well as the sole reason that their relationship was socially acceptable:

On the face of things, it would have been extremely unlikely for a

proper gentleman such as Holmes to take on a young woman as pupil,

much less apprentice her to his arcane trade. Twenty years before, with

Victoria on the throne, an alliance such as Holmes and I forged—close,

unchaperoned, and not even rendered safe by the bonds of blood, would

have been unthinkable. Even ten years before, under Edward, ripples of

shock would have run through the rural community and made our lives

difficult.

This was, however, 1915, and if the better classes clasped to

themselves a semblance of the old order, it did little more than obscure the

chaos beneath their feet. During the war the very fabric of English society

was picked apart and rewoven. Necessity dictated that women work

outside the home, be it their own or that of their employers, and so women

put on men’s boots and took control of trams and breweries, factories and

fields. (43)

Russell’s gloss of her status in 1915 borrows heavily from the issues that West describes in her journalism and reviews. One can posit that Russell is precisely the sort of woman whom West saw emerging from the crucible of the Great War: one free to choose her own relationships and her occupation, one who could—as Russell does by the close of

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice—equal even the most capable of men.

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King is not alone in creating fictional characters in the image of Rebecca West. In the television series Downton Abbey (2010-2015), writer-creator Julian Fellowes pursues the transformations wrought on the Crawley family and their entailed estate, the titular

Downton Abbey, following the Great War. There is, in the program’s first series, the usual concern over the impact of the war on the young men of Downton Abbey, especially Matthew, a distant cousin and heir apparent of Robert Crawley, Lord

Grantham. The crisis exists because the laws of entailment deny the estate and title to

Lord Grantham’s only children—his daughters Mary, Edith, and Sybil. In the course of the program’s run, the daughters each chart their own courses toward self-discovery in a

Britain slowly veering from its Victorian moorings: Mary follows a conventional route in marrying Matthew Crawley; Sybil falls in love with the Irish chauffeur and dies in childbirth; and Edith launches her own publication.

“Poor Edith,” as she is styled for her atrocious luck in attracting a match, appears at first blush an unlikely contender for the label “West-like heroine.” She is prim, easily flustered, and overlooked by her family in favor of Mary and Sybil. Yet, in the program’s second series, Edith becomes a columnist for a journal called The Sketch—a name reminiscent of Modernism’s culture of little magazines.40 In the subsequent series of

Downton Abbey, Edith inherits The Sketch through the death of a lover, Michael Gregson, and later ascends to the magazine’s editorship. A West-like moment arrives when, early in Downton’s final series, Edith debates The Sketch’s aesthetic with a tyrannical editor,

40 Incidentally, the series in which Edith becomes a columnist is set in 1920. Edith maintains her ties to The Sketch through and beyond 1922, yet Fellowes makes few other nods toward Modernist culture. Any reference to the literary milestones of 1922—Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s The Waste Land—are oddly and provocatively absent. (If anything, Fellowes and the show are anti- modern and neo-Romantic: the show proliferates with visual and textual references to Sir Walter Scott and other novelists of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.)

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Mr. Skinner; Skinner prefers a stark, blocky, and text-heavy approach to the periodical, while Edith staunchly defends a vision of the journal with a striking and provocative look, combined with artistic and expressive writing. Realizing that Skinner’s vision will keep The Sketch masculine and outmoded, Edith fires the petulant and obstructive editor.

In turn, she transforms the journal, hiring an all-women editorial team.

However, characters like King’s Mary Russell and Fellowes’s Lady Edith risk creating a new ideological fantasy, one that could prove as problematic as the conventional Great War thesis. Namely, Russell’s reflection suggests that the Great War catapulted women towards equality, when the actual march toward full suffrage was, rather, an incremental slog through the mire of politics. Much like Wilde in his libel trial,

West and her fellow feminists did not succeed in immediately securing equal rights for women. The Representation of Women Act 1918, which was passed by a coalition government, bestowed the franchise only on property-holding women no younger than thirty years of age; full voting rights were not granted to British women, aged twenty-one or older, until Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government passed the

Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act in 1928.

Nor have the British or American states achieved a condition of true equality between men and women, let alone between LGBTQ persons and heterosexuals. Debates over funding for Planned Parenthood in the United States, the drive for abortion rights and reproductive freedom in Ireland, gender wage gaps in both Great Britain and the

United States—these issues stem from the same institutional practices that West attacked in journalism and reviews during the Great War. This continued struggle for women’s rights makes artist-critics like Rebecca West relevant beyond the context of feminism

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during the Great War. Any of the articles and reviews discussed in this chapter can complicate a discussion of America’s and Britain’s current political cultures; any of

West’s ironic flourishes can illustrate how the governments, politicians, and agencies of these nations continue to frustrate the feminist cause and disillusion women—with disastrous consequences. West’s jeremiad against Home Secretary Richard McKenna, in which she assailed his decision to deny the pregnant Florence Seymour social and legal protections through the institution of marriage, simply because her lover was a convicted murderer; West’s insistence on granting the women laborers in the munitions plants military rank and pay equivalent to those positions; West’s trenchant readings of novels that re-inscribe traditional roles and subject women to the whims and desires of men— any of these articles and reviews contains language and insights useful in disrupting today’s dominant and exclusionary discourses. If Wilde has provided the artist-critic with a methodology for subverting critical orthodoxies, systems of knowledge, and discourses of power, then Rebecca West’s nonfiction demonstrates how one act of subversion can prove disruptive across contexts, across disciplines, and across historical periods.

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Chapter Three

Critical Biography: Virginia Woolf’s Roger Fry: A Biography and the Task of the

Critic

“If we open one of the new school of biographies its bareness, its emptiness makes us at once aware that the author’s relation to its subject is different. He is no longer the serious and sympathetic companion, toiling even slavishly in the footsteps of his hero. Whether friend or enemy, admiring or critical, he is an equal. In any case, he preserves his freedom and his right to independent judgement.” –Virginia Woolf, “The New Biography” (97)

1. Introduction: The “Ghostly Love-Affair” of Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry

Virginia Woolf and the Commemoration of Roger Fry

In the first edition of Virginia Woolf’s Roger Fry: A Biography (1940), the reader first encounters text written by neither Woolf nor Fry, the art critic who introduced the

British public to the “scandalous” techniques of post-impressionist painters. The volume opens with a plate of Fry, depicting in stark relief his gaunt cheeks, the probing eyes under his wire-rim glasses, and the chaotic swoops of his hair. His countenance is not unlike that of a crazed but benevolent wizard, by turns jovial and mercurial—which is how Fry struck painter-novelists Wyndham Lewis and D.H. Lawrence (q.v. Woolf, Roger

Fry 190-195). After the image, like a transcription in a commonplace book or an artist’s copy of a famous canvas, is a 1940 letter written to Woolf by Fry’s sister, the prison reformer Margery Fry (1874-1958). In this short note, Margery Fry thanks Woolf for accepting the task of commemorating her elder brother. Here is the letter in its entirety:

Dear Virginia,

Years ago, after one of those discussions upon the methods of the arts

which illuminated his long and happy friendship with you, Roger

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suggested, half seriously, that you should put into practice your theories of

the biographer’s craft in a portrait of himself. When the time came for his

life to be written some of us who were very close to him, thinking it would

have been his wish as well as ours, asked you to undertake it.

I have now begged to have this page to tell you of our gratitude to you

for having accepted, and for having brought to completion, a piece of

work neither light nor easy. As the book is to have no formal preface may

I here join with yours our thanks to all those who have allowed the use of

letters and pictures in their possession. (5)

The printing of this letter, for which Margery Fry “begged,” indicates Woolf’s reticence to have her own creative and critical labor recognized within the volume.1

(Margery Fry’s thanks also elide the immense pressure that she, as one of Fry’s executors, imposed upon Woolf—a factor that I will discuss later in this chapter.) The casual reader would be forgiven for assuming that Roger Fry was a commission for

Woolf, and that she had only a researcher or an academic’s familiarity with her subject: for an essayist who often irrupts reviews or biographies with first-person reflections or outbursts, this long-form biography curiously avoids any first-person references to the writer herself. Her evasive narrative voice may seem curious at this juncture in her career: Roger Fry followed by only two years the publication of her “novel-essay” Three

Guineas (1938), a firebrand indictment of Britain’s cultures of masculinity and

1 Perhaps, editing Woolf’s work after her death in 1941, Leonard Woolf recognized and obeyed Woolf’s hesitation to receive public recognition for a work that seemed a contribution to, and an epitaph from, a greater community of artists and writers: after all, Leonard curated later editions of Roger Fry that do not include the letter as a foreword. Verifying this claim would require a more extensive analysis of Leonard’s editorial work on Roger Fry. However, with the exception of the 1940 first editions, the 2015 Vintage Lives edition of Roger Fry is alone in printing Margery Fry’s letter as the volume’s foreword.

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militarism, which excluded women from academe, the arts, and civil service. Yet, the boldness of the narrative voice in Three Guineas was not possible for Woolf when commemorating a person as personally dear and professionally influential to her as Roger

Fry. As Hermione Lee observes in her 1997 biography of Woolf, “Fry affected her life in all kinds of detailed ways, domestically and professionally and intellectually” (285).

Woolf’s letters and diaries gesture toward Woolf’s writing of the biography as the conducting of (in Lee’s terms) a “ghostly love-affair”:

[Woolf writes,] “What an odd posthumous friendship—in some ways

more intimate than any I had in life.” Above all, his ideas excited her.

Their letters to each other bubble over with their desire to interest each

other. Fry says that his writing to her is like Sargent trying to exchange a

sketch with Velázquez. All the same, with his passions and his stories he

holds his own. She always learnt from him. (285)

For Woolf, this spectral romance—in which Fry’s ideas could provide a pleasant and inspirational haunting—was an immensely private affair, even if it had its beginnings in the Bloomsbury community. After Woolf’s brother, Thoby Stephen, died of typhoid in

November 1906, Bloomsbury was deprived of Thoby’s “reserved authority,” as Lee puts it, and with the influx of Thoby’s Cambridge friends and acquaintances Bloomsbury gradually relinquished its “monastic” attitudes (q.v. Lee 235). Amongst these members of the “New Bloomsbury” was Roger Fry, who—along with Duncan Grant—“switched everyone’s conversational attention from philosophy to art” (235). In Bloomsbury

Revisited (1995),2 Quentin Bell recounts the electrifying effect of Fry on Woolf’s sister,

2 Published in the United Kingdom as Elders and Betters.

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Vanessa Bell. Fry’s entrance into Bloomsbury altered Vanessa’s relationship with husband Clive Bell:

[A]s she put it, “we [i.e., Vanessa and Clive Bell] stopped talking about

‘the good’ and started talking about Cézanne. [. . .] His [i.e., Fry’s]

extraordinary energy clearly affected the Bells; they joined forces with

him in the immensely exciting discovery of a kind of painting which

united observation with a decorative language and which gave discipline

and architectural force to art. (52)

A frequent collaborator with her sister, Woolf found many occasions to encounter and interact with Fry, and biographies on Woolf revel in small instances of the art-critic’s extraordinary influence on Woolf as a novelist—meetings with Fry at various artists’ studios, at Bloomsbury social gatherings, in their correspondence, and at Fry’s lectures.

In their letters, Woolf and Fry became confidants, sharing their fears of the “herd” mentality governing popular attitudes toward art. In a series of character sketches written in the early 1930s, Woolf crafted a textual portrait of Fry “almost as a novelist might make a character in fiction”; Woolf chose Fry as one of her subjects, “partly because he himself once offered to be the subject in a biographical experiment [. . .] and I was to take notes and write a life in which fiction was to be allowed full play” (“Roger Fry: A Series”

129). In the following two passages, Woolf’s sketch compares the expectation of Fry— or, even, art lecturers at large—to the reality of the man’s performances:

When a circular, printed on hand[-]made paper, announced a series of

lectures on early Italian Art would be held at five thirty in Leighton

House, it seemed fitting that Roger Fry should be the lecturer. His name

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suggested rows of people sitting soberly listening to some “course” or

other; and also it suggested very discreet water colour paintings, with one

brown cow or one white sheep precisely at the right place; or an oil

painting of a swan sailing a lake, while a youth stretching over dabbles his

hand in the placid waters. (129-130)

[. . .]

Where was the gentle Don who had lectured on Cimabue in Leighton

House? He was nowhere. And what there was in his place was something

so complex, so disturbing, so many[-]sided, that it is tempting to poach on

the novelists’ preserves and to say that Roger Fry had been transformed

into a Don Quixote; into a wildly fantastical knight, prancing across the

prospect, hung with the queerest assortment of old tins and frying pans

and chains. (131)

In this character sketch, Woolf constructs a prototype of the figure who populates her

Roger Fry: not an art critic bound to formalism and the preservation of a field, but a

“many-sided” thinker whose presence, rhetoric, and analysis transform an encounter with art into a “complex” and paradigm-shifting experience.

The Writing of Roger Fry: A Biography

Not surprisingly, the inspirational tenor of Fry’s lectures recurs throughout the

1940 biography. However, a full recognition of the intimacy between Woolf and Fry’s theories of a formally “plastic” art had become possible only because death had evacuated Fry as a living presence in her life. Woolf’s approach to Fry as a biographical subject echoes Walter Benjamin’s contention that the storyteller’s craft requires the

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circumstances of death to grant “transmissible form” to “not only a man’s knowledge or wisdom, but above all, his real life—and this is the stuff that stories are made of” (“Task of the Storyteller” 94). However, the reality that her friends, and Britain’s reading public, would read her biography and measure her Roger Fry against their Roger Fry distressed

Woolf. Recounting the events preceding the biography’s publication, Lee writes that

Woolf’s actions speak to the existential and mental anguish she endured when her private labor became a public commodity:

It was typical of the divide she could erect between private feeling and

public behaviour that on the same day she had the Rodmell ladies at the

village hall in stitches over the Dreadnought [Hoax],3 she was anticipating

with “twinges” of apprehension the sneers against Bloomsbury which she

thought would greet the publication of Roger Fry on 25 July [1940].

(Some of that strain did show itself in public, though: at the end of the

talk, she left the hall at once and walked down the village street. The

organizer, bossy Mrs. Chavasse, told young Diana Gardner, one of

Virginia’s greatest admirers in the village, to pursue her, thank her, and

ask her to come back. Diana ran after her, but like Miss La Trobe after the

success of her play, she would not go back to receive their thanks.) She

3 In 1910, Woolf (still Virginia Stephen, at the time) joined her brother Adrian Stephen, Duncan Grant, Anthony Buxton, Guy Ridley, and the prankster Horace de Vere Cole in the Dreadnought Hoax. Disguised as members of the Abyssinian royal family (in blackface, wearing fake robes and beards) and their English translators, the team gained access to the H.M.S. Dreadnought and received a tour of the vessel from the Royal Navy. The entire escapade was a farce. At one point, the gum holding on Woolf’s false beard lost its adhesion, and she had to frantically re-apply the beard. The pranksters responded to every comment with “Bunga-bunga!,” as they were ignorant of the language spoken in Abyssinia. Yet, somehow, de Vere Cole and his cohort were able to maintain the illusion until well after the tour of the Dreadnought. See Adrian Stephen’s The “Dreadnought” Hoax, first published by Hogarth in 1936 and reissued by Chatto & Windus, with an introduction by Quentin Bell, in 1983.

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was as anxious about friends’ responses as about the reviews, and felt a

sense of responsibility and kinship towards Roger. Any attack on him as a

result of the book would feel like an attack on her. (724-725)

This entwining of the book with the author herself runs against the grain of

Modernist theories of art, against T.S. Eliot’s poetics of the “impersonal” poet-critic or the Yeatsian artist-priest.4 But her defensiveness cannot be so easily dismissed. If there was to be a Bloomsbury manifesto, it was—as Nigel Nicolson observes—this lyrical biography of Roger Fry: it was Woolf’s “main defense of Bloomsbury and its values,” and it expresses the Bloomsbury aesthetic and intellectualism via “the three qualities [of

Fry’s] that she chose to emphasize, his charm, his intelligence, and his persistence, which in combination had made him a major influence on a generation” (172). Woolf’s biography situates these attributes—charm, intelligence, and persistence—as crucial in

Fry’s (and, by extension, Bloomsbury’s) effort to make art and criticism contributors to public discourses and the public welfare. Woolf’s commitment to Fry (and these characteristics) bound her to the project’s reception, but her dedication also alerts the reader to Woolf’s belief that Bloomsbury’s aesthetic agenda was necessary for the improvement of British culture and should, therefore, be conveyed to the reading public.

Still, Lee writes that any derision “of the book would feel like an attack” inflicted upon Woolf (725). This description glibly returns to the question of Woolf’s anxiety and

4 See T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), for Eliot’s espousal of the “impersonal theory” of poetry; for Eliot, the “personality” (i.e., biography and characteristics) of the poet were irrelevant, and criticism is best suited to the scrutiny of poetic techniques vis-à-vis tradition and canon. See also W.B. Yeats’s “Ireland and the Arts” (1901), in which Yeats advocates a model of Irish arts advocacy in which creative writers and painters behave like the detached and ritual-bound priesthood of the Catholic Church. Curiously, in describing the influence of Modernism in his novel Atonement (2001), Ian McEwan incorrectly attributes these ideas to Virginia Woolf.

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her long struggle with mental illness—a surprisingly reductive comment, for a book with the heft of Lee’s Virginia Woolf. The remark also diverts the reader’s attention from the most compelling grammatical gesture in Lee’s distillation of Woolf’s anxiety during the talk on the Dreadnought Hoax. I refer here to the parentheses, enclosing Lee’s swift narration of the anecdote. The parentheses at once distance Woolf’s story from the narrative summary of anxiety, while seemingly eliding Lee’s curatorial judgment. Before

Lee suggests that the reader ascribe Woolf’s flight from the Rodmell ladies to mental illness, the parentheses offer readers an opportunity to revise their understanding of

Virginia, a private woman who must adopt the mantle of Woolf, the public persona.

Virginia Woolf’s Roger Fry and the Biographer’s Narrative Strategies

Curiously, Lee’s occasional use of parenthetical asides is a technique that Woolf deploys to striking effect in Roger Fry—especially when Woolf seeks to elide herself from the page. In a narrative that invokes with great frequency her husband Leonard and the Bells, Woolf absents herself entirely from Roger Fry except on two occasions, when she offers third-person citations for letters that Fry “wrote (to Virginia Woolf)” (238,

267). As Lee later would, Woolf renders “Virginia Woolf” the writer parenthetical, abstracting herself from (and ironically inserting herself into) this manifesto of

Bloomsbury’s values. But readers of Woolf’s fiction understand that being in parenthesis, that grammatical site of self-evacuation, is a crucial and generative space. In the single day narrated in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), the parentheses enclose incidents from the pasts of

Clarissa Dalloway and the shell-shocked soldier Septimus Warren Smith. The parentheses alert readers to a temporal shift in the narration and, in doing so, generate a sense of deep time in which the present is always enclosed by (and defined by) the past

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and the future necessitated even in the most experimental of plots. Parentheses and absences become more poignant in To the Lighthouse (1927), where Lily Briscoe’s commemoration of the deceased Mrs. Ramsay testifies to the benefits and limitations of an individual’s influence. The parentheses contribute to the work that Woolf accomplishes with negative diction—the reiteration of “not,” “never,” “nothing,” and similar terms—which Roberta Rubenstein identifies as Woolf’s “poetics of negation.”

Further, Rubenstein attributes to “negative diction” an effect identical to that of parentheses: “Negative diction functions as the verbal equivalent of what visual artists term ‘negative space’: the areas that surround the subject matter and therefore define it”

(39).

As Rubenstein reminds us, Roger Fry adored To the Lighthouse, even if he did find the novel’s symbolism difficult to parse (q.v. 38). Perhaps, he admired her prose for its painterly and plastic manipulation of grammar, language, and form. Like a canvas’s negative space, the parentheticals, elisions, and negations in Woolf’s prose appear to demarcate the work’s commitments and its scope. Yet, her use of these techniques demonstrates literary texts’ resistance to stasis and the tyranny of rigid, aesthetic rules— or, as Elaine Scarry puts it in glossing The Odyssey, how literature “continually restarts and refreshes itself” (On Beauty 23). Like the parenthetical comment or negative space,

Scarry observes, “[s]omething beautiful fills the mind yet invites the search for something beyond itself, something larger or something of the same scale with which it needs to be brought into relation” (On Beauty 29). Such moments of transformative beauty are not solely the province of the so-called “creative” genres of writing—fiction, poetry, drama, and so on. Woolf’s nonfiction also compels readers to seek the latent

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potentialities within a work of art. In writing Roger Fry, Woolf’s adoption of this narrative strategy elevates life writing—in particular, the biography—to a mode of art.

Moreover, in casting Fry as the epitome of Bloomsbury’s artistic manifesto, Woolf demonstrates the potential for biography to function as a form of criticism, with Fry himself as the exemplary critic. Like the beautiful, like Woolf’s novels, and like the canvases of Fry’s beloved Paul Cézanne, the critic’s task is to invite the public to participate, as Scarry puts it, “in a search for something beyond itself” and beyond preconceived beliefs.

2. Genre and Its Discontents: Literary Criticism, the Death of the Author, and Literary

Biography

“[B]iography, compared with the arts of poetry and fiction, is a young art.” –Virginia Woolf, “The Art of Biography” (116)

In the narrowest terms, literary biography does not seem a likely form for drawing readers into a mental state conducive to re-evaluating their firmly held notions: biography’s critics claim that the form rubberstamps authorial intent and, more over, affirms a passive and uncritical readership’s expectations about the subject’s historical importance. On its surface, the biography concretizes and delimits; it articulates the confines of the archive and conscripts all plausible interpretations to a narrow canon of verifiable records—birth certificates, letters, diaries, photographs, and public writings.5

5 Here, I list only primary visual and written texts, notably excluding film reels and other televisual productions. This partial list suggests that the archive will never be the same across subjects or historical periods. To draw this argument to its extremes, the biographer of, say, Maria Edgeworth must necessarily resort to a largely written archive of letters, essays, novels, and her joint projects with her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth. The biographer of Salman Rushdie would have written texts and an archive of YouTube videos, public readings, news recordings, and social media posts—so long as the computers, servers, and networks survive. Indeed, the biographers and creative-nonfiction writers of the twenty-first century face an overabundance of data, a problem altogether different from the paucity of facts that Woolf identifies in Lytton

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The entry for “biography” in the Oxford English Dictionary maps this limited terrain by suggesting what ground—if any—the form covers. “Biography” is, the dictionary’s writers note,

The process of recording the events and circumstances of another person’s

life, esp. for publication (latterly in any of various written, recorded, or

visual media); the documenting of individual life histories (and, later,

other forms of thematic historical narrative), considered as a genre of

writing or social history. (“biography, n” def. 1)6

In reading this, we are wont to consider what the definition casts as the material appropriately covered by the form—namely, “life histories.” But the term’s instability becomes manifest in the dictionary’s designation of biography as the “process of recording the events and circumstances” of a subject’s personal history. The notion of a

“process” suggests a system for delving into a vast archive, a structured and methodology-driven approach for cataloguing, organizing, and narrating the accumulation of texts and images.

Archives and Impressions in the Art of Biography

Of course, the biographer’s bias undercuts this illusory sense that the biographer’s

“process” stems from a rigid doctrine and a cohesive body of materials. The nature of the archive alone renders the OED’s constrictive definition even more suspect. In Archive

Fever (1995), Jacques Derrida evaluates the archive as formulated in Sigmund Freud’s

Moses and Monotheism (1939). Derrida observes, somewhat flippantly, that “concerning

Strachey’s struggle with the writing of Elizabeth and Essex (1928) (q.v. David Foster Wallace, “Introduction: Deciderization” xii; Woolf, “Art of Biography” 118). 6 The Oxford English Dictionary also provides a contribution for the verbal form of “biography”: “To write about the life of a (a person, esp. a historical or public figure); to make (such a person) the subject of a biography or biographical profile” (“biography, v” def. 1).

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the archive, Freud never managed to form anything that deserves to be called a concept.

Neither have we, by the way” (29). Instead, Derrida posits that theory has only discovered “an impression, a series of impressions associated with a word”:

To the rigor of the concept, I am opposing here the vagueness or the open

imprecision, the relative indetermination of such a notion. “Archive” is

only a notion, an impression associated with a word and for which,

together with Freud, we do not have a concept. We only have an

impression, an insistent impression through the unstable feeling of a

shifting figure, of a schema, or of an in-finite or indefinite process. (29)

Derrida does not suggest what would qualify as a “concept,” but his concern over the ambiguity of “notions” indicates that a “concept” would be an irrefutable philosophical position. Coyly, his observation—that “neither have we, by the way” articulated a concept—reminds readers that deconstructionist thought disavows any such concrete structures. Instead, in lieu of a concept of an archive, we each maintain an “insistent impression” of the archive and its materials. This impression is contingent upon our ever- shifting (and individuated) ideologies, poetics, tastes, and experiences.

Derrida’s use of “impression” denotes an unstable notion that governs our discipline: namely, the private and individual ways in which our trainings, our backgrounds, create reactions to works of art and evidence contained within the archive.

Understanding reactions to the archive as a collection of malleable impressions also recalls Walter Pater’s deployment, in Studies of the History of the Renaissance (1873), of this term. Rooted in the viewer’s emotional and immediate responses to a canvas, Pater’s impression provides “the original facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do” (3). That

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is, “facticity” in Pater’s sense of the impression adds yet another layer of artifice to the structure of an archive or critique. Instead of testifying to a universal moral or historical truth, the impression instead reveals what the viewer perceives as self-evident—that is, the “original facts” that function as the initial premises in one’s worldview and, by extension, one’s interpretation of an artwork. Indeed, for Pater, the impression is crucial in the work of “aesthetic criticism,” which requires the viewer to “know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly” (3). Pater recognizes that interpretation cannot be severed from the individual’s predilections and previous aesthetic education.

Responding to Pater, Oscar Wilde puts matters more glibly in his Preface to The

Picture of Dorian Gray (1891): “The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography” (3). That is, the critic gleans from the work of art that which is relative to her own lived experience. Similarly, the archive does not represent the sum of all accumulated knowledge, but instead betrays one scholar’s investment in a body of information. When the scholar writes an account founded in that archive (e.g., articles, histories, or biographies), she succeeds in “link[ing] the practice of a new intelligibility to the remainders of different pasts (which survive not only in documents but also in the particular ‘archive’ which is the historical work itself)” (Certeau 46). The archive and the historical work-as-archive suffer further transmutation when encountered by readers, whose impressions generate yet another iteration of the archive and the text.

The Biographer’s Dilemma: Authority and the Double-Absence of the Biographical

Subject

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In discussing the instability endemic to the biographer’s archive, I have not even broached a glaring absence, on which Derrida, Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, and Michel

Foucault agree: that the original moment is always irreclaimable.7 The archive is not the only suspect notion elided in the OED definition’s fantasy of an objectively

“documented” life history. The biographer’s subject also suffers from a double- absence—absence from the archive and absence from the text produced from the archive.

To illustrate the ramifications of this double-absence, let us consider two ways in which the subject is always removed from the bodies of these texts.8 Certeau’s contentions in

The Writing of History (1975) direct us toward the first of these absences. Like Benjamin,

Certeau contends that only death, either as a recordable event or a metaphor, spurs the writing of history.9 While both concur that history is always a narrative construct,

Certeau’s analysis in The Writing of History is more blunt in its embrace of writing as an encounter with “the death that inhabits this site [i.e., the project’s historical/biographical

7 In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin offers the following observation about past events: “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. ‘The truth will not run away from us ‘: in the historical outlook of historicism these words of Gottfried Keller mark the exact point where historical materialism cuts through historicism. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” (255). Similarly, Certeau comments that the writing of history is a post-formation of the past, one that is always ideologically driven. This inevitably leads to histories and counter-histories (to incorporate a word of Foucault’s), but does little to stave off Benjamin’s fear of lost histories: “Within the tissue of history,” Certeau writes, “analysis therefore chooses ‘subjects’ conforming to its place of observation. It is hardly surprising that studies aimed at correcting such edited views in order to promote the greater value of the writing of others originate not only from different ideological traditions, but also from places juxtaposed and often opposed to the former—for example, ecclesiastical settings of cultural Centers outside the French university” (31-32). 8 I do not intend to suggest that there are only two ways in which the subject’s double-absence affects our understanding of the biographical form—I acknowledge that other scholars may detect others. I have chosen to address only two possible consequences for the dual sakes of clarity and concision. 9 As Dorrit Cohn observes, the subject’s death is also crucial to the literary biographer, so much so that a death scene has become an archetypal feature of the form. See Cohn 5-7.

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subject], to make death manifest through a representation of the relations that current time keeps with its other” (11). “Writing speaks of the past only in order to inter it,”

Certeau writes later in the volume. He continues the grave metaphor of interment, observing that

Writing is a tomb in the double sense of the word in that, in the very same

text, it both honors and eliminates. Here the function of language is to

introduce through saying what can no longer be done. Language exorcises

death and arranges it in the narrative that pedagogically replaces it with

something that the reader must believe and do. The process is repeated in

other unscientific ways, from the funeral eulogy in the streets to burial

ceremonies. But unlike other artistic or social “tombs,” here taking the

dead or the past back to a symbolic place is connected to the labor aimed

at creating in the present a place (past or future) to be filled, a “something

that must be done.” [. . .] Thus it can be said that writing makes the dead

so that the living can exist elsewhere. (101)

If biography, as per the OED, is formally related to history, then the form functions as yet another instance of the written “tomb” constructed in the labor of penning history.

Throughout The Writing of History, Certeau deploys the meta-language of life and death to illustrate that one can construct history after a sequence of events has already expired.

The past is not reclaimable, and its moments and actors can never be reclaimed from

Certeau’s metaphorical tomb. Instead, a historical writer or biographer reconstructs the absent, the irreclaimable, and produces the illusion of a resurrected moment or person. It is through this conjuring trick, de Certeau insists, that the historian or biographer appears

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to cancel death and therefore provides a reading public with a textual site for critical engagement with both the past and the present.

The subject’s double-absence does not only affect the textual re-construction of the biography’s subject. The double-absence also gestures toward the metaphorical valences of the subject as a signifier—that is, the biographer’s deployment of the proper name as a metonym. As Derrida and Certeau imply, the biographer and historian will customize—either consciously or not—the subject-as-metonym to the philosophical and sociopolitical concerns of her own milieu. Nicolson’s brief biography of Woolf illustrates this through his claim that Virginia Woolf’s Roger Fry functions as a Bloomsbury manifesto. Here, his use of Woolf’s and Fry’s names echoes Certeau’s claims that historians view the proper names as forms of citation: in history, Certeau claims, “proper names already play the role of quotation in this discourse” (95). If the biography transforms a figure’s name into a metonym for a certain poetic or political agenda, then one may read the subject’s life history as authorizing certain scholarly interpretations at the expense of others.

This is the fear: that biography delimits the possibilities of criticism. The logical extension of this principle is that biography codifies authorial intent, as if the form (and its historical narrative) were effectively a primer on what the author-as-metonym represents and how. In her introduction to the Literary Biography special issue of South

Central Review (2006), Linda Leavell suggests that the vaguely quotation-like aura of the biographical subject’s name accounts for literary criticism’s distrust of the form.10 As

10 In previous versions of this chapter, this literature review consisted largely of a summary of recent articles about literary critics’ and historians’ attitudes toward biography as a form. While critical in formulating these ideas, this literature review seemed a digression from the nuanced discussion of how biography communicates narratives and philosophies beyond “the events and

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Leavell notes, this authority is redolent of the author function, which Roland Barthes pillories in “The Death of the Author” (1968) and which Foucault dissects in his counterpoint to Barthes, “What Is an Author?” (1969).11 Barthes decries the author function’s tendency to “impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. [. . . W]hen the Author has been found, the text is explained—victory to the critic” (147).

Barthes’s approach to authorship sounds as petulant as a child told that he cannot romp freely on the grass. Foucault’s complaint about the author function is far less maudlin, not to mention far more robust. Not surprisingly, Foucault faults the author function for monumentalizing the literary text and therefore preventing the text’s re- interpretation in later historical moments. Foucault implies that the accretion of objective scientific research has contaminated the praxis of literary criticism, by imposing a false analogy between discourses and empirical facts:

The initiation of a discursive practice, unlike the founding of a science,

overshadows and is necessarily detached from its later developments and

transformations. As a consequence, we define the theoretical validity of a

statement with respect to the work of the initiator, whereas in the case of

Galileo or Newton, it is based on the structural and intrinsic norms

established in cosmology or physics. Stated schematically, the work of circumstances of another person’s life.” I have included this research in the Works Cited and Consulted section for the reader’s reference. 11 We should also note the influence of T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which argues for viewing the poet as separate from the art of poetry. In turn, this informed the New Critics—including artist-critics like John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren. For these writers, literary texts stand on their own merits, regardless of what effects the author intended to produce. See also the work of Cleanth Brooks, W.K. Wimsatt, and Monroe Beardsley. If there is one critical principle that seems true regardless of theoretical camp, it is this: the author—as a figure, as a construct—is not to be trusted as an arbiter of literary meaning.

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these initiators is not situated in relation to a science or in the space it

defines; rather, it is science or discursive practice that relate to their works

as the primary points of reference. (“What Is an Author?” 134)

Foucault’s objection arises from the disciplinary distinction between the hard sciences and the strictly discursive sciences (e.g., history, literature, etc.).12 Foucault frets that the author function obscures the critic’s purpose for revisiting texts in later historical moments: namely, that re-readings and future readings (or, Foucault’s “returns to the text”) allow analyses that pressure the sociopolitical systems inherent in works of literature. Instead, the author function co-opts re-reading to re-authorize these interpretations: “A last feature of these returns is that they tend to reinforce the enigmatic link between an author and his work. A text has an inaugurative value precisely because it is the work of a particular author, and our returns are conditioned by this knowledge”

(136).

Critiques of Biography and the Fiction of the Passive Reader

Foucault arrives at the following proposition: the author’s name conveys a unique ethic, but it also advertises to readers a certain literary and historical value—this text, by this author, is worth reading. In theory, a biography about a particular author therefore packages the subject as a salable commodity, banking on that “inaugurative value.” As

Lee laments, “Biography sets out to tell you that a life can be described, summed up,

12 “What Is an Author?” tepidly engages with the tendency of scientific rhetoric to function as an irrefutable “quasi-discourse”—the term that Foucault applies, in this essay, to literary texts. Given the nineteenth-century contexts and the twentieth-century legacies of phrenology, physiognomy, and eugenics, the oversight strikes a modern reader as glaring. Yet, Foucault recognizes a distinction between the scientist’s discourse and the scientist’s discovery: “Rather, it [i.e., a return to the text] is an effective and necessary means of transforming discursive practice. A study of Galileo’s works could alter our knowledge of the history, but not the science, of mechanics; whereas, a reexamination of the books of Freud and Marx can transform our understanding of psychoanalysis or Marxism” (135-136).

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packaged, and sold” (4). However, this argument is unsatisfying for several reasons.

Firstly, the author function and its promise of “inaugurative value” presuppose a passive readership. That is, Barthes and Foucault’s contentions rely on the presumption that the common reader interprets texts only through the prism of an author’s reputation and personal history. Leavell’s remark about Barthes and Foucault points toward the consequences of this flawed logic on the genre of literary biography: according to this current of critical thought, biography concretizes a delimiting and author-centric mode of literary analysis. Yet, even a common reader brings to the written page a background that

Pater contends is crucial to the task of the critic. Each reader has an individuated training and education, a personal mindset cultivated through a lifetime of exposure to cultural productions in all of their forms—texts, graphic novels, the theatre, film, visual arts, advertisements, radio and podcasts, and so on. In assuming an imagined common reader, we cannot neglect the reality that individual observations and reflections lead to this

“refinement of sensibility,” to co-opt an appropriately aesthetic turn of phrase.

The common reader’s private and ineluctable sensibility hints toward a second fault in this position. The author function threatens to overshadow a point latent in

Certeau’s The Writing of History and Nicolson’s slender biography of Woolf. As a historian and a critic, the biographer always repackages her subject’s life for consumption by an audience constituted of her contemporaries. In the preface to Eminent Victorians

(1918), the iconoclastic Lytton Strachey demolishes the notion that biography offers a fixed monument to the past:

Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the

past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal processes—

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which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake. [. . .] To preserve, for

instance, a becoming brevity—a brevity which excludes everything that is

redundant and not significant—that, surely, is the first duty of the

biographer. The second, no less surely, is to maintain his own freedom of

spirit. It is not his business to be complimentary; it is his business to lay

bare the facts of the case, as he understands them. (10)

Of course, the trouble of the archive renders suspect any universal authority vested in the

“bare facts of the case.” Strachey’s preface anticipates Derrida’s later critique of the archive’s function as a mere impression. That is, biography’s value as a literary form extends from its portrayal of a complicated human subject, not from its ability to echo broader, teleological historical narratives. Strachey then suggests that the biography is an impression enclosed within other impressions: the reader should (and likely does) realize that the biography offers “a becoming brevity” that excises the mundanity of daily life and irrelevant events in the subject’s external sociopolitical milieu. The determination of these elements, whatever is “redundant and not significant,” extends from the biographer’s sensibility. Further, this “freedom of spirit” enables the biographer to reject the author function’s influence and analyze the archive’s materials “as he understands them.”13

13 In the case of Eminent Victorians, Strachey exercises his “freedom of spirit” by penning accounts at odds with popular impressions of renowned Victorians. Cardinal Manning becomes not an exemplar of the Oxford Movement, but a deceptive and manipulative operator who obsessively blocks the ascension of John Henry Newman to the rank of cardinal. Strachey’s portrait of Florence Nightingale is perhaps the kindest of the volume’s four narratives: while he depicts Nightingale as monomaniacal, he nonetheless valorizes her efforts to transform the War Office’s sluggish—and fatal, to soldiers in the field—protocols; out of all the book’s subjects, Nightingale alone produced lasting, beneficial results. Strachey then batters Dr. Thomas Arnold’s educational philosophy for minimizing the sciences. The book’s final account, of General Gordon’s last days in Khartoum, illustrates the delusional fanaticism of its subject, as well as a

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Intersecting Genres: Biography and Other Narrative Forms

The desire to categorize literary biography as a concrete and recognizable form produces a general (and nonsensical) anxiety at odds with its practitioners’ “freedom of spirit”—an attribute otherwise lauded in the novelists, theorists, and scholars who reinvent their disciplines. This distrust of biography does not hold up under pressure: in its best forms, biography is always performing a task other than the simple recounting of a life. Further, biographers possess narrative tools beyond the data and facts stored in the archive. On these grounds, one more area of resistance warrants reflection. Here, I refer to the presumption that biography differs categorically from, and can therefore be isolated from, other narrative forms of writing.

Proponents of literary biography often dwell on biography’s intersections with other narrative modes. In Biography: Writing Lives (2002), Catherine N. Parke observes that libraries and booksellers presume that their readers construe certain generic similarities between fiction, life writing (i.e., biography, autobiography, and memoir), and history. Libraries and bookstores telegraph this to browsers, shoppers, and readers through the curating of these genres on shelves and lists. According to Parke, a public library in Columbia, Missouri, gathers all forms of life writing—biography, autobiography, diaries, letters, and memoirs—on the same shelves; these are conveniently situated next to fiction because, as one of the site’s librarians observed,

“Both are, after all, stories of people’s lives” (xv). Parke then considers a mail-order catalogue, without designating the publisher or bookshop responsible for the backlist.

“Biography” once again functions as an umbrella term for all modes of life writing, but

scathing reception of the paternalism that would, across the empire, occlude Britain’s understanding of and empathy for its colonized subjects.

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this portion of the catalogue comprises “a disproportionate, if not surprising, three pages, second only to history’s five-and-a-half pages” (xv; q.v. xv-xi). Parke hints toward an anxiety of classification, a vague panic over what biography is and what the genre does.

But there is a cardboard flimsiness to her fear; a card catalogue drawer in Missouri and an unnamed publisher’s backlist speak more to the book industry’s operations than to any true critical methodology. Her fear seems, instead, to extend from the assumption that a passive readership will accept these arrangements on shelves and in lists; she presupposes a feedback loop in which presumed reading practices influence the cataloguing/archiving of texts, which in turn cements notions about reading practices, and so on.

Here, it’s worth considering Derrida’s general critique of bricolage as a shambles of a critical discourse. Predicating a critical language of biography on how books are listed or shelved resembles Derrida’s bricoleur, “someone who uses ‘the means at hand,’ that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them” (“Structure”

284). Such organizational schemas buckle once we pressure the generic terms. By citing the library shelves and the catalogue as two “parables of biography,” Parke provides, as she puts it, “an effective, if not subtle, historical overview of the relations among biography, fiction, and history, situated traditionally in a tug-of-war with biography in the middle” (xvi). Dorrit Cohn contends that the tussle between biography and fictional narratives proves most vexing for literary critics. In “Fictional versus Historical Lives”

(1989), Cohn adroitly recognizes the function of narrative point of view in this debate.

Cohn argues that this debate “can yield theoretical and critical light only if it is carried

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out separately in the two regimes of person, by which I mean the two principal ways a life can be told: by the self or by the other” (3-4). Cohn charts these narrative perspectives on a Cartesian grid, suggesting that governing the biography are the various polarities between first- and third-person narration, between the historical and the fictive.

Below, I have included Cohn’s grid, which illustrates the polarities between the

“domains” of history and fiction, as well as the narrative “regimes” of the first- and third- person perspectives (see fig. 3.1).

Fig. 3.1 Dorrit Cohn’s Genre and Voice Grid

Cohn’s diagram implies a rigid grid, on which we can tack the coordinates and precise form of a text’s narrative voice. However, such concrete pinpointing is the province of mathematics, not literary criticism, which must draw clarity from the aporias and ambiguities of the text. To illustrate this, Cohn draws upon Käte Hamburger’s interpretation of philosopher Karl Bühler’s concept of the Ich-origo.14 According to

14 Though she does not include a direct bibliographical reference to this source, Cohn here refers to Bühler’s Sprachtheorie (1934), translated in 1990 by Donald Fraser Goodwin as The Theory of

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Cohn, Bühler (and Hamburger, by extension) “meant [. . .] the zero point [on the

Cartesian grid], the center of orientation in space and time determined by the here-and- now of the speaking subject” (8). Following this, Cohn presents a theory of reading that anticipates Elaine Scarry’s argument in Dreaming by the Book (1999), namely, that writers employ literary techniques and generic/formal expectations to guide readers through the imaginative process required to interpret and understand a text. To this end,

Cohn observes that “[t]he idea, if not the term [Ich-origo] will be familiar readers of

Emile Benveniste,” for whom “every linguistic utterance defines, and is defined by, its speaker” (8). Crucially, the act of reading transforms these utterances from a speech act into a textual artifact, a fictional discourse in its own right, which allows for the detection of the narrative voice’s subject position:

This dislocation of the “I-origin” from speaking self to silent other results

in literally unheard of departures from standard grammatical norms; most

strikingly in a sentence that reads like this: [‘]Now was his last chance to

see her; his plane left tomorrow.[’] Conjoining as it does verbs in the past

tense with adverbs signifying present and future, a sentence of this type

epitomizes for Hamburger the deviance of a language that creates the

reality of unreal, imaginary beings. (8)

This “deviance of language” authorizes the ruse crucial to any successful fiction—whether we choose to label that fiction as a “biography,” “history,” or a “novel.”

Language: The Representational Function of Language (Amsterdam: John Benjamin). Cohn’s grid simplifies many of the visual models representing Bühler’s theories, which resemble Venn diagrams. In his work, Bühler theorized the importance of the speaker as a deictic center—the zero point on Cohn’s graph—and contended that the subject’s voice and positioning influence the audience’s interpretation of a text or a speech act. Bühler’s work would subsequently inform, amongst others, Roman Jakobson, Jürgen Habermas, and Karl Popper.

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Critically, grammatical time markers (including verb tenses, adverbs, prepositional phrases, and subordinate conjunctions) generate verisimilitude, the sense that the characters and situations feel vital to the reader. Interpreting her sample sentence (“Now was his last chance . . .”), Cohn observes that this transtemporal construction imposes upon the reader a sense of urgency: “We are in a linguistic domain,” she writes, “where the past no longer needs to refer to the speaker’s own past time, where it can refer to the

‘now’ of a man whose plane ‘left tomorrow’” (8). Yet, this reading of the narrative voice is incomplete. The time markers also gesture toward the function of intention, desire, and motive within the text—the very kindling that fuels the dramatic conflict in any narrative.

(That is, time markers validate the distinction that E.M. Forster draws between a “story” as a series of successive events and a “plot” as events connected by motivation and dramatic conflict.15) This functions on two different levels. Firstly, for character, the time markers direct us to consider the individual experiencing an event. Cohn’s example readily suggests a man whose hesitance has bungled his attempt to pronounce his love for a woman, and now circumstances have forced him to the verge of action. Secondly, the manipulation of time markers betrays the presence of a storyteller, a narrative voice that constructs the reader’s understanding of the characters and their desires. By way of

15 An opinion not dissimilar from Cohn’s appears in E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927). Forster notes, “We have defined a story as a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it” (86). The valence of “then” is incomplete without a prepositional phrase (“of grief”) that telegraphs to the reader the long process of mourning. From these additional words, one can construe the queen’s attachment to the king and the fatal consequence of deriving her identity from that relationship. I am not alone in drawing this parallel: in the opening of her contribution to the “Literary Biography” special issue of South Central Review, Diane Middlebrook argues that biographers should aspire to Forster’s construction. She writes, “Forster is referring to the writing of novels; but in my view his exemplum has resonance for biographers. We have all read the sort of biography that simply sets forth a sequence of events, ‘one damn thing after another.’ But in a really good biography, the documentation has been selected and shaped into an unfolding story; and the story has been infused with explanations, judgments, informed speculations” (5).

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example, consider the Cohn’s example of a fictional sentence that operates in these two registers:

“Now was his last chance to see her; his plane left tomorrow.”

Cohn’s sentence employs time markers (“now,” “last,” “tomorrow”) and a third-person limited narrator to draw the reader into the protagonist’s desperation. Notably, the implied scene—of a person hoping to see his beloved once more—plays with the same double-absence characteristic of the biographical subject: this character—whoever “he” is—remains absent from the narrative as both an agent and a corporeal entity. His existence and our relationship to him is a consequence of Cohn’s third-person point of view, and herein lies the illustrative power of Cohn’s grid.

Instead of a Cartesian grid on which we can pin down narrative voices, Cohn’s framework illustrates that visceral impressions of a life may come from an infinite array of possible narrative voices, temporal registers, and rhetorical play. Cohn views this wide field of play as a central element not only of fiction, but of any narrative form. Diane

Middlebrook concurs, as her scholarship on literary biography focuses on “characterizing them [i.e., narrators in literary biography] as fully literary creations that were designed as a channel of subjectivity through which the historical materials of biography are delivered to readers.” Putting this differently, Middlebrook claims that the genre’s narrative voices “are the equivalent of literary characters installed in a biography as its central intelligence” (14). That is, the biography’s narrator—even in a distanced and self- eliding voice like Woolf’s in Roger Fry—situates the narrative elements, style, story, and mood in order to develop a rapport with the reader.

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The work of novelist-scholars like A.S. Byatt reveals the inherent complexities of

Middlebrook’s sense that narrators are fictional characters. (These are characters whom, as I will soon argue, allow the literary biography to function as a form governed by the site of parenthesis, the place where the form’s multiple absences impel the reader to perform the labor of self-revision.) Biographers feature prominently in Byatt’s fiction— including the reptilian senior scholar Mortimer Cropper in Possession (1990) and the disaffected graduate student Phineas G. Nanson in The Biographer’s Tale (2001). But as a scholar, Byatt herself has also dabbled in the art of biography, which she employs as a critical method in Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965), Unruly

Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time (1989), and Portraits in Fiction (2001).

For Byatt (as for Woolf), the tasks of storyteller, literary critic, and biographer cannot be sundered. In her oeuvre, in which voices are always performances laden with hidden meanings, Byatt intentionally counters any presumed distinctions between fiction, biography, history, and literary criticism. Byatt dubs the ensuing performance of voice— be it a narrator, a biographer, or a scholar—an act of “ventriloquism,” a term chosen “to avoid the loaded moral implications of ‘parody,’ or ‘pastiche’” (On Histories 43).

Redolent not only of Benjamin and Certeau’s writings on death and storytelling, but also of Cohn’s reading of narrative voice, Byatt observes that “ventriloquism serves to emphasise at once the presence of the past and its distance, its difference, its death and difficult resurrection” (On Histories 45). Byatt goes so far as to call ventriloquism as a technique that, in her own novel Possession, “plays serious games with the variety of possible forms of narrating the past” (On Histories 48). Possession glibly performs

Byatt’s theories, as if on cue. Mortimer Cropper’s biography of the fictionalized

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Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash is entitled The Great Ventriloquist—after Ash’s composition of persona poems á la Robert Browning. Even the novel’s central quest narrative, in which Roland Michell and Maud Bailey pursue the correspondences between Ash and Christabel LaMotte, complicates the genre of literary biography, by illustrating the need of certain theoretical factions to fabricate versions of these poets in thrall of particular critical discourses—versions of the poets, that is, based on selective readings of an incomplete archive.

Possession’s postmodern play with biography, scholarship, and fiction demonstrates the entwinement of fiction, biography, and history; indeed, it is the ultimate variation on the themes analyzed by Cohn, Parke, Middlebrook, and Leavell, amongst others. For the sake of parity, I will point toward two other book-length analyses of literary biography. Several years before Cohn’s essay, in 1986, Ira Bruce Nadel argued in

Biography: Fiction, Fact, and Form that the biographer strategically deploys various

“narrative stances” to craft the archive’s materials into an entertainment, an instructional tool, and/or an interpretation of the subject’s life and work.16 For Nigel Hamilton, author of Biography: A Brief History (2007), the genre’s varied narrative voices provide readers with a position along “the embattled front lines in the struggle between society’s notions of truth and imagination” (1).17 However, as Woolf’s theory of the genre makes manifest, society—whatever one means by such a nebulous term—receives a biography’s “notions of truth and imagination” only through the mediation of the text’s narrative voice. Think

16 Nadel’s argument is, not surprisingly, harmonious with Scarry’s Dreaming by the Book— particularly in regards to Scarry’s argument for the “instructional” composition of works of art. 17 Hamilton problematically concludes that biography has reached its “full maturation” in the 1990s and 2000s—a comment that disregards the form’s tendency to co-opt and redeploy the defining characteristics of other genres. However, his opening remark offers a neat summation of the various tensions that I have discussed in this section of the chapter.

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of the biography as a Trojan horse, always conveying in the vessel of a life narrative an agenda that belongs to some silent other—a sensibility belonging to an elided figure, to a voice speaking as if from within parentheses.

3. The Essence of a Life: Woolf’s Theory of Biography

“Truth of fact and truth of fiction are incompatible; yet he [i.e., the biographer] is now more than ever urged to combine them. For it would seem that the life which is increasingly real to us is the fictitious life; it dwells in the personality rather than in the act.” –Virginia Woolf, “The New Biography” (100)

Virginia Woolf’s own theory of the genre never explicitly articulates the form’s ulterior motive, to convey a theory or argument by interpreting or critiquing the evidence at hand in a historical narrative of the subject’s life. Instead, her reaction to Lytton

Strachey’s methodology indicates how narrative voice and storytelling—whether we choose to situate these on Cohn’s grid or attach Byatt’s label of “ventriloquism”— insinuates the biographer’s private project by rendering the biographer parenthetical. By closing off the author from the subject, by separating the narrative voice from its writer, narration in Woolf’s ideal biography gestures toward, but seldom reveals outright, an alternative reading in which the recorded life operates as an argument by proxy.

I will return to this notion of parentheses and the cordoning off of the self momentarily, especially since the conceptual space indicated by this punctuation mark is central in Woolf’s Roger Fry. For now, let us bracket that thought, until we have considered the function of the private life in Woolf’s complicated poetics. Woolf’s own efforts in the essay form prioritize the inner-life of the individual, which she describes in her reading of early excerpts from James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) as “the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain” (“Modern Fiction”

10). Of course, the writer’s artifice produces these “flickerings” in the reader’s mind, and

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the narrative representation of this thought process produces the “messages” that entertain and instruct the reader. Or, as D.H. Lawrence puts it in “Why the Novel

Matters” (1936), narratives ought to produce “tremulations in the ether” that can “reach another man alive, [so that] he may receive them into his life, and his life take on a new colour, like a chameleon creeping from a brown rock on to a green leaf” (2508-2509).

Woolf’s “Modern Fiction” also considers the novelist’s obligation to develop complex and nuanced characters. Like Lawrence’s essay, Woolf’s emphasizes the reader’s encounter with the texts as the source of any messages conveyed from the language to its recipient. For instance, Woolf qualifies her argument about the transmission of the author’s intentions, contending that the novel’s “method” yields “the novelist’s intention if we are readers” (10-11)—evidence that the Modernists have not strayed far from the principles of Wilde’s Preface to Dorian Gray. Here, Woolf offers an implicit embrace of a close reading methodology that assesses the novel’s voice and perspective as meaning-laden aspects of the text, but practicing this exegesis does not require that the author provide an explanation or even confess that intent. The notion of

“intent” itself is the residue of the close reading process, something that the reader supposes based upon available textual evidence.

The Common Reader and Woolf’s Theory of Narrative Forms

Woolf’s reader is a cannier, cleverer individual than the passive straw man fabricated in Foucault and Barthes’s debate on the author-function. Even though Woolf’s common reader is “worse educated” than the “critic and scholar,” her reader proves adept

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at the truant reading championed by Walter Pater, a method that hinges upon the individual’s instinct for free association.18 As Woolf observes, such an individual

reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the

opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for

himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of

whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of

writing. (Common Reader 1)

Derived from a quote of Samuel Johnson’s, Woolf’s common reader interprets based upon impulse, upon the operation of those inscrutable inner-workings of the mind. In effect, this reader’s engagement with the text invents the author: “intentionality” exists not as a tangible sign of the author’s influence, but only as a product of the reader’s imagination, catalyzed by the literary language, form, and narrative voice.

In her essays, Woolf anticipates a reader whose process deflects attention from the author and toward the written artifact, toward the narrative strategies utilized to telegraph the text’s submerged meanings. In doing so, Woolf anticipates later artist- critics who revel in the gap between author and reader, in which the text offers the only means of communication. For instance, in Negotiating with the Dead (2002), Margaret

Atwood sketches the relationship as “a triangle, but not a complete triangle: something more like an upside-down V.” She elaborates this figure by identifying each point of the partial triangle:

The writer and the reader are at the two lateral corners, but there’s no line

joining them. Between them—whether above or below—is a third point,

18 See chapter one of this project for a description of Walter Pater’s truant reading, as put forward in Pater’s novel Marius the Epicurean.

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which is the written word [. . .]. The third point is the only point of contact

between the other two. [. . .]

The writer communicates with the page. The reader also

communicates with the page. The writer and reader communicate only

through the page. This is one of the syllogisms of writing as such. Pay no

attention to the facsimiles of the writer that appear on talkshows [sic], in

newspaper interviews, and the like—they ought not to have anything to do

with what goes on between you, the reader, and the page you are reading,

where an invisible hand has previously left some marks for you to

decipher [. . .]. (125-126)

Atwood’s invocation of the invisible hand resurrects the absent figure of the author, but her grammatical construction seconds Woolf’s subtle commentary on authorship’s separation from the work of interpretation. Atwood’s rather Catholic, cosmological take has the effect of making Woolf’s point manifest: while the spectral author has penned or tapped out the words, she has no sway over the reader’s interpretation.19

The author has “left some marks for [the reader] to decipher,” implying that any connotations discovered in the text evince the reader’s deductions (and not the author’s intentions). The writing accrues only that significance which the reader discovers on the page. Or, to put it as Barthes does in The Pleasure of the Text (1973), the act of writing

19 Often, creative writing textbooks and courses refer to the conceptual space where authorial intent and readers’ interpretations harmonize as “the zone.” Collected in Tom Bailey’s On Writing Short Stories (Oxford UP: 2000, 2011), Frank Conroy’s essay about the writing workshop describes the principle behind “the zone”: “The text here is thought of not as a single plane or page in space, but as the zone where the two arcs of energy [i.e., the writer’s and the reader’s] overlap. [. . .] This model then suggests that the reader is to some extent the cocreator of the narrative. The author, then, must write in such a way as to allow the reader’s energy into the work” (84).

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never guarantees a positive reception, and any passion must originate from the reader’s involvement with the written page:

Does writing in pleasure guarantee—guarantee me, the writer—my

reader’s pleasure? Not at all. I must seek out this reader (must “cruise”

him) without knowing where he is. A site of bliss is then created. It is not

the reader’s “person” that is necessary to me, it is this site: the possibility

of a dialectics of desire, of an unpredictability of bliss: the bets are not

placed, there can still be a game. (4)

Barthes contends that the text—the fulcrum point in Atwood’s diagram—generates a

“site of bliss” in which the reader’s desires and aesthetic training activate any latent meanings. In requiring the “unpredictability of bliss,” Barthes postulates a text that functions as a site of ceaseless play, a place amenable to Woolf’s impulse- and impression-motivated reader. “There can still be a game,” Barthes writes, and Woolf’s

Common Reader and other critical essays like it offer unlimited iterations of this game, as they attempt to pinpoint what actions, tics, or gestures telegraph those innermost

“flickerings.” One may consider Woolf’s thought experiment in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs.

Brown” (1924),20 when she imagines herself seated parallel to the common Mrs. Brown:

“instead of analysing and abstracting,” Woolf writes, “I will tell you a simple story which

[. . .] has the merit of being true, of a journey from Richmond to Waterloo, in the hope that I may show you what I mean by character in itself” (6).

20 Here, I am citing the 1924 booklet of this title published by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press, with a cover illustration by Vanessa Bell. This version of “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” combines and revises two earlier essays, the original short-form “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” and “Character in Fiction.”

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Woolf’s principles have left an obvious impression in her successors’ novels.

John Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) retests Woolf’s theory by imagining a fictionalized version of himself joining the novel’s protagonist, Charles

Smithson, in a train compartment; Byatt’s Possession conducts the experiment differently, employing third-person limited narration to recount scenes set in the nineteenth century, complicating the industry of academics studying the Victorian poets

R.H. Ash and Christabel LaMotte. The influence on biography studies of Woolf’s intense interest in the human psyche, in human character, seems less clear at first. Yet, the reader-as-critic and reader-as-creator of the literary text’s message remains germane to this conversation.

Woolf’s “Innermost Flickerings of the Soul”: Personality and the Biographical Subject

Respect for the individual’s private experiences and complex psychology unites

Woolf’s attitude toward fictional characters, readers, and biographical subjects. Firstly,

Woolf’s common reader is a biographer of sorts: a person who adapts whatever evidence she can to produce “a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing.”

(Indeed, Woolf’s Roger Fry fulfills all three tasks.) In sketching the parameters of a theoretical imagined literate public, The Common Reader proposes a model of improvisatory close reading that resurfaces in Woolf’s later appraisals—and embrace of—Strachey’s methodology for writing literary biography. Further, the writing of biography implies a two-tiered reading process, two simultaneous creative processes. The biographer reads the archive and interprets it based on the associations and impulses generated for her by the extant materials; the reader then consumes the biography and draws conclusions based on those left-behind “marks [. . .] to decipher,” which—if well

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written—will have the effect of leaving an impression of the biographer’s “intent.” (Here, as before, I refer to the “author’s intent” only to designate a critical fiction derived from a reader’s impression of the text.)

For Woolf, the written text and a biographer’s sources should function as a metaphor for what she terms “personality,” which differs from the truth of corroborated fact. Woolf contrasts these two poles, noting that

[I]f we think of truth as something of granite-like solidity and of

personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility and reflect that the

aim of biography is to weld these two into one seamless whole, we shall

admit that the problem is a stiff one and that we need not wonder if

biographers have for the most part failed to solve it. (“The New

Biography” 95)

Those biographers who “have for the most part failed” to unite fact and personality can attribute their shortfall to over-emphasizing the genre’s perceived need for truth—which is often more “truthiness” than truth.21 To demonstrate this in “The New Biography,”

Woolf draws a timeline of the genre’s history, situating its modern origin with James

Boswell against the turgid nineteenth-century biography and Strachey’s innovative practice. Prior to Boswell, the form was “draping the robes decorously over the recumbent figures of the dead,” but Samuel Johnson’s Scottish biographer reinvigorated the form, illustrating through Johnson’s person “an incalculable presence among us which will go on ringing and reverberating in widening circles however times may

21 Comedian Stephen Colbert’s notion of “truthiness” is apt in any consideration of “truth” in biography; Colbert observes that “truthiness” is the appearance of something like facticity, even if there is no possible way to corroborate the supposed truth-claim with verifiable evidence. Biographers spin—for good and ill—the archive’s verifiable facts, and this betrays the writer’s decision to use such details as a veneer for the text’s underlying argument.

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change and ourselves” (96). Woolf’s gloss of Boswell suggests that Johnson’s acolyte kindled, for his reader, a genuine sense of Johnson’s identity, his presence, his idiosyncrasies and private theories—those secrets intimated in, but never captured by, the archive. In an effective biography, Woolf writes, “We may sit, even with the great and good, over the table and talk” (96).

According to Woolf’s history of the genre, Boswell’s influence waned in the hands of the form’s Victorian practitioners. Certainly, her glib play with history reproduces some of the faulty reductive logic visible in her critiques of the “materialist”

Edwardians.22 Some glaring omissions include Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte

Brontë (1857) or the working-class biographies popular in the 1870s and 1880s (q.v.

Atkinson 73-75). So we should, as Juliette Atkinson argues in Victorian Biography

Reconsidered (2010), view Woolf’s historicism with significant skepticism and read her critique as applicable to only a very narrow subset of Victorian biographies. Generally,

Woolf hackles at the oppressive heft of the multi-volume biography, texts in line with

John Gibson Lockhart’s seven-volume Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837-8) or—more contemporary to her moment—Hallam Tennyson’s two-volume Arthur Tennyson (1897) and John Morley’s three-volume Life of Gladstone (1903). Atkinson contends that

Woolf’s umbrage is not with the form itself, but rather with the Victorian cult of masculine hero-worship and the prevailing “great men” narrative. Nonetheless, Woolf

22 Viz., Woolf argues in “Modern Fiction” that the chief Edwardian novelists—figures including H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy—are “materialists” who “spend immense skill and industry making the trivial and transitory appear the true and lasting” (8). Woolf claims that this manifests in Wells’s writing as “the work that ought to have been discharged by Government officials, and in the plethora of his ideas and facts scarcely having leisure to realise, or forgetting to think important, the crudity and coarseness of his human beings” (7-8). By huddling all Edwardians under the umbrella of “materialism,” Woolf neglects the complex heroines in Olivia Shakespear’s novels and the Austenian interiority of her friend E.M. Forster’s early novels.

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claims that Boswell’s successors transmuted the form into something resembling the

“loose, baggy monsters” that Henry James found populating the Victorian novel. Woolf describes the nineteenth-century biography thusly:

But the Victorian biography was a parti-coloured, hybrid, monstrous birth.

For though truth of fact was observed as scrupulously as Boswell observed

it, the personality which Boswell’s genius set free was hampered and

destroyed. [. . .] The Victorian biographer was dominated by the idea of

goodness. Noble, upright, chaste, severe; it is thus that the Victorian

worthies are presented to us. [. . .] The conscientious biographer [. . .]

must toil through endless labyrinths and embarrass himself with countless

documents. In the end he produces an amorphous mass, a life of Tennyson

or of Gladstone, in which we go seeking disconsolately for voice or

laughter, for curse or anger, for any trace that this fossil was once a living

man. (96-97)

In this curious invocation of Darwinian language, Woolf adapts the Victorians’ own idiom to object to the “amorphous mass[es]” written by biographers like Hallam

Tennyson and John Morley. That is, Woolf questions the supposed tendency of

Victorians to obsessively record and catalogue data, which in the case of a biographer

“dominated by the idea of goodness” would evince an Arnoldian and Ruskinian evolution of the individual’s intellect, sensorium, and aesthetic judgment. Woolf’s invocation of the biography as a fossil record suggests something to the contrary: “such truth,” as Steve

Ellis writes in his appraisal of Woolf’s post-Victorianism,23 “is in fact a limited mode of

23 Throughout his book Virginia Woolf and the Victorians, Steve Ellis argues that Woolf is best described by the phrase “post-Victorian,” rather than “Modernist.” Ellis observes that Woolf’s

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apprehension compared with what she called the ‘greater intensity and truth of fiction’”

(31).

Arguably, this nod toward fiction’s ability to portray the “hidden” lives of marginalized figures like her Mrs. Brown anticipates her later, feminist arguments in A

Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, namely, that reforms are necessary to counteract the manner in which the academy and the civil service rendered women invisible.

However, Woolf’s interest in a personality’s “intensity” extends from her embrace of the subject or character’s intangible mental life, a position advanced prominently in “Modern

Fiction,” “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” and “On Being Ill.”

A brief return to Dorrit Cohn allows us to tie Woolf’s narrative theories to the formal qualities of the biography. Cohn’s Cartesian grid charts a cosmos of narrative voices, but an earlier article—her 1966 “Narrated Monologue: Definition of a Fictional

Style”—distills this infinite range of perspectives. Cohn’s gloss of “narrated monologue” resembles not just free-indirect discourse but the voice of Woolf’s ideal biographer, who melds the veneer of objectivity with “personality.” Cohn writes, on the complex admixture of verb tense, grammar, and narration,

By allowing the same tense to describe the individual’s view or reality and

that reality itself, inner and outer world become one, eliminating explicit

distance between the narrator and his creature. Two linguistic levels, inner

speech with its idiosyncrasy and author’s report with its quasi-objectivity,

writing bear a distinctively Victorian atmosphere and discursive stamp, and as such her writings mark not a departure from, but an evolution of, an aesthetic and worldview. Even as Woolf strives to distance herself from her Victorian and Edwardian forbears, her craft borrows heavily in terms of technical elements like voice and sociopolitical ones like class attitude.

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become fused into one, so that the same current seems to pass through

narrating and figural consciousness. (99)

Cohn’s “same current” recalls a principle of artistic composition argued for as early as

Aristotle’s Poetics—unity of purpose, which generates the sense that a work is “of a complete, i.e. whole, action, possessing a certain magnitude” (Aristotle 13). More germane to this discussion, however, is Cohn’s insistence that this style—one part “inner speech” and another “author’s report”—is indicative of fiction, a genre uniquely situated to express either a Bergsonian flux of memories or William James’s stream of consciousness.24

Woolf manipulates these novelistic flourishes in her nonfiction, and without these aspects no literary form—be it poetry, fiction, or nonfiction—warrants her attention as a critic and a reader. In “The New Biography,” Woolf implies that biographies should aspire to the voice, structure, and length of a novel; moreover, her contemporaries practicing the art proved the efficacy of modeling themselves after novelists:

With the twentieth century, however, a change came over biography [. . .].

The first and most visible sign of it was in the difference of size. In the

first twenty years of the new century biographies must have lost half their

weight. Mr Strachey compressed four stout Victorians into one slim

volume [. . .]. But the diminution of size was only the outward token of an

24 See, specifically, chapter nine (“The Stream of Thought”) in the first volume of William James’s The Principles of Psychology (1890). Here, James conceptualizes the notion that writers and critics would later identify as “stream of consciousness.” James contends that an individual’s “stream of thought” comprises the following five characteristics: (1.) a thought always belongs to a personal consciousness, (2.) a person’s thoughts are always changing, (3.) a person’s thoughts follow a continuous progression, (4.) these thoughts relate to things external to the person her- or himself, and (5.) a person’s consciousness is selectively interested in some elements of the thing to the exclusion of others. See also Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory.

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inward change. The point of view had completely altered. [. . .] He [i.e.,

the biographer] is no longer the serious and sympathetic companion,

toiling even slavishly in the footsteps of his hero. Whether friend or

enemy, admiring or cynical, he is an equal. In any case, he preserves his

freedom and his right to independent judgment. Moreover, he does not

think himself constrained to follow every step of the way. [. . .] He

chooses; he synthesises; in short, he has ceased to be the chronicler; he has

become an artist. (97)

An artist who, interestingly enough, has mastered the unfettered and truant reading indicative of the common reader; an artist who, less surprisingly, has thrown off the yoke of that tyrant—literary convention—and no longer believes herself a slave to the genre’s traditions and accepted praxis. Observing that the sudden slimming of biography since the Victorians is “only the outward token of an inward change,” Woolf contends that the trimmer narrative form allows the genre, its authors, and its narrative perspectives to self- actualize. Once “the point of view had changed,” biography becomes capable of alloying historical data (via Cohn’s “quasi-objective” reportage) and personality on two unique registers—that of the author and, via free-indirect discourse, the biographical subject.

Gabrielle McIntire accounts for the role of these registers in Woolf’s aesthetic, observing that “[b]iography [. . .] is not simply life writing, but it is also life giving, as

Woolf proposes that writing breeds life, and that the two gerunds of writing and living coexist in a dialectical relationship of necessity and self-sustainability” (120). It requires the slightest of inductive leaps, then, to claim that the biographer should aspire to the novelist’s methods for framing and narrating a life. For Woolf, the exemplar of this

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practice remains Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, the exercise in which he “compressed four stout Victorians into one slim volume.” In books like Eminent Victorians and Queen

Victoria, Strachey vivified his own iconoclastic reading of the Victorians and a believable, human facsimile of the biographical subjects.

In “The Art of Biography,” Woolf muses about the attributes of Strachey’s style that rendered possible his project: Strachey discovered that “biography seemed to offer a promising alternative” to other modes of creative writing. “To recreate them [i.e., biographical subjects],” Woolf muses, “to show them as they really were, was a task that called for gifts analogous to the poet’s or the novelist’s, yet did not ask that inventive power in which he [i.e., Strachey] found himself lacking” (118). Woolf simultaneously derides Strachey, claiming that he viewed himself as deficient in the craft of an inventing a narrative world, while praising his facility with storytelling and manufacturing the likeness of a human being—skills traditionally seen as the province of creative writers.

This backhanded compliment is typical of Woolf, melding genuine praise with the brand of snidery reserved for her rivals.25 This was especially true for Woolf’s relationship with Strachey, which Alexandra Harris presents as a back-and-forth of

25 A few examples from Woolf’s diary will evince her private acerbity toward fellow writers, whom we might now call Woolf’s “frenemies.” A quick entry from October 1917 recounts a meeting with Katherine Mansfield, Woolf’s rival in short fiction: “We could both wish that one’s first impression of K.M. was not that she stinks like a—well civet cat that had taken to street walking. In truth, I’m a little shocked by her commonness at first sight; lines so hard and cheap” (17). She then proceeds to praise Mansfield’s intelligence, but the insult governs the passage. In a 1921 entry, she wrote of dining at the Cock Tavern with “[p]ale, marmoreal Eliot [. . .], like a chapped office boy on a high stool with a cold in his head” (121)—a barb that echoes a collective sentiment regarding Eliot’s attempts to assimilate with British culture. Perhaps her most famous attack targets James Joyce in 1922, when Ulysses threatened to cheapen the stylized interiority that Woolf praised in her essays and would develop in her own novels. “I finished Ulysses,” pens an underwhelmed Woolf, “and think it a misfire. Genius it has I think; but of the inferior water. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. A first rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky; startling; doing stunts. I’m reminded all the time of some callow board school boy, full of wits and powers, but so self-conscious and egotistical that he loses his head [. . .]” (148).

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“competition and flair.” She observes that Strachey “was a literary rival: his Eminent

Victorians had made him a household name in 1918, long before people had heard of

Virginia Woolf. And the rivalry spurred them both on” (69-70). As Ellis observes,

Eminent Victorians and Strachey’s refusal to buckle under the “great men” narrative enabled Woolf’s development of a distinctly post-Victorian ideology, a shift that allows for an alternative cultural history predicated on the hidden lives of commoners, like

Woolf’s Mrs. Brown (q.v. 13-14).

Their mutually antagonistic friendship also kindled Woolf’s desire to adapt stream-of-consciousness narration toward the biographical project. Woolf’s first book- length experiment in biography and narrative voice appears in her pan-historical novel

Orlando (1928), in which the eponymous character switches genders half way through the novel. McIntire writes of the Woolf-Strachey rivalry’s influence on Orlando, contending that Strachey’s model set Woolf’s creative agenda. According to McIntire,

Woolf perceived Orlando as a way to compete with Strachey’s novelistic flourishes:

Part of her “task” in 1927-8 while she was composing the novel was to

give Orlando’s body and history a poetry and a physicality with her

novelist’s “gifts.” Such an endeavor confirms what I will explore as

Woolf’s more general understanding of past experience as a materiality

that demands the translation of inscription. (126)

McIntire proceeds to cite Sandra Gilbert’s introduction to the 1993 Penguin Modern

Classics edition of Orlando, in which Gilbert provocatively advances her belief that

“Orlando is history, if only because the light of her mind is the lamp that lights up time for Woolf’s readers [. . .] the terms of history become Orlando’s terms, and finally even

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history itself becomes Orlando’s story, the tale of a body now male, now female” (xxvii qtd. in McIntire 126). The value of biography (or, the biographical novel), according to

McIntire, extends from its replication of a quasi-physical sense or impression of the past, one which can be related only through text.

Logically, McIntire’s interests in desire and gender fluidity as a counter-historicist discourse couple Gilbert’s position to Pierre Bourdieu’s thoughts on the body as a physical enactment of the past. However, this contention also recalls Certeau, Benjamin, and Strachey’s insistence that the writing of history manufactures a version of the past intended for consumption by the account’s contemporary readership—history is that

“double tomb” as Certeau puts it, which “honors” the archival evidence and “eliminates” the need for the original subjects, materials, and events. While the “double tomb” does allow for a tedious affair, like those granite-hewn biographies of Tennyson and Disraeli which Woolf so deplored, an effective biography will develop the biographical subject’s personality as a means of complicating, challenging, and posing alternatives to accepted histories. What current proponents of biography have gleaned from Woolf resembles

Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call for views from the sociopolitical and historical peripheries of the empire. Elaborating on Woolf’s principles, historian Alice Kessler-Harris offers biography as a powerful supplement to her own critical tools: “Suppose, then, that we imagined the life of an individual, not as a subject to be studied for its own sake, but as evidence that could provide a different path into the past” (626).

Kessler-Harris measures biography and history by the same yardstick as Woolf: whether or not the text transforms the archive into prose that imparts something—a lesson or emotional response—to the reader: “Insofar as we imagine history to be a social

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science, the facts are our data,” Kessler-Harris writes. “But our art rests on our interpretive skills, on the elegance with which we weave both old and new facts into persuasive arguments. And if these arguments help to alter the perceptions of our readers about the world we live in, so much the better” (625-626). Crucial to the writing and recounting of any narrative, therefore, is the relationship between the text and its recipient, between written word and the reader. The varied and limitless deployment of narrative voices, amplified by the nigh-infinite range of possible interpretations,26 generates boundless readings that undermine the advance of a singular and restrictive reading of a text.

Ironically, for Woolf, these same qualities provide any creative text with the transhistoricism that Strachey views as inseparable from the biographer’s project. Again anticipating Atwood’s triangle, depicting the communication between author-text-reader,

Woolf manipulates Orlando’s internal monologue in the novel’s concluding passage to cast writing as a whisper that lingers across the ages, guaranteeing this communion. After

Orlando receives compensation for her poem, The Oak Tree, the novel’s third-person narrator attributes to her the following reverie:

What has praise and fame to do with poetry? What has seven editions (the

book had already gone into no less) got to do with? Was not writing poetry

a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and

praise, and blame and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill

26 I offer this observation with the caveat that Stanley Fish offers in his hypothetical scenario of an Inuit-based reading of William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily.” Fish contends that there is a finite limit to the powers of free association. One cannot posit an authoritative reading of “A Rose for Emily” based in Inuit cultural practices and folklore if there are no bases in the story, Faulkner’s biography, drafts, letters, or so on. However, if one uncovered a letter in which Faulkner posits a connection to a specific Inuit narrative or custom, the free associations suddenly become valid. See Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? (1980).

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suited as could be to the thing itself—a voice answering a voice. What

could have been more secret, she thought, more slow, and like the

intercourse of lovers [. . .]? (325)

A “secret transaction,” not unlike “the intercourse of lovers”—certainly, this is not unlike the ghostly love affair that, according to Hermione Lee, Woolf conducts with her memory of Roger Fry, a silent conversation that extends Fry’s influence beyond his

(and beyond Woolf’s) writings. As in a love affair, the biography is electrified with these valances, charged by what each voice—writer and subject/text and reader—contributes to the exchange. Earlier in the closing chapter of Orlando, Woolf glibly refers to the exasperating and rewarding consequences of the unfettered potentialities formed at the confluence of subject, biography, and reader:

For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the

mind at once, how many different people are there not—Heaven help us—

all having lodgment at one time or another in the human spirit? Some say

two thousand and fifty-two. So that it is the most usual thing in the world

for a person to say, directly they are alone, Orlando? (if that is one’s

name) meaning by that, Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular

self. I want another. Hence, the astonishing changes we see in our friends.

(308)

Even here, Woolf proves adept at evasion, at that subtle elision of self that is central to her voice as a biographer. When Woolf works her pen in this genre, she writes an account not of how literary or historical figures change, but of how she herself (and by extension the reading public) should transform. By placing herself aside, in parentheses, Woolf’s

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efforts in literary biography indicate how critics might guide their readers toward a similarly individual, intimate, transformative encounter with works of art.

4. Beginning a Ghostly Love Affair: Virginia Woolf and the Invention of Fry’s

Personality

“That might serve for the skeleton of many such talks, and to give the skeleton flesh and blood—so far as flesh and blood can be given without voices, without laughter, without Roger Fry himself, looking now like Erasmus, now like a fasting friar [. . .].” –Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography (270-271)

Woolf’s Society and the Anxiety of Writing Roger Fry: A Biography

It should be little surprise that Woolf would turn to biography to crystalize a poignant and transformative likeness of Roger Fry’s many personae—artist, critic, and friend. Though we often consider Woolf as an essayist or a novelist or a publisher, she has in her intellectual DNA a predisposition toward biography. Her father, Leslie

Stephen, was the first general editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and many of Woolf’s short essays in the Common Reader resemble lyrical riffs on the DNB’s entries. Moreover, Woolf viewed memoir as a genre perfectly suited to commemorating her friends and companions; we may recall, for instance, the written “portrait” of Roger

Fry cited earlier in this chapter, in which Woolf renders with passion her Roger Fry, a magnetic and erudite art lecturer.

Emphasizing Fry’s personality—those traits that Nigel Nicolson called “his charm, his intelligence, and his persistence”—provided Woolf ballast as she, through the narrative strategy of self-elision, crafted his biography into a primer for the task of criticism. Namely, the critic at her best shall open readers to encounters with art and literature, which impel readers to set aside—to bracket off—their biases and allow the art to transform their preconceived notions. This duty of the critic was impressed upon

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Woolf by her friendship with Fry and his influence on Bloomsbury’s coterie of artists, writers, and thinkers. Woolf sought to preserve that legacy so Fry’s methodology could endure, even if the circumstances surrounding the biography’s composition—the intervention of Fry’s survivors and Woolf’s own moods—were not always conducive to her creative process. Here, I have elected to keep, to riff on Derrida remixing Hamlet,

“the time out of joint,” moving from 1940 when Roger Fry was published, to 1935 when

Woolf accepted the charge to write a biography Fry, and lastly to a few encounters between Woolf and Fry prior to his death in 1934.

To begin, it is worth recalling Margery Fry’s 1940 letter to Virginia Woolf, which was included as the foreword only in the first print run of Roger Fry. Margery Fry identifies two reasons why Woolf should write her brother’s biography: firstly, that Fry suggested “half seriously” that Woolf “should put into practice [her] theories of the biographer’s craft in a portrait of himself,” and secondly, that Woolf’s friendship made her the default choice to those closest to Fry. On the first of these grounds, we readily see that Woolf saw Fry’s “half-serious” comment differently: in her portrait of Fry from the mid-1930s, Woolf comments that Fry had expressed the wish quite ardently (“Roger Fry:

A Series” 129). Secondly, Harris’s biography of Woolf recounts Margery Fry’s initial invitation, in 1935, as if the matter were as fawning as the 1940 letter suggests: “Fry’s family [in 1935] was more forthcoming [than Strachey’s], handing over piles of letters, wanting her opinions, setting out what should and shouldn’t be included” (131).27

27 Harris refers to Lytton Strachey’s death in 1932, which also devastated Woolf and contributed to the haunting loneliness that would become common to her in the 1930s and ’40s. “For years she had been thinking about ways to write portraits of her friends,” Harris reports of the invitation to write Fry’s biography, “and now she was called on as Bloomsbury’s biographer. The Strachey family had wanted her to write about Lytton, though somehow they hadn’t liked to ask her”

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The 1940 letter and Harris’s gloss suggest that Woolf’s enterprise was met with congeniality. But in applying her theories, Woolf tussled with the burdens of her peers’ expectations and the subsequent onset of her own doubts. (After all, history and biography are always intended for their contemporaries, and it is this intent that orientates these texts toward certain themes and arguments.) In a 1935 letter to Vanessa Bell, Woolf laments a horrid experience at a showing of Fry’s canvases in Bristol, which illustrates the fomenting of tension between Woolf and Margery Fry:

Really the Frys in the first place, it was broiling hot; then we lost our way

and only got there just in time. Then there was a large audience, all of the

most stodgy and respectable; then they kept an electric fan going so that I

could hardly make myself herd—then I felt in my bones that neither

Margery [Fry] nor Pamela [Diamand] much liked what I said. In short it

was all rather an absurd waste of time and energy, I felt—though I thought

Roger’s pictures, as far as I could see them in the crowd, a good deal

better than I expected. Margery never wrote and thanked me—and in fact I

feel that the Frys view of Roger is completely different from ours, and I’m

in rather a puzzle to know what to do about seeing Margery before I go.

I’m sure she’ll disapprove of anything I write. Yet I feel she means to hold

me to it. (360-361)

Margery’s potential disapproval is neither a figment of Woolf’s imagination nor the anxiety that Hermione Lee casts as the debilitating attendant to Woolf’s creative endeavors. Joanne Trautman Banks supplies the following context in a footnote to

(131). Had the Stracheys felt differently, Woolf may have authored more than one book-length literary biography.

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Woolf’s 1935 letter to Vanessa: “Margery Fry had first thought to write her brother’s life herself, but then, as his literary executor, she asked Virginia to undertake the project. In spite of her misgivings, Virginia agreed” (361). Margery, Fry’s estate, and other members of the Bloomsbury circle possessed a sense of ownership—not to mention an implied clout—over the memory of who Fry was, and why he embraced his views on art.

However, these parties did not exert their influence over Woolf in a unified front.

Margery and Fry’s partner, Helen Anrep, had approached Woolf separately about writing the biography. Such early instances as these confirmed Woolf’s concern that the project

“would be extremely problematic, not least because of the possible conflicts between the guardians of his memory” (Lee 646). Woolf confessed to her diary that the thought of

Margery reading the manuscript would cause her “to get the back shivers” (472). This stress pursued her to the writing desk, where the voices of her peers dogged her throughout the writing process. Even Leonard exerted a sense of proprietorship over Fry, which compelled Woolf to record the following debate over her depiction of Fry’s personality:

One Sunday L. gave me a very severe lecture on the first half. [. . .] At last

he was almost angry that I’d chosen “what seems to me the wrong

method.” His theme was that you can’t treat a life like that: must be seen

from the writer’s angle, unless the liver himself a seer, which Roger

wasn’t. It was a curious example of L. at his most rational and impersonal:

rather impressive, yet so definite, so emphatic, that I felt convinced: I

mean of failure; save for one odd gleam, that he was himself on the wrong

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tack, and persisting for some deep reason—dissympathy with Roger? lack

of interest in personality? Lord knows. (473)

Woolf rejects Leonard’s critique for its apparent disinterest in Fry’s “personality,” which her biography casts as a the result of a lifelong conflict between Fry’s upbringing in a pragmatic Quaker family and his attraction to the beautiful. Still, as context, the presence of Fry’s other stewards deepens Woolf’s description to Vanessa of the Bristol show’s atmosphere. The crowd, the conversations swept away by the electric fans, and the implicit stuffiness of the room’s heat and those “most stodgy and respectable” persons—these dramatize several of the underlying tenets of Fry’s aesthetic philosophy: firstly, that art ought to foster the free and open exchange of ideas; secondly, that art loses its poignancy when it transmutes from a medium of conversation (consider, again,

Atwood’s diagram) into a status symbol. It is tempting to refer to these stands as “pillars” of Fry’s thought, but the image will not do: it would be more apt to refer to these principles as threads woven into a rope, flexible yet strong, consistent. When Woolf bristles at the scene in Bristol, she rehearses the manner in which she will ventriloquize

Fry in the biography. That is, when others accept the status quo—the chatter and discomfort of the Bristol venue, the canvases fawned over as if on a tabernacle—Woolf will speak as if in Fry’s voice, resist the orthodoxy of class roles and social decorum, and oppose the tyranny of convention, whatever form it may take.

Woolf’s Fry and the Public Function of Art: The Failures of the Omega and the Herd

Mentality

Woolf’s rendering of the Omega Workshops and Fry’s motives proves illustrative in displaying the extent to which his praxis entwined the problem of art as a status

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symbol and the necessity of communicating through art. The short-lived Omega

Workshops in Fitzroy Square, London (1913-1919), represent Fry’s ambition to provide artists with a livelihood while encouraging the production of aesthetically pleasing furnishings and housewares with utility:28 “The young artists were to make chairs and tables, carpets and pots that people liked to look at; that they liked to make,” Woolf observes. “Thus they were to earn a living; thus they would be free to paint pictures, as poets wrote poetry, for pleasure not for money. Thus they would assert the freedom of art

‘from all trammels and tyrannies.’ And the great danger which had seduced so many fine talents—the danger of becoming a ‘pseudo-artist,’ [. . .] would be removed” (Roger Fry

189).29 The artists whom Fry intended to employ in the workshops—writer-artists like

D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis—would receive the opportunity to develop their

28 The Omega Workshops also point toward a difference between Fry and the aestheticism of Oscar Wilde. Although Wilde costumed himself and decorated his home according to the principles espoused in his lecture tours, Fry adopted a different stance which sought to undercut the class privilege flaunted by Wilde in exorbitant expenditures, personal deficit spending, and extravagant dress. Governing the Omega’s mission was the presumption that such furniture and housewares were rightly the province of the public (and not simply the art-consuming public), and that such objects—with which we would interact privately, intimately—should prove more influential than such public artworks as monuments and train station murals. For a consideration of the difficulties that Fry’s Omega faced against the public view on monuments, contrast with Benedict Anderson’s assessment of Tombs of the Unknown Soldier in the introduction to the new edition of Imagined Communities (2006). 29 In offering this citation to Woolf’s Roger Fry, I have chosen to excise a problematic phrase, in which Woolf compares the “pseudo-artist” to sex workers: the pseudo-artist is “the prostitute ‘who professed to sell beauty as the prostitute professed to sell love’” (189). The analogy is problematic, especially as Woolf conflates artists (whose work allows for individual choice) with sex workers, whose labor is criminalized and socially stigmatized. More specifically, Woolf parallels sex workers to “pseudo-artists,” implying that neither is recognizable as a mode of labor. Certainly, one could argue that Woolf is merely quoting Fry, but in writing the biography—in choosing to ventriloquize Fry as she does—Woolf commits a conscious choice to affirm, repeat, and extend the analogy. While Woolf’s and Bloomsbury’s politics, social mores, and attitudes toward sexuality were generally advanced and liberal for the early twentieth century, it is nonetheless critical that we recognize the lapses in tolerance—and the manifestations of class privilege—in Woolf’s writing.

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craft without the interference of the commercial demands imposed by publishers, newspapers, book reviewers, and (at the time) a mannered Edwardian readership.

Fry’s Omega Workshops sought to liberate artistic production from commodification—even if the social upheavals of the Great War stymied the Omega’s operations. Regardless, the Omega offers a compelling counterpoint to the standard narrative of the war years, one that complements my second chapter’s analysis of

Rebecca West’s wartime feminism. While West’s book reviews and journalism contributed to discussions of women’s changing social, familial, political, and labor roles, the Omega testifies to Fry’s interest in transforming the private citizen’s intimate encounters with functional objects. Simultaneously, the Omega points toward Fry’s commitment to those impressions, sensations, and values communicated via an art unshackled from such mercenary interests as paychecks and rent. That is, those

“trammels and tyrannies” which Woolf cited are consequences of the marketplace, which coerces artists and writers into seeking approbation in the public sphere.

The public’s taste (or lack thereof) was not an insignificant hurdle, especially for a critic like Fry who advocated for the formal “plasticity” of art and the disconnection of art from moral discourses. Fry asserts the following in “An Essay in Aesthetics”:

That the graphic arts are the expression of the imaginative life rather than

a copy of actual life might be guessed from observing children. Children,

if left to themselves, never, I believe, copy what they see, never, as we

say, “draw from nature,” but express, with a delightful freedom and

sincerity, the mental images which make up their own imaginative lives.

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Art, then, is an expression and a stimulus of this imaginative life,

which is separated from actual life by the absence of responsive action.

Now this responsive action implies in actual life a moral responsibility.30

In art we have no such moral responsibility—it presents a life freed from

the binding necessities of our actual existence. (Vision and Design 15)

The crux of Fry’s argument in this passage strikes the ear as atavistic, as redolent of a

Romantic interest in childhood as at once originary and exemplary.31 Fry offers the child’s vision—free, sincere, fluid—as a visual counterpart to the interiority and stream- of-consciousness of Modernist narration; indeed, reading Fry, one may recall the opening chapter of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), in which the third-person narrator mimics Stephen Dedalus’s voice and shapes the boy’s impressions into an account of language formation and self-orientation. Fry removes from childhood, from its forms of play and creative expression, the stigma of social decay attached by novelists like Robert Louis Stevenson and philosophers like John Stuart Mill.32

30 “An Essay on Aesthetics” illustrates Fry’s dependence on Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art? (1898), which offers another nexus point between Woolf and Fry. (Woolf praises the Russian formalists—especially Tolstoy—in the closing passages of “Modern Fiction.”) However, much like Woolf’s writings on narrative, Fry takes an aesthetic principle and adapts it to his own purposes. Specifically, Fry accepts Tolstoy’s argument that all art simultaneously points toward and develops the imagination. However, he uncouples this belief from Tolstoy’s contention that critics should predicate art’s inherent worth on whether or not it improves morality. 31 Another essay in Vision and Design—“The Art of the Bushmen”—offers a similar claim to defend primitivism. In this essay, Fry contends that the artist’s confidence translates into clarity of vision, regardless of the style or the mode of envisioning one’s environment. For Fry, this confidence evinces greater artistry than the most cautious, timid, and convention-abiding examples of realism. 32 I refer here to Robert Louis Stevenson specifically because, in texts like the novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stevenson often casts his characters’ lapses the consequence of a childhood desire: Jekyll’s confession indicates that he had fostered a craving for malfeasance since his school days. John Stuart Mill’s “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” published in the Crayon in 1860, contends that non-Western nations remain in the “childhood” of their civilization. Fry appears to counter these pejorative understandings of childhood.

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A public readership raised on Ruskin and Arnold, a readership that came of age during the Oscar Wilde trials—such a public sphere rankled at the disavowal of morality in literature and art. Woolf and Fry’s oeuvres offer examples of the outcry against prose and canvas, alike. The public sphere, via the book review, rallied against the interiority and fragmented plots of the Modernist novel: the contemporary reviews of a novel like

Woolf’s To the Lighthouse range from an unsigned piece in the Times Literary

Supplement, which alleged that Woolf’s characters “are not completely real,” to Edwin

Muir’s measured praise of Woolf as a novelist who “surmounts” questions of character and technique “such as few novelists would even attempt,” to Conrad Aiken’s that

Lighthouse recalls and rivals Jane Austen. 33 (These reviews, and others, are included in

Majumdar and McLaurin 193-221.) The comfort of convention afflicted the reception not just of novelists, but of painters. Writing to William Rothenstein in June 1910, Fry laments, “It’s terrible that no critics have any independence of mind” (332). It was a feeling he would experience again after orchestrating “Manet and the Post-

Impressionists” (more commonly known as the First Post-Impressionist Exhibition) in

1910: Woolf reports that “[t]he public in 1910 was thrown into paroxysms of rage and laughter. They went from Cézanne to Gauguin and from Gauguin to Van Gogh, they went from Picasso to Signae, and from Derain to Friesz, and they were infuriated. The pictures were a joke, and a joke at their expense” (Roger Fry 153-154).

Frances Spalding’s 1980 biography of Roger Fry indexes the First Post-

Impressionist Exhibition with a telling tag: “exhibition undermines social order” (298).

33 One must wonder how this praise struck Woolf, who insists in “Modern Fiction” that little has changed in the canon of narrative techniques since Austen wrote her novels, despite the many political and social upheavals associated with the nineteenth century: exploration, Darwinism, parliamentary reform, industrial reform, and empire, to name but a few.

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She cites Quentin Bell’s 1964 observation that the exhibition “destroyed the whole tissue of comfortable falsehoods on which that age based its views of beauty, propriety[,] and decorum” (Bell qtd. in Spalding 140). But what Fry’s exhibition—like Woolf’s novels— destabilized was the public’s propensity to silently accept the beautiful as something monumental and unshakeable. Indeed, Fry referred to the intransigent British people as the “herd.” He lamented to Marie Mauron in 1920 that “it’s the movement of the herd

I’m on the lookout for” (Letters 481). Over a decade later, in 1931, he wrote to Woolf of the anxiety which the “herd” produced in him:

But all alone my hatred of humanity in the mass is overpowering. It’s

queer how I only like individuals—any kind of a herd produces a kind of

inverted herd instinct in me. Anyhow, you see, I must have a letter from

you. (Letters 659)

For Fry, the public’s inclination to foreclose itself from alternative points of view, from anything new or unexpected, causes him to balk at public discourse as a mere entrenchment of popular theories. Instead, Fry seeks out the individual’s impressions— what is personal, intimate, unique—and like Pater views those private instincts as foundational to one’s interpretation of art. Not surprisingly, after announcing his distaste for the herd, Fry then expresses an ardent wish to have The Waves (1931) at his side; after all, Woolf’s fluid novel surges from character to character, as intense a dive into the individual’s mind as Modernist prose could muster.

Resisting the Herd: Creativity, Elitism, and Democratic Thought in Fry and Woolf

At first blush, Fry’s letter to Woolf seems to revel in the presumed snobbery of the Bloomsbury coterie, and the correspondence calls to mind the feeble surface reading

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of Woolf’s famous essay “Am I a Snob?” (While Woolf answers in the affirmative, this particular memoir views “snobbery” as a complex, social performance expected in British culture and necessitated by Woolf’s anxiety.34) This presumption also drives current, popular misconceptions best characterized by Ian McEwan’s false assertion that Woolf’s

Modernism sets up “the artist as a sort of severe high priest who belonged to a small elite and was not going to ever have his pages dirtied and grubbied by the hoi polloi” (Ryan

153).35 But such a reading falsely concretizes Bloomsbury and its ideologically diverse members; it also inaccurately casts a distrust of the public’s taste as a distinctly

Modernist and/or Bloomsbury invention.36 Fry’s contempt for the herd is the logical successor to the aestheticism of Pater and Wilde, which responded the moralizing of John

Ruskin and Matthew Arnold. Wilde in particular sought to flip Victorian primness on its head, insisting that his ribald comments and provocative liaisons were unrelated to the decay of British culture.37 A similar concern becomes manifest in Fry, whose essay “Art and Life” implies that court life motivated the calcification of art into an immutable status

34 “All the same, I have made one discovery. The essence of snobbery is that you want to impress other people. The snob is a flutter-brained, hare-brained creature so little satisfied with his or her own standing that in order to consolidate it he or she is always flourishing a title or an honour in other people’s faces so that they may believe, and help him to believe what he does not really believe—that he or she is somehow a person of importance” (“Am I a Snob?” 184). 35 Incidentally, McEwan’s description better describes W.B. Yeats, who espouses precisely this formation in his essay “Ireland and the Arts,” reference in footnote 4, above. Further, Woolf observes that an ecclesiastic fervor for art is reminiscent of Fry, rather than Bloomsbury writ large: “Many listeners [of Fry’s] might have inferred that the lecturer [. . .] was inviting them to the practice of a new kind of religion. He was praising a new kind of saint—the artist who leads his laborious life ‘indifferent to the world’s praise or blame’; who must be poor in spirit, humble, and doggedly true to his convictions. [. . .] No Fry among all the generations of Frys could have spoken with greater fervour of the claims of the spirit, or invoked doom with more severity” (Roger Fry 262). 36 Quentin Bell’s observation in Bloomsbury that the group “was always under fire” is worth remembering here: Bell impresses upon his readers that reputations fluctuate from moment to moment (10). 37 As I argued in the first chapter, the ideology advanced in such texts found authorization from the state via legislation and court proceedings, and Wilde’s testimony in Regina v. John Douglas sought to display the artifice—and startling ramifications—of the state endorsing such scruples.

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symbol: “In the eighteenth century we get a curious phenomenon,” Fry writes in this essay, the first in Vision and Design (1920). He continues:

Art goes to court, identifies itself closely with a small aristocratic clique,

becomes the exponent of their manners and their tastes. It becomes a

luxury. It is no longer in the main stream of spiritual and intellectual

effort, and this seclusion of art may account for the fact that the next great

change in life—the French Revolution and all its accompanying

intellectual ferment—finds no serious correspondence in art. (5)

While Fry refers here to the visual arts, his claim regarding the French Revolution suggests that the commodification of art precluded painters from depicting with candor or freedom the assaults on established institutions like the French nobility. It is worth observing here that we should read Fry’s version of history with the same scrutiny as

Woolf’s attacks on the Victorians, or Wilde’s on British culture, public tastes, and artistic production in “The Soul of Man under Socialism.” These histories function more accurately as observations regarding social trends and tastes. Yet, each also anticipates

Benjamin’s contention in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that the state has a vested interest in the ritualization of art.38

Conversely, critics participate in this exchange by, to invoke Benjamin’s phrase,

“politicizing art” into a counter-discourse that directs the reading public to interrogate the

38 “Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert. Such fusion is of great social significance. The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion. With regard to the screen, the critical and the receptive attitudes of the public coincide” (234).

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dominant political discourse, as well as prevailing aesthetic norms. It is on these grounds that Melba Cuddy-Keane, in Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere

(2003), argues that the presumed snobbery of Woolf and her peers actually allowed for an improvement of class relations by emphasizing a communication between author and reader. Reflecting on Woolf’s “Middlebrow,” an unsent letter to The New Statesman included in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942), Cuddy-Keane notes that

“for Woolf—witnessing, as she did, the emergence of strategies aimed at the mobilization of ‘the masses,’ for war or for marketing—the key issue was the relation between the author and the reader” (32). While the anti-intellectual would charge Woolf as advocating for a Yeatsian artist-priest, Cuddy-Keane situates Woolf as an advocate for the

“inclusiveness” fostered when writers communicate clearly, genuinely, with their readers

(33). Implicit in this contention is the idea that the critic’s role is to appeal to the masses using a different rhetorical and discursive register, one that appeals to a person’s innate individuality. That is, the critic’s strategic deployment of the elements of literature— narrative voice, figurative language, form, and so on—can counteract the homogenizing tactics of commercial advertising and military recruitment posters common during and after the Great War years.

Of course, Wilde, Fry, and Woolf were not the last to harbor such wariness of popular sentiments, nor were they the last to suggest that the critic’s assault on tradition may prove democratizing. Foucault and Barthes’s hemming and hawing over the author function hinges on the presumption of a guileless reading public in need of better instruction from critics. More recently, artist-critics ranging from David Foster Wallace to Salman Rushdie to Francine Prose have warned the literary industry about adopting the

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narrative techniques of television, on the grounds that the medium lures viewers into tolerating a neoliberal and imperialist ideology.39 Moreover, as these contemporary writers contend, the flaunting of commodity culture, wealth, and security in television— much like the display of art bound to class prestige—instills in the middle and working classes the misconception that they also can—or soon will—enjoy similar privileges.

Even Woolf’s most generous readers and scholars will cede that her writing evinces the privilege associated with her upper-class social circle and inherited from the

Victorian lifestyle of her father, Leslie Stephen. Despite this, Woolf casts her luxuries as tools that enable her to go against the grain of British artistic tastes; in her writing, she constructs a space in which the common reader interacts with oppositional views. Though natural to Woolf, her encounters with Fry amplified this tendency to appeal to readers outside of the Bloomsbury circle. For instance, Cuddy-Keane argues that Fry’s lectures instilled in Woolf an acute awareness of the exchange between critic and audience. She writes, “Fry as a lecturer thus achieved the double display of subject and object that is similarly the goal of Woolf’s essays: he illustrated for his audience the processes of his own thinking and in the process convinced them to see for themselves” (107). Woolf herself confesses this in the biography, celebrating the acumen and enthusiasm with which Fry captivated his listeners: it is “the power,” Woolf declares, “whatever its origin, to transmit emotion while transmitting facts” (89).

While Woolf found the exuberance of Fry’s lectures impossible to emulate, she nonetheless observed in Fry a model for transmitting her own ideas. Both Fry and Woolf,

39 See David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” in Review of Contemporary Fiction and reprinted in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again; Salman Rushdie, “Reality TV: A Dearth of Talent and the Death of Morality,” published in The Guardian on 9 June 2001; and Francine Prose, “Voting Democracy off the Island: Reality TV and the Republican Ethos” in the March 2004 issue of Harper’s.

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after all, utilize biography as a rhetorical Trojan horse. Woolf’s first and second Common

Reader employ biography as a tool for literary analysis. Fry—in the tradition of art critics like Pater—couches his interpretations in available material about the artist’s period and private history. His Giovanni Bellini (1899) credits Bellini’s “genial and well-balanced temperament” to “the more general circumstances of his Venetian birth—the fact that he lived most of his life in Venice, and that he enjoyed [. . .] the confidence and admiration of the Venetian people” (1), while later books like Vision and Design and Reflections on

British Painting (1934) contain single-artist essays that mull on the intersections of the artist’s experience and aesthetic.

But the biography is more than Woolf’s attempt to ventriloquize Fry and imitate his methodology. Reconstructing Fry’s personality, as Lee recounts, was like a “ghostly love affair” for Woolf, which deepened her attachment to him. As Harris points out,

“Fry’s aesthetics had been a deep, sustained influence on her writing, and his friendship had been a tonic to her” (129). While we can, like Roberta Rubinstein, observe in the negative spaces of Lily Briscoe’s paintings evidence of Fry’s imprimatur, one of Woolf’s own reminiscences displays the full effect of his presence on her development as a novelist, reader, and critic. On 8 April 1918, Woolf recorded in her diary a fleeting encounter with Fry:

For some reason one can’t settle to read, and yet writing seems the proper

channel for the unsettled irritable condition one is generally in. Perhaps

this condition is intensified by tea at the 17 Club, particularly if one

happens to meet Roger in the Charing Cross Road, in his wideawake hat

with four or five yellow French books under his arm. He is the centre of a

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whirlwind to me. Under this influence I was blown straight into a book

shop, persuaded to lay out three shillings and seven pence on a French

novel, made to fix a day for coming to Durbins, invited to a play, and

fairly overwhelmed—made to bristle all over with ideas, questions,

possibilities which couldn’t develop in the Charing Cross Road.

The “wideawake hat,” symbolic of Quaker propriety and of Rembrandt’s self-portrait, is a striking image that conjures a Roger Fry whose life propelled him from stark pragmatism into the halls of art galleries and museums. On that day in 1918, Woolf was unaware that she had collided with a cameo that anticipates the model of self-revision, from rigidity to the freedom of artistic expression, which she would narrate in her later biography. But nonetheless Fry’s influence is there, a “whirlwind” that blows Woolf toward the risks and rewards of bookshops, novels, and plays; a gale that whisks her toward previously unimaginable “questions, ideas, possibilities.” She could not have known, then, that she described the outcome of reading effective criticism.

5. Woolf’s Roger Fry, the Task of the Critic, and the Aesthetic Labor of Self-Revision40

“Roger Fry had a great capacity all his life for laying himself open, trustfully, optimistically, completely to any new idea, new person, or new experience that came his way. But with it was combined another characteristic—when he had sat long enough at those feet to see where they led, he would get up and go off, sometimes in the opposite direction. This rare combination—the capacity to accept impressions implicitly and then submit them to the test of reason—made him the most stimulating of critics.” –Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry (86)

The 1918 encounter with Fry on Charing Cross Road granted Woolf, in miniature, an argument on which Roger Fry elaborates: that the task of criticism is to drive readers toward new ideas, impressions, and questions. Indeed, this austere depiction provides

Woolf with a running theme in Roger Fry: the expansive worldviews of the artist and

40 In this section of the chapter, all citations to Virginia Woolf refer to Roger Fry, unless noted otherwise in the text or the parenthetical citations.

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critic would necessarily supplant his Quaker upbringing under Sir Edward and Mariabella

(née Hodgkin) Fry. The biography gradually revises Fry into the hybrid Quaker-

Rembrandt suggested by the hat: the first chapter situates Fry as always uncomfortable in the Society of Friends and its utilitarianism, and by the closing chapter—entitled

“Transformations”—Woolf observes of him that his “[s]ensation beckons one way; training and reason another. The Quaker, the scientist, the artist, each in turn took a hand in the composition. [. . .] He had no centre” (295).41 Woolf revels in the inherent instability of this figuration, suggesting that an attitude like Fry’s—his propensity for

“laying himself open, trustfully, optimistically, completely to any [. . .] new experience”

(86)—actualizes the pleasures and lessons latent in art. Moreover, it is an outlook that the critic should instill in her readers.

My intent here is not to summarize the chief events in Fry’s life; for that, I refer readers to the Fry biographies by Woolf and Frances Spalding, or to the two volumes of

Fry’s correspondence, edited by Denys Sutton. Instead, drawing on Certeau’s The

Writing of History and biography’s intersections with history and narrative fiction, I contend that Woolf’s narrative voice crafts Fry and his evolution into a metonym for the praxis of criticism as a unique mode of intellectual exchange with the literate public. By abstracting herself from the biography’s narration, Woolf succeeds in inhabiting Fry, his experiences, and his aesthetic in order to explicate how art and criticism foster communication across social, ideological, and temporal barriers. Fry serves as a

41 Woolf’s comment that Fry “has no centre” resonates with Derrida’s urge to resist the delimiting influence of the “structurality of the structure,” as he terms it in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” By appearing devoid of any center of gravity, Fry exemplifies the fluidity of thought and adaptability that, for Woolf, is crucial in the critic and the theorist.

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mouthpiece for Woolf’s understanding of the critic’s development and, consequently, for the critic’s role in shaping the aesthetic sensibility of individual readers.

What Woolf notes about Fry—that his encounters with art expanded his worldview beyond the narrow purview of a Quaker ideology—becomes a model for critics and readers, arguing that the honing of one’s aesthetic inevitably alters the viewer/reader’s presumptions and inspires ideological shifts. In this chapter’s introduction, I termed this “the aesthetic labor of self-revision,” denoting that aesthetics and the beautiful direct this inner—and often unrecognized and unrecognizable—change.

That is, the aesthetic is inherently inseparable from the development of that inner person, of that common reader, on whom Woolf fixates her critical acumen. Here, I will use this concept to draw parallels to Roger Fry and more recent writings like Elaine Scarry’s On

Beauty and Being Just. To move toward this argument, I will briefly survey the initial reviews of Roger Fry, as well as some relevant intersections with Fry’s art criticism. This will lead into a reflection on Woolf’s manipulation of narrative voice in Roger Fry to generate a conceptual space in which self-revision can occur. This explication will then home in on two particularly illustrative examples: Woolf’s decision to insert her common reader into the text, and her fascination with Fry’s commitment to Paul Cézanne.

The Early Reviews of Woolf’s Roger Fry: A Biography and Fry’s Plastic Theory of Art

Curiously, the early reviewers took no notice of Woolf’s co-option of Fry as a metonym for the critic’s task. To put this differently, Roger Fry’s initial critics did not balk, as Leonard Woolf had, at what Woolf “did to Fry.” Moreover, they lauded Woolf’s first foray into a strictly nonfictional literary biography. Woolf’s own misgivings about the form’s limitations in Orlando offered book reviewers and art critics a space in which

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to pose their own generative addendums to Woolf’s Fry and, by extension, her theory of criticism. In Parnassus, H.W. Janson offers the often-parroted remark that Fry stands as the Ruskin of his era, although Ruskin and his formalism are Fry’s “direct antipode for whom he had nothing but hate and contempt” (25). While he hedges on the question of

Fry’s legacy, he praises Woolf for prioritizing “the personality of Fry” and—while he calls this the “author’s interpretation”—attributes any and all theories of art to Fry (26).

In a joint review of Fry’s Last Lectures (1939) and Woolf’s Roger Fry for the Art

Bulletin, James Johnson Sweeney raises Fry as emblematic of Britain in “a period of transition”; Fry’s push for the acceptance of Cézanne and Post-impressionism echoed

Britain’s desire “to lean on someone who could provide it with an approach that would offer a form and structure on which to build its vision with some semblance of stability in a world that appeared hopelessly chaotic and patternless” (92). His précis of Roger Fry tracks this theory, suggesting that the reader approach the biography not for Fry—whose upbringing and family tragedies rendered him “not a vivid figure”—but for its

“microcosmic portrait of the development of tastes and interests through a critical period in England” (92).

These reviews view Woolf’s depiction of Fry’s personality as a litmus test for the book’s success, a clear corroboration of Woolf’s theory of the genre. The same occurs in

Tancred Borenius’s review for Burlington Magazine. He praises Roger Fry as “a sustained essay in the biographer’s art, [. . .] reviving with masterly effectiveness the magnetic personality of Roger Fry” (100). He refers his own review as a “supplement” based on his “acquaintance with Roger Fry [that] reaches, I think, somewhat farther back than Mrs. Woolf’s” (101). The Derridean valences of the term “supplement” come

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through as he offers a complement to and expansion of those “one or two passages [that] have, however, been allowed to remain more sketchy than is quite in conformity with the authoritative voice of the whole” (100-101). Borenius then draws upon the manifestation of Fry’s “intellectual economy” as the editor-in-chief and as a writer in the pages of the

Burlington Magazine. Borenius credits Fry with generating interest in the magazine’s equitable treatment of ancient and modern art: “Much of the interest of his writing on ancient art sprang from his commenting upon it as if it were modern art: but the converse also held good—he wanted you to apply to modern art the same standards as to ancient art” (101).

In this statement, Borenius strikes nearer the mark than Fry’s other reviewers by highlighting Fry’s critical methodology. Borenius suggests that Fry’s approach to resisting the calcification of art was the application of equal standards, regardless of the period. Through much of the twentieth century, these equal standards created an “image of [Fry] which has been unquestioned for too long: that of Fry the rigid formalist, whose separation of art from life [. . .] conserved art as the privilege of the few” (Green 14). Yet, reducing Fry to a “rigid formalist” is misleading; it is akin to arguing that the “mythic method” and the “classicism” of Modernist writers shelters literature from any change in the winds.42 It is also a snapshot view of Fry that overlooks the accumulative effect of his

42 In reality, the opposite is true. T.E. Hulme’s “Romanticism and Classicism” (ca. 1911), though anticipating the same formalist methods as Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” discovers a surprising degree of aesthetic flexibility “old classical view which is supposed to define it [i.e., beauty] as lying in conformity to fixed standards” (68). Furthermore, Eliot’s 1923 review of Joyce’s Ulysses, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” contends that Joyce’s mythic method— or, the adaptation of a classical source to a contemporary scene—re-invents both the source material and the Dublin of 16 June 1904. Indeed, Eliot observes that the mythic method helps ground readers in the text, as such common referents as the wanderings of Odysseus create a sense of order in a post-Great War world—a place of turmoil that Eliot describes as the “immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is contemporary history” (483).

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aesthetic encounters—the factors that gradually shifted Fry from a critic of the Italian

Renaissance to a champion of Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne. As Christopher Green comments, Fry’s exposure to Post-impressionist, cubist, fauvist, and futurist painters inspired him to think, “especially after 1918, that form at its best is ‘plastic,’ by which he means directly evocative of mass and space in three dimensions.” Fry redeployed

Bernard Berenson’s notion of the “ideated picture space,” in which “aesthetic experience was an intensification, a heightening of sensual experience, bringing sensibility and reason together” (Green 26).43

The formalist view of Fry falsely supposes that he erects an impregnable wall between art and life, a sort of aesthetic equivalent to the separation of church and state.

But, as is the case for that tenet of American political thought, Fry accepts the murkiness of the liminal space between art and life: in an essay with that very title—“Art and

Life”—he recognizes “that under certain conditions the rhythms of life and art may coincide with great effect on both; but in the main the two rhythms are distinct, and as often as not play against each other” (Vision and Design 7). Once again Fry implicitly reaches toward Wilde; his remark that life and art “play against each other” recalls

Wilde’s contention in “The Soul of Man under Socialism” that the state seeks utility and efficiency, while art concerns itself with the emotional and psychological welfare of the individual citizen. But Fry also seems to anticipate Benjamin, Foucault, Hannah Arendt,

Louis Althusser, and others who meditate on art and politics. For Fry, like these other thinkers, art runs against and challenges the rhythms of life, those movements that are

43 Ironically, Berenson and Fry both began their careers as aficionados of the Italian Renaissance in the late nineteenth century. However, Berenson’s brand of formalism led him to revile the modern works as lacking dimensionality and verisimilitude, while Fry adapted these concepts so as to defend modern art from critics and viewers unprepared for the canvases’ shocking experiments.

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orchestrated by our habitation in a civil society shaped by the presence of state institutions and the threat of their power.

In fact, Fry’s critics need read no further than the opening paragraph of “Art and

Life” to discover this. Fry establishes a schism between art and life as a means of destabilizing the socioeconomic and political privileges that constrain interpretation. In the essay’s initial paragraph, Fry objects to how “we habitually treat them [i.e., works of art] not merely as objects of aesthetic enjoyment but also as successive deposits of the human imagination.” Fry cavils at the treatment of art as “crystallised history,” which subjects the canvas to historical interpretations devoid of concern for the work’s effect on the viewer’s senses or emotional state. Fry rankled at public institutions that perpetuated this outlook. Woolf claims that Fry viewed the Royal Academy of Art as a “bugbear” representing “everything that was dull, established, and respectable” (83), while Quentin

Bell suggests that Fry rallied Bloomsbury into supporting modern painters ignored by the

Royal Academy and the conservative public (34).44 Fry’s distaste for “crystallization” plays into my earlier point about his resistance to art as a status symbol that dictates how the public—that “herd” which so repulsed him—should behave and think.

Likewise, Fry’s take on art history resonates with E.M. Forster and T.S. Eliot’s takes on literary history in Aspects of the Novel and “Tradition and the Individual

Talent,” respectively: new works of art necessarily transform how and why we engage

44 Woolf observes that Fry did believe that an institution like the Royal Academy could be useful—if it were only as progressive as Fry in its attitudes regarding new artists and movements. “Roger Fry was by no means opposed to Academies,” Woolf writes. “They had a useful part to play. An academy, he said, might be ‘an effective organ of scholarly and academic opinion.’ It might preserve ‘a tradition of sound craftsmanship, a thing no more inherently impossible than a tradition of good plumbing and of carpentering.’ And Academicians in the past had done this— the tradition still lingered among the older men” (107).

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with so-called “canonical” works.45 By distinguishing “art” from “life,” Fry’s essays also direct art’s consumers to view traditions and transformations in the context of the works themselves and not in thrall of existing social or moral discourses. He draws upon the art/life separation in “An Essay in Aesthetics” to distinguish morality (as a motive for action) from the function of art (as an exegesis of the “imaginative life,” emotion, and the psyche): “Morality,” Fry writes, “appreciates emotion by the standard of resultant action.

Art appreciates emotion in and for itself” (Vision and Design 19). It is a stroke intended to sweep aside any lingering particles of Ruskin’s thought: Fry states that while moral concerns can and should apply to the actions of persons and states, art functions affectively to activate the emotions. One may wonder if Fry, like Woolf, viewed such moralizing as a Victorian tyrant, against which the twentieth-century artist ought to rebel.

Clearing Space for the Biographical Subject: Woolf’s Narrative Strategy of Self-Elision

Indeed, the Roger Fry in Vision and Design—the same figure recalled by Quentin

Bell and the book reviews—resembles Woolf’s Fry, with his “great capacity [. . .] for laying himself open.” But to make an example of Fry, and to convincingly insinuate the common reader into Roger Fry, Woolf must first eliminate another critic from the text: herself. Adapting a narrative strategy common to the biographer, Woolf elides her presence from the text, with the notable exception of two third-person references to instances when Fry “wrote (to Virginia Woolf)” (238, 267). The third-person narration and the parentheses are masterstrokes of narrative manipulation. Returning to Cohn’s

45 Consider Aspects of the Novel, where Forster imagines all generations of British writers working alongside one another in a space like a British Museum reading room (9). Eliot conjures a similar image in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” through his point that literary tradition remains in flux, precisely because past and present writers engage in a transtemporal conversation through their works. Woolf offers a comparable position in A Room of One’s Own, when she contends that women writers speak (and write) with the full force of their predecessors’ texts behind them.

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diagram (see fig. 3.1, above), the consistent third-person point of view locks the text squarely on the extreme end of the X-axis, what Cohn dubs “Regime: Third Person.”

Moreover, Woolf’s refusal to use the first-person pronoun, even in the parentheticals, imposes on the text an academic gentility, the veneer of the disinterested scholar perusing the archive and assembling a cogent history. If, as novelist John Gardner has argued, any decent narrative prose aims to entrance its readers in the narrative “dream” (39-41), then

Roger Fry intends this narrative voice to entrance its audience in a manner equal to any of Woolf’s novels: the reader should find herself enraptured in the history of Roger Fry and forget that Virginia Woolf ever intervened in this account.

Woolf scholarship and its commitment to Woolf’s anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder could easily overshadow our reading of her narrative pose in Roger Fry.

After all, isn’t this stance simply indicative of Woolf’s response to the bullish presences of Margery Fry and Leonard, or Woolf’s expectation that Bloomsbury and the critics would pan Roger Fry and, by extension, Woolf herself? Yet, Woolf’s diaries and letters reveal a meticulous, canny, and process-oriented writer who wrote, rewrote, and revised until arriving at the proper voice and atmosphere. Though her self-referential parentheses appear only twice in Roger Fry, they evince not anxiety but a conscious decision to deflect attention from herself to her subject. As a punctuation mark and a gesture of self- elision, the parentheses direct readers toward a space closed off from the main body of the text, a pause or an aside in which reflection occurs.

To put this differently, Woolf’s parentheses demarcate the space of “negative language,” which function like the “negative spaces” that Roberta Rubinstein identifies in

To the Lighthouse. Negative diction and negative space, according to Rubinstein, draw

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the parameters of a seemingly evacuated space that actually “surround the subject matter and therefore define it” (39). In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak offers a similar claim in her rumination on Jacques Lacan’s term

“foreclosure”; adapting “foreclosure” to her figure of the native informant, Spivak contends that such foreclosure excludes the native informant’s narrative from the body of literary and critical texts, even as that voice becomes necessary to shaping the text and its discursive practices (q.v. 1-19). More recently, Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology

(2006) reflects on the function of brackets as a device for orientating readers towards that which has been bracketed, foreclosed, elided, or placed in parentheses. “We remain reliant on what we put in brackets,” Ahmed states; “indeed, the activity of bracketing may sustain the fantasy that ‘what we put aside’ can be transcended in the first place. [. .

.] We could question not only the formal spaces of the bracket (which creates the fantasy that we can do without what we put to one side), but also with the content of what is bracketed, with ‘what’ is ‘put aside’” (33-34). With parentheses Woolf sets herself aside, into the narrative margins of Roger Fry; to borrow from Ahmed, this generates a fantasy that this narrative of Fry’s life can “do without” the presence of Virginia Woolf and that the narration “transcends” Woolf. On the contrary, Woolf’s self-elision signals that her aesthetic theories, her principles as a critic, surround and give form to Roger Fry.

Placing herself in parentheses, Woolf coyly plays on the presumed facticity of literary biography and distracts readers from the narrative techniques that she borrows from fiction. This should shock neither Woolf’s readers nor her scholars: after all, in A

Room of One’s Own (1929) Woolf adopts the protean Mary Beton-Seton-Carmichael persona, and Three Guineas creates a hypothetical female letter-writer responding to

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fundraising requests from charities. Here, we may recall that Cohn’s diagram shows only a dotted line—easily permeated, easily traversed—between the “domains” of history and fiction. By extracting any reference to herself, Woolf deftly hides from view those yearnings expressed in the playfulness of Flush (1933), her biography of Elizabeth

Barrett Browning’s spaniel, and the conclusion of Orlando: that biography should offer a

“secret transaction” between the reader and every valance of the text. Even though Roger

Fry contains no passages quite like Orlando’s contemplations or Lily Briscoe’s epiphany in To the Lighthouse that one wants “fifty pairs of eyes” to see Mrs. Ramsay,46 the biography nonetheless retains traces from which we can deduce Woolf’s presence: the ornate lyricism, reveries enclosed in parentheses, the seamless insertion of and allusions to other texts (often without citation), the wonder at Fry’s state of mind, the concern for the physical and mental health of Fry’s tragically ill wife Helen (née Coombe).47

However, some evidence is more explicit and requires knowledge not of Woolf’s biography, but her other writings. The success of these interventions depends upon the assumed scholarly voice and Woolf’s self-elision; to put this more aptly, only by placing

46 “One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see [Mrs. Ramsay] with, she reflected. Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with, she thought. Among them must be one that was stone blind to her beauty. One wanted most some secret sense, fine as air, with which to steal through keyholes and surround her where she sat knitting, talking, sitting silent in the window alone; which took to itself and treasured up like the air which held the smoke of the steamer, her thoughts, her imaginations, her desires. What did the hedge mean to her, what did the garden mean to her, what did it mean to her when a wave broke?” (225). 47 In his review of Roger Fry, Borenius praises Woolf’s treatment of the tragic and debilitating illness of Fry’s wife Helen. Woolf remarks that Helen’s death prepared Fry for the later adversities of his life and career: “At the back of all that he accepted and rejected after his wife left him lay the fact of that experience—he had suffered and was to go on suffering, something that was, he said, ‘far worse than death.” This comment marks one of Woolf’s rare uses of footnotes in the biography. Her footnote reads, “Helen Fry died in the Retreat at York in 1937. After her death the cause of her illness was found to be an incurable thickening of the bone of the skull” (148). As Hermione Lee observes, even “progressive” facilities like the Retreat practiced inhumane methods of caretaking—a fate that Woolf was spared, when Leonard agreed to tend Woolf’s mental illness at home.

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herself in parentheses can Woolf attribute to Fry those principles always looming on the margins of her writing. And only then can Woolf push us into our own parenthetical pause, where we can reflect on our own critical praxis through her ventriloquized version of Fry.

The most blatant of these interventions occurs when Woolf co-opts—though it may be more apt to say “self-plagiarizes”—her introduction to The Common Reader to conceptualize Fry’s “common seer.” In the fifth chapter, entitled “Work,” Woolf situates

Fry in 1901, at the beginning of his tenure as the chief art critic for Athenaeum, when he was only thirty-five years old. “It was an opportunity of great value to Roger Fry,” Woolf informs us, “because it gave him a chance to clear his mind and to deliver himself of views that had been forming during these years of travel and intensive picture-seeing [in

France and Italy]” (105). It was a position that Fry approached “with extraordinary energy and independence”:

The mass of old newspaper cuttings is evidence of that, and if in time to

come anyone should wish to trace Roger Fry’s long and adventurous

career as an art critic to its source, it is here in these columns of faded

print. Even to the common seer, to coin a counterpart to Dr. Johnson’s

Common Reader, to whom the names of Pesellino and Matteo da Siena

mean nothing whatever, to whom English painting round about 1900 is an

obscure tract of country and its figures shadowy enough, these old articles

seem curiously alive, alert and on the spot. Further, they are very amusing.

[. . .] Nor was Roger Fry a born writer. Compared with Symonds or Pater

he was an amateur, doing his best with a medium for which he had no

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instinctive affection. For that very reason perhaps he was saved from some

of their temptations. He was not led away to write prose poems, or to

make the picture a text for a dissertation upon life. (105-106)

Woolf achieves here a double self-elision from the text: firstly, she refuses to take ownership of her earlier citation of Samuel Johnson’s common reader; secondly, she poses the common reader as a common seer with whom Fry seeks to communicate. So,

Woolf’s Common Reader, which predates Roger Fry by fifteen years, encloses the passage and infringes on it. In the Common Reader’s introduction, Woolf holds this idealized reader as the one controlling the “final distribution of poetical honours” (1), and she offers this figure as a hypothetical reader of Fry’s Athenaeum reviews. Moreover, in another instance of her backhanded compliments, Woolf differentiates Fry from

“professional” cultural and art critics like John Addington Symonds and Walter Pater, whose ornate prose may challenge and frustrate readers interested in precise and frank interpretations.

Woolf predicates Fry’s malleability as a critic and thinker on this “amateurism,” which resembles the intuitive common reader’s praxis. She likens Fry to the common reader, who “is worse educated” than the scholar (i.e., less specialized) and “reads for his own pleasure”; moreover, the common reader “is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole” (1). In the biography, Woolf describes Fry’s Athenaeum reviews as a hodgepodge, borrowing heavily from his interest in other art forms: “He wrote of pictures as if they were pictures,” but “[o]ften in those early articles he makes shift with terms that belong to the literary critic, or to the musical critic” (106). The discourses of literature and music

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become the “odds and ends” with which Fry reviewed for Athenaeum—although Woolf is rather vague on how he still succeeded in writing of paintings “as if they were pictures” while resorting to other critical lexicons.

Roger Fry’s Self-Revision from Quaker Austerity to Model Critic

What matters, though, is that Woolf interprets Fry as a generalist not unlike the common reader. This outlook becomes possible through Fry’s earlier life experiences.

Indeed, the first four chapters—covering Fry’s early life, education, and his marriage to

Helen Coombe—are careful to chart Fry’s exposure to painters, music, philosophy, and literature beyond the narrow scope of his training. Woolf observes that some may have witnessed something “fantastic, flighty, gushing, in his character,” as his young adult life in Beaufort Street and Cambridge gave rise to his “old complaint,” that “life is too full of different possibilities and interests.” But for Woolf, this proves a boon to the critic and a model contrary to the specialization expected of academic authorities:

All these different, sometimes conflicting, interests and activities may

have interfered with that absorption in art, that isolation and concentration

which, as he was often to remark, the great artists, like Cézanne, have

found essential. To the critic, however, a richer, or a more varied diet, may

be helpful. And circumstances were forcing him to become a critic. (88)

It is not that critics do not concentrate or hone their craft, Woolf suggests, but that critics should, from necessity, attune themselves to the interplay of their obsessions, activities, and social events. (Mapping onto this claim A Room of One’s Own and its concluding observation that the woman writer requires £500 per annum and a room of her own, we can see Woolf’s attempt at distinguishing herself from Fry: she is like that “great artist”

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who requires space; Fry is a critic who thrives on surplus obligations.) Where Fry rankles at “conflicting” passions and obligations, Woolf observes fodder for his later essays and reviews—the “richer, or a more varied diet” that would manifest itself in the protean discourse of Fry’s Athenaeum reviews and books like Vision and Design.

Yet, even this snippet nods toward Woolf’s larger project, which is to argue that critics resist the rigidity that often accompanies specialization and that inevitably leads to the calcification of art, of its latent meanings. Woolf suggests that Fry’s education and the flurry of his social and professional commitments—to the projects of Bloomsbury, to initiatives like the Omega Workshop, and so on—enabled his maturation into an artist- critic who practiced forms in the essay and on the canvas. Further, this take on the critic’s capacity offers a model of thinking that our own inquiries should instill in the reader: flexibility, openness, and moreover the dangerous willingness to be wrong. These attributes are central to the aesthetic labor of self-revision.

Here, the narrative of Fry’s attraction to Paul Cézanne proves instructive. As

Green has remarked, Fry’s critical eye did not immediately take to Cézanne, and it was not until after the Great War that Fry derived a notion of “plastic form” from Cézanne’s experiments with perspective, depth, and color. It begins, naturally enough, with Fry’s

Quaker upbringing. His was a youth, as Woolf recounts, circumscribed by the faith’s somber temperament, constituted of “[s]uch scruples—‘miserable questions of dress and address,’ as [Roger’s father] Edward Fry came to call them—[that] tormented the weaker spirits and laid them open to ridicule” (12). This confined Fry’s early exposure to art, as

“even in the nineteenth century almost the only picture to be found in a Quaker household was an engraving of Penn’s Treaty with the Indians—that detestable picture,

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as Roger Fry called it later” (12). The faith’s strictures continued to exert themselves in the early 1890s, while Fry was a Cambridge art student touring Venice; there, J.A.

Symonds “saw in the young Cambridge art student someone who could still be very easily shocked and was worth shocking and so educating” (74). Symonds took to tutoring

Fry and introduced him to Aestheticism and the Decadents, which enabled Fry to detect in Lord Ronald Gower the archetype for Wilde’s Lord Henry Wotton. “It was now Roger

Fry’s turn to be shocked,” Woolf writes of these days in Venice; “there was still a great deal of the Quaker in him that was liable to shock from the ‘surprising’ things that were openly discussed. There was no ‘cast iron morality,’ nothing Nomian in the atmosphere that surrounded Symonds [. . .] at Venice” (74).

After Venice was Paris, where the young Fry remained slow to shrug off his

Quaker youth. Because of its scruples, he failed to see the charm of Cézanne’s work, which was then on show in Paris:

He missed, to his lifelong regret, seeing any picture by Cézanne. And

Paris and French painting, considering what both were to mean to him

later, made very little impression upon him at first sight. It may have been

that the first sight struck at him from an odd angle. Modern painting had to

strike through a Quaker upbringing, through a scientific education;

through Cambridge and Cambridge talk of morals and philosophy, and

finally through an intensive study of the old Italian Masters before it

reached him. (80)

If Woolf were writing the same passage for herself, she could as easily have substituted the “modern novel” for “modern painting,” and swapped the legacy of Leslie Stephen and

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the nineteenth-century novel for all the stern moralism of Fry’s Quakerism and

Cambridge. Nonetheless, Woolf illustrates Fry embarking on the first phase of self- revision, the recognition of either an impediment to or an error in interpretation.

In “On Beauty and Being Fair,” the first essay in On Beauty and Being Just,

Elaine Scarry classifies two types of error in appreciating the beautiful. The first of these is a hyperinflation of a work’s qualities, and the second is simply under-appreciation. “Of these two genres of error,” Scarry postulates, “the second seems more grave: in the first

(the error of overcrediting), the mistake occurs on the side of perceptual generosity, in the second (the error of undercrediting) on the side of failed generosity” (14). While the critic may guide readers to amend each class of misinterpretation, the second proves more applicable in deciphering Virginia Woolf’s narrative arc, of Roger Fry’s self-revision into a model critic. In Fry’s case, as in the second class of interpretive errors, the beauty of

Cézanne and the modern painters had already infiltrated Fry’s sensorium, but his religion, upbringing, and education had conditioned him to resist the pleasures offered in the canvas.

This exposure and immediate, almost visceral, resistance would have occurred unconsciously to Fry, or to anyone else hedged in by convention. “One lets things into one’s midst without accurately calculating the degree of consciousness required by them,” Scarry notes (15). Scarry elaborates on the consequences of such thoughtlessness, in the context of errors in aesthetic judgment:

In the second genre of error a beautiful object is suddenly present, not

because a new object has entered the sensory horizon bringing its beauty

with it (as when a new poem is written or a new student arrives or a

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willow tree, unleafed by winter, becomes electric—a maze of yellow

wands lifting against lavender clapboards and skies) but because an object,

already within the horizon, has its beauty, like late luggage, suddenly

placed in your hands. The second genre of error entails neither the arrival

of a new beautiful object, nor an object present previously unnoticed, but

an object present and confidently repudiated as an object of beauty. (17)

Implicit in Scarry’s remark—that the beautiful is “present and confidently repudiated”— is a critique of the conditioning that compels readers and viewers to put matters in terms of black and white, of categorically beautiful or not. The problem, of course, is that sometimes we are not yet prepared to appreciate a particular canvas or novel. Sometimes we lack the mental space to contemplate the object and must, like the Sherlock Holmes of

A Study in Scarlet, clear out excess data in order to concentrate.48 Sometimes we remain constrained by our social conditioning, our cultures, our politics—what has conditioned us to accept a particular fantasy perception of the world. Here, we may consider the novelist John Updike, who confessed that leaving Pennsylvania as a young adult would require him to move beyond the narrow worldview of his provincial upbringing: “I arrived in New England with a Pennsylvania upbringing to write out of my system” (xiii).

48 As the Holmes canon developed, Arthur Conan Doyle would modify Holmes’s ability to retain knowledge. In A Study in Scarlet, however, Watsom expresses dismay that Holmes should be “ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System.” In response, Holmes describes a mental space-clearing gesture that enables him to process new information, a priori, without the corruption of any unhelpful precedents. Of this ability, Holmes says, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. [. . .] Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before” (17). Holmes’s discipline is as distanced as one can be from Woolf’s common reader, but this method renders him startlingly open to unprecedented sensory experiences, which Scarry contends are an essential element of the beautiful.

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In mentioning the fictional Holmes and the late Updike, I point to two versions of thinkers who, much like Fry, had to repudiate canons of rules, accepted conventions, and ideological/religious strictures in order to hone their own methodologies. Such a battery of regulations and stipulations—like those I have previously attributed to Ruskin and

Arnold—impose upon the individual and the public sphere a false, Kantian sense that one can apply aesthetic rules universally. Subsequently, any work that fails to meet those general standards can be found deficient. Yet, as Scarry argues, “[b]eauty always takes place in the particular, and if there are no particulars, the chances of seeing it go down”

(18). In other words, if we are driven to observe only general and vague qualities, or such vacuous arbiters as the “prestige” and “reputation” of a canvas, we will overlook those particular elements of composition and design that make beauty manifest in a painting.

Indeed, any critic who over-values a work’s conventionality or its authenticity perpetuates failures of aesthetic judgment, and does so through the production of, to put it simply, bad criticism which cements rather than expands the ideas and sensations latent in the work. On similar grounds, Woolf recounts Fry’s distaste for “experts”: “He had no great respect for expertise; often enough he said sarcastic things of those who can only like a picture or trust themselves to buy it if assured by an expert that it is ‘genuine’”

(122). As Woolf reports, Fry’s iconoclastic attitude toward the provenance of paintings earned him praise as a rare and candid expert on collections of the Old Masters. He possessed the wherewithal to call out a fake, often consoling clients afraid to voice their own concerns on a work’s authenticity. Woolf recounts one such occasion, when “an impoverished noblemen who [. . .] sent for Roger Fry to verify some of the ascriptions”; when Fry identified the paintings as fakes and named the forger, this nobleman “was so

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delighted that his taste was confirmed and so impressed by the insight of the expert”

(123). While Fry’s abilities slowly warmed private citizens and collectors, universities and academies hesitated to endorse Fry’s controversial views. When the Slade

Professorship opened at Cambridge in 1904, Fry was passed over despite a near universal concurrence that he was “frank and independent; original yet learned [. . .]. In short, there seemed to be considerable agreement among experts that ‘no critic and historian of Art in

England is better fitted for the post’” (128).

Though being turned over afflicted him, Fry did not require the approbation of

Cambridge and the coveted Slade Professorship to further develop his craft. Much like

Oscar Wilde, Fry found success in the United States. In New York, a receptive public celebrated Fry and his Athenaeum reviews. Pierpont Morgan attempted to induce Fry into accepting a post as the Director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Fry later agreed to assist in modernizing the Met’s collections by acting as a European buyer

(q.v. 128-131). The liberality and wealth of Fry’s American connections jolted him into activity and increasingly exposed him to the contemporary work occurring in France.

“Ever since 1906, as a letter to his wife explains,” Woolf informs us, “he had been becoming more and more absorbed in the work of Cézanne in particular and in modern

French painting in general” (132).

After the First Post-Impressionist Exhibition: Fry, Criticism, and the Transformation of

Public Perceptions of Art

This marks a drastic shift from the young Fry in Venice and Paris, the one who was unimpressed with the aesthetic innovations in French painting, the Fry for whom—as

Woolf put it—“the first sight struck [. . .] at an odd angle.” However, it also signals Fry’s

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willingness to address the error in his own vision, namely, that he had “undercredited” the poignancy and beauty of French painting. This shift points toward the second component of the aesthetic labor of self-revision, namely, the willingness to view art differently. For the critic, the logical extension of this labor is the duty of offering these alternate interpretations to a literate public constituted of common readers. Arguably, precisely this occurred when, in 1910, the Grafton Galleries commissioned Fry to organize a show of contemporary works. Fry entitled the exhibition “Manet and the Post-

Impressionists”—better known today as the First Post-Impressionist Exhibition. Not only did Fry coin the term “Post-Impressionism” with the exhibition’s title, he charted a trajectory from Manet’s late-impressionist aesthetic through the primitivism and nascent cubism of Picasso and the brash color palettes of Matisse.

When it opened in November 1910, “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” jolted the British viewership, betraying the extent to which Scarry’s two fallacies of aesthetic judgment had dominated the public’s view of painting. By this, I mean that Fry’s curatorship over the included artists illustrated the extent to which the British public had unconsciously committed two errors. Firstly, the public had absorbed and reiterated the confining classicism that governed the “experts” and their defense of realism in nineteenth-century landscape, portraiture, and animal paintings, as well as the hyper- realism of the Pre-Raphaelites (i.e., an “overcrediting”). Secondly, the public— instinctively reviled because of their quiet indoctrination—failed to recognize the techniques, composition, and perspectives at work in the Post-Impressionist canvases.

Charles Harrison notes that the public and critics applied the following epithets to what they encountered in the Grafton Galleries: “horror,” “madness,” “infection,”

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“sickness of the soul,” “putrescence,” “pornography,” “anarchy” and “evil” (47). While

Harrison captures the rhetoric of the pandemonium over the exhibition, Woolf’s Roger

Fry prefers—in yet another of those moments that hint toward its author’s self-elision— to dramatize the outcry after the fashion of gossip in Mrs. Dalloway: “One gentleman, according to Desmond MacCarthy, laughed so hard at Cézanne’s portrait of his wife that

‘he had to be taken out and walked up and down in the fresh air for five minutes. Fine ladies went into silvery trills of artificial laughter.’ The secretary had to provide a book in which the public wrote down their complaints” (154).

The exhibition became a society affair, a scandal to the public’s conditioned expectations of art. Yet, the robust reaction (“The pictures were outrageous, anarchistic and childish,” Woolf pens, ventriloquizing the public; “They were an insult to the British public and the man who was responsible for the insult was either a fool, an impostor or knave” [154]) suggests some kind of return of the repressed, a public that unconsciously craved the spectacle that would topple the stultifying rules and proprieties of art. Not surprisingly, the furor over “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” precipitated a rapid alteration in the public’s understanding of non-realist and non-representational art, which is indicative of the critic’s and the artist’s potential to transform the public’s perception, either of aesthetics or ideology. As George Heard Hamilton writes,

The exhibition, which ran until 15 January 1911, immediately became one

of those epochal events, comparable to the first Impressionist exhibitions

in Paris and the Armory Show of 1913 in New York, which arouse the

bitterest antagonism at the time, but which swiftly change the direction of

an entire generation’s artistic experience. Indeed, so intense was the

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interest which could be felt beneath the public protest that Fry and his

supporters were encouraged to arrange a “Second Post-Impressionist

Exhibition” at the same gallery in October 1912. (228)

In his essay for the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, Fry reminisces about the impression left on the public of “a movement which was the more disconcerting in that it was no mere variation upon accepted themes but implied a reconsideration of the very purpose and aim as well as the methods of pictorial and plastic art” (Vision and

Design 166). Fry inspired—if not invented—a demand for such multi-perspectival and plastic art, for formally diverse movements that experimented with composition, source material, and forms that could express and stimulate what his other essays termed the

“imaginative life” of the viewer. Here we discover an obvious intersection between

Woolf’s engagement with psychic interiority and Fry’s brash yet effective display in the

Grafton Galleries: the critical commonplace in Woolf studies that her famous claim in

“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”—“On or about December 1910 human character changed”—refers to the aftershocks of “Manet and the Post-Impressionists,” which facilitated literary Modernism’s explorations of characters’ lush mental states of being.

But it is not enough for the critic to shock the public into self-revision; the critic must also remain open to transformation. It is here that Fry’s commitment to Cézanne provides Woolf with her most poignant illustration of the critic’s lifelong work to produce texts that foster a space of comfortable silence, where the reader may engage in reflection and self-revision. Fry first saw Cézanne’s work in 1906, when the International

Society hosted an exhibition in the New Gallery. Woolf sees fit to cite in its entirety the

“first glimpse” contained in Fry’s review of the 1906 gallery, but the following lines

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prove most salient in capturing that moment when Fry begins to open himself to

Cézanne:

There were, it is true, a few of M. Cézanne’s works at the Durand Ruel

exhibition in the Grafton Gallery, but nothing which gave so definite an

idea of his peculiar genius as the Nature Morte and the Paysage in this

gallery. From the Nature Morte one gathers that Cézanne goes back to

Manet, developing one side of his art to the furthest limits. [. . .] We

confess to having been hitherto sceptical about Cézanne’s genius, but

these two pieces reveal a power which is entirely distinct and personal,

and though the artist’s appeal is limited, and touches none of the finer

issues of the imaginative life, it is nonetheless complete. (Fry qtd. in

Woolf, Roger Fry 111-112).

The full passage is of interest, as it illustrates Fry clinging to his earlier presumption that

Manet represents the pinnacle of Impressionism while nonetheless ceding territory to

Cézanne. But we nonetheless witness a critic wavering in his earlier convictions, opening himself to the possibility that his earlier convictions were misguided, if not ill informed.

Reconsidering Cézanne, Reconsidering the Beautiful

Fry’s wavering on Cézanne implicitly offers the reader a breach of confidence, which invites reconsideration of the painter’s oeuvre. It was a reflection that Fry imposed on the public with “Manet and the Post-Impressionists,” and it was a reconsideration that he would continue pursuing for the remainder of his life. After the First World War, Fry went on pilgrimage to Cézanne’s home in Aix, France, a venture that proved overwhelming. Woolf reports that “[t]o his critical eye it was too sharp,” then cites Fry’s

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complaint that “[t]he illumination is so tremendously definite here that a small change of angle alters the tones a great deal” (223). But Fry was possessed with a desire to see the subject of his study more deeply, channeling a fierce energy that Woolf frequently attributes to the zealotry of his Quaker upbringing. (Though Woolf overplays her drubbing of Quakerism, her repetition does bring up the worthwhile consideration that self-revision often repurposes one’s character traits, in service of an expanded worldview.) “Persuaded [. . .] to go sight-seeing” by Cézanne, Fry toured the artist’s house and convinced a gardener—who had never heard Cézanne’s name—to allow him to roam the gardens. In prowling about Aix and the sites associated with Cézanne, Fry gradually relinquished his idolization of the painter but kept the inspiration: after a disappointing conversation with a shopkeeper, who “could only remember an old man who was rather cracked,” Fry “gave up the pursuit of associations and turned to his own canvas. Colours and shapes after the frozen war years when he had no one to talk to about art, and everyone talked politics, became absorbing” (224).

Woolf’s narration demonstrates that the journey to Aix forced Fry to self-revise in two key ways: firstly, he surrendered his pursuit to mentally compose a hagiography of

Cézanne, and secondly, the tumult of perceptions enabled Fry to quite literally change the color palettes in his own paintings and to detect shades, potentialities, that had been shadowed during the Great War. When Woolf writes of Fry’s Cézanne: A Study of His

Development (1927), she praises it as the book most likely to illustrate “to the common reader at least, [. . .] the value of destroying theories by acids, because the positive construction left is so very solid” (284). Woolf continues:

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Here at least the theory is consumed, and the critic has become a creator. It

suggests that if Roger Fry received the impulse to create from the work of

art rather than from the thing itself, it was because a work of art posed an

intellectual problem and thus gratified that intense intellectual curiosity,

the desire “to pull apart and to analyse” [. . .]. At any rate, the Cézanne,

whether we call it criticism or creation, seems to justify the endless work

of revision and analysis that lay behind it. (284)

Woolf stretches this passage for another two pages, embarking on a lyric, metaphor-laden disquisition about Fry’s comprehensive portrayal of Cézanne, an artist who “emerges and becomes ‘the great protagonist of individual prowess against the herd’” (285). Yet

Woolf’s initial comments on Fry seem most poignant in considering the critic’s task: by allowing himself to self-revise and by fostering a similar mindset in his readers, Roger

Fry transforms works of art from static objects into “an intellectual problem,” something that remains protean and impossible to fix, something that—like the amorphous and subversive forms of history, fiction, and literary biography—will telegraph different messages at different moments in history.

6. Conclusion: Criticism after Roger Fry and Roger Fry: A Biography

“Art lives by destroying itself,” Quentin Bell observes, “and, as fashions change, artists and their works grow, fade, and sometimes grow again in public estimation”

(Bloomsbury 10). The same is true for literary critics and art historians, for political scientists and economists: their influence can wane, but may remain present. “Human beings are not works of art,” Woolf muses; “They are not consciously creating a book that can be read, or a picture that can be hung on the wall. The critic of Roger Fry as a

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man has a far harder task than any that was set him by the pictures of Cézanne” (294).

True, but Fry was an artist-critic who left behind an archive of letters and paintings and art reviews and books, which suggested to Virginia Woolf a comprehensive tale of who the critic is, and of what that person does. And Roger Fry—regardless of whether or not his prose is visible on one’s critical horizon—demonstrates that criticism decenters our most deeply fixed beliefs and compels what I have termed the “aesthetic labor of self- revision,” that willingness to change possible only through an encounter with an object of beauty.

It would be too glib to attribute to Woolf’s Roger Fry those later critical theories that have celebrated dismantling structural thought or veering away from the illusions of centers and spheres of influence. Despite the joy with which Woolf refrains that Fry “had no centre,” he was a person nonetheless governed by his passions and commitments.

Chief amongst these was that art was necessary to Great Britain’s intellectual well being; in this sense, he had hardly diverged from Ruskin and Arnold. But where Arnold saw uneducated “philistines” who required strict education so as to assimilate into a British body politic, Fry saw a “herd” misguided by presumptions that crystallized art into a tool of social and ideological control. For Fry, art alone could rapidly force viewers into a state of self-reflection, though the experience could prove agitating and require something like Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” Criticism offers a more quiet and private place in which this self-revision can occur. Moreover, the art of criticism extends to readers a thoughtful conversation that encourages debate and engagement with critics and scholars.

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This poses a challenge for literary criticism, especially for scholarly modes of criticism that predicate themselves on veneers of “authority” and “objectivity.” These airs usually generate an atmosphere of elitism and inaccessibility through the use of jargon— a sin of which I am far too guilty in this project. When jargon obfuscates argumentation and analysis, the elements of criticism that enable communication in Atwood’s author- text-reader triad, we run the danger of either isolating common readers interested in the topic, or making the humanities more insular than they should be. What Woolf offers us in Roger Fry and her manipulation of literary biography are not new skills, but skills that have often been pushed aside in a desperate scramble to render the humanities more scientific, to prove that we can operate with the statistical efficiency of the social sciences and polling data. Of course, we need to consider the politics of our discipline, remain conscientious members of our own community, and understand how sociopolitical power formations have mapped models of influence and control onto the academy. To that end, recent studies like Roderick Ferguson’s The Re-order of Things, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s

Provincializing Europe, and Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology—not to mention the innovative work of disability studies—have inherent value in urging scholarly critics to re-carve their ontological prisms.

If anything, Woolf’s and Fry’s appeal to the readers as individual readers— imagined others with whom we want to communicate but may never physically encounter—sustains art and criticism by allowing for a range of intellectual, affective, and aesthetic reactions. Let us consider Fry once more, in two passages from the

“Retrospect” of Vision and Design:

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When the critic holds the result of his reaction to a work of art clearly in

view he has next to translate it into words. Here, too, distortion is

inevitable, and it is here that I have probably failed most of accuracy, for

language in the hands of one who lacks the mastery of a poet has its own

tricks, its perversities and habits. There are things which it shies at and

goes round, there are places where it runs away and, leaving the reality

which it professes to carry tumbled out at the tail of the cart, arrives in a

great pother, but without the goods.

[. . .]

Fortunately he [i.e., Leo Tolstoy] showed by an application of his [moral]

theory to actual works of art what absurdities it led to. What remained of

importance was the idea that a work of art was not the record of beauty

already existent elsewhere, but the expression of an emotion felt by the

artist and conveyed to the spectator. (200, 205)

Each passage seems to anticipate Derrida’s cryptic and infamous remark, that there is nothing outside of the text. Indeed, Fry suggests that, once criticism becomes set down on the page, that it is subject to the same “distortions” and aporia that afflict any written document. (If he is guilty of anything here, it is respecting the “mastery of a poet” too much.) Fry likens language to an untethered horse that possesses its own intelligence and an agenda inscrutable from the human’s vantage point; if it “arrives [. . .] without the goods,” perhaps it is because we are not interpreting its presence properly. Similarly, there is nothing beyond the canvas, and Fry witnesses in it the complex communication

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between the artist, the medium, and the viewer—the process by which the spectator determines which emotions exist, and what elements convey them.

When Woolf applies her theories of narrative and biography in Roger Fry, she elides herself so as to create for her readers a character of the ideal critic, a version of Fry who establishes a conversation with common readers despite what he terms “the possibility of infinitely diverse reactions to a work of art” (Vision and Design 208). And if critics did not stimulate the conversations that produced these disparate reactions, then what purpose would the critic have? After all this, perhaps the best summation of

Woolf’s Roger Fry, of her theories of biography and criticism, would be this: the task of the critic is to keep art and literature interesting, and this is only possible when the work of art does not possess a fixed interpretation. Or, to again resort to Wilde’s Preface to The

Picture of Dorian Gray, “when critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.”

Critics should unsettle us and make matters unsettling; they should revel in a clarity of prose and vision that nonetheless accepts that certain matters on the page, on the canvas, or in our reality will necessarily remain murky.

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Coda

The Afterlife of Scottish Nationalism; or, Hugh MacDiarmid, Scottish Letters, and

Britain after Brexit

Hauf his soul a Scot maun use Indulgin’ in illusions, And hauf in gettin’ rid o’ them And comin’ to conclusions Wi’ the demoralisin’ dearth O’ onything worth while on Earth . . . . –Hugh MacDiarmid, “My Quarrel with England” (Collected Poems 141)

Writing in the shadow of the Second World War and the imminent collapse of empire, Christopher Murray Grieve—the journalist and poet best known by his nom de plume Hugh MacDiarmid—advanced an aggressive agenda for preserving Scotland’s cultural and political contributions to Europe. MacDiarmid’s program required harmonic relations between Communism and the young Scottish National Party (SNP), the product of a 1934 merger of the Scottish Party and the National Party of Scotland. It was a paradoxical ideology, pitting nationalism’s tendency for insularity against Communism’s hope that the withering away of the state would result in an international civil society.

Yet, MacDiarmid’s nonfiction betrays neither conviction: he preemptively parries the contradictions or aporias that political theorists and literary scholars would detect, and he substitutes instead a fantasy of the Scottish nation as an always hybrid enterprise. In his autobiography Lucky Poet (1943, rev. 1972), MacDiarmid pronounces the mission of his

Communist Scottish nationalism like this:

I understood that ere long the Empire would begin to disintegrate and what

desperate steps—leading on irresistibly to the naked confrontation of

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Communism and Fascism—would be tried to hold it together, and that the

role of the Scotsman and Communist in that great issue must be to oppose

Imperialism in every possible way and hasten its downfall, while so far as

Scotland was concerned the effort should be to regain a measure of

Independence—or set afoot a militant anti-English and anti-Imperialist

movement to that end—with the object of preventing Scotland being

overwhelmed in England’s imminent and inevitable and well-deserved

ruin. (234).

In this assault of verbiage, MacDiarmid laments what he perceives as Great Britain’s death drive, a hurtling toward reactionary, prejudicial, and tyrannical policies designed to perpetuate the aims of empire. To resist this, he calls for an independent Scotland, or perhaps he advocates for the dissolution of the United Kingdom—his prose renders the idea murky, vacillating between a “militant movement” and the less certain “measure of

Independence.”

MacDiarmid trades in such waffling expressions and this revisionist take on

Scotland—namely, that Britain’s northern kingdom has always been a state colonized against her will. Regardless, Scotland’s public sphere seems to have absorbed these notions through the decades separating the twenty-first century from the 1930s Scottish

Renaissance’s intelligentsia of MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Catherine Carswell,

Edwin Muir, and Naomi Mitchison. Eighty years after the SNP’s creation and sixty-nine years after the wartime publication of Lucky Poet, on 18 September 2014, the kingdom of

Scotland held a vote that tested the legacy of the Scottish Renaissance. The referendum ballot asked one question: “Should Scotland be an independent country?”

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The results on paper would not have pleased MacDiarmid—but the fragmented public opinion may have piqued the poet’s contrarian spirit. In the referendum, 86% of

Scotland’s eligible voters had turned out at the polls, concluding a two-year campaign by the SNP (urging the “yes” vote) and the Westminster parties (backing the “no” vote) to decide Scotland and Great Britain’s future. By a 55% to 45% margin, Scots elected to remain part of the United Kingdom. On 19 September, Scottish First Minister Alex

Salmond addressed the public to concede that the SNP failed to win on the independence question. He also tendered his resignation as the Scottish Parliament’s First Minister and as leader of the SNP. With the signature plank of the SNP’s platform voted down,

Salmond recognized that his political capital had waned and stepped aside, to allow for

SNP leadership in Edinburgh that could foster devolution-focused dialogue with

Westminster.

In handing over power to his deputy Nicola Sturgeon, Salmond enjoyed a rare privilege for a Scottish First Minister: the power to step down of his own volition and ensure a peaceable political transition.1 But Salmond was chary—if not prescient—in his concession speech. He subtly indicted the isolationism that, during the next twenty months, would come to characterize the palaver of pro-Brexit politicians like Boris

Johnson, the Tory mayor of London, and Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK

Independence Party (Ukip) and a Member of European Parliament. “Over the last weeks, we have a seen a scare and a fear of enormous proportions,” Salmond observed of the

1 At present, Salmond is the only former First Minister to voluntarily step down. Donald Dewar, who held the office upon the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, died in office of a brain hemorrhage. His immediate successor, Henry MacLeish, was deposed as a result of the Officegate scandal. The third First Minister, Jack McConnell, saw the Scottish Labour Party lose at the polls to Salmond’s SNP, and McConnell subsequently resigned as the leader of Labour in Scotland.

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“no” campaign’s final push, “not a scaremongering directed at the Scottish people, but the scare and the fear at the heart of the Westminster establishment as they realize the mass movement of people that was going forward in Scotland” (Concession Speech).

Salmond’s comment calls out only an English fear of increased public support for the

SNP’s political agenda—that “mass movement of people” including 45% of Scottish voters. However, he also alerted Scots and global audiences of the innate dread of

England’s post-imperial isolationists, who crave influence over other nations coupled with insulation from the external stipulations imposed by pan-governmental organizations like the European Union. Following the results and Salmond’s speech,

Farage issued a rant rife with such scare tactics. Ignoring Westminster’s vast legislative history of depriving home rule to Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, Farage demanded that all

Scottish MPs in the central government recuse themselves from voting in “England-only” matters, as—he alleges—England has been “ignored” (“Nigel Farage”).

Of course, the debate was not only political, but cultural. Harry Potter creator

J.K. Rowling, crime novelist Ruth Rendell, Booker Prize-winner Martin Amis, and

Scottish Book of the Year-winner Ewan Morrison were vocal supporters of remaining in the United Kingdom. The independence vote sported its own prominent roster; fiction writers Alasdair Gray, A.L. Kennedy, and Irvine Welsh were particularly aggressive proponents of a free Scotland. In the months preceding the vote, The Guardian published a feature that contained testimonies from, amongst others, Welsh, Kennedy, Allan

Massie, and the poet Kathleen Jamie. Their sentiments ranged from Welsh’s full-throated yell for independence, to John Burnside’s contemptuous charge that the independence

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referendum was a “phoney” effort to entrench career politicians in their offices

(“Writers”).

While the referendum was decisive, the outcome seems to have done little to quell the debate over Scotland’s independence. This became apparent during a First Minister’s

Questions in March 2016, when Sturgeon accused the SNP’s adversaries for being “anti-

Scottish”—when Labour and the Tories were pointing out that Scotland in 2015 ran a deficit of £15 billion (Johnson, “Nicola Sturgeon”). Sturgeon again floated the possibility of independence immediately after the 23 June 2016 advisory referendum on Britain’s

European Union membership—the so-called Brexit. Because Scotland voted to remain in the EU, while England voted to leave, Sturgeon claimed that Westminster had surrendered its mandate to rule Scotland.

While he could not have anticipated this continued discord, Salmond’s remarks during the independence referendum’s aftermath were positive. Announcing his intention to resign the post of First Minister, Salmond conjectured that “Scotland can still emerge as the real winner” (Palmer, “Alex Salmond Resigns”). In his final remarks as First

Minister on 18 November 2014, Salmond echoed that sentiment, observing that “more change and better days lie ahead for Scotland and this parliament” (“Alex Salmond’s

Resignation”). These proud declarations seem curious for the leader of a nationalist party, which would—one might suspect—use independence and national sympathies as a benchmark for success. However, latent in Salmond’s remarks is the potential for

MacDiarmid’s hybridity and, therefore, a hint as to why the “yes” vote failed to carry the referendum. For Salmond and MacDiarmid, Scotland was never intended to be a nation isolated behind fixed borders and within a romanticized past. Scotland exists because of

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and in spite of the empire, because of and in spite of Europe, and because of and in spite of its own mythology.

To see this, we must knock down Scottish nationalism from its “independence or bust” posturing, and we must consider how the rhetoric of Scottish nationalism advocates something more nuanced—a cosmopolitan polity, in which collective governance and inclusivity matter more than ethnic or national origin. Taking MacDiarmid at the sum of his written words—and not just the buzzwords touted by the SNP—reveals a radically different model for Scotland and nationalism, one that should be championed over the surge of reactionary and bigoted nationalisms in England, the United States, France, Italy, and other Western nations. Perhaps Scotland and its thinkers, like MacDiarmid, can offer a better, and more tolerant, nationalism. And perhaps this is the past, present, and future relevance of artist-critics like MacDiarmid: their literary language offers ways to complicate political language and to resist tyranny as it develops.

Scotland and the Fictions of Literary Nationalism

When the new Scottish Parliament first convened in 1999, members of the SNP wore white roses, a nod to MacDiarmid’s poem “The Little White Rose.” It is a spare lyric, and its affected yet conversational English calls to mind the early poems of W.B.

Yeats:

The rose of all the world is not for me.

I want for my part

Only the little white rose of Scotland

That smells sharp and sweet—and breaks the heart. (Collected Poems 248)

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Colin Kidd reports that the SNP delegation’s optics were an obvious nod to the party’s origins in the literary aspirations of the 1930s Scottish Renaissance, even if the allusion to MacDiarmid is an “invocation of literature so recondite [. . .] as to have minimal traction with the electorate.” Even if voters failed to decipher the white rose, the party’s intent to advertise itself as an organization of homegrown poets, novelists, and would-be philosopher kings was clear.

But this inspirational performance—like much of Scotland’s political literary nationalism—is guilty of perpetuating a self-congratulatory surface reading. The SNP effectively acts like Robin Williams’s Mr. Keating in Dead Poets Society: quoting Robert

Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” while conveniently ignoring the contradictions that generate the poem’s actual meaning (cf. Dettmar, “Dead Poets Society”). After all, “The

Little White Rose” is as much a statement of nationalist yearning as it is a lament. The fragrance of MacDiarmid’s white rose intoxicates its reader with nationalist feeling, but something about this “sharp and sweet” scent anticipates decay. Yes, the poem veers toward isolationism in expressing a desire only for the white rose—a delicate symbol of a

Scotland easily wilted when exposed to the elements. However, the speaker’s tone is bittersweet and resigned; he has not attained the rose but only desires it as an alternative to the “rose of all the world.” This rose of globalization is, for the Scot, something fertilized by the nation’s domestic and international contexts—its status as a constituent nation in Great Britain, its complicity in empire, and its philosophical contributions (á la

Adam Smith and David Hume, to pick two) to European thought. The roses in

MacDiarmid’s lyric represent a double-assumption crucial to the SNP’s ideological posturing: that Scotland is an oppressed colony, but also an essential player in global

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affairs. This desire to have their cake and eat it is perhaps best captured in the full title of

Arthur Herman’s 2001 popular history of Scotland: How the Scots Invented the Modern

World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World and

Everything in It.

Effective nationalism is often like mediocre literary criticism: it muddies the water, distorts the truth’s reflection. Matters worsen when nationalists slurry politics and literature into an aspirational, revisionist history. Kidd’s essay, published in The

Guardian on 19 June 2014, depicts the SNP’s political platform as an outgrowth of

Scotland’s extensive literary past, which invents a narrative of Scots slowly—yet surely—trudging toward freedom from England. He observes that Chris Bambery makes a similar point in A People’s History of Scotland (2014). There, Bambery states that

Scotland’s folksingers, poets, novelists, and artists have advertised and advocated for an independent Scotland, utilizing Scots’ earlier rebellions as evidence of an original, natural condition of Scottish freedom. Like Kidd, Bambery is careful to qualify that some of these narratives are literary inventions: his skepticism towards the patriotic vitriol of

Braveheart (1995) admirably demonstrates that feudal society complicated and endangered Robert the Bruce’s rule after the 1314 victory at Bannockburn, generating rivalries that threatened his son David’s claim to the throne and that precipitated

Scotland’s second war of independence during the middle ages.

Nonetheless, from the 1300s until the 1707 Acts of Union, Scotland remained legally independent from England. However, the literary champions of Scottish independence conveniently manipulate the historical fact that a Scot—King James VI of

Scotland—made the union a de facto political reality when he ascended to the English

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throne upon the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603. As the personal embodiment of the union, and the first Stuart monarch, King James pronounced himself the “King of Great

Brittaine, France, and Ireland,” with the first term denoting that his reign united the kingdoms of the largest island in the British archipelago. (It’s worth noting that King

James VI and I also contributed to Scotland’s reputation for grooming literary politicians: he was a celebrated scholar in his own right, penning the Daemonologie and volumes on what we would now call “best practices” in operating a monarchy.) Due to religious squabbles, the Catholic Stuarts lost the throne upon the execution of Charles I in 1649, the event that inaugurated Oliver Cromwell’s commonwealth. Still, when the monarchy was restored in 1660, it was a Stuart who ascended to the throne: James II. Even when

James II was later deposed in the 1688 Glorious Revolution, a Stuart remained a claimant to the throne: James II’s daughter, Mary II, ruled in partnership with William of Orange.

The legal union occurred after these disruptions, during the reign of Queen Anne

(notably, Mary II’s younger sister and therefore a Stuart), when the passage of the 1707

Acts of Union gave de jure form to Great Britain. The Scottish crime novelist Josephine

Tey—a contemporary of MacDiarmid’s and an adversary of independence—derided

Scots’ resistance to the 1603-to-1707 narrative from a pro-English perspective: a

Scotland Yard inspector in Tey’s The Daughter of Time (1951) refers to 1603 as the year when “[w]e had the Scots tied to our tails for good,” and the inspector implies a similar disgust at the Scots’ attitude toward 1707 (45).

Like Tey’s disgruntled detective, history and politics suggest that Scotland and

England were bound in a permanent marriage that vacillated between caution and abuse.

It is the latter, of course, that literary Scotland prefers to harp on, usually by

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romanticizing the sociopolitical upheavals of the various Jacobite risings—three attempts

(in 1688, 1714, and 1745) to re-install the Stuart line to the British throne. The 1745 campaign and its lionizing of Charles Edward Stuart owes its place in literary memory to

Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since (1814). In this novel, which E.M.

Forster panned in Aspects of the Novel (1924), Scott recounts the narrative of young

Edward Waverley, who must grapple with his father’s allegiance to the Hanovers and his uncle’s secret fealty to Charles Edward Stuart. But he still feels the inexorable tug of

Scotland’s rugged, romantic, and liberated past—embodied by the brash and free- roaming highlander Fergus Mac-Ivor and his tempestuous sister, Flora. While the

Jacobites lose the war and Edward marries the cultivated Rose Bradwardine, the novel retains a vestigial trace of the fervor for a Scottish polity. This is apparent when Scott, in the novel’s penultimate chapter, emphasizes a canvas that drew exuberant tears to the eyes of Baron Bradwardine, Edward’s new father-in-law: “It was a large and animated painting, representing Fergus Mac-Ivor and Waverley in their highland dress, the scene a wild, rocky, and mountainous pass, down which the clan were descending in the background” (361).

It is tempting to read Old Sir Walter, as Virginia Woolf teasingly labeled the novelist, as hankering for a free Scotland. Yet, his novels and political activism offer a canny embrace of Scotland’s multifaceted character. Waverley concludes with “A postscript, which should have been a preface,” in which Scott points out that “[t]he gradual influx of wealth, and extension of commerce [in the eighteenth century], have since united to render the present people of Scotland a class of beings as different from their grandfathers, as the existing English are from those of Queen Elizabeth’s time”

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(363). More over, Scott engineered the first state visit of a British monarch to Scotland since James VI and I departed for London in 1603. Scott engineered the so-called King’s

Jaunt in August 1822, during which Scott costumed the visiting King George IV in head- to-toe Royal Stuart tartan. Scott’s intent was to display the king for the Scots and, in so doing, manufacture a vision of the union in which Scots provided the spirit, character, and very look of British power. Scott even copied this spectacle, however anachronistically, into his novels of the Crusades. Set during the Third Crusade, Scott’s

The Talisman (1825) features the Scottish Sir Kenneth as its key actor, and the Sultan

Saladin even advises Richard Coeur de Lion, England’s king, to arrange a marriage between Sir Kenneth and Richard’s cousin, Edith Plantagenet. Saladin proposes this only after concluding that the British Isles could thrive only if the Scots were placated: “Yet it now appears that a union betwixt this gallant Earl and the lady will bring about friendship betwixt Richard and Scotland, an enemy more dangerous than I, as a wild-cat in a chamber is more to be dreaded than a lion in a distant desert” (326).2

Scott’s novels depict Great Britain as a joint Anglo-Scottish enterprise, but one heavily reliant on a Scottish culture that the English would just as soon sneer at. In

Scott’s historical novels, there is a sense that Scotland is more authentic, more in touch with its rural and earthy past. This is an inheritance from Robert Burns, whose Poems,

Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) suggests that Scotland’s language differs from

England. Writing in Lallans, or the dialect of lowland Scotland, Burns positions himself as a humble rustic who “amuses himself with the little creations of his own fancy, amid

2 My article on the anachronistic nationalism in Scott’s The Talisman is forthcoming in European Romantic Review. I am grateful to Tara Ghoshal Wallace for her advice and mentorship in the writing of that article.

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the toil and fatigues of a laborious life” (iv). His poem “To a Mouse” displays this whimsy and the poetical fancy of the heaven-taught ploughman:

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,

O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!

Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

Wi’ bickering brattle!

I was be laith to rin an’ chase thee,

Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion

Has broken Nature’s social union,

An’ justifies that ill opinion,

Which makes thee startle

At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,

An’ fellow-mortal! (138-139)

Burns’s Scotsman communicates with nature, and he possesses a humility that would make a braggart of Henry David Thoreau. Lallans saturates the first stanza: words are clipped short, and Scots idioms and pronunciations replace the English idiolect more familiar to modern readers. However, the second stanza suggests that Burns’s lexicographical game makes the same maneuvers as Walter Scott’s novels. The guttural and throaty voice of the ploughman shifts registers between stanzas; the poem’s speaker, with his talk of “Man’s dominion” and “social unions,” suddenly adopts English rhetoric that sounds natural only in the tracts of John Locke.

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The Burns of the first stanza exemplifies the figure co-opted by the Scottish

Renaissance of the 1930s. Catherine Carswell’s 1930 biography of the poet elevates into a form of orthodoxy Burns’s claims that his poetry was stimulated not by academic training, but by his proximity to an under-educated and impoverished Scottish people.

(Carswell’s biography was not entirely complimentary: she instigated a minor scandal by arguing that Burns suffered from a prolific sexual appetite and that he was not some ascetic at a plough.) MacDiarmid capitalized on Lallans in the “synthetic Scots” of his own poems. MacDiarmid’s synthetic Scots blended various strains of Scottish vernacular so as to invent a Scottish language that had gone moribund under the English control of

Britain’s education system. In proposing that Scottish writers embrace this invented vernacular, MacDiarmid urges poets to return to the style and voice of the Scottish makars, or the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century poets who influenced Burns. “Burns knew what he was doing,” MacDiarmid proclaims, “when he reverted from eighteenth-century

English to a species of synthetic Scots and was abundantly justified by the result” (At the

Sign of the Thistle 12). Yet MacDiarmid echoes the coy politics of Walter Scott: this fabricated Scottish dialect evinces both artifice and authenticity, both a calculated act of political resistance and a claim rooted in a far past where “Scotland, and not England, was apparently destined to produce the great poetry of the United Kingdom” (12).

MacDiarmid’s programmatic dialect conveys a strange sentiment for a Scottish nationalist vouching for his country’s secession from Great Britain: English and Scottish letters—to name but two national elements—collectively constitute British literature and demand equitable attention in academe and the press. In short, Scotland is inseparable from Britain—and severing ties with England would instigate an existential crisis. This

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contradiction is in the marrow of Scottish nationalism, and the very bones of Scotland’s literary character. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde (1886) proves this point. Dr. Henry Jekyll’s great moral discovery, “that man is not truly one, but truly two” (82), takes on a different complexion when we consider

Stevenson’s physician as a metaphor for a Scot bonded to Great Britain. Clayton Meeker

Hamilton’s reading of Jekyll and Hyde—a novella set exclusively in London—betrays the Scottish novelist’s conflation of Edinburgh with the empire’s hub. Hamilton meditates:

I have often wondered why the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

was set in London instead of Edinburgh. Utterson is a very Scottish sort of

lawyer; Lanyon is a very Scottish sort of doctor; and the metaphysical

speculation that allures Dr. Jekyll to his doom is decidedly more Scottish

than English. Furthermore, the tale might most appropriately be conceived

as happening among the gloomy doorways and mysterious wynds that

undermine the tall, decaying lands which darkly overhang the High Street

of Edinburgh. (61-62)

Soon after, G.K. Chesterton notes that Jekyll and Hyde is a “decidedly Caledonian” novella about Stevenson’s (and the Scot’s) paradoxical attachment to his homeland:

“Jekyll and Hyde have become a proverb and a joke,” Chesterton writes, “only it is a proverb read backwards and a joke nobody really sees” (57, 60). One possible reading of the joke is that Scotland and England are like two cartoon characters bound together by an elastic band; when they try to run from each other, the band snaps and flings them back together. By 1919, the textual manifestations of this dynamic inspired G. Gregory

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Smith to observe in Scottish Literature: Character and Influence that any “cohesion” in

Scottish literature “is only apparent, that the literature is remarkably varied, and that it becomes, under the stress of influence and native division and reaction, almost a zigzag of contradictions. [. . .] If therefore Scottish history and life are, as an old northern writer said of something else, ‘varied with a clean contrair spirit,’ we need not be surprised to find that in his literature the Scot presents two aspects which appear contradictory” (4-5).

This précis of Scotland’s literary nationalism hasn’t even broached cultural contributions to that “clean contrair spirit,” like Calvinism, Gaelic folklore, and the romanticizing of clan culture. A retinue of Scottish writers from the 1800s to present—

Walter Scott, James Hogg, Margaret Oliphant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Catherine

Carswell, Edwin Muir, and MacDiarmid himself—construct a Scotland whose religious convictions and mythology operate in tandem with a deep yearning for the nation’s status before James VI and I unified the crowns. Yet, this desire is accompanied by a tacit recognition that a liberated Scotland is a problematic fantasy. Scotland’s curious, Jekyll- and-Hyde attitude toward England exposes enough chinks in the edifice of the SNPs literary nationalism. Recently, historians have removed the scaffolding erected by

Scotland’s poets and novelists, revealing a nation that has largely had an ambivalent attitude toward independence. This is not to say that Scots haven’t suffered ample reasons for rankling under British rule. For instance, the 1979 devolution referendum was tainted by an infamous amendment that required 40% of the entire electorate to vote in favor of devolution; although the pro-devolution vote eked out a 51% victory, the total turnout

(64% of the electorate) meant that the “yes” vote never had a chance to reach the

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threshold required to validate the vote. Westminster would not devolve authority to

Edinburgh until the Blair government and New Labour took power in the 1990s.

Still, the desire for independence is a relatively new phenomenon. Bryan Glass has recently argued that the history of the British Empire is inseparable from Scottish history, and that the Scots benefited from the economics of empire more than most

British constituencies. Glass observes, “Scottish nationalism [. . .] did not exist in the nineteenth century. There was no need for Scottish nationalism. The Scots took great pride in the benefits they received as a result of their involvement in the British state” (9).

Examining nineteenth-century Scottish goods branded with the likenesses of Walter Scott and Robert Burns, Ann Rigney’s The Afterlives of Walter Scott (2012) suggests that

Scottish culture is closely bound with Britain’s consumer culture, generally. Even when

Scottish nationalism developed after the First World War, Glass points out, nationalists were generally advocates of home rule rather than independence. (Even MacDiarmid— who the SNP holds as a champion of independence—suggested that a “measure of independence” would be an acceptable outcome.) Tom Nairn’s foundational The Break- up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism stages the rise of nationalism in Scotland even later: he contends that the independence camp gained momentum after the final breakup of the British empire in the 1960s and 1970s.

More recently, in The Illusion of Freedom (2010), Tom Gallagher has contended that Scotland’s politics of independence have succeeded only because the Scottish

Parliament at Holyrood, Edinburgh, has been spared the embarrassment heaped on recent

UK Prime Ministers John Major, Tony Blair, and Gordon Brown. Now, post-Brexit, we can add the potential union-breaker David Cameron to that coterie of premiers. (J.K.

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Rowling has pilloried Cameron in a post-Brexit tweet that went viral: “Scotland will seek independence now. Cameron's legacy will be breaking up two unions. Neither needed to happen” [@jkrowling, 23 June 2016].) Gallagher suggests that the SNP’s political survival depends upon the incantatory voices of Scotland’s creative writers and artists— those hewing to MacDiarmid’s legacy, like Alasdair Gray and Irvine Welsh. But these writers have invented a mythical Scotland riddled with, and vexed by, its ties to England.

The contradictions in their literary nationalism fabricates another fable, of a nationalism equipped to think globally and peacefully with its neighbors in Britain and the globe. It is not the nationalism desired by Salmond and the SNP in 2014. However, it is the nationalism that Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP, and a post-Brexit Scotland need in

2016—and it is a version of nationalism that could heal some of the wounds inflicted upon the European Union. And like its pro-independence counterpart, this version of nationalism also emanates from the logical faults in Hugh MacDiarmid’s poetry and his critical writings on Scottish politics and culture.

The Global (and British) Sympathies of Hugh MacDiarmid’s Scottish Nationalism

Problems other than a revisionist history of Scotland riddle MacDiarmid’s nationalism: he is infamously paternalistic, overtly sexist, noncommittal to violence and civil disobedience alike, and inconsistent in his embrace of home rule or full independence. Of course, Alex Salmond’s SNP conveniently edits out these issues, until one principle remains: MacDiarmid and his literary legacy inspire a case for independence, earning Scotland a warranted place on the world stage. In fact, Salmond required Scotland’s literati as evidence for the nation’s historical, cultural, political, and

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linguistic difference from England. According to Kidd, Burns, MacDiarmid, and synthetic Scots propped up Salmond and the SNP’s literary case for independence:

Salmond is adept at Burns-speak, and liable to introduce echoes of the

bard into the most prosaic policy announcements. [. . .] Salmond has the

uncanny—and enviable—ability to both campaign and govern in the lively

idioms of Burns.

For Salmond, literature is a kind of QED: Anglo-Scottish differences

in diction, lilt, sensitivity and worldview prove the grand truths of

nationalism. He has argued, plausibly enough, that it is impossible to

mistake the differences between a Scottish novel and an English novel.

Novels, he believes, reveal fundamental differences in the values and

ethos of Scots and English.

Kidd’s portrait of Salmond is of the consummate critic-governor, one that seems strangely prescient of Edward Mendelson’s depiction, in a piece written for The New

York Review of Books, of President Barack Obama as a literary critic. Yet, if Salmond had been a better literary critic, perhaps he would have detected something more valuable in MacDiarmid by reading not for MacDiarmid’s strain of virulent nationalism, but what

MacDiarmid suggests is possible when nationalism falls apart.

Another of MacDiarmid’s spare lyrics demonstrates what happens when politics mismanages the work of literary criticism. Like “The Little White Rose,” MacDiarmid’s

“The Weapon” seems to evince Alan Riach’s claim that MacDiarmid and Yeats are

“kingly cousins” with comparable political aims—independence, by any means, and government run by poets and creators. Here is “The Weapon,” in its entirety:

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Scots steel tempered wi’ Irish fire

Is the weapon that I desire. (Collected Poems 197)

The prosody of “The Weapon” seems forged especially for Salmond and the SNP: it suggests that Scots possess the mettle necessary to achieve independence, and all they require is the passion of the Irish. The metaphor of “Scots steel” is readily visible as something martial, militant. Yet, the lyric buckles if a critic pressures its allusions. What, exactly, fuels the speaker’s “Irish fire”? Does it refer to Yeats’s politics, which fluctuated from a vanguard of artist-priests to flirtations with fascism? Or is it a nod to another of

MacDiarmid’s favorite Irish writers, James Joyce, whose lecture “Ireland, Island of

Saints and Sages” contends that expatriate writers will restore Ireland’s glory? Is “The

Weapon” urging Scots to go it alone without England (like Yeats), or coaxing Scots to export their intellects and talents to Europe and the United States (like Joyce)?

The same contradictions inflect MacDiarmid’s political programs. A Communist and a nationalist, MacDiarmid found himself disavowed by both movements in the decade preceding the formation of the SNP. While Communism’s desire for an international labor movement seems at odds with nationalism’s isolationist tendencies,

MacDiarmid notes in his autobiography Lucky Poet that he recognizes no dissonance between those ideologies: “I, on the contrary, was determined to strengthen and develop my organic relationship to the Commons of Scotland by every means in my power, not to get back to the people [. . .] but to get right under their skin, to get deeper and deeper into their innermost promptings, their root-motives” (232). When he advances Scottish independence a few pages later, he also proposes that a “measure of independence,” like home rule in a devolved parliament, could achieve the same ends if it stabilized the

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balance of power between the United Kingdom’s constituent nations (234). When

Scottish literary scholars like Margery Palmer McCulloch write of MacDiarmid, they are quick to recognize that MacDiarmid and his writings are easily exploited but—like an ideologically savvy version of Oscar Wilde—impossible to pigeonhole.

Ian Duncan comments that “failure is written into the protocols” of MacDiarmid’s poetry and his nationalist writings (255), because the linguistic vehicle of synthetic Scots strives to reclaim a romanticized, Scottish history and culture that never has—and never shall—exist. But if synthetic Scots and comparable projects fail, they may allow for the infusion of foreign traditions. Robert Crawford identifies this possibility, when he labels

MacDiarmid and Ezra Pound as two poets who “sought to find strength in native as well as foreign models, to transfuse the richness of international culture into the culture of their homeland, and to form a vast and eclectic vision which leaves them open to the charge of megalomania” (247). While “megalomaniac” feels an apt label for

MacDiarmid—Lucky Poet is a marvel of self-aggrandizement—MacDiarmid’s lofty ambition to cast literature as some cosmic entity gives most nationalist thought the air of something petty, precious, and narrow-minded.

Returning closer to MacDiarmid’s home nation bears out the benefits of the cooperative poetics at the heart of MacDiarmid’s Scottish nationalism. For MacDiarmid, stasis and sameness threaten literature and the public: he reviles what he terms the

“English Ascendancy,” or academe and the press’s tendency to prioritize English writers.

In the posthumously published Aesthetics in Scotland (1984), MacDiarmid sneers at

“normality,” those “traditions [. . .] preserved in literature, art, religion[,] and philosophy” that function “[a]s the sworn custodian” of “established dogmas” (48, 49). Alan Bold’s

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introduction to Aesthetics contends that the volume presents the first concise articulation of this position, but the essays in 1934’s At the Sign of the Thistle volley against the

“normality” of the English Ascendancy. “English literature,” MacDiarmid declaims in

“The English Ascendancy in British Literature,” “is maintaining a narrow ascendancy tradition instead of broad-basing itself on all the diverse cultural elements and the splendid variety of languages and dialects in the British Isles” (At the Sign 17).

MacDiarmid appeals to “each of the British elements—English, Irish, Welsh, Scots”—to

“distinguish and divide,” to borrow from their own traditions and seek out intersections between their styles and techniques. “Sectionalism has not helped our cultural development,” MacDiarmid observes; “the broader endeavor may” (20).

When MacDiarmid alludes to this “broader endeavor,” he refers to the need for

Scottish literature (and other literatures in English) to not entrench themselves in either regionalism or isolationism—positions easily fortified by nationalism. Recalling lyrics like “The Weapon” or “The Little White Rose” or his modernist mock epic A Drunk Man

Looks at the Thistle (1924), the paradoxes in MacDiarmid’s “The English Ascendancy” suggest that the infusion of alternative literary traditions can stimulate British literature, rendering it a multiethnic and multinational enterprise. MacDiarmid holds aloft the

“multi-linguistic work of James Joyce” as a prime example of how Scottish literature may engage with Europe and the globe; he also asserts that “Scottish, Irish, and Welsh

Gaelic literatures, and Scots vernacular literature [. . .] are nearer to [Continental literatures]” than English (17, 18). While MacDiarmid’s philology is questionable, his lionizing of Joyce clarifies his intent. Even when advocating the interests of the Scottish nation, MacDiarmid desires a literature that refuses the homogeneity of the “normal”—

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for him, English literature—so as to communicate at home and abroad. MacDiarmid’s contention about the Gaelic languages’ proximity to European literatures suggests that

Scottish nationalism (and his nationalist poetics) does not aim to sever ties with Britain or the world. On the contrary, MacDiarmid’s nationalism denounces the single-mindedness of Alex Salmond’s SNP and the appropriation of Scotland’s literary tradition as a closed case for independence. Scottish literature and Scotland the nation: if isolated, they will forfeit those cultural exchanges that enhance Scots’ creative output, and which distribute

Scotland’s strangely progressive nationalism abroad.

A Glance to the Future: Scottish Nationalism, Globalism, and Europe after Brexit

“All vocabularies,” MacDiarmid muses in “Problems of Poetry To-Day,” “are hopelessly hybrid” (At the Sign 90). MacDiarmid’s poetics have generated a literary

Scotland that is, as Eleanor Bell notes in Questioning Scotland (2004), an in-between nation, an inscrutable entity that thrives in the gloaming where the past blurs with modernity; the colony shapes the empire; a constituent nation binds to its sister kingdoms; and the nation colludes with the world at its peripheries. One can hear echoes of MacDiarmid’s assault against the English Ascendancy when Salman Rushdie claims for Britain’s former colonies the right to reinvent English for their own purposes:

As for myself, I don’t think it is always necessary to take up the anti-

colonial—or is it post-colonial?—cudgels against English. What seems to

me to be happening is that those peoples who were once colonized by the

language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more

and more relaxed about the way they use it—assisted by the English

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language’s enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large

territories for themselves within its frontiers. (64)

Rushdie recognizes for Britain’s former colonies what MacDiarmid proposed for the

Scots. As a language, English can be counter-colonized and reappropriated, by those peoples who once fell under its rule; England’s neighbors in Great Britain and the former colonies can chart their own cultures on the map of the English tongue’s conquests.

This potential seems necessary as Europe and the world grapple with the economic shockwaves of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. Only England and

Wales voted to leave the EU, surrendering to the scaremongering, racism, and prejudices of UKip’s Nigel Farage or the Tories’ Boris Johnson. (When I first drafted this essay, both were favorites to replace David Cameron. A series of television interviews undercut their campaign promises—especially Farage and UKip’s dodgy claim that EU moneys would be re-channeled toward the NHS. Because of this fallout, Farage and Johnson surrendered their bids to lead the Brexit camp. Former Home Secretary Teresa May has succeeded Cameron as Prime Minister. Johnson has received a second chance in May’s cabinet as the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs.) The Brexit camp’s rhetoric displays the worst features of nationalism, evidence of Yeats’s fear in

“The Second Coming” that “the best lack all conviction while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Indeed, when Salmond and the SNP pushed for independence in

2014, they risked a similar economic collapse: the Cameron government had insisted that

Scotland could not keep pound sterling as its currency and would have limited access to

North Sea oil interests, and then-president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel

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Barroso, asserted that Scotland would find it “extremely difficult, if not impossible,” to join the EU (“Scot. Independence: What’s Going on?”; “It Would Be . . .”).

But the political landscape may be different after Brexit, when England stands largely alone in its desire to throw off the EU’s yoke. It is hopeful that Scotland and

Northern Ireland, long associated with the ire of nationalism, voted to remain in the EU, and that leaders like Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP have sought dialogues with European bureaucrats to secure a place for their respective nations in Europe’s free market.

Suggesting that the Scots could hold a second independence referendum, Sturgeon’s rhetoric has shifted drastically from Salmond’s manipulation of Burns- and MacDiarmid- esque idioms. On 24 June 2016, after the Brexit vote, Sturgeon issued the following remark: “I intend to take all possible steps and explore all possible options to give effect to how people in Scotland voted—in other words to secure our continuing place in the

EU, and in the single market in particular” (“Brexit: Nicola Sturgeon”). Her language casts an independent Scotland as a partner and a neighbor, as a nation whose interests are entwined with the other states in her union. It suggests an embrace of that amorphous

Scotland that captured the fancy of Scottish writers—that country with its own rich heritage, whose fortunes are nonetheless hitched to the welfare of a greater political enterprise.

In preparing for meetings with EU officials, and in considering whether to hold another independence referendum, Sturgeon would do well to read MacDiarmid and delve into his contradictions—because it is through contradictions that artist-critics defy the totalizing illusions of political power, resist the isolating rhetoric of fear and hate, and voice the need for tolerance and compassion. Plumbing those depths, Sturgeon may

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discover a progressive nationalism predicated in inclusivity and respect for foreign traditions—like MacDiarmid’s desire to see parity between all the “British elements” that constitute literature written in English. Sometimes, as MacDiarmid’s writings suggest, a

“measure of independence” is preferable to the Brexit camp’s nationalist venom of xenophobia, bigotry, and exceptionalism.

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