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Studies FICTIONS OF THE SELF: STUDIES"IN FEMALE MODERNISM JEAN RHYS, GERTRUDE STEIN AND DJUNA BARNES by ROBYN GROVES B.A., Adelaide, 1975 M.A., The University of British Columbia, 1980 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Program in Comparative Literature) We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA February 1987 (c^ Robyn Groves, 1987 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department of by his representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Program iri^^^-^^^^^AVt! X^/y^e ~7 The University of British Columbia 2075 Wesbrook Place Vancouver, Canada V6T 1W5 Date Abstract This thesis considers elements of autobiography and autobiographical fiction in the writings of three female Modernists: Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes. In chapter 1, after drawing distinctions between male and female autobiographical writing, I discuss key male autobiographical fictions of the Modernist period by D.H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust and James Joyce, and their debt to the nineteenth century literary forms of the Bildungsroman and the Kunstlerroman. I relate these texts to key European writers, Andre Gide and Colette, and to works by women based on two separate female Modernist aesthetics: first, the school of "lyrical transcendence"—Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf—in whose works the self as literary subject dissolves into a renunciatory "female impressionism;" the second group—Rhys, Stein and Barnes--who as late-modernists, offer radically "objectified" self-portraits in fiction which act as critiques and revisions of both male and female Modernist fiction of earlier decades. In chapter 2, I discuss Jean Rhys' objectification of female self-consciousness through her analysis of alienation in two different settings: the Caribbean and the cities of Europe. As an outsider in both situations, Rhys presents an unorthodox counter-vision. In her fictions of the 1930's, she deliberately revises earlier Modernist representations, iii by both male and female writers, of female self-consciousness. In the process, she offers a simultaneous critique of both social and literary conventions. In chapter 3, I consider Gertrude Stein's career-long experiments with the rendering of consciousness in a variety of literary forms, noting her growing concern throughout the 1920's and 1930's with the role of autobiography in writing. In a close reading of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, I examine Stein's parody and "deconstruction" of the autobiographical form and the Modernist conception of the self based on memory, association and desire. Her witty attack on the conventions of narrative produces a new kind of fictional self-portraiture, drawing heavily on the visual arts to create new prose forms as well as to dismantle old ones. Chapter 4 focusses on Djuna Barnes' metaphorical :.. representations of the self in prose fiction, which re-interpret the Modernist notion of the self, by means of an androgynous fictional poetics. In her American and European fictions she extends the notion of the work of art as a formal, self-referential and self-contained "world" by subverting it with the use of a late-modern, "high camp" imagery to create new types of narrative structure. These women's major works, appearing in the 1930's, mark a second wave of Modernism, which revises and in certain ways subverts the first. Hence, these are studies in "late Modernism" and in my conclusion I will consider the iv distinguishing features of this transitional period, the 1930's, and the questions it provokes about the idea of periodization in general. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Chapter One: Autobiography: Self Creation 1 Fictional Autobiography 6 The Novel as Portrait of the Male Artist 7 The Artist as Woman 13 Female Autobiography 2 2 Female Autobiographical Fiction 2 5 The Female Aestheticists 29 Chapter Two: Portrait of the Artist in Exile 41 The Caribbean 44 Expatriation 49 Autobiographical Fiction 50 Character 50 Vignette 53 Voyage in the Dark 56 Wide Sargasso Sea 64 Europe 74 Good Morning, Midnight 84 Chapter Three: Self Portrait and Cubist Artifice .. 101 Exile or Expatriate 101 Autobiography: Cubist Self Creation 112 Conclusion 145 Endnote 150 vi Chapter Four: Djuna Barnes: The Patterned Self .... 154 Origins 154 Expatriation 159 Nightwood 16 8 The Divided Self 171 The Designing Self: The Self as Design 185 Conclusion 210 Footnotes 230 Bibliography 254 1 Chapter One This thesis deals generally with women's autobiographical fiction in the Modernist period and specifically with the autobiographical novels of three female expatriates living in Paris in the 1920's and 1930's. I will treat Modernism as the distinct stylistic phase in literature, art and music which dominated England, Europe and America between 1914 and 1939. Modernism is a collective} name for a number of movements—Impressionism and its aftermath, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Symbolism and Imagism, Vorticism, Dadaism and Surrealism—whose common aim was to subvert the Romanticism and Realism of the nineteenth century and to propel the twentieth century into the abstract."*" Autobiography: Self creation I wish to begin my study with the autobiographical impulse itself, and changing interpretations of it. Three major areas for theoretical consideration emerge. First, what is the relationship of autobiography to fiction? Is it possible to formulate strategies for turning autobiography into fiction? Secondly, can we distinguish specifically female strategies for this process? How is writing sexually differentiated? Finally, what distinguishes Modernist self-portraiture in fiction? Did styles and methods of literary self-representation alter with the waves of Modernism? Forms of autobiography have altered throughout history in accordance with changing concepts of the self It is the self-conscious literary form, offering insight into the modes of consciousness of other men as well as oneself. Despite a certain wilful blurring of the divisions between literary forms.in the twentieth century, it remains true that autobiographies are texts in which authors make themselves the subjects of their own works. Since the mid-eighteenth century, when David Hume looked "into himself and discovered "only perceptions, no discernible separate self," and "Identity, capable of unifying disparate perceptions..."merely a quality which we attribute to them," attempts at self-representation in the arts have undergone 2 radical shifts. Contemporary critical theory offers one possibly unifying perspective on these shifts in its claim that both the psychological self and the literary subject which embodies it are human constructions: they are fictive. In the nineteenth century, Nietzsche, echoing Hume's conclusion and extending it in his provocative critique of the self as subject in The Will to Power, said: "the 'subject' is not something given...it is something added 3 and invented and projected behind what there is." Nietzsche's belief that the psychological self is not a given that exists before we invent or project it forms the basis for contemporary critical views of autobiographical, and other, writing. The Western tradition of the "self," deconstructionists conclude, is a constructed tradition. 4 It is not self-generating or self-sustaining. It is 3 constructed from pre-existing and continuously changing sets of ideas and assumptions which saturate the language we must 5 use to "think ourselves into being." These critics, Nietzsche included, do not wish to undermine the notion of an individuated self; they simply remind us that "the central fact about subjectivity is that its previous formulations have the status of a fiction," in the history of an individual life. The idea that a writer can create a self as he creates a text--out of all previous systems of creation, most especially language--is brought up to date by Paul de Man in relation to autobiographical literature: We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces consequences, but can we not suggest with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its respects, by the resources of the medium.7 The writer creates his image or idea of himself, and the imaginary construction of his life based on it, in and through his text. I do not mean to discredit the factual component in autobiographical writing; to underestimate the power of "lived experience" in a writer's work can inhibit an informed reading of the text. Before one is able to consider those qualities which have been, as Nietzsche put it, "added and invented and projected," one must be well aware of "what there is" in the foreground to begin with; and it is with the lives of the women whose 4 autobiographical fiction I explore, that I will always begin. A fictional autobiography is a narrative in which the subject, that is the author and his life, is given the status of fiction, and acts as a starting point for narrative. Examples are D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and James Joyce's g Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In such works, the artistic representation of "facts," the process of selecting, ordering and transmuting if not translating them, has necessarily altered them in radical, imaginative ways. Filtered through the writer's memory and an awareness of the autobiographical tradition in literature, they have ceased to be only the facts of a life.
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