Country, House, Fiction Kristen Kelly Ames
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Conventions Were Outraged: Country, House, Fiction Kristen Kelly Ames A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN ENGLISH YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO June 2014 © Kristen Kelly Ames, 2014 ii ABSTRACT The dissertation traces intersections among subjectivity, gender, desire, and nation in English country house novels from 1921 to 1949. Inter-war and wartime fiction by Daphne du Maurier, Virginia Woolf, Nancy Mitford, P. G. Wodehouse, Elizabeth Bowen, and Evelyn Waugh performs and critiques conventional domestic ideals and, by extension, interrupts the discourses of power that underpin militaristic political certainties. I consider country house novels to be campy endorsements of the English home, in which characters can reimagine, but not escape, their roles within mythologized domestic and national spaces. The Introduction correlates theoretical critiques of nationalism, class, and gender to illuminate continuities among the naïve patriotism of the country house novel and its ironic figurations of rigid class and gender categories. Chapter 1 provides generic and critical contexts through a study of du Maurier’s Rebecca, in which the narrator’s subversion of social hierarchies relies upon the persistence, however ironic, of patriarchal nationalism. That queer desire is the necessary center around which oppressive norms operate only partially mitigates their force. Chapter 2 examines figures of absence in “A Haunted House,” To the Lighthouse, and Orlando. Woolf’s queering of the country house novel relies upon her Gothic figuration of Englishness, in which characters are only included within nationalist spaces by virtue of their exclusion. In Chapter 3, continuities between Orlando and Between the Acts test Woolf’s call to “indifference” to war in Three Guineas. The country house reifies the nostalgic crisis of Woolf’s feminist pacifism: political agency must occupy the borderland between nostalgic idealism and cynical self-abnegation. Chapter 4 examines popular country house novels by Wodehouse, Mitford, Bowen, and Waugh that explicitly engage, with various degrees of seriousness, with political conflicts of the 1930s and ’40s. Exposing disavowed affinities among the country house ethos, English patriotism, and fascist nostalgia provides opportunities to negotiate, if not resolve, ethical quandaries of wartime neutrality, irony, and indifference. By forcing readers to confront their own circumscription by nationalist and gendered expectations, these country house novels ultimately foreclose the possibility of escaping them – but they also demand readers’ renewed commitment to figures of difference and narratives of failure. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project is an expression of the influence, effort, and dedication of many individuals. I extend my deepest gratitude to the members of my dissertation committee for their patient, enthusiastic, and careful guidance of this project from its earliest stages. It has been a tremendous privilege to work with each of them. My adviser, Lesley Higgins, has taught me how to read and write with thoughtfulness, precision, and ethical commitment. Her profound generosity – with her time and energy, her erudite scholarship, and her friendship – have sustained and encouraged me throughout this long, rewarding experience. From my first days at York, Jonathan Warren has inspired me to read against the grain, modeling theoretically rigorous ways of thinking that have pushed me to ask new and exciting questions about texts. Elicia Clements has played an essential role in shaping my critical approach, raising nuanced questions that challenged me to refine my feminist voice. York University, and the donors of the International Tuition Fee Scholarship and the Provost Dissertation Scholarship, have provided generous financial support that enabled me to complete this project. I am very fortunate to have been part of York University’s Department of English. I thank my professors and colleagues, many of whom I am lucky to count among my mentors and dearest friends. Thomas Loebel and the participants in the Dissertation Workshop helped me to articulate my argument at a crucial juncture in my academic journey. Kathy Armstrong and Emma Posca make the Graduate Program a wonderfully collegial, welcoming, and seamlessly productive place. Kathy Kremins and Allan Hepburn sparked in me a love of modern literature that was the catalyst for this undertaking. Timothy, Sandra, Keith, and Justin Ames have always celebrated my wildest ideas. Our reunions, while too brief and too few, have been cherished and necessary interludes in the writing process. In sharing long afternoons on the Elm Lodge porch and instigating midnight dance parties in a Grace Street kitchen, Lindsay Knox, Mairi Omand, Alexis Saffran, Lindsay Stein, and Kristen White have lent vitality and perspective to this project. Duncan Clegg, I may not have met you had I not pursued this degree. Without you, this document would not have been written. To find you has been an amazing and unexpected gift, and the greatest and happiest coincidence of my life. This dissertation is for my parents, Timothy and Michele Ames. Their unconditional love and support, formidable work ethic, and resilient sense of humour have always been essential to who I am and all that I accomplish. I thank them for their belief in me. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION..............................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1......................................................................................................................29 “How Absurd to Say We Are Not Companions”: The Remembered Domesticities of Rebecca “Terribly happy”: Masochism and memoir...................................................................................................37 “How calm I am, I thought, how cool”: Composed femininity and masculine masochism.......51 “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again”: Spatial stories and dreams of presence.........64 Constellations of female desire.............................................................................................................80 CHAPTER 2......................................................................................................................93 Spectral Subjects: The Woolfian Gothic “A Haunted House” and To the Lighthouse: Companionable spectres...........................................106 England as camp in Orlando.................................................................................................................122 Ironical perambulations: Orlando and the feminine Gothic............................................................142 “All was lit as for the coming of a dead Queen”: Nostalgia, difference, and the present.........149 CHAPTER 3.....................................................................................................................151 Repetition, Spectacle, and the Limits of Indifference in Between the Acts “What does ‘our country’ mean to me as an outsider?”: Nationalism at the margins...............153 Tyranny at home, tyranny abroad: Woolf’s feminist pacifism, 1938-1940...................................156 Repetition and “the present moment”...............................................................................................159 Pointz Hall and the country house tradition.....................................................................................163 Ancestresses “of sorts”........................................................................................................................168 “The essence of emptiness, silence”: revisionary echoes................................................................173 Pointz Hall’s ironic configurations.....................................................................................................179 Nostalgic myths made manifest: The cynical anti-fascism of Between the Acts.............................193 CHAPTER 4....................................................................................................................202 A Dubious Art of Being In Between: The Country House Novel, Nostalgia, and the Lure of Fascism Country house novels as camp artifacts............................................................................................206 Nancy Mitford and the BUF: The ambivalent parody of Wigs on the Green.................................213 “Frightfully funny”: P. G. Wodehouse and the limits of satire.....................................................226 Anglo-Irishness, neutrality, and the force of style in Elizabeth Bowen’s wartime writing........233 “In quest of this fading light”: Nostalgic self-invention in Brideshead Revisited............................255 CONCLUSION...............................................................................................................263 NOTES............................................................................................................................269 1 INTRODUCTION “This isn’t real life any more,” he said. “Tea on the lawn, evensong, croquet, the old ladies calling, the gentle unmalicious gossip, the gardener trundling the wheelbarrow full of leaves and grass. People write about it as if it still went on; lady novelists describe it over and over again in books of the month, but it’s not there any more.” —Graham Greene I see war