Primitivism in Modernist Literature: a Study of Eliot, Woolf and Lawrence
PRIMITIVISM IN MODERNIST LITERATURE: A STUDY OF ELIOT, WOOLF AND LAWRENCE A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by William Christopher Van Esveld May 2012 © 2012 William Christopher Van Esveld PRIMITIVISM IN MODERNIST LITERATURE: A STUDY OF ELIOT, WOOLF AND LAWRENCE William Christopher Van Esveld, Ph.D. Cornell University 2012 The subjects of “civilization” are trapped in an alienating, inauthentic culture, but can escape by cultivating the “primitive” hidden within themselves: grotesque, even terrifying, but authentic in its drives, desires and relationship to the world. Known as primitivism, this diagnosis of cultural failure and its purported cure profoundly influenced modernist artists. Beyond the succès de scandale they enjoyed by inverting the hierarchy of savage and civilized, primitivists claimed to speak from a position that was, as Eliot put it, “deeper” and “older” than – and uncontaminated by – their culture. They plumbed an unchanging, inner essence, of which they saw glimpses everywhere from ancient artifacts and African masks to drawings by children and mental patients. The rediscovery of primitive mentality thus promised to overcome modernity’s characteristic epistemological anxiety – what James Clifford called “off-centeredness in a world of distinct meaning systems.” Yet while primitivism revalued the stereotype of the savage and prized the primitive as mysterious and unknowable, it never overcame the objectifying view that “primitives” were fundamentally all the same, and important primarily as a window onto suppressed aspects of the civilized personality. Primitivism informed (and in some cases deformed) Eliot’s, Woolf’s and Lawrence’s critical social theories, their justifications for writing and publishing, and their understanding of their own aesthetic projects.
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