Copyright 2014 Cecily Garber FICTION-CRITICISM IN INTERWAR ENGLAND: JUDGMENT, GENDER, AND THE PLURALIST PUBLIC SPHERE BY CECILY R. GARBER DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2014 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Kirkpatrick Professor Vicki Mahaffey, Chair Associate Professor Hina Nazar Associate Professor Jim Hansen Assistant Professor Andrew Gaedke ABSTRACT It is tempting to say that intellectual writers in early twentieth-century Britain produced popular journalism for outlets like Good Housekeeping, Vanity Fair, and The Daily Telegraph simply to make money. However, this dissertation argues that such “side” work in fact played an important role in intellectual writers’ careers by giving them tools to produce topical, political literature. This study first examines the popular essays of Rose Macaulay, Aldous Huxley, and Virginia Woolf, all intellectually respected novelists in their day, to argue that their journalism crossed contentious lines in the period’s “battle of the ’brows,” or the battle between high, middle, and lowbrows for cultural legitimacy. This study then defines a genre I call “fiction- criticism” to describe novels like Macaulay’s Potterism, Huxley’s Point Counter Point, and Woolf’s unpublished “novel-essay,” The Pargiters, which all bear significant traces of their popular essay writing and occupy an overdetermined position in the literary public sphere. Fiction-criticism’s status as accessible, intelligent, and conversant with high and middlebrow conventions allowed it to capture and speak to a wide readership from varying classes and cultural backgrounds. In doing so, the genre promoted dialogue between citizens with different tastes, outlooks, and even value systems and consequently worked to broaden readers’ political judgment. The project argues that cultivating political judgment was particularly important for women who were entering the public sphere through professions newly opened to them. To ground my understanding of judgment, I turn to Hannah Arendt’s seminal text on the subject, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, which draws a link between aesthetic judgment, a practice that these writers were cultivating, and political judgment, which effects how readers perceive and ultimately act in the world. This project concludes with a “coda” that demonstrates ! ii! the persistence and relevance of fiction-criticism in the twenty-first century, in J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year. ! iii! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Clearly I owe many thanks upon completion of this project. My adviser, Vicki Mahaffey, is not only wonderfully knowledgeable about all things British modernist, but also warm and understanding, and has always offered both praise and criticism in the most constructive ways. Without her patience and insight, I would not have made it through this program. I thank Hina Nazar for introducing me to the primary theoretical framework engaged here and for providing valuable feedback on my writing about theories of judgment, both contemporary and Victorian. I have carried her ideas with me from my first semester in graduate school through to the end of this dissertation. Jim Hansen and Andrew Gaedke have also offered incisive comments and questions about this work, and I appreciate the time all my committee members gave to reading this dissertation on top of many other commitments. I learned much about scholarship on the middlebrow from conferences organized by Kate MacDonald, at Ghent University, and thank her for feedback on my thoughts about Macaulay’s 1910s novels. I began toying with some of these ideas in eye-opening classes taught by Julia Saville, Matthew Hart, Ted Underwood, Catherine Gray, Joseph Valente, and by Vicki, Hina, and Jim as well. My experience at Illinois has been enriched by participating in the British Modernities Group, in its many meetings, seminars, and conferences. My fellow graduate students, including Claire Barber, Kathy Skwarczek, Carrie Dickinson, Esther Dettmar, John Lee Moore, Shawn Ballard, Heather McLeer, and the BMG’s founder, now professor, Christina Walter, make me proud to be in Illinois’s English program. Special thanks to my friends in the English department without whom I wouldn’t have made it: Stephanie Brabant, Ligia Mihut, Zia Miric, Thierry Ramais (and his lovely wife, lawyer Colleen Ramais), Erin Heath and friends working elsewhere at Illinois, Diana Jaher, Harriett Green, and Anya Hamrick. ! iv! I am perennially grateful to my parents, Linnette and Randy Garber, who have supported my pursuit of this degree and all those leading up to it. I owe them far more than can be named in these acknowledgements. Just a handful of their essential provisions include: delicious food, warm and safe shelter, unconditional love, a running start at life, copious books, opportunities to learn about other cultures, travel to far away places, and education in so many ways. Finally, I want to thank my boyfriend, Benjamin Hsu, who has been a much needed balance and ballast in my life during these past three years of writing. From driving with me for 15 hours to Montreal, where I attended my first professional conference, to helping me produce elaborate and sometimes unusual vegetarian meals in Illinois, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, he has enriched my life, both inside and outside academia. ! v! TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION: THE EXPANDING PRESS, FRAGMENTING PUBLIC SPHERE, AND WOMEN’S NEW ROLES IN INTERWAR ENGLAND…...………....……….1 CHAPTER 2: TASTE AND POLITICS: ROSE MACAULAY’S 1910S AND 20S NOVELS……………………………………………………………………………..…………..31 CHAPTER 3: “HIGH MIDDLES” AND DULL WOMEN: ALDOUS HUXLEY’S INTERWAR ESSAYS AND 1920S NOVELS………………………………………………………………...99 CHAPTER 4: MEDIATING MIDDLEBROW MEDIA: VIRGINIA WOOLF’S COMPLETE ESSAYS AND “NOVEL-ESSAY”………………………………………….…..……………..155 CHAPTER 5: CODA: J. M. COETZEE’S DIARY OF A BAD YEAR………………………….234 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………258 ! vi! CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: THE EXPANDING PRESS, FRAGMENTING PUBLIC SPHERE, AND WOMEN’S NEW ROLES IN INTERWAR ENGLAND While they may seem like an odd threesome, Rose Macaulay, Aldous Huxley, and Virginia Woolf saw quite a lot of each other in interwar England, throughout the 1920s and 30s. Woolf’s diary is peppered with references to the two others, recording when they met at parties, dinners, luncheons, and teas. They were all born into what Noel Annan famously called “the intellectual aristocracy,” intellectual families prominent in the Victorian age that produced intellectual children. In their day, all were respected as highbrow novelists who also wrote popular journalism that was distributed to wide readerships. All were active pacifists in the late 1930s, a time when it wasn’t easy to maintain such a stance. To be fair, there were clear differences between these writers: though their social circles overlapped, they weren’t equivalent, nor did they write for quite the same publications. Many of their novels employ highly divergent styles. However, Macaulay, Huxley, and Woolf’s positionings as respected intellectuals and fiction-writers who contributed significantly to widely-read publications led them all at some point of the interwar period to produce pieces of work that had much in common, writings that I here call “fiction-criticism.” In studying together these writers’ largely neglected works that combine elements of journalism with more or less realist narrative, I aim to draw attention to the complications of cultural hierarchies and readerships in the interwar period, intellectual novelists’ engagement with a broad reading public, and the potential of such work to impact the thinking of a wide range of readers. While technically fiction, the fiction-criticism studied here contains expository passages that sometimes, if not often, quote verbatim from essays the authors published elsewhere. The fiction follows somewhat in the tradition of nineteenth-century realism—it is not highly 1 experimental, yet it is more “talkative” than most realist fiction. Each of these novelists had elsewhere experimented to different degrees with aesthetic forms,1 yet in their fiction-criticism, they chose to write in relatively familiar forms. Such work combined imaginative and critical functions to engage a wide readership, as readable novels would, while pushing readers to recognize outlooks outside their own within interwar England, to consider multiple perspectives, and ultimately to broaden their judgment of the world around them. None of the writers considered here were involved in traditional politics until the 1930s, when the peace movement grew more active. However, I will argue that through their fiction-criticism, Macaulay, Huxley, and Woolf were significantly engaged with the contemporary world, encouraging political pluralist judgment in their readers at a time when the public sphere was understood to be divided and further dividing. Mass-market publications and the public(s)’s judgment Debates about the cognitive capabilities of the reading public and its role in politics proceeded with vigor on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the interwar period. On the American side, for example, Walter Lippmann and John Dewey famously disagreed about the ability of individual citizens to engage with multiple perspectives and make independent decisions. Lippmann argued that a small cadre of experts manipulated public opinion and