Spaces and Objects in British and Irish Modernist Novels Mary Allison Wise University of South Florida, [email protected]

University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 6-24-2016 Tracing the Material: Spaces and Objects in British and Irish Modernist Novels Mary Allison Wise University of South Florida, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Scholar Commons Citation Wise, Mary Allison, "Tracing the Material: Spaces and Objects in British and Irish Modernist Novels" (2016). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/6438 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Tracing the Material: Spaces and Objects in British and Irish Modernist Novels by Mary Allison Wise A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy with a concentration in Literature Department of English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Major Professor: Susan Mooney, Ph.D. Marty Gould, Ph.D. Hunt Hawkins, Ph.D. R. Brandon Kershner, Ph.D. Date of Approval: June 17, 2016 Keywords: twentieth-century British literature, Irish Literature, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, thing theory Copyright © 2016, Mary Allison Wise ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The ideas for this project began to germinate in two courses: Susan Mooney’s Ulysses course, which focused on narratological readings of Joyce’s novel, and Elisabeth Fraser’s art history course, “Collecting the Empire,” which considered the artifacts collected/looted from the British and French colonies and exhibited in the capitals of empire. In the intellectual cross- pollination between these classes, I began to think about how objects tell a narrative—their own narratives and narratives of history—and how we can read these objects within literature. Eventually these thoughts coalesced into a paper on collections and collectors in Ulysses, and that paper developed into a dissertation. I am thankful to Dr. Mooney for her constant support and tireless direction through the drafting of this dissertation. I am indebted to the helpful early guidance that Dr. Fraser provided and her encouragements of this project from the beginning. Dr. Marty Gould’s ever-insightful readings and probing questions have always pushed me to think more rigorously. To Dr. Hunt Hawkins and Dr. Brandon Kershner, thank you for your thoughtful comments that have helped me see aspects of this project in new lights, and for your great generosity with your time. I would also like to acknowledge the faculty and staff of the English Department at the University of South Florida, who have helped me in many very practical ways over the past six years, and the Graduate School, for awarding me the exceedingly generous Presidential Fellowship, without which this dissertation would at best have only “limp[ed] together for the only possible,” as Beckett phrases it in Murphy. My fellow graduate students along the way have provided much advice, insight, and encouragement, both related to this project and beyond. Two colleagues stand out in particular: Cassie Childs and Jessica Cook, who long ago went from being fellow students and friends to becoming my family in Florida. It is to you that I largely owe the successful completion of this project, but also my sanity and my happiness. And to those friends outside of Florida, who have kept me connected to the world, have listened to me, and have motivated me, I am deeply grateful. Arnisa, I think it started like this: Or puoi la quantitate / Comprender dell' amor ch'a te mi scalda, / Quando dismento nostra vanitate, / Trattando l'ombre come cosa salda. You have inspired and enriched my thinking in more ways than I can estimate. My family—my parents, Gary and Patrice Wise, and my siblings—have been my inexhaustible supporters long before this dissertation or the Ph.D. was a gleam in my eye. With their love, the spaces we occupied and the objects we owned never mattered too much. I dedicate this dissertation to them. TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Introduction 1 Chapter One: Archiving the Exterior in Ulysses 15 Perdition 15 In the Heart of the Material Metropolis 21 The Crystal Palace of the Creator 23 Coffined Thoughts in Mummycases 28 Omnium Gatherum 37 Museum Without Walls 48 Incorporation 60 Chapter Two: Archiving the Interior in Ulysses 63 Infinite Riches in a Little Room 63 Physiognomy of the Interior 66 The Total Library 75 Necropolis 83 The Language of Pockets 92 Coda to Ulysses: Petite Mort 100 Chapter Three: Disjecta Membra: Severed Histories and Prosthetic Materiality in The Years 106 Body Language 106 Caesura 113 A Haunted House 116 The Mark on the Wall 129 Solid Objects 140 Subject and Object and the Nature of Reality 149 Shut off the Wireless and Listen to the Past 159 Chapter Four: Dead Lines/Live Wires: Telephonic Materiality in Murphy 164 Short Circuit 164 Something There 172 What Where 187 Stirrings Still 206 Conclusion: Remains 211 Bibliography 220 i ABSTRACT Tracing the Material considers how James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s The Years, and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy represent material spaces and objects as a way of engaging with the fraught histories of England and Ireland. I argue that these three writers use spaces and objects to think through and critique nineteenth and early twentieth-century conflicts and transitions, particularly in the areas of empire, nationalism, gender, and family. Writing in the 1920s and 1930s, in the decline of British ascendency, the rise of the Irish Free State, and between the World Wars, these writers seek to interpret their history through the material world as a way of articulating their political, cultural, and social dissatisfactions, and to imagine the future. Drawing in part from Walter Benjamin’s materialist historiography and Jacques Derrida’s texts on spectrality and mourning, I investigate how the material world becomes the means through which nations and individuals express their guilt and desires, mourn losses, cut their losses, articulate the present, and anticipate the future. A study of the material world in these novels thus yields insights into how literary texts respond to history, both overtly and implicitly, foregrounding the importance of physical spaces and things in the larger narratives of national and personal history. My dissertation offers a new understanding of the way twentieth-century literature navigates its history through materiality, destabilizes subject-object distinctions, and exposes the often-unexpected power of the non-human world. ii INTRODUCTION In this project, I investigate how James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett engage with the fraught histories of England and Ireland, histories which are inscribed into the physical environment—specifically the built spaces and the material things—of these two countries. These writers interpret British and Irish physical environments as a way of understanding and responding to nineteenth and twentieth-century conflicts and transitions, particularly in the areas of empire, nationalism, gender, family, and class structures. They reveal a reluctance to discard the past and an uneasy desire to hold on to it. Focusing on Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Woolf’s The Years (1937), and Beckett’s Murphy (1938), I consider how these novels negotiate the materiality of their public historical worlds and imagine material spaces where the private histories of their characters reflect concerns in the nations at large. Materiality becomes the means through which countries and individuals express their guilt and desires; mourn losses, cut their losses; articulate the present and anticipate the future. I study how the novels’ materiality thus yields insights into how modern literary texts affectively and ideologically reckon with history, both overtly and implicitly. Events infuse spaces and objects with particular weighty meanings; in these texts we see narratives of imperial dominance inscribed across the material environment—narratives challenged by nationalist movements. On the home front, the role of women, of men, and of the family is expressed, mandated, and resisted in everyday rooms and items, and changing ideas of class, of home, are registered in the physical world. Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett are active readers and interpreters of the unwritten material environment around them and, as I will demonstrate, they render it insistently in their narratives, 1 re-connecting it to the conflicted histories of their nations. Their contemporary, Walter Benjamin, claims that the true historian “read[s] what was never written” (“Paralipomena” 405). Benjamin’s own investigations into the past, his archaeologies, locate historical shifts less in large-scale events than in changes to concrete artifacts, the unwritten and often-overlooked material traces of modern society. While Benjamin was most concerned with the transitions to modernity in nineteenth-century Paris, Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett focus on the shift from the nineteenth century to the twentieth in the two primary loci of Dublin and London. The three texts I consider cover a period of fifty years, from 1880-the late 1930s. In time and place, these novels both overlap and diverge: Joyce’s Ulysses, set in turn-of-the-century Ireland, lies on the fault line of two centuries and two nations, England and Ireland, struggling for ascendancy; Woolf’s The Years, covering a time frame of five decades, traces English history from the Victorian age to the verge of the Second World War, from imperial power to the brink of its dissolution; Beckett’s Murphy, moving between England and Ireland in the 1930s, considers the imbricated history of these countries while also wrestling with the desire to deny history and politics entirely. From multiple vantage points, these novels contend with the recent troubled histories of these two nations, exposing a weighted past, a rapidly-changing present, and a disconcerting future.

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