Modernist Women Writers, the Senses, and Technology
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Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports 2018 Dissensual Women: Modernist Women Writers, the Senses, and Technology Allyson DeMaagd Follow this and additional works at: https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd Recommended Citation DeMaagd, Allyson, "Dissensual Women: Modernist Women Writers, the Senses, and Technology" (2018). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 5469. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/5469 This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by the The Research Repository @ WVU with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you must obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. This Dissertation has been accepted for inclusion in WVU Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports collection by an authorized administrator of The Research Repository @ WVU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Dissensual Women: Modernist Women Writers, the Senses, and Technology Allyson DeMaagd Dissertation submitted to the Eberly College of Arts and Science at West Virginia University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Lisa Weihman, Ph.D. Julia Daniel, Ph.D. Dennis Allen, Ph.D. Lara Farina, Ph.D. Pamela L. Caughie, Ph.D. Department of English Morgantown, West Virginia 2018 Keywords: modernism; modernist women; senses; synaesthesia; technology; H.D.; Bowen, Elizabeth; Loy, Mina; Woolf, Virginia Copyright 2018 Allyson DeMaagd ABSTRACT Dissensual Women: Modernist Women Writers, the Senses, and Technology Allyson DeMaagd My project, Dissensual Women: Modernist Women Writers, the Senses, and Technology, analyzes depictions of the senses and technology in modernist women’s writing. I argue that modernist women writers challenge traditional sensory hierarchies that value the so-called masculine senses of sight and sound and denigrate the so-called feminine senses of smell, taste, and touch. H.D., Mina Loy, Virginia Woolf, and Elizabeth Bowen revalue the feminine senses, challenge sensory elitism, and advocate for an inclusive sensorium, one that features the perceptions and experiences of women, queer women, the lower classes, the nonhuman, and the differently abled. They wage their dissent through experimentation with various technologies, ranging from the X-ray to the telephone. While technological invention is not unique to the twentieth century, the twentieth century is oft-recognized as a period of rapid technological change, one that incited a “crisis of the senses.” New technologies produced new sensations and prompted modernist subjects to question and redefine what it meant to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. I place modernist women writers at the center of this sensory reclamation. In so doing, I shift the scholarly conversation away from the masculine senses of sight and sound, which have historically been privileged in modern scholarship, and toward the so-called lesser, feminine senses of smell, taste and touch. By examining the confluence among the senses, technology, and gender, and by including heretofore marginalized perspectives, I contribute a synthesis that revises our understanding of modernist women’s everyday, lived experience. I also expand the conversation to address the subversive potential of sensory integration. My project removes the senses from the limited framework of the single-sense study to consider their place in the larger sensorium. In so doing, I challenge popular thinking, which suggests that technological innovation has contributed to the atomization of the senses. Instead, I illuminate the ways in which H.D., Loy, Woolf, and Bowen deploy technology to re-unify sensory reality or to draw attention to its destructive disunity. iii Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 H.D., Imagiste Synaesthete 21 Chapter 2 choked by a robot!’: Technology, Power, and the Battle of the Senses in Mina Loy’s Insel 57 Chapter 3 “‘...A zoom severed it’: Sensory Interruption in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts 97 Chapter 4 Sensory Dystopia: the Sights, Sounds, and Technologies of Elizabeth Bowen’s Eva Trout 140 Epilogue 173 Bibliography 175 1 According to the schema of the aesthetic revolution, the root of domination is separation” Jaques Rancière, Dissensus Introduction “The flux of life is pouring its aesthetic aspect into your eyes, your ears—and you ignore it because you are looking for your canons of beauty in some sort of frame or glass case or tradition. Modernism says: Why not each one of us, scholar or bricklayer, pleasurably realize all that is impressing itself upon our subconscious, the thousand odds and ends which make up your sensery [sic] every day life?” (“Gertrude Stein”) “War and the slow recovery have been in all fields threatening us with a loss of standard: isolation, restrictions, substitutes and make-do’s bred a resignation, or thankfulness for anything in any form, which could affect art badly if we were not pulled clear. Aesthetically our senses need resharpening” (“Third Programme”) In 1924, Mina Loy called for a sensory awakening. She beckoned fellow modernists to look to oft-ignored sensory impressions as a means of reinvigorating art and notions of beauty. More than two decades later, in 1947, fellow writer Elizabeth Bowen issues a similar call, but with a stronger sense of urgency. Bowen suggests that, in the wake of WWII, art and the senses are more dramatically in need of “resharpening.” Despite the years that separate Loy and Bowen, both women exhibit a mutual investment in the senses. More specifically, they share a concern that their fellow modernists do not value or engage sensory experience to its fullest potential, that the senses are being overlooked as important avenues to artistic creation. Their investment in the senses begs the question, how did they respond to their own prompts? How did they take stock, as Loy says, of “the thousand odds and ends which make up [one’s] sensery [sic] every day life”? What did they, and other modernist women writers, do to make the senses “new”? In asking these questions, I join the effort to recover modernist women writer’s radical subversion of literary forms and ideas through the body and its senses. Dissensual Women: Modernist Women Writers, the Senses, and Technology seeks to answer these questions. This project examines how H.D., Mina Loy, Virginia Woolf, and 2 Elizabeth Bowen respond to traditional conceptualizations of the senses, revise sensory narratives, and reclaim power over their senses and sensing bodies. In so doing, it also examines the role technology plays in that reconceptualization. As Sara Danius observes in Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses, the modernist- period was “an age where technological devices increasingly claim sovereignty over and against the sensorium” (23). However, in the paradox common to modernism, technology also inspired individuals to reclaim that sovereignty. Dissensual Women responds to Danius’s claim that “the relation of gender and technology in literary modernism is a crucial yet strangely undertheorized topic” and concerns itself with sensual and technological reclamation among modernist women writers (11). H.D., Mina Loy, Virginia Woolf, and Elizabeth Bowen are among those modernist women who took up the torches of synaesthesia, the intersensory, and the multisensual in order to challenge sensory segmentation, dismantle sensory hierarchies, and create sensory parity. In so doing, they question and complicate what constitutes “common sense.” Common sense or “consensus,” a term coined by Jacques Rancière, refers to those sensory practices that, over time, become common to and accepted by a given society—the sensory practices society values, as opposed to the practices they marginalize, ignore, or deem deviant. 1 These values are upheld within “consensual communities,” “in which the spiritual sense of being-in-common is embedded in the material sensorium of everyday experience” (Rancière 81). Through repetition, these everyday experiences become naturalized and normalized. However, when individuals or groups of individuals expose this process of naturalization and question these norms, they engage 1 Rancière defines consensus as “an agreement between sense and sense…between a mode of sensory presentation and a regime of meaning” (144). 3 in “dissensus.” Dissensus “...breaks with the sensory self-evidence of the natural order that destines specific individuals and groups to occupy positions of rule or of being ruled, assigning them to private or public lives, pinning them down to a certain time and space, to specific ‘bodies,’ that is to specific ways of being, seeing, and saying” (Rancière 139).2 The dissensual women highlighted herein make it their mission to offer alternatives to these norms: to articulate new ways of being, seeing, and saying. Sensory Hierarchies, Privilege, and Power To understand how H.D., Loy, Woolf, and Bowen trouble sensory norms, we must first understand those norms and their social implications. In the Western world, the senses are often organized into hierarchies. According to anthropologist and sensory scholar David Howes, sensory rankings are always allied with social rankings