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ETD Template THE SEDUCTIVE FALLACY: WOMEN AND FASCISM IN BRITISH DOMESTIC FICTION by Judy Suh B.A., University of Notre Dame, 1994 M.A., University of Pittsburgh, 1996 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2004 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Judy Suh It was defended on March 31, 2004 and approved by Eric O. Clarke Marcia Landy Barbara Green Paul A. Bové Dissertation Director ii THE SEDUCTIVE FALLACY: WOMEN AND FASCISM IN BRITISH DOMESTIC FICTION Judy Suh, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2004 “The Seductive Fallacy” provides a literary focus for feminist critiques of fascist gender and sexuality. It explores two fascist and three anti-fascist novels—Wyndham Lewis’ The Revenge for Love (1937), Olive Hawks’ What Hope for Green Street? (1945), Virginia Woolf’s The Years (1937), Phyllis Bottome’s The Mortal Storm (1938) and The Lifeline (1946)—that illuminate British domestic fiction’s rhetorical range in the prolonged crisis of liberal hegemony after World War I. Across political purposes and a range of readerships and styles, they illuminate the genre’s efficacy to theorize modern women’s social, political, and cultural agency. In particular, the dissertation’s critical readings of these novels explore fascism’s emergence within liberal democracies. Juxtaposing Lewis and Hawks with literature from the archives of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), the first two chapters stress fascism’s production and consumption of political fantasies prevalent throughout the British novel’s humanist tradition, especially notions of women’s agency inscribed in the traditions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century domestic literature. The last two chapters highlight and evaluate Bottome’s and Woolf’s divergent critical representations of fascist domesticity. The dissertation concludes that Woolf’s anti-humanist feminist domestic fiction better enables readers to perceive the irreducible modernity of fascism. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS................................................................................ v Introduction........................................................................................................................1-22 1. Chapter One “Articial, Unreal, Yet Penetrating”: Wyndham Lewis’ Domestic Fascism.....................23-65 2. Chapter Two The Biopolitics of Fascist Satire: Olive Hawks’ What Hope for Green Street? ...........66-107 3. Chapter Three Phyllis Bottome: Liberal Anti-Fascism .........................................................................108-51 4. Chapter Four Virginia Woolf’s Joyful Failure: The Years and Inter-war Politics.............................152-208 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………… 209-222 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My dissertation could not have been completed without the following generous sources of financial support at the University of Pittsburgh: the Andrew Mellon Fellowship, the Provost’s Development Fund, and the International Studies Fund. In addition, the Boston Consortium, the British Library, the University of Sheffield, UK, the University of Bradford, UK, and Professor Martin Durham at the University of Wolverhampton, UK provided archival materials and much appreciated direction. I would also like to thank the members of the dissertation committee, Professors Paul A. Bové, Eric Clarke, Marcia Landy, and Barbara Green, for their precious time and advice. The work is dedicated to those who helped sharpen its claims intellectually and personally, especially Matthew Lamberti, Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Richard Purcell, Anastup Basu, and my parents, Jae Hong and Chung Ok Suh. v INTRODUCTION My title refers to a “seductive fallacy” that understands fascism as a primitive and foreign (German or Italian) cultural phenomenon in absolute opposition to British liberal democracy. Cold War geopolitics demanded the perception of radical differences between (benevolent) British racism and empire from continental European forms, and emphasized fascism’s historical tendency to congeal into totalitarianism. Although well-intended, this fallacy is seductive, dangerously engendering intellectual and political complacency. It obscures the presence and persistence of fascist values that permeated politics and culture to facilitate race, gender, and sexual discrimination in Britain. Cultural critics, as Erin Carlston has noted, have written eloquently about the “numerous manifestations of fascist influence on European political, cultural, and intellectual life between the wars,” and on the various forms of theater, film, and literature that were important in establishing the consent necessary for the evolution of fascist parties into totalitarian dictatorships (10).1 In making explicit the connections between official fascist doctrine and various literary and artistic movements, they have produced important questions about the “aesthetic” and cultural nature of twentieth-century politics in general. The overt aestheticization of political forums and processes was fascism’s real “innovation.” Walter Benjamin argued in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical 1 See Robert Soucy, Fascism in France: The Case of Maurice Barrès (Berkeley: U of California P, 1972); Robert Soucy, Fascist Intellectual: Drieu La Rochelle (Berkeley: U of California P, 1979); David Carroll, French Literary Fascism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995); Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986); Walter Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993); Walter Adamson, “The Culture of Italian Fascism and the Fascist Crisis of Modernity: The Case of Il Sevaggio,” Journal of Contemporary History 30 (1995): 555 – 75; George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: The Universal Library, Grosset & Dunlap, 1964); Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Border Crossings: Italian/German Peregrinations of the Theater of Totality,” Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn 1994): 80 - 123; Marcia Landy, Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema, 1931-1943 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986); and Mary Ann Frese Witt, “Fascist Discourse and Pirandellian Theater,” South Atlantic Quarterly 91. 2 (Spring 1992): 303 – 31. 1 Reproduction” that fascism renders politics aesthetic, substituting the masses’ demand for rights with a fulfillment of their desire for expression (241). Alice Kaplan echoes his observation, explaining that “fascism can be characterized formally as an entry of aesthetic criteria into the political and economic realms” (26). Although keenly emphasizing the aesthetic nature of inter-war politics, studies of British (or expatriate American) writers have tended to focus on the relationships between writers’ political activities (e.g., W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis) and fascist regimes outside England. In related projects, writers such as W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, and C. Day Lewis, have appeared as the heroic (but also problematic) intellectuals fighting against Franco during the Spanish Civil War.2 This focus, in eliding fascism’s presence in Britain, tempts us to regard it primarily as a foreign influence.3 Some historical and social aspects, however, make it much more difficult to posit the “otherness” of fascism in Britain. Not only the dispossessed, but leading establishment aristocrats comprised a considerable portion of the BUF constituency.4 In his journal, The Week, Claude Cockburn revealed a group of wealthy powerful Britons who sympathized with Hitler 2 Auden wrote in the Foreword to The Orators, “My name on the title-page seems a pseudonym for someone else, someone talented but near the border of sanity, who might well, in a year or two, become a Nazi.” In 1934, Christopher Isherwood praised the new Youth Movements in Germany as “brave and worthy citizens” in “The Youth Movement in the New Germany,” Action, Dec. 10, 1931. On these writers, see Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988). 3 John Weiss claims that “The lower middle class was too well off and too liberal to supply Mosley with significant votes—no fascist ever sat in Parliament” (81). Colin Cross also explains, “Classically, Fascism grows form a discontented lower middle class. But in the mid-1930s the bulk of the British lower middle classes was in a heyday of prosperity” (130). 4 Most influential were the newspaper baron Lord Rothermere, the socialite Lady Diana Guinness, née Mitford (later Mosley’s wife), Lucy Houston (Lady Byron), and Oswald Mosley himself. For a fuller discussion of aristocratic influence on the BUF, see Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley. 2 (the “Cliveden Set”).5 Oswald Mosley’s retrospective accounts of the British Union’s appeal during the inter-war period also refer to a prevalent middle-class fear of déclassment.6 Moreover, historical research shows that some proto-fascist neo-Romantic youth movements in Germany took their cue from the structure of English public schools—institutions crucial for reproducing an upper middle-class dominated British social order. The program of the Wandervögel, for instance, was developed by Hermann Lietz, a pedagogue who transplanted the English public school emphasis on militarism and physical fitness in a German setting. Lietz substituted Germanic ideology in lieu of English claims to imperial
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