Authentic Modernism: Ekphrasis and Objecthood in British and American Literature of the Early Twentieth Century By Dawn E. Blizard B.A., Carleton College, 1998 A.M., Brown University, 2001 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2009 © Copyright 2009 by Dawn E. Blizard This dissertation by Dawn E. Blizard is accepted in its present form by the Department of English as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date_______________ ___________________________________ Robert Scholes, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date_______________ ___________________________________ Paul Armstrong, Reader Date_______________ ___________________________________ Timothy Bewes, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date_______________ ___________________________________ Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School iii VITA Dawn Blizard was born on December 17, 1974 in Abington, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She received her B.A. from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota in 1998, with Distinction in the English Major and a Certificate of Advanced Study in German. In 2001 she earned an A.M. from Brown University. At Brown she was awarded Graduate School fellowships and the Jean Starr Untermeyer Dissertation Fellowship. She taught courses in rhetoric and composition as well as twentieth-century literature and its theories in the departments of English and Comparative Literature. She also served as curator of the art exhibit “New Art in The New Age: What was Modern? (1910-1914)”, on display from September 30 to October 30, 2005 in the Carriage House Gallery at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To write a dissertation is to become part of an intellectual community—one constituted through the exchange of texts as well as conversation, and one that extends beyond the limits of a single institution or disciplinary field. I am fortunate to have been introduced into this community by thoughtful and dedicated scholars who not only taught me its language and trained me in its conventions, but also helped me to feel at home here. Robert Scholes has been a patient, supportive and enthusiastic mentor. I thank him for having great faith in my abilities and my work, for providing me countless opportunities to engage with the profession, and for helping me think of myself as a scholar rather than a student. Though he came late to my project and committee, Paul Armstrong has been the best reader one could ever hope for—thoughtful, precise, encouraging and pragmatic. Timothy Bewes’s insightful comments helped me hone my thinking and improve my writing. This project had its roots in an independent study I undertook with Mutlu Blasing, who taught me almost everything I know about reading poetry, and whose critical acumen guided my writing in its earliest stages. At Carleton, Disa Gambera inspired me, challenged me, and showed me just how exciting close reading can be. I would not have embarked on graduate study without her encouragement, and would not have completed it without her steadfast support. The challenges of graduate school are as much psychological as intellectual, and I overcame them with abundant support from family, friends and colleagues. I am lucky to have been part of a talented cohort of graduate students in my department, and to have had the opportunity to present my work at conferences where I got to know young scholars who have generously shared their wisdom and experience with me and who v made it easier for me to imagine a world beyond Brown. Over the years I spent working on this project, Lea Allen’s friendship has meant more to me than I could ever hope to express here; her good sense and unwavering support have sustained me in more ways than she knows. The love and absolute trustworthiness that Valerie Maine and Maryann McCurdy brought to my family made this dissertation’s completion possible by allowing me to focus. And I would never have started writing it—or come to graduate school— were it not for my father, who has encouraged me to pursue my passions (however impractical) since I was little. I do not believe I would have finished it without Marion, who taught me by example how to face what is difficult with courage and grace. My husband Robert has supported me at all stages of the writing process in every possible sense that the word ‘support’ could ever take on—he fed me, listened to me, fixed my computer, gave me time and space to think and write, and put up with me—which at times must have seemed more than could be expected of any reasonable human being. Without him, my writing would not exist. vi for Kate vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 CHAPTER ONE Henry James at the Museum 20 CHAPTER TWO Bloomsbury on Private View 68 CHAPTER THREE Wyndham Lewis in the Fake-Masterpiece Factory 118 CHAPTER FOUR Gertrude Stein’s Atelier 168 Works Cited 218 viii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1.1. “The Young Man Had Left Her, Smiling, Looking Back” 42 Figure 1.2. “The Halls of Julia” 47 Figure 2.1. Poster for the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition 91 Figure 2.2. Omega Workshops Pottery Advertisement 104 Figure 3.1. “Victor Stamp’s signature” 162 Figure 4.1. “Room with Oil Lamp” 192 Figure 4.2. “Room with Gas (Femme au chapeau and Picasso Portrait)” 193 Figure 4.3. “Gertrude Stein in front of the atelier door” 200 Figure 4. 4. “First page of the manuscript of this book” 209 ix INTRODUCTION Later it struck me that the best history of painting in London was the National Gallery, and that the best history of literature, more particularly of poetry, would be a twelve- volume anthology in which each poem was chosen not merely because it was a nice poem or a poem Aunt Hepsy liked, but because it contained an invention, a definite contribution to the art of verbal expression. —Ezra Pound, “How to Read” Were all modern paintings to be destroyed, a critic of the twenty-fifth century would be able to deduce from the works of Proust alone the existence of Matisse, Cézanne, Derain, and Picasso; he would be able to say with those books before him that painters of the highest originality and power must be covering canvas after canvas, squeezing tube after tube, in the room next door. —Virginia Woolf, “Pictures” Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf have both been canonized as high modernist writers, but the “modernisms” they are held to epitomize are very different. Pound is most often associated with the hard-edged objective aesthetic of Imagism, a poetic program that insisted upon “direct treatment of the ‘thing’” and the elimination of extraneous detail from verse (“Retrospect” 3). Woolf, in contrast, is best known for her novelistic treatment of the minute particularities of subjective experience, her attempt to capture the “myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel” that are, as she writes, received by “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day” (“Modern Fiction” 149-150). Both Pound and Woolf, however, are said to have been influenced or stimulated by developments in the visual arts; the formal innovations of both writers’ work have been attributed to their contact with modern painting. Ample biographical evidence can be marshaled in support of this claim: Pound wrote extensive art criticism in the early decades of his career, helped found the Vorticist movement, which included painters Wyndham Lewis and David Bomberg, and campaigned tirelessly 1 2 to find patrons and procure financial support for visual artists whose work he admired;1 Woolf was intimately acquainted with the latest developments in modernist design through her relationship with her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, as well as her close friendships with Bloomsbury artists such as Roger Fry and Duncan Grant.2 By this logic, the different forms taken by their literary experiments might be said to correspond to the different styles of modern art that each favored: Woolf admired the idiosyncratic Impressionism of Walter Sickert and later came to appreciate the Omega Workshops’ Cubist- and Fauvist-influenced decorative style, while Pound preferred the machine-age dynamism of Vorticist work as well as the rough-hewn abstraction characteristic of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculpture. In the passages quoted above, however, both Pound and Woolf describe the relationship between the visual and literary arts in terms of the work’s location—which is connected to its position in culture and history—and with reference to the way the materiality of the medium determines its legacy—how it will be remembered, and how long it will endure. For Pound, the National Gallery does not merely represent or allow access to the “best” exemplars of painting’s history, but quite simply is that history: it stands as lingering physical evidence of the evolution of the plastic arts. In its stability and for the quality of the “inventions” it houses, the National Gallery offers itself as a model that the poetry anthology should aspire to emulate, Pound argues. Literature, that is, would be improved if it could attain the material constancy and cultural prestige of the 1 For a detailed summary of Pound’s published art criticism and its influence, see Zinnes’s introduction to Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts; for a book-length examination of Pound’s influential relationships with visual artists, see Pound’s Artists. 2 Both Gillespie and Panthea Reid have undertaken extensive biographical study of Woolf’s relationships with visual artists: Gillespie’s The Sisters’ Arts focuses on Virginia’s intense but complicated bond with her sister Vanessa, while Reid considers her place in the Bloomsbury coterie more broadly.