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“Ghosts Within Us”: a Study of Women Writers of Gothic Modernism By “Ghosts Within Us”: A Study of Women Writers of Gothic Modernism By Nihad Laouar Canterbury Christ Church University Thesis submitted For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2019 i ii Acknowledgments I would like to thank my first supervisor, Dr Andrew Humphries, for his unfailing help and support throughout this project. His hard work, patience, enthusiasm, guidance and encouragement are what have made this project possible. I would also like to thank my second supervisor Prof. Carolyn Oulton for her support, unstinting encouragement, and continued belief in my project. My thanks also go to all my family, friends and colleagues who have supported me in this project and who patiently have listened to my endless talks about the Gothic. Finally, I would like to extend my thanks to the Algerian Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research for their funding that enabled me carry out this research in Modernist and Gothic literature. i 1 Abstract This thesis offers a reading of Modernist narratives by British women writers through Gothic lens. The ostensible archaic mode of the Gothic that Modernism endeavoured to throw away returns from the repressed to haunt Modernist fiction. Women writers that this thesis examines, show the importance of this writing mode. Through its elastic elements, the Gothic continues to live in the early twentieth century. This thesis shows how women writers adapt Gothic tropes to engage with their own and their age’s anxieties between the fin de siècle and the 1930s. This study shows how the Gothic communicates historical and gender concerns from women’s perspective with the aim to establish a women’s voice within the field of Gothic Modernism. The Gothic, in the works of Vernon Lee, E. Nesbit, May Sinclair, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Daphne du Maurier and Jean Rhys, evolves and responds. This means that the Gothic transforms from the fin de siècle to become more psychological in later works of these writers from the 1910s to the inter-war period. In other words, the Gothic evolves as it responds to the varying anxieties, affecting women across these periods. This thesis aims to add a unified study of Modernist women writers to the field of Gothic Modernism. By unified, I mean that this study produces a sense of the continuity to the Gothic. It highlights the Gothic’s revival in the 1890s and its subsequent re-invention in the Modernist period at the hands of Modernist women writers. ii Contents Acknowledgments .................................................................................................................. i Abstract ................................................................................................................................ ii Chapter One: From Haunted Castles to Haunted Subjectivities: Women Modernist Writers and the Revision of the Gothic. ............................................................................................. 1 Chapter Two: “I think I am haunted”: The Revenant New Woman and Troubled Masculinities of the fin de siècle .......................................................................................... 27 Chapter Three: The Gothic Aesthetics of Modernism in May Sinclair’s Uncanny Stories and War Fictions ....................................................................................................................... 68 Chapter Four: “It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I dispatched her”: The Revenant Angels of Modernism ............................. 113 Chapter Five: “A Phantom in my mind”: The Haunted Spaces of the Inter-War Period in Daphne du Maurier’s Fiction: ............................................................................................ 148 Chapter Six: “There always remains something”: A Representation of Women as Living Ghosts in Jean Rhys’s Fiction............................................................................................ 187 Chapter Seven: Conclusion: “We live in Gothic times”: Women’s Journey in the Castles of Modernity ......................................................................................................................... 222 Bibliography: .................................................................................................................... 239 iii Chapter One: From Haunted Castles to Haunted Subjectivities: Women Modernist Writers and the Revision of the Gothic. Gothic and Modernism have a complex relationship to each other which remains difficult to account for (Smith and Wallace 3). This complexity grows out of the opposing concepts of both fields, for the classical Gothic elements of ghouls, vampires and ghosts seem to oppose Modernism’s project of rationalism and reason. This thesis shows that despite its attempt to break with the past that includes the Gothic, Modernism and women’s Modernist fiction particularly, ends up adapting it as its cornerstone with the Gothic becoming an important backbone of its literary experimentation. When Virginia Woolf states in her essay “Edith Birkhead’s The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance” (1921) that “It is at the ghosts within us that we shudder” (305), she alludes to new sensibilities of the Gothic mode which emerge at the heart of women’s Modernism and function as a narrative feature. This thesis aims to give a sustained study of women writers’ adaptation of the Gothic in literary Modernism. In doing so, Modernist texts under study reveal the way the Gothic departs from its traditional locus of castles to make the individual’s subject its main site in Modernism. The female subject particularly becomes a central zone where Modernist ghosts lurk and this is what Woolf means by “the ghosts within us”. This thesis will show how Modernism ostensibly disavows the Gothic but in practice reimagines it. This is a vital aspect of women’s writing because the women writers that this examines are forced to filter their gendered experience of instability and terror through an indirect lens. 1 The Gothic that was known to have witnessed a decline in the mid-nineteenth century emerges again in the fin de siècle period. It declines again from the Edwardian period, 1910s to the inter-war period, 1930s. Catherine Spooner writes that: For the intelligentsia of the - early twentieth century, it became fashionable to reject Gothic along with other nineteenth-century baggage. Woolf’s date is convenient for our purposes: following the end of the Edwardian period there was a relative dearth of Gothic literature (although in the cinema Gothic narratives thrived) until much later in the century with the revival of interest in popular literary forms in the 1960s (40). Julian Wolfreys also points out that the Gothic “was given life in 1764 with the publication of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. It died allegedly somewhere around 1818 or 1820, with the publication of, respectively, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer” (8). The chapters that this thesis examines will show the way Modernist British women writers revive and innovate the Gothic in these periods where it seems to have declined between 1890 and 1940. Their Gothic approach is born from their need to articulate gender issues of their times and react to the upheaval of the First World War. By pursuing a systematic reading of the Gothic in the works of Vernon Lee, E. Nesbit, May Sinclair, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Daphne du Maurier and Jean Rhys, this thesis shows how these women writers reform the classical Gothic conventions, that are pointed out earlier in this introduction, to adapt to a new historical era while trying to give a definition to women’s shifting but challenging position within the chaos of Modernity from the fin de siècle into the inter-war period. In the texts I examine, the Gothic is used to respond to the anxieties of the period as they affect women, and the way in which the Gothic evolves in women’s fiction accordingly. This means that the Modernist Gothic arises as a reaction to anxieties such as the rise of the New Woman in the 1890s and specifically the 2 emergence of new horrors with the outbreak of the First World War (1914-1918). As such I argue that there is a transition from a still more literal sense of Gothic in the fin de siècle through the Edwardian period to become a more internalised Gothic during the war period and through its aftermath. I locate this study in the field of Gothic Modernism with the aim to highlight women writers’ contribution to the field as a way of showing a continuity of women’s perspective across the period between 1890 and 1940 in response to its gender, ideological and national concerns as they influence women’s position and experience. The field of Gothic Modernism is still in its relative infancy. The available scholarship on twentieth century Gothic has mainly focused on strengthening the relationship between these seemingly opposed fields by tracking Gothic traces in Modernist texts. This has also focused on Gothic cinema which was on the rise during the early twentieth century through movies’ adaptations of famous Gothic literary figures such as Tod Browning’s Dracula (1925) and James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) (Kavka 214). Scholarly works, as such, highlight a range of Modernist writers, examining these writers call upon Gothic manifestations in their works to reflect on a society in chaos during and after the First World War. In exploring the differing aspects of Gothic in their writings, these
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