TRESPASSING WOMEN: REPRESENTATIONS OF PROPERTY AND IDENTITY IN BRITISH WOMEN‘S WRITING 1925 - 2005 by JAMIE LYNN MCDANIEL Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation Adviser: Dr. Kurt Koenigsberger Department of English CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY August, 2010 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of ________Jamie Lynn McDaniel___________________________ candidate for the __English PhD_______________degree *. (signed)_____Kurt Koenigsberger_______________________ (chair of the committee) ___________Mary Grimm_________________________ ___________Gary Stonum__________________ ___________Joseph Fagan_______________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ (date) ___July 9, 2010________________ *We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein. ii Dedication To Ann Cobb, Teresa Noell, and Sonja Adams, who cultivated my early love of literature, To my grandparents, who instilled in me a sense of fairness, And to my parents, Jackie and Jane McDaniel, whose hard work and dedication have made me who I am today. iii Table of Contents Introduction Narratives of Identity, the Gender Propriety of Property, and Tactics of Trespassing …………………..………………………...8 Chapter One ―Her house was no longer hers entirely‖: Legal Classification, Biographical Narratives, and the Law of Intestacy in Virginia Woolf‘s Orlando …………………….……………………......…30 Chapter Two ―What You Really Get When You Try to Sell Things‖: (Mis)Recognition and (In)Tangibility in Jean Rhys‘s Good Morning, Midnight ………...…………………………………….58 Chapter Three A Boat of Our Own: Revisions of Possessive Individualism and the Dangers of the Egalitarian Instinct in the Novels of Penelope Fitzgerald ………………………………………………………..84 Chapter Four Trespassing through Bodies: Hysterical Women and Dispossession in the Novels of Hilary Mantel ………….….…..123 Chapter Five A Voyage into the Interior: Self-Possession, ―New Women,‖ and the Reclamation of Somatic and Textual Property in Margaret Drabble‘s The Millstone ……………………………...………...154 Epilogue Jeanette Winterson, Online ―Real Estate,‖ and the Future of Women‘s Property ………………………………..…………....184 Bibliography …………………...……………………………………………...194 iv Acknowledgements This project would not have been possible without the support of Case Western Reserve University‘s Department of English. I am particularly grateful to my committee members Mary Grimm, Gary Stonum, and Joseph Fagan for their helpful comments and constant encouragement. I want to highlight the contribution of Kurt Koenigsberger, my committee chair and dissertation adviser. I have come to know Kurt as the kind of scholar and teacher after which I want to model my own approach to research and teaching. He introduced me to many of the authors I explore in this dissertation, and he has pushed me to go beyond what I thought were my limits. Even when I stumbled, Kurt never doubted my abilities. Most importantly, he has helped me develop my critical voice. The dissertation process often involves straying from the intended path, and Kurt has shown me that the moments when I venture into unknown territory are the most valuable. The humor I have shared with friends and colleagues have made writing this dissertation a bit more bearable. I owe many thanks to Danielle Nielsen, Joi Tribble, Monica Madden, Josh Bearden, Jason Carney, Nicole Emmelhainz, Darcy Brandel, Nárcisz Fejes, Asdghig Karajayerlian, Danny Anderson, Wells Addington, Ken McGraw, Brad Ricca, Caroline Markel, Amanda Booher, Carrie Shanafelt, Eve McPherson, Danielle Hane- Devore, James and Pat Baxter, Stephen Baxter, Clark and Frankie Gable, Nancy Whitt, Bryan Johnson, and Rosemary Fisk. Chalet Seidel, Tasia Hane-Devore, and especially Jim Baxter have gone above and beyond in their support. They have made my life a lot less lonely during what can become an alienating experience. Finally, my family Jackie and Jane McDaniel, Brad and Jadah McVay, and Anna and Bella McVay have always reassured me when I doubted myself and have shown me nothing but love. v Trespassing Women: Representations of Property and Identity in British Women‘s Writing 1925 – 2005 ABSTRACT by JAMIE LYNN MCDANIEL This dissertation examines novels for spatial and temporal practices, what I call ―tactics of trespassing,‖ used by twentieth- and twenty-first-century women writers Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Penelope Fitzgerald, Margaret Drabble, Hilary Mantel, and Jeanette Winterson to re-imagine established constructions of national and gender identity and its relation to property. I focus on property‘s ability to enable or to prevent particular identity formations and chart the responses of modern British women writers to the ways that legal, political, and economic treatises have historically rendered property ownership in terms of the masculine. As a result, these discourses have defined feminine propriety through property‘s inaccessibility for women. In novels by these writers, I discern a preoccupation with ―looking back,‖ a process through which authors revisit narratives of national and gender identity—narratives that did not account for or represent particular sections of the British public—for the goal of redefining what, as a result of this absence, was defined as properly ―British‖ for a woman. The specific sites through which these works look back are incarnations of property. By enacting new narratives of identity that challenge the propriety of traditional accounts, contemporary women writers aim to stake vi a claim for a place within the current British body politic. Through their tactics of trespassing upon grounds of property and propriety defined by masculine society, in other words, these writers show how traditional constructions of national and gender identity are essential but insufficient for marginalized groups to understand their relationship to and position within Britain. By showing how these writers establish a degree of plurality and creativity in their intellectual heritage, this dissertation disputes the claims of British property discourses that assert to represent the whole of British society. My approach investigates contemporary novels that current studies of British identity often neglect and combines the idea of looking back with examinations of property in order to draw together two strands in British Studies previously considered in isolation. vii Introduction: Narratives of Identity, the Gender Propriety of Property, and Tactics of Trespassing In 1816 British poet Lord Byron‘s wife Anne Isabella ―Annabella‖ Milbanke1 left him after six months of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. Even as early as her honeymoon, Annabella had described Byron‘s behavior as being ―so alarming & cruel as disposed me several times to make my escape.‖ Taking their month-old daughter with her, Annabella withdrew2 from him after fifty-four weeks of marriage and wrote, ―If ever I should be fool enough to be persuaded to return, I shall never leave his house alive‖ (qtd. in Hay 129). However, she could not seek a legal separation on her own. Instead, her father had to sue Byron for breach of marriage contract, claiming damage to property (his daughter) entrusted to Byron and accompanied by a large sum of money (the dowry). Annabella could take only this course of action because she did not exist in the eyes of the law as a separate and independent legal entity apart from her husband or her father. The suit for separation, therefore, took place between two men who had negotiated the marriage contract, a strategic exclusion that shifted the balance of power toward men. Annabella‘s story, which can be read as a woman‘s story sui generis, did not end with her as a victim of an unfair legal system. Legally disadvantaged because of her sex, she nevertheless developed ways to manipulate that same legal system. For example, after leaving Byron and traveling to London, Annabella, with the assistance of Byron‘s spurned lover Lady Caroline Lamb, spread rumors about Byron that included accusations of incest with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, marital violence, and sodomy. Annabella 1 Though the history of her name is complicated by inheritances her father received and by her marriage, I will refer to her as ―Annabella‖ for the sake of clarity. 2 According to Ashley Hay, Lord Byron did not even know that Annabella had left him for at least another two weeks (125). 8 also called Byron‘s mental fitness into question and had several doctors examine him. An account of the doctors‘ visits began to circulate throughout London. In short, Annabella used the creation of a narrative to engage tactically with the law that sought to exclude her on the basis of her sex. In order to regain equity in their divorce proceedings, she tapped into an identity narrative that cast Byron as belonging to a particular category of man: the maniacal, out-of-control husband.3 Regardless of the veracity of the facts, this narrative eventually forced Byron to sign, against his will, the Deed of Separation and to grant many requests that otherwise would not have been open to discussion. This infamous incident calls into question the ways that traditionally marginalized groups such as women respond to their legal, economic, and political marginalization, especially given the historical determination by men of a woman‘s proper societal and legal role. How does a