Law,The Domestic and Sovereignty in Interwar
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LAW, THE DOMESTIC AND SOVEREIGNTY IN INTERWAR WOMEN’S WRITING Submitted for examination for the degree of Ph.D. in English Literature by ELLEN TURNER August 2011 SCHOOL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE , LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY ABSTRACT My Ph.D. examines women’s writing in the i nterwar period through a questioning of the boundaries between the public and private sphere as traditional masculine forms of power based on a system of sovereignty and law enter the domestic realm. I also consider how power might be reimagined abroad. I juxtapose works of popular fiction from E.M. Hull, Agatha Christie and Marie Belloc Lowndes with the modernist writers Sylvia Townsend Warner, Katherine Mansfield and Rebecca West. Like much popular fiction of the early twentieth century, the bestsellers I explore exist in a complex relationship with that of their “other” - modernism. Section One looks at the modernist short story writer Mansfield alongside Christie, the Queen of Crime. The conception of home, for both Christie and Mansfield, is always somewhat uncanny. My readings of sovereignty in Mansfield and Christie are very much underpinned by a notion of the domestic space which becomes permeable to the political sphere at certain times of crisis. By using Giorgio Agamben’s theory of bare life within the state of exception, I unpack the notion of how the public and private become conflated. In the uncanny domesticity which haunts the pages of both Mansfield and Christie, the category of femina sacra offers a more gender specific reading than that of homo sacer or bare life within which I examine the paradoxical notion of legalised murder. The two chapters of Section Two juxtapose Warner’s modernist fantasy novels with the popular desert ro mance novel of Hull. This section examines ways in which colonialism and imagined representations of colonial lands and the colonial “other” impacts on understanding of sovereignty and representations of power. Though apparently from two dissimilar literary worlds, Hull and Warner share a surprising affinity: I look at Warner’s imagined representations of colonial lands and the colonial other in terms of how these may impact on understandings of sovereignty and representations of power. I consider how the imagined space of her early novels is broadened to include the historical spaces of her later fictions. In the chapter on Hull I argue that representations of androgynous and cross-dressing women, a theme also apparent in Warner’s novels, allow for her hero ines to inhabit positions of relative power in relation to their male counterparts. Section Three contrasts the modernist West with popular romance/psychological thriller writer Lowndes. Both writers also have a deep-seated concern with the domestic and its complex relationship with power and rule. Though neither of these authors are consciously writing within the Gothic tradition I draw on notions of this genre to explore the uncanny in relation to images of domesticity that find themselves tainted by the threat of murder. In this section I draw on Freudian psychoanalytic notions, both of the death drive and of das unheimliche , to unravel parallels between the works of these two authors specifically examining how representations of death and the recurrent notions of the opposing life and death drives can be read as enactments of the grand-narrative of sovereignty. Although my thesis is concerned with authors who were writing in and around the literary innovations characterised by the modernist movement, this is not a project about modernism in a straightforward sense; rather, I read somewhat marginal modernist figures alongside popular fiction writers who seem to function as auxiliary modernists. Whilst I am comparing the low-brow with the modernist I do not seek to place any value laden judgements on the relative literary merits of these works; though, on the whole, the popular fiction I examine takes a more conservative approach than that of its more innovative modernist counterparts, it still, at moments, disrupts expectations with its critical stance towards conceptions of sovereignty and law. CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii INTRODUCTION 1 SECTION ONE THE MODERNIST SHORT STORY VERSUS THE DETECTIVE NOVEL 37 CHAPTER ONE 49 KILLING WITH IMPUNITY IN KATHERINE MANSFIELD ’S NEW ZEALAND NARRATIVES CHAPTER TWO 77 AGATHA CHRISTIE AND JUSTICE OUTSIDE LAW : LEGALISED MURDER AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR 108 THE DEAD , THE ALIVE AND THE DOMESTIC SECTION TWO THE MODERNIST NOVEL VERSUS THE DESERT ROMANCE 111 CHAPTER THREE 120 THE MODERNIST FANTASY NOVEL AND SOVEREIGNTY REIMAGINED IN SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER CHAPTER FOUR 151 FEMINISM AND SOVEREIGNTY IN E.M. HULL ’S THE SHEIK AND BEYOND 184 HOW (U N)S CRUPULOUSLY WE ARE PRESERVING THE RUINS SECTION THREE 188 THE MODERNIST FANTASY VERSUS THE POPULAR THRILLER CHAPTER FIVE REBECCA WEST ’S ‘G OTHIC ’ MODERNIST FANTASY NOVEL : SOVEREIGNTY , THE SELF AND THE THREAT FROM 197 WITHIN CHAPTER SIX MARIE BELLOW LOWNDES ’ POPULAR GOTHIC 233 PAPER -THIN WALLS 269 CONCLUSION 275 BIBLIOGRAPHY 285 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost I would like to thank my two supervisors Stacy Gillis and Alison Light for their continued support. I would particularly like to thank Stacy for being so generous with her time. I am enormously grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the Ph.D. along with an additional research trip. Thanks also to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin for a Dissertation Fellowship which allowed me to research the Marie Belloc Lowndes archives. For their immeasurable amounts of support, I am particularly grateful to Liz Berry, Becca Gill and Leigh Simpson. I would also like to offer my heartfelt thanks to all my friends and fellow postgraduates at Newcastle University who have all contributed to what is a fantastic research environment in the School of English. I dedicate this project to both of my grandmothers; Juliette Turner, who shared her love of literature and has only recently confessed t hat she used to covertly read her mother’s desert romance novels; and Joyce Bellamy, who, when I mentioned I was working on The Sheik, went to her village library and took out the Virago edition of the novel and was only too pleased to show me the introduc tory remarks: ‘As a piece of pornography so soft that you could give it to your grandmother, it is simply divine – though its very existence suggests that your grandmother could probably tell you a thing or two.’ 1 1 Kate Saunders , ‘Introduction’, in E.M. Hull, The Sheik (London: Virago, 1996), pp.v-xi (pp.x-xi). ii INTRODUCTION 1 This thesis examines women’s writing in the interwar period through a questioning of the boundaries between the public and private spheres as traditional masculine forms of power, based on a system of sovereignty and law, enter the domestic realm. I also consider how power might be reimagined abroad. I juxtapose works of popular fiction by Agatha Christie (1890-1976), E.M. Hull (1880-1947) and Marie Belloc Lowndes (1868-1947) with the modernist writers Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) and Rebecca West (1892-1983). Whilst Andrew John Miller has recently undertaken a study into sovereignty in the works of interwar modernists W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, my argument is concerned with writers from the margins. 1 Like much popular fiction of the early twentieth century, the bestsellers I explore exist in a complex relationship with that of their ‘other’, modernism. Modernist writing and the popular fiction contemporary to it have been mutually influential; elements of the popular fiction I have looked at can be seen to embody modernist elements, whilst my readings of modernist fiction are not reliant on a simple understanding of their reactionary qualities to the popular, but engage with them in a more complex correlation. This is the primary motivation behind the chapter pairings. Whilst my thesis is concerned with authors who were writing in and around the literary innovations characterised by the modernist movement, this is not a project about modernism in a straightforward sense; rather, I read somewhat marginal modernist figures alongside writers of popular fiction who seem to function as auxiliary modernists. The six writers who are considered in the three constituent sections of this project were all born between the years of 1868 and 1892. Though the dates and spans of their literary outputs vary considerably, all were producing fiction during the years in which modernism 1 Andrew John Miller, Modernism and the Crisis of Sovereignty (New York: Routledge, 2008). Maud 2 was at its height. The works I look at fall roughly (though not exactly) within the period between the two World Wars. 2 The period between the First World War (1914-1918) and the Second World War (1939-1945) was characterised by significant changes in societal expectations of women, not least the 1928 granting of the right to vote for women over 21. Fears surrounding the breakdown of conventional gender roles started to manifest themselves in interwar culture. Angela Kershaw and Angela Kimyongür explore this in their discussion of women in Europe during this period: The desi re to ensure that women’s dedication to their traditional domestic destinies did not waver manifested itself in a public preoccupation with the public and private conduct of women, with their appearance, with their clothes and hair, with their adoption of such unfeminine habits as drinking and smoking. 3 Potentially unfounded fears that the First World War had irrevocably changed women’s roles in society since the absence of men, who were away fighting on the battlefield, meant that women were liberated (or forced out) from the restrictions and imprisonment (or potential safety) of the domestic realm dominate literary representations of power in the in examples I use in this thesis.