Universitat De València Departament De Filologia
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UNIVERSITAT DE VALÈNCIA DEPARTAMENT DE FILOLOGIA ANGLESA I ALEMANYA Doctorado en Lenguas, Literaturas, Culturas y sus Aplicaciones Michael Field’s Sapphism: A Tiresian Ontology of Openness between Life and Death in Long Ago (1889) Presentada por Mayron Estefan Cantillo Lucuara Dirigida por Dr. Miguel Teruel Pozas Dra. Laura Monrós Gaspar Valencia, abril de 2019 2 Siempre a mi madre G. Elizabeth, auténtica σύμμαχοσ mía A mi tita Lucila y mi madrina Gladys, mis bases ontológicas 3 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: TOWARDS MICHAEL FIELD’S TIRESIAN ONTOLOGY (11) 1. Objectives and the Emanated Method: ‗Sapphic Tiresias‘ (17) 2. (The) Myth (of Tiresias) as Hermeneutical Truth (22) 3. Towards a Homeric Tiresias in Long Ago (27) 4. The Metaphysical Turn: After the Critical Narrative of Sexuality (36) 5. Michael Field and German Philosophy: Towards Heidegger (41) CHAPTER I: TOWARDS MICHAEL FIELD’S SENSE OF ONTOLOGICAL AND POETIC DWELLING (51) 1.1. Origins: ‗Daughters of Industry‘ (51) 1.2. Before ‗Michael Field‘: Education and First Collaboration (53) 1.3. The Rise and Fall of Michael Field: Before Long Ago (57) 1.4. Long Ago (1889): Rebirth and the Year of Pain-cum-Pleasure (60) 1.5. After Long Ago: Productivity, Cosmopolitanism, and Conversion (62) 1.6. Aestheticism: Against ‗Drawing-Room Conventionalities‘ (64) 1.7. Francophilia, Cosmopolitanism and Roman Catholicism (69) 1.8. Late-Victorian Hellenism and Dionysianism: ‗Bacchic Maenads‘ (74) 1.9. Victorian Sapphism and Long Ago: ‗Two Dear Greek Women‘ (79) 1.10. ‗This Multiform Life‘ and Its ‗Tragic Elements‘ (84) CHAPTER II: LONG AGO AS A LYRICAL ONTOLOGY OF REVIVALS (91) 2.1. The Romantic Cover and the Audacious Handshake (91) 2.2. The Death of the Author: Writing as/in Ambivalent Mitsein (97) 2.3. Approaching the Past: Gewesenheit and Proto-Modernism (104) 2.4. Revivalism: The Face and Air of a Feminine Past (110) 2.5. Sappho‘s Eternal Postmodernity: The Dumb Attempt (119) 2.6. From the Greek Sublime to the Liberated Field (124) 2.7. Translating the Sapphic Seed: From Shelley to Steiner (133) 2.8. Prospective Revivalism and Ontic Writing (138) CHAPTER III: TOWARDS AN ONTOLOGY OF THE FEMININE (144) 3.1. The Dionysian Community of Maidens: Beyond the Cartesian Ego (144) 3.2. Sapphic Utopianism: Maidenhood as Freedom (152) 3.3. Lesbian Desire: Ontologising the Feminine (158) 3.4. The Perverse Mythology of Marriage and Maternity (170) 3.5. Subverting the Sexual Politics of Being: Authentic Existence (174) 5 CHAPTER IV: SAPPHO’S SEIN-ZUM-TODE AS HETERO-MORTALITY (179) 4.1. The Inauthentic Love and the Heroic Quest towards Death (179) 4.2. The Form of Life, the Content of Death, and the Liminal Shore (186) 4.3. The Necrological Analogy: Sappho and the Broken Topography (192) 4.4. A Suspended Ophelia: The Waters of Oblivion and the Composing Body in Decomposition (199) 4.5. Sappho‘s Sein-Zum-Tode: Death as a Way to Be (210) CHAPTER V: THE MYTHOPOIESIS OF SAPPHO’S SEIN-ZUM-TODE (215) 5.1. Sappho and the Birds of Sorrow: The Paradoxical Passion (215) 5.2. From Aphrodite as Tragic Double to a Ghostly Sappho (222) 5.3. Aphrodite Revisited: A Frail Hope (229) 5.4. Boreas, the Moirai, and Sappho‘s Death Drive (235) 5.5. The Omnipotence of Eros: Rethinking Materialism (238) 5.6. The Determinism of Love: Eros as ‗Fatal Creature‘ (244) 5.7. Instructing Aphrodite with Authenticity: the Advantages of Mortality (249) CHAPTER VI: PHAON BETWEEN ECSTASY AND DEATH UNDER SAPPHO’S REGIME OF DESIRE (254) 6.1. The Perversity of Sappho‘s Dreams (254) 6.2. Sappho‘s Sublime Voracity: Towards the Labialisation of Desire (260) 6.3. The Snake-Woman on the Littoral Battlefield (275) 6.4. A Mythology of Feminine Ravishment and Combustion (279) 6.5. A Bloodless Phaon: The Imposed Being-Towards-Death (284) CHAPTER VII: THE METAPOETRY OF LIFE AND DEATH: BETWEEN THE MUSES AND APOLLO (290) 7.1. The (Feminine) Power of Poetry beyond Death (291) 7.2. The Apollonian Value of Violence, Death and Memory (303) 7.3. The Apollonian Forms of Death: Towards the Heroic Swan (309) 7.4. Excluding the Anti-Poetic Leap? (317) CONCLUSIONS (321) APPENDIX (332) WORKS CITED (343) RESUMEN (363) 6 7 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks Shakespeare‘s Hamlet I write these words of gratitude with an acute fore-awareness of failure. So many are the debts I have contracted over the course of this project, that I know my acknowledgments will do no justice to my multiple creditors. I owe them the unreturnable. The Universitat de València has granted me a four-year scholarship (Atracció de Talent) and three mobility bursaries that have meant not only enough patronage to make these pages possible, but also independence, filial-maternal compensation, and family reunions. The National Research Project FFI2012-32071, funded by the Spanish MINECO and directed by Dr Carmen Morenilla Talens, has offered me a platform to start my academic career in a formal setting and within a supportive team of specialists. The Research Network VINS, funded by the Spanish MINECO and directed by Dr Rosario Arias Doblas, has allowed me to exchange interests and ideas with renowned experts in the field of (Neo)Victorian Studies. The Research Group LAP (Literature, Arts and Performance), led by Dr Laura Monrós Gaspar, has opened my research to a productive dialogue with different theories of intertextuality, intermediality, semiotics, reception, and adaptation. My supervisors, Dr Laura Monrós Gaspar and Dr Miguel Teruel Pozas, deserve my most heartfelt thanks for their wise guidance, intellectual generosity, personal support, encouragement, and patience. 8 My work with Andrea Navarro Noguera within the GRATUV (Grup de Recerca i Acció Teatral de la Universitat de València) has been an invaluable incentive in every phase of my research and a fruitful invitation to share with other young academics. My international research visits tutored by Dr Christine Berthin (Université Paris Nanterre) and Dr Ana Parejo Vadillo (Birkbeck College) have been significant opportunities for academic improvement, as well as for personal growth. My work at the Department of English and German Studies (UVEG) has signified both an enriching professional experience and a precious chance to consolidate my ties with Dr Vicent Cucarella, Dr Carme Manuel, and Dr Mariajosé Coperías. My Colombian and Spanish families are silent yet vital voices of support, pride and understanding behind every effort made throughout this thesis. My dearest friends, Clara, Laura, Vicent, Maite, Andrea, Clarita, Patry, VMB, Pepe, Nohemí, Andreea, and Gayané, please see yourselves necessarily contained in here. My Denken here is but an act of Danken towards you all! 9 10 INTRODUCTION TOWARDS MICHAEL FIELD’S TIRESIAN ONTOLOGY These women whose identity recalls the flesh of Tiresias pushed inside-out –Michelle Lee Michael Field, the joint pseudonym of Katharine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper, is no longer an unfamiliar name in the canon of Victorian literature. After nearly a century of disregard and virtual oblivion, this literary couple has gained growing prominence amongst fin de siècle scholars since the 1990s, mostly due to their idiosyncratic collective identity and partly due to the impressive quality of their work. Angela Leighton, Chris White and Virginia Blain pioneered in rediscovering the figures of Bradley and Cooper, offering critical assessments of their poetic collections, and encouraging further recognition of their original contributions to Victorian letters. As a result of this ground-breaking rediscovery, in 2004 the University of Delaware hosted the first conference on Michael Field that led to the publication of Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson‘s Michael Field and their World in 2007. In subsequent years, four other scholarly books came out and consolidated the appraisal and reception of Michael 11 Field as a significant name of late nineteenth-century culture: Marion Thain‘s „Michael Field‟: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Fin de Siècle, Jill Ehnenn's Women's Literary Collaboration, Queerness and Late-Victorian Culture, Sharon Bickle‘s The Fowl and the Pussycat: Love Letters of Michael Field, 1876-1909, and Marion Thain and Ana Parejo Vadillo‘s Michael Field, The Poet. Published and Manuscript Materials.1 Between 2009 and 2010, Michelle Lee and Sharon Bickle launched and edited two issues of The Michaelian, the first academic journal exclusively devoted to ―promoting cross-disciplinary studies of Michael Field and their considerable coterie of literary and artistic friends as well as related aspects of fin-de-siècle culture and life‖ (―Fieldnotes‖). Furthermore, in July 2014, it was at the Senate House that The Michael Field Centenary Conference was held with the aim ―to acknowledge and celebrate the diversity and vitality of new scholarship surrounding Michael Field and fin de siècle literature generally‖ (Vadillo et al., ―Call for Papers‖). The present dissertation seeks to partake of such academic vitality with a new critical look at Bradley and Cooper‘s early oeuvre, offering the very first in-depth study entirely dedicated to their first joint volume of poems, Long Ago (1889). Nevertheless, the reception of the Michael Fields, as they were usually called in their circle of peers, has not been limited to purely critical studies. In 1996, Isobel Armstrong, Joseph Bristow and Cath Sharrock published one of the first anthologies to focus specifically on nineteenth-century women poets and to include Bradley and Cooper with eight of their poems. In a more recent and general compilation devoted to Victorian literature, Victor Shea and William Whitla have ratified the canonical status of Michael Field with a large total of twenty-eight poems. This significant turn from a specifically gendered anthology to a more general one suggests not only that Bradley and Cooper represent a necessary presence in any contemporary compilation of Victorian authors, but also that theirs is no longer a minor, marginal and peculiar name: ‗Michael Field‘ has instead come to share critical and anthological recognition with such major writers as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson or Oscar Wilde.