i (Post)Modernist Biofictions: The Literary Afterlives of Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath Bethany Layne Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of English September 2013 ii The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2013 The University of Leeds and Bethany Layne The right of Bethany Layne to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. iii Acknowledgements With thanks to my supervisors, Dr. Tracy Hargreaves and Dr. Katherine Mullin, for four years of kindness, humour, and an attentiveness to detail that by far exceeded the call of duty. Thanks also to Dr. Richard Salmon for an encouraging and meticulous transfer review, and to the University of Leeds for the Research Scholarship that made this project possible. Special thanks are due to my parents, Jane and Jonathan Layne, and my grandfather, Walter Bellamy, for the financial support and unending faith that propelled me to this point, and to my mum in particular for teaching me to read. I am grateful to the people who have accompanied me on this journey, especially Amber Pouliot and Hannah Ridge. I would like to thank the new friends I made, including, but by no means limited to, Christine Chettle, Helen Kingstone, Simone Lomataire and Rachel Webster, and to the old friends who provided support from afar, particularly Josh Rodda and Liz Sunter. Finally, this thesis is dedicated to Alexander Hodgkins, with love and gratitude for the last eight years. iv Abstract This thesis addresses a new mode of contemporary writing: the biographical fictions about authors that have proliferated over the last ten-to-fifteen years. I find antecedents for this subgenre in two active areas: metafiction’s troubling of the boundary between first- and second-order discourses, and Neo-Victorianism’s recovery of the subject. I use the phrase ‘(Post)Modernist Biofiction’ to describe these novels. The parenthetical ‘(post)’ refers both to my subjects’ chronological positioning pre, mid, and post Modernism, and to the genre’s partial engagement with theoretical developments. This selective engagement is borne out by the compound noun ‘biofiction’, which raises a tension between embodied and textual subjectivity. Critical interest has kept pace with the flourishing of biofiction, with articles and book chapters multiplying around certain novels. I contribute to this emerging field in one of the first studies to consider biofiction as a genre. I discuss three popular subjects, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath, and their manifestation in sixteen primary texts, considering examples of the literary biopic and the lyric memoir alongside the novel, and the more popular biofictions alongside the critically overlooked. In doing so, I adopt an intertextual approach, which places the biofictions in dialogue with their subjects’ work. I have three main avenues of exploration: the first, to consider how biofiction might serve to introduce or to recall its subjects’ texts; the second, to ask whether biofiction might contribute to scholarly discourse as well as borrowing from the same; and the third, to address biofiction’s intervention into postmodernist debates about subjectivity. On the whole, the works of biofiction considered in this thesis do not, I argue, naïvely resurrect the Author-God rejected by Roland Barthes. Instead, their intertextuality fragments that figure, enabling a sophisticated recovery of subjectivity as it exists in the form of discourse. v Table of Contents Intellectual Property and Publication Statements ii Acknowledgements iii Abstract iv Introduction 7 Chapter One: The Henry James Papers, or, What Biofiction Knew 29 Felony (2001) 37 The Open Door (2008) 44 ‘Dictation’ (2008) 51 The Typewriter’s Tale (2005) 57 Conclusion 68 Chapter Two: In the House of (Bio)Fiction: James, the Prefaces, and Revision 72 The James Boys (2008) 76 Author, Author (2004) 80 The Master (2004) 90 Lions at Lamb House (2005) 100 Conclusion 110 Chapter Three: ‘They leave out the person to whom things happened’: 115 Re-reading the Biographical Subject in Sigrid Nunez’s Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (1998) and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1999) Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury 123 The Hours 139 Chapter Four: The ‘Supreme Portrait Artist’ and the ‘Mistress of the Phrase’: 164 Contesting Oppositional Portrayals of Woolf and Bell, Life and Art, in Susan Sellers’s Vanessa and Virginia (2008) Chapter Five: Your story / My story / Her story: 198 Authoring Sylvia Plath in Ted Hughes’s Occasional Prose (1965-1988), Birthday Letters (1998), and Emma Tennant’s The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted (2001) vi Occasional Prose 208 Birthday Letters 215 The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted 228 Chapter Six: ‘Her Own Words Describe her Best’?: 243 Resisting Ted Hughes’s Authoring of Sylvia Plath in John Brownlow/Christine Jeffs’s Sylvia (2003) and Kate Moses’s Wintering (2003). Sylvia 247 Wintering 262 Conclusion 283 Bibliography 292 7 Introduction What I have chosen to refer to as (post) modernist biofiction has its roots in two trends in contemporary literature: metafiction and the neo-Victorian novel. In ‘The Novel Now’, David Lodge describes metafiction as a product of the influence of poststructuralist theory on the humanist model of the relationship between fiction and criticism. Thus while, under the humanist model, it was understood that ‘novelists wrote novels and critics criticised them’, the ‘second-order discourse’ of criticism relying for its existence on the ‘first order discourse’ of fiction, poststructuralist theory radically troubled the boundary between the two discourses.1 This, Lodge argues, led to the growth of metafiction, a genre which ‘transgress(es) the conventional distinction between factual and fictional narrative’ by interleaving ‘documentary sources’ with invented material.2 Metafiction, of which the most famous example is, perhaps, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), has been the subject of important work by Robert Scholes, Patricia Waugh, and Mark Currie, all three of whom situate the genre at the fault line between fiction and criticism. For Scholes, the writer of metafiction has the power to act as his own critic, by incorporating scholarly insights and perspectives ‘normally formulated externally’.3 For Waugh, this ability ‘simultaneously to create a fiction and to make a statement about the creation of that fiction’ merges the concepts of creation and criticism into the blended discourses of ‘interpretation’ and ‘deconstruction’.4 And for Currie, such a definition makes metafiction integral to Modernism, postmodernism, and literary theory, projects for which the critical-creative borderline is ‘a primary source of energy’.5 1 David Lodge, ‘The Novel Now’, in Metafiction, ed. by Mark Currie (New York: 2 Ibid, p.154. 3 Robert Scholes, ‘Metafiction’, in Metafiction, ed. by Currie, pp.21-38 (p.21). 4 Patricia Waugh, ‘What is Metafiction and Why are They Saying Such Awful Things About it?’, in Metafiction, ed. by Currie, pp.39-54 (p.43). 5 Mark Currie, ‘Introduction’, in Metafiction, ed. by Mark Currie (New York: Longman, 1995), pp.1-20 (p.2). 8 Such foregrounding of the mutual influence between fiction and criticism is also a defining characteristic of the comparatively new subgenre of biofiction. For Currie, metafiction’s illumination of the symbiotic relationship between the two discourses is in part attributable to the way in which ‘the roles of writer and critic are often fulfilled by the same person’.6 The same is true of the biofiction authors under consideration, several of whom are, or once were, academics: David Lodge, Cynthia Ozick, Michiel Heyns, and Susan Sellers. In the case of biofiction, as in the case of metafiction, this dual identification produces novels that demonstrate ‘a high level of critical awareness’.7 My sample also includes a different kind of group: novelists who have accrued a popular critical authority after producing a work of fiction. Colm Tóibín, Michael Cunningham, and Kate Moses have each, respectively, become the go-to person for popular journalism on Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath. More obviously, literary biofiction partakes of what Lodge refers to as metafiction’s ‘foregrounding of the act of authorship within the boundaries of the text’.8 Although biofiction tends to invoke the historical rather than the contemporary author, the use of the proper noun similarly emphasises the ‘ontological boundary’ between fiction and fact.9 Lodge has also considered how metafiction’s invocation of the author might be viewed as a form of conservative resistance to the querying of the author’s existence and purpose by literary theory.10 Biofiction, as shall shortly be demonstrated, is similarly interpretable as a response to Roland Barthes’s death knell for authors; like metafiction, it reinstates the author, but with an acute awareness of the theoretical status he trails. Biofiction also has roots in another immediately identifiable trend in recent fiction: the neo-Victorian novel. As a genre, neo-Victorianism has been steadily developing over the past forty years, from the publication of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso 6 Ibid., p.3. 7 Ibid. 8 Lodge, ‘The Novel Now’, p.154. 9 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Routledge, 1987), p.206. 10 Lodge, ‘The Novel Now’, p.154. 9 Sea and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant's Woman in the mid to late 1960s, to contemporary writing by Peter Carey, A.S. Byatt, and Sarah Waters. Neo-Victorianism shares with biofiction a concern with restoring the subject into contemporary literature, though the subject is more often a fictional character than a historical figure.