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Modernism, Age, and the Growth of the Subject Modernism, Age, and the Growth of the Subject by Glenn Clifton A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy English Department University of Toronto © Copyright by Glenn Clifton, 2012 Modernism, Age, and the Growth of the Subject Glenn Clifton Doctor of Philosophy English Department University of Toronto 2012 Abstract “Modernism, Age, and the Growth of the Subject” examines discourses of aging in modernist literature, charting metaphors of age in which cultural norms, genres, and somehow even subjectivity itself have become older. Despite the common association of modernist writing with youth and rebellion, most of the best-known modernist characters are middle-aged people: the protagonists of Woolf’s later novels, beginning with Mrs. Dalloway, are almost all aging women, and Joyce was only able to write Ulysses by shifting his focus from the soaring ambitions of the young Stephen Dedalus to the thoughtful and bumbling figure of the middle-aged Leopold Bloom. Henry James provocatively described the “new” age by claiming “the novel is older now, and so are the young.” Examining texts by Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Winifred Holtby, Samuel Butler, Sigmund Freud, and T. S. Eliot, I show how modernists re-imagine processes of maturation and growth at the levels of individual, history, and species, understanding a state of maturity as a metonymy for the age of their own age. Older modernist characters are often better able to navigate the vicissitudes of twentieth-century life than their younger counterparts because they have more distance from the ideological norms which they imbibed in their ii youth. The mature modernist consciousness is marked by the ability to critically sift and re-inherit the personal and historical past, and often by an increased openness to the forces of the unconscious mind. Critiquing Victorian models of maturity for their buttressing of authoritative, conventionally “adult” social positions, and the corresponding emphasis on the potential of youth to achieve great things, modernist maturity runs against the cultural grain, suggesting that only those conventionally understood as failures and outsiders can be genuinely mature. Modernist maturity dwells in the state of what Giorgio Agamben calls “impotentiality,” as these authors delineate a communitarian “ethics of maturity” by associating their adult characters not with fulfilled individual potential, but with new possibilities for inter-personal connection and ethical action that emerge only when the individual has forsaken investment in his or her personal future. iii Acknowledgments In the course of writing this dissertation I have accumulated debts of gratitude to many people. Thanks first and foremost go to Melba Cuddy-Keane for her rigorous eye, her persistently careful mind, and her impressive devotion to the project. Thanks to Neil ten Kortenaar for his generous gift of time and his unrelentingly honest questions, and to Mari Ruti for her capacious responses. Michael Levenson demonstrated remarkable generosity in his responses and helped me see many ways the project might be expanded. Paul Stevens, thank-you for your subtle sense of direction. To Jane and Gregg Clifton, thanks always for their unending forms of support, many-minded and open-hearted. Thanks also to Mark, who asked questions and suggested titles. To my comrades in work, Colin Loughran, Kai Hainer, Camilla Eckbo, Brandon MacFarlane, Alex Peat, Elizabeth Dickens, Claire Battershill, Dan Newman and Daniel Tysdal, I commend you for all the ways you have stood by and heard me out. A special word of thanks must go to Dan Harney, who consistently offered stratagems and kindly notes of support, even when he had to deliver them through holes in the floor. To Stewart Cole: thank-you for the gentle ways you kept me going. I must thank Laura Farina for helping to bring me to Toronto and to this project, which would never have existed without her enthusiasm. To Sarah Neville, for all you have brought me and all the places you have taken me, thank-you. This project was made possible by generous fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Ontario Graduate Scholarships program; a special thanks goes to Patricia Wallis, donor to my O. G. S. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments..............................................................................................................iv Table of Contents................................................................................................................v Introduction.........................................................................................................................1 Chapter One: The Potentialities of the Victorian Bildungsroman ....................................20 Chapter Two: Childhood and Perception at the Dawn of Modernism: What Maisie Knew ...........................................................................................................................................67 Chapter Three: Experience in The Ambassadors............................................................106 Chapter Four: Aging and Inheritance in the 1930s: Older Women in Woolf, Sackville- West, and Holtby ............................................................................................................154 Chapter Five: Modernist Time and the Epidemic of Immaturity: Evolution and the Unconscious in Freud, Butler, and Eliot.........................................................................211 Conclusion: Modernist Maturity.....................................................................................258 Works Consulted.............................................................................................................266 v Introduction Modernism has often claimed to be young. Imagined on the model of the avant- garde, modernism is symbolically youthful whatever the age of the actual persons involved, for the avant-garde is disruptive and aggressive, shrugging off the truisms of the previous generation. In “A Manifesto of Italian Futurism” (1909), F. T. Marinetti bragged that “the oldest among us are not yet thirty; this means that we have at least ten years to carry out our task. When we are forty, let those younger and more valiant than us kindly throw us into the wastebaskets like useless manuscripts!” (quoted in Howe 171). Ford Madox Ford famously referred to Ezra Pound’s circle as “les jeunes,” saying that their discontent represented the spirit of the times (Harvey 188-9). The definitions of modernism put forth in the 60s and 70s, highly dependent on Marinetti, Pound, and the authors in their circles, tended to focus on this “heroic” avant-garde version of modernism, imagining the artists as youthful renegades, caught in an Oedipal struggle between generations. In such accounts, Stephen Dedalus, with his soaring ambitions, was often taken as the emblem of Anglo-American modernism, echoing Satan with his rebellious non serviam.1 The image of modernism as youthful and heroic, however, tells only half the story. Age, both in the life of the individual and in the sense of an historical progression of “ages,” is a pervasive concern in modernist literature. But most of the best-known modernist characters are middle aged people: the protagonists of Woolf’s later novels, beginning with Mrs. Dalloway, are almost all aging women, and Joyce was only able to 1 Heather K. Love notes that the “heroic” and transgressive version of modernism Stephen represents has most often been taken as modernism’s key note (Love 19). 1 2 write Ulysses by shifting his focus from the young Stephen Dedalus to the thoughtful and bumbling figure of the middle-aged Leopold Bloom. Many modernist literary critics defined their activities through the rhetorical position of “maturity.” T. S. Eliot uses the word maturity incessantly in his essays, claiming that an indefinable quality of maturity is the primary criterion of a classic (CSP 116). F. R. Leavis echoes Eliot throughout his critical writings. Wyndham Lewis launches a prolonged attack on Stein, Bergson, and others in Time and Western Man (1927), claiming they represent a “child cult”—a claim which implies by contrast that Lewis occupies a more adult position (TWM 51). Even Ford’s statement about “les jeunes” needs to be taken in its context. In his Literary Portrait of “Les Jeunes and Des Imagists,” the 40-year-old Ford is remarking that of all the poems in a recent collection, his is the only one so outdated as to use rhyme; so while Pound and the other contributors may all seem to be young, Ford, himself a major writer, is coining the term to express the fact that he feels old.1 Older characters in modernist literature are frequently more successful at navigating the vicissitudes of modern life than their younger counterparts: in Lord Jim, Conrad’s mature narrator Marlow is more stable than the emphatically youthful Jim, who is described as “the youngest human being now in existence” (213); in James’s The Ambassadors, Lambert Strether emerges as a more promising centre of modernist consciousness than the young man, Chad, he is sent to rescue. Woolf’s older protagonists almost all find options open to them that were not open in their youths: Lily Briscoe in 1 There is also, however, an aspect of Ford’s life which aligns him with childhood; Levenson highlights this aspect of Ford as a man who claims he had never really
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