People, Objects, and Anxiety in Thirties British Fiction

Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2012 The Things That Remain: People, Objects, and Anxiety in Thirties British Fiction Emily O'Keefe Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation O'Keefe, Emily, "The Things That Remain: People, Objects, and Anxiety in Thirties British Fiction" (2012). Dissertations. 374. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/374 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2012 Emily O'keefe LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO THE THINGS THAT REMAIN: PEOPLE, OBJECTS, AND ANXIETY IN THIRTIES BRITISH FICTION A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN ENGLISH BY EMILY O‘KEEFE CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2012 Copyright by Emily O‘Keefe, 2012 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to Joyce Wexler, who initially inspired me to look beyond symbolism to find new ways of engaging with material things in texts. Her perceptive readings of several versions of these chapters guided and encouraged me. To Pamela Caughie, who urged me to consider new and fascinating questions about theory and periodization along the way, and who was always ready to offer practical guidance. To David Chinitz, whose thorough and detailed comments helped me to find just the right words to frame my argument. A Teaching Scholars Fellowship and an Advanced Doctoral Fellowship from Loyola University Chicago helped me greatly in bringing this project to completion. Thank you to my professors in the English department, and thank you especially to my friends and colleagues in the graduate program, many of whom offered me feedback and support on this project. Thanks and love to my parents, Pat and Cass O‘Keefe, whose lifelong advocacy for education and literacy has motivated my work and studies. To my sister, Molly O‘Keefe, whose visits and phone calls relieved the tension and kept me working on. Finally, I could never have done this without Adam Davenport, my love, my best friend, and my strongest supporter. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS v CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION: THINGS AND THE THIRTIES 1 Defining Things, Objects, and Persons 6 Things, Objects, Persons in the Thirties 13 CHAPTER TWO: KITSCHY THINGS AND SYNTHETIC BODIES IN CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD‘S THE BERLIN STORIES 23 Kitsch: ―Unnecessarily Solid, Abnormally Heavy, and Dangerously Sharp‖ 27 ―Bizarre Remnants of Statuary‖: Things and Politics 47 Doing Business with a Corpse 57 CHAPTER THREE: TREES WALKING: BODIES AS THINGS AND THINGS WITH BODIES IN JEAN RHYS‘S FICTION 70 Humanlike Things and Thinglike People 75 Film Minds and False Arms in the Interwar City 88 ―Wear Me, Give Me Life, and I Will Do My Damnedest for You!‖ 97 Conclusion: Things and Otherness in the Thirties City 113 CHAPTER FOUR: EVELYN WAUGH‘S ―DUBIOUS CLUTTER‖ OF PEOPLE AND THINGS 117 Waugh‘s ―Promiscuous Collections‖ 122 Things and People on the Move 132 Are People ―Just‖ Things? 144 CHAPTER FIVE: TOYING WITH THINGS: THINGS, GENRE, AND GENERATIONS IN ELIZABETH BOWEN‘S INTERWAR NOVELS 164 Toys, Children, and Creativity 172 Adolescents, Lost in the Grand Estate 183 Death, the Future, and ―Imperturbable Things‖ 194 Coda: Bowen and World War II 207 BIBLIOGRAPHY 214 VITA 231 iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Christopher Isherwood CK Christopher and His Kind GB Goodbye to Berlin LS Lions and Shadows MNCT Mr. Norris Changes Trains PV Prater Violet Jean Rhys ALMM After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie GMM Good Morning, Midnight LB The Left Bank and Other Stories VD Voyage in the Dark Evelyn Waugh BM Black Mischief CS The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh DF Decline and Fall EAR Essays, Articles, and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh HD A Handful of Dust L The Letters of Evelyn Waugh VB Vile Bodies v Elizabeth Bowen B The Bazaar and Other Stories BC Bowen’s Court DH The Death of the Heart HP The House in Paris MT The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen TLS The Last September PPT People, Places, Things TN To the North vi CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION: THINGS AND THE THIRTIES In Nancy Mitford‘s Wigs on the Green (1935), the courting Jasper Aspect and Poppy St-Julien discuss the advent of political ideologies such as Nazism and Communism in Europe. Wigs on the Green is a comic novel—albeit one that focuses on the rise of fascism in Britain, with an underlying awareness of the dangers it presented— but the exchange includes some of the dark rhetoric that was becoming common in the thirties. ―I am inclined to think that the Western civilization we know needs putting out of its agony as soon as possible. It is old and tired, the dark ages are practically upon us anyhow, and I should prefer that they march in with trumpet and flag than that they should creep upon us to the tap of the typewriter. I am at heart, I suppose, a Nihilist.‖ ―I don‘t know what that is,‖ said Poppy. ―No! But then you are a girl with a very limited outlook, aren‘t you?‖ ―I‘m not.‖ ―Oh! yes, you are. Like most women you only care about personalities, things don‘t interest you.‖ ―That‘s simply not true. I‘m fearfully interested in things—I absolutely long for a sable coat.‖ (98–99) Jasper‘s millenarian invocations of the death of Western civilization and the coming of the dark ages were echoed by many from all over the political spectrum in interwar Britain. The scars of the First World War were still visible, and the late twenties and thirties saw the publication of several memoirs of that conflict (including Robert Graves‘s Goodbye to All That, published in 1929, and Vera Brittain‘s Testament of Youth, which 1 2 came out in 1933). Despite the lingering awareness of the horrors of that war and the resulting efforts of many people to promote peace, commentators throughout the thirties—even very early in the decade—thought that another war was inevitable. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell‘s novel from the year after Wigs on the Green, Gordon Comstock thinks of ―the great death-wish of the modern world…Enemy aeroplanes flying over London, the deep threatening hum of the propellers, the shattering thunder of the bombs‖ (24). The historian G. N. Clark mused, in 1932, that the ―commonest phrases we hear used about civilization at the present time all relate to the possibility, or even the prospect, of its being destroyed‖ (qtd. in Overy 15). Like Mitford‘s Jasper Aspect, many reacted to the bleak outlook of the times by affiliating themselves with a political or religious ideology, even an extreme one. Young writers such as Orwell, W. H. Auden, and Naomi Mitchison were eager to make their political positions a major part of their writing—a tendency that Virginia Woolf, speaking for a slightly older generation, criticized in her essay ―The Leaning Tower.‖ Several other figures, including Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, went through religious conversions in the late twenties or early thirties.1 Yet Poppy‘s flippant response to Jasper‘s references to political ideologies—to focus on things, like coats—was, as I will argue, also a common (and not always flippant) response to the atmosphere of dread and tumult. While Mitford presents Poppy‘s longing for a sable coat comically, numerous British novels of the thirties feature people who respond to the growing political and 1 See Peter McDonald‘s essay ―Believing in the Thirties‖ for more examples of the importance of belief in a political or religious ideology during the 1930s. 3 social uncertainty of the times by focusing on material things that seem solid, permanent, and far removed from the realm of human affairs. This dissertation analyzes the appeal of things in interwar British literature (and particularly in the literature of those thirties writers often referred to as ―late modernists‖—a term I will discuss shortly). In exploring these thirties writers‘ attraction to the material world, I draw on the recent ―turn toward things‖ in literary criticism and some other academic disciplines. Like others who have analyzed thoughts about things in various time periods, cultures, and literary genres, I attempt to capture thirties British writers‘ complex fascination with material things. Therefore, I show that despite this frequent appeal to the material world as a place of stability and comfort, many of these writers also recognized conflicting aspects of things, knowing (and fearing) that even seemingly impenetrable things could change as the world was changing around them. Yet although furnishings such as tables and chairs could warp, decay, become lost, or perish in the bombs of war, their ultimate remoteness from human society made them appealing and seemingly safe from the traumatic political and cultural changes that seemed to be on their way. This focus on writers‘ representations of things marks a significant departure from existing criticism of thirties British fiction, which centers most frequently on the writers‘ and characters‘ ideological commitments. Samuel Hynes‘s landmark The Auden Generation (1979) noted the ―moral commitment and discipline‖ of a generation for whom ―writing became a mode of action‖ (13). More recent approaches to the work of the thirties writers echo and expand on this contention. Chris Hopkins, in his English Fiction in the 1930s: Language, Genre, History (2006), notes that much writing of the 4 time was characterized by ―an aesthetics or politics in which writing had to engage the actuality of history now‖ (78).

Load more