University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses 5-8-2020 WRITING AGAINST HISTORY: FEMINIST BAROQUE NARRATIVES IN INTERWAR ATLANTIC MODERNISM Annaliese Hoehling University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, and the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Hoehling, Annaliese, "WRITING AGAINST HISTORY: FEMINIST BAROQUE NARRATIVES IN INTERWAR ATLANTIC MODERNISM" (2020). Doctoral Dissertations. 1932. https://doi.org/10.7275/17381008 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1932 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WRITING AGAINST HISTORY: FEMINIST BAROQUE NARRATIVES IN INTERWAR ATLANTIC MODERNISM A Dissertation Presented by ANNALIESE D. HOEHLING Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2020 Department of English © Copyright by Annaliese D. Hoehling 2020 All Rights Reserved WRITING AGAINST HISTORY: FEMINIST BAROQUE NARRATIVES IN INTERWAR ATLANTIC MODERNISM A Dissertation Presented by ANNALIESE D. HOEHLING Approved as to style and content by: ____________________________________ Laura Doyle, Chair ____________________________________ Stephen Clingman, Member ____________________________________ Ruth Jennison, Member ____________________________________ Karen Kurczynski, Member ____________________________________ Randall Knoper, Department Head Department of English DEDICATION For my Mama, who taught me empathy and how art can help one survive. And to Steve, for everything, but especially for recognizing me. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project represents investments beyond intellectual production, and I am not the only person who made these investments. I would like to thank Laura Doyle, my Chair and advisor throughout my time at UMass. It was her course on Modernism and Global Studies that introduced me to a Spanish novel from Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, which opened the door for me to the possibilities of baroque modernism in a global context. I walked through that door, and Laura has been a resource as well as a champion for my project ever since. Throughout my research and writing, there have been times when I needed clear guidance and times when I needed the space and trust to explore. Laura provided both. I also wish to express gratitude to members of my committee: Stephen Clingman, whose influence on my trajectory with baroque modernism has also been crucial, and whose feedback on writing as well as encouragement when I most needed it has been valuable throughout coursework, exams, and dissertation. Ruth Jennison has been that important voice, from exams through the dissertation, to ask key questions that push me to work harder. And I thank Karen Kurczynski, who not only added a necessary disciplinary perspective from Art History but also has been a generous reader with transformative insights—I could not have hoped for a more effective and helpful addition to the committee. I am also appreciative of the opportunities and support provided by the English Department and the Graduate School at UMass, including Travel Grants to attend conferences to present developing research, a Dissertation Fellowship to focus on writing, and a Dissertation Research Grant, which funded a trip to London in 2018. There, the archivists at the Royal Academy of Art and the Tate helped make the v internationalist and nationalist endeavors during the interwar years come alive through the documents of exhibit organizers. I extend particular appreciation to co-panelists and conference attendees who have helped foster earlier stages of some of these ideas, especially the collegial communities I have found through the Space Between Society and the International Virginia Woolf Society, whose scholarly support extends far beyond annual conferences. I also thank the reviewers and editors at the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and the Journal of Modern Literature for shepherding my research and writing on baroque modernism. Many faculty in the English Department played official and unofficial support and advocacy roles throughout my time at UMass, and I wish to especially thank Suzanne Daly, who has always provided the most useful advice for professionalization and has been a beacon for my cohort ever since our first semester in her Theorizing the Discipline course; as well as Asha Nadkarni, Rachel Mordecai, and Jane Hwang Degenhardt, for supporting and advocating for graduate students in our teaching and student—not to mention our human—roles. I also thank departmental staff who provide so much support for all of us, especially Wanda Bak, Patty O’Neill, and Tom Racine. And I thank my colleagues and students at UMass who have learned with me. It was in the classroom where I often found the questions, insights, and desire to understand our complicated social contexts that reminded me why any of us do this kind of work. I want to especially thank my friends and colleagues who have become another kind of family. Sharing meals and tears as well as writing and teaching advice and support—and laughs, lots of laughs—has been key to surviving this journey. Joshua Barsczewski, Bo Jimenez, Marlene Perez, Joy Hayward-Jansen, Nirmala Iswari, Kate vi Perillo, Michelle Brooks, and many, many more. I want to especially thank Saumya Lal, whose generosity, friendship, and keen reader skills I just could not do without. And to Benjamin Zender and Anna-Claire Simpson Steffen, there just aren’t enough words to express my appreciation for your love and fierce friendship, not to mention your talents and geniuses, which inspire me. And to my other family, which has loved and supported me through the various paths I have taken, even (or especially) when my path may not have made sense to you: thank you. vii ABSTRACT WRITING AGAINST HISTORY: FEMINIST BAROQUE NARRATIVES IN INTERWAR ATLANTIC MODERNISM MAY 2020 ANNALIESE D. HOEHLING, B.A., HENDERSON STATE UNIVERSITY M.A., UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS M.F.A., UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Laura Doyle In the decades following the end of the Great War, paranoia and panic about survival and sovereign control were driven by unprecedented death tolls from war, disease, and economic disaster as well as by revolutionary agitation around the globe. This fear was channeled into policing gender, sexuality, and race; and the parameters of white, middle- class womanhood were weaponized for social control in the transatlantic imaginary. In this study, I identify two rhetorical-political figures that helped to shape this imagination: Surplus Women and Trafficked Women. In my analysis of the literature, these figures help to contrast domestic scenes, on one hand, where the integration and fortification of national and racial identities is secured through white, middle-class, reproductive womanhood, with, on the other hand, the transience and mobility of threatening or transformative sexuality and racial ambiguity. Writing Against History therefore attends to narrative form as well as the political imaginary of gender and race in order to consider how women’s experimental writing participates in constructing or resisting national and colonial imagination. This dissertation argues that baroque aesthetics, recuperated and reculturated at the turn of the twentieth-century, aestheticize a tension between viii incommensurable forces, including life and death, pleasure and pain, love and fear. Focusing on four novels by modernist women from English, Anglo-Irish, American- Expatriate, and British-Creole contexts, I define a feminist baroque aesthetic potential in modernist narratives that do not simply resist but renegotiate the terms of white, middle- class womanhood forged by colonial-patriarchy. In their open and ambiguous narrative forms, feminist baroque narratives point to an ongoing individual and collective responsibility to recognize the narratives and social forms that demand or force certain visions of a future contingent on sexual, racial, and economic exploitation. This study’s juxtaposition of feminist baroque aesthetics and the interwar historical context reorganizes and renegotiates the relationships between texts, readers, and modernism, as well as between subjects, nations, and war. The interwar period, in this baroque modernist context, is re-seen as its own vanishing point that, like a baroque fold, can introduce imagined possibilities as well as a self-consciousness of personal responsibility in relation to those possibilities. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................v ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... viii LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................... xii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS .........................................................................................