The Psychology of Sexual Difference in West, Stein, and Woolf
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Material Minds and Modern Fiction: The Psychology of Sexual Difference in West, Stein, and Woolf Author: Linda Marie Martin Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:107625 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2017 Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. MATERIAL MINDS AND MODERN FICTION: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN WEST, STEIN, AND WOOLF Linda Marie Martin A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Boston College Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences Graduate School September 2017 © Copyright 2017 Linda Marie Martin MATERIAL MINDS AND MODERN FICTION: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN WEST, STEIN, AND WOOLF Linda Marie Martin Advisor: Marjorie Howes, Ph.D. Material Minds and Modern Fiction examines how modern women writers adapt discourses from experimental psychology in their fiction to confront the politicized issue of psychological sexual difference. Debates regarding the concept of the “gendered brain” were fundamental to the early twentieth-century women’s movement in Great Britain and the United States: defenders of the anti-suffrage and antifeminist position used the supposedly inherent differences between men and women’s brains to justify the denial of rights, whereas equality feminists insisted on the innate sameness of the human mind to bolster their claim to equal sociopolitical access. My dissertation attests that Rebecca West, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf draw on experimental-psychological theory in their literary works in a way that unsettles the premises of this debate, developing literary discourses that acknowledge psychological disparities between men and women without conceding to gender essentialism. Emerging at the end of the nineteenth century, experimental psychology was a disciplinary approach to psychological study that theorized cognition as a physiological process to be studied using the empiricist methodology of the natural sciences. The material mind—the idea that the human mind is no more or less than the human brain—was a foundational concept in the field. Employing an interdisciplinary method, my dissertation shows that experimental- psychological theory enabled modern women authors to approach the issue of gendered brains from a materialist perspective that maintained the equality-feminist claim to parity. West, Stein, and Woolf draw on diverse strands of experimental-psychological thought to craft distinctive aesthetic strategies that position sexual difference as the product of inequitable environmental exposures or social conditioning rather than an immutable feature of psychic life. My project testifies to the prominence of experimental- psychological theory in the modern era as well as the diversity of psychological schools that fall within its rubric. A recovery project of sorts, my chapters position the theories offered by modern experimental-psychological researchers as inextricably bound to expressions of feminism in modern fiction, serving as adaptable discourses for women writers seeking to use their literary medium to deconstruct the ideology of gender essentialism. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................v Introduction ........................................................................................................................1 Chapter One: The Need for Riotous Living: Rebecca West’s Feminist Behaviorism ...........................................................................................................21 Chapter Two: The Making of Men and Women: Gertrude Stein, Hugo Münsterberg, and the Discourse of Work ..............................................................95 Chapter Three: Changing This Unalterable Nature: Virginia Woolf and the Evolution of Sexual Difference ...............................................................151 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................213 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am immensely grateful to the community of the English Department at Boston College, which has become my intellectual home. I would like to express my deepest thanks to my advisor Marjorie Howes, who is unflaggingly generous with her time and whose insightful input, sensible advice, and warm mentorship have been invaluable to me. I would like to thank Alan Richardson, who has enthusiastically nurtured my academic career from my earliest days at Boston College and continually challenged me to grow and improve as a scholar, and Rob Lehman, who has supported me through my major exam and dissertation and enriched this project with his thoughtful and perceptive comments. I also wish to thank Mary Crane, Vanessa Ryan, Maia McAleavey, and Kevin Ohi for graciously serving as exam committee members and teaching mentors. I am extremely appreciative of the financial support, including doctoral and dissertation fellowships, granted by Boston College, as well as the opportunities that the university has provided for teaching and pursuing individual research. I extend a special thanks to my fellow graduate students in the English Department, whose friendships I dearly cherish, and to my Illinois-based friends and family—especially my sister Cathi and my parents, Mary and Jeff—for their many restorative conversations and for gamely serving as a long-distance support team. Thank v you to my husband Garrett Rapp for your unconditional love, encouragement, humor, and patience. I dedicate this project to Professor Wes Chapman, whose passion for the profession and devotion to his students continue to inspire my academic journey. vi INTRODUCTION In the third chapter of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, the narrator returns home from the British Museum in an attitude of disappointment. While there, she had hoped to find a formidable collection of literary works written by women but was confronted instead with a discouraging array of empty shelves. Woolf wonders, somewhat impishly, “why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet.”1 Refusing the notion that women are simply intrinsically incapable of great art, she offers a theory: The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in [the woman’s] case not indifference but hostility. The world did not say to her as it said to them, Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me. The world said with a guffaw, Write? What’s the good of your writing? Here the psychologists of Newnham and Girton might come to our help, I thought, looking again at the blank spaces on the shelves. For surely it is time that the effect of discouragement upon the mind of the artist should be measured, as I have seen a dairy company measure the effect of ordinary milk and Grade A milk upon the body of the rat. They set two rats in cages side by side, and of the two one was furtive, timid and small, and the other was glossy, bold and big. Now what food do we feed women as artists upon?2 In keeping with A Room’s preoccupation with “grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in,” Woolf pursues the connection between a woman’s cognitive capacities and “the conditions of her life,” framing women’s historical lack of 1 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929; repr., Orlando: Harcourt, 1981), 41. 2 Ibid., 52–3. 1 artistic output as the product of systemically hostile circumstances.3 More specifically, she presents this connection as a viable subject of psychological study. Just as researchers “measure the effect of ordinary milk and Grade A milk upon the body of the rat,” Woolf suggests that the “psychologists of Newnham and Girton” measure “the effect of discouragement upon the mind of the artist,” positing the brain as an organ that can, like the rat’s body, be fed or starved. While phrases like “lab rat” and “guinea pig” are used idiomatically today to refer to experimental subjects in all fields, in the mid-1920s the use of rats for experimentation was associated almost exclusively with the behaviorist John B. Watson and his widely published psychological research, which used rats to illustrate the determining effects of environmental conditions on behavioral patterns.4 By likening experimental rats to human subjects, Woolf replicates what John Greenwood calls the “standard behaviorist generalization from animal to human behavior” and implicitly endorses it as a methodological practice, aligning the premises of behaviorist theory with her feminist interpretation of English literary history.5 Presenting the gendered achievement gap in literature as a problem ripe for behaviorist study, Woolf shores up her assertion that psychological sexual difference is the product of patriarchal sociocultural influences rather than an innate disparity in men and women’s natures. 3 Ibid., 42, 51. 4 As Kerry W. Buckley attests, the white rat was first used experimentally in the English-speaking world in 1892 by Adolf Meyer, a psychiatrist and Watson’s colleague at Johns Hopkins. Watson soon adopted rats for his own research, producing “the first systematic studies of rat behavior.” The huge amount of press Watson received for his research, both positive and