Modernist Unselfing: Religious Experience and British Literature, 1900-1945 Christina Iglesias Submitted in Partial Fulfillmen

Modernist Unselfing: Religious Experience and British Literature, 1900-1945 Christina Iglesias Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2018 © 2018 Christina Iglesias All rights reserved ABSTRACT Modernist Unselfing: Religious Experience and British Literature, 1900-1945 Christina Iglesias This dissertation examines the role of religious experience in British modernist literature, arguing that a strain of modernist writing drew from different religious traditions to conceptualize and model ways of escaping the confines of the self. In distinctive yet strikingly similar ways, these writers draw from these traditions—orthodox and heterodox, eastern and western—not in an attempt to propound traditional theological ideas but to recapture a religious sensibility that extends beyond dogma or creed: a sensibility that can offer means of getting beyond the self’s limited, solipsistic, and myopic perspective. In response to the perceived decline of religion in late 19th- and early 20th-century British culture; the atomizing effects of industrial modernity; and a growing distrust, informed by contemporary psychology, of the limitations of the self and the self’s perspective, the works this dissertation examines achieve a frame of reference beyond the individual point of view through processes and practices I group under the term “unselfing.” Unselfing emerges in these works as a moral and broadly religious imperative, necessary to achieving authentic communion between people and, paradoxically, to achieving a more authentic relationship to the self; at the same time, these works represent unselfing as an endeavor that is necessarily asymptotic, difficult, and always incomplete. They model unselfing in and through literary form, not only conveying but also embodying processes of unselfing in their formal experimentation. Reading works by D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Dorothy Richardson, and T.S. Eliot alongside contemporary psychological, philosophical, and anthropological writings of the period, I show how a pervasive and urgent desire to use spiritual practices to escape the self shaped the development of British modernist literature. Modernist Unselfing thus challenges prevailing accounts of British modernism, according to which secular artistic innovation absorbed and attained the sacred value formerly located in religion. I argue that, on the contrary, these narrow accounts of secularization and aestheticization have obscured what much of modernist experimentation was actively attempting to capture: a desire, often ethically-minded, to forego self. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1: “A Way and a Word”: D.H. Lawrence’s Symbols 30 Chapter 2: “Going Away” and Coming Back: E.M. Forster’s Perspectival Imaginings 92 Chapter 3: “Minute to Minute Living in the Spirit”: Dorothy Richardson’s Quaker Aesthetic 151 Chapter 4: “Redeemed from Fire by Fire”: T.S. Eliot’s Purgatorial Poetics 193 Bibliography 251 i Acknowledgments First and foremost, I want to thank my dissertation committee for their amazing direction, insight, and encouragement. Thanks to Sarah Cole for teaching me, challenging me, caring for me, and for the outstanding mentorship that has sustained me from day one of graduate school; to Gauri Viswanathan for inspiring me and for always believing so much in me and in this project; and to Edward Mendelson, for reminding me always to stay true to myself and to my ideas. Each has offered invaluable guidance and support, intellectual and otherwise, indispensable to the development of this project. Thanks, too, to my dissertation examiners, Branka Arsić and Alberto Medina, for their thoughtful and insightful feedback. I also want to thank my brilliant University Writing and Literature Humanities students, who have taught me so much over the past five years. I am indebted beyond words to my family and friends for the incredible love and support that has inspired me throughout this project and over the course of this degree. Special thanks to Jayne Hildebrand, whose trenchant wit and commiseration have been a constant solace; and to Julia Clarke, whose unfailing support and wonderful fiendship have brightened even the darkest of days. I owe the most profound gratitude to my parents, Ramon G. Iglesias and Ileana Iglesias, for so very many things—but above all, for the unconditional love that has, as the song goes, made me “everything I am.” Thanks to my brother, Eduardo Iglesias, for making me laugh, for encouraging me, and for always believing in me; to my cousin, Chelsea Tymms, for the poetry, the cookies, and the sisterhood; to my grandmother, Luisa Mangas, for so much love and so many prayers; and to all of my grandparents, without whose bravery and sacrifice none of this would be possible. ii Most of all, I am grateful to—and for—Matt Margini, who has inspired me, supported me, and encouraged me beyond measure. This project would be unimaginable without his attentive reading, patient listening, thoughtful suggestions, and—most of all—his enduring, selfless, incredible love. I dedicate this project to him. Our son, Raymond Margini, has only just arrived—but already he has changed my life in the most amazing ways. I close by thanking you, Ray, for the privilege of seeing the world in all its wonder through your eyes. iii Introduction In his 1912 essay “The Essence of Religion,” British philosopher Bertrand Russell simultaneously announces the decline of religion and its continued, urgent relevance: The decay of traditional religious beliefs, bitterly bewailed by upholders of the Churches, welcomed with joy by those who regard the old creeds as mere superstition, is an undeniable fact. Yet when the dogmas have been rejected, the question of the place of religion in life is by no means decided. The dogmas have been valued, not so much on their own account, as because they were believed to facilitate a certain attitude towards the world...a life in the whole, free from the finiteness of self and providing an escape from the tyranny of desire and daily cares. (112) “The place of religion in life,” for Russell, has little to do with superstitious “creeds” and “traditional religious beliefs.” Rather, religion’s enduring function, outside the bounds of these doctrines and dogmas, is to “facilitate” a particular, liberating “attitude”—an attitude geared expressly towards release from “the finiteness of self.” Later in the essay, Russell argues that the project of liberation from self is religion’s most powerful and valuable offering, stating outright that “the essence of religion...lies in the subordination of the finite part of our life to the infinite part,” a process which requires “a moment of absolute self-surrender, when all personal will seems to cease, and the soul feels itself in passive submission to the universe” (114). Russell’s comments reveal him to be less interested in putting God in the ground than in excavating the ruins of His churches for a means of escaping the self. Remarks like these might seem odd given Russell’s notorious disavowal of religion in more famous tracts like “Why I Am Not a Christian” (1927), but they are far from anomalous: versions of the sentiments he expresses in “The Essence of Religion” appear again and again in the writings of his contemporaries in a variety of disciplines and across a wide spectrum of belief and affiliation. These figures, while often openly and emphatically disavowing allegiance to institutionalized religion, often voiced in the same breath their interest, nonetheless, in the idea 1 of a substantially religious orientation: John Middleton Murry writes of “a religious sense” (“The Sign Seekers” 5)1; T.E. Hulme celebrates “the religious attitude”; Jane Harrison describes “the religious impulse” (Epilegomena 1). The literary figures of this period also display an abiding interest in these concepts: E.M. Forster, like Murry, invokes a “religious sense” (Hill of Devi 106, 220), and D.H. Lawrence refers often to a “religious impulse” (Fantasia of the Unconscious 67). And, like Russell, they envision religion, detached from institutional affiliation, as most valuable for the methods of self-escape it could offer. H.G. Wells, for instance, writes in God the Invisible King (1917) that “the fundamental proposition” of religion is that “salvation is escape from self into the larger being of life” (76). This overarching interest in religion’s capacity for “escape from self” was shared by believers and non-believers alike; throughout Mysticism (1911), one of the period’s most important and influential studies of religious experience, Evelyn Underhill repeatedly locates what she calls “the stripping off of the I, the Me, the Mine, utter renouncement, or ‘self-naughting’” at the fountainhead of religion, calling it “an imperative condition” of union with the divine (425). The turn of the 20th century may have witnessed a decline in allegiance to orthodoxy, but it also witnessed a broad resurgence of attention to the complexities and psychic underpinnings of religious experience.2 At the same time, the period’s thinkers consistently imagined and recognized the project of escaping the self as a quasi- religious imperative. Modernist Unselfing explores the literary manifestations of this approach to religion in British literature between 1900 and 1945. This body of work reveals a widespread effort to 1 Elsewhere, Murry claimed, “I am not a Christian, I am not anything, but I have been forced to the conclusion that I am religious” (“To the Unknown God” 60). For an extensive treatment of Murry’s case, see Owen, “‘The Religious Sense’ in a Post-War Secular Age.” 2 My dissertation adopts a broad definition of “religious experience” to include mystical visions and out-of-body experiences as well as participation in the ritual and rites of traditional religions, following in the spirit of William James’ description in his landmark Varieties of Religious Experience (1902): “the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto” (53).

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