University of Cincinnati

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI _____________ , 20 _____ I,______________________________________________, hereby submit this as part of the requirements for the degree of: ________________________________________________ in: ________________________________________________ It is entitled: ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ Approved by: ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ MIND OVER MOTHER: GENDER, EDUCATION, AND CULTURE IN TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITISH WOMEN’S FICTION A dissertation submitted to the Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY (Ph.D.) in the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the College of Arts and Sciences 2001 by Ann K. McClellan A.B., University of Michigan, 1993 M.A., University of Cincinnati, 1996 Committee Chair: Professor Beth Ash Abstract Mind over Mother: Gender, Education, and Culture in Twentieth Century British Women’s Fiction Applying the critical methodologies of psychoanalytic object-relations theory and cultural studies, this dissertation focuses on recurring representations of women intellectual characters and their relationship to (and reactions against) both matrilineal and patriarchal traditions in fiction writing and academia. I argue that twentieth-century British women writers work through their anxieties regarding gender and scholarship through their use (or misuse) of convention, phrasing, and vexed characters. Writers such as Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Sayers, Margaret Drabble, Anita Brookner, and Jeanette Winterson all write of women academics who seek to escape from personal relationships through a retreat into scholarship. Woolf’s Three Guineas, A Room of One’s Own, and Night and Day and Sayers’ Gaudy Night analyze women’s relationship to scholarship as a cultural construct and institution by questioning their own ability to capture such experience through traditional genres such as the bildungsroman and the detective novel. Although Margaret Drabble claims she successfully reconciles motherhood and scholarship in The Millstone (1965), her heroine, Rosamund Stacey, actually ends up sacrificing all personal relationships in favor of the dominant, narcissistic relationship with her child. In the obverse scenario, Dr. Ruth Weiss in Anita Brookner’s The Debut (1981) struggles to establish her own life independent from her egotistic parents by escaping into literature until it becomes impossible to tell the difference between her own life story and her thesis on Balzac’s fiction. Ultimately, Jeanette Winterson’s Gut Symmetries (1997) is the only text in the study that satisfactorily resolves the conflict between women’s gendered and intellectual identities. A critique of the grand unified theories (GUT) of the Enlightenment, the novel suggests that the only way to liberate women is to disrupt the social conventions of gender and, simultaneously, the novel’s narrative conventions. While critics such as Mary Poovey, Deirdre David, and Susan Leonardi have written histories of women intellectuals in England, their work, though important, fails to address the systems that contribute to—and connect—women’s oppression and women intellectuals’ dissatisfaction. Acknowledgments This study owes a great deal to the friends and colleagues who read and commented on the various chapters: Douglas Connell, Cathrine Frank, Scott Hermanson, Nainsi Houston, Samantha Jones, and Jeff Miller. All of you have been constantly supportive of my ideas, my work, and this project. My childhood friends Kelly Eberhardt, Jennifer Fauss, Chris Houston, Kristen Janetzke, Kristine Mills, Bob Newton, and Jill Pilarcik have all followed the progress of my studies and provided the sympathy, friendship, and support necessary to succeed in graduate school. I have been fortunate to have worked with brilliant scholars at the University of Cincinnati like Jonathan Kamholtz, Margaret Lindgren, and Wayne Hall, but I am most greatly indebted to the enthusiasm, encouragement, and constructive criticism of Professors Beth Ash, Lisa Hogeland, Maura O’Connor, and the late Robin Sheets. I have been very fortunate to have had such strong, influential, and brilliant women in my life. They are all inspirations for this study. To those who brought my love of literature to life and made all of this possible, I thank my parents: Jerilynn and James McClellan. My siblings, Kevin and Karen McClellan, helped and encouraged me, and my grandmothers, Shirley Minton and the late Helen McClellan Broadhead, provided me with two early models of strong, intelligent, admirable women. I am also grateful to my new family, Earnest, Gracie, Christian, and Kevin Finley, for welcoming me and my abstract work into their lives. They have offered nothing but support and love, and for that I thank them. Finally, to my husband, Greg Finley, I owe an inestimable debt of gratitude. His understanding, emotional support, and faith in me made this project and its completion possible. The University of Cincinnati has been very generous in its financial support for my research. A University Research Council Fellowship enabled me to research rare books at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, England, and to interview novelist Margaret Drabble in London. The Myrl R. Ricking Fellowship from the Department of English and the Charles Phelps Taft Advanced Graduate Fellowship from the Taft Memorial Fund provided the means to fully research and complete the project. 1 Table of Contents I. Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………..2 II. Adeline’s (Bankrupt) Education Fund: Woolf, Women, and Education……………………18 III. Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day—An Academic Exercise?………………………………..56 IV. Between Women: Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night……………………………………….91 V. “All I had to Sacrifice was Interest and Love”: The Scholar as (M)Other in Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone……………………………130 VI. “Outside the Natural Order”: Anita Brookner’s Academic Women………………………..166 VII.“Stray Words on Crumpled Paper”: Knowledge, Love, and Identity in Jeanette Winterson’s Gut Symmetries……………………………………………………..201 VIII.Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………….242 2 Introduction Current institutional interest in interdisciplinary thinking, feminist epistemologies, and the shift of traditionally marginalized knowledges to the forefront of higher education illustrate the influence that women intellectuals have had in changing academia. However, there are also significant costs to women’s having gained access to the academy. When faced with the discrimination, devaluation, and conceptual impossibility of their position as intellectuals, academic women are forced to think more creatively and innovatively about the relationship between gender, pedagogy, and scholarship in order to survive. Understanding women’s conflicted relationship with their writing and scholarship as socially and historically constructed provides a contextual as well as a theoretical basis to these contemporary concerns in higher education. As educational historian Carol Dyhouse explains, “since education was (and is) one of the few areas of public life where women have achieved a measure of status and authority, the history of education is a good arena in which to explore the social history of sexual politics and that of sex and gender generally” (“Miss Buss” 23). This project explores women’s persistent anxiety with women’s intellectualism and its implications not only for our understanding of the relationship between gendered identity and women’s writing, but also for feminism, literature studies, and the future of the academy as well. Applying the critical methodologies of psychoanalytic object-relations and cultural studies, this dissertation focuses on recurring representations of women intellectual characters in twentieth century British women’s novels and their relationship to (and reactions against) both matrilineal and patriarchal traditions in fiction writing and academia. Because women have been historically guided into “nurturing” positions which propagate stereotypes of mothering, when a 3 woman wants to become an academic in the 1990’s, she often feels that she is, in some ways, falling prey to a devalued feminine identity. Being an academic, in other words, a teacher, links a woman intellectual back to a past tradition that has been degraded and devalued in the eyes of current political feminist thought. Thus, women in the academy are in the conflicted position of having to justify their work as intellectuals as well as their place within the academy as something other than “nurturers.” In order to understand the ways in which intellectual women are historically denied access to the culture forming apparatus of academia, it is necessary to analyze the ways in which they are systematically re-contained within discourses of mothering and femininity. Women scholars must repeatedly seek innovative ways to resist categorization and falling prey to cultural stereotypes. Many of these women resist through their writing. In Playing and Reality, object-relations theorist D. W. Winnicott describes a transitional space where creative writers can work through their own identity and separation issues. It is a fantasized sphere between objectively perceived reality and the writer’s subjective desires and imagination. Writing (in)

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