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The Fiction of Violet Trefusis in Relation to V. Sackville-West and V

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The Fiction of Violet Trefusis in Relation to V. Sackville-West and V THE UNIVERSITY OF HULL "A Sea That Had No Shores": The Fiction of Violet Trefusis in Relation to V. Sackville-West and V. Woolf being a thesis submitted for the Degree of PhD An the University of Hull by Ana 1. Zamorano Rueda (M. A. ) September1997 dedicado a la estrella de la hora violeta ABSTRACT This thesis shows how the notion of androgyny works in the fiction of Violet Trefusis. It also posits her writing in connection to some novels by Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Working within a theoretical framework provided by Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytical theory this thesis focusses on and seeks to redress the traditional conceptualization of androgynyproviding a notion of the androgyne more in accordanceto Woolf's androgynousideal. The androgyneis understoodin this thesis as a carnivalesque figure that disrupts the patriarchal system of hierarchical binary oppositions. Chapter Two provides a historical framework to Woolf's androgynousideal. The research focuses, in Chapter Three, on the literary relationship sustainedby Sackville- West, Woolf, and Trefusis which producedan, up to now unexplored, intertextual space where Challenge (1919), Orlando (1928) and Broderie Anglaise (1935) are interwoven. The apprehensionof androgynyis an attempt on the part of these three women writers to find a different type of sentencewhose construction has been theorised by Kristeva as Poetic language.This literary practice is an uncomfortable and dangerous one since it implies the avowal of the maternal serniotic in symbolic language. The difficulties in achieving the symbolic positionality of the subject of poetic language are addressed in Chapter Four in the analysis of Trefusis's Echo (1931) and Woolf's Between the Acts (194 1). Chapter Five concentrateson Trefusis's discomforting senseof outsiderness.In Pirates at Play (1952) Trefusis explores the dialectics of foreignerness. Through the transubstantiationof her self into an armchair in Memoirs of an Armchair (1960) Trefusis acknowledges her abject in an attempt to relax the boundaries that separate self from other. Finally Chapter Six examines the search of a feminine Jowssance and its connections to death, or rather undeath, in two novels: Sackville- West'sAll Passion Spent (193 1) and Trefusis's Hunt the Slipper (1937). TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGENMENTS I INTRODUCTION 2 CHAPTER ONE The Hermaphroditic Dimension Of The Androgyne 6 The androgynous body and the hermaphrodite 6 The Tale of the Androgyne 8 The Story ofthe Fountain Salniacis 13 The androgynous mind 19 Androgynous Writing 32 CHAPTER TWO A Historical Framework For An Androgynous Ideal 47 Sexuality, inversion and the scientific discourse 53 The healing of the pervert 59 "Every God relies on a mother Goddess" 66 CHAPTER THREE The Literary Network of Violet Trefusis, Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf 74 Actual Encounters 75 "The other night Virginia and I were talking about you" 98 The Rebellion 103 A love letter 113 Thep iece of embro idery 119 CHAPTER FOUR The Subject On The Stage Of Poetic Language 128 Explorer on an unknown terrain 133 The practice of creating emotions 145 CHAPTER FIVE Objects, Pirates And Other Outsiders 156 Tales of the Creation 156 The wanderer's quest 167 Adrift on unknown waters 173 CHAPTER SIX: Feminine Jouissance And Death 191 "Veiled infinity and the moment when revelation burst forth" 201 The endlessjourney of a stray 214 CONCLUSION An Open-ended Finale 223 REFERENCES 225 Acknowledgments I would like to expressmy gratitude to my supervisor Professor Marion Shaw for her constant advice, helpfiil criticism and her kind and unfailing support throughout this researchwork. I am deeply indebted to and wish to thank The University of Hull for a PhD researchscholarship and Sir Philip Reckitt Educational Trust for travel grants. My thanks also go to Dr Patsy Stonemanand ProfessorAngela Leighton for all they have taught me through their teaching and writings. From Spain, Dr Angeles de la Conchahas been a continuoussource of encouragementand judicious comments. Nigel Nicolson generously opened the doors of his mother's tower at SissinghurstCastle. I am deeply indebted to him for allowing me to consult documents and for our conversations. I owe special thanks to Paddy Long for her generosity, friendliness and professionalism when reading my work. I also wish to thank Martina Mower and JonathanPlant, who devoted in one way or other many evenings to me and my thesis, for their help and for the fiin. Dr Gaele Sobott-Mogwe read some parts of this thesis and provided generouscomments, for this I am grateful. My very great thanks go to Julia Salmer6nwho has helped me in more ways than I can record. Finally, there is my family; especially my mother Isabel Rueda and my sister Elisa. I thank them for being always there and for not hiding an infallible faith in me. I know my father and my aunt would have beenproud. INTRODUCTION Since the publication of Nicolson's Portrait of a Marriage in 1973, Violet Trefusis (1894-1972) has been the subject of five biographiesl. Trefusis's letters to Vita Sackville-West, published in 1989, are commonly regarded as exceptional writing by critics. However, her literary production has remained unexposed to serious critical enquiry. The only exception is to be found in The Last Edwardians: An Illustrated History of Violet Trefusis & Alice Keppel, a catalogue from an exhibition held at The Boston Athenaeum in 1985 and in the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum (Florida) in 1986. This volume includes a chapter by Loma Sage entitled "Violet Trefusis The Writer. " In the seven odd pages dedicated to Trefusis "the writer" Sage provides a panoramic view of Trefusis's fictional work. Whilst hinting at the possibilities of Trefusis's novels, Sage seems to be trapped in the tendency, started by Trefusis's biographers, of looking at Trefusis's fictional work as merely autobiographical. Whilst not disregarding the interesting insights that a proper study of Treftisis's oeuvre as autobiography would provide, Sage's chapter remains on the surface of Trefusis's texts. Nonetheless, Sage points out a need for further research into Trefusis's work. Talking about Trefusis's defeat at the end of her love affair with Sackville-West she argues: In the sad event, she'd digested her 'difference' and concealed it. Or partly concealed it. For it is there in the writing, in the paradoxes and the mischief and the games. (Sage 1985: 79) Sage's suggestion has found no echo and the only publication that has since approached Trefusis has been yet another biography: Souhami's Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter published in 1996 where, once again, Trefusis's literary work is used as biographical material. 'Phillips, John (1985) The Last Edivardians: An Illustrated History of Violet Trefusis and Alice Keppel. Jullian, Philippe and Phillips, John (1986) Violet Trefusis. A Biography. Sharpe, Henrietta (1981) A Solitary Woman: A Life of Violet Trefusis. Souhami, Diana (1996) Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter. Wajsbrot, Cdcile (1989) Violet Trefusis: hiographie. Introduction In view of the critical vacuum surrounding Trefusis's literary production, this thesis sets out to propose a study of her work from a poststructuralist perspective. The aim of this thesis is to show how the notion of androgyny works in the fiction of Violet Trefusis. Trefusis interest in androgyny is not unique or isolated. Many writers contemporary to her such as Mann, Gide, Colette, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Forster, Rilke, Djuna Barnes, H. D., Rose Macaulay, to name but a few, showed in different ways a fascination with androgyny. It is not by chance that Eliot introduced in The Maste Land (1922) the mythical Tiresias, the man/woman who acquired wisdom through the change of his/her sex. Androgyny is one of the main themes in Joyce's Ulysses (1922). D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1920) and The Rainbow (1915) are texts-where Lawrence's own perception of the androgynous ideal is explored. Yet, Trefusis seemed particularly intrigued by Woolf s suggestion in A Room of One's Own that the mind of the artist should be androgynous.Within the framework provided by the theoretical work of Julia Kristeva an examination of Woolfs androgynous ideal reveals that far from the traditional notion of the union of complementaryhalves androgyny can be understood,and it is indeed understood in this thesis, as a hermaphroditic site of struggle that comes out of the transformation of two asymmetrical bodies into one unfinished and unfixed body containing tensetraces of the two bodies that constitute it. The idea of wholeness implied in traditional views of androgyny conveys a desire for transcendencewhereas what is at stake in the hermaphroditic conceptualization of the androgyne is transformation. Woolfs androgynous ideal is closely related to Kristeva's postulate of the importance of the semiotic mother in the symbolic articulation of a poetic languagethat participates in the discourseof the carnival. In relation to this different conceptualizationof androgyny, the texts discussedin this thesis have been analysedin view of Kristeva's opinion in "From One Identity to an Other" that in analytically approachinga text the critic should: for the ...search within the signifying phenomenon the crisis or unsettling process of meaning and subject rather than for the coherenceor identity of either one or a multiplicity of structures.(Kristeva 1981 c: 125) Introduction 4 Within this framework the main claim of this thesis is that the so called "delightful" (Jullian and Phillips 1986: 73-81) and "charming" (Sharpe 1981: 96-97) writing of Violet Treftisis presents a textual undercurrent pressing to overflow with devastatingconsequences. This text has been producedby a mind striving to articulate a perceived "difference" and an imagination receptive to anomalies. Consequently, her writing is a necessaryexercise in search of a knowledge that patriarchal discourse cannot provide. The tensions that androgynyposits in Trefusis's texts never resolve and for this reasonher fictional work presentsa challengeto patriarchal notions of language as univocal and identity as fixed.
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