ELECTRIC MODERNISM by Haley A
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
ELECTRIC MODERNISM by Haley A. Larsen A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Purdue University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English West Lafayette, Indiana May 2021 1 THE PURDUE UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL STATEMENT OF COMMITTEE APPROVAL Dr. Maren T. Linett, Chair Department of English Dr. Derek Pacheco Department of English Dr. John Duvall Department of English Dr. Ryan Schneider Department of English Approved by: Dr. S. Dorsey Armstrong 2 Dedicated to Sean 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To my wonderful dissertation committee: Professor Derek Pacheco, for incredibly generous feedback on my writing style and voice, and for being supportive as my dissertation moved in a new direction. Professors John Duvall and Ryan Schneider for their willingness to serve on my committee and for energetic, motivating questions that helped me shape the project. To my chair, Professor Maren Linett, for being my advisor, mentor, and friend over the years. Thank you for believing that I could complete my dissertation while working in a new field, in absentia. By reading the strangest novels with you — Spleen, Nightwood, The Violent Bear it Away— I’ve learned how to make room for new, diverse, and strange ideas. Working with you has made me a more considerate, open, and gracious writer, and a more compassionate person. To my supportive family, all the Wells and Larsen and Crouch folks. Thank you for helping me build a well-stocked library. To my Grandpa Wells, who always believed I was restrofinofical. Final thanks to Sean Crouch, who has always given me room to grow, change, and be who I am and want to be. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... 7 ELECTRIC MODERNISM: AN INTRODUCTION ..................................................................... 8 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................... 25 ELECTRIC LIGHTS IN WHARTON’S FICTION ..................................................................... 27 Electric Connotations at World’s Fairs and in New Diagnoses ................................................. 38 Illuminating Lily Bart in The House of Mirth ............................................................................ 42 Mapping Electricity Across The Age of Innocence.................................................................... 54 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 69 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................... 71 ILLUMINATED ABJECTION IN RHYS’ FICTION ................................................................. 74 Traumatic Spaces as Modern Spaces ......................................................................................... 78 Reading Technology in Rhys’s Fiction...................................................................................... 84 Flickers of Light in Voyage in the Dark .................................................................................... 86 Judgmental Red Lights in After Leaving Mr. McKenzie............................................................ 90 Strange Encounters in Good Morning, Midnight ....................................................................... 97 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 106 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................. 108 WIRED MINDS IN H.D.’S FICTION ....................................................................................... 110 H.D.’s Legacy in Scholarship .................................................................................................. 112 H.D.’s Electric Theories of Mind in Notes on Thought and Vision ......................................... 113 The Electrified Female Artist in Nights ................................................................................... 116 Electricity in the War-Time Mind............................................................................................ 128 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 135 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................. 137 UNCREATIVE ELECTRICITY IN OLIVE MOORE’S SPLEEN ............................................ 139 A Short Literary Review .......................................................................................................... 141 Vitalism and Modernity ........................................................................................................... 144 Ruth and the Vitalist Soul ........................................................................................................ 147 The Male Artist and the Salvation of Art................................................................................. 150 5 Ruth as Uncreative Artist ......................................................................................................... 153 Moore’s Rules for Modern Life ............................................................................................... 160 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 162 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................. 163 CODA: MODERN, ELECTRIC SELFHOOD ........................................................................... 165 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................. 168 6 ABSTRACT This dissertation traces invocations and theories of electric power in modernist literature by women, showing how four modernist authors—Edith Wharton, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Olive Moore, and Jean Rhys—deploy electricity in their fiction and highlight its varied and contradictory cultural meanings. Modernist literature by women leverages the open and strange impressions from the era of what electricity might mean, so that authors might make their own arguments about where artistic impulses originate, how homes would change when they became wired, how modernization would change modernist art forms, or why some social spaces gleam brighter than others. Edith Wharton and Jean Rhys highlight cultural and class system dynamics with their electric metaphors and electrically wired settings, in which they fuse mental states with modern atmospheres. H.D. and Olive Moore explore how women experience artistic inspiration, as either a transcendent space of unlimited possibility for the former, or as proof of the limitations of gender for the latter. 7 ELECTRIC MODERNISM: AN INTRODUCTION In this dissertation, I explore moments in modernist fiction by women when electricity becomes an undeniable force for profound change, a harbinger of a new and strange modern life. In Hilda Doolittle’s (H.D.’s) 1935 novella Nights, for example, a female artist named Natalia feels, desperately, that in order to become a successful artist, she “wanted the electric power to run on through her, then out, unimpeded by her mind” (51). Decades before, at the end of Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel The House of Mirth, the exhausted and downtrodden Lily Bart overdoses on chloral and then, quite suddenly, feels “every nerve” in her body waken separately; in her anguish, she feels “as though a great blaze of electric light had been turned on in her head” (321). In a haunting nightmare, Sasha Jansen from Jean Rhys’s 1939 novel Good Morning, Midnight dreams that the entire world has been reduced to “an enormous machine” with “innumerable flexible arms” (187). Electric lights illuminate the ends of these arms, casting judging eyes into the dark night. Finally, in Olive Moore’s 1930 novel, Spleen, a frustrated modernist painter and Impressionist forcefully pushes back on artistic tradition, claiming that electric light is the “salvation of Art!” (157). I explore in the four following chapters how the modernist women authors above incorporate electricity into the modernizing worlds their fiction portrays as a force of dramatic, palpable change in women’s lives—in both their external environments and across the mental states and emotions they experience. It might promise sexual emancipation and artistic novelty, as it does in H.D.’s and Moore’s works. Or it might bring devastating psychological confusion and terror, as it does for women in Wharton’s and Rhys’s fiction. But all of these authors avoid making such simple arguments about electric power, as cleanly animating or nerve-numbing. Instead, they highlight the conflicting and contradictory powers of electricity without deciding 8 on any final, lasting definition of it. Because of this, these modernist authors continually showcase the ways technological innovations are as social as they are mechanical. As Jennifer Lieberman puts it, “electricity seemed so powerful...because it was uniquely multifarious” (4). Sometimes, electric power