© 2012 Michelle H. Phillips (Honey M. Phillips) ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
2012 Michelle H. Phillips (Honey M. Phillips) ALL RIGHTS RESERVED “THE CHILD IN THE MIDST”: MODERNISM AND THE PROBLEM OF CHILDHOOD INTERIORITY by MICHELLE H. PHILLIPS (Honey M. Phillips) A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Literatures in English written under the direction of Marianne DeKoven and approved by ___________________________ ___________________________ ___________________________ ___________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October, 2012 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION “The Child in the Midst”: Modernism and the Problem of Childhood Interiority By MICHELLE H. PHILLIPS (Honey M. Phillips) Dissertation Director: Marianne DeKoven This dissertation argues that ironic representations of childhood fueled modernism’s emergence and set the stage for a little-known, but unprecedented body of modernist children’s literature. Between the haunted children of Henry James and the many drowned children in Gertrude Stein’s wartime writing, modernism shape-shifts around the figure of the disenchanted child. In the first half of the dissertation, I examine the figure of “the child in the midst” from the emergently modernist writings of Henry James to the late modernism of Djuna Barnes. In What Maisie Knew and in The Turn of the Screw, James ironically turns figurations of childhood ― from simplicity to division, from transparency to opacity, from innocence to ambivalence ― and in so doing he also turns the novel toward ironic, ambivalent, and limited points of view. At the other end of the modernist timeline, Djuna Barnes’s Robin Vote is figured as a child and as a modernist work of art. Through her character’s devastating conjuncture of modernism and childhood, Barnes performs a ii double critique of figures (the child) and narratives (modernism) of re-invention on the eve of WWII. The waning years of modernism are a watershed for modernist children’s literature. In the second half of the dissertation, I argue that these two phenomena are profoundly linked. The turn to children’s literature operates as a politically radical extension of modernism’s longstanding challenge to childhood and serves, in addition, as a crucial aspect of late modernism’s rejection of high modernist methods and forms. In his works for children, W.E.B. Du Bois compares the problem of the color line to the child/adult divide and seeks to democratize the gap between them in part by addressing the black child as an adult. Stein’s wartime writings about and for children are similarly anti-nostalgic. The disillusionment of the lost generation is rooted for Stein in the nineteenth-century romanticization of childhood. Stein’s late modernism is preoccupied with representing and with killing children, with writing and with destroying children’s narratives as the conjoined prerequisites for killing the nineteenth-century child in the midst. iii Acknowledgments I could neither have hoped nor dreamed for a better dissertation director than Marianne DeKoven. Marianne played a number of roles for me throughout this process. She has been my motivational speaker par excellence, with an enthusiasm as reliable as it was infectious. She has been my closest advisor, unwaveringly fair and patient, not to mention uncannily spot-on. She has been a brilliant resource whose own scholarship in the fields of feminist, modernist, postmodernist, and now animal studies has consistently forged a path for work that is gutsy, pressing, and intellectually profound. Each and every member of my committee, including Cheryl A. Wall, Harriet Davidson, and Patricia Crain, has shaped this project in ways both definite and indelible. Cheryl made The Souls of Black Folk the center of my universe for a semester and more. Harriet set me on a path to re-appreciating late modernism. And Pat introduced me to cultural studies of childhood. I could not have completed this work without their exceptional guidance through every stage of the writing process. I also owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Michael McKeon for his meticulous and candid feedback on parts of the dissertation’s second chapter, work-shopped in his 2009 Mellon Dissertation Seminar on the Problems of Historical Interpretation, and to all of my fellow colleagues in that workshop. Most especially, I would like to acknowledge the help of my fellow workshop participants, Shakti Jaising, Natalie Roxburgh, and Sonali Barua, whose words of advice and encouragement helped to fuel my ongoing revision of that chapter. I have been fortunate to have published a version of chapter one in The Henry James Review 31 (2010): 95-110, and I am grateful for the suggestions for revision that the readers and editors of that journal provided which have helped me to iv reshape the chapter for the dissertation. Similarly, readers’ reports from PMLA aided me tremendously in sharpening my thinking on Du Bois in chapter three. For many of these chapters, it has been my great privilege and pleasure to conduct research at a number of wonderful institutions and libraries. The librarians at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where I studied W.E.B. Du Bois’s papers went out of their way to provide me with access to materials for chapter three. Similarly, I have rarely met more knowledgeable librarians than those at Yale’s Beinecke Library who helped me enormously in my research on Gertrude Stein for chapter four. I received financial support from a number of sources which truly enabled the research and time necessary to complete this work. I would like to thank the Rutgers English Department as well as the University more broadly for supporting my participation in conferences, for supporting my research efforts, and for supporting the first stages of the writing process with a generous fourth year fellowship. In addition, one of my most substantial and meaningful sources of funding has come from the Mellon Foundation, which not only funded my participation in the dissertation writing seminar with Michael McKeon but which also funded a full final year of dissertation writing and revision. As important as the funding itself has been the efforts of many colleagues to help me to procure it. Many of these advisors have already been named, but I owe a special thanks again to Marianne DeKoven and Patricia Crain as well as to John Kucich and Rebecca Walkowitz for their invaluable assistance in this daunting process. For their unwavering moral support, I am also exceedingly grateful to Stacy Klein, to Cheryl Robinson, and to Courtney Borack. They have each shared their wisdom and strength with me in times of uncertainty. v Last, but always far from least, none of this would have been possible without the shared sacrifices of my family. To my dog, Frankie, to my mom, Debra, and to my wife, Michelle, I thank you for weaving the net to hold me. To Jasiu, I thank for being. vi Dedication For Michelle & Jasiu vii Table of Contents Abstract of the Dissertation ii Acknowledgments iv Dedication vii Table of Contents viii List of Illustrations ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1: “The “Partagé Child” and the Emergence of the Modernist Novel in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew 26 Chapter 2: A Suspect Innocence: The Turn of the Screw, Nightwood, and the History of Modernism 73 Chapter 3: The Children of Double Consciousness: From The Souls of Black Folk to The Brownies’ Book 154 Chapter 4: Drowning in Childhood: Gertrude Stein’s Late Modernism 208 Works Cited 280 viii List of Illustrations The Dream, Henri Rousseau, 1910 131 “Men of the Month, The Crisis, October 1918 173 “N.A.A.C.P.,” The Crisis, October 1919 174 “The Lynching Fund,” The Crisis, October 1916 175 “Shadows of Light,” The Crisis, October 1916 178 “As the Crow Flies,” The Brownies’ Book, September 1920 197 “As the Crow Flies,” The Brownies’ Book, December 1920 200 “As the Crow Flies,” The Brownies’ Book, March 1920 202 ix 1 Introduction In this dissertation I work to trace modernism’s specific aesthetic, cultural, and political preoccupation with childhood from the early child-centered works of Henry James to the late prolific children’s literature of Gertrude Stein. Throughout, I argue that modernism innovates unconventional and often disturbing representations of childhood in ways that proved instrumental to modernism’s own emergence and evolution from the 1890s through the post WWII era. Though canonical figures like T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, and W.E.B. Du Bois all wrote about and for children, modernist studies has not only neglected this phenomenon of cross-writing but has also failed to examine the modernist child in terms that exceed the Romantic and post-Romantic paradigms of the previous century. Yet modernism’s children have little in common with the child-ideal of the modern era. Indeed, the innocent, rejuvenating, and wondrous child comes under fire in these works, which not only feature damaged children but which also imagine “the child set in the midst” as an internalized mythology of ominous proportions. In the nineteenth century, the Biblical image of “the child set in the midst” enjoyed new popularity, capturing the modern Anglo-American embrace of childhood as a widely beloved and emulable style of being. In Mark (9:35-37) and in Matthew (18:1- 3), Christ took “a little child” and “set him in the midst” of his disciples as a reminder and emblem of divinity. In Matthew, Christ says both that “whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me” and that “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (qtd in MacDonald 7). For the popular children’s writer and minister, George MacDonald, the lesson of the parable is clear.