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The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgementTown of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Cape Published by the University ofof Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University Ruth Miller and the poetics of literary maternity Town Sarah Jane Warner Cape of UniversityThesis Presented for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of English Language and Literature UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN August 2012 As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking – John, I sd, which was not his name, the darkness sur rounds us, what can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not buy a goddam big car, drive, he sd, for christ‟s sake, look out where yr going. Robert Creeley, “I Know a Man” Town Cape of University ii Acknowledgements I am grateful to STINT, the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education, for providing the funding for my research fellowship at Växjö University as part of the “Africa Writing Europe” project. I wish to thank Professor Maria Olaussen for an exceptionally productive month spent in the School of Humanities at Växjö. I would also like to thank the Harry Oppenheimer Institute Committee of Management for its contribution to local travel expenses in the early stages of my research at the National English Literary Museum. I am indebted to my supervisors: Professor Dorothy Driver for her vision and expert steering of the project from the start; and Dr Sandra Young for her generous and determined facilitation of its graceful landing. Dr Natasha Distiller‟s insightful comments and advice came at a crucial stage. I am grateful to Jane Fox for permission to use LionelTown Abrahams‟s unpublished correspondence with Pat Campbell; to Ken Owen for his willingness to respond to importunate queries on the English liberal scene in Johannesburg; and to Joy Powell for agreeing to be interviewed on her association withCape Ruth Miller. To my colleagues: I owe special thanks to Linda van der Walt for her steadfast support and invaluable assistance with all my IT-relatedof requirements; to Mandy Mitchley for her assistance in granting me study leave; and to Jane Lamb for her solicitous enquiries after “Ruth Miller” all these years. To my family – my parents for all they have given me and their maverick belief in my ability to finish; to Digby (and Emma) for going first and showing me how; and to Graham and Nancy for making everythingUniversity happen (dogs, stars, rabbityness) again and again. To Fionah, for the time... iii Abstract Ruth Miller‟s poetry was written between 1940 and the year of her death in 1969, and is published in three volumes, Floating Island (1965), Selected Poems (1968), and Ruth Miller: Poems Prose Plays (1990). In this thesis, I modify the concept of literary maternity suggested by Joan Metelerkamp in her article, “Ruth Miller: Father‟s Law or Mother‟s Lore?” (1992). My approach is informed by a model of literary maternity that is not defined in terms of a female figure but in terms of a relation between the earliest parent and the child, or what is referred to in psychoanalytic terms as the preoedipal relation. My thesis is concerned to show how Miller‟s poetry and a theory on the maternal function of literature reinterpret each other; it includes a consideration of Miller‟s literary legacy, Townthe critical literature describing her oeuvre, and the issues of continuity and authority that arise in the context of literary publication. To this end, I drawCape on the unpublished correspondence collected in the Miller archiveof at the English Literary Museum in Grahamstown, with particular reference to a series of letters exchanged between Lionel Abrahams, Miller‟s literary executor, and Miller‟s daughter, Pat Campbell, between 1985 and 1994 surrounding the publication of Miller‟s collected work. The theoretical orientationUniversity of the thesis is psychoanalytic and post-structuralist, placing special emphasis on the work of Melanie Klein (1882–1960), a Viennese-born psychoanalyst who established the school of object relations in London after the Second World War and developed the technique of play therapy. Klein‟s interest in the mother-child relation, her matricentric but non-idyllic version of psychic development, is traced through readings of her work offered by Julia Kristeva and Jacqueline Rose, and is explored with reference to Miller‟s poetry. iv Table of Contents Abstract................................................................................................................................. iv Table of Contents .................................................................................................................. v Preface ................................................................................................................................. vi Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One ....................................................................................................................... 33 Chapter Two ....................................................................................................................... 71 Chapter Three ................................................................................................................... 112 Chapter Four ..................................................................................................................... 145 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................... 178 Town Cape of University v Preface “[...] readers, knocking on the hard case of metaphor, plead / let us in let us in” (Joan Metelerkamp, “Ruth Miller” Towing the Line 120–121) “Read me, hold me, but don‟t crush me, don‟t get too close. Above all, don‟t think you know, and I would want to add, don‟t expect to get it right” (Jacqueline Rose, On Not Being Able to Sleep 164) “Come not unto me, let me go in peace / For no-one and nothing now can rescue me” (Ruth Miller “Come Not Unto Me” in Ruth Miller 39) My intention in writing this thesis is to revisit the issue of Ruth Miller‟s literary maternity in the context of the literary criticism describing her oeuvre in order to explore the implications it could have for the survival of her legacy and the reader‟s willingness “to open up the [Miller] corpus, to transform it, to recognize its interminability” (Rose, Why War? 27). I propose to do this byTown situating Miller‟s maternity in the mobile relations that materialise in readings of her text rather than in a continuous authorial voice (called “Miller”) constituted,Cape or substantiated, for use by emerging poets, particularly emerging womenof poets, at a particular historical moment. It is my suggestion that the way to think, and to continue thinking about the Miller corpus, the way to ensure that her work continues to be read and reread, is for the reader to negate, provisionally, any filial connection with Miller. My expectation is that this approach willUniversity open up Miller‟s oeuvre (including the critical literature describing it), as well as the topic of literary maternity, to more interpretation and to the testing of new connections. In an attempt to ensure the survival of Miller‟s literary legacy and to assist her literary heirs in their ongoing search for authority, legitimacy, and guidance, revisionary readings of Miller‟s work have asserted the need for her would-be daughter-poets in particular to establish connections with her. In the course of my thesis I will show that a similar move to establish connections with Miller (or an vi authorial voice called “Miller”) in critical readings of her work, before rehearsing some sort of separation from her text, fails on at least two counts. Firstly, in their eagerness to connect with Miller, readings of this nature inevitably insist on the continuity of the writing voices or selves that speak across her text (most particularly her poetry and personal correspondence) resulting in the shutting down of other potential connections; secondly, while such readings might recognise their role in constructing the authorial voice they then go on to analyse, there is little initiative on their part to consider the effects that this involvement might have on the reader‟s putative externality to, or non-implication in, the text thus created. As a result, the reader might be self-conscious about her ability to conjure the writer‟s voice, but she remains unable to credit the text‟s ability to prefigure her. Town The provisional negation of any filial connection with Miller‟s work will be accomplished through a conscious staging andCape restaging of a series of ambivalent separations in my close readings of the criticalof literature describing her poetry as well as of a selection of her poems that undoes the fixity of the positions reader-daughter, poet-mother inside the text. The motility and seeming intransitivity of these “separations” will be shown to recall descriptions of preoedipal object relations, their oscillation betweenUniversity “seeking, finding, obtaining, possessing with satisfaction” and “losing, lacking, missing, with fear and distress” (Joan Rivière qtd. in Rose, Why War? 151). By acknowledging the imaginary status