Hanson, Erin 2019 English Thesis Title: “An Unexploited Mine” : The Body, Ecology, and Virginia Woolf’s Aesthetics of Interruption Advisor: Walter Johnston Advisor is Co-author: None of the above Second Advisor: Released: release now Authenticated User Access: Contains Copyrighted Material: No “AN UNEXPLOITED MINE”: THE BODY, ECOLOGY, AND VIRGINIA WOOLF’S AESTHETICS OF INTERRUPTION by Erin Hanson Professor Walter Johnston, Advisor A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in English WILLIAMS COLLEGE Williamstown, Massachusetts May 10, 2019 Table of Contents Acknowledgments i Prelude: “queer, difficult” iii Chapter One: “a flat tire” 1 Chapter Two: “get up steam again” 22 Chapter Three: “hag-ridden” 50 Works Cited 77 Acknowledgments Over the past three years, Walter Johnston has been a staggeringly patient, attentive, and encouraging adviser. His edits were absolutely heroic -- the difference, more or less, between having something I’m proud of and having nothing at all -- and his encouragement kept me in school. Walter, I began believing in myself because of you. I have been blessed to have wonderful mentors, interlocutors, and friends among the Williams faculty. Early on, Margaux Cowden advised the first project that allowed me to see myself as a scholar. This year would have been impossible without Bernie Rhie’s monumental generosity. Bernie, you are showing me a new way to live that is already saving my life. Watching Chris Pye teach has changed how I think about learning and thinking. And, Chris, there is little about Williams I will miss more than sitting in your seminars or dropping by your office. My writing -- and love for Lily Briscoe -- have benefited tremendously from Stephen Tifft’s influence; almost nothing can cheer or charm me so much as running into him. The only thing that has gotten me through these last few days has been the promise of drinking tea with Christopher Bolton; I feel so lucky to be able to share this place, Williams, with him. Special thanks are due to Anjuli Raza Kolb. Anjuli has known me since I was eighteen; I’m twenty-three now. Since that first day in Rumble in the Jungle, so much of this half-decade has been made with your help or made in your image. You are written into my intellectual DNA. I am so grateful we can be on each other’s teams. Gage McWeeny and Krista Birch at the Oakley Center have been wonderful all year, but in particular these last few months as I have abdicated my fellowship’s responsibilities to tend to a brain injury. I have been so welcomed at the OC this spring, and -- extenuating circumstances notwithstanding -- the space and community among the other fellows has been one of the best parts of my senior year. A particular highlight has been having Emily Vasiliauskas as a literary ally (and advice-giver) around the Oakley Center; she has taught me so much about intellect, focus, and balance. I also owe many thanks to the Ruchman family; not only did their incredible generosity fundamentally enable much of my academic work this year, but their warmth and kindness converted the major disappointment of cancelling my “Ruchman Seminar” into the great joy of getting to know the Ruchman family. Kirsten Lee did everything first and better, and showed me how to balance ambition with limitations. Every time I have faced a moral conundrum for the past three years and handled it well, it was because I asked myself “what would Tony Wei Ling do?” Overwhelmingly, my friendship with Vidya Venkatesh is and has been one of the most important things in my life. Eliza Klein has been a wonderful comrade. Sarah Fleming was my concussion goddess before I knew I needed one. Nothing was more fun than living with Max Harmon, Carlos Malache, and, most of all, Alex Griffin; I want to be more like each of you: Max’s selflessness and humour, Carlos’s style and sweetness, Alex’s -- everything about Alex. Natalie Wilkinson should know how much making home with her and Morraine this year has meant to me. My grandmother Gaye is an inspiration, and has brought so much silliness and fun into my life. My sister Emily remains my first and best role-model; she is the coolest person I know. My brother Ian has shown me all the different ways strength and courage can look. I don’t know how to begin thanking the three people to whom I owe the most: my partner and my parents. Bertie Miller, meeting you was the reason this has been worth it. Bird, you pulled up weeds while I wept; you lifted me up the stairs for fatigue and for fun; you made dinner and then thanked me for swallowing it whole. To be able to start a garden with you is my greatest happiness. I can’t wait to spend years and years together. i “AN UNEXPLOITED MINE” Mom and dad, there is no greater force in my life than your support of me. No index of your contributions could fit you who have home-schooled me for twenty-three years. You both already know just how you have made this completion (of this thesis, of this degree) possible in its most basic ways. But Dad, so much of what I am proudest of in this work -- all that derives, for instance, from its impracticable but resolute ambition -- I inherited from you. And mom, you were the vital origin of this work’s verve: what it means to be in a world, in a body, among others -- all of this, at its best, you taught me. Dad and mom -- however scant a recompense, this thesis is for you. Thank you. ii “AN UNEXPLOITED MINE” Prelude: “queer, difficult” In artist and writer Carolyn Lazard’s 2015 video Get Well Soon, a nightgowned figure trapped in a meadow follows instructions as a roleplayer in a video game.1 Of their well known essay, “How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity,” Lazard writes, “The story I’m telling here is equal parts a processing of the trauma of illness and an exploration of how the body is treated under the regime of capitalism.”2 The same could be said of Get Well Soon. A two-pronged metaphor for the acute solitude of illness and the maddening, labyrinthine bureaucracies of the American healthcare system: the game mode is cut through with a series of domestic vignettes. At one end of a galley kitchen, Lazard sits alone on a red chair at a red-accented table slicing red meat.3 A close-up shows them handle the raw beef, and a voicemail lists their prescription medications in concert with non-diegetic ambient tension. This opening scene establishes the house as a space of illness, in which one -- too tired to stand -- sits through the slow chore of parceling the flesh and blood required to feed oneself. But soon the bright greens and yellows of the meadow replace the sterile black, white, and saturated vermillion of the kitchen.4 Walking with a cane through tall grass, Lazard’s character finds a letter which they are instructed to open and read: “Your journey starts here./ You are on a quest to cure that which ails you.”5 Thus initiated into a “quest” or “mission” game, the meadow becomes the space of pursuit and of health, and the escapism of signing-on becomes the curative impulse of seeking care (and of the title’s hackneyed command). In Get Well Soon, real illness and aspirational wellness are provisionally spatialized as interior and exterior: the filming moves paratactically between indoors (the kitchen, hallways, bathroom, or bedroom) and outdoors (the grass and trees of the meadow); between incorporation (the game’s final command reads “ingest”) and expulsion (sitting in front of the toilet, whether to clean it or to sully it with vomit); between innards (thigh flesh pierced with syringe and edible meat sliced with knife) and the extended or outstretched (syringe, cane, and knife brandished, box in tree reached for at arm’s length).6 But as this list itself already begins to suggest, what’s at stake in the video’s arc is the mutual contamination -- rather than quarantining -- of inside and outside. The narrative concludes with the failure of the elsewhere to extricate one from the here; Lazard arrives by the end of the tiring and circuitous quest not to panacea, but to yet another command to “ingest” an unknown substance, the outcome of which we do not see.7 The video game’s nostrum is delivered mythologically -- in a unlabeled bottle that appears spontaneously in a box in a tree -- rather than pharmaceutically, sure, but -- fine print notwithstanding -- not more enigmatically or arbitrarily than the great needle of “Humira” with which Lazard stabs themself. Lazard repeatedly ironizes any binary between inside and outside the body. In one instance, a visual repetition of the meat-cutting scene, Lazard sits at the kitchen table, decapitated by the camera frame, chopping beets (Fig. 1).8 “There is an intelligence in your body that takes care of it for you,” a saccharine voice croons in the background. “It breathes your body. It beats your heart. It digests 1 Carolyn Lazard, Get Well Soon (2015), from Vimeo, video, 13:30, http://www.carolynlazard.com/get-well-soon. 2 Lazard, “How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity,” Carolyn Lazard, accessed December 11, 2018. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55c40d69e4b0a45eb985d566/t/58cebc9dc534a59fbdbf98c2/1489943709737/H owtobeaPersonintheAgeofAutoimmunity+%281%29.pdf. 3 Lazard, Get Well Soon, 0:17-1:24.