The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts PHILANTHROPY, THE WELFARE STATE, AND EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE A Thesis in English by Milena Todorova Radeva © 2007 Milena Todorova Radeva Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2007 ii The thesis of Milena Todorova Radeva was reviewed and approved* by the following: Mark Morrisson Associate Professor of English Thesis Advisor Chair of Committee Janet Lyon Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies Joan Landes Ferree Professor of History and Women’s Studies Vincent A. Lankewish Special Member Robert Caserio Professor of English Head of the Department of English *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii ABSTRACT “Philanthropy, Welfare, and Early Twentieth-Century Literature” furthers the discussion of modernist literature and its relationship to modernity by showing the role of the philanthropy- versus-welfare debates in early twentieth-century fiction. I examine works by Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Rebecca West, Ernest Hemingway, Anzia Yezierska, Edith Wharton, Wyndham Lewis, and E.M. Forster in the context of philanthropy, the birth of welfare, the professionalization of social work, the crisis of liberalism, the disintegration of the British Empire, immigration in the United States, and World War I. In addition to my inquiry into the historically constructed discourses and practices of philanthropy, I position my discussion of literature in relationship to recent critiques of Habermas’s account of the disintegration of the bourgeois public sphere and to Derrida’s work on the gift, and I argue that artistic engagements with philanthropy helped define twentieth-century notions about how to govern; how to conceive of class and gender boundaries; how to give; and how to market one’s labor, whether physical or intellectual. Early twentieth-century writers participated in the debates that shaped such milestones of contemporary social policy as the 1911 Insurance Act in Britain and Progressive and New Deal legislation in the United States. In order to trace the writers’ engagement with this “New Philanthropy,” I study recent scholarly works as well as contemporary publications like The Charities Review, The Salvation Army Yearbook, C.S. Loch’s Annual Charities and Digest, Burdett’s Hospital and Charities; modernist periodicals such as Blast, The Enemy, and The Egoist; and government documents like the “Louisiana Mothers’ Pension Statute” (1939) and the Hansard Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law and Relief of Distress and the “Louisiana Mothers’ Pension Statute” (1909). For most modern and modernist writers, as well as for Derrida, neither the state-based economy of gift-giving nor philanthropy represents true giving. As phenomena of giving, both philanthropy and welfare annul the gift. Yet modern writers’ discourses of philanthropy, welfare, and altruism are movements towards the promise of the gift; and just as they render an account of the (im)possibility of true giving, they carve out a place for modernist subjectivity, the modernist artist, the “New Woman,” the poor, the immigrant, and the colonial subject in the turbulent first decades of the twentieth century. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.........................................................................................vi Introduction..................................................................................................................1 Modernist Writers and Philanthropy ....................................................................2 Why Philanthropy and Welfare? ..........................................................................5 A History of British Philanthropy.........................................................................7 Methodology and Approach .................................................................................10 Women-Writers, Altruism, and Philanthropy in Early Twentieth-Century Britain.....23 Modernist Engagements with Philanthropy..........................................................25 All Passion Spent and Upper-Class Philanthropy.................................................29 “Charity Up-to-Date”: British Philanthropy Becomes Professional ....................34 Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and the New Philanthropy............................37 Between Old Philanthropy and the New: Mrs. Dalloway .............................38 The Gift of Painting: To the Lighthouse .......................................................44 The Causes of Poverty and Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas .......................48 Three Guineas................................................................................................49 Conclusion ............................................................................................................57 Empire and Welfare .....................................................................................................59 Introduction...........................................................................................................59 Historical Perspectives on Empire and Welfare. ..................................................63 The Judge, The Salvation Army, and the “Little Englander.”..............................68 E. M. Forster, V. Sackville-West, and British Philanthropy in India...................77 All Passion Spent ..................................................................................................83 Rebecca West and the Balkans.............................................................................86 At the Margins of Europe..............................................................................86 “Never in the Balkans has Empire meant trusteeship.”.................................90 Rebecca West’s Philanthropy: Pleasure and Public Spirit ............................96 Rebecca West’s Feminist Historiography .....................................................104 Conclusion ............................................................................................................109 American Philanthropy: the Great War, Immigration, and the Progressive Era .........110 Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Conceptions of American Philanthropy .....110 Giving Beyond the Gift ........................................................................................1144 Edith Wharton and Charity: The Philanthropist Herself ......................................119 “The Refugees” .............................................................................................129 Fighting France. From Dunkerque to Belport ..............................................133 Summer..........................................................................................................136 The House of Mirth .......................................................................................144 v Yezierska and the Object of Philanthropy............................................................149 Charity Organization, Progressivism, and Social Work in the US................1522 Yezierska and Philanthropy...........................................................................157 Yezierska and the Settlement Movement ......................................................168 John Dewey and the Progressive Movement.................................................177 Conclusion ............................................................................................................188 Wyndham Lewis and the Gift of Egoism ....................................................................191 Altruism and The Egoist .......................................................................................191 Liberals, Individualists, and State Philanthropy...................................................1933 Wyndham Lewis’s Public Persona: The Enemy as Philanthropist.......................199 Hobson, Rymer, and Satire...................................................................................202 The Occult Power of Philanthropy: Left Wing Over Europe, “The Death of the Ankou,” and The Art of Being Ruled.............................................................209 “The Death of the Ankou”....................................................................................2122 The Art of Being Ruled ........................................................................................217 Severity and Generosity in Tarr (1918)...............................................................220 Abject Bodies and Abject Relationships in Childermass.....................................225 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................2303 0 Ernest Hemingway and the “New” Philanthropy ........................................................2311 Whimsical Philanthropy: A Moveable Feast ........................................................2333 Hemingway’s Soldiers and Mothers: A Farewell to Arms and the Great War.....240 Soldiers, Mothers, and American Philanthropy ............................................240 The American Red Cross and the Great War ................................................2444 The Gift of the Abject: “A Way You Will Never Be” ..................................2511 To Have and Have Not: Family, Violence, and the New Deal.............................256 “The Poor and the Lowly” and the New Deal...............................................2577