University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 12-2003 Domesticity and the modernist aesthetic : F.T. Marinetti, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein Allison Elise Carey Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Recommended Citation Carey, Allison Elise, "Domesticity and the modernist aesthetic : F.T. Marinetti, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2003. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/5115 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Allison Elise Carey entitled "Domesticity and the modernist aesthetic : F.T. Marinetti, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Allen Dunn, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Allison Elise Careyentitled "Domesticity and the ModernistAesthetic: F.T. Marinetti, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein." I have examinedthe finalpaper copy of this dissertation forform and content and recommend that it be accepted in partialfulfillment of the requirements for the degreeof Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. {la._;;il;n Dun,H,Majorl'rofessor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Acceptance forthe Council: Domesticity and the Modernist Aesthetic: F.T. Marinetti, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein A Dissertation Presented forthe Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Allison Elise Carey December 2003 ii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my mother, Sue Carey, whose unfailing love and support sustained me through this project, and to my husband, Walter Squire, without whose patience, love, and nagging I could never have completed this project. 111 Acknowledgements I wish to thank all those who helped me complete my Doctor of Philosophy degree in English. I would like to thank Dr. Dunn for leading me through the thickets of literary theory, for his patience, and for introducing me to the work of Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes. I would like to thank Dr. Papke forher suggestions regarding feminist interpretations of the modernists, forher impeccable editing skills, and forher inspiration when other responsibilities threatened to distract me from this project. I would like to thank Dr. Gamer for his kindness, his ideas, and his valuable guidance through this long process. I would also like to thank Dr. Brizio for serving on my committee. I wish to thank the English Department for awarding me the Alvin Thaler Travel Fellowship in 1995. This award made it possible forme to attend the School of Criticism and Theory; my studies there greatly impacted my thinking about the dissertation project. I wish to thank Pino Natale fortranslating Paolo Possiedi's article "La cucina futurista" into English forme. I also wish to thank Dr. Bruce Wheeler forhis encouragement throughout my time in undergraduate and graduate school. Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends, whose support and distraction kept me together and made the completion of this project possible. IV Abstract Literary modernismhas been presented, in scholarship and critical histories, as a masculinized movement: a literature largely by men and concernedwith issues of literary formrather than with everyday life. This critical tunnel vision has inevitably prevented a full accounting of many key aspects of modernistliterature. One issue of modernismthat has been persistently overlooked by scholars is the central role of domesticity in many modernisttexts and the importanceto modernists of reclaiming the domestic as a subject of high art. As this study demonstrates, modernisttexts often focusedon everyday life, and these modernisttreatments of the domestic were rarely purely formal. Instead, modernistauthors used formalexperimentation to transformand recover, not obliterate, the material of everyday life. Three modernist authors-F.T. Marinetti, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein-provide particularly rich illustrationsof modernism'simpulse to aesthetically transformthe domestic. This study examines texts in which these authors critically engage domesticity: Marinetti's The Futurist Cookbook (1932), Barnes'sLadies A/manack (1928) and Nightwood (1936), and Stein's Tender Buttons (1914). Marinetti's, Barnes's, and Stein's transformationsof the domestic rely on an aesthetics of desublimation, a recognition that threats, anxieties, and violences are concealed within the fabricof everyday life. In The Futurist Cookbook, Marinetti explores those conflicts inherent (but latent, contained) in nineteenth-century domesticity: conflictswhich are racial, sexual, regional, national, and colonial in nature. Moreover, Marinetti appropriates domesticity's potential for containment and uses this power to symbolically control those outside the Futurist aesthetic and social program. Like Marinetti, Barnesexplodes traditional domesticity in her novels, and she calls into question traditional definitions of gender and sexuality, as these novels problematize domesticity's traditional role as a site of the definition and maintenance of gender distinctions. However, these two novels have strikingly different tones and present very different images of the domestic: in Ladies A/manack, Barnes celebrates the grotesque excesses of domesticity, while in Nightwood, domesticity is a memento mori, a bellwether of the characters' and their society's steady disintegration. Stein's Tender Buttons, like Barnes'sLadies Almanack, privileges a domesticity which exceeds propriety, and Stein explores the nature of selfhoodthrough the selfs interactions with its immediate surroundings: the domestic sphere. In addition, Stein brings out the most vibrant, uncontrollable aspects of domesticity-its excess-particularly the violent and the erotic, which are, of course, those facetsof life most likely to be absent from Victorian representations of the domestic. VI Table of Contents Chapter 1: Modernism and Domesticity .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 1 Domestic Antecedents .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 7 ModernistResponses to Domesticity .................................. 12 Theoretical Foundations ............................................ 17 The Domestic Transformationsof Marinetti, Barnes,and Stein .............23 Chapter 2: Domestic Transgressions: F.T.Marinetti's The Futurist Cookbook ................ 38 Pleasure in Excess .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 54 The Fragmented, UnregulatedAgent ..................................70 Marinetti and the Fruits of Colonialism ................................83 Chapter 3: From the Grotesque to the Uncanny: Djuna Barneson Domesticity, Body, Self ......99 "theDoor that hath banged a million Years!": Grotesque Domestic Bodies in Ladies Almanack .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 107 "a swill-pail [ ...] brimming with abominations": Uncanny Domesticity in Nightwood .............. ....................................... 12-1 Chapter 4: "a violent kind of delightfulness": The Paradoxical Domesticity of Stein's Tender Buttons . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 134 Breaking the Noun ............................................... 144 Rejecting Utility: Tender Buttons Critiques the Victorians ................ 150 Defamiliarizingthe Domestic: Violence in Tender Buttons ................158 Chapter 5: Conclusion ............................................................ 172 ' Bibliography ......................................................... 176 Vita ................................................................. 188 Chapter 1 Modernism and Domesticity Literary modernismhas been presented, in scholarship and critical histories, as a masculinized movement. That is, with the exception of Virginia Woolf, who occupies "perhaps the sole femaleslot on the high modernistroster" (Harrison and Peterson viii), the modernistcanon has always been decidedly male. This canon was anchored by "The Men of 1914," Wyndham Lewis's phrase to identify Ezra Pound, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and himself, which phrase was then adopted by Hugh Kenner in his influentialstudy The Pound Era. In his After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Andreas Huyssen describes the masculine slant of the modernistcanon as "the powerful masculinist and misogynist current within the trajectory of modernism, a current which time and time again openly states its contempt forwomen and forthe masses and which had Nietzsche as its most eloquent and influentialrepresentative" ( 49). This masculinized version of modernismhas persisted and stood as the only version of modernismuntil the 1970s and 80s, when feministscholars began to reassess the canon. 1 This narrowed focusof canonical modernismhas, of course, impeded discussion 1 For analyses of the