The Spoils of Shame: Queer Affect in the Works of Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Radclyffe Hall, and Virginia Woolf By Dominique D. Groeneveld Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English at Brown University PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY, 2011 @ Copyright 2011 by Dominique D. Groeneveld This dissertation by Dominique D. Groeneveld is accepted in its present form by the Department of English as satisfying the dissertation requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Date ___________ ____________________________________ Prof. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date ___________ ____________________________________ Prof. Ellen Rooney, Reader Date ___________ ____________________________________ Prof. Tamar Katz, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date ___________ ____________________________________ Prof. Peter Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii Curriculum Vitae Dominique D. Groeneveld attended the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where she earned a Master‟s degree (Cum Laude) in the Department of Comparative Literature in 1995. Her Master‟s thesis interrogates critical constructions of the law in Continental modernist writing. Between 1997 and 1999, she has taught in the courses in English literature at Houston Community College and the University of Houston. As a graduate student in the Department of English Literature at Brown University, she has specialized in the fields of Anglophone literature from 1900-1945, literary theory, and the study of gender and sexuality; on the latter, she has designed and taught a number of undergraduate seminars at Brown. She was the recipient of the Florence Harnish Dissertation Fellowship and the Graduate Fellowship to the 2003-2004 Pembroke Seminar. She has also served as Graduate Coordinator of the Mellon Graduate Workshop “Genealogies of Knowledges” and, from 2001 to 2005, has been the Graduate Representative on the Brown Faculty Committee for Lesbian, Gay, and Transgender Affairs. She has presented conference papers on Emily Dickinson, Henry James, James Joyce, modernist affect, and queer shame at, among others, the 2001 and 2004 James Joyce Conferences (London, UK; Dublin, Ireland), the 2002, 2003, and 2005 conferences of the Modernist Studies Association (Houston, US; Birmingham, UK; Chicago, US) and the 2006 NEMLA Conference in Philadelphia. iv Acknowledgments In the course of writing this dissertation, I have acquired a number of different, happy debts. Barbara Herrnstein Smith has taught me—through her work and, importantly, through her persistently giving engagement with that of my own—the value of critical practices that remain open to the possibility that one may not find what one was looking for—or find what one wasn‟t looking for. Her insistence that ideas and feelings can (and do) unfold complexly inspires the interrogations of shame in this project. I am indebted to her intellectual generosity, her more than capacious support, and for offering a model for the kind of thinker and teacher I can only aspire to become. I also thank Ellen Rooney and Tamar Katz for their crucial feedback, especially in the dissertation‟s initial stages of framing its literary and conceptual scope. I have been sustained, throughout the past years, by the truly enabling commitments of queer kin, persons whose lives and works enact singular and, at times, invisible ties that lie beyond those of the biological family or oppositely gendered coupleship. From Stephen Barber, I have received the vital gifts—lessons, really, at once personal, pedagogical, and philosophical—of doing sisterhood well; danke, meine Schwester. W.R. Duell and James Faubion are in, this respect, eminent Foucauldians, having elevated the latter‟s notion of “friendship as a way of life” into the art of loving generously; as such, they are the finest of artists. To Colleen Lamos, finally, I owe more than I can say. I thank her, most of all, for her confidence in what are deemed to be sub- human, or even non-human, states of mind that, she frequently emphasizes, encompass potentially surprising affective and other capacities—perhaps precisely v because those states of minds are closer to those of other species than to those of “normal” humans. Mijn bijzondere dank gaat verder uit naar Coen and Annamieke die, ondanks wat soms een uitzichtsloze en ondoorgrondelijke onderneming leek te zijn, op ontelbare manieren (en met zoveel liefde) hun steun en buitengewone loyaliteit hebben getoond— steun voor een voor hen ongetwijfeld mysterieus werk. Dat werk had evenwel nooit het daglicht gezien zonder deze prachtige mensen; met hun, de wereld is eenvoudigweg een stukje beter. Dit proefschrift is het eindpunt van een lange geschiedenis die begon met mijn moeders dagelijkse lees-lessen toen, op de leeftijd van zes, mijn specifieke vorm van linkshandigheid-gerelateerde leesblindheid aan het licht kwam. Het is een bijzondere ironie in deze dat dit proefschrift zich in belangrijke mate buigt over de vaak verbazingwekkende wendingen binnen cognitive processes. Haar toewijding—elke middag twintig minuten lezen—heeft ertoe geleid dat lezen, in plaats van een probleem, een grootse bezigheid werd, een toegang tot fantastische personages, verre tijden, nieuwe werelden. Mijn diepe dank aan Femie voor het feit dat ze nooit twijfelde dat haar dochter zou kunnen lezen en dat, decennia later, ze ook zou kunnen promoveren—mijn dank ook voor zo veel meer. Moeders zijn wonderlijke wezens. Dit proefschrift is opgedragen aan mijn vader, die het helaas niet meer heeft kunnen lezen, en aan Joep, die het wellicht in de toekomst wel zal lezen. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Uneasy Dispositions: Modernism‟s Bad Feelings 1-25 Chapter One: Divas Falling Down: 26 -63 Shame in the Later Writings of Oscar Wilde and Eve Sedgwick Chapter Two: “Theories” of Shame and Sophistication in Joyce‟s Dubliners 64-105 Chapter Three: Inverted Feelings: 106-161 The Well of Loneliness, Gay Shame and Male Honor Chapter Four: Making Scenes: 162-245 Woolf's Experimental Affects in Three Guineas and Between the Acts vii i n t r o d u c t i o n Uneasy Dispositions: Modernism’s Bad Feelings For all its hauteur and sophistication, its cool impersonality, irony, and distancing experimentalism, modernism feels badly, a lot. In terms of its emotional disposition, modernism appears to be quite “low,” full of negative feelings, dysphoric sentiments, and other affective unpleasantness: jealousy and melancholia, for example (so capaciously combined in Proust); or envy and ressentiment (prominent in, among others, the worlds of Prufrock and Anderson‟s Ohioans); isolation and apathy (point of destination for most of Rhys‟s heroines, many of the characters in Barnes‟s Nightwood); irritation and discontent (of Joyce‟s artist as a young man), and abjection and disillusionment (of Mann‟s artist as an old man); alienating boredom (staged in the plays of Beckett); paranoia (think of Pound, Conrad, Lewis); and depression, disgust, as well as infinite permutations and combinations of the above (just turn to Kafka). Moreover, and this only intensifies modernism‟s affective malaise, modernists seemed to have had bad feelings about feeling, most influentially expressed by T.S. Eliot‟s call to “escape from emotion.” In his theory of an aesthetics of impersonality, he classifies and re-classifies feelings versus emotions, then new versus usual emotions, complex versus ordinary ones to finally arrive at the proposition that the modern poet rework the latter kind of emotion into “feelings which are not in actual emotions at all”—as if, by taking “actual” emotions 1 out of feelings, the latter become less, well, touchy-feely.1 To be sure, Eliot is envisioning a modernism that is devoid of the alleged excessive emotionality of Victorian literature, but his awkwardly articulated ideas also announce, even enact, an affective repertoire that is uneasy in and about feeling. And yet, as Suzanne Clark argues, the legacy of Eliot‟s impersonal aesthetics, especially in the New Critical emphasis on formalist and objective evaluations of modernist texts, has mostly resulted in the notion of an unfeeling, rather than an ill-feeling modernism.2 When scholars do address this “low” mood, they do so often in very general terms, attributing it to the fast and furious philosophical, scientific, socio-economic, and political changes of the first half of the twentieth century. Unlike the grand feelings of nineteenth-century fiction, such as sympathy and pity, modernism‟s dysphoric temperament thus appears to be more suited to relativist attitudes toward truth, belief, and perception (Einstein, Heisenberg, Bergson, Fleck, James), to more deterministic notions 1 T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1920), The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, David H. Richter, ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin‟s, 1998), 501. 2 Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 2-10. My point here is not to dismiss Eliot‟s underlying critique of the expressive model in interpreting and evaluating literature, of the tendency, that is, to confuse the literary text with the articulation of the feelings of its author. To be sure, Eliot‟s ideas (as well as John Dewey‟s subsequent definition of “aesthetic emotion” and “objectified emotion,” Wimsatt and Beardsley‟s concept of the affective fallacy, and