Modernist Movements: Border Crossings and Ways of Knowing in the Literature of Anglo-American Women, 1913-1930 A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities 2018 Katharina Boeckenhoff School of Arts, Languages and Cultures 2 Table of Contents Abbreviations ............................................................................................................................. 3 Abstract ...................................................................................................................................... 4 Declaration ................................................................................................................................. 5 Copyright Statement .................................................................................................................. 5 Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................... 6 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................... 7 Modernist Movements ............................................................................................................. 7 Knowing Geographically in Modernist Studies ................................................................... 13 Movement and Producing Modern Sexual Knowledge ....................................................... 25 Movement and Knowledge in Women’s Literary Modernism ............................................ 32 CHAPTER ONE ........................................................................................................................... 44 Travelling as a Way of Knowing .......................................................................................... 44 Sexual Hermeneutics of Space ............................................................................................. 44 Border Crossings in Women’s Travel Writing .................................................................... 52 ‘Men of Science’ on Voyages of Discovery ........................................................................ 56 CHAPTER TWO .......................................................................................................................... 70 Surface Aesthetics and Non-Arrivals in Olive Moore’s Spleen ......................................... 70 Journeys to Italy in British Fiction ....................................................................................... 74 Surface Aesthetics and Deferred Arrivals ............................................................................ 83 Material Textuality and Sites of Knowledge ....................................................................... 92 Gender and Authorship: Inhabiting the Space of the Page .................................................. 97 CHAPTER THREE ..................................................................................................................... 101 Moving towards the Real in Natalie Barney’s The One Who Is Legion .......................... 101 Reading Barney’s Recalcitrant Body ................................................................................. 104 Between Disembodiment and Incorporation ..................................................................... 112 Materiality/ Immateriality .................................................................................................. 116 Actuality/ Potentiality ........................................................................................................ 120 Body versus Flesh/ Text versus Form ................................................................................ 124 CHAPTER FOUR ....................................................................................................................... 131 Choreographies of Border Crossings in Djuna Barnes’s Short Prose ............................ 131 Travelling Intimately with Djuna Barnes .......................................................................... 134 Traversing the Surface of the Page .................................................................................... 145 The Artist as Traveller: Seeing with Eyes Wide Open ...................................................... 153 Cosmopolitan Sophistication and Literary Artistry ........................................................... 156 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 160 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................... 165 Word Count: 73,638 3 Abbreviations ‘BI’ Djuna Barnes, Becoming Intimate with the Bohemians ‘GM’ Djuna Barnes, The Grande Malade ‘GV’ Djuna Barnes, Greenwich Village As It Is ‘H’ Djuna Barnes, The Hatmaker ‘HM’ Djuna Barnes, The Hem of Manhattan ‘LQ’ Djuna Barnes, Who Is the Last Squatter? ‘SN’ Djuna Barnes, Seeing New York With the Soldiers SP Olive Moore, Spleen TO Natalie Clifford Barney, The One Who Is Legion or A.D.’s After-Life ‘WA’ Djuna Barnes, Why Go Abroad – See Europe in Brooklyn! 4 Abstract This thesis proposes a new way of thinking about relations between literary modernism and movement by exploring the writings of Anglo-American women published between 1913 and 1930. Crossing borders to ‘foreign’ places is an instance of movement particularly relevant to the colonial geopolitics and ethnographic projects in Britain, Europe and North America in the early twentieth century. In the discourse of anthropology and sexology – gradually emerging as disciplines with ‘scientific’ ambitions at the time – travels abroad served as a way of gathering knowledge empirically: ‘men of science’ traversing national borders to gather data is a central and gendered aspect in the production of anthropological and sexological knowledge. This thesis brings into critical focus the scientific paradigm of travel with the aim of illustrating the ways in which border crossings and ‘foreign’ spaces figure in literature’s engagement with forms of knowing sexual otherness in the early twentieth century. Texts by Olive Moore, Natalie Clifford Barney, and Djuna Barnes are read as sites appropriating and interrogating movement as a gendered way of knowing through experiments with narrative movement, textual space, female authorship, and the legibility of eccentric bodies. How movement is mobilised as a practice of knowing sexual otherness not only in anthropological and sexological publications but also in modernist studies is the subject of Chapter One. Chapters Two to Four explore the distinct ways in which the complex relationship between gendered movement and sexual knowledge shapes the experimental aesthetics of texts published by Anglo-American women writers between 1913 and 1930. Chapter Two examines how the story of an ‘unnatural’ English woman’s emigration to an island in Southern Italy in Moore’s Spleen (1930) aligns deviations from gender norms with geographical peripheries but, at the same time, complicates this correspondence. The oscillation between loyally replicating and ironically mimicking ‘scientific’ discourse on gender, sexuality and race characterize a novel invested in figuring itself as different whilst taking dialectical recourse to existing paradigms of difference. Chapter Three probes how the ‘journey of discovery’ in Barney’s The One Who Is Legion or A.D.’s After-Life (1930) unfolds in form of the protagonist’s quest for a genderless existence and in form of the text’s search for a new way of representing outside of any literary traditions. The novel seeks to overcome the reproduction of sameness – encapsulated in procreative heterosexuality – by exploring the potential of liminal states and spaces as grounds for difference. Chapter Four illustrates the significance of travel as an exceptionally productive concept, uniting aspects ranging from the skill of literary representation and the production of knowledge to female authorship, in newspaper articles and short stories published by Barnes between 1913 and 1930. By taking recourse to the language and logic of tourism many of her pieces pose questions about travelling and storytelling as ways of producing authentic representations about a place and its people. Geographical frameworks and spatial concepts proliferate in current approaches to literary modernist studies. The thesis contributes to this critical momentum by exploring a less considered line of inquiry: rather than examining the kind of knowledges a spatial concept like movement yields it probes how a number of female-authored texts playfully interrogate how moving across space is implicated in a process of knowing sexual otherness, as a male prerogative, in the early twentieth century. How these texts respond to the gendered discourse of movement as a ‘scientific’ way of knowing presents a yet little examined aspect of the epistemological and aesthetic concerns of female modernist writers. 5 Declaration No portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning Copyright Statement i. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and s/he has given The University of