THE STRIFE OF WORDS’: VIOLENCE IN THE WRITING OF DOROTHY RICHARDSON by Louisa Minna Westbury April 1999 Department of English University College London Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of London ProQuest Number: U641989 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest U641989 Published by ProQuest LLC(2015). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 'The Quakers ... worked everywhere, ploughing up the land, calling men to cease the strife of words'. Dorothy Richardson, The Quakers; Past and Present, p . 28. ABSTRACT This thesis examines Dorothy Richardson's thirteen volume novel-sequence Pilgrimage, written between 1913 and 1954. Critical approaches to this work are diverse; however, I was struck by an apparent general contradiction in literary studies of Richardson. While all critics agree that Richardson's writing is fluid in form and celebrates multiplicity, most nevertheless acknowledge psychological conflict in her work, and many use the language of strife in describing her. My thesis focuses on the violence in Richardson's work, making it explicit, rather than implicit, as previous critics have done. I argue that Richardson's fascination with violence is a continuing complex preoccupation, which must be taken into account to modify existing readings of her. I begin by examining The Quakers; Past and Present (1914), arguing that this book not only served as Richardson's apprenticeship as an author, and allowed her to explore her mystical leanings, but it also enabled her to express her preoccupation with violence. I then analyse Pointed Roofs (1914), the first volume of Pilgrimage, comparing Richardson to women writers such as Elizabeth von Amim, Katherine Mansfield and Violet Hunt, who were fascinated and repulsed by the latent aggression and masculinity of pre-war Germany. I consider the connections between the feminist element and the formal daring of Pilgrimage within the context of feminist fiction of its time, arguing that the linked themes of social and literary rupture constitute forms of violence. I then turn to the significance of London in Pilgrimage, focusing on the accosting of women by men in public spaces, and Miriam's encounters with beggars, with reference to Virginia Woolf, May Sinclair, and H.G. Wells. Finally, I locate the centrality of hatred in Pilgrimage, examining what I term Richardson's 'unreasonable' hatreds - or those which are not explicable in terms of reasonable alibis. I conclude that one of the desired goals of Miriam's and of Richardson's quest is coming to terms with hatred and violence. The character of Jean functions as a check on Miriam's hatreds; Jean is an externalisation of Richardson's own internal drive to suppress hatred. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to express my most sincere thanks and appreciation to my supervisor, Professor David Trotter, for his unfailing support and guidance. I am extremely grateful for his help and advice in writing this thesis, for the wisdom, acuity and kindness with which he read my work and gave shape to my ideas, and for his willingness to answer questions at aU times. My thanks also go to Dr Kasia Boddy and Dr Rene Weiss for their advice and support. I thank my fnends, both inside and outside University College, who have been extremely supportive. Finally, I wish to thank my mother and father, my sisters Charlotte and Philippa, and especially my husband Julian Treger, for their unceasing support, their understanding and sympathy in difficult times, and for their continuous encouragement. CONTENTS ABSTRACT.....................................................................................................................3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.............................................................................................4 CONTENTS.....................................................................................................................5 INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................... 6 CHAPTER 1 'THE STRIFE OF WORDS': VIOLENCE IN THE QUAKERS: PAST AND PRESENT....................26 CHAPTER 2 WOMEN IN GERMANY.....................................................................74 CHAPTER 3 DOROTHY RICHARDSON AND THE NEW WOMAN................. 128 CHAPTER 4 ACTS OF ACCOSTING: THE DARKER SIDE OF LONDON IN PILGRIMAGE................... 179 CHAPTER 5 RICHARDSON'S HATREDS ............................................................ 213 CONCLUSION........................................................................................................... 254 APPENDIX................................................................................................................. 263 BIBLIOGRAPHY.......................................................................................................264 INTRODUCTION One of my first undertakings in this study of Dorothy Richardson's thirteen volume novel-sequence Pilgrimage (which she wrote between 1913 and 1954), was a thorough perusal of the secondary literature, in order to ascertain what had already been said about her. As Carol Watts, George H. Thomson and Joanne Winning have provided comprehensive surveys of the existing Dorothy Richardson criticism,^ I shall not re-cover well trodden ground by giving a lengthy account of my reading here; rather, I shall refer to relevant critical works at specific points in my argument. Winning, whose thesis usefully explores aspects of gender, femininity and lesbian sexual identity in Pilgrimage, arguing that the latter forms 'the subtextual motivation of the text', has noted the diversity of critical approaches to Richardson's novel-sequence: [This] clearly indicates that it is a vast and complex text which supports multiple and often contradictory readings. Despite the apparent cohesion conferred upon it by the parameters of the chronological narrative. Pilgrimage is in fact a text of fragments, written over a period of forty years and through a panorama of changing cultural and historical ^See Carol Watts, Dorothy Richardson (Plymouth; Northcote House Publishers, 1995), Select Bibliography, pp. 91-93; George H. Thomson, A Reader's Guide to Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 1996), Chapter Five: A Select Bibliography, pp. 145-169; and Joanne Winning,Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage as Archive of the Self (PhD thesis, 1996), Introduction, pp. 5-17. Other critical studies have been published since these works appeared. Those I have found particularly useful are Jacqueline Rose's 'Dorothy Richardson and the Jew' in States of Fantasy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) pp. 117-132, an examination of Richardson's problematic representations of race and Englishness; Susan Gevirtz'sNarrative's Journey: the fiction and film writing of Dorothy Richardson (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1996), which takes as its subjectPilgrimage and Richardson's late 1920s 'Continuous Performance' columns about the early silent cinema, and explores the ways in which each illuminate and interrogate the other, usefully defining Richardson's theories of reading and viewing practices; and Kristin Bluemel's Experimenting on the Borders of Modernism: Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1997), a study of the relationship between experimental forms and oppositional politics in Pilgrimage, which connects the work's challenge to the literary and cultural norms of its period with Richardson's construction of a lesbian sexuality, her use of medicine to interrogate class structures, and her feminist critique of early twentieth century science. landscapes. For this reason it defies and eludes a unitary reading, throwing up endless shifts and contradictions. ^ Indeed, one issue all the critics seem agreed upon is that Richardson's writing is typically modernist in its open-endedness, its impressionism, and its celebration of multiplicity. Jean Radford, for example, reads Pilgrimage as a precursor of écriture feminine in 'its unboundedness, fluidity, refusal of closure, its pleonastic, metonymic qualities . .'^ Stephen Heath believes that Richardson is 'writing in the end for silence', away fi'om the reductive and categorising impositions of language, notably male language, and that she narrates her protagonist's life as 'a story in elsewheres and silences'. Heath explains that 'the point is ... that there is no one, only the myriad, the flow that only by a fiction - the old idea of the novel - can be stopped in some simple unity, some given identity'."* Watts, who argues that Pilgrimage offers 'a form of cultural memory of a difficult coming-to-consciousness, a struggle over gendered meanings and identities which is no less contested today', uses the term 'mobile impressionism' to describe Miriam's consciousness. Watts writes: 'the novel ... attempts to represent the way in which an individual inevitably experiences the "now" of his or her cultural moment as partial