Durham E-Theses A Literary Feminist Phenomenology of Place in Early Twentieth Century Women's Writing FOO, CARISSA,CAI,LI How to cite: FOO, CARISSA,CAI,LI (2017) A Literary Feminist Phenomenology of Place in Early Twentieth Century Women's Writing, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/12154/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 A Literary Feminist Phenomenology of Place in Early Twentieth Century Women’s Writing Carissa Foo A Thesis presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Studies Durham University England 2017 Statement of Copyright The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the author’s prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. Abstract The following work develops a critical approach to women’s experience by engaging with phenomenology and modernist poetics of place. It critiques the androcentricity of phenomenology and philosophical abstractions of gender and space, arguing that a feminist phenomenology with its focus on alternative modes of being in a diverse but socially and gender-stratified world can more aptly articulate experiential specificities that neither fortify nor fit into conventional paradigms of experience. This thesis discusses the imaginative and aesthetic rendering of women’s experiences of rooms in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, and Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover,” “Pink May,” and “Hand in Glove.” Chapter 1 addresses the affinities between phenomenology and feminism, and trace the trajectory of the narrative of place in modernist women’s writing. Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 discuss the power of place, examining how women experience the environing world and come to perceive it in its givenness. The chapters show how naturalised understandings of identity and gender manifest in the experience of place, and argue that a “shaking” of place and the discovery of a room of one’s own can expand the realm of experiential possibilities to configure a feminine kind of experience that may transform the normative world into something more hospitable and livable for those who fall short of the hegemonic ideal. Contents Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................ 1 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 2 1. Phenomenology, Feminism, and Place in Modernist Women’s Writing ................. 10 Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology and the Material World 10 Feminist Revision and Phenomenology 15 The Phenomenon of Place in Modernist Women’s Writing 24 2. In Situ: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway ................................................................. 38 Situations in Phenomenology and Literature 39 Situations in Mrs Dalloway 45 Connecting Places 61 Confining Places 68 Towards Feminine Experience 79 3. Bent on the Dark: Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood ......................................................... 90 Sense Experience 98 Position and Power 109 Bent Bodies 117 Body-World 134 Negative Space 142 What of the Night? 154 4. A Room of Her Past: Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight ................................ 164 Contextualising Rhysian Place 167 A Radical Reflection on Good Morning, Midnight 171 Between Seeing and Thinking 180 The Habit of Rooms 190 Spatial Consciousness 195 Feminine Re-Vision 204 5. On Shaky Ground: Elizabeth Bowen’s Ghost Fiction ........................................... 222 The Haunted House is a Bad Home 230 The Power of Beliefs 249 Believing is Practically Seeing 258 Committing to A View of the World 271 Conclusion ................................................................................................................. 278 Works Cited ............................................................................................................... 284 Foo 1 Acknowledgements The Ph.D. journey has been tempestuous, with many lessons and crises. But I would not trade a single moment. I have learned so much. I see the world differently now. I must thank John for his tremendous support and meticulous supervision. He has taught me many things, but most of all, how to better appreciate texts. I want to thank my postgraduate friends, who have lamented and laughed with me in trying times; my housemates and church friends, who have helped to put things in perspective; my friends in Singapore, who are always there, here. Finally, I extend my deepest gratitude to my parents for believing in me. To God who gives me courage and wisdom and love. Foo 2 Introduction If we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not as always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees and whatever it may be in themselves… —Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929) Virginia Woolf closes A Room of One’s Own by inviting fellow women to experience the world and in doing so live for the dead poets of our sex. If “our relation is to the world of reality and not to the world of men and women,” then the women who came before our time “shall find it possible to live and write” (132). To have a room of her own, woman must first turn to her relation to the lived world, that brick and mortar world. And it is the city of London to which Clarissa in Mrs Dalloway turns her attention. The hubbub of modern life is a stimulus for her interior space: as she “plunges” into the heart of the city, the spatial boundary between inner and outer spaces collapses, and she is in the midst of “what she loved” (MD 4). Sasha Jenson in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, too, fixates on the city; her wanderings and relentless search for a hotel room of her own are spatial manifestations of her lack of fixity and socio-geographical ambivalence. Contrary to Clarissa, Sasha is where she does not feel belonged. Still in both novels is an emphasis on women’s active engagement with the exterior world. Beyond the city, the accent on space opens up narratives of inconspicuous, modest rooms wherein identities, subjectivities, the past and the present, action and thought are interrogated. In Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover,” the room upstairs is where Kathleen Drover escapes the haunting of her former lover and re- Foo 3 sees the past in light of the woman she has become. In Mrs Dalloway, the attic room in London somewhat merges with the room on the top of the house in Bourton where Clarissa was once with Sally Seton; the room expands just as Clarissa’s aloneness gives way to female solidarity. In Bowen’s “Hand in Glove,” the attic room is also a threshold space, between reality and unreality where the oppressive culture takes the form of a murderous glove. The tight room allows for confrontations of rigid rules and boundaries, fixed norms and conventions, ironically making space for a deeper contemplation of the significance and representation of place in the study of women’s experience.1 The experiential turn to places—be they streets or rooms—is a modern phenomenon. One explanation for this were the technological advances that emerged from about the late nineteenth century to early twentieth century which created new ways of experiencing space.2 The motor car, for example, altered conceptions of speed and mobility: time taken to get from one place to another was shortened and distance was a lesser obstacle.3 Such changes affected everyday experience, including that of the modern writer. Woolf wrote in her diary in July 1927: “All images are now tinged with driving a motor” (149). Modern experiences were influenced by new forms of mobility which inspired the freedom of imagination.4 1 See Chapter 1 for a discussion of rooms in general; Chapters 4 and 5 for a detailed discussion of small rooms in Good Morning, Midnight and “Hand in Glove.” 2 These include mainly innovations which changed the way distance and time was perceived: the safety bicycles in the 1880s, mass production and sale of the motor car in the 1900s, and the Wright brothers’ flyers in 1900s which allowed cross-country flights over a sustained period of time. 3 Concepts of time and space shifted in tandem with scientific discoveries of the time: Einstein’s relativity theory destabilised the uniform space of Newtonian physics and Euclidean geometry. For a more detailed discussion of the changing conception of space in the early 1900s, see the chapter “Space” in Stephen Kern’s The Modernist Novel. 4 Wendy Parkins elaborates on the life of the modern writer and the relationship between writing and driving: “the ephemerality, spontaneity and unpredictability of car travel” challenged modern writers to “capture a moment in time” (152). For a detailed discussion of how the modern writer was influenced by transportation options like the motor car, see Parkins’s Mobility and Modernity in Women’s Novels Foo 4 The rapidly modernising world and varying perceptions of space figure into the narrative of place in modern fiction. The experiential turn to one’s relation with the world as suggested in A Room of One’s Own is not only a material one but modernist as well.5 The authors discussed in this thesis: Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Djuna Barnes, and Elizabeth Bowen, are a coterie of modernists in the early twentieth century who “write of events in meaningful rooms and evocative exterior settings” (Kern, The Modernist Novel 77).