Women, Modernism and British Poetry, 1910–1939

Resisting Femininity

Jane Dowson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351871518
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Primarily a literary history, Women, Modernism and British Poetry, 1910-1939 provides a timely discussion of individual women poets who have become, or are becoming, well-known as their works are reprinted but about whom little has yet been written. This volume recognizes the contributions, overlooked previously, of such British poets as Anna Wickham, Nancy Cunard, Edith Sitwell, Mina Loy, Charlotte Mew, May Sinclair, Vita Sackville-West and Sylvia Townsend Warner; and the impact of such American poets as H.D., Amy Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore and Laura Riding on literary practice in Britain. This book primarily maps the poetry scene in Britain but identifies the significance of the network of writers between London, New York and Paris. It assesses women's participation in the diversity of modernist developments which include avant-garde experiments, quiet, but subtly challenging, formalism and assertive 'new woman' voices. It not only chronicles women's poetry but also their publications and involvement in running presses, bookshops and writing criticism. Although historically situated, it is written from the perspective of contemporary debates concerning the interface of gender and modernism. The author argues that a cohering aesthetic of the poetry is a denial of femininity through various evasions of gendered identity such as masking, male and female impersonations and the rupturing of realist modes.

Chapter One
Introduction

(You seldom get the impression of femininity from a woman's book.)¹

My vision for this book was to restore the reputations which literary women gained and lost while also reassessing their significance to a pluralised modernisms. One central strategy is to unsettle the binary concepts which falsely sever 'experiment' from 'tradition' and which support a hierarchical model of modernist poetics. The omission of women from histories of literary modernism is particularly invidious because of its elevated status and metonymical 'intellectuality'. It assigns women to modernism's antithetical ground of the 'popular' or 'sentimental'. Since, however, the dominance of high modernist principles partly accounts for the exclusion of much poetry from twentieth-century literary canons, there have to be reservations about endorsing the principles of selection which have undermined women. Some feminist histories have also colluded with the exclusivity of the so-called avant-garde and discounted non-experimentalists, partly because they seem old-fashioned and partly because they appear to support patriarchal structures by adopting verse forms associated with a male-dominated tradition. In privileging the formally adventurous, however, feminist critics have often missed women's negotiations with literary conventions; they have not always recognised the cultural constraints which meant that many women in the early years of the century were writing as men in order to publish at all. Their textual practice was complicated by their uncomfortable relationship with their literary foremothers -the nineteenth-century 'poetesses', caricatured as imitative and genteel personifications of sentimentality - particularly in this period when both the impersonal poetics of modernism and the emergent social realism of orthodox thirties poetry were exceptionally hostile to the sentimental. Consequently, they disguised their gender, often literally by using pseudonyms or initials or by male speakers and male-associated verse forms and metres. Some used anti-realist strategies to evade gender identification altogether. The 'avant-garde' poets, however, subverted the male-associated traditions through innovative syntax or by breaking conventional boundaries of genre. Others were formally cautious but occupied with sex and class politics. Common to all poets was a negotiation with stereotyped femininity, by denial, rejection, avoidance, parody or transgressive representations.

I concentrate on the poetry scene in Britain because most of the feminist revisionary histories have come from the American academy and have tended to overlook British women and the contribution of American women to poetry in Britain. I include some American women's involvement in the international network of writers which was significant to the production and promotion of modern poetry in Britain. Although Amy Lowell, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein and H.D. are frequently canonised in the United States, they have yet to be integrated into British anthologies or academic syllabuses of women's writing. Laura Riding, an American who lived in Britain on and off during the 1920s, and Mina Loy, who was English but lived in the United States, have not been properly reassessed in relation to Anglo-American, modernist or women's poetry.

Most of the work was written or published between 1910 and 1939 and therefore follows on from the revisionary studies of women's poetry of the nineteenth century.² Modernism's inauguration is cited variously between 1890 and 1919.1 have chosen 1910 as a suitable starting point, since the death of Edward VII and accession of George V that year were marked by the new 'Georgian' poetry. Additionally, the Post-Impressionist exhibition stimulated interest in new modes of formalism in art and writing.³ For Virginia Woolf, 'in or about 1910' heralded the arrival of modernity when 'human character changed': 'All human relations have shifted - those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children, and when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.'⁴ The years 1910 to 1939 were a period of social upheaval dominated by the First World War and changes in legislation concerning the rights of women. Women's poems contribute to a more comprehensive cultural representation of modernism and demand a revision of the narrowly language-centred model of literary criticism.

In order to destabilise its hegemony, feminist critics can find themselves wanting to place women within modernism, to discredit it as a meaningful term, to claim it as a feminine aesthetic, to identify a distinctly female modernism or to locate it as an international female movement. There is a convincing case for redefining modernism as a cultural crisis associated with feminist activity at the beginning of this century. The persistent supremacy of formal experiment in the rhetoric of literary criticism also means that women must be counted among the experimentalists if they are not to be perceived as perpetually conservative and irrelevant. While experimental modernism continues to be associated only with male poets in Britain, the conceptual association of 'women' and 'sentimental'- because modernism defined itself in opposition to the 'sentimental'- is able to persist. Modernism needs to be pluralised for historical accuracy. Celeste Schenck argues for opening up modernism to 'anything written between 1910 and 1940', judging that the loss of 'a certain stylistic designation' is less than the gain of 'all other modernisms against which a single strain of white male, international modernism has achieved such relief'. Although not going as far as 'anything written', I use Celeste Schenck's distinction between 'avant-garde' and 'rear-guard' modernisms:

If Mew's case is to be heard and the annals of poetic 'modernism' duly revised, we must attend more carefully to the differences between rear-guard and avant-garde modernism. If we listen to the more traditional meters of Anna Wickham, Charlotte Mew, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Alice Meynell, and Edith Sitwell (not to mention the five hundred or so British women who wrote strong war poetry during the years around 1914) as attentively as we now hear the daring verbal experiments of H.D., Gertrude Stein, and Mina Loy, we must renounce, salutarily, any hope for a unitary totalising theory of female poetic modernism. The situation of marginalised modernists such as Mew, Wickham, Townsend Warner, Meynell and Sitwell has much to tell us, not only about the dispersive underside of the 'Modernist' monolith but also about inadvertent feminist participation in the politics of canonicity.⁵

There have to be reservations about even Schenck's division- between avant-garde and rear-guard modernisms- since it suggests a point at which an 'avant-garde' modernist crosses the 'rear-guard' line. In separating 'avant-garde' from 'rear-guard' and 'female' modernisms, I do not intend to endorse the superiority of stylistic innovation or to entrench clear-cut categorisation. On the contrary, my difficulty in classifying the poems indicates that the line is only ever arbitrary. My chapter titles, 'Between Georgian and Bloomsbury', 'The Anglo-American Avant-garde' and 'Female Modernists', emerged from the textual and contextual complexities which necessitated cross-classification and new groupings. Stylistically radical poetry is often not as anti-realist as it would appear and a poet like Charlotte Mew runs across all the groups. 1 use 'rearguard' to describe a stylistic reserve which is associated with the psychological conflict between embracing and rejecting modernity with its implications for newly defined gender roles.

Collectively, the diversity and ingenuity of the poets demonstrate that it is fruitless to approach the period with a binary model of modernist or non-modernist art. As Suzanne Clark puts it, 'modernism is both caught in and stabilised by a system of gendered binaries: male/female, serious/sentimental, critical/popular. Upsetting the system - as women do - introduces an instability and reveals the contradictions'.⁶ A binary model is also inappropriate since literary histories have exaggerated the schism between 'tradition' and 'experiment'.

The radical and reactionary forces of modernism co-exist in parallel or in competition. The cross-currents of literary practices which considered themselves 'modern' mean that there are no grounds for the exclusion of poetry which was not stylistically extreme. For a start, the long shadow of W.B. Yeats casts doubt over any attempt to divide the 'old' from the 'new' in poets or poetry. T.S. Eliot reckoned that modern poetry was recognisable but unclassifiable: it was 'perceived by the sensibility, but not defined in words'.⁷

The contemporary debate recognised that the sense of modern could not be divorced from a sense of tradition and wrestled with whether 'modern' meant a clean break from, a reaction to, or a continuation of the past. In his influential anthology, The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936), Michael Roberts cited Hart Crane's dismissal of the myths of a radical modernity: 'The deliberate program then, of a "break" with the past or tradition seems to me to be a sentimental fallacy.'⁸

If form and metre are used as registers of the simultaneous tugs of the 'old' and 'new', poets variously used the short lyric, the narrative poem or ballad of the English tradition - that is nineteenth-century Romanticism and the ignominious vers libre. For some, the revival of older forms, notably Elizabethan and classical, was an attempt to connect with a more distant past than the previous century.

Formalist structure, by itself, does not signify the measure of modernity in a poem. It is more discernible in the collapse of formal rhetoric and preference for contemporary idioms. Modernity was most palpably registered in a change of subject matter, from the rural to the urban and from romance to desire. It was also registered in a psychological alienation from the modem world and its counterpoint condition of retreat, through myth, fantasy and dream.

The continuing respect for traditional forms in the literary papers contradicts the myth that all literary practice was avant-garde. The equation between radical form and potential anarchism originated in the reception to vers libre by a conservative literary establishment whose approval women needed to be taken seriously. To some extent the war deflated the revolutionary ideals associated with imagism and vorticism. Although the General Strike in 1926 and two minority Labour governments in 1924 and 1929 sharpened the socialist awareness of intellectuals, which developed through the 1930s, it was mitigated by their reaction against mass culture. As John Lucas observes, 'The radical impulse in poetry of the 1920s is, therefore, a complex matter ... [English poetry] was a great deal more various and more accomplished than is usually allowed. '⁹ He contests the myths that all the best English poets before Auden were killed in action, leaving poetry to the foreigners, Yeats, Pound and Eliot, and recognises the number of women writers: 'If the 1920s sees the emergence of a new generation of women prose writers - Woolf, Rhys, Bowen, for example - it is also remarkable for the number of women poets who begin to publish.'¹⁰ However, the poets named-Anna Wickham, Charlotte Mew, H.D., Sylvia Townsend Warner, Elizabeth Daryush- are 'not worth making a fuss over', except for Laura Riding, 'a poet of real worth, though the nature of that worth is very difficult to pin down and deserves an essay in itself'. The difficulty of 'pinning down' women's poetry is one reason why it is dropped from literary records and why I aim to restore women's place in literary movements. At the same time, their poetry presses upon the boundaries of these established groups and unsettles the binary oppositions between conservative and progressive or between sentimental and experimental.

In 'The Literary Context' I outline women's achievements in a cultural environment which demeaned them. In a climate of new opportunities, many women became public literary figures but they found that the literary establishment had the ethos of the exclusive male club. Consequently, in their writing, women masked their womanly identity which was detrimental to their status. The section on 'Rear-guard modernism' includes poetry of the First World War which documents women's differing responses to the models of femininity projected through the powerful government recruiting propaganda. Some poems appear to be complicit with the official responses for women, as maternal nurturers of the country, while others resisted them through direct or implicit protest. Some poetry can be placed alongside canonical anti-war poems whereas others are obviously separated by the gender specific experiences of the war at home or medical aid abroad. Some women seemed to unconsciously enter into male activity and others paraded as the paradigms of feminine self-sacrifice, but a covert disjunction between the discourse and the unarticulated subjectivity of the poet often provides textual ambiguity and energy. Women's poems are vital to the cultural records of the War, but also demonstrate that war poetry was contiguous with, not parallel to, the fluctuations of modernist innovation. The grouping, 'Between the Georgians and Bloomsbury', blurs the reductive binaries of 'tradition' and 'experiment'. It was difficult to classify any poets as simply' Georgian', partly because it has become a term of ready contempt in literary criticism and partly because Frances Cornford and Vita Sackville-West do not conform to either Georgian stereotype - the country gentleman or the demure poetess.

The poets counting as 'modernist' were difficult to arrange because they traverse the experimental/traditional and expressive/impersonal fences. The radical experimentalists are grouped as 'avant-garde' wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology of Poetry Publications and Enterprises by Women, 1910-1939
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Literary Context
• 3 Rear-Guard Modernism
• 4 The British Avant-Garde: Edith Sitwell (1887-1964) and the Women of Wheels - Nancy Cunard (1896-1965), Iris Tree (1897-1968) and Helen Rootham (d. 1938)
• 5 The Anglo-American Avant-Garde: H.D. (1886-1961), Amy Lowell (1874-1925), Marianne Moore (1887-1972), Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-1991), Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) and Mina Loy (1882-1966)
• 6 Female Modernism
• 7 The 1930s: Cultural Politics and the Poetry of Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland, Nancy Cunard, Winifred Holtby, Naomi Mitchison and Stevie Smith
• 8 Conclusion: The Legacy of Modernism
• Bibliography
• Index