Rereading Modernism

New Directions in Feminist Criticism

Lisa Rado

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136321382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire féministe

Until about 1986, feminists generally considered modernism a reactionary, misogynist, and hegemonic mire not worth investigating. Since then enough studies of modernism have appeared that 17 feminist critics can now review and debate their treatment of the period. They evaluate the progress and goals of the new era of modernist scholarship.

As the authors in this volume suggest, instead of condemning writers for not practicing or portraying an acceptable politics of gender, we ought instead to show how their assumptions about the nature of the sexes inform their texts, both in their creation and in their reception. This also allows examination of the complex and changing relationship between human subjectivity and aesthetics.

This volume is a highly reflective dialogue, introspective and evaluative, at a moment of crisis within modernist studies and feminist studies. The analysis of critical work on early-twentieth-century literature not only helps reread and redefine a definition of modernism; it also intends to redirect and reintegrate feminist theory.

Part I

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Lost and Found

Remembering Modernism, Rethinking Feminism

Lisa Rado

In the 1950s, when students at Columbia College first demanded a course in modern literature, Lionel Trilling and his colleagues were skeptical at best. Convinced that such study would contribute to the demoralization of the student body by institutionalizing the emergent “modern self-consciousness and the modern self-pity” (Trilling 6), and suspicious as to the true motivations of the students’ request, the faculty resisted, wavered, but ultimately capitulated. Nevertheless—determined to save face—the department turned their ostensible defeat into “a ground for [their] display of a certain mean-spirited, last-ditch vindictiveness” (Trilling 7–8). Trilling explains:

I recall that we said something like, ‘Very well, if they want the modern, let them have it—let them have it, as Henry James says, full in the face. We shall give the course, but we shall give it on the highest level, and if they think, as students do, that the modern is the facile, the easily comprehended, let them have their gay and easy time with Yeats and Eliot, with Joyce and Proust and Kafka, with Lawrence, Mann, and Gide.’ (Trilling 8)

What is remarkable about this admission (besides its candor) is not only that Trilling and his colleagues defined the modernist avant-garde solely in terms of “a number of ‘superwriters’” (Eysteinsson 88), but the fact that this selective list consisted entirely of literary men.

The faculty of Columbia College was not alone. In a phenomenon similar to the selective canonization of the male Romantic poets, the English departments of the 1950s and 1960s engaged in a massive cultural ‘forgetting’ that repressed the existence of central female modernist writers like H.D., Marianne Moore, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Rebecca West, Dorothy Richardson, and even to an extent Virginia Woolf, while elevating select male writers—primarily Joyce, Lawrence, Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Lewis, Proust, and Kafka— to an unassailable literary elite, a coterie ‘of the highest level.’1

What is particularly surprising about this selective canonization is that, perhaps to the greatest extent in history, modern women authors played a pivotal role in shaping the aesthetics of their time. From Stein’s linguistic experimentalism, to Richardson’s exploration of subjective consciousness, to H.D.’s imagism, to Woolf’s moments of being, they did much to define those characteristics we now identify with the modern. Anything but the boys’ club that Trilling’s comments would suggest, the modernist movement in the arts was fueled by both men and women who sought to forge a revolution in style, taste, and value. This newly gendered avant-garde thus elevated the question of gender itself to a new importance in poetic production. No longer content to remain passive muses, the female modernists demanded a place in the center of the cultural arena, and in doing so disrupted old sexual hierarchies significantly.

However, due to the patriarchal legacy of Trilling and his colleagues, the community of modernist women writers became truly a “lost generation” until the mid-1980s. Convinced that “the Pound era” represented the works of a select group of misogynist male writers, the emergent feminist critics of the 1970s and 1980s—among them Patricia Meyer Spacks, Mary Jacobus, and Elaine Showalter—for the most part stayed clear and wrote instead about the great Victorians: Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot. The great exception, of course, was the study of Virginia Woolf; nevertheless, such scholarship mostly centered around the question of whether or not she ought to be seen as a proto-feminist, not a proto-modernist.2

Yet in 1986, with the publication of Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank, what was once considered a “wasteland” for those interested in gender studies was transformed into a watershed. Certainly there had been earlier work that began the process of remembering: Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Writing Beyond the Ending (1985) and Alice Jardine’s Configurations of Women and Modernity (1985) had begun to theorize the evolution of the twentieth-century woman writer and her relation to the literary tradition. Moreover, by the early 1980s, feminist investigations of male writers like Joyce, Faulkner, and Lawrence, as well as more complex explorations of Virginia Woolf and H.D., had begun to appear.3 Yet the achievement of Benstock’s encyclopedic study was that she proved beyond doubt that rather than being a male-dominated, monolithic movement, the modernist avant-garde included a large number of women—as artists, as editors, and as intellectuals—who not only participated in the modernist project, but actually shaped it. Once-forgotten names like Natalie Barney, Djuna Barnes, and Harriet Shaw Weaver were suddenly rescued from the island of ‘misfit’ writers. The previously forbidden topic of lesbian discourse was let out of the closet. The association between male and female writers of the period was suddenly revealed to be one of colleague to colleague rather than master to disciple.

Benstock’s ground-breaking work sent a shock wave through the feminist scholarly community. Within two years, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar published the first volume of No Man’s Land, in which they reread modernism as a movement not devoid of gender issues, but actually determined by them. In 1989, they published a second massive volume on the subject, which was followed one year later by Bonnie Kime Scott’s anthology of work by the “lost” women of the modernist period, appropriately entitled The Gender of Modernism. Determined to recanonize those writers, as well as to demonstrate their relationships to male modernists like Pound and Eliot, Scott and many other feminist critics have begun the process of cultural remembering.4 As a result of these feminist forays, not only is a much more accurate census of the modernist avant-garde beginning to take shape, but the ways in which this literary period has been theorized and constructed are transforming as well. One wonders what Lionel Trilling and his cohorts would think of the new theory—endorsed by such critics as Hélène Cixous, Marianne DeKoven, and Lynette Felber—that modernist stylistics are in fact a mode of écriture féminine?

Yet despite the emergence of a new era in modernist scholarship with this explosion of debate over the question of gender in modernist studies, there has been no formal evaluation of its progress or its goals. Especially as the unfortunate ideal of “criticism for criticism’s sake” is threatening to take over academe, it is crucial that we ensure that we engage in our research ever mindful of its function. More specifically, it is time for feminist critics to begin to ask ourselves what we are hoping to achieve in our review of modernism. What should be our goals? How useful is it to prove over and over again that Hemingway, Faulkner, or Joyce was or was not a misogynist? How helpful is it to theorize the entire modernist movement as the latest version of the age-old war between the sexes? What are the benefits and limitations of biographically-centered explorations of female modernist subjectivity? It is time to pool our findings and critique constructively in order to locate new areas of inquiry and thus promote a fuller understanding—specifically a gendered understanding—of “what modernism was” (to use Maurice Beebe’s famous phrase).

As we engage in this reflective process, we ought to keep in mind that feminist work on the modernist period has been taking place at an exciting theoretical and historical moment in the development of feminist criticism as a whole. It has been nearly a quarter of a century since Kate Millet published Sexual Politics, a work that served as a call to arms for a generation of (mostly) women scholars determined to make gender studies a central part of the critical curriculum. In this task we have largely succeeded; indeed, these days it is a commonplace to point out that feminist theory has gone from the marginal to the mainstream. Now freed from the burden of defensive self-justification, feminists find themselves in an exciting but unpredictable stage of aggressive self-definition. Suddenly almost no one seems to know what “feminism” means, or if someone does, she proclaims the ignorance of the misguided majority who supposedly do not. Confronted with titles like Gender Trouble, Conflicts in Feminism, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics— titles that echo the troubled self-consciousness of the feminist movement as a whole—we cannot escape the growing sense of fissure, destabilization, and discord in the ranks that has made even terms like “gender” and “woman” politically suspect.

Especially important for the purposes of this study is that recent feminist forays into modernism are not only coinciding with this important transitional period in feminism, they are mirroring it. In other words, the conflicts over the direction of the feminist movement as a whole are being played out, even showcased, in the various feminist approaches to modernist texts. The analysis of critical work on early-twentieth-century literature not only helps us to reread and redefine our definition of modernism; it can serve as the matrix through which we can redirect and reintegrate feminist theory, as well.

What are the primary issues troubling feminists and feminist/modernists these days? First, scholars are becoming increasingly divided over whether the political project of equality for women can best be achieved by emphasizing the difference of female experience or attempting to invalidate the notion of gender categories altogether. While Carol Gilligan proclaims the oppositional moralities of the sexes, Judith Butler challenges “the political assumption that there must be a universal basis for feminism, one which must be found in an identity assumed to exist cross-culturally” (Butler 3). This problem is emerging in current work on literary modernism in the debate between the idea of separate “male” and “female” modernisms—advanced in recent work by Gilbert and Gubar— and the concept that modern fiction of both sexes leads to “the unsettling of gender distinctions” (Eysteinsson 97). Ironically, both sides claim that their readings support the contention that the modern period is one worthy of feminist inquiry, one that showcases feminist practice.

The dialogue between Anglo-American and French feminism, aptly summarized by Toril Moi as the debate between critics concentrating on the images of women in literary texts and those focusing on the linguistic strategies of the texts themselves, continues to rage. Yet it is particularly central to the ongoing reconstruction of literary modernism. While some feminist critics—like Judith Fetterly and Sandra Gilbert—focus on the degrading and dehumanizing images of women in the works of writers like Ernest Hemingway and T.S. Eliot, others—like Hélène Cixous or Lynette Felber—can find in either James Joyce or Dorothy Richardson the empowering jouissance of an écriture féminine.5 As a result of these dichotomies, two very different portraits of the modernist period have emerged: one as conservative, patriarchal, and repressive, the other as radical, feminist, and subversive. Must we choose between them? Or can we find an intermediate or alternative method of feminist critique that might allow us to reconcile these polarities?

The question of the canon has always been an important one for feminists, and even more so lately as its contents are swelling in order to accommodate the works of previously marginalized groups, such as homosexuals, people of color, and writers from English-speaking countries other than England and the United States. Attempting to fend off or invalidate charges that the feminist movement is dominated and directed by white, middle-class, heterosexual women, some scholars are increasingly exploring alternative texts and approaches to those texts. We see this project at work in the efforts by critics such as Shari Benstock and Karla Jay to theorize a “lesbian modernism”; in the work of Afro-Americanist scholars like Gloria Hull, Cheryl Wall, and Carla Kaplan to place the achievements of black women writers in the context of the modernist movement; and in the insistence of Angela Hewett and others that we incorporate an increased awareness of class into our study of modernism—a study that has mostly dealt with upper-middle-class women’s lives and tastes.6

The issue of the feminist canon is connected to the debate over whether we ought to devote our time to studying male or female authors. While some critics like Bonnie Kime Scott, Suzette Henke, and Judith Bryant Wittenberg have focused on the gendered exploration of the works of male modernists like Joyce and Faulkner, others—like Jane Marcus, Margaret Stetz, and Elizabeth Muther—have instead chosen to focus mainly on literary women like Woolf, West, and Cunard. Does it really matter whether we spend our energies recovering women’s texts or revealing new aspects of men’s? That it does for today’s generation of feminists is made agonizingly clear by one feminist/modernist—Minrose Gwin—who actually went so far as to disavow an entire body of her work within one year of its publication. “Feminism and Faulkner: Second Thoughts or, What’s a Radical Feminist Doing with a Canonical Male Text Anyway?”—recently published in The Faulkner Journal —is a bizarre and troubled article that slips between the self-flagellating discourse of the penitent and the euphoric language of the “born again” as its author attempts to justify her past work while showcasing her conversion to more female-centered projects.

Even more recently, feminist debates have centered around the relative merits of so-called “psychological” versus “cultural” criticism. The advent of new historicism as a theoretical discipline as well as the work of Foucault on the constructed nature of sexuality and gender have led many feminists to abandon critical strategies rooted in New Critical assumptions about subjectivity, womanhood, and language. Nevertheless, others, suspicious of anything resembling a deconstructi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• General Editor's Introduction
• I. Introduction
• II. Rereading Modernism
• III. Rereading Feminist Criticism
• IV. New Directions