Jonathan Collins Gender as a Consideration for the Modernist Writer In this essay I am going to examine in what way gender was a concern for a selection of modernist writers and that while in many ways modernism was alive with misogynistic and male-centric literature, there were a few who went against the grain and empowered women. Firstly, I will examine Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen’s role as a ‘proto-modernist’ and early feminist after which I will assess Virginia Woolf’s contribution to twentieth century modernist literature as one of the first modern feminist writers and critics. Finally, I will explore American author John Steinbeck’s depiction of women in Depression era America as portrayed in his documentary novel ‘The Grapes of Wrath’. According to critic Marianne Dekoven modernist writers had a “near-obsessive preoccupation” with gender and femininity (2005:176). If you examine in detail the works of what is now considered the modernist canon, you will see that this is not far from the truth. In many of what are considered the most famous modernist writers there is an often-unhealthy preoccupation with women, gender, sex and the female body. For example, in 1925, American writer Conrad Aiken wrote to modernist poet T.S. Eliot congratulating him on the publication of a collection of poetry to which Eliot responded by sending him a page torn from the Midwives Gazette. What followed was both puzzling and disturbing as he had underlined the words “blood, mucus, shreds of mucus, and purulent offensive discharge,” from an article on vaginal discharge (Hauck 2003: 233). This is quite unsettling and illustrates not only Eliot’s but also many other male modernist’s misogynistic views of women and sexuality. Fortunately not all modernist writers were of this mentality as is evident in the work of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Although not strictly modernist his work is in many ways a sort of ‘proto-modernism’ taking into account his use of symbolism and his treatment of gender issues. In the notes of the 1878 publication of ‘A Doll’s House’ Ibsen wrote on the topic of women that: A woman cannot be herself in contemporary society, it is an exclusively male society with laws drafted by men, and with counsel and judges who judge feminine conduct Jonathan Collins from the male point of view (Ibsen 1998: viii). Throughout his working life Ibsen was quite vocal on “the obstacles put in the way of individual liberty and freedom by bourgeois society” (Ledger 2008: 34), which is evident in many of his plays and often from the point of view of a woman. Nevertheless, he denied being a feminist stating in a speech at the Norwegian Women's Rights League in 1898: I thank you for the toast, but must disclaim the honour of having consciously worked for the women's rights movement. I am not even quite clear as to just what this women's rights movement really is (Finney 1994: 90). He did, however, believe that women should hold somewhat equal positions of power in society and that married women should have separate property rights to those of their husbands (Finney 1994: 90). James Joyce, who was an acolyte of Ibsen wrote: 'Ibsen's knowledge of humanity is nowhere more obvious than in his portrayal of women’ (Johnson 2004: 197). All of this hints at the fact that Ibsen was more humanist rather than feminist. American author Joan Templeton in her study ‘Ibsen’s Women’ claims that Ibsen was one of the first playwrights to treat women as complex human beings rather than inferior creatures (1997: 333). This is certainly true of his 1879 work ‘A Doll’s House’ in which we see the protagonist Nora stand up for herself and leave her dominating husband behind. The play ‘Ghosts’ on the other hand examines what could have happened had she stayed behind or even returned, in the form of its protagonist Helene Alving. Mrs. Alving in ‘Ghosts’ has always been defined by her husband, Captain Alving, and continues to be defined by him even after his death. She is referred to throughout the play as “Mrs. Alving” and is for the most part the embodiment of the perfect woman who has given up personal freedom and happiness for the sake of her family. That is not to say that Mrs. Alving never tried to escape. During the play we discover that she did at one time plan to leave her husband and it is implied that she had a brief affair Jonathan Collins with one of the play’s male protagonists, Pastor Manders. However, in an attempt to save face, Manders sends Mrs. Alving back to her husband. At the same time Mrs. Alving is shown to be quite radical in that she openly criticises the men of upper class Norwegian society who regularly have extra-marital affairs, including her late husband Captain Alving. This demonstrates how gender issues are explored in ‘Ghosts’ in relation to venereal disease and the double standards of upper class Norwegian society. As claimed by English poet Coventry Patmore in his famous 19th century poem the woman should be “The Angel In the House” and be a loyal and devoted wife and mother (Woolf 1983: 302). Conversely, men were often encouraged as part of the ‘cult of masculinity’ to be promiscuous, thus increasing the risk of Sexually Transmitted Infections, such as syphilis among the aristocracy (Mortensen 2007: 176). We see this in Mrs. Alving’s son Oswald who is suffering from ‘latent’ congenital syphilis due to his late father’s sexual licentiousness. Strangely enough there is no mention that Mrs. Alving or Captain Alving’s illegitimate daughter Regina suffers from the disease which could be seen as another device by Ibsen to show societies double standards with regards men and women. Mrs. Alving never leaves the house and is rarely seen to be offstage. This can be examined from two angles. Firstly, ‘Ghosts’ is unique in that is one of the first plays to place a woman’s point of view as the centre of the action and the fact that Mrs. Alving rarely leaves the stage emphasises this point. Secondly, this fact may also be a device used by Ibsen to show that while the men in the play were free to move as they pleased, women were trapped by men and by society at large. Regina is also portrayed in a similar manner although she is depicted as a character that aspires to advance socially, which is recognisable in her use of French words and expressions. However, due to her social status and gender she is severely limited and her aspirations are quite impossible. Initially we believe her to be the daughter of Jacob Engstrand, an entirely despicable character, who is building a brothel in the guise of a ‘home for sailors’. As time goes on we learn that Captain Alving is in fact Regina’s father and not Engstrand’s as she believed and she is shown to resent the fact that she could have been raised as the daughter of an aristocrat. Engstrand uses this against her and manipulates her into working in his ‘home for sailors’, in essence turning her into Jonathan Collins a prostitute and therefore twisting her only means of escape from life as a maid, into life as a bawd for sailors. Just as Mrs. Alving is forever defined by the men in her life, so is Clarissa Dalloway, the protagonist in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs. Dalloway’. Originally entitled ‘The Hours’, Woolf decided to use an alternate title for the final published version and called the novel ‘Mrs. Dalloway’. This was an interesting choice for Woolf as it demonstrates that both Clarissa’s husband and social status forever define her in a similar way to Mrs. Alving. Socially, she is nothing more than MP Richard Dalloway’s wife and she is hidden behind his name and rank. In fact, we do not discover Clarissa’s maiden name until about a quarter of the way through the novel by the introduction of her father, Mr. Justin Parry (1992: 75). Woolf does this intentionally to illustrate that not only is Clarissa hidden behind her husband’s name but also, prior to her marriage, and in a similar fashion to her mother, hidden behind her father’s name as well and has never been her own person. In ‘Mrs Dalloway’ Woolf disembarks from the traditional Victorian style, which had dominated female literature since the nineteenth century. ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ examines twelve hours in the life of Clarissa Dalloway during which she is preparing to a host a party. In these twelve hours we see the past and present of Clarissa and other important characters that were once part of Clarissa 's life. To achieve this Virginia Woolf creates a narrative in which we see Clarissa abandon dreams and would be lovers in order to be the good wife and as her old friend Peter Walsh puts it “the perfect hostess” (Woolf 1992: 44), The novel is considered to be autobiographical in that we see many of the desires and anxieties of the author projected onto Clarissa and in doing this Woolf illustrates many problems faced by women such as herself in early twentieth century London. The author criticizes the misogynistic and patriarchal society in post-war England. She deals with the difficulty that women had with being economically independent, the fact that they had little or no formal education and that they were inherently dependent on their male counterparts. Clarissa’s marriage challenges the norms of society in which the goal of the woman was, ultimately, to marry. Although Clarissa has married Richard Dalloway, she Jonathan Collins appears to have done so for more selfish reasons than, for example, Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’. Clarissa’s original suitor Peter Walsh was rejected in favour of a bourgeois lifestyle. Clarissa realised early on that life with Peter, although more passionate, would have been a difficult and domineering one and in choosing Richard Dalloway she opted for a quite, easy life. Peter Walsh was not the only rejected lover of Clarissa Dalloway and we are also made aware of the protagonist’s sexual ambiguity and her brief ‘love affair’ with her friend, Sally Seton. In her 1924 essay ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’, Woolf claims that: On or about December 1910, human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910. (1924: 4) Woolf was most probably referring to the events set in motion by Roger Fry’s 1910 Post-Impressionist exhibition, in which appeared artists that had until recently been considered too obscure or avant-garde for public consumption. Another factor that may have influenced Woolf’s statement was the death of Suffragette Mary Jane Clarke, sister of Emily Pankhurst, as an indirect result of the events of Black Friday in November of that year. Considered by many to be founder of modern feminist literature and criticism (Goldman 2007: 66), the suffragette movement would have had a profound impact on Virginia Woolf and her feministic writing. Although not strictly a feminist novel, and more naturalist than modernist, American author John Steinbeck’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ is the story of a primitive and animalistic group of people, the Joad family, escaping drought and poverty in the ‘Dust Bowl’ during America’s Great Depression. The family, originally a traditional father-led family undergoes a reformation and the balance of power shifts from Patriarchal to Matriarchal throughout the novel. As the family slowly falls apart, the mother, Ma Joad begins a transformation into the matriarchal figure that holds they family together for as long as she can. While the book does not completely rewrite gender roles, it does show a definite shift from a patriarchal to a matriarchal led Jonathan Collins family throughout the course of the novel. For critic Warren Motley, the character of Ma Joad was largely influenced by anthropologist Robert Briffault’s image of the mother in his work ‘The Mothers: The Matriarchal Theory of Social Origins’ and that the shift from patriarch to matriarch is not a step forward but a return to a more primitive time when the mother held a position of power equal to that of men as is illustrated in the following passage from ‘The Mothers’ (Motley 2007: 51) It used to be asserted that the more civilized a society the higher the status of the women in it. It was held that in uncivilised societies their position was one of outrageous oppression. If this were true, the Redskins and the Papuan cannibals would have to be accounted more civilised than the Chinese and the ancient Greeks…In the great majority of uncultured societies, women…exercise an influence which would appear startling even in the most feministic of modern societies. (1959: 70) There is evidence that Steinbeck was in fact familiar with the work of Briffault and Carol Steinbeck, John Steinbeck’s first wife, is quoted as saying that Ma Joad is “pure Briffault” (Motley 2007:52). As mentioned already ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ is mostly a naturalist work however there are definite elements of modernism throughout. One of the components of modernism that we find in the novel is in its allusion to mythology and classical literature. For example, Ma Joad is alluded to as the archetypal ‘earth mother’ (Lisca 2007: 45); a symbol of abundance, fertility and protection whose character provides spiritual and emotional support for the other characters in the novel. Her initial description is quite complimentary and she is presented to us like a mother goddess, a giver of life, a healer and a being whose whole existence is concerned with protecting and nurturing her family: …heavy, but not fat; thick, with child-bearing and work…She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family (Steinbeck 1992: 154) Jonathan Collins Throughout the novel Steinbeck presents women as indomitable. When the men in the novel are disheartened and overwhelmed, the women take control. Ma Joad becomes the pillar of the family, never showing weakness, as she knows the effect it would have on the family: She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone (1992: 155). Staying with the theme of the mother goddess myth, Ma’s relationship with her son Tom is reminiscent of the Thetis and Achilles story (Tóth 2010). According to the legend, the sea nymph Thetis, mother of Achilles blesses him before sending him off to war. This is alluded to in Ma Joad visiting her son Tom in his hiding place, where he is waiting for his face to heal, and sending him away (2010). Ma Joad’s release of her son is like a symbolic second birth; he is leaving his hiding place, which “is the womb from which the hero is reborn into a new life to become a new kind of leader“ (Minny 2010: 121). Ma’s daughter, Rose of Sharon becomes an extension of her goddess-like status. According to feminist critic Mimi Reisel Gladstein, Steinbeck utilises the Demeter and Persephone myth to show continuity and rebirth in their mother-daughter relationship as they become “the eternal feminine that duplicates itself and thus provides continuity and promise for the future” (2007: 89). This myth becomes a reality at the end of the novel when we see Rose of Sharon’s transformation from young girl to mother goddess herself by offering her breast to save a dying man from starvation. In this essay gender as a consideration for a selection of modernist and ‘premodernist’ writers was examined. As illustrated the treatment of gender is as wideranging as modernism itself, however it is anything but homologous. As demonstrated, while Ibsen wrote about gender related issues, his own views on feminism were quite ambiguous and pose certain problems of ambivalence for the contemporary critic. Likewise in “The Grapes of Wrath” it is difficult to argue that Ma Joad’s role was in fact a feminist one taking into account Steinbeck’s reading of Jonathan Collins Robert Briffault. In this sense, his casting of Ma Joad as Matriarch seems to have arisen from the family’s falling into destitution and having to live in a more primitive manner. Virginia Woolf’s feminism on the other hand was anything but ambivalent and both her fiction and non-fiction dealt with issues that would have been previously considered indecent or improper in women’s writing such as sexual ambiguity, the increasingly decadent British Empire and women’s independence. We see the protagonist in ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ with a mind of her own and making her own decisions. Woolf’s influence by the suffragettes and her own unique perspective inspired a whole generation of feminist writers and critics alike. Nowadays, while the position of women has improved in western society, there is still an absence of women’s rights in other parts of the world and work of literature such as Arundhati Roy’s ‘The God of Small Things’ and ‘Americanah’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie continue to be influenced by writers such as these. Bibliography • Briffault, Robert (1959), The Mothers: The Matriarchal Theory of Social Origins, Grossat and Dunlap, New York • Dekoven, Marianne ‘Modernism and Gender’ in Levinson, Michael (ed.) (2005), The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, Cambridge University Press, London • Finney, Gail, ‘Ibsen and Feminism’ in Mc Farlane, James (ed.) (1994) The Cambridge Guide to Ibsen, Cambridge University Press, London • Goldman, Jane ‘The Feminist Criticism of Virginia Woolf’ in Gill Plain and Susan Sellers (eds.) (2007) A History of Feminist Literary Criticism, Cambridge University Press, London • Hauck, Christina (2003) ‘Abortion and the Individual Talent’, ELH, Volume 70, Number 1, pp. 223-266 • Ibsen, Henrik (1998) A Doll’s House, Oxford University Press, London • Ibsen, Henrik (2010) Ghosts, Faber and Faber, London • Johnson, Jeri, ‘Joyce and Feminism’ in Attridge, Derek (ed.), (2004) in The Cambridge Guide to James Joyce, Cambridge University Press, London Jonathan Collins • Ledger, Sally (2008), Henrik Ibsen, Northcote House/British Council, California • Lisca, Peter, ‘The Grapes of Wrath: An Achievement of Genius’ in Bloom, Harold (ed) (2007) Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Chelsea House Publishers, New York • Minny, J. (2010) A Study of Holism in Select Novels of John Steinbeck: An Ecocritical Approach, Department of English and other Foreign Languages, Bharathidasan University, http://hdl.handle.net/10603/5073 • Mortensen, Ellen (2007) Ibsen and the Scandalous: Ghosts and Hedda Gabler , Ibsen Studies, 7:2, 169-187 • Motley, Warren, From Patriarchy to Matriarchy:Ma Joad’s Role in The Grapes of Wrath in Harold Bloom (ed) (2007) Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Chelsea House Publishers, New York • Steinbeck, John (1992) The Grapes of Wrath, Penguin, London • Templeton, Joan (1997) Ibsen’s Women, Cambridge University Press, London • Tóth, Gabriella (2010), ‘Myths and Contexts in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath’ E-journal of American Studies, vol. VI, No. 1, Spring, http://americanaejournal.hu/vol6no1/gabriella-toth • Woolf, Virginia (1924) Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, The Hogarth Press, London • Woolf, Virginia (1992) Mrs. Dalloway, Penguin, London • Woolf, Virginia, Professions for Women in Martha Rainbolt and Janet Fleetwood (eds.) (1983) ‘On the Contrary: Essays by Men and Women’, SUNY Press, New York