Making It New?

188 T H E C A M B R I D G E Q UA RT E R LY doi:10.1093/camqtly/bfr007 Making it New? Charlotte Charteris The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers edited by Maren Tova Linett. Cambridge University Press, 2010. £50 hb; £17.99 pb. ISBN 9 7805 2151 5054 IN HER INTRODUCTION to The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers, editor Maren Tova Linett outlines with clarity what she sees as the aims and achievements of the collection. Briefly acknowledging the debt owed by herself and her fellow contributors to the feminist critics of the 1980s and 1990s, she emphasises the volume’s efforts to depart from simplistic models of female modernism as inherently ‘different’ from its male counterpart, and to convey instead an understanding of women’s modernism as the product of changing historical, intellectual, and political contexts experienced and assimilated by both men and women. This collection, she asserts, contributes to this more ‘nuanced account by seeking to understand women’s modernism in its own terms. It does not excessively compare women’s modernism to men’s, but neither does it shy away from acknowledging areas in which women’s modernism does speak back to, or simply speak to, modernism practised by men’. Arguing for a variety of approaches to literature within women’s modernism – though seemingly unwilling (as are most of her contributors) to speculate upon whether these divergent approaches in fact constitute a multiplicity of ‘modernisms’ or, indeed, upon what might be the broader implications of Downloaded from http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/ at Christ's College on November 15, 2016 history’ (Gegenentwurf zum gängigen Geschichtsbild) is produced ( p. 362), and, second, to explore assiduously its various aspects and functions. As for coming to terms with the variety of literature that makes use of counterfactual history, as well as literary works that are themselves counterfactual histories, there is clearly still much room for discussion. Widmann’s study may not provide all the answers, but it is the most comprehensive treatment of the subject, and it sets up an exceptionally critical and multifaceted investigation of this phenomenon. MAKING IT NEW? 189 Downloaded from http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/ at Christ's College on November 15, 2016 such plurality – Linett highlights the range of writers considered in the volume ‘whether or not their work is evidently and formally experimental’, and stresses that they are discussed there because they all ‘break new ground by approaching modernity from women’s perspectives, as diverse as those perspectives turn out to be’. Linett thus positions this Cambridge Companion within the expanding realm of the ‘new modernist studies’ which demonstrate that ‘there is much more to modernism than was apparent when analysis of “the men of 1914” with occasional mention of Virginia Woolf dominated courses and conferences about modernist literature’. It is at times, however, quite tempting to characterise this collection as an analysis of Virginia Woolf with occasional mention of her literary favourites: of thirteen chapters (including Linett’s introduction) only five fail either to make reference to or to quote from Woolf within their opening paragraphs. Nonetheless, the volume does attempt to contribute to the expansion of the accepted canon of women’s modernism, as Linett explains, ‘along the axes of location and time’. The volume, she argues, ‘reaches toward a transnational account of modernist literary production in English’ and ‘participates in the parallel temporal expansion of modernist studies’. The Cambridge Companion is broadly successful in achieving these aims, particularly when considered alongside comparable texts such as the hefty Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture (2006) edited by David Bradshaw as part of the Blackwell Companions series. One cannot help wishing on occasion, though, that the critics featured in the Cambridge Companion were a little more aggressive in their approach, reaching out and grabbing, rather than tentatively reaching towards, the authors and locations (both temporal and spatial) that might expand the modernist canon. The twelve chapters proper of the Cambridge Companion are separated by Linett into two sections, the first constituted of four articles dealing with questions of genre and modes of production. Bonnie Kime Scott discusses the transformation of the novel, Miranda Hickman the problem of form as encountered and resolved by female modernist poets, Penny Farfan considers women’s modernism in performance and Jayne Marek the little magazines, presses, and salons central to women’s cultural and intellectual exchange during the early twentieth century. A second section, comprising the remaining eight chapters, is dedicated to introducing and engaging with a variety of contextual and thematic issues. Women’s writing of the modernist era is discussed in this latter, weightier section in relation to gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, political activism, visual culture, trauma, and religion and spirituality. By organising the collection in this way Linett avoids many of the discontinuities engendered in critical 190 T H E C A M B R I D G E Q UA RT E R LY Downloaded from http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/ at Christ's College on November 15, 2016 companions that are arranged schematically around apparently sealed readings of isolated texts – articles on specific modernist publications, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, Mina Loy’s Lunar Baedeker, and Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives among them, dominate the Blackwell Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture mentioned above, for example – and allows a more fluid dialogue to emerge between authors, texts, and genres, as well as promoting reflections on shifts within a specific writer’s oeuvre. The opening section of the Cambridge Companion provides a lucid introduction to the major canonical figures of women’s modernism, assessing the role of female modernists in the formation and transformation of the key artistic movements of the period, while also highlighting the contributions made by less familiar writers and their circles. Scott’s survey of the novel considers the ways in which formal experimentation, interest in psychology and psychoanalysis, and engagement with feminist concerns reshaped prose fiction, aiding the production of uniquely feminine accounts of everyday life. Though her account finds its focal points within the accepted canon of women’s modernism, dealing at some length with Dorothy Richardson, Gertrude Stein, and (of course) Virginia Woolf, Scott’s commitment to the geographical and temporal expansion of this roll is evident. Woven into the early sections of her article – which is organised chronologically – are tantalising references to the novels of poet H.D. and to the earlier works of Jean Rhys, while in her final section she prefaces an account of the often neglected Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen with the acknowledgement that ‘modernist transformations continued to be felt by writers concerned with a wider audience and writing after 1941, the year when both Woolf and Joyce died’. Though mindful of the fact that, like many other authors ‘either branded “middlebrow” or surviving well past the heyday of modernism, Bowen is generally considered less transformative’ of the novel, Scott joins critics such as Andrew Bennett, Nicholas Royle, and Maud Ellmann in voicing her affirmation of the significance of Bowen’s novels, citing her materialism as a radical departure, in its psychological depth, from that so repudiated by Woolf. Accessible and widely applicable – Hickman suggests that ‘the contours of the argument . . . could be used to trace the development of many modernist women fiction writers’ with equal validity – Hickman’s discussion of the problem of form for female modernist poets follows a similar pattern to Scott’s chapter. Looking first at the works of more familiar poets, Hickman explores the products of Mina Loy’s early struggles with the tenets of Futurism, considers Imagism’s debt to H.D., and traces the impact of Marianne Moore’s long-running association with T. S. Eliot upon the reception of her work, before seeking to expand the MAKING IT NEW? 191 Downloaded from http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/ at Christ's College on November 15, 2016 geographical and temporal horizons of modernist poetry studies to include an analysis of the early work of a much younger modernist, Canadian poet P. K. Page, composed over a period spanning from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s. In doing so she begins the process, as does Scott, of formulating a much needed account of the continuities and departures of a modernism cut asunder not by the First, but by the Second World War. Less conventional in its content, the richest and most vivid of the opening chapters is, however, supplied by Farfan in her overview of drama and performance in women’s modernism. Opening with a striking passage from Djuna Barnes’s 1914 account of her voluntary submission to forcible feeding (an ‘experiment’ conducted by Barnes in order that she might better understand and convey the effects of such an ordeal on hunger-striking suffragettes in Britain), Farfan’s chapter considers a range of dramatic performances, from Isadora Duncan’s ballets to the ‘spectacular assemblage-ensembles’ created and worn by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. She argues that the female ‘performing body’ represented a ‘liminal zone between aesthetic practice and everyday life’ in the early twentieth century. Discussion of such performances is coupled with analysis of suffrage plays and female-authored dramas of the Harlem Renaissance to produce an account which, in company with Sowon S. Park’s later chapter on women’s modernism and political activism, serves forcefully to debunk the persisting myth that the modernist work of art stands detached from and independent of socio-political debate. Marek’s chapter continues the trend in its emphasis not only on the producers of women’s modernism but also on its female facilitators, detailing the ‘legendary salons and publishing concerns run by women’ during the period and explaining their role in providing ‘a focused forum that accelerated the social processing of new ideas in circulation at the time’. What Marek’s discussion of the magazines inspired by such forums inadvertently highlights, however, is the absence, from the opening section of this Cambridge Companion as a whole, of any account of the genre that often proved one of the mainstays of such publications: the modern short story. The genre is mentioned in several of the chapters comprising the collection’s second section, most notably in Heather Ingman’s article on religion, spirituality, and the occult, but its formal qualities are never discussed at length. This omission seems odd when we consider the short story’s extraordinary versatility, its openness to experimentation, and its significance in the formation and transformation of the literary identity not only of modernist heavyweights such as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Katherine Mansfield (whose work is, in fact, surprisingly underrepresented in this collection, no doubt because of this failure to 192 T H E C A M B R I D G E Q UA RT E R LY Downloaded from http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/ at Christ's College on November 15, 2016 engage with the short story genre), but also those of writers like Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Wharton, Mary Butts, and Jean Rhys. The formulation of what Jean Radford, in her chapter on race and ethnicity in white women’s modernist literature, terms an ‘inclusive’ modernism remains a guiding principle throughout the second section of the collection. Patricia Juliana Smith explains the concept of the ‘New Woman’ and considers the overlap between notions of gender, sex, and sexuality during the period, citing responses to lesbianism in the work of Radclyffe Hall and Willa Cather as well as Woolf, H.D., and Stein, while Thadious M. Davis’s chapter on black women’s modernism not only considers the work of favourites such as Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen but also traces the attempts made by lesser-known black female modernists, such as poet and playwright Georgia Douglas Johnson and novelist Jessie Redmon Fauset, to reclaim ‘the feminine’ and frame new models of modern black femininity. Woven into both chapters are pertinent references to key gender theorists such as Judith Butler and Michel Foucault which – here as elsewhere in the volume – provoke reflection without overburdening the discussion with theoretical jargon. Radford herself, in her account of the Jewish ‘other’ in white women’s modernism, breaks new ground by juxtaposing the responses of two unfairly neglected English moderns, Mary Butts and Sylvia Townsend Warner, to the perceived threat to Englishness posed by immigration. The pairing recurs later in the volume as Heather Ingman considers the role of nature and the occult in modernist women’s spiritualism, following a sensitive introduction to Warner’s first novel, Lolly Willowes (1926), with a detailed analysis of Butts’s major works. Turning from Butts and Warner, Radford goes on to discuss Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Her account of the text, and that given by Laura Doyle in the succeeding chapter, clearly show the commitment of the volume as a whole to extending the canon of women’s modernism both geographically and temporally, but they also highlight a more general tendency to privilege geographical expansion over temporal. As noted above, examples of Canadian, Anglo-Irish, and Caribbean authors working beyond what Bonnie Kime Scott terms ‘the heyday of modernism’ are considered in the volume, but no mention is made of Warner’s contemporaries – younger English women writers like Stella Gibbons and Nancy Mitford – who continued to engage with modernist concerns from the early 1930S to the mid-1950s and beyond. They seem destined to remain in the somewhat sombre shadow of female forebears such as Woolf and Richardson. One might be forgiven for concluding from this study that few modernist women writers – with the exception perhaps of Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, and Dadaist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven – actually had a MAKING IT NEW? 193 Downloaded from http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/ at Christ's College on November 15, 2016 functioning sense of humour. The response given by Woolf to the news that ‘comic’ novelist Gibbons had won the 1933 Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse for Cold Comfort Farm (1932) is perhaps indicative of the attitude of many of the proponents of modernist literary studies: ‘I was enraged to see they gave the £40 to Gibbons. . . . Who is she? What is this book?’ While not formally or evidently experimental, Gibbons’s novels demonstrate an acute awareness of the power of modern culture and technology to aid social mobility and alter the boundaries of class. In Cold Comfort Farm Seth Sharkadder’s escape from rural drudgery to Hollywood stardom is facilitated by his passion for cinema, while ‘hired girl’ Meriam Beetle – whose mother envisions a bright future for her four grandchildren as a modern jazz band – is saved from any further unwanted pregnancies by heroine Flora Poste’s frank advice on contraception. As a result, Meriam receives and accepts an offer of marriage from one of her employers at the farm. In Nightingale Wood (1938), erstwhile spinster Tina Wither finds love in the arms of the family’s chauffeur, Saxon, after her father reluctantly grants her permission to take driving lessons from him. Her young widowed sister-in-law, former shop girl Viola Wither, changes the whole course of her life when, having had her hair cut, on a whim, into a short modern style, she attracts the attention of wealthy bachelor Victor Spring. Both novels demonstrate a familiarity with what Nancy Mitford would later publicise as ‘U and non-U English’ in her tongue-in-cheek account Noblesse Oblige (1956). Reuben Sharkadder hurriedly substitutes ‘lunch’ for ‘dinner’ on inviting Flora to dine with him, while Viola provokes her mother- and father-in-law by requesting ‘note-paper’ instead of ‘writingpaper’ when attending to her correspondence. Saxon, conscious of his working-class background and pathologically obsessed with improving himself, begs Tina to correct his grammar and usage whenever possible. The exclusion of Mitford herself from the Cambridge Companion seems strange when we consider the resurgence of critical interest in her circle, demonstrated not only in recent studies such as D. J. Taylor’s Bright Young People (2007), but also in the decision taken by Penguin to reissue many of her novels in 2010, among them Wigs on the Green (1935), her acerbic critique of fascist sympathy within the English aristocracy, and the later Radlett trilogy (1945– 60). The work of both Gibbons and Mitford raises as many questions about literary classification as it does about women’s modernism and social class. Among the most vivid and inspiring accounts of women’s literature in the Cambridge Companion are those of Maggie Humm and Suzette A. Henke. Lively and accessible, Humm’s chapter on women’s modernism and visual culture considers the technical and philosophical repercussions 194 T H E C A M B R I D G E Q UA RT E R LY Downloaded from http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/ at Christ's College on November 15, 2016 of female engagement with a variety of media, including painting, photography, and film. Considering a range of film criticism originally published in journals such as the influential Close Up (1927 – 33) by female poets and novelists such as Colette, H.D., and Dorothy Richardson, Humm not only discusses the impact of cinema’s formal qualities on print media but also argues for the significance of cinema-going itself as a highly wrought personal experience. Now recognised as crucial to the development of lesbian cinema, films such as Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform (1931) and Georg Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929) provide the context, along with Carl Dreyer’s Joan of Arc (1928), for an incisive account of how writers such as H.D. privileged autobiography and identification with actresses and female protagonists in their intensely gendered film criticism. Moving away from film, Humm considers the influence of domestic photography on Woolf, departing from much of the Woolf criticism in the Cambridge Companion by focusing almost exclusively on her essays and short fictions. As she wryly notes, ‘Woolf was intermittently a novelist but continually a critic.’ Henke’s chapter, dealing with women’s modernism and trauma, is as thought-provoking in what it leaves out as in what it includes. A sensitive account of the representation of ‘shell shock’ and post-traumatic stress disorder in the writings of Rebecca West, Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Woolf, the chapter not only considers the direct repercussions of the First World War as they emerge in characters like Woolf ’s Septimus Smith but also seeks to trace the impact of traumas suffered on the home front – bereavement and loss, childhood abuse, and abandonment in adulthood – detailing the role of scriptotherapy (the process of working through the traumatic experience on paper for the purposes of self-analysis and rehabilitation) in the production of H.D.’s and Barnes’s novels. One is reminded of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey novels, not only in their vivid portrayals of shell shock – see, for instance, Whose Body? (1923) and The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928) – but also in the autobiographical nature of titles such as Strong Poison (1930), which allowed Sayers to ‘write through’ personal traumas such as her rejection by novelist John Cournos, the birth (and subsequent relinquishment) of her illegitimate son, and her abandonment by his father, Bill White. Though she does not draw the comparison herself, the applicability of Henke’s argument to women’s literature of the home front during the Second World War – Rose Macaulay’s short story ‘Miss Anstruther’s Letters’ (1942) comes to mind – also stands out. The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers sets itself an enormous challenge in aiming to demonstrate that, as Maren Tova Linett puts it, ‘Women’s literature . . . has many well-known names and locations, but also many less familiar players and locales that are nevertheless crucial to A B O O K T H AT F O U N D I T S T I D E 195 doi:10.1093/camqtly/bfr012 A Book that Found its Tide Henry Power The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift, volume i: A Tale of a Tub and Other Works, ed. Marcus Walsh. Cambridge University Press. 2010. £85. ISBN 9 7805 2182 8949 A TALE OF A TUB WAS FIRST PUBLISHED, together with The Battel of the Books and A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, in 1704 – and readers have had difficulty with it ever since. The Tale’s central narrative is straightforward enough: a father dies, leaving each of his three sons – Peter, Martin, and Jack – a coat. He also leaves a will, in which he gives his sons firm instructions on the proper management and upkeep of these coats: its gist is that they are not to be tampered with. The sons, however, wilfully misread the will in order to accessorise their coats, adding shoulder-knots, gold lace, flame-coloured linings, and other appendages. Downloaded from http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/ at Christ's College on November 15, 2016 understanding women’s participation in the burst of creativity that later became known as modernism.’ For the most part, however, it succeeds in doing just that. A lively, lucid, and accessible introduction to the chief genres, key ‘players’, and major contextual and thematic issues of women’s modernism, it also identifies and engages with previously neglected figures – such as Bowen, Page, Butts, and Warner – whose writings also resonate with those issues. Though at times one is left wanting more, these more unusual references, coupled with an extensive guide to further reading, do provide the foundations for accounts of a multiplicity of alternative female modernisms, inclusive of the work of authors previously dismissed as ‘low’ or ‘middlebrow’ both by their peers and by more recent critics. So-called ‘comic’ writers such as Gibbons, Mitford, and Sayers have as much to say as their elders about changing perspectives on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, politics, and the repercussions of war during the period. By ignoring them we risk replicating (and thereby advocating) the narrow-mindedness that excluded all female writers from the canon of literary modernism for so long.