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EMPHASIS MINE:
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION
AND THE MDDERNIST WOMAN WRITER

BY

Cecilia Konchar Farr

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1990

ABSTRACT
EMPHASIS MINE:

ADTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION-
AND THE MDDERNIST WOMAN WRITER

BY

Cecilia Konchar Farr

I have found, in my study of modernism, that
autobiographical fiction was a developing form often used but
seldom discussed, even by early feminist critics, although
autobiography was often defined as a "feminine" genre by
critics who denigrated the personal and the domestic. This
dissertation explores the prevalence of the genre among women
writers in the 'twenties, focusing on five novels-~Woolf’s In
the_LigthQnse, H.D.'s HEBmigne, Anzia Yezierska's Bread
Givens, Radclyffe Hall's Hell_gf_Lgneliness and Nella
Larsen's Quicksand.

The first third of this project sets up a theoretical
context for the analysis of the novels which follows by
exploring autobiographical theory and the alliances between
French and Anglo-American feminist critiques. Chapter One
surveys the field of autobiography, including traditional

interpretations and recent feminist revisions. Chapter Two

defines autobiographical fiction, paying close attention to
the issues of referentiality and subjectivity in a postmodern
perspective. Part One concludes with a redefinition of
modernism in light of the significant contributions of
women's autobiographical fiction to Anglo-American literature
of the early twentieth century.

Part Two centers on linguistic interpretations of
"feminine language" in modernism and includes analyses of the
novels by Woolf and H.D. Part Three explores
autobiographical fiction and social change, calling on
socialist-feminist theories and demonstrating how
marginalized voices, such as Yezierska's, Hall's and
Larsen's, can be subversive to the dominant discourse of our
culture.

I contend that autobiographical fiction holds a unique
place halfway between fiction and "truth" and, because of
this, it foregrounds in fascinating ways the central issues

of modernism, postmodernism and feminist criticism.

The teacher said to the students:
"Come to the edge."
They replied: "We might fall."

The teacher again said:
"Come to the edge."
and they responded: "It's too high."

"Come to the edge"
the teacher demanded.

And they came.

and she pushed them.
And they flew.

This dissertation is lovingly dedicated to
Katherine Fishburn, teacher and friend.

iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to express my appreciation to the College of Arts
and Letters for the summer dissertation fellowship that made
completion of this dissertation possible--and for the
continued support over my three years at MSU as a Dean's
Fellow. Thanks to the English Department, and especially to
Katherine Fishburn, Victor Paananen, William Johnsen, James
Seaton, Kathleen Geissler, Barry Gross and Lorraine Hart,
Lisa Fine of the History Department and Joyce Ladenson of
Women's Studies--all of whom helped me in various ways. I
would also like to acknowledge Cathy N. Davidson and Linda W.
Wagner Martin for recruiting me to MSU and for, along with
Dr. Fishburn, nurturing me through my first year. Thanks to
the faculty and students at the 1989 School of Criticism and
Theory at Dartmouth College, who stimulated the ideas that
became this dissertation, and to the irrepressible and
ever-exciting Women's Caucus and all of its wonderful
members. Special thanks to Dana Nelson Salvino for doing it
first and showing me how and to Sherry Wynn for her help with
word-processing and printing.

I want to acknowledge Douglas Sego, Rex Neibar, Terry
Such and especially Virginia Unkefer for being my dearest
friends and, through endless games of "Cutthroat," never
letting me take myself too seriously. Thanks to my family
who gave me the stubbornness never to give up. Finally, a
hearty thanks to Tracy E. Farr and Daley Elaine Farr who
were, in different fashions, with me all the way.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter
Chapter
Chapter

Chapter
Chapter
Chapter

Chapter
' Chapter
Chapter

PART ONE
A KIND OF WONDERMENT:
TOWARD A THEORY OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION

One: The Autobiographical Tradition
Two: Autobiographical Fiction
Three: Modernism and Autobiographical Fiction

PART TWO
THE NOT-KNOWN AS WE'VE KNOWN IT:
MOTHER-LANGUAGE IN MODERNISM

Four: The Possibility of Feminine Language
Five: Virginia Woolf Writing Her Self
Six: H.D. Releasing HER

PART THREE
WRITING BEYOND THE STORIES:
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION AND SOCIAL CHANGE

Seven: Anzia Yezierska Valuing the Struggle
Eight: Radclyffe'Hall Speaking the Forbidden
Nine: Nella Larsen Claiming a Voice

Conclusion

Works Cited

vi

13
36
55

75
89
121

156
176
193

207

212

Introduction

In 1982, just after I finished my undergraduate degree in
English (encountering no more than two or three women writers
along the way), I read Sylvia Plath's Ihe_Bell_1ar.
Eventually that reading experience inspired me to quit my job
in journalism and return to graduate school to study women
writers. A few years later, it inspired this dissertation.

At the risk of accusations of being "autobiographical"
(i.e. "spontaneous and natural," not "crafted and
aesthetic"1), I must also add that before I accomplished
either of these things, my contacts with Sylvia Plath and
Esther Greenwood had introduced me to a new sense of self
that has since been revised, rethought and expanded through
my study of feminist theory. By acknowledging the brilliant
Esther's untenable position in a patriarchal society, Plath
named what for me had remained guiltily nameless. Ihe_Bell
1a; helped me to come to terms with a lingering sense of
frustration I'd had since recovering from a bout with severe
depression a few years earlier, when my feminist spirit
confronted, once and for all, the expectations of my
working—class community. For the first time in years I felt
"normal"*—or vindicated in my neurosis. My insane response

to an insane society was, of course, the only sane response.

I needed to see myself not as my (very American) intellectual
training had led me to see myself--as self—determined and
self-created (with wounds, it follows, that were
self-inflicted)--but as a product of my culture as well. As
we postmodern critics would say, reading Plath "located me
historically."

In the several years that have passed since I first read
Ihe_Bell_Jar I have confronted the questions of postmodernist
and feminist criticism, questions about historicity,
subjectivity, language and difference. As I've studied I‘ve
attempted to locate the concepts of "woman" and "female"
historically, culturally, philosophically, even biologically.
I have asked myself over and over how reading Plath's
text-—and other texts before and since-—affected my sense of
these concepts. Because my project began autobiographically,
with an affirmation of my "self" through Plath's novel, I
have maintained an interest in autobiography, and especially
in autobiographical fiction. Even as I've called that
selfhood into question, I've maintained that for political,
psychological and historical purposes, the autobiographical
act is, for women writers and readers, a radical act. Domna
C. Stanton, in her study of autobiography, Ine_£riyate_fielf+
agrees: She concludes, "Although the injunction against
writing had somewhat lifted for some women in some
contemporary places, autogynography . . . had a global and

essential therapeutic purpose: to constitute the female

subject. In a phallocentric system, which defines her as the
object, the inessential other to the same male subject--that
Ihe_fieggnd_fiex had proved beyond a doubt--the graphing of the
auto was an act of self-assertion that denied and reversed
women's status. It represented. . . the conquest of identity
through writing" (14).

I choose to write about the women's autobiographical
novel, then, because of In§_Bgll_Qar--and because I find it
fascinating that, in defiance of the linguistic tradition
described by Jacques Lacan, Simone de Beauvoir and Helene
Cixous, the author of an autobiographical novel places
herself firmly in a subject position; she assumes both that
she has the authority to write and that she can be a subject.
Thinly disguised as a fictional character, she also seems
more free to question and challenge the limits of her
self-perception and her cultural and linguistic repression.
Naming women's experiences, the autobiographer gives them
legitimacy in our logocentric world; she is, as Margaret
Homans writes, "bearing the word."2

In this postmodern age it has, of course, become
impossible to write naively about "the author" of a text.
Contemporary critics can't discuss "the author" without
posing a dozen questions about language, subjectivity and the
construction of the self. These questions are often aimed at
toppling the mysogynistic and ethnocentric tradition of

Western humanist discourse, still prevalent in the academy,

which claims the self as a unified whole "man," the "sole
author of history and of the literary text" (Moi 8), a
concept which has proven dangerous to women and minorities
(Moi 8). According to Toril Moi, this traditional concept of
the "phallic man" led to an understanding of history or text
as "nothing but the 'expression' of this unique
individual-~all art becomes autobiography, a mere window on
the self and the world, with no reality of its own" (8).
James Olney, one of the best-known theorists of
autobiography in the United States, reinforces this concept
of unified man in Metaphors_gfi_fielf. "A man's autobiography
is . . . like a magnifying lens," he writes, "focusing and
intensifying that same peculiar creative vitality that
informs all the volumes of his collected works; it is the
symptomatic key to all else that he did and, naturally, to
all that he was" (4). Olney theorizes that autobiographers
attempt to give us access to the universal through study of
the particular, i.e. the autobiographer's unique metaphor,
through which "like the poet, the autobiographer . . . draws
out of the flux of events a coherent pattern" (45)--
Montaigne's questing religious spirit, for example, or Mill's
reasoned "syllogism on private human experience" (259).
Sidonie Smith, in her feminist study A_Eoetics_of_flomen;s
Autobiography; challenges Olney and other male theorists of
autobiography. Like Moi, she focuses on recent French

criticism to expose the underlying assumptions of Western

humanism in autobiographical theory. These assumptions
include "confidence in the referentiality of language and a
corollary confidence in the authenticity of the self" (5),
two assumptions which American postmodernism has undermined.3
Smith joins Stanton, Estelle C. Jelinek, Francoise Lionnet,
Nancy K. Miller, Carolyn Heilbrun and others in exploring
feminist theories of autobiography which allow for a more
flexible concept of self, informed not only by French
feminisms, but also by the insights of feminist psychological
theorists such as Carol Gilligan, Nancy Chodorow, Jessica
Benjamin and Dorothy Dinnerstein.

A plural self and more open borders of individual
definition characterize these theories. Cixous in "Sorties"
and Luce Irigaray in Ihi§_sex_flhigh_i§_ugt_Qne discuss the
multiplicity of femaleness--of female language, sexuality and
relationships. In undermining patriarchal practices, we
must, as Cixous says, undermine patriarchal thinking--the
objective logic, the binary oppositions, the phallic self-—
that form and inform our thoughts. In doing this, feminist
literary critique embraces "a playful pluralism," as Annette
Kolodny encourages in "Dancing Through the Minefield"; it
locates itself in multiplicity.

On the other hand, as Nancy Hartsock observes, it is
disturbing to have the traditional unified subject pluralized
and problematized "exactly at the moment when so many of us

who have been silenced begin to demand the right to name

ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of history"
(196). In order to develop theories of gender difference, to
understand and identify an alternative tradition in
literature and to acknowldege women's experience of
oppression under patriarchy, women must be identified as
distinctly different subjects from the men who wrote the
books and dominated the societies. There is very little
comfort in multiplicity and deferral of meaning when
necessity and politics demand that we identify women writers,
and especially minority women writers, as unique selves with
specific interests and a decidedly different position in
relation to the dominant culture. Nancy K. Miller, for
example, responds to Roland Barthes, by shifting his emphasis
on text as "hyphology," which "chooses the spider's web over
the spider" and threatens the continued erasure of women's
creative production, to an emphasis on production and the
writing subject as "arachnology." "By arachnology, then,"
she means "a critical positioning which reads against the
weave of indifferentiation to discover the embodiment in
writing of a gendered subjectivity; to recover within
representation the emblems of its construction" (272).

To talk about women's texts, in other words, we must talk
about the gendered subjectivity which constructed them. But
we must talk about that subjectivity without reinforcing
traditional ideologies of a unified, whole self which were

oppressive to women and minorities who were historically

denied such selfhood. To avoid reinscribing our oppression,
we must maintain a postmodern view of the self as multiple,
as culturally, psychologically and biologically defined, as
gendered but not in the Western humanistic tradition of
binary oppositions of male and female. Because these
fascinating theoretical tensions are central to recent
feminist studies of autobiography, autobiography has become
the field where these ideas are played out to their fullest.
It is the field where humanism and poststructuralism meet,
where French and American feminist theories form their most
useful alliances.

This dissertation project focuses on these alliances by
surveying the field of autobiographical theory and its recent
feminist revisions, then analyzing and defining the genre of
women's autobiographical fiction, with special attention to
the intersections of autobiography and fiction and the
masking and narrative tricks that often make the line between
the two genres difficult to distinguish. Part One concludes
with a redefinition of modernism in light of the significant
contribution of women's autobiographical fiction to the
Anglo-American literature of the early twentieth century.

I have found, in my study of modernism, that
autobiographical fiction was a developing form often used at
the turn of the century but seldom discussed, even by early
feminist critics, although autobiography was sometimes

defined as a "feminine" genre by critics who denigrated the

personal and the domestic, as Gilbert and Gubar demonstrate
in their study of modernism. Influential modernist women
writers--Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Dorothy
Richardson, Antonia White, Nella Larsen, Anzia Yezierska,
Mary Antin, Radclyffe Hall-—all used the autobiographical
novel to challenge the limits of "fiction" and "Truth," as
well as to find their unique voices in a culture still
dominated by white male discourse. Parts Two and Three of my
project, then, center on these writers and their development
of modernist autobiographical fiction.

Chapter Three in Part Two introduces the ideas of French
feminism and Lacan on mother-language and demonstrates how
Anglo-American feminist critics have claimed the symbolic
space of pre-Oedipal "language" for literary and cultural
critique. Chapter Four, "Virginia Woolf Writing Her Self,"
studies the cryptic writing of Woolf's To_the_LighthQuse and
its association with this mother-language. In this chapter I
aim to strike a balance between the postmodern position which
rejects the ideas of Woolf's texts as a window to her self,
and the phallocentric position, which discourages an
apprehension of Woolf's contraditions, her complex
multiplicity and her "feminine language." I find that, in
the pages of IQ_Lhe_Lighthnse, Woolf bridged the gap between
these two modes of feminist thinking. My thesis is that
Woolf, as a result of her fascination with the then—radical

ideas of Freudian psychology and her efforts to understand

her place in the world as a woman, had made some discoveries
she wanted to articulate in this novel——discoveries about
female psychological development, about the stifling nature
of patriarchal thinking and about being a woman artist in a
phallocentric world. These discoveries prefigure and modify
some of the conclusions of contemporary feminist literary and
psychological theory. Because my training is in the American
feminist/Western humanist tradition I believe that some of
Woolf herself is available through this text. But the
conclusions of this chapter are only possible through an
expansion of that aesthetic, an embracing of the insights of
French feminism and what French theorists call "modernity."
(See Note 3)

Chapter Five, "H.D. Releasing Her," further examines this
tension through a study H.D.'s autobiographical novel,
fiERmiene. I find that in her experimental wordplay, in her
attempt to find a language to describe adequately her
experience, H.D. in a sense discovers feminine writing by
recovering her mother-language. In her attempt to overthrow
the scientific, logical law of her own father (represented in
its artisitic guise by the Ezra Pound character George
Lowndes) H.D. accomplished a cultural and linguistic coup
d'état, subverting and finally overthrowing what we now
define as the Lacanian Law of the Father.

Part Three focuses on marginality and autobiographical

fiction, through the novels of Anzia Yezierska (Breed

10

Giyere), Radclyffe Hall (Well_ef_Lenelineee) and Nella Larsen
(Quiekeend). Making use of socialist-feminist theories of
fiction I demonstrate how subversive these marginalized
voices are to the dominant discourse and discuss the power of
subjectivity of ethnic—American, lesbian and black women
writers. In my conclusion I will trace the trajectory of
autobiographical fiction into contemporary literature, where
these marginalized voices have all but conquered the American

literary tradition.

In "Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's
Fiction," Nancy K. Miller theorizes that the "elsewhere" that
is, according to Irigaray, the location of feminine language
in phallogocentric discourse is "a form of emphasis: an
italicized version of what passes for standard face. Spoken
or written, italics are a modality of intensity and stress, a
way of marking what has always already been said, of making a
common text one's own" (29). In my dissertation, I argue
that in autobiographical fiction women claim this "elsewhere"
of female language by changing both the discourse they write
in and the constructions of self this discourse engenders.
This parenthetical "emphasis" is, in autobiographical
fiction, more than an "emphasis added"; it is a distinctive

emphasis of their own.

11

Notes

1 I am quoting here from Domna C. Stanton's distinction
between the term "autobiographical" when applied to a woman's
text and the same term when applied to a text written by a
man (4).

2 Homans uses this image as the key concept in her
impressive study of woman's place in language, Beaxing_Lh§
A. 0' qo-.qo- .00. ‘uq ‘ .9‘ ‘0 r '0 0‘ “I I" ‘0 _

Womenls_mriting (1986).

3 I use the term postmodernism to indicate recent American
literary and cultural theory influenced by, among other
things, continental philosophy. For a definition of
"modernity" I rely on Alice A. Jardine's helpful study of
French theory throughout Gyneeie and her clear explanations
of how the philosophical questions of French modernity relate

to American postmodernism.

PART ONE

A Kind of Wonderment:
Toward a Theory of Women's Autobiographical Fiction

We can only retell and live by the stories we have read or
heard. We live our lives through texts.
--Carolyn G. Heilbrun

I confess that in the face of the women's autobiographi—
cal novels I will discuss here I still retain "a kind of
wonderment" despite the time I've spent researching and
studying them. This wonderment, to use George Gusdorf’s
phrase, is characteristic of a twentieth-century orientation
toward autobiographical writings. Says Gusdorf, "the heroism
of understanding and telling all, reenforced even more by the
teachings of psychoanalysis, takes on, in the eyes of our
contemporaries, an increasing value. Complexities, contra-
dictions, and aberrations do not cause hesitation or repug-
nance but a kind of wonderment" (34). The complexities,
contradictions, and aberrations" of the five writers and
their novels which are the focus of this study are enough to
keep many critics busy for many years. They were enough to
set me on the way to what has been an exciting and
challenging project——theorizing women's autobiographical

fiction.

13

Chapter One: The Autobiographical Tradition

Though I hesitate to begin "by turning to the male model
to see how and where it doesn't work," this "gesture to
revise" which Nancy K. Miller regrets in her essay on
autobiography in Sepjeet_Le_Qhenge (47) seems an impossible
one to avoid at this point in feminist critique. Aside from
a political objection to the message communicated by
beginning with a male model, my hesitation also has a
practical side. As Sidonie Smith suggests, a summary of what
has gone before in autobiographical theory does little to set
a context for women's autobiographical writing—-and
especially for their fictions--since most traditional
theories focus doggedly on male models of "pure" auto-
biography (7). Estelle C. Jelinek explains, for example,
that "critics by and large still have certain expectations of
a 'good' autobiography. It must center exclusively or mostly
on their authors, not on others . . . It should be
representative of its times, a mirror of the predominant
zeitgeist. The autobiographer should be self-aware, a seeker
after self-knowledge. He must aim to explore, not to exhort.
His autobiography should be an effort to give meaning to some
personal mythos" (4). Women's autobiographies, she goes on
to explain, break nearly every one of these rules. With this

disclaimer, then, I will begin by offering a brief summary

14

(as Smith, Miller, Jelinek and Domna C. Stanton all dol) of
what has gone before in (male) autobiographical theory.
Rather than offer a general review, however, I will focus on
the problems that will remain uppermost in this study--the
nature of the autobiographical subject, the creation of the
"self" through language, and the social and political
reverberations of certain constructions of individuality.
Though most theorists trace the beginning of auto-
biography to a post—Renaissance emphasis on individuality,
autobiographical theory is mainly a twentieth-century
phenomenon, and, as Jelinek points out, "It is only since
World War II that autobiography has been considered a
legitimate genre worthy of formal study" (1). Before then,
autobiographies were considered generally as historical
documents, as accurate accounts of the lives of public
figures-~the more accurate and historically representative
the account, the better the autobiography. Smith maintains
that this "preoccupation with the bios of the
autobiographer"--the life of the author-—led to the eventual
rejection by the next generation of critics of this early
mode of theorizing autobiography (4). In all the studies of
autobiography from George Misch's 1907 Histor¥_2£
AuLthQgIaph¥_in_AnLiQuit¥ to the numerous publications of
the 19303, little distinction was made between
autobiographies and biographies. Then, in fifties and

sixties, critics like Wayne Shumaker, Georges Gusdorf and

15

Barrett John Mandel began to argue that autobiography should
be treated as literature, not as biography. Many influential
studies have since followed their lead, analyzing
autobiography as a distinct literary genre, with an emphasis
on the autos, or the questions of self-representation, which
abound when authors attempt to write their own lives.

Most of these more recent studies of autobiography,
which I will identify more specifically in the pages that
follow, begin with St. Augustine or Montaigne and trace their
almost exclusively Western male heritage through Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Goethe, John Stuart Mill, Benjamin Franklin and
Henry Adams, or other similar figures. With their emphasis
on self-representation, almost all participate in what Alison
M. Jaggar has so lucidly described as a traditional liberal
concept of human nature, which focuses on the individual-—his
self-interest, his need for self-fulfillment, his innate
ability to reason (I choose the masculine pronoun purposely,
here and elsewhere, to indicate that this philosophy
generally excludes consideration of a female gendered concept
of "man") .2 In the 1960 WWW.
one of the early formal studies of the genre, Roy Pascal
writes, "True autobiographies are those whose chief concern
is to illuminate a personality" (134). Albert E. Stone, in
his 1981 collection Ihe_Amerieen_Autehiegrephy, reinforces
Pascal's claim in his discussion of autobiography as "an

activity of self-construction." Stone explains: "In the

16

language of psychoanalysis, autobiography is . . . an
overdetermined document; it is simultaneously historical
record and literary artifact, psychological case history and
spiritual confession, didactic essay and ideological
testament. Uniting all these available modes and possible
motives for 'telling one's story' is, of course, the self who
is both actor and author. Personal identity is the root and
result of the autobiographical act" (2) [emphasis added].

And Karl Joachim Weintraub in the Introduction to his
appropriately—named Value ef the Indiyidual; Self and
Qireumstenee_in_Autebiegrephy (1976) insists that his subject
matter, "a major component of modern man's self-conception,"
is "the belief that, whatever else he is, he is a unique
individuality, whose life task is to be true to his very own
personality. This essay rests on the conviction that this
conception of personality, this idea of the individualized
person, is a part of the modern form of historical
consciousness" (xi). Later he adds prescriptively, "My
interest is less in all the varied forms of autobiographic
writing than in that proper form of autobiography wherein a
self-reflective person asks "who am I?" and "how did I become
what I am?" I search for condition of self—conscious
individuality" (1) [emphasis added].

Though this emphasis on the "seamlessly unified self" of
traditional humanism--"potent, phallic and male" (Moi 8)--has

the merit James Olney claims for it, of being "largely

17

responsible for opening things up and turning them in a
philosophical, psychological, and literary direction" (19),
it has some obvious problems for the recent feminist
autobiographical theories which I will discuss in the second
half of this chapter. It is also problematic in that it
overemphasizes the autos of autobiography to the exclusion of
considerations of the bios and graphia, or the life
experiences of the subject and the writing itself, or the
creation of the text in language. The definition of
autobiography which others have most often cited, Philip
Lejeune's from his study Le_£eete_ee;ebiegrephigee (1975),
reflects this: "A retrospective account in prose that a real
person makes of his own existence stressing his individual
life and especially the history of his personality" (14)
[emphasis added]. Although Lejeune considers all elements of
autobiography and develops a theory based on a pact between
author and reader, within this one-sentence definition he
captures the problem of autobiography's traditional focus on
the separated and distinct individual with sharp ego
boundaries, the unproblematized "self" of traditional Western
discourse.

Georges Gusdorf's influential 1956 essay "Conditions and
Limits of Autobiography," translated by James Olney and
included in the important 1980 collection Antehiegrephy;

WM. contains key statements of

the ethno- and androcentricity of recent autobiographical

18

theory. Since this essay is seminal to contemporary
considerations of autobiography, I will quote from it in some
detail. Gusdorf posits that "autobiography is not to be
found outside of our cultural area; one would say that it
expresses a concern peculiar to Western man" (29) [emphasis
added]. His catechism of autobiography begins "Each of us
tends to think of himself as the center of a living space: I
count, my existence is significant to the world, and my death
will leave the world incomplete" (29). Gusdorf traces this
sense of significance to the Copernican Revolution, when man
was torn from alignment "to the great cosmic cycles" and
found himself, instead, "engaged in an autonomous adventure"
(31). According to Gusdorf, this turned "man's
consciousness" inward to "reassemble the scattered elements
of his individual life and to regroup them in a comprehensive
sketch" (35). Without a sense of individuality, of
self-conscious awareness, Gusdorf writes, autobiography
cannot exist. "The author of an autobiography masters [the
turmoil and fascination of Narcissus] by submitting to it;
beyond all images, he follows unceasingly the call of his own
being" (33). Calling on Hegel's statement that
"consciousness of self is the birthplace of truth" Gusdorf
describes autobiography as a means to self knowledge "thanks
to the fact that it recomposes and interprets a life in its
totality. . . . In other words, autobiography is a second

reading of experience, and it is truer than the first because

19

it adds to experience itself consciousness of it" (38). A
sense of self-conscious individuality and the desire to order
experience through a written account of the individual life

seem to guide Gusdorf's theory.
Similarly, James Olney. in Metaphors_of_Selfi__Ihe
WW (1972). sees the desire to order

experience as central to the autobiographical project. He
writes: "The most fruitful approach to the subject of
autobiography, I believe, is to consider it neither as a
formal nor as an historical matter, which would be to
separate it from the writer's life and his personality, but
rather to see it in relation to the vital impulse to order
that has always caused man to create and that, in the end,
determines both the nature and the form of what he creates."
The work, then, no matter what form it takes "will express
and reflect its maker" (3). Later he reinforces this point:
"What one seeks in reading autobiography is not a date, a
name, or a place, but a characteristic way of perceiving, of
organizing" (37).

This tendency to theorize about the male autobiographer
and his "characteristic way of perceiving the world" leads
almost inevitably to the centrality of a certain type of
writer. In Ihe_Exemined_Self (1964), a study of Benjamin
Franklin, Henry Adams and Henry James, for example, Robert F.
Sayre finds a commonality among his three autobiographers.

"One reason they are so absorbing," he suggests, "is that

20

these increasingly intense examinations somehow account for
other men's lives as well; they comment profoundly on the
American experience" (vii). Though, he adds later, "the
great autobiographer is never really a typical man of his
time, . . . he can be an especially acute witness to it"
(184). But even with this qualification, Sayre's
autobiographer becomes a prototype, a representative man.
The theorist's tendency to universalize the singular life
experience of the male autobiographer leads to an
ethnocentric view of the world, excluding the experiences of
non-Westerners, minorities and women. Alice A. Jardine
rightly calls our attention to the connection between this
process of representation and "the sorting out of identity
and difference . . . naming, controlling, remembering,
understanding" and to its complicitousness "with a violence
as old as Western history itself" (119), a point I will
return to in Part Three of this dissertation.

Sayre's carving out of public territory for the male
autobiographer has roots in the oldest autobiographies in
English. Cynthia S. Pomerleau explains that as early as the
seventeenth century women wrote about their private lives,
men their public: "The idea that oneself, one's feelings,
one's spouse and domestic relations were properly and
innately worth writing about was essentially a female idea,
however tentatively conceived at the time" (28). This may

have been because, as Annette Kolodny argues in her study of

21

Kate Millet's autobiography, "the fine distinctions between
public and private, or trivial and important, which have
served as guidelines for the male autobiographer, have never
really been available to women" (240).

Carolyn G. Heilbrun, in "Woman's Autobiographical
Writings: New Forms," likens women's orientation toward
autobiographical writing to what Gusdorf has called a
"preautobiographical era in human history." Gusdorf
explains: "The individual does not oppose himself to all
others; he does not feel himself to exist outside of others,
and still less against others . . . the important unit is
never the isolated being" (29). Alison M. Jaggar, in
Eeminiet_EeliLiee_end_Hemen_NeLere, points out the male bias
inherent in the theories that focus on the "isolated being,"
presupposing solipsism. She argues that it is hard to
imagine women developing a theory "ignoring human
interdependence and especially the long dependence of human
young" (45). As Heilbrun says, women lived in Gusdorf's
"preautobiographical era," until very recently. "Though they
occasionally wrote about their own lives," she argues,
"singularity was hardly to be boasted of. Even in the
twentieth century, before the current women's movement, women
had only what Patricia Spacks has called 'selves in
hiding'(112). Their narratives of self were strictly bound
in by convention and scarcely to be compared with those of

the male autobiographer expressing, as Gusdorf puts it, 'the

22

wonder that he feels before the mystery of his own destiny.’
Autobiography in that sense has been possible for women only
in the last two decades, and then probably not in what
theorists of the genre would call its true form" (14).

The stricture that dictates that autobiographies must
"center exclusively or mostly on their authors, not on
others," of course, not only limited women's tendency to
write autobiographies in the traditional form, it also
limited the reception of the ones they did write. As Jelinek
first observed, women's autobiographies have been,
historically, different from men's, often finding their most
significant expressions of selfhood not through rugged
individualism, but through identification with an "other," as
can be seen, for example, in Margaret Cavendish's Tree
Worinw
jMergery_Kempe. As Susan Stanford Friedman points out, "The
emphasis on individualism as the necessary precondition for
autobiography is . . . a reflection of privilege, one that
excludes from the canons of autobiography those writers who
have been denied by history the illusion of individualism"
(39). In other words, a sense of distinct individuality,
negative and illusory though it may be, was a luxury that
women, with their enforced gender-identification, were
historically not allowed--and their writings reflect that.

This is especially significant in the development of

autobiographical theory because, as Friedman makes clear in

23

her critique of Gusdorf: "The very sense of identification,
interdependence, and community that Gusdorf dismisses from
autobiographical selves are key elements in the development
of a woman's identity, according to theorists like [Sheila]
Rowbotham and [Nancy] Chodorow. Their models of women's
selfhood highlight the unconscious masculine bias in
Gusdorf's and other individualistic paradigms" (38). She
also argues with Gusdorf's contention that "the consciousness
of self upon which autobiography is premised is the sense of
'isolated being,‘ a belief in the self as a discrete, finite
'unit' of society. Man must be an island unto himself.
Then, and only then, is autobiography possible" (36).

Indeed the woman's position in patriarchal culture,
defined memorably by Simone de Beauvoir, of being the
inessential, the object-Other where the subject is always
male, sheds new light on what Gusdorf calls "a new spiritual
revolution" which coincided with the appearance of
autobiography. Gusdorf posits that when "the artist and the
model coincide, the historian tackles himself as object

The subject who seizes on himself for object inverts
the natural direction of attention; it appears that in
acting thus he violates certain secret taboos of human
nature" (32). Gusdorf's autobiographical author/subject
begins his new spiritual revolution by, in a sense, becoming
woman, by placing himself in her "natural" position. When

women take up the pen to write their autobiographies,

24

however, their subject position inverts Gusdorf’s "natural
direction of attention."3 The implications of this are
especially interesting when considered in light of Catherine
MacKinnon's ideas about subjectivity and objectivity
introduced in "Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State."
MacKinnon proposes that women, "having been objectified as
sexual beings while stigmatized as ruled by subjective
passions . . . reject the distinction between knowing subject

and known object-—the division between subjective and

objective postures" (536). For women, she argues,
"objectification is alienation." There is no distinction
between objectification and alienation, she writes, "because

women have not authored objectifications, we have been them"
(541—2).

Of course, that makes autobiographical writing in its
traditional sense a difficult proposition for women writers.
As MacKinnon notes, "the problem of how the object can know
herself as such is the same as how the alienated can know its
own alienation" (542). In addition, as Smith explains, for
the woman writer "to call attention to her distinctiveness is
to become 'unfeminine.‘ To take a voice and to authorize a
public life are to risk loss of reputation" (10). Kolodny
similarly suggests that women have historically been
reluctant to create an "artful invention" of themselves, as
William L. Howarth theorizes the autobiographer must do,

because women have been "defined, framed, restricted, and

25

simplified (for their own purposes) by everyone from Norman
Mailer to Madison Avenue advertising executives" (240).
Woman, who has been placed in the position of object and
fixed there by the male gaze, performs a revolutionary act
when she writes her story, as I will discuss in further
detail later. Again, as Stanton so eloquently states and I
emphasize: "Although the injunction against writing had
somewhat lifted for some women in some contemporary places,
autogynography. . . had a global and essentially therapeutic
purpose: to constitute the female subject. In a
phallocentric system, which defines her as the object, the
inessential other to the same male subject--that Ihe_Seeend
Sex has proved beyond a doubt--the graphing of the auto was
an act of self-assertion that denied and reversed women's
status" (14) [emphasis in original].

Many feminist theorists of autobiography have taken a
similar political stand, calling attention to the strategies
woman writers have used to write their stories in spite of
cultural prohibitions against doing so. Following the
Chodorow model of interdependence as a model of women's
self-development, some have posited an other-identification
similar to the paradigm first observed by Jelinek in her
collection, Womenls_Aut9biQgranh¥l_Essa¥s_in_£riticism
(1980), the first significant study of a women's
autobiographical tradition. In her introductory essay to

this volume Jelinek concludes, "In contrast to the

26

self-confident, one-dimensional self—image that men usually
project [in autobiography], women often depict a
multi-dimensional, fragmented self-image colored by a sense
of inadequacy and alienation, of being outsiders or "other";
they feel the need for authentication, to prove their
self-worth" (xiii). Mary Mason (writing the only essay on
women's autobiography in Olney's collection) also concludes
that "the self-discovery of female identity seems to
acknowledge the real presence and recognition of another
consciousness, and the disclosure of female self is linked to
the identification of some "other" (210).

Spacks finds in the autobiographies of well-known women
of the twentieth century a similar tendency to refrain from
asserting a unique and independent individuality; instead,
women like Golda Meir and Eleanor Roosevelt used their public
commitment "to find an acceptable definition of self almost
without declaring individuality" (121). She quotes Eleanor
Roosevelt: ". . . my interest or sympathy or indignation is
not aroused by an abstract cause but by the plight of a
single person whom I have seen with my own eyes . . . . Out
of my response to an individual develops an awareness of a
problem of the community then to the country, and finally to
the world." Spacks explains, "Happiness, as these women
implicitly or explicitly evoke it, derives from relationship"
(122). In an essay on Lillian Hellman's autobiographical

writings, Marcus K. Bilson and Sidonie Smith also decide that

27

"Hellman renders the self through the 'other'" (179).

This sense of otherness takes on further significance
when coupled with the insights of recent French theory,
especially that of Héléne Cixous, Julia Kristeva and Luce
Irigaray, which describe, in opposition to Freudian theories
of self-definition, the maintenance of a persistent tie with
the mother. Though I will discuss this in further detail in
Part Two, I will point out here that these theorists, and
others following them, such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar, credit this link to the mother for a multi-voiced
discourse characteristic of much of the experimental fiction
writing of modernism. The ("true") fragmented self, so
essential to the theoretical writings of the postmodernists,
is revealed through fissures in the smooth facade of
individuality. This individuality is now seen as only an
illusion of Western humanism-—an illusion linked in the
twentieth century to Freudian constructs of successful
individuation. Many of the feminist revisions of
autobiographical theory cited herein rely on this observation
to critique traditional views of autobiography.

Shari Benstock, for example, in her Introduction to The

' I E
g. .9 C. 0.9. 2,.

' . ._ ‘ ‘ ‘ 0‘0 «00. " a. ' ‘ 0 tone.
Writinge, sees diversity and divisions in women's
autobiographical writings as characteristic of the genre.

Indeed, she refuses to create a master theory of women's

autobiography in order to avoid smoothing over these

28

divisions which themselves define the texts, as well as the
feminist criticisms of the texts. She writes of the authors
cited in her collection of essays, "The effort to theorize a
paradigm of self that would include each of these women is
revealed as naive and critically self-serving. The writing
moment that promises to seal the self and to heal a divided
subject instead opens a seam in the autobiographical text
exposing what Felicity Nussbaum has termed a 'fissure of
female discontinuity' that escapes the boundaries of any
given theory of selfhood or writing practice" (9).

Stanton builds her theory of "autogynography" on a
similar insight into the multiplicity of the self and its
connection to others: "The female 'I' was thus not simply a
texture woven of various selves; its threads, its life-lines,
came from and extended to others. By that token, this 'I'
represented a denial of a notion essential to the
phallogocentric order: the totalized self-contained subject
present-to-itself . . . . autogynography . . . dramatized the
fundamental alterity and non-presence of the subject, even as
it asserts itself discursively and strives toward an always
impossible self—possession" (15).4

Interestingly, Jelinek, coming from a political or
empirical perspective instead of Stanton's more linguistic
and metaphorical one, notices almost the same characteristics
of women's autobiographical writing. She observes:

irregularity rather than orderliness informs

 

29

the self-portraits by women. The narratives of their
lives are often not chronological and progressive but
disconnected, fragmentary, or organized into
self-sustained units rather than connecting chapters.
The multidimensionality of women's socially
conditioned roles seems to have established a pattern
of diffusion and diversity when they write their
autobiographies as well, and so by established
critical standards, their life studies are excluded
from the genre and cast into the 'nonartistic'
categories of memoir, reminiscence, and other
disjunctive forms. (17)
She, too, concludes that the traditional criterion "of
orderliness, wholeness, or a harmonious shaping with which
critics characterize autobiography is often not applicable to
women's autobiographies" (19). Kolodny makes a similar
(characteristic) connection between woman's cultural
experience and her writing, tracing an "apparently loose or
disjointed sentence style" in Millet's Flying to "the
narrator's own 'broken and discontinuous experience'" (258).
Gusdorf, too, perceptively cites the impulse to order as
"the original sin of autobiography," undermining and
falsifying the text's connection with the author's lived
experience. He writes that because "the narrative is
conscious, and since the narrator's consciousness directs the

narrative, it seems to him incontestable that it has also

30

directed his life" (41). Even so, Gusdorf himself commits
the same sin in his discussion of autobiography, eliding the
orderly text with a seamlessly unified author. Many of the
revisionist feminist theorists do likewise, a point which
Toril Moi makes (rather uncomfortably for American feminists)
in SexnelLIeanel_Eelitiee, where she condemns feminist
critics of Virginia Woolf for their Western humanist bias. I
will return to this discussion of subjectivity (and further
problematize it) in Chapter Two.

Not being without sin myself, I hesitate to cast
stones——or dole out blessings. But, returning to the
observation that woman‘s lived experience has been more
diverse, characterized by accommodation to a multiplicity of
roles and demands, it appears that women's autobiographical
texts and the theories which have recently sprung up around
them are less prone to Gusdorf's "original sin." As Jelinek
points out, "the projection of an image of self-confidence"
has been characteristic of men's autobiographies (as any
"resisting reader" of Henry Adams could attest). This, she
writes, "is contrary to the self-image projected in women's
autobiographies. What their life stories reveal is a
self-consciousness and a need to sift through their lives for
explanation and understanding. The autobiographical
intention is often powered by the motive to convince readers
of their self—worth, to clarify, to affirm, and to

authenticate their self—image. Thus, the idealization or

31

aggrandizement found in male autobiographies is not typical
of the female mode" (15). A corollary lack of confidence in
the inevitability of their own destiny seems to follow from
this different view women autobiographers have taken of
themselves. Thus, the woman writer's narrative is more
fragmented, less an "artful invention" than those male texts
held up by traditional theorists as exemplary
autobiographies.

Interestingly, Susan Stanford Friedman finds the same
hesitations which Jelinek cites as characteristic of woman's
autobiographies in the autobiographies of minority men (and I
would add in the writings of male theorists who have embraced
postmodernism, such as Roland Barthes in his autobiographical
work, Ber;hee_by_3erehee). When these women writers take up
the subject position outside of the prescribed cultural
boundaries of representations for woman, she posits, they
must develop a "dual consciousness-—the self as culturally
defined and the self as different from cultural
prescription." This dual consciousness "directly parallels
W.E.B. Du Bois's identification of dual consciousness for
blacks living in a dominant white culture" (39). I will
return to this insight in Part Three.

Thus, the feminist critique of traditional
autobiographical theory shifts attention away from the idea
of a clearly defined individual and a carefully ordered

experience, a shift that problematizes subjectivity.

32

Traditional autobiographical method, as Heilbrun points out,

simply doesn't work for women:
Erik Erikson has said that autobiographies 'are
written at certain late stages of life for the purpose
of re-creating oneself in the image of one's own
method; and they are written to make that image
convincing.’ As is usual with Erikson's observations
about life histories, this applies more easily to men.
Women do not look back to recreate themselves in
keeping with some finally perceived ideal; rather,
they look back towards the moment at which they found
the courage to move forward into as yet unnarrated and
unexplored ways of living; they have no 'image of
one's own method.‘ (21)

Feminist revisionary autobiographical theory also moves
from the narratives of the public man to narratives of
women's self-development in private as well as public
spheres, because as Spacks points out, "commitment to formal
autobiography, a story of the self written with the intent of
dissemination, implies also a claim of significance—-a fact
that troubled early practitioners who felt obliged to defend
themselves against the charge of vanity by asserting the
exemplary shape of their experience or the didactic intent of
their prose. Women, for obvious social reasons, have
traditionally had more difficulty than men about making

public claims of their own importance" (112). Elizabeth

33

Winston also notes that woman autobiographers who moved into
the public sphere found themselves in an uncomfortable
position: "Those whose autobiographies were published before
1920 tended to establish a conciliatory relationship to their
readers, by this means attempting to justify their
untraditional ways of living and writing so as to gain the
audience's sympathy and acceptance. Women who published
autobiographies after 1920, however, no longer apologized for
their careers and successes, though a few still showed signs
of uneasiness at having violated cultural expectations for
women" (93).

Finally, feminist autobiographical theory focuses on
relationships and on women's cultural identification as
Object-other. Again, Jelinek insists that woman
autobiographers place emphasis "on the personal, especially
on people, rather than on their life work, their professional
success, or their connectedness to current political or
intellectual history." This, she adds, "clearly contradicts
the established criterion about the content of autobiography"
(10).

When we review the autobiographical tradition, it becomes
obvious that women writers and feminist critics have, indeed,
written "in a different voice," altering autobiography and
the terms of our discourse about it. Though I see this
difference as mainly culturally constructed—-women responding

to our different cultural roles--nonetheless, I find the

34

ifference significant enough to warrant the separate study

f a women's autobiographical tradition, as many of studies
've cited here undertake. As the feminist critique continues
0 develop, it affects traditional autobiographical theory in
ignificant ways. For example, though Olney includes only
ary Mason's essay on woman's autobiography, his introductory
ssay demonstrates a significant shift from the theory of his
arlier Meeephere_ef_self (1972). He acknowledges the
nfluence of minority and feminist autobiographical theory
nd, with a nod to postmodernism, calls Michel Leiris's
endless, open-ended, labyrinthine [and, of course, male]
ntiautobiography" the "classic autobiography" for our time
27).

As autobiographical theory continues to develop, the
iscourse will continue to change, to focus on different
roblems and different strengths, because just as
utobiography is an act that "alters in some degree the shape
f one's life and leaves one different" (Pascal 183),

heorizing is an act that alters the shape of our discourse.

35

Notes

1 All of these summaries are helpful in setting a context
for contemporary autobiographical theory; I would suggest
turning to Jelinek' 5 Introduction in Thc_Traditicn_cf_Wcmcn_s

for a more
thorough historical overview than I have thought necessary to
develop in this chapter. Also exceptionally useful is James
Olney's "Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic,
Historical, and Bibliographical Introduction," the opening
essay in his collection W
Critical

2 Jaggar' 3 discussion of traditional liberalism can be found

in W, especially Chapters

Two and Three.

3 I will return to this point in Chapter Two, but for now I
will simply make clear that I am not discussing an
unproblematic "subject" position, nor insinuating that this
is any way a natural or necessary order of things.

4 Again, Stanton's explanation of the female "I" is, of
course, dependent on the insights of modernity which I will
examine in further detail in Chapter Two.

36

Chapter Two: Autobiographical Fiction

Because the aim of the project is to develop a theory of
autobiographical fiction, I will now move from my survey of
the autobiographical tradition to a look at the intersections
of autobiography and fiction. Though this may sound like an
easy shift, it brings up complex questions about the nature
of fiction and truth, questions which are central to
postmodernist literary theory. Indeed, Pascal in his essay
"The Autobiographical Novel and The Autobiography" warns that
"If one starts with the ideas that the terms 'fictional' and
'true' will serve to distinguish these two forms of writing,
one is doomed to disappointment" (134). Many theorists of
autobiography have confronted the problems such distinctions
hold for their work. I will focus on these problems as they
apply to self—representation in autobiographical writing.

Lejeune, in Le_EeeLe_eeeehiegrephigee, claims that
"internally" there is "no difference between an autobiography
and an autobiographical novel." The difference comes out
only in the reader's perception of the difference, he
theorizes (52). Darrel Mansell, in an essay on fact in
autobiography included in Stone's collection Ihe_Amerieen
Angghiegrephy, also places the distinction between the two
genres on an understanding between reader and writer, though

while Lejeune's theory weighs heavily toward the reader,

37

Mansell's centers on the writer and "his intention."
According to Mansell, "when we are determining which side of
the great fact-fiction watershed a book belongs on, its
conforming or not conforming to the facts of reality is
irrelevant. We make our determination on the basis of the
author's declared or inferred intention, and the probability
or plausibility of what he says is merely one of many means
at his disposal for establishing his intention. The genre
'autobiography' seems therefore a matter of the author's
intention, nothing more" (68) [emphasis added].

Like Lejeune, Mansell finds nothing apparently or
inherently different in the two genres. He states strongly
that "there is no way an author or anybody else could make a
distinction between autobiography and fiction that would not
crumble in his hands. There is nothing decisive in the
relation of word to what happened, nothing decisive in the
writer's own mental processes, nothing decisive in the
organization of words on the page—-nothing that makes an
essential distinction between the two kinds of writing" (71).
But for some reason we make the distinction, Mansell adds,
because "somehow an 'intention' declares itself to us" (72).
He concludes by placing the distinction between autobiography
and fiction in "the very constitution of the mind" of the
writers and readers. He explains: "All texts tend to be a
conflation of fact and fiction. But the intending or

inferring mind has got to declare for one or the other in

38

spite of the unimpeachable truth that such a distinction does
not 'exist' in the texts themselves" (75).

Stone, too, insists that "the reader completes the
autobiographical act in much the same way the psychoanalyst's
interpretation completes a dream" (6). He cites Mansell,
Lejeune and Barrett John Mandel who all agree that writers
and readers form a pact "or contractual community" which
decides the terms of differentiation between fiction and
truth. "They commonly agree," writes Stone, "that the
language of autobiography points both outward to the world of
remembered experience and inward to a reflective
consciousness. Thus," he concludes, "like all
narratives-—including of course, histories-~autobiography is
simultaneously fiction and fact" (7).

Likewise, though on a larger scale, Michael Riffaterre
argues in Eietienel_lreth that narrative truth has nothing to
do with factuality "nor does the interpretation or esthetic
evaluation of fictional narrative require that it be verified
against reality." Instead, for Riffaterre, truth is tied up
with the concept of referentiality. He relies on the
agreements that "exist in any language and with which all
speakers of that language are familiar" to provide a basis
for referentiality--for a relationship between language and
reality. Thus, "Words may lie yet still tell a truth if the
rules are followed" (xiii).

Though Lejeune, Mansell, and Stone's arguments rely on an

39

understanding of the relationship between reader and text and
Riffaterre's on a perceived foundation of rules all speakers
understand, all three deny any inherent difference between
fiction and truth. Apparently, Riffaterre would even argue
that fiction contains more truth than does nonfiction.
Gusdorf makes a similar claim for autobiography, saying that
"in autobiography the truth of facts is subordinate to the
truth of the man, for it is first of all the man who is in
question. The narrative offers us the testimony of a man
about himself, the contest of a being in dialogue with
itself, seeking its innermost fidelity . . . . The
significance of autobiography should therefore be sought
beyond truth and falsity" (43). But before we abandon this
distinction as irrelevant, what is Gusdorf's "truth of the
man" which is superior to a mere "truth of facts"? What is
this truth that fiction declares? And how does it relate to
the distinction between "novel" and "autobiography" and to
the Dewey Decimal classifications of "fiction" and
"nonfiction"?

Taking a cue from Riffaterre, I will begin my examination
of these questions by confronting the concept of
referentiality, the relationship between language and truth.
Riffaterre, again, finds a basis for referentiality in the
shared system of rules which all speakers of a language
share--a characteristically structuralist view. Critics of

structuralism argue that this concept, though based on faith

40

in empirical, scientific analysis of language systems, has as
its foundation a Platonic belief in "true originals." In
other words, as Plato explains in Book X of Ihe_Repeblic,
"Whenever a number of individuals have a common name, we
assume that there is one corresponding idea or form" (3).
This idea or form is the original thing (or the ultimate
"thingness," as some have described it), in the mind of God,
if you will, and all reproductions of it are mere imitations
hearkening back to the one original. Artists and poets are
implicated in Plato's system for being "thrice removed" from
the original thing, creating, unforgiveably, an "imitation of
an imitation."1

This assumption of art as mimesis is, of course, a
central concept in the tradition of literature and of
literary criticism, one which I only begin to develop here,
but for the purpose of this essay suffice it to say that
art's ability to reproduce truth has been questioned, revised
but, most often, relied upon in Western tradition at least
since Plato. Perhaps, then, the most striking characteristic
ideology of postmodernism as we've inherited it from
Continental theory is the end of this belief. Since World
War II in Europe and, in the U.S. at least since Jacques
Derrida delivered his highly influential critique of
Levi-Strauss and structuralism, "Structure, Sign, and Play in
the Discourse of the Human Sciences," at Johns Hopkins in

1966 the idea of a "transcendental signified" has been

41

consistently challenged. Derrida demonstrated that words as
signifiers don't refer back to "true originals," but only to
other signifiers. As Hazard Adams and LeRoy Searle explain,
"Fundamentally Derrida's attack was on the assumption lying
behind the whole tradition of Western metaphysics as he saw
it. Western metaphysics was the prisoner of the idea of
'being as presence,’ that is, the notion of some anchor of
being behind language, which was its ultimate truth or
referent. He called this notion 'logocentrism' . . . " (8).

Postmodernism, following Derrida, contends that we cannot
talk about a transcendent truth beyond language because
everything has its being in and through language, and
language is subject to the "endless deferral of meaning." A
term, then, has meaning only in relation to other terms, only
in relation to what it isn't. This concept Derrida calls
"différance." Steering back to the question at hand, then,
it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between
fiction and truth, since both are equally constructs of
language and neither can claim referentiality. Without a
transcendental signified, what would they refer to? What
would make the fictional world of the novel any more "true"
than the "real" world of lived experience?

Paul de Man in "Autobiography as De-facement" finds the
fascination of autobiography in this tension--in
autobiography's inability to live up to our expectations for

it because of the fallacy of logocentrism. "The interest of

42

autobiography, then, is not that it reveals reliable
self-knowledge--it does not—-but that it demonstrates in a
striking way the impossibility of closure and of totalization
(that is the impossibility of coming into being) of all
textual systems made up of tropological situations" (922).
Autobiography, then, gives no more reliable an access to
truth than does any "textual system." Yet even without the
possibility of revealed self-knowledge, autobiographical
writing, revolving as it does around parallel poles of author
and subject, seems to be somehow more "true" than fiction.
This observation to which most of us still cling leads
inevitably to the question of subjectivity, what I would call
the other major preoccupation of postmodernism. Mandel, for
example, relies, again, on the presence of speaking and
reading subjects to locate the "truth" of autobiography. He
contends that "What defictionalizes autobiography is both the
readers' powers of cocreation and the author's animation in
the present of his or her past. The author, it may be said,
is always present in autobiography" (64). Apparently
influenced by the philosophies of Hans-Georg Godamer, he
later he adds, "it is the very overlapping of
autobiographer's and the reader's horizons that adds to the
undeniable aura of truthfulness surrounding the text" (68).
However, Michel Foucault in "What is an Author" (1969)
sends the concept of "subjectivity" careening into the same

undifferentiated discursive space as Derrida sent "truth."

43

Arguing that the "author-function" is a construct of "the
legal and institutional systems that circumscribe, determine,
and articulate the realm of discourses" and not a
transcendent "originating subject," he concludes "the subject
(and its substitutes) must be stripped of its creative role
and analyzed as a complex and variable function of discourse"
(148). Subjectivity, then, is also a function of language,
having existence only within language. The idea of the
unified, whole "man" of Western humanism which I addressed in
Chapter One depends, just as Plato's mimesis depends, on the
presence of the transcendental signified which is beyond
language.

Foucault explains how the notion of 'author' is connected
to this concept of Western man. The coming into being of the
author, he says, constitutes "the privileged moment of
individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge and
literature, or in the history of philosophy and science"
(139). The oral storytelling and folk traditions which
preceded this moment found little need to fix "property
value" in the name of the author. It is time again, he says,
to stop letting our adherence to outdated ideas of
transcendence hold us back. "Is it not necessary to draw a
line between those who believe that we can continue to
situate our present discontinuities within the historical and
transcendental tradition of the nineteenth century and those

who are making a great effort to liberate themselves, once

44

and for all, from this this conceptual framework?" (141).

Or, as John Barth put it, "It did happen: Freud and Einstein
and two world wars and the Russian and sexual revolutions and
automobiles and airplanes and telephones and radios and
movies and urbanization, and now nuclear weaponry and
television and microchip technology and the new feminism and
the rest, and there's no going back to Tolstoy and Dickens &
Co, except on nostalgia trips" (Jardine 23).2

Dragged into this post—Derridean, post—Foucauldian age of
postmodernism, autobiographical theory has had to adapt
itself to new exigencies. The autobiographical text is no
longer an unproblematized historical account of a person's
life but, in the words of Roland Barthes, "a multidimensional
space in which a variety of writings, none of them original,
blend and clash. . . . a tissue of quotations drawn from
innumerable centres of culture" (146).3 Some theorists of
autobiography have responded to the demands of these new
insights. Returning with them, then, to the distinction
between autobiography and fiction, returning without
transcendent truth and without the author—subject, where do
we go from here?

Shari Benstock, like Alice Jardine, finds a new,
postmodern speaking/writing subject the most fruitful field
of inquiry in her explorations of autobiography.4 Focussing
on how both text and autobiographical subject are constituted

in language, she theorizes, "language is neither an external

 

45

force nor a 'tool' of expression, but the very symbolic
System that both constructs and is constructed by the writing
Subject" (16). She writes of the "primordially divided"
SUbject and notes that "The self that would reside at the
Center of the text is decentered--and often is absent
altogether——in women's autobiographical texts" (20).
ThErefore, the postmodern self, divided and decentered, opens
a new series of questions about subjectivity and texts,
queStions about "the unsettling of the 'I'/the unsettling Of
'selflwcnity," questions she finds most compelling in recent
antObiographical texts by women (21). "Language, she writes,
"whic1r1 operates according to a principle of division and
Sepaliaation, is the medium by which and through which the
.3911? ' is constructed. 'Writing the self' is therefore a
processsss of simultaneous sealing and splitting that can only
traC€3 :fissures of discontinuity" (29). In Part TWO Of this
disseen:1:ation, I will consider in greater detail this concept
Of "‘V1?:iting the self" through language.

BEEInstock also criticizes Gusdorf for his failure to
recogn jze the "unsettling of self—unity" in his notion that
tr“? €11T“tist and model coincide in autobiography. This
SC>~CEi§1~.1ed coincidence, she says, is itself a fiction, an
1411A153;il<n1 like the child's image of itself in Lacan's mirror
53tla‘363 ~ Like the autobiographer, she writes, "The developing
(213411“C1 drives toward fusion and homogeneity in the

(It)
rlsyt-ruction of a 'self' . . . against the effects of

46

division and dissolution" (12). Gusdorf's definition of
autobiography as "a mirror in which the individual reflects
his own image," argues Benstock:
overlooks what might be the most interesting
aspect of the autobiographical: the measure to which
'self' and 'self—image' might not coincide, can never
coincide in language-—not because certain forms of
self-writing are not self—conscious enough but because
they have no investment in creating a cohesive self
over time. Indeed, they seem to exploit difference
and change over sameness and identity: their writing
follows the "seam" of the conscious/unconscious where
boundaries between internal and external overlap.
Such writing puts into question the whole notion of
"genre" as outlined by the exclusionary methods of
Gusdorf's rather narrow definition of the auto—
biographical. And it is not surprising that the
question of "genre" often rides on the question of
gender(15).5
Domna C. Stanton, too, focuses on the transformation of
the divided female subject of autobiography through
1;><:>:stmodern linguistic theories inspired by Lacan. She
<::;1=‘:itiques Lejeune's "avowed belief in truth value and the
'jL‘<:3UEEntity of the proper name" as "the profound subject of
£511“ltlobiography” and argues that a woman's signature does not

SCL‘tlempt to fix meaning in the same way that thlS proper name

 

47

of the male subject attempted to (10). Stanton argues,
almost in spite of herself, that "at this symbolic moment the
female signature, unlike the generic fixation, had liberating
rather than constraining effects" (16), though she hesitates
before the contradictions inherent in a belief that "the
gender of the author did make a difference, at this
discursive point in time" (17). Trapped by the
contradictions of both embracing and rejecting gender
distinctions and the category "author," Stanton finds herself
at an irresolvable impasse.

Nancy Hartsock cites this impasse between postmodernist
thinking and feminist politics in her essay "Rethinking
Modernism: Minority vs. Majority Theories" (1987). Looking
at the relation between academics and activism, she writes,
"Somehow it seems highly suspicious that it is at this moment
in history, when so many groups are engaged in 'nation—
alisms,’ which involve redefinitions of the marginalized
Others, that doubt arises in the academy about the nature of
the 'subject,‘ about the possibilities for a general theory
which can describe the world, about historical 'progress.'
Why is it, exactly at the moment when so many of us who have
been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to
act as subjects rather than objects of history, that just
then the concept of subjecthood becomes 'problematic'" (196)?
Hartsock implicates the "transcendent voice of the

Enlightenment attempting to come to grips with the social and

48

historical changes of the middle to late twentieth century"
and trying to put the argument on its own terms for this
contradiction. Yet her Marxist solution—-to transform power
relations and "to change the world, not simply to redescribe
ourselves or reinterpret the world yet again" (206)--does not
solve the problem.

The problem is the competing desires to embrace the
liberating concepts of postmodernism, which free us from the
oppressive ideologies of Western humanism, and to hold fast
to the (finally silencing) traditional principles which allow
us to make political arguments in the culture we deal with at
this moment in time. And this problem continues to create a
dilemma for feminist thinkers.6 Nancy K. Miller apparently
decides in "Arachnologies" that the gendered signature must
be maintained. She argues against Barthes's emphasis on the
text as "hyphology," which, she says, "chooses the spider's
web over the spider" and in which "the subject is self-con-
sciously erased by a model of text production which acts to
foreclose the question of agency itself" (80). She proposes,
instead, "arachnology," which places the spider, i.e., the
writing subject, again at the center of the theory. She
reinscribes the same subject which Barthes's "Death of the
Author" threatens (again) to erase.

I would propose, with Miller, a reinscription of the
gendered subject at the moment of creation. In other words,

as a woman writes her story, she relies on cultural myths of

49

self creation, on stories. As Heilbrun notes, "We can only
retell and live by the stories we have read or heard. We
live our lives through texts." As an autobiographer creates
her story, she turns to the stories which have preceded hers
to model her own. This, in a sense, makes the unified
Western humanist male a self-fulfilling prophecy even in
women's texts. She writes not her story, but the story. In
any case, a subject is present in the creation of the text
inasmuch as the writing subject places it there, inasmuch as
a subject is present in our cultural mythmaking.

However, if the subject is just that, a cultural myth,
then, as Benstock points out, the fascination of
autobiography comes in finding the fissures in the smooth
facade of that myth. We know the unified self is an
illusion, like the illusion of Lacan's mirror image, as
Benstock observes. The tension between the presence and
nonpresence of the subject becomes, for the postmodernist
observer, the driving force behind the autobiographical
impulse. This holds especially true for women's texts, as I
will explain in Part Two, because of the importance of the
nonpresence of the female in Western culture. The fragmented
nature of the text--the "tissue of quotations drawn from
innumerable centres of culture"--also seems more applicable
to the experience of women and minorities who are (and have
been historically) excluded from full participation in the

dominant culture and who have created competing traditions of

50

their own. Woman autobiographers, I will argue, lived with
and confronted the postmodernist dilemma long before we
identified it.

I find similar tensions in autobiographical texts at the
reading moment, when readers also trained in the myths of
Western culture, insist on bringing the subject into being as
a unified, whole entity. We see the writer writing her
story, and we know it's a "true" story, her story; yet on
another level, we can no longer accept these terms. We are
careful when we discuss the author in intellectual circles so
that we don't let slip our naive belief in the truth of her
existence. This is, after all, an autobiographical text. We
create the author, the text does not deliver her up fully
formed, as Athena from the head of Zeus.

Because these tensions are so much more apparent when the
questions of truth and subjectivity becomes central--in the
autobiographical text-—I find this a most fascinating field
of inquiry. The texts that interest me most and that will be
the focus of this study are, again, autobiographical novels.
When I introduced the concept of fictionality into the
equation of truth and subjectivity, my field of inquiry
expanded yet again. When an autobiographer fictionalizes her
life, she takes liberties with cultural constructs of truth
and fiction, breaking taboos and redrawing lines of
definition. Her self creation becomes self-conscious in a

way the "pure autobiography" would not allow. As Pascal

51

observes, "A novelistic disguise was necessary, no doubt, in
times when writers were more reluctant to be candid about
themselves and their acquaintance" (135). I contend that
these women autobiographical novelists, freed somewhat by
their posture of fiction from the constraints imposed on
women and minorities in their post-World War I societies,
used the disguises of fiction in order to be more honest
about their life experiences. In other words, they were free
to create selves in some senses outside of prescribed culture
boundaries. I will, of course, return to this contention in
later parts of this study.

Because I see the dilemma of postmodernism placing
feminists in a similar position, where we are "making a great
effort to liberate [our]selves from false cultural myths and
models, the stories these five women create in their effort
to deal with a new twentieth-century world become even more
meaningful. For while we deny the truth value of these myths
of Western humanism-—the myths of the humanistic man and of
transcendent truth beyond language-—we cannot deny their
cultural power nor their hand in our creation. We are
socialized to live with them, penalized and restricted by
them and constantly subject to their hegemonic power.7 We
cannot speak without reinscribing them. Nor can we move on
in our feminisms by denying them without first confronting
and deconstructing them. That is, as I see it, the radical

purpose of these five novels and of this dissertation.

52

Thus, I write of the subject of autobiographical fiction,
but never an unproblematized subject. I write of the subject
who exists in our cultural myths of modernism and that
subject which seems much more likely to exist, the
fragmented, decentered subject of our postmodern myths, the
subject "stripped of its creative role and analyzed as a
complex and variable function of discourse." I write of the
gendered female subject, because she does exist in all of our
discourse. Indeed, as I will explain further in Chapter
Four, her absence make our language possible. I write of how
five women writers rework this subject as they bear her
through the Word. I write, sometimes unproblematically,
about these "writers," because for me they are very much
alive in the lines (and between the lines) of their novels.

I have turned about and created them with some degree of
confidence in the referentiality of their language and some
degree of faith in their existence as (Western humanistic)
subjects. No doubt, I write about them with some sense of
wonderment.

I also write with some degree of faith in my language to
express ideas that others will be able to comprehend. I
place the value on women's experience (as mediated by
language) which I find in the most responsible of feminist
literary criticism. Though I do not find the solution
Hartsock proposes above to be wholly workable, I do agree

with her Marxian aim "to change the world, not simply to

53

redescribe ourselves or reinterpret the world yet again"

(206). Redescription and reinterpretation, however, seem to
me to be a necessary part of the change. We do live by
fiction. Gail Godwin writes of autobiography, "I believe our

lives shape our fiction just as much as our fiction gives
shape to our lives. I'm most comfortable speaking for
myself, but I'm convinced that I'm speaking for my favorite
writers, as well. . . . They wrote to discover, to work out,
to test their ideas in the process of writing. As they
worked on their novels, they worked on their lives: on their
vision of life. They tested it, revised it, expanded it.

They revised their judgments as they became more
implicated with their characters, they stumbled on new
connections, they reached new insights, and, as their
characters grew and changed, they found themselves growing
and changing, too" (9) [emphasis added].

This writing project, "fictional" in some ways and, of
course, autobiographical in others, has had a similar effect
on me as I begin to understand, as Heilbrun said, "the way
autobiography works in fiction, and fiction in autobiography"

(118).

54

Notes

1 Riffaterre and other structuralists would most likely deny
this connection to Platonism and refer, instead, not to true
originals but, again, to shared language rules.

2 I take the liberty of borrowing this quote from Jardine
because I found it so appropriate. She notes, however, that
he is here addressing fiction writing specifically. (This
may or may not be a legitimate categorization, in terms of
this study.) She cites Barth in "The Literature of

Replenishment," AfilaniC_Manhi¥, January 1980, p.70.

3 Barthes is discussing texts in general, not
autobiographical texts specifically. However, his
autobiographical text (Ber;hee_by_Bethee), again, makes
clear that postmodernism has undermined not only traditional
ideas of discourse and texts in general, but of autobiography
in particular.

4 This stance is perhaps reflective of her interest in
French theory. Kristeva, most notably, takes the speaking
subject as her primary field of inquiry.

5 Again, I will discuss this point in more detail in Chapter
1, Part Two of this dissertation when I address the relevance
of French feminisms and psycho-linguistic constructs of
female self-development and language acquisition to
autobiographical theory.

6 Nancy K. Miller and Peggy Kamuf debated this point in
Diacritics (Summer 1982).

7 For a helpful and excellent discussion of this hegemonic
power, see Raymond Williams on "Hegemony" in Marxiem_end
Literature (1977).

55

Chapter Three: Modernism and Autobiographical Fiction

Though "modernism" (like autobiography) is most often
defined even today in terms of male writers—-Joyce, Eliot,
Pound, Lawrence, Hemingway, Faulkner-—it is unquestionable
that women writers of the early twentieth century were
influential in developing new strategies for literature.
H.D. and the Imagist poets, Gertrude Stein and her
experiments with form and language, Virginia Woolf and Djuna
Barnes and their innovative novels were often cited by
critics of the 'twenties and 'thirties as central to the
modernist project.1 However, as modernism came to be defined
and redefined in later years, women writers were written out.
David Lodge, in his 1976 Inaugural Lecture on "Modernism,
Antimodernism and Postmodernism" for the University of
Birmingham, for example, defines all three modernist
movements in terms of male writers, speaks of the high
"Eliot-Pound modernist mode" and never mentions a woman
writer--not even Woolf. In Peter Faulkner's brief
introduction to modernism, published in 1977, Woolf is cited
along with Eliot, Pound, Joyce and Lawrence as a key figure
of that literary period--the only woman to be so recognized.
In his 1986 anthology, A_MedernieL_Reeder, Faulkner adds Amy
Lowell to the ranks, but surrounds her with James, Ford Madox

Ford and six new male writers.2

56

As Nina Baym and Gilbert and Gubar point out, in claiming
modernism as a male enterprise, critics and writers created
their "ideal order" by cutting off or redefining all that was
"female" in the literature of the time.3 Maurice Beebe, for
example, defines modernism as:

an international current of sensibility which
dominated art and literature from the last quarter of
the 19th century until about 1945--from the
Impressionist exhibitions of the 18705 and the first
writings of Henry James to about the time of the
Second World War. Modernist literature is
distinguished by its formalism. It insists on the
importance of structure and design-~the aesthetic
autonomy and independent whatness of the work of
art--almost to the degree summarized by the famous
dictum that "a poem should not mean but be." Secondly,
Modernism is characterized by an attitude of
detachment and non-commitment which I would put under
the general heading of "irony" in the sense of that
term as used by the New Critics. Third, Modernist
literature makes use of myth not in the way
myth was used earlier, as a discipline for belief or a
subject of interpretation, but as an arbitrary means
of ordering art. And, finally, . . . Modernist art
turns back upon itself and is largely concerned with

its own creation and composition. The Impressionists'

57

insistence that the viewer is more important than the

subject viewed leads ultimately to the solipsistic

worlds-within-worlds of Modernist art and

literature. (23)
Beebe, too, characterizes modernism via male artists--
"Flaubert, James, Conrad, Ford"--and in New Critical terms
(which were, of course, created by elite white male
academics). Certainly formalism and self-reflexivity are
significant aspects of modernism, as evidenced by the
experimentations with genre, but the "independent whatness"
and "aesthetic autonomy" of the work are principles that
women writers, like Zora Neale Hurston, Anzia Yezierska,
Nella Larsen and Harriet Arnow, and male writers, like John
Steinbeck, Nathaniel West and Richard Wright, rejected
through their emphasis on social context. Beebe's ironic
"attitude of detachment and non-commitment" characterized
only a small portion of modernism. Martha Gellhorn satirizes
that attitude with her world-weary foreign press corps in A
Stricken_Eield. Her narrator's story in this autobiographi-
cal novel is one of intense involvement and commitment
against the backdrop of this stylish detachment, as is
Lillian Hellman's story "Julia" from Eentimenee. And the use
of myth as arbitrary ordering of art in a chaotic world may
hold true for "The Wasteland" but it does little to explain
the depth of belief beneath the romance myth that is the

subject of Ellen Glasgow's Berren_Greund and, to a lesser

58

extent, of H.D.‘s HERmiene. As for solipsism and an emphasis
on the viewer rather than the subject viewed, the focus,
later in this chapter, on the rise of autobiographical
fiction during the modernist period will, I hope, undermine
this premise.

To explain away the significant achievements of women
modernists, critics have had to revise our perceptions of
much of the really new work of the period. Faulkner and
Joyce become the perceptive men who experimented with
language, point of view and narrative style, revealing
psychological truths through the way they tell a tale.

Little recognition, however is afforded Stein, whose Three
Liyee was arguably the first of such experiments. Even less
attention goes to the writers of the Harlem Renaissance whose
experimentations were often paired with a social conscious-
ness that added another dimension to Modernism and

perceptively prefigured later Marxist theories of literature.

It is my contention that the autobiographical work of the
authors I study in this project opened doors to modernist
fiction that authors, until then, had only been tentatively
approaching. I will also argue, in the chapters which
follow, that Woolf and H.D. experiment with language for a
purpose-~to find a female language, a woman's sentence in a
language that has been dominated and defined by men--while

experimental male modernists seem out to prove that language

59

has no purpose——that it is arbitrary and ultimately
meaningless (thus, Eliot's "Shakespeherian Rag" and Joyce's
"contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality," which seem almost an
absurd sort of one-upmanship on Stein). Finally, I will look
at an immigrant writer, a lesbian writer, and a writer of the
Harlem Renaissance whose interest in self-exploration,
community and social issues debunk some of our favorite myths
of Modernism.

The fear that the really new works of art of the women
modernists would alter our perception of our literary and
thus historical past and our conception of art was a powerful
and intimidating force at work in modernism, as Gilbert and
Gubar contend in Ne Man's Land; The War ef the merge. It's
not surprising, then, that our estimation of those new works
and their place in the our past have been so carefully
guarded in the academy and by the critical establishment.
Gilbert and Gubar, in the first two installments of their
projected three-volume work on modernism, make a significant
contribution to the redefinition of early twentieth-century
literature from the feminist perspective and to the
reclamation of what is innovative in modernist art. Other
feminist critics--Shari Benstock, Marianne DeKoven, Jane
Marcus, Alicia Ostricker, Bonnie Kime Scott--have theorized a
female modernism, "a separate, previously buried or
discredited tradition (or anti-tradition) of modernist

writing by women that is radically different in many ways

60

from 'high canonical male modernism'" (DeKoven 19). In this
chapter, I will continue that project, redefining modernism
by restoring some of the original concerns of the writers of
the period, concerns that have been obscured as we've viewed
modernism from the interested perspective of critics.4

The spirit of the age of modernism is usually
characterized by the philosophical upheaval brought about
through the undermining of our comfortable views of humanity
and God. Though I could argue that this began with the
Copernican revolution, when humankind stepped down from its
safe place in the center of the universe, it seems to have
become inevitable by the late nineteenth century in the
writings of Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud. Darwin's emphasis
on instinct rather than intellect and his placing of human
beings along an evolutionary chain that included all other
life overturned Enlightenment views of "the rational man" as
the rightful ruler of the world. Nietzsche's rejection of
Christian morality and embracing of power and the "revision
of all values" further problematized the Western sense of
self-definition. Finally, Freud's theories of the
unconscious and human psychological development placed
humankind out of control of our own destiny. Explanations
for human behaviors were traced to childhood and infancy and
to unconscious "drives."

Freud's first important work was published in 1899, and

he visited the U.S. in 1909. Thereafter, his works were

61

widely read and discussed by mainstream Anglo—American
artists. His influence is obvious in the work of many
modernist writers, especially Lawrence and the later drama of
Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill. However, his
influence was much more pervasive, as the concerns of
psychological inquiry touched all parts of modern culture.
Peter Faulkner contends that "it could be argued that the
consciousness of the modern artist has been rendered more
self-directed by the influence of psychological
investigation, revealing the complexity of the human
personality, and of philosophical enquiry, emphasizing the

role of the agent in creating the reality that he

experiences" (21). Certainly Freud's work did more than give
artists new terms to use. It radically and permanently
changed their view of themselves and their world. I will

explore this in more detail in Part Two of this project.

The writings of Karl Marx also exerted influence on the
temper of the times. Gone was the shared sense of reality
among the privileged as Marx demanded attention—-and
power--for the working classes. Faulkner posits that "In
general what was happening can be seen as a breaking-up (more
or less violent in different countries and areas of activity)
of the nineteenth-century consensus" (14). Though I question
the existence of a universal consensus in the golden past, it
is true that social and philosophical upheavals of the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries knocked the

62

foundation from beneath the intellectual traditions of
Western humanism. Though many writers still strove for some
sense of unity in their art, they had to locate new sources
for it. Many, like T.S. Eliot, turned to myth. Guided by
Sir James Frazer's The_Geleeh_Beegh, an ambitious
anthropological study of humanity's rites, beliefs and
institutions, Eliot built his "Wasteland" imagery around
traditional motifs of magic and religion.

A second popular characteristic of modernism goes
hand-in-hand with philosophical upheaval--disillusionment.
Here Stein's epigraph "You are all a lost generation" is an
often-repeated refrain. Hemingway's heroes are the epitome
of this Lost Generation, the quintessential existentialist
stoics.5 Cleanth Brooks writes of these heroes that they
"find little more in which to believe than courage and a
certain personal dignity as they look out upon a world bereft
of meaning" (1805). Also significant in defining modernism
is the fact that most critics place it between two wars, that
is beginning just before World War I and ending with World
War II. Using these major catastrophic events as starting
and ending points attest to the pervasive sense of
hopelessness and loss of control which, critics say,
characterizes the writing of the periods.

The problem of making meaning also becomes central for
the modernist artist, struck by what Peter Faulkner calls "an

unremitting self-consciousness" (19) in the face of the

63

pervasive relativism and subjectivity which resulted from the
loss of the transcendent-—the loss Nietzsche characterized as
the death of God. The modernist mode, as it came to defined,
was to beat back relativism and subjectivity with the
objectivity and distance of scientific inquiry——to strive for
a mature, ironic detachment. This became even more urgent as
artists began to see themselves not only as craftspersons,
but also as intellectual trendsetters, as the prophets of a
new age. Indeed, with religious myths ravaged by Nietzsche
and Frazer, only the artist and the intellectual were left to
fill the void.

So the artists took their experimentation very seriously,
questioning the forms and purposes of literature just as
Freud, Darwin, Nietzsche and Marx had questioned other
intellectual traditions. Their goal was to make art appear
natural and unconstructed, even as they strained over every
word and sentence. Lodge argues that modernism "turned its
back on the traditional idea of art as imitation and
substituted the ideas of art as an autonomous activity" (3).
With the sure sense of reality lost, "the effort to capture
reality in narrative fiction, pursued with a certain degree
of intensity, brings the writer out on the other side of
'realism.'" Lodge explains:

The writer's prose style, however sordid and banal the
experience it is supposed to be mediating, is so

highly and lovingly polished that it ceases to be

64

transparent but calls attention to itself by the
brilliant reflections glancing from its surfaces.
Then, pursuing reality out of the daylight world of
empirical common sense into the individual's
consciousness, or subconscious, and ultimately the
collective unconscious, discarding the traditional
narrative structures of chronological succession and
logical cause and effect, as being false to the
essentially chaotic and problematic nature of
subjective experience, the novelist finds himself
relying more and more on literary strategies and
devices that belong to poetry, and specifically to
Symbolist poetry, rather than to prose: allusion to
literary models and mythical archetypes, for instance,
and the repetition of images, symbols and other
motifs--what E.M. Forster described . . . as "rhythm"
in the novel. (4)
Thus, for many, formalist, symbolist poetry became high
modernism; the more a novel or short story resembled poetry,
it followed, the better it was. Indeed, some "novels"
blended short stories, poetry and vignettes yet retained the
symbolic unity so essential to high modernism--Stein's Three
Liyee, for example, or Hemingway's lh_Qr_Iime or Jean
Toomer's gene.
The experimentation of modernist writers moved into other

areas, beyond pen and paper. With the restrictions of

65

Prohibition in place in the U.S., young American writers
sought the freedom of Europe and established an artistic
community of expatriates in Paris. There they notoriously
indulged in drinking and in the sexual freedoms of what
Fitzgerald called "the Jazz Age," as characterized by
Hemingway in The_fihh_Alee_Rieee. According to Cleanth
Brooks, this was also a time for young, American writers to
redefine the traditional American idealism of Franklin and
Jefferson. "American literature," he argues, "[is] a record
of unique value, for in it the reader can live through the
fortunes of American idealism as it has to meet the shock of
lived experience" (1826). Nick Carraway, the prototypical
innocent, agrarian Midwesterner, for example, confronts the
corruption of the wealthy as he spends a summer in and around
New York City in Ihe_Greer_Gerehy. Recurring images of the
city in the mainstream literature of the time demonstrate
this same confrontation between the innocent and the
contamination of industrialism and wealth-~John Dos Passos's
Mehherreh_1rehefer, for example, or Lawrence's Sehe_ehd
chcra.

Marianne DeKoven also points out that the preoccupation
with experimentation, the (in)famous modernist "impulse to
'make it new'" came with both a disgust for the recent past
and ""a fear of the 'new' itself: a fear of loss of privilege
and power, projected as fear of chaos, anarchy, the

disintegration of the self," which often expressed itself as

66

a fear of women, a view Gilbert and Gubar support (35).

I've already pointed out above how these characteristics
of modernism were developed with reference to mostly male
literature by critics with an interest in promoting their
favorite writers. I won't deny having a similar interest.
As I've studied modernism, I have become convinced that the
autobiographical mode was influential in helping to
incorporate linguistic innovations into modernism and in
providing a means to apply the psychological insights into
the human personality developed by Freud and his followers.
In this sense, the autobiographical fiction of the modern
period ushered in postmodernism and the questions central to
its development which I discussed in Chapter Two. Women's
autobiographical fiction, especially, highlighted
multiplicity, fragmentation and decentered subjectivity and
was first to capture the cadences of the pre-symbolic
language of the infant-mother dyad, a phenomenon I will
discuss further in Part Two. Autobiographical fiction also
provided a means for writers on the margins of mainstream
culture to explore their place in early twentieth-century
society—-and to change that society in meaningful ways.
These, I submit, should be among the key characteristics of
modernism.

The sheer number of autobiographical novels from the
modernist period adds a lot of literary weight to an argument

about their significance. Lawrence and Joyce, Hemingway and

67

Fitzgerald all wrote important autobiographical novels. In
addition, H.D.‘s HEBmiehe and Woolf's Ie_rhe_Lighrhehee study
family relationships with the distance afforded by the use of
fictional names and the passage of time--both write of their
youth as middle-aged women. Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage
is also a fascinating example of the power of this genre.
Indeed, Virginia Woolf found her "woman's sentence" in this
multi-volume novel. In a review, Woolf wrote that Richardson
"has invented or, if she has not invented, developed and
applied to her own uses, a sentence which we might call the
psychological sentence of the feminine gender" (quoted in
Marcus, Languagee 27). In trying to replicate a uniquely
female experience in her "stream-of—consciousness" style
(some critics say the term was coined for Richardson),
Richardson found psychological sources of a female language.

Though less experimental in language use, Antonia
White's novels also use fictionalized personal experience to
plumb the depths of female psychology. In Segar_Heeee, the
main character's relationships with her father, whom she both
fears and loves, and her husband, whom she loves but does not
desire, provide a revealing account of how an intelligent,
talented woman effaces herself before the forces of her
culture. Similarly, Radclyffe Hall's Ihe_Weii_ef_Leheiineee
explores what it means to be a lesbian in a society which has
no place for such a gender category.

Other significant works of Anglo-American autobiographi-

68

cal fiction include Nella Larsen's Qaiekeahd, the story of
the "tragic mulatta";6 Martha Gellhorn's powerful war novel A
firrickeh_Eieid; Beryl Markham and Olive Schreiner's African
novels; the novels of immigrant writers, such as Mary Antin's
Ihe_£remieed_Lahd and Anzia Yezierska's Bread_fiiyere, as well
as numerous other works in the genre by male writers, among
them Sherwood Anderson's Wineaburgr_thC, and Henry Roth's
Call_it_Slecn.

But in the effort to redefine modernism with an eye on
autobiographical fiction, a list of examples of the
prevalence of the genre is not all that's available. As
Shari Benstock and Susan Stanford Friedman argue, women
writers of the period lived and wrote modernism differently
from their male counterparts. Friedman writes of a
"Modernism of the margins," while Benstock posits in an essay
on "Expatriate Modernism" that women writers in Europe
experienced expatriation differently from the male
modernists. "For women," Benstock writes, "the definition of
patriarchy already assumes the reality of expatriate in
patria; for women this expatriation is internalized,
experienced as an exclusion imposed from the outside and
lived from the inside in such a way that the separation of
the outside from the inside, patriarchal dicta from female
decorum, cannot be easily distinguished" (20). In other
words, a woman's lived experiences place her in a unique

relationship with the prevailing ideas of a culture. She is

69

both within and without. In patriarchal culture, no matter
what her physical location, her space is always both loyal
citizen and expatriate. As Benstock argues, "Patria can
exist only by excluding, banishing matria; matria is always
expatriated" (25).

Women's autobiographical fiction, which locates itself in
the midst of this tension between the forces that dominate
women's lives in patriarchal culture, cultivates the best
impulses in women's fiction, and results in some of the best
writing of the Modern period. Because of their contradictory
relationship with the culture that Modernist philosophy was
attempting to rewrite, women writers critiqued both the
culture and its modernist critiques, as I will demonstrate.
Benstock concludes, "The coming together of an internalized
and a lived expatriation gave rise to very special forms of
writing that both do and do not share the basic premises
assumed to be common to modernism" (28). Whether the
Anglo-American women writers I discuss in this volume lived
their dual expatriation in the immigrant slums of New York,
in the privileged salons of Paris or in the pervasive sense
of "otherness" imposed by white racism, the condition seems
to describe accurately an aspect of modernism which has yet
to be fully understood.7 Their attempts to do so, through
fictional autobiographical accounts of their lives, provide
some of the best pieces missing from the larger puzzle.

Several feminist critics, including, again, Benstock,

70

Friedman and Gilbert and Gubar, have made great progress in
providing alternative definitions of modernism which account
for the woman writer. One of the concerns of these new
definitions is the woman writer's problematic relationship
with the Word-—with, as Stein writes, "patriarchal poetry."
Benstock, in The_2riyare_fieif, finds that women modernists
contended with the problem of subjectivity. She writes,
The instability of this subject is nowhere more
apparent than in women's writings of [the Modernist]
period, in texts by Djuna Barnes, Isak Dinesen, H.D.,
Mina Loy, Anais Nin, Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein, and
Virginia Woolf, writing that puts into question the
most essential component of the autobiographical--the
relation between "self" and "consciousness." The
simultaneous exploration of the autobiographical and
the probing of self-consciousness in works by each of
these writers suggests not that they knew their Freud
better than T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, or
W.B. Yeats, but that as women they felt the effects of
the psychic reality Freud described more fully than
did the men. Gender became a determining issue at the
point at which culture (broadly defined in both its
psychic and social terms) met aesthetic principles.
(21)
Not only is woman's relation to language unique, but, as

Gilbert and Gubar posit, women modernists had a distinctly

71

different response to the changing gender relations of the
early twentieth century: "For, as is so frequently the case
in the history of sex relations, men view the smallest female
steps toward autonomy as threatening strides that will strip
them of all authority, while women respond to such anxious
reaction-formations with a nervous sense of guilt and a
paradoxical sense of vulnerability. At the same time, some
women, particularly in the modernist period, have felt
empowered by every advance toward cultural centrality, so
that the female half of the dialogue is considerably more
complicated than the male" (66).

Modernist women writers of autobiographical novels, one
could argue, began the task of consciousness-raising which
was essential to the radicalism of the 'seventies. In the
words of Victor Schklovsky, the Russian formalist, they seem
determined to render the familiar unfamiliar: "Art exists to
help us recover the sensation of life, it exists to make us
feel things, to make the stone, stony. The end of art is to
give a sensation of the object as seen, not as recognized.
The technique of art is to make things 'unfamiliar', to make
forms obscure, so as to increase the difficulty and duration
of perception" (Quoted in Lodge 7). By rendering their
psychological and social experiences in their cultural
context and, most often, with that context foregrounded and
problematized, women modernists changed our perception of'

both women and culture. Most specifically, modernist women's

72

autobiographical fiction challenges what Gilbert and Gubar
call the "Eliotian theory" of modernist writing as "'an
escape from emotion' and 'an escape from personality'" (154).
Instead it takes on the challenge of exploring emotion and
understanding personality especially in relation to others.
Despite these premises of escapism through modernism,
William Spengemann in his study of autobiography, sees
modernism as it is traditionally defined (the "Eliotian
theory") as an impetus to the development of the
autobiographical novel. He writes of autobiography's
"apparently increasing tendency to assume fictive forms in
the modern era," then contends that "the modernist movement
away from representational discourse toward self-enacting,
self-reflexive verbal structures and the critical theories
that have been devised to explain this movement conspire to
make the very idea of literary modernism synonymous with that
of autobiography" (xiii). Though his conclusion-~that
literary modernism and autobiography are ineradicably
intertwined--is sound, I disagree with its premises. Women's
autobiographical novels in the modernist period for the most
part did not give up representational discourse, nor did they
understand language to be self-enacting, self—reflexive or
liberating for their writing. (It also goes without saying
that the critical theories which explained modernism
conspired against women's autobiographical writing.) Women

modernists often used autobiographical novels, the genre of

73

both self—revelation and intricate disguise, to wrestle with
the contradictory messages of patriarchy. The question of
their success--to what extent the viewer becomes the viewed,
the subject the object--are ours to explore.

Samuel Butler, in 1897, argued that literary arts are
"more naturally left to women." He contends, according to
Gilbert and Gubar, that "If the truth were known, we might
very likely find that it was man rather than woman who has
been the interloper in the domain of literature" (131).
Though my goal is not to write male writers out of modernism,
I think a more careful study of the modernist movement might
lead to just such a conclusion—-that women writers, because
of their dual "expatriation," their placement in the
psychological and philosophical discourse of the time, and
their situation in patriarchal language and culture, were the
true adventurers, leading the way in defining the new

literary domain of modernism.

Notes

1 Shari Benstock notes in "Expatriate Modernism" that these
writers are often selected because of their place "within the
boundaries of the old definitions" of modernism (34). She
suggests, with reference to Celeste Schenck's essay in the
same volume on Wemehie_flririhg_ih_fixiie, that modernism
needs to reformulated with sympathy toward writers who "did
not pursue Modernist experiments" (37h).

74

2 Robert Kiely includes essays on Woolf and Willa Cather in
his 1983 collection Mederhiem_3eeeheidered, which also
contains studies of 15 male writers. Lawrence B. Gamache and
Ian 8. MacNiven allow only late modernist figures Doris
Lessing and Margaret Drabble in the ranks of Lawrence, Joyce,
Eliot, Faulkner, Forster and Hemingway in their 1987 volume
entitled Ihe_Mederhiere. This tallying could, of course, go
on and on. These examples, however, seemed characteristic of
the recent devaluation of women's contribution to modernism.

3 I refer here to Gilbert and Gubar's Ne_Mahie_Lahd and to
Nina Baym's important essay, focusing mostly on
nineteenth-century American literature, "Melodramas of Beset
Manhood." Also, I place the word female between quotation
marks to call attention to its problematic nature. I do not
subscribe to the position that there is a mysterious,
essential, biological femaleness inherent in all women,
though I do hold to gender distinctions which seem
predominantly cultural. I find Alison Jaggar's Marxist
explication of this perceived dichotomy most helpful. She
explains that "in the Marxist view, human nature is not
conceptually distinct from non-human nature, so Marxists do
not see a line between the biological and social components
of human nature. Instead, Marxist theory views human biology
and human society as related 'dialectically.’ In other words,
biology and and society are not, in the end, conceptually
separable from each other; rather they are related in such a

way that each partially constitutes the other. . . . So
Engels writes, 'the hands is not only the organ of labour, it
is also the product of that labour.'"(55).

4 Not, of course, that my perspective is disinterested. It
is, however, openly interested in women writers and in
autobiographical fiction. I do not pretend that the theories
I propound are in any way universal or inevitable. Indeed,
with an eye toward the feminist pluralism I praised in the
preceding chapter, I welcome expansions and critiques of my
View.

5 Hemingway seemed quite fond of Stein's characterization and
used it as the epigraph to Ihe_$nh_Aiee_Rieee.

6 From Barbara Christian's explanation of this category in

Blacicflcmmflccelists (1980).

7 A collection of essays edited by Mary Lynn Broe and Angela
Ingram, Wemeh_e_flririhg_ih_flxiie, goes a long way toward
filling this gap by developing an understanding of the
condition of expatriation in modernism, especially in its
early essays by Benstock, Broe, Friedman, Susan Hardy Aiken
and Judith Kegan Gardiner.

PART TWO

The Not-Known as we've Known It:
Mother-Language in Modernism

We are as voyagers, discoverers
of the not known.

--H.D. in Trilggy

Chapter Four: The Possibility of Feminine Language

Despite what Domna C. Stanton cites as the "age—old
pervasive decoding of all female writing as autobiographi—
cal," contemporary feminist critics are now asking if it has
ever been possible in our patriarchal culture for women to
write their life stories. As Carolyn G. Heilbrun asks, "How
can women create stories of women's lives if they have only
male language with which to do it?" (40).

The idea of the language we speak being male, or
dominated by the same patriarchal power structures that
dominate our culture, is a fairly recent one, inspired in
part by Michel Foucault's writings on power.1 It is also a
concept which recent feminist criticism has examined
carefully and taken quite seriously. Mary Jacobus, for

example, observes that our language "may reinscribe the

76

structures by which [women] are oppressed" because "women's
access to discourse involves submission to phallocentricity,
to the masculine and the symbolic: refusal, on the other
hand, risks reinscribing the feminine as a yet more marginal
madness or nonsense." Jacobus's solution is to work within
male discourse but "work ceaselessly to deconstruct it" (45).

Margaret Homans explains in Bearihg_rhe_Werd that when
women decide to write their own stories they confront
cultural myths "that situate them as the silent and absent
objects of representation." Even if they don't believe in
the myths, they are affected by them and must develop ways of
dealing with them because Western culture has for so long
subscribed to and retold them. Within these male-centered
myths, women cannot represent themselves as subjects without
revisionary or revolutionary tactics (6).

Both Jacobus and Homans use the terminology of Jacques
Lacan, who retells Freud's phallocentric myth with an
emphasis on how children acquire language. Since Lacan's
formulation is also the basis of French feminist theories of
a female space in (or beyond) language to which Jacobus
refers and which will be essential to this discussion, I will
review these theories briefly in the next several pages.

According to Lacan's theory, which though based on a male
model claims universality, "all children, irrespective of
gender," are at first "engaged in a dyadic relation with the

mother in which they find themselves whole and unitary"

77

(Homans 6). This mother-infant relationship is pre-
linguistic, characterized by exchanges of body language and
non-representational sounds. Freud called this the
pre-Oedipal stage in which "no gap has yet Opened between
signifier and signified, subject and world" (Eagleton 166).
Everything is one thing to the child; everything is part of
the unified mother-self. In Lacanian theory this stage of
psycholinguistic development is called the Imaginary Order,
"in which there is no difference and no absence, only
identity and presence" (Moi 99).2

This stage ends when the child is about eighteen months
old, Homans explains, when "two changes occur simultaneously:
the child begins to acquire language, and he (and I use the
pronoun advisedly here) becomes aware of sexual difference."
This stage "is the mythic equivalent" to the Freudian Oedipal
crisis, when the father "intervenes in the potentially
incestuous dyad of mother and child" and forbids the child
access to the mother's body. According to Lacan, because the
father is marked by possession of the phallus, "the phallus
becomes the mark of sexual difference, that is difference
from the mother" (Homans 6). And because this awareness of
difference generally corresponds with language acquisition
(when the child discovers everything is not self, the other
things must be named), Lacan connects the two as marking the
entrance into the Symbolic Order, when signs gain meaning

only through the absence of the objects they signify. Homans

78

explains, "Thus the child leaves behind the communication
system he shared with his mother, which required no
difference, and enters . . .the 'Law of the Father,’ or the
symbolic order, which is simultaneously the prohibitions of
incest with the mother, the non [no] of the father, and the
sign system that depends on difference and on the absence of
the referent, the nom [name] of the father, that complex of
signifying systems and laws that make up Western culture"
(7). It becomes clear, then, that the absence of the
mother--the absence, indeed, of the female--is the basis of
this cultural model.3

Because the phallus would restore unity between mother
and child in sexual connection-—a connection denied the child
by the father--the desire for the forbidden phallus and the
incestuous union with the mother become another key to the
Symbolic Order. Homans writes, "It is, by this logic,
because of the lack of the phallus, not its possession, that
the child enters with such enthusiasm into the Law of the
Father, for it is symbolic language alone that can
approximate the bridging of the gap between child and mother
opened up by the simultaneous arousal and prohibition of
incest." In this way, language becomes the equivalent of
sexual desire. "Replacing the forbidden phallus, language's
system of differences and absences becomes a system for
generating substitutes for the forbidden mother" (Homans 7).

Because the phallus, the symbol of sexual union with the

79

mother, is forbidden by the father, the representational
system of language springs from unsatisfied desire for both
the phallus and the mother's body.

Homans points out that this myth has been the basis of
Western cultural tradition, as male writers since classical
Greece have repeatedly killed, married or otherwise searched
unsuccessfully for union with the mother (or a reasonable
substitute thereof), a union that would bring on the father's
punishment. Quest literature, male individuation and
initiation stories, as well as romantic tributes to
inaccessible women, all fit into and reinforce this myth, as
Joseph Campbell's popular study of archetypes, Here_uirh_a
Iheheahd_Eaeee (1949), makes clear. Women are consistently
identified as "other" in the Symbolic Order where only the
father's voice can be the subject. They figure into Western
tradition as the silent signified, the inaccessible
literal—~a tradition in which men under the Law of the Father
are the signifiers, those in control of the powerful and
privileged figurative, the power of naming. In other words,
"Women must remain the literal in order to ground the
figurative substitutions [for her which] sons generate and
privilege" (Homans 9). This connection of the female to the
literal is quite clear in the poetic imagery of our culture,
where woman is inevitably identified with nature and the
earth, as well as with the body and its sexual and biological

functions.4 Men, however, come down through the classical

80

tradition as the keepers of culture, lords of logic, science,
and intellect. They lay claim to the abstract and
figurative.

Thus, this formulation of a subject/other polarity
becomes the foundation of Western language and thought. As
Simone de Beauvoir explains, "the subject can be posed only
in being opposed--he sets himself up as the essential, as
opposed to the other, the inessential, the object" (45). And
further, "[Woman] is defined and differentiated with
reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the
incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He
is the Subject, he is the Absolute—~she is the Other
Otherness," she concludes, "is a fundamental category of
human thought" (44). Helene Cixous reiterates:

Activity/passivity,
Sun/Moon,
Culture/Nature,

Day/Night,

Father/Mother,
Head/heart,
Intelligible/sensitive,

Logos/Pathos

Form, convex, step, advance, seed, progress.

Matter, concave, ground-~which supports the step,

81

receptacle.

Man

Woman

Always the same metaphor: we follow it, it transports
us, in all of its forms, wherever a discourse is
organized. The same thread or double tress leads us,
whether we are reading or speaking, through
literature, philosophy, criticism, centuries of
representation of reflection. Thought has always
worked by opposition . . . By dual, hierarchized
oppositions. Superior/Inferior. ("Sorties" 90-91)
Obviously the Freudian-Lacanian myth is a masculine
model, a "hierarchization" which "subjects the entire
conceptual organization to man" (Cixous 91). As Homans
points out "it is only those who lack [the phallus]—-those
who might once have had it . . .-—who are privileged to
substitute for it symbolic language; daughters lack this
lack" (9). Because the daughter does not experience sexual
difference in the same way, Nancy Chodorow suggests, she does
not experience as completely as the male child the separation
from the mother which would place the daughter in opposition
to the mother. In other words, she doesn't enter as

completely into the Symbolic Order and, thus, is not

82

completely initiated into the male model of the world. She
doesn't readily adopt the set of polarities based on the
concept of male self and female other. She remains one with
the mother, even while she reaches out to the father-—not
because she covets his phallus and wants one of her own, but
because she covets his connection with the mother. Chodorow
concludes with a significant revision: "A girl's libidinal
turning to her father is not at the expense of, or a
substitute for, her attachment to her mother." Instead, she
explains, "a girl develops important oedipal attachments to
her mother as well as to her father" (127).

Freud held that the female child's failure to separate
completely from the mother is a sign of her weakness,
inferiority and lack of successful psychological adjustment.
It is incomplete individuation. Homans, however, claims that
this continued pre-Oedipal attachment to the mother allows
the daughter to speak two languages at once--both the
symbolic language and "the literal or presymbolic language
that the son represses at the time of his renunciation of his
mother" (13). This "daughter's language" may value the
literal and base figurations on presence rather than absence
(14).

This revision of psycho-linguistic theory has powerful
implications for women writers. If the Lacanian model is
"true," and it is to the extent that it has been believed,

repeated and reinforced culturally, then our language has

83

been hostile to a female subject. Feminist thinkers since de
Beauvoir have, of course, repeated this assertion. They have
attempted to overcome the barriers in language to write
themselves out of objectification. Chodorow's revisionary
female psychology (reinforced by similar studies by Carol
Gilligan, Dorothy Dinnerstein and Jessica Benjamin) and
Homans' fascinating interpretation of it, would open more
space in language for women beyond that which has belonged
exclusively to us—-the presymbolic "language" of the
infant-mother dyad.5 In contrast, this biologically-centered
"l'écriture feminine," "semiotic" or pre-Oedipal literal
language of the mother, has been the center of French
feminist thought.6

In "The Laugh of the Medusa" Cixous explains the
liberating effects of recovering this mother-language: "[The
woman] must write her self, because this is the invention of
a new insurgent writing which, when the moment of her
liberation has come, will allow her to carry out the
indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history"
(250). Likewise, Xaviere Gauthier argues that l'écriture
feminine is the only avenue open to women who want to write:
"As long as women remain silent [signified], they will be
outside the historical process. But, if they begin to speak
and write as men do, they will enter history subdued and
alienated" (162-3). They will be forever relegated to the

position of signified other. In other words, as long as

84

women attempt to write without significantly altering
phallogocentric language, they will perpetuate their
oppression, an oppression that is woven into the very fiber
of our language.

Many French feminists have argued passionately against
the possibility of women combining phallogocentric language
with their own, as Homans advocates. In Lee_Geerriiieree,
Monique Wittig's women lament: "Unhappy one, men have
expelled you from the world of symbols and yet they have
given you names, they have called you slave, you unhappy
slave. Masters, they have exercised their right as master.
They write, of their authority to accord names, that it goes
back so far that the origin of language itself may be
considered an act of authority emanating from those who
dominate. . . . the language you speak is made up of words
that are killing you" (112).

This psycho-linguistic repression of the female is, for
French feminists, the crux of any discussion of women in
Western culture. Political oppression is secondary; it
cannot be overcome until its foundations in language are
destroyed.

Anglo-American feminists, however, have Opted out of this
seemingly bleak linguistic determinism, asserting that women
can successfully unite two worlds/words, the pre-Oedipal
l'écriture feminine and patriarchal language. By treating

Lacanian language acquisition theory as Homans does, as a

85

cultural model, we escape the oppression of its linguistic
determinism and disrupt (and eventually destroy) its
phallogocentric foundations, as Jacobus suggests.7 While
Cixous insists that, with very rare exceptions, "there has
not yet been any writing that inscribes femininity," these
American feminists have demonstrated that women writers have
written as women, from a subject position, despite formidable
cultural, psychological and economic opposition. They
describe a socially constructed "feminine language," in which
biology is only one factor in determining difference, instead
of a "female language" which is determined (despite the
theorists' protests to the contrary) almost exclusively by
biology. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's "Sexual
Linguistics: Gender, Language and Sexuality," Rachel Blau
DuPlessis's Wririhg_Beyehd_rhe_Ehdihg, Patricia Yaeger's
chc¥2Mad_Wcmcn, Sidonie Smith's A_Pcctics_cf_flcmcnis
Autobiography and Homan's book are examples of this area of
exploration. They uncover the strategies with which women
writers have confronted phallogocentrism and written "in a
different voice," a voice that, ironically, is best
understood through the psycholinguistic descriptions of
female language which French feminisms contain.8

Women's autobiography has become increasingly important
in this discussion of female language because the genre is
unabashedly self-representational. The woman writer "steals"

autobiographical writing, as Smith points out, "seeking

86

thereby to represent herself rather than to remain a mere
representation of man" (41). All women's autobiographies
"testify to the reality that, despite the textual repression
of woman that supports the phallic order, woman has chosen to
write the story of her life, thereby wresting significance
and, with it, autobiographical authority out of cultural
silence" (42). Autobiographical writing amplifies anxiety of
authorship because the writer claims significance not only as
writer, but also as subject.9 A woman cannot take up the pen
to write her own story without assuming, first, that she has
the authority to write and, second, that she can be a
subject. Again, I would also point out that this involves a
belief, as it has come done through our cultural tradition,
in a self that can be reproduced. As I noted earlier, this
has been problematic for the woman writer, whose legitimate
selfhood was always in question. The woman writer was, in
other words, placed in the midst of what we've defined as

. the postmodern dilemma--the loss of firm boundaries around
the self--long before postmodernism existed.

In this light, Tc_rhc_Lighthcuae and HERmiehe, the novels
which I will study in the pages that follow, stand as
witnesses to the Anglo-American feminist position--that women
have found ways of speaking in their own voices, of escaping
the cultural relegation of women to Object, even while
negotiating the boundaries of their culturally-restricted

subjectivity and selfhood. Woolf and H.D. were both

87

painfully introspective, having suffered nervous breakdowns
and undergone psychotherapy, and both were, of course,
literary, given to sorting through their lives on paper.
This combination results in language that is startlingly
close to the French feminist descriptions of mother—
language--a language discovered, I will argue, at least half

a decade before it was defined.

Notes

1 An excellent discussion of "the friendship" between
Foucault and feminism is found in Eemihiem_ahd_fleheahiri
Beilecriene_eh_fieei§rahce, edited by Irene Diamond and Lee
Quinby, Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988. Diamond and Quinby
note in their introduction that "the crucial role of
discourse in its capacity to produce and sustain hegemonic
power" is key to both feminist and Foucauldian analysis.

2 For clarity, these citations and the ones which follow
call on Margaret Homans, Toril Moi and Terry Eagleton and
their concise, abbreviated versions of Lacan's obscure
primary material.

3 This idea of the absent mother is closely associated with
the concerns of modernism, as they've been revised in recent
years. Shari Benstock, for example, theorizes that "The

internalization of female exclusion provides . . . the
psychic and literary space out of which women Modernists
write" ("Expatriate" 29).

4 This binary opposition is also the basis of Susan
Griffin' 5 fascinating study of pornography in her Eerhegraphy

W, New York:
Harper, 1981.

5 It is not entirely accurate to call the infant—mother
exchanges of the Imaginary Order a language, per se, since it
is, again, presymbolic. For lack of a substitute for the
word "language," I call attention to it with quotation marks.

88

6 The term ”semiotic" belongs, of course, to Julia
Kristeva's linguistic theories, which, though tied to the
Imaginary Order and the mother's body, are not defined as
gender-distinct. "L'écriture feminine," however, as Cixous
explains, is biologically female: "I maintain
unequivocally," she writes, "that there is such a thing as
marked writing" ("Laugh" 249). I address the two together
because of their similar origins in the pre-symbolic stage of
development, though clearly the theories of Kristeva and
Cixous should not be conflated under a single label of
"French feminism."

7 Gilbert and Gubar, avoiding the "immoderately mystical"
language of French feminisms, also posit a "social" rather
than a "symbolic contract" such as Kristeva identifies in her

Lacanian theories. They call on empiricism and on literary
history "to argue that the female subject is not netessarily
alienated from the words she writes and speaks" (229). They

go on to suggest, radically, that "the idea that language is
in its essence or nature patriarchal may be a reaction
formation against the linguistic (as well as the biological)
primacy of the mother" (264).

8 Benstock also theorizes a language of modernism influenced
by French feminist thinking. She writes, "This Modernist
writing is not a form of écriture feminine that can be
practiced by either males or females because its common
denominator is linguistic experimentation. Instead it is a
genderized writing that situates itself creatively,
politically, and psychologically within a certain space and
time" ("Expatriate" 29).

9 The term "anxiety of authorship" is taken from Gilbert and
Gubar's Wm

89

Chapter Five: Virginia Woolf Writing Her Self

I think Virginia Woolf, for example, early realized, deeply
if unconsciously, that the narratives provided for women were
insufficient for her needs. Her life and her works, the
equal to any by her contemporaries, have been until recently
less studied academically because we quite literally did not
have the language, the theory, or the perceptions with which
to analyze them.

--Carolyn G. Heilbrun

A breakthrough for me in my struggle to identify the
relevance of the category "autobiographical fiction" in its
setting of contemporary feminist (especially French feminist)
thought about the female self came with my own reading of
Virginia Woolf, coupled with Toril Moi's insightful
observations early in Sexualchxtual.Pclitics. Woolf's easy
shift from the cryptic language of Ie_rhe_Lighrheeee to the
straightforward tone of A_Reem_efi_Qheie_Qen, with its clear
rhetorical purpose and strategies, struck me as significant.
Clearly the language of her novels is encoded for a reason,
or she could have written them just as she wrote her
nonfiction prose. With this distinct shift in writing style,
Woolf bridges the gap between Showalter's reading of her as
revealing a unified, phallic self and Moi's reading as

revealing a self in flux, embracing complex contradictions

90

and multiplicity. One could study Woolf's autobiographical
impulse through either Ie_the_Lighthenee or A Reem ef Qne's
One and arrive at different conclusions--both relevant,
because both are founded on Woolf's own self-revelation.
Some have concluded that Woolf, of necessity, spoke the
"double-voiced" discourse of women—-both the dominant,
patriarchal language of our culture and a suppressed, secret
women's language. Conrad Aiken, in an early review of Ie the
Lighthehee, marvels that Woolf is both "old—fashioned" and
boldly experimental (15). Certainly, like all women, Woolf
lived in two worlds--the male-dominated, phallocentric
society in which she was educated and in which she learned to
write, and a self (female)-centered inner world where, I
believe, she trained herself through intense introspection to
hear the cadences of what Helene Cixous's later described as
rhythmic mother-language.l

For me, Woolf's complexity opened a space in contemporary
critical theory to fit autobiographical fiction. There is an
"I" to identify, but it's a complex "I" with roots in
patriarchal culture and in l'écriture feminine. Thus, all
women's autobiographical fiction is creating a fictionalized
self to correspond with a (fictionalized, created) cultural
self, but I also find, especially in the more experimental
women's autobiographical fiction, an attempt to get at an
often hidden, culturally prohibited psychological self.

Virginia Woolf's agenda can hardly be described as

91

hidden. She wrote openly of her anti-patriarchal politics
and hopes for feminist freedoms.2 Even in this postmodern
age of Derridean deconstruction and Barthean dead authors, I
maintain that Woolf the writer is trying to communicate
something to us--as certainly in her novels as in her
nonfiction prose. Nor am I alone in taking this
anti—postmodernist stand. Numerous critics have found that
"something" in Woolf's novels--be it pacificism,
homo-eroticism, aetheticism and high modernism or feminism.
To dismiss any of these "—isms" as unintentional or grafted
on to the texts by critics is to underestimate Woolf. Most
critics see her as a purposeful and perceptive writer,
capable of both searing cultural critique and acute
self-awareness. This self-awareness, what I will call the
autobiographical impulse in Woolf, is the "something" I have
found in her novels, most obviously in Ie_the_Lightheuee.
Louise DeSalvo, too, finds this autobiographical impulse
in Woolf, especially in connection with Woolf's efforts to
sort through her experience of childhood sexual abuse.
DeSalvo's description of the dangers of this enterprise
demonstrate how significant it was for Woolf to "write her
self." When Woolf began to write her autobiography, "A
Sketch of the Past" in April 1939, twelve years after the
publication of Ie_the_Lighthenee, "It was the bravest writing
task that she had ever set out to accomplish, because she

knew that for her introspection was a dangerous and difficult

92

enterprise, and that if she probed too deeply into the past,
she could pay dearly for it by becoming agitated, depressed,
and even suicidal," DeSalvo contends. Woolf feared, too,
that writing about her younger years would end her writing
altogether, DeSalvo points out. "Nonetheless, she began
to rethink the relationship between childhood experiences and
personality," perhaps spurred on in her autobiographical
project by her readings of Freud, which began just a few
months before she took up "A Sketch," DeSalvo explains.
"So," DeSalvo concludes, "late in her life, she began a
project that she came to describe as autoanalysis" (99).
Influenced by Freud's theories, Woolf, with "A Sketch of
the Past," resumed her lifelong project, one that first took
shape in Te_the_Lightheeee--examining her life through her
relationships with her family and from the position of woman
artist in patriarchal society.3 Woolf herself wrote that
with Ie_the_Lighthehee "I suppose that I did for myself what
psycho-analysts do for their patients. I expressed some very
long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I
explained it away and then laid it out to rest" (Sketch 81).
Certainly, like most other modernists especially in
England, Woolf had thought for years about Freud's theories
before she began her autobiography, but, as Elizabeth Abel
points out, her "knowledge of psychoanalysis, she repeatedly
declared, came not from 'study' but from 'superficial talk'"

(13). Such talk, we know from her diaries, occurred while

93

she wrote Te_the_Lighthehee, when "the event that captured

the attention of the British psychoanalytic world," Melanie
Klein's 1925 lectures providing an alternative to Freud's
Oedipal cycle of gender-identification, took place at the
nearby home of her brother Adrian (Abel 143). Woolf's press
(Hogarth) published Freud, but she resisted reading him,
often spoke up (in those superficial talks) against
psychoanalysis and insisted that she never read him until
1939. However, as H.D.‘s companion Bryher noted, "You could
not have escaped Freud in the literary world of the early
twenties. Freud! All literary London discovered Freud about
l920[;] . . . the theories were the great subject of
conversation wherever one went at that date. To me Freud is
literary England . . . after the first war. People did not
always agree but he was always taken in the utmost
seriousness" (Abel 17).4 Evidently, Woolf was one of those
who didn't agree, and, as Abel so skillfully argues in
‘ yircinia_Wcclf_and_rha_Eicticna_cf_Ps¥chcanalysis, Woolf was
out to provide alternative readings to the Freudian myths
that were gaining so much power in her culture.5 She did so
by reexamining her own life--first, safely, behind the mask
of fiction, then later in her openly autobiographical works.
To locate Woolf's self-awareness or speak of an
autobiographical impulse, however, the contemporary critic
must, as I discussed in Part One, come to terms with the idea

of the patriarchal or phallic self, the unified whole "man"

94

of the Western humanistic tradition. Toril Moi insists that
the effort to see Woolf as a unified self with a rhetorical,
purposeful text is reductive. "In this humanistic ideology,"
she argues, "the self is the sole author of history and of
the literary text. History or text become nothing but the
'expression' of this unique individual: all art becomes
autobiography, a mere window on the self and the world, with
no reality of its own" (8). The text, to Moi, is either
representative of a unified and phallic self, or it is
multiple and diffuse. But just as there is a text which the
author cannot contain nor solely signify, there is,
unquestionably, a self behind the text which the text cannot
reproduce nor contain. Woolf, with the clear, purposeful
writing of A Beem ef Qhe's Own and the rhythmic musicality of
Ihe_Wayee, refuses to be contained or categorized. She is
both integrated and diffuse. She is both phallic and female.
And the womanhood which she allied herself with and defended
encompasses both. She is not a neuter or an androgyne, but a
woman——a multi-faceted and complex woman.

Woolf was nothing if not intensely introspective. And
some of her works are clearly autobiographical. Because of
these two factors, I've found that her works contain the keys
to unlocking some of the theoretical dilemmas of postmodern
feminism which I described in Part One. She bridged the gap
between the phallocentric position on her writing, which

disallows an apprehension of her contradictions, her

95

multiplicity and her "female language," and the postmodern
position, exemplified by Moi, which rejects the idea of
Woolf's works as a window on the self. My route toward this
bridge is to examine Woolf's self—examination in Te_the
Lightheuee. I believe that Woolf, as a result of her
fascination with psychology and her efforts to understand
herself and her place in the world as a woman, had made some
discoveries she wanted to articulate in this
novel--discoveries about female psychological development,
about the stifling nature of patriarchal thinking, about the
violence of the paternalistic Victorian family and about
being a woman artist in a phallocentric world. Those
discoveries prefigure and modify some of the conclusions of
contemporary feminist literary and psychological theory.
Since Moi wrote her introduction to Sexaaiilextual
Eeiitiee, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", in which she
criticized American feminists (specifically Elaine Showalter)
for their failure, because of an unconscious humanist bias,
to recognize Woolf's strengths, many feminist readings have

appeared in the U.S. that would reverse Moi's claim.6

Margaret Homan's examination of Lacan in Bearihg_the_Wcrd,

for example, begins with an analysis of Ie_the_Lightheeae and

cites the significance of the absent mother in Lily Briscoe's
inability (or unwillingness) to distinguish between subject
and object. Homans, again, rejects culturally constructed

binary oppositions and the humanist view of the phallic self

96

and credits Woolf with having done the same.

In addition, as I mentioned above, Elizabeth Abel's
YirciniaJcclLanthLEicticnsJLEscchcanalrm is a
fascinating and revealing historically-based examination of
Woolf's encounters with Freudian thought and Melanie Klein's
matricentric revisions of it; Shari Benstock, in Ihe_£riyate
Seifr develops a theory of Woolf's sense of subjectivity in
relation to Lacan's mirror stage; DeSalvo's landmark work

9'0'. AC. ' 0- «sq e 0' ere-e -.-q :9. - or e‘
Life_ahd_flerk makes use of psychoanalytic and postmodern
theory to illuminate Woolf's multiplicity and her "neurosis";
Makiko Minow-Pinkney uses Lacanian and Kristevan theory in
YrrciniaJicclLanthc—Eroblcmcmmiuciect to describe
Woolf's dance between semiotic and symbolic language; and
Ellen Bayuk Rosenman, in Ihe_lhyieihie_£reeeheei__yirgihia
WCCli_cnC_Lhc_MCLhcIcflcughler_33lciicnchipr looks at Woolf's

psychological ties with her biological mother. Prominent
Woolf scholars-~Jane Marcus, Peggy Kamuf, Rachel Blau
DuPlessis and Carolyn Heilbrun--have also begun to mine the
resources of postmodernism for further insights into Woolf's
writing.

The approach that I propose has, then, begun to be a
fruitful field of inquiry in Woolf scholarship, adding
strength to Heilbrun's contention that Woolf's "life and her
works, the equal to any by her contemporaries, have been

until recently less studied academically because we quite

97

literally did not have the language, the theory, or the
perceptions with which to analyze them" (120). Apparently,
postmodernism and feminism are providing some of those
missing terms. As I pursue this analysis of Woolf's recovery
of mother—language through the autobiographical impulse, I
will call on these feminist studies; before I begin, however,
I wish to acknowledge their influence. Because the field of
"Lycanthropy," as Jane Marcus playfully calls Woolf studies,
is so broad and diverse, it will be impossible to acknowledge
all the theorists who have influenced my thinking on Woolf.
However, I must say that the feminist work, both in Woolf
studies and in literature in general, which has blossomed
since the early seventies, is what brings my work into

existence. Without it, this project would be impossible.

Woolf sets her stage by establishing early in Ie the
Lighthehee a dread of patriarchal power that is pervasive in
the novel. She begins with Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, on vacation
in the Hebrides with their eight children and several guests,
arguing over whether or not "it will be fine" enough the next
day to go on a boat excursion to a nearby lighthouse. Their
youngest son James's response to both parents focuses the
argument, which is mostly unspoken. Marital patterns,
developed over long years of communication and lack of it,

are strikingly revealed in Woolf's careful plotting of the

98

thoughts of these three, intertwined with the silent musings
of other characters.

James's violent response to Mr. Ramsay's "But, . . . it
won't be fine" exemplifies the dread of patriarchal power
which Woolf foregrounds in this first part and again in the
final section, "The Lighthouse" (10). Mr. Ramsay's powerful,
insistent presence permeates the novel and casts a shadow,
literally and figuratively, over the actions of its
characters as he paces up and down the terrace. Mrs. Ramsay
"could feel his mind like a raised hand shadowing her mind"
(184), and she tries to deflect his presence, softening the
harsh judgment he makes about the weather: "But it may be
fine-—I expect it will be fine" (10). But James knows that
what his father says "was always true. He was incapable of
untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a
disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any
mortal being, least of all his own children . . . " (11). In
Mr. Ramsay's world, the phallogocentric world Cixous writes
of, the hierarchies are in order; one must simply follow
through with "courage, truth and the power to endure" (11).

Woolf puts Mr. Ramsay's value system up against Mrs.
Ramsay's in their exchange over the lighthouse trip that
makes up Chapter One of the novel, "The Window." While "the
folly of women's minds," their "hopeless vagueness," their
"extraordinary irrationality" and their flying "in the face

of facts" enrages him, Mrs. Ramsay has a different standard

99

for evaluating her husband's arguments. She feels that "to
pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for
other people's feelings" is Mr. Ramsay's horrible outrage
(50—51). She sees a world, as Carol Gilligan describes it,
"comprised of relationships rather than people standing
alone, a world that coheres through human connection rather
than through systems of rules (29). In Lacanian terms, Mr.
Ramsay's world of rules and logic, of finding the way past
"Q" (to "R", or to the letter that begins his own name) is
the world of the Symbolic Order, while Mrs. Ramsay's empathic
identification represents the lack of separation of the
Imaginary Order, when there is no difference, only
connection. Mr. Bankes, in collusion with Mr. Ramsay and the
Symbolic Order, also uses logic and order to stave off the
chaos of the natural, the biological, the female. He muses
that "the sight of [Mrs. Ramsay] reading a fairy tale to her
boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of
a scientific problem, so that he rested in contemplation of
it, and felt, as he did when he had proved something absolute
about the digestive system of plants, that barbarity was
tamed, the reign of chaos subdued" (74).

Several feminist critics have pointed out the devastating
effect of the Victorian patriarchal family from which Freud
and, by association, Lacan theorized. DeSalvo, in her study
of Woolf's response to the sexual abuse of her half brothers,

discusses how the Victorian family gave the father "immense

100

powers of his wife and children--an unrestricted right of
physical control, the right to control behavior, and sexual
rights" (9). He made demands on the daughters, as Mr.
Ramsay's demand for sympathy, to which his daughter Cam
succumbs. In the final section of the novel, Cam laments
silently to her brother, "you're not exposed to it, to this
pressure and division of feeling, this extraordinary
temptation"--the temptation to give up her desire to "resist
tyranny to the death" and, instead, to give her father what
he wants (253). Beverly Ann Schlack points out that fathers
in general in Woolf's fiction "are oppressive or ineffectual.
In either case they manage to burden, demean or disappoint
their women" (53).

Mrs. Ramsay, however, though she bows her head and
accepts Mr. Ramsay's words, rejects the self—centeredness of
separation and the phallic self when she observes with
disapproval Tansley wanting "'to assert himself’: . . . so it
would always be with him till he got his Professorship or

married his wife, and so need not be always saying,

'I--I--I.' For that was his criticism of poor Sir Walter, or
perhaps it was Jane Austen, amounted to 'I--I--I.' He was
thinking of himself and the impression he was making" (160).

Indeed, the thing most irritating to Mrs. Ramsay is
separation—-"strife, divisions, differences of opinion"--in
her children (17).

Lily Briscoe, "Woolf's closest fictional representative"

101

(Abel 1), reinforces our impression of the masculine Symbolic
Order by rejecting Mr. Ramsay's insistent "I——I—-I" ("Why
should she look at the sea when I am here?") and by
acknowledging its stifling influence on her female artistic
spirit. Living in a world dominated by one type of
impressions--Mr. Paunceforte's "pale, elegant, transparent"
paintings, she is encouraged to distrust her own vision. She
struggles "against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to
say: 'But this is what I see,’ and so clasp some miserable
remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces
did their best to pluck from it" (32). Her struggle is also
apparent in the following passage: "She could have wept. It
was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She could have
done it differently, of course; the colour could have been
thinned and faded; the shapes etherialized; that was how
Paunceforte would have seen it. But then she did not see it
like that. . . . [What she saw] would never be seen; never be
hung even, and there was Mr. Tansley whispering in her ear,
'Women can't paint, women can't write" (75).

In this revealing passage, the autobiographical impulse
seems clearly at work, as Woolf, the woman artist who sees
language and novel—writing differently from the male
modernists of her day, writes of what it means to have her
work devalued. Significantly, Lily's artistic vision is
vivid and concrete--"colour burning on a framework of steel;

the light of a butterfly's wing lying upon the arches of a

102

cathedral," "clamped together with bolts of iron"--as opposed
to Paunceforte's abstract impressionism. As with her image
of the kitchen table, Woolf bases Lily's figurations on the
concrete presence which characterizes l’écriture feminine,
rather than the absence of the female that is the Symbolic
Order, a point which I will illustrate further later in this
chapter.

The reader comes to feel the dread of Mr. Ramsay's
patriarchal power through Lily who cannot paint when Mr.
Ramsay approaches her. "He made it impossible for her to do
anything," Woolf writes, echoing her oft-repeated confession
about her father's effect on her. "Let him be fifty feet
away, let him not even speak to you, let him not even see
you, he permeated, he prevailed, he imposed himself. He
changed everything" (223). With his immense need for
sympathy (which Lily finally resists, commenting on his
"beautiful boots"), Mr. Ramsay "was like a lion seeking whom
he could devour" (233). Through Lily, Woolf is speaking both
autobiographically and generally, psychologically and
politically-—as a daughter and as an artist in patriarchal
culture. She perceives that women are devoured or erased by
the power of the phallocentric Symbolic Order.

Acknowledging this power, Woolf sets out to undermine and
get beyond it. She pulls together Mr. Ramsay's "subject and
object" polarity with the unifying influence of "a scrubbed

kitchen table" (38). She has Mrs. Ramsay yearning for the

103

unity, the harmony, the "pure joy, of the two notes sounding
together" (62) which she finds lacking in her marriage.

Lily, too, seeks unity--in fact, strives for, above all else,
a unity that cannot be contained, significantly, in "any
language known to man" (emphasis added). She sought "not
knowledge but unity, . . . not inscriptions on tablets

but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought,
leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsay's knee" (79). Here Woolf
prefigures what contemporary American psychological theorists
have identified as perhaps the greatest difference between
male and female models of psychological development: Woolf
connects Lily with a mother figure, Mrs. Ramsay, who
reinforces her desire for unity and intimacy, not for
separation. And, most significantly, Woolf has Lily insist
that in this connection is knowledge. Self-knowledge, she
indicates, comes from connection with the mother, not
separation from her.

DuPlessis posits that Ie_the_Lighthehee expresses
"yearning for a female bond" in "the yearning love Lily felt
for Mrs. Ramsay" (60). Woolf, DuPlessis points out, poses
"pre-Oedipal alternatives" to the female child's rejection of
the mother in the Oedipal scenario through her depiction of
the lesbian bonding of Mrer_flaiieuay and the mother—child
dyad of Ie_the_Lighthenee (61). Woolf, indeed, writes of
Lily's desire to dissolve into Mrs. Ramsay "like waters

poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the

104

object one adored" (79)—-an image Abel calls "Woolf's most
celebrated figure of the daughter's desire to dissolve into
the mother" (19).

Some critics speculate that Woolf's early loss of her
mother (She was 13 when Julia Stephen died) may have
intensified this desire for connection she felt for her
throughout her life. This loss is perhaps best expressed by
Nancy Ramsay who observes Minta crying over her lost brooch
and concludes that "she wasn't crying only for that. She was
crying for something else. We might all sit down and cry,
she felt. But she did not know what for" (117). However,
here I would make a separation between the metaphorical or
mythic desire for connection with the lost pre-Oedipal mother
which all children, in the psychoanalytic model, experience,
and the lived experience of need for nurturance. Though the
two are related, in that we live by the stories our culture
gives us, they cannot be conflated without leading to
biological determinism or the mother-blaming that is so often
the result of Freudian psychology. In fact, Woolf's
relationship with her mother is a clear illustration of this.
In her diary and in "Reminiscences" Woolf presents an
ambivalent view of her mother. Rosenman notes that "The
powerful image of maternity spawned equally powerful
frustrations as the promise of perfect, all-encompassing
mother-love was, inevitably, unfulfilled. Whatever the

nature or adequacy of Julia's actual mothering . . . Woolf

. "'53::

105

describes deprivation as well as bliss in her childhood"
(137).

Woolf is even able to condemn her mother for her
complicity in the victimization of her half sister, Stella.
As DeSalvo asserts, "Woolf stresses that Julia had trained
Stella [As Mrs. Ramsay did Prue and Cam] for submission and
victimization. She described that as a child, Stella had
been 'suppressed'; that Stella lived in her mother's shade,
that she imputed to herself 'an inferiority' which her mother
both instilled and encouraged. . . . Woolf did not
romanticize her mother; she described the process whereby a
self-sacrificing mother, reSponding to the demands for care
made upon women, turns to her daughter and, in turn, enslaves
her" (65).

Still, Woolf urges thinking back through our mothers.

She holds fast to a vision of female development that rejects
the misogyny of the castration complex. She values
connection with other women, especially through Lily's
yearning for Mrs. Ramsay. What are we to make of this
apparent contradiction? Jane Marcus questions, "Are we then
to murder in our minds our own mothers (and all the messages
they give us about how to live in the patriarchal world) in
order to think back through the mothers of literature and
history? Is mental matricide necessary for the woman artist?
No, Woolf tells us. Abandoned, motherless daughters must

find new mothers, real and historical, a linked chain of

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sisterhood over past time in present space, and rescue and
redeem their own mothers' lives from their compromises with
the patriarchy" (21). Clearly, Woolf understood the power of
cultural myth-making and didn't simplemindedly valorize her
own mother to suit her myths. It seems apparent that Woolf,
here again, bridges the gap between phallocentric thinking
and postmodernism. She sees her mother's behavior
clear-sightedly, almost disinterestedly, and assesses it, yet
she continues to create her Mothers in her personal
myth-making——through her stories. DeSalvo notes, "This
reforming of the mother/daughter dyad Woolf saw as an urgent
and compelling necessity if women were to move beyond passing
on their own enslavement to their daughters" (66). Woolf, it
seems, might argue, as Cixous does in "The Laugh of the
Medusa," that women must pursue a radical, alternate form of
knowledge through their connection with their mothers
because "In women there is always more or less of the mother
who makes everything all right, who nourishes, and who stands
up against separation; a force that will not be cut off but
will knock the wind out of the codes" (252).

Despite her radical position, however, Woolf still had to
confront the cultural myth that "the death or absence of the
mother sorrowfully but fortunately makes possible the
construction of language and culture" (Homans 2). Or, more
pointedly, that the death of the mother makes art possible:

Rosenman writes of Woolf's complicity with that myth and "the

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sense of loss in which art originates" for her: "When the
'centre' of the unifying maternal presence becomes a 'centre
of complete emptiness' with her death, as it does in Ie_the
Lighthenee when Mrs. Ramsay dies, art asserts itself as a
source of compensation. Lily Briscoe's attempt to paint Mrs.
Ramsay after her death . . . is also a central attempt in
Woolf's work: to recover the dead mother, to fill the empty
center" (138).

Marcus, too, theorizes that the brief second section of
Ie_the_Lightheeee, "Time Passes," is Woolf's "lament for the
dead mother. The figure of the empty house, the questioning
of the meaning of life, the horror and chaos of the universe,
devastation and meaninglessness, is a portrait of the dead
mother's body and the daughter's appalling sense of loss.

Woolf drew Ie_the_Lighthehee as two blocks connected by
a tunnel. In the tunnel, time is fluid and personality is
stable, while in the flanking blocks, personality is fluid
and time is stable. Time is experienced according to the
mother's presence or absence" (6).

Woolf's task of recovery, of finding the mother's voice,
is Lily's task in the novel. For Lily, Mrs. Ramsay
(significantly Mrs. Ramsay writing "under the rock," perhaps
of patriarchal authority) "resolved everything into
simplicity; . . . she brought together this and then that and
then this" (240). Luce Irigaray writes of this pulling

together of forces as diffuse as Lily and Tansley within one

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woman in W:
It is therefore useless to trap women into giving an
exact definition of what they mean, to make them
repeat (themselves) so the meaning will be clear.
They are already elsewhere than in this discursive
machinery where you claim to take them by surprise.
They have turned back within themselves, which does
not mean the same thing as "within yourself." They do
not experience the same interiority that you do and
which perhaps you mistakenly presume they share.
"Within themselves" mean in the privacy of this
silent, multiple, diffuse tact. If you ask them
insistently what they are thinking about, they can
only reply: nothing. Everything. (103)

Lily, too, exemplifies this multiplicity which cannot be

contained in language. She notes in at least three separate

instances that everything and nothing coincide: "For really,

what did she feel, come back after all these years and Mrs.

Ramsay dead? Nothing, nothing--nothing that she could

express at all" (217). "And she wanted to say not one thing,
but everything" (265). "For nothing was simply one thing"
(277).

Indeed, Mrs. Ramsay "may have said," and Lily remembers,
that the intimacy of human relationships is spoiled by trying
to contain it in speech. "Who knows what we are, what we

feel?" Lily asks. "Who knows even at the moment of intimacy,

109

This is knowledge." Led by her memories of Mrs. Ramsay, Lily
wonders if we aren't more expressive in silence side by side
(256).

Because patriarchal language and logic, as Irigaray
contends, cannot contain the female experience, this silence
becomes significant in the novel. Mrs. Ramsay's desire for
silence, in fact, is what Lily finally captures in the
artistic vision of her. The "wedge-shaped core of darkness"
of lost personality which Mrs. Ramsay desires to become is
exactly the image of her which Lily reproduces in her
painting. Mrs. Ramsay yearns "To be silent; to be alone.
All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal,
evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to
being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something
invisible to others" (95). And Lily paints Mrs. Ramsay as a
"triangular purple shape" with no attempt at a likeness, no
resemblance to "a human shape," as Mr. Bankes points out
(81).

To understand and express herself, to say "not one thing,

but everything" (256), Lily reaches for Mrs. Ramsay's

silence. She cries out for Mrs. Ramsay in a language she
knows won't reach her. "'Mrs. Ramsay,‘ she said aloud, 'Mrs.
Ramsay!’ The tears ran down her face" (268). Abel proposes

that "the object of desire is the mother who has died, but
its origin is ancient-—for the longing, like its language, is

repetitive. . . . Never adequately available, Mrs. Ramsay

110

confirms in death an absence that begins at birth" (69).
Here, she posits, Lily reaches, through her art, into the
semiotic, the traces of the infant-mother language of the
Imaginary Order. "In painting," she writes, "Lily seeks a
mode of representation outside of the father's symbolic
universe" (47). Indeed, in the end, it is Lily's silent
vision of Mrs. Ramsay "standing lightly by her side" and
"raising to her forehead a wreath of white flowers" which
allows her to complete her art--to fill in the "formidable
space" and feel the rhythm of her painting.

Homans, too, argues for this experience of pre—Symbolic
mother language; however, she finds it in "the pleasure Cam
and Mrs. Ramsay share in the rhythm and feel of words, which
I would argue derives from and constitutes a myth of a
daughter's never having lost the literal language she shared
with the mother" (18). However, Homans would distinguish
this jouissance from Kristeva's semiotic of the male
modernists because, she argues, Kristeva always maintains,
as Lacan, that the child is male. She writes, "If the
mother-daughter language I am discussing is continuous from
childhood and is therefore, unlike Kristeva's semiotic,
neither repressed nor capable of a dangerous return, it is,
instead, socially and culturally suppressed and silenced, but
silencing and suppression are a very different matter from
repression" (19).7

Marcus, too, finds traces of pre—Oedipal "language" in 19

111

the_Lighthenee. "Mrs. McNab," she asserts, "is the voice of
the semiotic. Her lurching and rolling rhythms of working
are the origins of language" (7)——the language and the rhythm
of the female body. Finally, DuPlessis finds Woolf returning
to the unity of the infant-mother dyad through the "cackle,
rattle, and yaffle" of her novels-—the ballads, the Celtic
counting-out rhymes, Mrs. McNab's song. Significantly, all
of these theorists find legitimate sources for this rhythmic
mother-language in the pages of Te_the_Lighthehee. I
believe it is because Woolf was, in fact, reproducing it with
some accuracy.

In the center "Time Passes" section this is especially
evident. Here Woolf comes closest to finding her "woman's
sentence"——to reproducing the "language" of the Symbolic
Order. For example, Woolf here undermines concepts like
linear time and space. She writes (parenthetically), "(for
night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together)"(
203). She also puts the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay, Prue and
Andrew in parentheses, shifting the focus of the novel from
the characters, who had been central in "The Window," to the
all-powerful and uncontrollable forces of nature. "What
power could now prevent the fertility, the insensibility of
nature?" (207) she asks. In this section Woolf also stops
privileging speech and favors sounds and silence, as in the
following passage:

And now as if the cleaning and the scrubbing and the

112

scything and the mowing had drowned it there rose that
half—heard melody, that intermittent music which the
ear half catches but lets fall; a bark, a bleat;
irregular intermittent, yet somehow related; the hum
of an insect, the tremor of cut grass, dissevered yet
somehow belonging; the jar of a dorbeetle, the squeak
of a wheel, loud, low, but mysteriously related; which
the ear strains to bring together and is always on the
verge of harmonising, but they are never quite heard,
never fully harmonised, and at last, in the evening,
one after another the sounds die out, and the harmony
falters, and silence falls. (212)
In addition, Woolf introduces female body images and "those
pools of uneasy water" (198); she repeatedly mentions
mirrors; and she describes accurately (again) the lack of
difference characteristic of the Symbolic Order. In the
abandoned house, she writes, "there was scarcely anything
left of body or mind by which one could say, 'This is he' or
'This is she'" (190); "At length, desisting, all ceased
together, gathered together, all sighed together" (191).
Indeed, Woolf invokes these and other aspects of
mother-langague in several passages in the novel. Water, for
example is a constant image, not only with the rolling
rhythms of the ocean waves, seemingly always in the
background, but also when Mr. Bankes observes Mrs. Ramsay:

"Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, half—way

113

down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from sunlight
to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waters
swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest"
(46). Mrs. Ramsay, too, connects waters with herself: "She
often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human
emotions" (51). Later in the novel, Lily, too, "seemed to be
standing up to the lips in some substance, to move and float
and sink in it, yes, for these waters were unfathomably deep.
Into them had spilled so many lives" (286).

Woolf also uses the language of sexuality and the female
body, as when Mrs. Ramsay sits with James standing between
her knees: "James felt all her strength flaring up to be
drunk and quenched by the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of
the male, which smote mercilessly, again and again, demanding
sympathy" (59) until there is nothing left of Mrs. Ramsay
"All was so lavished and spent" and everything left of Mr.
Ramsay, "Filled with her words, like a child who drops off
satisfied" (60).

In listening for her woman's sentence, Woolf also
reproduces the rhythms which Kristeva describes as remnants
of the pre-Symbolic semiotic, for example, the "long, steady
stroke of the Lighthouse" which was Mrs. Ramsay's stroke (97)
and the steady beat of Mrs. Ramsay's life--"Domesticity
triumphed; custom crooned its soothing rhythm" (49). Indeed,
Lily, remembering how Mrs. Ramsay "opened bedroom windows"

and "shut doors," tries to "start the tune of Mrs. Ramsay in

114

her head" (76). Mrs. Ramsay both represents and creates
these rhythms, as when she reads the story of "The Fisherman
and His Wife" to James and when, after the big family dinner
which concludes "The Window" section, she hears her guests
speak but fails to identify words: "the voices came to her
very strangely, as if they were voices at a service in a
cathedral, for she did not listen to the words. The sudden
bursts of laughter and then one voice (Minta's) speaking
alone, reminded her of men and boys crying out the Latin
words of a service in some Roman Catholic cathedral. She
waited. Her husband spoke. He was repeating something, and
she knew it was poetry from the rhythm and the ring of
exultation" (166).

Not only does Woolf give us, in Mrs. Ramsay, someone who
hears the rhythms of mother-language, she also gives us
someone who feels ambivalence for patriarchal language,
especially in its academic robes. Early in the novel, Mrs.
Ramsay does not "catch the meaning, only the words" of
Tansley's "ugly academic jargon," for example (22). She sees
Mr. Ramsay's "phrase-making was a game" (106), and she
continues throughout "The Window" her habit of exaggeration,
which her daughter Cam picks up (to her father's irritation,
of course) in "The Lighthouse." Woolf contrasts one final
time in "The Window" the differences between Mr. and Mrs.
Ramsay as they sit reading in a room together--his thoughts

continue to progress from A to Q, while she listens to the

115

rhythms underneath the words. Words "began washing from side
to side of her mind rhythmically, and as they washed, words,
like little shaded lights, one red, one blue, one yellow, lit
up in the dark of her mind, and seemed leaving their perches
up there to fly across and across, or to cry out and to be
echoed" (178). Again ignoring meaning, Mrs. Ramsay "did not
know at first what the words meant at all" (179), her mind,
instead, catches the rhythms of language, "going up and down,
up and down with the poetry" while her husband "was still
feeling very vigorous, very forthright, after reading about
Steenie's funeral" (183).

Mrs. Ramsay's train of thought lacks the linearity of Mr.
Ramsay's alphabetized logic. Irigaray describes this jumble
of impressions and observations and interruptions in Ihie_Sex
Which_ie_Net_Qne: "'She' is indefinitely other in herself.
That is undoubtedly the reason she is called temperamental,
incomprehensible, perturbed, capricious—-not to mention her
language in which 'she' goes off in all directions and in
which 'he' is unable to discern the coherence of any meaning"
(103). Woolf accurately reproduces this diffuseness in the
following passage where Mrs. Ramsay contemplates her house:
"Mats, camp beds, crazy ghosts of chairs and tables whose
London life of service was done--they did well enough here;
and a photograph or two, and books. Books, she thought, grew
of themselves. She never had time to read them. Alas! even

the books that had been given her and inscribed by the hand

116

of the poet himself. . . . And Croom on the Mind and Bates on
the Savage Customs of Polynesia ('My dear, stand still,‘ she
said)--neither of these could one send to the Lighthouse"
(43).

Lily inherits Mrs. Ramsay's ambivalence for patriarchal
language, separating herself from it and wondering about the
meaning arbitrarily "attached" to the words "like" and
"dislike" (40). Lily "felt rather inclined just for a moment
to stand still after all that chatter, and pick out one
particular thing; the thing that mattered; to detach it;
separate it off; clean if of all the emotions and odds and
ends of things, and so hold it before her, and bring it to
the tribunal where, ranged about in conclave, sat the judges
she had set up to decide these things. Is it good, is it
bad, is it right or wrong?" (169).

Perhaps the most expressive passage pertaining to woman's
placement in language--her yearning for the absent mother and
the physicality of the Imaginary Order, as well as her
ambivalence toward patriarchal laws-—is the following, when
Lily muses:

The urgency of the moment always missed its mark.
Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches
too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back
again; then one became like most middle-aged people,
cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and

a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one

117

express in words these emotions of the body? express
that emptiness there? . . . It was one's body
feeling, not one's mind. . . . To want and not to
have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a
strain. And then to want and not to have-—to want and
want—-how that wrung her heart, and wrung it again and
again! Oh, Mrs. Ramsay! (265—266)

I would argue, then, that Woolf's revision of cultural
myths and destruction of patriarchal hierarchies takes place
not only in the plot but also within the language of the
novel. For example, it is almost impossible to identify a
single consciousness with the apparently omniscient
third-person narrative voice of Ie_the_Lighthehee. What we
have, instead, is a collective consciousness which moves
effortlessly in the most intimate corners of all the
characters's minds. Jane Marcus's "Collective Sublime"
extends this relationship to the reader.8 Through this
collective consciousness Woolf stands up against the unified,
phallic self of Western humanist tradition. The characters's
lives and thoughts bleed into one another, even become one,
as Prue, Cam and Lily, in some sense, become Mrs. Ramsay, and
as James, Tansley and Andrew inherit the father's character.

The novel's form also circles and turns inward, like the
waves Woolf likens it to: "She felt . . . how life, from
being made up of little separate incidents which one lived

one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore

118

one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash
on the beach" (73). Woolf later pursues this metaphor with
the interconnectedness of the characters of Ihe_Wayee. In
fact, while Woolf composed Ihe_Wa1ee, she wrote to a friend,
"though the rhythmical is more natural to me than the
narrative, it is completely opposed to the tradition of
fiction and I am casting about all the time for some rope to
throw the reader' " (Abel 27). Apparently, the Lightheuee
with its rhythmic echoes of the semiotic, was a starting
point. Woolf finally found her voice in Ihe_flayee, which she
called "the first work in my own style" (Woolf Diary IV:
157).

Woolf's curiosity about what it takes for her, a woman
artist, to understand and value her female experience leads
her to undertake the autobiographical project of Ie_the
Lighthehee. Because Woolf is an astute and hypercritical
observer, fascinated with the ideas of psychoanalysis, her
novel reveals some striking insights into female psychology,
insights which are especially illuminating when considered in
terms of contemporary feminist thought. Using personal,
lived experience, Woolf describes what it is like to struggle
with a patriarchal culture while trying to maintain a sense
of her self which is uniquely female. She successfully uses
(patriarchal) language to describe a female experience, as
Anglo-American feminist argue women writers have done, but

she adapts that language. Her use of pre-Symbolic "language"

119

is, then, empowering. It does not silence her or reduce her
to a primal scream. Marcus writes, "Some contemporary
critical theorists describe women as outside of language.
Virginia Woolf's whole oeuvre disproves this claim"
("Thinking"10). Woolf, she argues, can "untie the Mother
Tongue" to free language from patriarchal patterns (14).

Indeed, because of Woolf's introspection and questioning,
feminists have a resource for understanding the connection,
as Lacan describes it, that women continue to feel with the
mother-centered Imaginary Order. Also because of Te the
Lighthehee, we can begin to identify and recover "female
language" as it has existed (and it has existed)

historically.

Notes

1 Though Woolf herself tried to integrate these two worlds
through the Bloomsbury group's celebrated claims of androgyny, she
later rejected the group's view as not a compromise but a
reinscription of masculinity.

2 Several essays in Jane Marcus' 5 collection Virginia_fleei£r_A
Eemihiet_5iaht place Woolf politically in relation to the feminist

movement of her time. See especially Gillespie and Black. Also
J. B. Batchelor' 3 "Feminism in Virginia Woolf" in Virginia_fleeirr

AJcllccrianfLriticalJcsars, Claire Sprague, ed
Prentice- Hall, 1971

3 DeSalvo finds Freud's influence on Woolf to be profound: "I
believe that reading Freud precipitated a crisis, plunged her into
the 'whirlpool,‘ by irrevocably damaging her belief in the logic
of what she had established. I believe that it eroded her sense
of self. If she was right and Freud was wrong, she was not a

120

madwoman, but a woman whose response to her childhood was
appropriate, though painful. But if Freud was right [about his
drive theory] and she was wrong, she was, indeed, a madwoman, a
prey to uncontrollable urges and forces" (128).

4 Abel quotes here from Bryher (Winifred Ellerman) to Susan Susan

Stanford Friedman, cited in Paxche_Rebcrn1_Thc_Emergcncc_cf_H1D1
(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981), 18.

5 Woolf's negative attitude about Freudian theory is wittily
expressed in Ie_the_Lighthehee when she has the simple- —minded
Minta Doyle explain that "she thought she must have been tossed in
her perambulator when she was a baby" making her afraid of bulls
(113). Mrs Ramsay "pitied men always as if they lacked
something-~women never, as if they had something" (129).

6 Though I find Moi's work on Woolf insightful, I also find her
view of Anglo-American feminist criticism reductive, especially in
relation to Woolf criticism. Even before Showalter and before Moi
Woolf scholarship was alive and well among American feminists,
certainly most often in what Moi would call the humanist camp
where most were trained, but also on the margins of that camp,
pushing the limits of humanist thinking. Indeed, since I began my
study of Woolf, I have been repeatedly delighted to see the
diverse and radical feminist work that Woolf's work inspires.

7 Homan's distinction here hearkens back to the difference I
cited between Anglo-American and French thinking in Part One and,
again, in the preceding chapter. I find her work an admirable
example of the American feminist reworking of the potentially
destructive patriarchal bias in contemporary thought.

8 Allen McLaurin also discusses group consciousness in Woolf,
modifying the modernist definition of stream- of- consciousness
writing in his essay "Consciousness and Group Consciousness in

Virginia Woolf" in Virginia Weelf: A gentehary Eerspeetiye, Eric
Warner, ed; New York. St. Martin's, 1984.

121

Chapter Six: H.D. Releasing HER

Early in her autobiographical novel HERmiehe, H.D.
reveals her ambitions for language:
Words may be my heritage and with words I will prove
conic sections a falsity and the very stars that wheel
and frame concentric patterns as mere very-stars, gems
put there, a gift, a diadem, a crown, a chair, a cart
or a mere lady. A lady will be set back in the sky.
It will be no longer Arcturus and Vega but stray
star-spume, star sprinkling from a wild river, it will
be myth; mythopoeic mind (mine) will disprove science
and biological—mathematical definition. (76)
Word-play was obviously more than an experiment in
modernist technique for "H.D., Imagiste." In this insightful
female kUnstlerroman written in 1927 about her experiences of
1907-1911, H.D. undertakes a project more radical than
Woolf's revisions of cultural myths. She subverts and
overthrows what Jacques Lacan later named the "Law of the
Father," the phallogocentric foundation of Western culture.
Using words, her patriarchal "heritage," she unseats the
Father, sets "a lady" in the sky and transforms the universe
from the ordered, named territory of male astronomers to

"star sprinklings from a wild river." The source of this

122

river for H.D. is, as for Virginia Woolf, mother—language,
the feminine "mythopoeic mind (mine)," which she claims as
her own.

With HERmiehe, and indeed to a lesser degree with her
early poetry, H.D. began a task that is today central to
feminist thinking. Before Simone de Beauvoir wrote The
Secend_5ex identifying woman's place as "object-Other" in a
philosophic system where the male is always subject, before
Lacan built his language acquisition theory on Freudian
phallocentrism, before Anglo-American and French feminists
began their debate on the nature of women's oppression/
repression by language in androcentric society, H.D.
confronted these problems perceptively in HERmiehe. H.D.
used modernism's experimental pairing of language and
psychotherapy for a different, more radical purpose and with
decidedly different results from other modernists. Celeste
Schenck observes that for Woolf and H.D. experimental
language, "the notion of breaking sentence and sequence," was
central. It "was a way of rupturing political assumptions of
great pertinacity and of making a radical criticism of power
and status" (246n).

Significantly, HERmiehe was H.D.‘s first attempt at
autobiographical fiction. She was, as Helene Cixous says,
writing her self, attempting to wrest meaning and order from
a particularly formative time of her life, a time that

encompassed her failure at Bryn Mawr, her engagement to Ezra

123

Pound, her lesbian relationship with Frances Gregg and her
subsequent nervous breakdown and recovery. This novel was,
like Te_the_Lightheeee for Woolf, a personal and
self-exploratory endeavor for H.D., so personal that it was
not published until years after her death, so female that it
seems exceptionally free from oppressive cultural gender
ideologies. In her attempt to overthrow the Specific
structures of the scientific, logical law of her own father
(what she calls the Gart theory of mathematical-biological
definition) and its artistic counterpart, the demanding
masculine order of the Ezra Pound character, George Lowndes,
she accomplished a cultural and linguistic coup-d'état,
subverting and finally overthrowing what we now know as the
Lacanian Law of the Father.1 In finding a language to
describe adequately her experience she, in a sense, discovers
l'écriture feminine by recovering her mother—language and
returning to the Imaginary Order; in addition, she uses the
phallocentric language of the Symbolic Order, turns it inside
out and successfully subverts it to make a place for her
female subject. In this way, HERmiCne powerfully exemplifies
what Homans calls a dual daughters' language. From a
subversive position within and beyond Lacan's father-centered
Symbolic Order, H.D. takes language beyond the
deconstructive, psychological experimentation of other
modernists by questioning not only its power to represent

reality, but also its complicity in the creation of an

124

androcentric reality. Thus, her novel rattles the very
foundations of Western culture in a way none of the "great
(male) texts" of modernism could.

Interestingly, H.D.‘s fictional autobiography, like
Woolf's, takes place before her study of Freud and her
psychoanalysis with him began in 1933, but, again, in the
atmosphere of literary London where Freud was on every
tongue. This seems significant in that both writers seem
more free to trust their own understanding of their personal
experience before they began formal study of psychoanalysis;
after their study, both seem more willing to trust the
authorities than themselves, and, for this reason, I find
their later writings less insightful. For example, Freud
tried to steer H.D. away from her "dangerous" feelings of
transcendence and mysticism because he saw them (insight-
fully) as "a form of nostalgia for the time when the ego did
not seem distinct from the external world: when the infant
was nursing at her mother's breast." He commented on her
dangerous "desire for union with the mother" (Fields 34).
But in HERmiehe, under the protective guise of fiction, H.D.
delved into these dangerous areas.

Passage after passage in HERmiehe attest to the
protagonist's recognition of the patriarchal bias and power
of language. Hermione Gart, nicknamed "Her," repeatedly
calls her words "a gambler's heritage," something she won

somehow illegitimately for herself and must continue to use.

125

As she sits at the dinner table listening to her father and
brother talk unintelligibly of their scientific theories——of
Minnenberg and Coppard and the Copenhagen volume--Hermione
observes, "They hurl things at one another across the
tablecloth like two arctic explorers who have both discovered
the North Pole, each proving to the other, across chasms of
frozen silence, that his was the original discovery. They
would drag up people and things from Ptolemy to Pericles to
Phidias" (36). And in those "chasms of frozen silence" are
Hermione's mother and sister—in—law, "keeping up a secondary
line of dialogue" about salt and what the maid should wear.
Hermione, left out of both the combative, scientific
figurative of male language and the frozen, passive,
salt-of—the—earth literal of female language, must use her
gambler's heritage to integrate the two worlds.

She must tread lightly, however, around the immense
destructive power of the masculine Symbolic Order on which
her language is founded. Appropriately, the word that
threatens to destroy Hermione is 'father': "Words beat and
sizzled and a word bent backward like a saw in a sawmill
reversed, turned inward, to work horrible destruction. The
word 'father' . . . reversed itself inward, tore at the
inner lining of the thing called Her Gart. It tore her inner
being so that she stood stiff, alert" (15). Language also
has supernatural power to "carve and set up solid altars"

(76). Indeed, as Monique Wittig says, "They write, of their

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authority to accord names, that it goes back so far that the
origin of language itself may be considered an act of
authority emanating from those who dominate" (43). As
Hermione reads in her Bible, "In the beginning was the Word."
H.D. writes, "This frightened her. God is in a word. God is
in a word. God is in HER. She said, 'HER, HER, HER. I am
Her, I am Hermione . . . I am the word AUM.‘ This frightened
her" (32).

Obviously, this phallocentric language of the Symbolic
Order and its claim to historical and divine authority poses
serious problems for a woman writer. In a sensitive study of
H.D.‘s perception of her "Otherness" in language and culture,
Rachel Blau DuPlessis notes:

The difficulty of establishing female identity as
subject is signalled by H.D.‘s cunning nickname for
her main character, Hermione. That object case, used
in subject place, exactly locates the thematics of the
self-as-woman: 'surveyor and surveyed,’ who pointedly
explores the selfhood she can make from articulating
her Otherness. (61)
For example, the book begins with Hermione Gart's declaration
"I am Her, Her, Her" and a fascinating shift of pronouns-—
from "Her Gart," to "she grasped," "her fingers slipped,"
"she cried in her dementia" (3) [emphasis added]. A few
chapters later (and throughout the book), H.D. writes, "Her

stooped to the springhouse door . . . Her bumped her head on

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the low door . . . Her rarely thought . . ." (ll-12).
Later, as S. Travis explains perceptively, Hermione confuses
Her-self with Fayne Rabb/Frances Gregg, playing again with
subject and object. "I will not have her hurt. I will not
have Her hurt. She is Her. I am Her. Her is Fayne. Fayne
is Her. I will not let them hurt HER" (181).

In Freudian and Lacanian cultural models the separation
of Self and Other is an essential stage in linguistic and
psychological development. Hermione, however, wants to
integrate Self and Self, fusing the influences of both of
her parents. But, "In Hermione Gart the two never fused and
blended, she was both moss—grown, imbedded and at the same
time staring with her inner vision on forever-tumbled
breakers. If she went away, her spirit would break; if she
stayed, she would be suffocated" (9). This dilemma parallels
the problem of the developing female child faced with
initiation into Lacan's phallocentric Symbolic Order while
retaining attachment to the Imaginary Order and to the
mother. Eventually, for Hermione, this pull toward the
"moss-grown" suffocation of "staying" joins with the
inviting, socially acceptable passivity of domesticity and
marriage and remains a central conflict in her development.
Throughout the first half of the book Her weighs the benefits
and drawbacks of marrying George, whose sexuality "smudged
[her] out" (73). She must resist his powerful pull toward

passive objectivity, her approved place in society and in the

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Symbolic Order, so she can be Her, the object as active
Subject. In this moving and sensuous passage, for example,
Hermione tries to integrate the cultural vision of the
passive, feminine "good girl" with her desire for self
determination:
She wanted George as a child wants a doll, whose other
dolls are broken. She wanted George as a little girl
wants to put her hair up or to wear long skirts. She
wanted George with some uncorrelated sector of Her
Gart, she wanted George to correlate for her, life
here, there. She wanted George to define and to make
definable a mirage, a reflection of some lost
incarnation . . . She knew sooner or later that George
would begin his prodding and sooner or later, she must
make up her mind. She wanted George to make the thing
an integral, herself integrity. She wanted George to
make one of his drastic statements that would dynamite
her world away for her. She wanted this, but even as
she wanted it she let herself sink further, further,
she saw that her two hands reached towards George like
the hands of a drowned girl. She knew she was not
drowned. Where others would drown--lost, suffocated
in this element--she knew that she lived . . . she
wanted George to pull her out, she wanted George to
push her in, let Her be drowned utterly. (63)

Hermione's decision to marry George is constantly

129

undermined by this ambivalence--and by her recognition of
what he, as the representative of the phallocentric Symbolic,
will do to her. First, his sexual nature is threatening and
aggressive. It victimizes her: "George was like a great
tawny beast, a sort of sub—lion pawing at her, pawing with
great hand at her tousled garments" (85). And "the face of

George looked like a wolf, was a wolf, it was a wolf mask on

a man's body" (174). George tears her clothes and "breaks,
slashes and tatters [her] weeks." Second, and more
significant, George wants to make her an object-muse, "a Her

that he called decorative" in order to more fully define
himself as subject and as poet (172). Of the last revealing
scene with him, H.D. writes, "Burst up, up said George
Lowndes, dance under a pink lampshade. You are essentially
feminine, said George Lowndes, dance and dance for you make
me feel a devil" (219).

Generally, Hermione's relationships with her parents and
other characters in the novel, male and female, focus on her
identification with them—-suggesting the unity of the
Pre-Oedipal, mother-centered, Imaginary Order, rather than
the sense of difference inherent in the Symbolic. Her
encounters with George, however, are revealing in the urgency
they arouse in Hermione not for fusion, but for
identification and self—assertion. She senses that George
would make her like the "Hans Anderson mermaid" who "sold her

glory for feet and then couldn't speak." "I will not sell my

130

glory," Hermione insists (120). She recognizes that "George
does not know what [she] is" (84) and that "George could
never love a tree properly" (73). In her delirium near the

end of the novel she wants to confront George with what he's
done to her. She says, with quintessential modernist irony:
"Can't you see you've tampered with me like an ill—bred child
with a delicate mechanical instrument? You have no respect
for science" (191).

In spite of her serious doubts about George, Hermione's
initial decision to marry him seems an obvious step in her
move toward self-revelation. Marriage is, even today, a
socially acceptable way to obtain a new identity by taking a
new name. Because she, as Hermione Gart, failed to live up
to the academically successful reputation of the Gart name,
Hermione feels she is nothing: "She could no longer struggle.
Clutching out toward some definition of herself, she found
that "I am Her Gart" didn't let her hold on. Her fingers
slipped off; she was no longer anything. Gart, Gart, Gart
and the Gart theorem of mathematical biological intention
dropped out Hermione. She was not Gart, she was not
Hermione, she was not any more Her Gart, what was she" (4)?

She turns her gaze in on herself and decides that "She
must have an image no matter how fluid, how inchoate.
'PeOple want to marry me. I don't want to marry peOple.'
But, she concluded, 'One has to do something.’ . . . Names

are in people, people are in names" (5). Later she observes,

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"Hermione Gart. I am Hermione Gart and will be Hermione
Lowndes. . . it wasn't right. People are in things. Things
are in people. I can't be called Lowndes"(112).2

Throughout the novel Hermione Gart grasps at the

father's power to name by renaming herself Her, Tree, Aum

and Fayne. In the end, she rejects marriage and patrilineage
and insists on her own identity, telling her nurse, "My
name's Hermione." She explains the significance of this
naming in the conversation which follows: "'It seems quite
too beautiful a name to be used in conversation.’ 'Yes isn't
it? They call me Her. I am called Her.‘ 'That seems a
little--I mean a little too short.‘ 'Yes. That's my way. I
am too--too remote you know and too—-too silly. I am both' "
(200). Similarly, H.D. herself rejected the name Hilda

Doolittle that was her inheritance in the patriarchal system.
Adalaide Morris states that "H.D. used her signature not to
fix but to extend and disperse her identity" (497). H.D.‘s
(and Hermione's) self-affirmation and embracing of multiple
names/selves which disrupts the ordered Law of the Father is
characteristic of l'écriture feminine.

Not only does H.D. recognize the naming and defining
powers of phallocentric language, but she also confronts her
entrapment in and alienation from it. The powerful image of
Hermione's mother sitting in a darkened corner of a room
while Gart "collected all the light to fall just there on

just that microscopic slide or just that bowl of little

132

sizzling acids" (81) clearly defines women's place in Helene
Cixous's patriarchal binary opposition--Man/Woman,
Light/Dark, Activity/Passivity, Culture/Nature. Indeed,
images of entrapment, suffocation, drowning and death abound
in the novel. Toril Moi explains that "for one of the terms
to acquire meaning, [Cixous] claims, it must destroy the
other. The 'couple' cannot be left intact: it becomes a
general battlefield where the struggle for signifying
supremacy is forever re-enacted" (105). H.D. understands who
set up the battlefield: "God, some sort of Uncle Sam,
Carl-Bertrand-Gart God, shut us up in a box, with
temperatures too high and temperatures too low to breed new
specimens like Bertrand Gart, like Carl Gart in their
aquariums" (96).3 She also recognizes women's role in the
battle. According to Cixous, in this patriarchal paradigm,
"either woman is passive or she doesn't exist" (92). There
is no space in language to record women's struggles because
woman enters language as the defeated passive, where activity
is equated with victory. For example, H.D. writes of
Hermione, "The catch was that her perception was ahead of her
definition. She could put no name to the things she
apprehended, felt vaguely that her mother should have
insisted on her going on with the music" (13). This vague
resonance of a rhythmic mother—language again takes H.D. into
the realm of l’écriture feminine.

Hermione's continual gravitation toward her mother and

133

her fierce identification with other female characters
prefigures Cixous's revisionary psycho-linguistic theory,
which has the female maintaining significant ties with the
Imaginary Order. Cixous explains that "in woman there is
always more or less of the mother who makes everything all
right, who nourishes, and who stands up against separation;
force that will not be cut off but will knock the wind out o
the codes" (252). Hermione's choices justify also Nancy
Chodorow's contention that the female child never completely
breaks her ties with the mother, nor does she reject the
mother in order to enter the Symbolic Order. Thus, she neve

integrates fully into her thinking the subject/object

polarity. Nor does she learn to devalue the literal and bas
figurations on absence. Instead, she finds expression and
identity in the presence of others. For example, "One I

love, two I love, three I love" is a repeated refrain in
HEBmiene, significant in that it positions Her in what Carol
Gilligan calls "a web of relationships," rather than in a
binary opposition of male and female. Hermione rejects this
opposition and stands up against separation by seeing her
brother as her double. "She did not know why and how she
loved her brother. He did not know how and why he loved
Hermione. They stared at one another like two hawk—moths,
like two hummingbird beetles, like two long-throated

cranes . . . " (17). She would be one with Bertrand" (18).

Though H.D. is known (some critics say best known) in

a

f

r

e

134

connection with famous men-—Pound, D.H. Lawrence, William
Carlos Williams, Richard Aldington and Freud--her most
significant relationship was with Bryher, the woman with whom
she lived for much of her life, and who adopted H.D.‘s
daughter Perdita. Significantly, in the novel, Hermione also
stands up against separation by identifying passionately with
other women, most obviously Fayne Rabb, the Frances Gregg
character. Mirror images surround Fayne--images of
identification and connection, of presence, not, as with
George, of differentiation and absence. When Hermione meets
Fayne she is "astonished to perceive how she could turn,
perceive as a mirror the whole of the fantasy of the world
reversed and in that mirror a wide room opening" (76). She
identifies Fayne as "a sort of reflection of a stormcloud
seen in water" (133) and insists, "I know her. Her. I am
Her. She is Her. Knowing her, I know Her. She is some
amplification of myself like amoeba giving birth, by breaking
off, to amoeba. I am a sort of mother, a sort of sister to
Her" (158).

It is finally this stand against separation which allows
Hermione to claim a place in language, to conclude that "It
was George with his volumes who was wordless, who was
inarticulate" (170). It allows her to reject cultural
constructions, to undermine the patriarchal binary
opposition: "A twist, a turn. Men are not strong. Women

are stronger. I am stronger. I turn and twist out of those

135

iron arms. . . . She said, 'Please put the light on'" (173).
It allows her to pull her mother-self out of darkness and
rediscover her pre-Oedipal language.

After a severe storm Hermione and her mother, Eugenia,
are flung together in the morning room, in "profound intimacy
like shipwrecked mariners after the heavy sweep of waves has
numbed them past consciousness of former quarrels" (88).

Here they relive Her's birth in a transformational scene in
which Eugenia takes on generative powers and induces
Hermione's rebirth in language. Hermione observes the
creative power of mother-language: "Words of Eugenia had more
power than textbooks, than geometry, than all of Carl Gart
and brilliant 'Bertie Gart' as people called him. Bertrand
wasn't brilliant, not like mama. Carl Gart wasn't brilliant
like Eugenia" (89). She insists that "one should sing hymns
of worship to [Eugenia], powerful, powerless, all-powerful"
(81). Following this scene, Hermione finally takes her
mother's advice and writes a poem.

Eugenia's story of Hermione's birth into the arms of
Demeter, the nurse who "was so much better than the doctor,"
is ironically juxtaposed with the failure of Bertrand and
Carl Gart's "creation/experiment" which is flooded out of the
laboratory by the rains. "Now Bertie and I will begin
another breeding," Carl Gart says. "That took ten years,
fifteen in all if you count the first experimental failures"

(92). Their masculine infertility reduces their science and

136

language to something tiny and inept in the face of Demeter,
the goddess of fertility, who "had driven the raging storm
back . . . had saved [Eugenia and Hermione] from the numbers"
(90).

This passage perceptively demonstrates Hermione's

recognition of both maternal creative energy and female
linguistic authority, both of which resist "biological—
mathematical definition," and which, in French feminist
theory, are inevitably related. According to Cixous, "Women
must write through their bodies, they must invent the
impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and
rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut
through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse" (256).
In order to save themselves "from the numbers" of that
reserve-discourse "that laughs at the very idea of
pronouncing the word 'silence,'" women tap into maternal
power. Indeed, as Moi explains, "The mother's voice, her
breasts, milk, honey and female waters" are all part of
Cixous's invocation of the eternally present maternal power
(117). H.D. locates this power and identifies it with
Hermione's writing: "Almost for a moment, repudiating that
earlier mystic genealogy, her soul had gone further, almost
she had found her mother--wood-goddess on a woodpath. Almost
words would work charm . . . but not yet (67).

Hermione eventually defers to the originality of this

mother-language and, thus, counters phallogocentrism. "So

137

you think I have so little spunk, so little character that I
would repeat (like a foul parrot) words, words, words out of
someone else's mouth, spew back words that have been already
chewed and chewed?" (95). Deborah Kelly Kloepfer also notes
HERmiehe's preference for l'écriture feminine. She discusses
H.D. in terms of Julia Kristeva, saying that her discourse in
HERmiehe and the other autobiographical novels comes before
paternal sign and law. "The rhythms and repetitious pulsing
prose, associated with the heritages of maternal and
homosexual otherness, proposes not only a polarity between
(male) speech and (female) silence but a new speech, the
speech of the Other."4 Though Cixous associates this
Other—language more closely with the female body than
Kristeva, the focus in both theories is the pre-Symbolic
Language of the Mother.

Like Cixous, Irigaray connects this language to the
female body. While male sexuality and, in the Lacanian
construction, language acquisition center on the single sex
organ, the phallus, Irigaray insists that the female language
of the Imaginary Order has no center but is multiple and
diverse: "A woman 'touches herself' constantly without
anyone being able to forbid her to do so, for her sex is
composed of two lips which embrace each other continually"
(100). She adds, "woman has sex organs just about
everywhere. She experiences pleasure almost everywhere"

(103). Thus, "Woman would always remain multiple, but she

138

would be protected from dispersion because the other is part
of her, and is autoerotically familiar to her" (104). The
idea of multiplicity is essential to French theories which
insist that women must write the body. Because Freud and
Lacan base their theories on biological differences, French
feminists undercut those theories by embracing female
sexuality. By seeing the negative lack of phallus as a
positive multiplicity of sexual response, the idea of
femaleness becomes positive. Irigaray explains that woman
encompasses male and female in her identification with both
father and mother, "Thus woman does not have a sex. She has
at least two of them, but they cannot be identified as ones.
Indeed she has many more of them than that. Her sexuality,
always at least double, is in fact plural" (102).

This multiplicity of female psychological and sexual
response parallels Hermione's experience. At one point H.D.
describes Hermione as an octopus: "Hermione let
octopus-Hermione reach out and up and with a thousand eyes
regard space and distance and draw octopus arm back, only to
replunge octopus arm up and up into illimitable distance"
(71). Clearly Her's doubling identifications with her
brother, with the family's servant Mandy, with her nurse and
with Fayne are indicative of the multiplicity of l'écriture
feminine.5

The "rhythms and repetitious pulsing prose" which

Kloepfer locates in HERmiehe can also be characterized as the

139

echoes of pre-linguistic mother-language, what Cixous calls
"the resonance of fore-language," which duplicates the
diversity of the female body. For Hermione, "Words beat and
formed unformulated syllables" (25). She is attuned to the
inner pulsations of Kristeva's semiotic, which H.D. describes
in mystic terms as an "ouija-board feeling" that "was saying
something but she couldn't comprehend the something that
something in her kept repeating. . . . Something far and far
within kept repeating something that had no words, to which
words fitted. A sort of ouija-board sensation to which words
fitted" (122). The language of the female body is apparent
not only in these rhythms, but also in the recurring circular
images and in the circularity of H.D.‘s prose. The first
line of the novel, for example, is "Her Gart went round in
circles."

Interestingly, H.D.‘s use of the language of the female
body intensifies with Hermione's powerful attraction for
Fayne. Hermione associates a "steady rhythmic clap clap
clap" with Fayne (137) and describes the "concentric
intimacy" of their relationship (164). The rhythms are even
more apparent when she reads her poems to Fayne: "Her Gart
spoke and read, read and spoke, her words made rhythm to the
poem, the poem made rhythm suitable to her swift words.

Words came from nowhere, tumbled headlong somewhere" (179).
Fayne, in fact, functions as an intimate, violent muse in

this passage which prefigures the language of Wittig's The

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Leehiah_Bedy: "The words were (as it were) dragged out of
her long throat by a small hand, by a tight hand, by a hard,
dynamic forceful vibrant hand. The hand of Fayne Rabb
dragged words out of the throat of Her Gart" (145). And,
while sexuality with George is associated with heat and fire,
Fayne is described in archetypal images of female fluids.
When Hermione tells George she loves "Her, only Her, Her,
Her," he replies, "Narcissus in the reeds, Narcissa" (170).
Hermione tells Fayne," You are not myself but you are some
projection of myself. Myself, my self projected you like
water" (146).

This linguistic emphasis on female sexuality can also

explain more fully Hermione's rejection of traditional

logical structures and chronologies. Irigaray explains that
because of the plurality of female sexuality "'she' is
indefinitely other in herself." She "goes off in all

directions" in a language "in which 'he' is unable to discern
the coherence of any meaning" (103). Hermione's language,

then, comes from a mind that H.D. describes as "a patchwork

of indefinable association" (24). "Science, as Bertram Gart
knew it, failed her" (6) and "her mathematics and her
biology hadn't given her what she dreamed of" (12). In

another key passage, H.D. exposes this terrible failure of
science and phallogocentrism in the cold detachment with
which Carl Gart receives his daughter (much like Mr. Ramsay's

possessive observation as Mrs. Ramsay and James): "Carl Gart

141

brought his mind by a superhuman effort to readjustment to
the thing before him. He saw an odd fury-ridden creature
with white face and flame-lipped face and a face where two
lips were drawn tight almost like dead lips across a
skeleton. He saw ridges in the face, fine bones beneath the
face" (99).

Still, Hermione tries to work through her female
"dementia," to pin her indefinable associations down in
patriarchal terms with the constant repetition of such words
as exactly and precisely. She finally discovers that only
art will allow her to work with her "odd distorted images,"
because "art was what science wasn't. Art was the
discriminating and selecting and bringing odd distorted
images into right perspective"--Her own perspective (139).
Music, like language, is, to Hermione, "notes beamed and shot
star and meteor and shooting star, reflection of star and
meteor and shooting star seen in the polished top of the
piano" (109), not music like science "all made to a pattern."
Hermione rages, "I am tired of things that make molecule
pattern and pattern like planets rotating round the sun and
planets making just so much of a slight variation in their so
set circle (110). She insists on "stray star—spume, star
sprinkling from a wild river" (76).

And here Hermione's perspective overlaps obviously with
H.D.‘s. The organization of the novel is a reflection of

Hermione's "patchwork of indefinable associations." The

142

story unfolds somewhat chronologically, somewhat
hierarchically, but always by associations rather than in
obvious structures. For example, when Hermione first meets
George's mother, she focuses suddenly and intensely on a
statue of a praying boy on the piano. As people enter and
leave the apartment, play music, speak to her and of her,
Hermione continually returns to the image of the ceramic boy
with his hands reaching toward heaven. The central action of
the scene comes across as background for the tiny statue and
the associations it sends "whirling in [Hermione's] head"
(106). For Hermione, an "inevitable word-reaction followed
her least thought but reaction was under everything" (224).
Time also has a fluidity in HERmiehe which defies
traditional chronology. Despite frequent references to heat
and cold and to the changing of the seasons, it is difficult
to decide just how long the episodes of the novel last in
linear time--especially the wandering delirium of Hermione's
breakdown in the final pages of the novel. For Her, "There
is the slightest screen door between today and last year.
Everything goes on with everything" (209). Claudine Herrmann
explains that woman's "most mortal enemy" is time--"man lives
in an organized, temporal perspective," but woman's time
"responds to the mind's rhythm, which is at one with the
biological rhythm." HEBmiehe exemplifies this French
feminist approach to time. Her "claims the right to the

present moment, [and] affirms the refusal of a life alienated

143

in social time which is so hostile to interior time" (172).

At the conclusion of the novel, Hermione includes a
rejection of America in her dismissal of Western
philosophical traditions: "There was nothing in America for
them but rows of desks and stabilization and exact
formalization (Uncle Sam pressing things down in test tubes),
there was nothing but standardization or dancing at a
carnival" (233). Hermione realizes that she is unusual, a
carnival freak in a country that values the math and science
she failed to apprehend at Bryn Mawr. In other words, she
never fully accepts the Symbolic Order, never enters
completely the Law of the Father. The insightful
self-examination and subsequent self-acceptance which lead
her back to the pre-Oedipal Language of the Mother also lead
her inevitably out of traditional society.

Because H.D. undertook such a merciless psychological
self—examination as both woman and author in her writing of
HERmiene, the text represents both feminized patriarchal
language and feminist mother-language more completely than
any text which preceded it and most which have followed. As
Hermione/H.D. attempted to negotiate the polarities of self
and society, mother and father, artist and muse, her personal
endeavor comes to reflect and amplify the female position in
male—dominated, figurative culture. Because of her run—ins
with that culture--conic sections at Bryn Mawr, her father'

and brother at home, George in the forest--she suffers a

144

breakdown, a loss of self. "I'm too strong and I'm nothing
and I'm frightened," Hermione says. "She achieved a very

ugly voice that blubbered unbecomingly from somewhere, saying

it over and over like a prayer wheel. 'I am frightened. I
am the word Aum, I am Her. I am Her. . . . I am so
--so——very--frightened' " (176). Even with her naming

prayer—chants Hermione can't recover what she lost with her
integration into the foreign, phallocentric Symbolic Order.
"What did one take, as they say, 'up' after one had been
banged on the head and sees triangles and molecules and life
going on in triangles and molecules" (51). Triangles and
molecules and parallelograms don't accommodate a woman/artist
who perceives concentric patterns and stray star-spume.
Hermione fears--and rightly-~that her patriarchal
linguistic heritage will destroy her as it destroyed many
woman writers before her: "I will be caught finally, I will
be broken. Not broken, walled in, incarcerated. Her will be
. incarcerated in Her" (215). Yet she stands up against
"incarceration" in phallogocentrism. And "before
discarding" it, she must "get it right" (147). Words were
indeed "her plague and her redemption," and she uses them to
"prove conic sections a falsity." Though she is trapped by
them, though they often fail her, it is through them,
finally, that she reclaims the creative powers of l'écriture
feminine. And with the redemption of l'écriture feminine,

she is able to break the patterns of silence and

145

objectification that were her plague in phallogocentrism.
Hermione's blank page is "virginal for one purpose, for
one Creator. Last summer [when she was reborn] the Creator
had been white lightning brandished against blackness. Now
the creator was Her's feet, narrow black crayon across the
winter whiteness" (223). H.Dz compares Hermione's usurpation
of patriarchal language with the hard—earned, unnatural feet
of the Hans Christian Anderson mermaid--and her first
faltering steps on them are the crayon smudges of a child.
Unlike the mermaid, however, Hermione has not been seduced by
the unfaithful lover, the Law of the Father. Through the
power of her "mythopoeic mind (mine)" and her identification
with (and as) women, she has succeeded in recovering her
pre—symbolic female self and setting an unnamed lady back in
the male-defined sky. Even as she embraces the lover, she
is, as Monique Wittig says, killing him with the words she
speaks.
According to Toril Moi:
As far as the study of sex differences in language
goes, any analysis of isolated fragments (sentences)
in literature, as for instance in the much—quoted case
of Virginia Woolf's theory of the 'woman's sentence',
will warrant no specific conclusions whatever, since
the very same structures can be found in male writers
(Proust, for example, or other modernists). The only

way of producing interesting results from such texts

146

is to take the whole of the utterance (the whole text)
as one's object, which means studying its ideological,
political and psychoanalytical articulations, its
relations with society, with the psyche and--not
least--other texts. (155-6)
As with the preceding analysis of Te_the_Lighthehee, an
examination of H.D.‘s HERmiehe, the "whole text," certainly
reveals a panorama of female psychological concerns and
cultural issues, as well as a distinctly female focus and
sense of composition. HEBmiehe, however, will also handle
close—ups even more ably than Te_the_Lighthehee. H.D.‘s
sentences pulse with the rhythms and images of the female
body. They recur and circle back on themselves. They
delight in subversive word-play, as in the confusion of
subject and object. They revel in presence and deny
difference. They affirm the female self in its unique
psychological position between Imaginary and Symbolic. In
short, they accomplish what no male modernist's sentences,
for all their experimentalism, accomplished. HEBmiehe, like
Te_the_Lighthehee, challenges Cixous's contention that there
has been no writing which inscribes femininity. Years before
l'écriture feminine was defined, H.D. found it a powerful

tool for self—definition in this autobiographical novel.

147

Notes

1 Although, obviously, Lacan's language acquisition theory
predates H.D.‘s writing, I will assume for the purpose of
this discussion that he defines as accurately as anyone a
pre-existent cultural and psychological phenomenon. I use
his terms to discuss that phenomenon.

2 In transcribing passages of the novel my use of ellipses
is problematic because of H.D.‘s frequent use of them within
her own passages. I refer readers back to the novel for
clarification.

3 George, as I have noted, is also tied to the patriarchal
order of Uncle Sam, Carl and Bertrand Gart. On page 98, for
instance, he is described as "George Uncle-Sam-in-whiskers."

4 I am referring here to DuPlessis's use of Kloepfer's
argument (from DuPlessis, p.55).

5 For further discussion of Hermione's identification with
Mandy, see Friedman's "Modernism of the 'Scattered Remnant':
Race and Politics in H.D.‘s Development" collected in
Benstock ' 5 WW,
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. Hermione's identification
with her nurse, though not discussed in detail here, is
clearly the center of their conversations (see pp. 200—212,)
culminating in Hermione's statement: "I want to take up
nursing" (215).

PART THREE

Writing Beyond The Stories:
Autobiographical Fiction and Social Change

"Women's Stories have not been told. And without stories
there is no articulation of experience. Without stories a
woman is lost when she comes to make the important decisions
of her life. She does not learn to value her struggles, to
celebrate her strengths, to comprehend her pain. Without
stories she cannot understand herself."

-—Carol P. Christ

One of the most persistent aims of feminist theory,
especially in the several years since I first encountered it,
has been to avoid the violence that generalization and
categorizing inflict on those who are exceptions to "The
Rules." Psychoanalytic theory, for example, has been
especially vulnerable to feminist critique because of its
obvious bias toward white, middle-class, heterosexual
subjects and values. Also vulnerable to feminist critique
are the language and aims of literary criticism, especially
in its recent incarnation as Theory. Theory by definition
categorizes and generalizes; it invents The Rules.

Nevertheless, young scholars (including me) are quite often

149

fascinated by Theory, absorbed in its intriguing play of
ideas and, sometimes, appropriated by its power. I confess:
I am a feminist literary theorist. This is not a
contradiction in terms, though I've encountered it as such
repeatedly as I've worked on this project. I was not
surprised to encounter skepticism for the "feminist" part
from young (mostly male) graduate students and older (mostly
male) professors. I was surprised when feminists warned me
away from theoretical work. French feminist theories, they
told me, are studies in immasculation.l The theorists
worship the Fathers (especially that great misogynist father,
Freud), reinforcing their violence and power. Then, when I
started to combine French feminist observations with American
feminist political agendas and make direct connections with
women writers' lives, theorists warned me away from such
naive empiricism and traditional thinking. I kept forgetting
the non-referentiality of language and the problematic nature
of subjectivity.

These final chapters are an attempt to answer the
criticism from all sides—~to integrate the best of what I've
learned about feminism and theory through readings of three
novels I find exemplary of several trends in autobiographical
fiction as it grew up with modernism. However, I make no
apologies to empiricists or feminists for the theoretical

work of the preceding two chapters on Virginia Woolf and

150

H.D., for which I had the same goal. Nor should I apologize
for the graduate-school training which led me to value their
experimental language and modernist aesthetics even while it
reinforced their positions as privileged, elite, white women;
this training also gave me the critical skills to challenge
their positions and their meanings. These critical skills
inform my use of Theory, which I perceive as mainly positive,
though I see where it often forces its practitioners to
repeat the oppressions of our culture. I find the
opportunities for discovery in some theoretical work to be
worth the risks involved, as long as its practitioners remain
constantly on guard and try ceaselessly to deconstruct its
biases. As Linda Kauffman contends, "it is precisely the act
of theorizing which has enabled [feminists] to frame
questions in ways that have radically altered our means of
articulating perceptions of domination, subjugation,
exploitation, and repression" (2). Toril Moi, too, holds,
that we cannot separate ourselves from our intellectual
context--Wollstonecrafts's theories, for example, are
intimately connected with Rousseau's, so much so that
"without Rousseau, there would have been no Wollstonecraft."2
As we make ourselves more aware of the problems and
shortcomings of where we're located (not that we can ever be
completely self—aware3), we are better able to use that

context to strengthen our work. Like it or not, it seems

151

literary and critical theory are the context in which we now
function-~intellectually and academically. Ignoring that
context limits feminist critique.

Though I have described in some detail what I see as the
modernist context of the novels I interpret as well as the
postmodernist context of my interpretations, I will, in the
next three chapters, expand that context further. Shari
Benstock warns that "our feminist rereadings of Modernism
cannot remain comfortably within the limits of the old logic,
within the boundaries of the old definitions, within the
conventions of the old strategies" ("Expatriate" 34). In
other words, we shouldn't celebrate only the women modernists
such as H.D. and Virginia Woolf who fit into traditional
categories of modernism. By so doing, Benstock explains,
"feminist critics have--unwittingly I think——played into the
hands of a conservative critical establishment that has
rewarded the revolution in poetic language, overlooking
contributions by women whose writings stayed within
traditional genre boundaries" (36h).

The final three writers that I consider--Anzia Yezierska,
Radclyffe Hall and Nella Larsen--are three whose writings
"stayed within traditional genre boundaries" but broke from
tradition in other significant ways. I examine each of these
three autobiographical novels individually, with reference to

the view of postmodernism laid out by Nancy Fraser and Linda

152

J. Nicholson in "Social Criticism without Philosophy: An
Encounter Between Feminism and Postmodernism." Fraser and
Nicholson maintain that, to avoid the violence of
generalization, "postmodern feminists need not abandon the
large theoretical tools needed to address large political
problems" (34). But Fraser and Nicholson do, however, insist
that "not just any kind of theory will do. Rather, theory
here would be explicitly historical, attuned to the cultural

specificity of different societies and periods and to that of

different groups within societies and periods." Theory, they
write, should be "nonuniversalist" and "attuned to changes
and contrasts instead of to covering laws" (34). In

LifclLinca1_Thccrizinc_Hcmcnis_Autcbicsranh¥, Bella Brodzki

and Celeste Schenck pull together a collection of essays
that, as much as possible, heeds this advice, avoiding the
tendency to universalize. Included are discussions of
autobiographies by Native-American, Latin-American and
African-American women, Quebecois and Egyptian women from
various historical moments and from various critical
perspectives. Similarly, in Antehiegraphieai_yeieer_Raeer
Genderr_fieir;fiertraitere, Francoise Lionnet is attuned to

cultural specificity. She centers her discussion of
autobiography on métissage, or miscegenation--the
intersections of race and culture in bi- or multi-lingual

writers.

153

Sidonie Smith, in W,
focuses on marginality and how it affects women
autobiographers. Smith posits that "Choosing to write
autobiography . . . unmasks [the woman writer's]
transgressive desire for cultural and literary authority"
(50). Woman, she says, has no public story to tell "Since
the ideology of gender makes of woman's life script a
nonstory, a silent space, a gap in patriarchal culture" (50).
The dictum against autobiography is even more prohibitive if
the autobiographer is a woman of color or a working-class
woman. Then, "she faces even more complex imbroglios of
male-female figures: Here ideologies of race and class,
sometimes even of nationality, intersect and confound those
of gender. As a result, she is doubly or triply the subject
of other people's representations, turned again and again in
stories that reflect and promote certain forms of selfhood
identified with class, race, and nationality as well as with
sex. In every case, moreover, she remains marginalized.

In her doubled, perhaps tripled, marginality, then, the
autobiographer negotiates sometimes four sets of stories, all
nonetheless written about her rather than by her" (51). This
multiple marginality is an especially relevant concept for
the three woman writers who make up Part Three of this
project.

Taking my cue, then, from the work of Smith, Lionnet,

154

Brodzki and Schenck and other admirable (mostly socialist—
feminist) texts, I examine three autobiographical novels,
looking at their transgressions and transformations, how they
modify rather than characterize traditional modernism--
Yezierska, for example, telling the American immigrant
woman's story while other modernists lived as expatriates in
Europe; Hall regretting rather than celebrating the painful
experience of alienation that her lesbianism brought on; and
Larsen exposing racism and undermining the American dream in
a very different way from Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott
Fitzgerald or William Faulkner. Finally, I examine how the
challenges these three novels made to modernism have changed

not only our literature, but also our world.

155

Notes

1 I'm not sure where this term originated because I've
encountered it frequently in feminist theory but have yet to
locate it in Webster or the Oxford English Dictionary. I
believe it first appeared on page xx of the Introduction to
Judith Fetterley' s The_Reeietihg_Reaeer (1977). It serves as a
convenient antonym for "emasculation," and means making a man
of a woman.

2 From a seminar with Moi at The School of Criticism and
Theory at Dartmouth College, Summer, 1989.

3 With thanks to Stanley Fish who made this point quite
emphatically at the same School of Criticism and Theory and in
his essays "Consequences" and "Being Interdisciplinary Is So
Very Hard to Do." Despite his objections, I maintain that it
is possible (and ethically necessary) to step out of one's
cultural limitations and attain a certain level of
self-awareness--and, most importantly for feminist critics, to
change one's behavior in reference to this increased
self-awareness. See also Myra Jehlen's "Archimedes and the
Paradox of Feminist Criticism" for further discussion of this
problem.

156

Chapter Seven: Yezierska valuing the Struggle

Though recent years have seen a revival of interest in
Anzia Yezierska and her works, the popular writer of the
'twenties still suffers censure for her reliance on
autobiography as subject matter for her novels and stories.
This reliance, critics assume, leads to a lack of authorial
detachment, a tendency toward melodrama, and, the
ever-present condemnation of women writers, a proclivity for
sentimentalism.l Carol B. Schoen, in several essays and in
her book Aeria_1eriereha argues that critics must "move
beyond the autobiographical level" in order to appreciate
Yezierska's "concern for the craft of writing" and with
"esthetic considerations" ("Cinderella" 5-6). Schoen
maintains that "If the reading of her works is restricted to
autobiographical--to sociological, rather than literary
analysis--there is a real possibility that our potential
understanding [of her works] may be limited" (11). She
insists that "Yezierska was not an illiterate immigrant who
miraculously found words to describe her life; she was an
educated, highly conscious artist who struggled to develop

the tools of her trade" (3). Yezierska's daughter Louise

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Levitas Henriksen agrees that Yezierska exaggerated her
connection with such uneducated characters as the young Sara
Smolinsky in Bread_fiiyere. "It should have been obvious," she
writes in her biography of her mother, "that to write as she
did in the guise of an untutored immigrant took a certain
sophistication" (6).

In the effort to reclaim Yezierska from simplistic
autobiographical criticism and open her works up to a more
objective formalist analysis, however, critics often fail to
value just how much Yezierska's close identification with her
characters adds to her work. As Schoen points out, Yezierska
wanted to be a spokesperson for her people--immigrant
working—class Jews. Indeed, because Yezierska had
experienced first-hand the hardships of poverty and
ignorance, her central purpose in writing was not to create
works of art, but to increase the reading public's awareness
of and sympathy for the plight of struggling immigrants.2
This does not, as critics contend, weaken her works. Her
skillful combination of autobiography and fiction is, rather,
her greatest strength. It is from this combination that she
wrests "cultural and literary authority" (Smith 50).

Through Sara Smolinsky in Breag_giyere, Yezierska
retells, with poetic license, the stories of her
youth--women's "Horatio Alger" stories which had never been

the topic of serious "literature."2 Sara is the youngest of

158

four daughters of an immigrant Polish Jewish family living in
a "dark, airless tenement railroad flat" in New York City
(Henriksen 14). Her father is a scholar, and, in the
Eastern-European Orthodox Jewish tradition, studies Torah and
depends on his wife and daughters for financial support.
Sara's struggle against her father's tyrannical authority
parallels Yezierska's similar struggle with her father,
though to increase the tension in the novel, Yezierska
eliminates her six brothers from the story and simplifies the
characterizations of her three sisters. Indeed, in selecting
the details and incidents and in carefully paring down
characters Yezierska heightens the "struggle between a father
of the Old World and a daughter of the New" that is the
subtitle of her novel.

Sara's conflicts with her father are not only
literal--the daughter challenging her father's right to
. dictate her choices-—they are also figurative. As Schoen
points out, the sense of community and heritage of the Jewish
people "are embodied in the person of the father so that
Sara's alternate rebellions and regrets have psychological as
well as social validity" (Anzia 73). In other words, Sara
challenges her religious and cultural heritage via her
father, a point to which I will return later. It is Clear
that Yezierska faced similar cultural and religious barriers

when she chose to write Bread_§iyere. Not only is she,

159

through autobiography, telling a woman's life, making of a
"silent space" a story, but she is also, through fiction,
creating a story. This creation poses a serious dilemma for
Jews because, in their tradition, this sort of artistic work
violates the Second Commandment—-to have no other gods. As
Cynthia Ozick explains, "The writer of fiction is really a
kind of idolator, or, worse, divinity-seizer. The writer of
fiction intends to become a small-scale god, a creator,
setting herself or himself in competition with the Creator.
That, after all, is the warning inherent in the Second
Commandment. Whoever sets up an image-making shop is in
competition with the Maker of the world" (259—260).

In an essay on Jewish autobiography, Alvin H. Rosenfeld
also addresses "the problem of Jews and fiction." Rosenfeld
explains, "we are not allowed to indulge ourselves ultimately
in fabrication" (133):

The Will of the Imagination is a powerful and
seductive one, but it is not Jewish Will. It knows
nothing of history and cares nothing for the Lord of
History. Indeed, it has declared history void of a
Master and has arrogated to itself the sole powers of
Creation. Its only piety is pleasure, it only wish,
to be indulged. Indulge Imagination and you can have
what you will--the riches of magic and mystery, the

transforming powers of illusion, the obliteration of

160

all precedence and priority, a momentary triumph over
conscience, sense, and time. (154)
Rosenfeld theorizes that when Jews undertake to break

this prohibition, there must be a powerful motivation

present. For Mary Antin, a contemporary of Yezierska, for
example, Rosenfeld argues that "Autobiography. . . [was]
equivalent to an act of exorcism: like the Ancient Mariner,

Mary Antin would tell her tale to be rid of it" (136).

Antin, he posits, embraced the traditional Jewish "pursuit of
an intellectual life" to resolve painful conflicts in her
private life (141). Alice Kessler Harris argues that

Yezierska's motivation for telling her story is similar to

Antin's--to justify herself, "to seek absolution" for her
life. She explains that "Yezierska, like Sara, opted for
self and built her life around her own authentic needs. She

freed herself from a tradition few of her countrywomen could
ignore in that first generation, and she did it against the
heaviest odds" (xvii).

I propose that Yezierska did indeed have a powerful
motivation to write her life--not only to plead her own case,
but to plead the case of the immigrant to a country that,
just before the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, appeared to
be increasingly apathetic to it. Autobiographical fiction
gave Yezierska the tools to plead this case most effectively.

Using her life as a blueprint, she built fictions that were

161

so true to life that she could escape the religious
prohibition against fiction. Using fiction, she disguised
her life to escape the cultural prohibition against telling a
woman's "nonstory." In addition, by pleading the case of
the immigrant woman in a novel, Yezierska avoids, in some
measure, accusations of being strident or political, charges
often leveled against women writers who aim to have influence
outside the domestic sphere. She expands her field, placing
value on the immigrant life experience in general. Her
depictions of the poverty Sara and her family lived in, for
example, are vital and moving; the girls' pathetic attempts
to make their dirty, cluttered room more presentable when
their suitors visit or Sara's visions of food as she stands
starving at her ironing board are not easy to forget. "A
terrible hunger rose up in me," Sara says, "--a hunger I had
been trying to forget since my lunch of two stale slices of
bread and a scrap of cheese. Just when I had to begin saving
more from eating, the starvation of days and weeks began
tearing and dragging down my last strength" (167). Sara
imagines her stomach is "like some clawing wild animal in me
that I had to stop to feed always" (173).

Yezierska replicates not only the constant hunger, both
literal and figurative, of the immigrant's life, but also its
tension, lack of privacy and constant noise. Sara muses, at

one point, about what her parents' life could have been like

162

without "the haggling and the cursing, the tearing at each
other's throats for pennies" which she sees at the fishmarket
(141). "If only there was plenty of money between them," she
says, "how happy they would be together, fighting in fun,
instead of nagging and galling each other fighting over
pennies'" (117). When she finally escapes her parents' home
and finds a room of her own, she glories, most of all, in its
privacy: "As I sat there, in the stillness of the morning, I
realized that I had yet never been alone since I was born.
This was the first time I ate by myself" (156). Later she
describes the "terrible racket" that was a constant backdrop
to immigrant life in New York. "Phonographs and pianolas
blared against each other. Voices gossiping and jabbering
across the windows. Wailing children. The yowling and
shrieks of two alley cats. The shrill bark of a hungry pup"
(164). When finally she graduates from college, with her
"Dark night of poverty over" (239), Sara joys in "the leisure
and the quiet" of her life and revels in "my precious
privacy, my beautiful aloneness" (241).

Yet the peace of solitude away from the racket of the
ghetto also has its downside for Sara--the loneliness of
alienation from the new world in which she's chosen to live.
Henriksen discusses these feelings that, for Yezierska, also
came as part of her experience as a working-class immigrant

girl. This sense of alienation, Henriksen points out, was

163

like that of other members of the "lost generation" —-yet
quite different (6). Yezierska writes that Sara watched life
"from the outside" (218). When she attends a college dance,

Sara sits on the sidelines "cold, lifeless, like a lost

ghost. I was nothing and nobody. It was worse than being
ignored. Worse than being an outcast. I simply didn't
belong" (219). This sense of not belonging was not, as it

seemed for other modernists, something she was proud of or
cultivated; it was not, for her, an indication of superiority
or uniqueness. It was, in fact, her greatest trial. "'Why
is it,’ she asks her dean at college, "that when a nobody
wants to get to be somebody she's got to make herself
terribly hard, when people like you who are born high up can
keep all their kind feelings and get along so naturally well
with everybody?'" (231).

"Making herself terribly hard" was a necessary part of
Sara's break with her family and her decision to devote all
of her time to study and work. She says, "More and more I
began to think inside myself, I don't want to sell herring
for the rest of my days. I want to learn something. I want
to do something. I want some day to make myself for a person
and come among people. But how can I do it if I live in this
hell house of Father's preaching and Mother's complaining?"
(66). Yet coming among people meant leaving behind not only

the "hell house" but also the people and the traditions with

164

which she was raised. It involved a break with and a
rejection of her family, especially her father, and of her
religion.

Sara's break with her father becomes the central theme of
the novel, and in it Yezierska captures many of the hardships
and sacrifices involved in adapting to a new world. Though
it would be easy to see the father as the bad guy of the

story, representing all that is old and outdated, it was not

that simple for Sara. As Schoen explains, Sara's father "is
never simply a villain. He, like his daughters, is caught
between two opposing ways of life" (Yezierska 69). While the

younger Sara is eager to adapt to the new world and must
learn to value tradition, her father does all he can to hang
on to the old ways he's used to and avoid the new. He throws
out lines like "women have long hair and small brains" (122),
"Women were always the curse of men but when they get older
they're devils and witches" (96), and "It says in the Torah:
What's a woman without a man? Less than nothing--a
blotted-out existence. No life on earth and no hope of
Heaven" (205).

Against this negative influence, Sara struggles to
identify herself as "a person among people," despite the
"handicap" of having been born female. Yezierska explains:

Of course we all knew that if God had given Mother

a son, Father would have permitted a man child to

165

share with him his best room in the house. A boy
could say prayers after his father's death--that kept
the father's soul alive forever. Always Father was
throwing up to Mother that she had borne him no son

to be an honour to his days and to say prayers for him
when he died.

The prayers of his daughters didn't count because
God didn't listen to women. Heaven and the next world
were only for men. Women could get into heaven
because they were wives and daughters to men. Women
had no brains for the study of God's Torah, but they
could be the servants of men who studied the Torah.
Only if they cooked for the men and washed for the
men, and didn't nag or curse the men out of their
homes; only if they let the men study the Torah in
peace, then, maybe, they could push themselves into
Heaven with the men, to wait on them there. (10)

The father's tyranny, in this passage as throughout the
novel, carries the weight of religious edict, forming a dual
oppression for Sara and her sisters. Rejecting her father
would mean, for Sara, rejecting her religious tradition
because, as he constantly reminds his family, "The whole
world would be in thick darkness if not for men like me who
give their lives to spread the light of the Holy Torah" (24).

Similarly, Kamel connects Yezierska's experience of

166

separation from her parents with her continued belief in the
religious teachings of her youth. Yezierska failed as a
screenwriter in Hollywood, she argues, because "she feared
the success which would prove her parents wrong about their
'Daughter of Babylon' who chose to separate herself from the
orthodoxies of her family" (48).

Sara, however, manages to challenge these orthodoxies,
first by confronting her father, then by rejecting his
religious rites. She says, "More and more I began to see
that Father, in his innocent craziness to hold up the Light
of the Law to his children, was as a tyrant more terrible
than the Tsar from Russia" (65). When her father reminds her
again that "No girl can live without a father or a husband to
look out for her. It says in the Torah, only through a man
has a woman an existence. Only through a man can a woman
enter Heaven," Sara openly rejects his message. "I'm smart
enough to look out for myself," she tells him. "It's a new
life now. In America, women don't need men to boss them.

I've got to live my own life. It's enough that Mother
and the others lived for you" (137). After he chases away
Fania's suitor because he has no money, Sara turns the tables
on her father, confronting him with his own preaching:

"How long [her father asks] will love last with a
husband who feeds you with hunger? Even Job said, of

all his suffering, nothing was so terrible as poverty.

167

A poor man is a living dead one. . . ."

"Father, I broke in, 'didn't you yourself say
yesterday that poverty is an ornament on a good Jew,
like a red ribbon on a white horse? . . . But didn't
you say that the poorest beggars are happier and freer
than the rich?" I dared question Father.

"Blood-and-iron! Hold your mouth!’ hollered

Father. 'You're always saying things I don't ask
you." (70)
Later, she questions, "What are you always blaming everything

on the children?" Again, he silences her "And he walked away
as if I was nothing" (85).

After her mother's death, Sara extends the challenge to
her father's authority to the religion he represents. The
undertaker arrives and "with a knife in his hand, out into
Father's coat and he rent his garments according to the
Biblical law and ages of tradition." Her sisters follow,
tearing their dresses as required by the rites of mourning.
But when the undertaker turns to Sara, in her expensive new
suit bought with her first earnings as a teacher, she turns
him away: '"No,' I cried. 'I feel terrible enough without
tearing my clothes. . . . I don't believe in this'" (255).

Because of Sara's daring rejection of patriarchal
authority and tradition, it often comes as a surprise when,

at the end of the novel, she invites her father to live with

168

her husband and herself.3 But Yezierska actually prepares
the reader for this ending, with several references to Sara's
identification with her father. "I am flesh of his flesh and
blood of his blood," she laments at one point. "Why can't he
understand me? Why don't we understand each other?" (206).
And again, "Wild with all that was choked in me since I was
born, my eyes burned into my father's eyes. 'My will is as
strong as yours'" (138). Sara's sisters also notice the
similarity between their father and Sara. "Let's leave her to
her mad education," one sister says. "She's worse than Father
with his Holy Torah'" (178). Even Sara's father points out
their intellectual kinship when he introduces her to her
mother's doctor near the end of the novel. He boasts, "And
this, my youngest, is a teacherin. She has a head on her.
Takes after her father, even though she's only a girl" (249).
Most significant, however, is when Sara herself finally
realizes the power of this connection. Though Breag givers
doesn't employ experimental language as did the previous two
novels I discussed, this passage is powerful in its evocation
of the lack of separation that characterizes the
mother~language which feminist critics have theorized. You
will recall from Chapter Four that Nancy Chodorow and others
hold that the female child retains a sense of connection from
the pre-linguistic Imaginary Order. Sara says: "How could I

have hated him and tried to blot him out of my life? Can I

169

hate my arm, my hand that is part of me? Can a tree hate the
roots from which it sprang? Deeper than love, deeper than
pity, is that oneness of the flesh that's in him and in me.
Who gave me the fire, the passion, to push myself up from the
dirt? If I grow, if I rise, if I ever amount to something,
is it not his spirit burning in me?" (286).

Sara experiences a similar sense of oneness with her
sisters throughout the first third of the novel. When
Bessie, the oldest, comes home tired and depressed after an
unsuccessful day of job hunting, Sara "felt only the dark
hurt of her weary eyes" (1). Later, when their father sends

away the man Bessie loves, Sara watches Bessie crying

silently. "I couldn't stand to look on her," she says.
"Tears came into my eyes. So I ran out of the bedroom to the
kitchen not to cry" (46). Then, she follows the weeping

Bessie into the bedroom "and hid myself behind the door of
the bedroom and I cried and cried" (51). When Mashah, the
second daughter, also experiences heartbreak, the whole
family shares her pain-~except the father: "We found Mashah
with her head on the window sill, her whole body shaking with
sobs--sobs that could not cease--and could not be consoled.
Like dumb things, we all cried with her-~all through the
night. With so many women weeping in the house, Father could
not sleep any more" (60).

Most significantly, Sara shares this connection with her

170

mother, whose nurturing pulls her homeward even while her
father's tyranny pushes her away. When Sara finally does
leave, she observes her mother "clutching at her heart in
helplessness, her sorrowful eyes gazing at me. All the
suffering of her years was in the dumb look she turned on me.
Bending over, she took out from her stocking the red
handkerchief with the knot that held her saved-up rent money.
And without a word, she pushed it into my hand" (136). This
nurturing continues when Sara is alone, starving and cold,
and her mother appears miraculously with a warm feather bed
on her back. "She threw her arms around me and kissed me
hungrily . . . 'All the way from Elizabeth for you to carry
it,‘ I cried. In the sputtering light of the candle, her
sunken eyes gleamed out of their black sockets with a dumb,
pleading love that made me hate myself for my selfishness.

It seemed to me I never knew till now how close to my heart
my mother was" (170). When Sara stands at her mother's death
bed, she completes her connection with her mother through a
mystic experience, much like Lily's spiritual oneness with
Mrs. Ramsay or H.D.‘s artistic bond with her mother, "wood
goddess on a woodpath": "Suddenly the sorrowful eyes became
transfigured with light. Her lips moved. I could not get
the words, but the love-light of Mother's eyes flowed into
mine. I felt literally MOther's soul enter my soul like a

miracle. . . . She's in me, around me. Not in that clay"

171

(252-253) [emphasis added].

This spiritual link with the mother introduces a similar
problem in Bread Givere as it did in Te_the_Lightheh§e; that
is, the mother, in reality, is often her daughters' betrayer.
Herself co-opted by the patriarchy, the mother sells her
daughters over to the father's power. Sara's mother is
especially guilty of this in her worship of her husband.
"Mother licked up Father's every little word, like honey,"
Sara says. "'I'm only a sinful woman,‘ Mother breathed,
gazing up at him. Her fingers stole a touch of his hand, as
if he were the king of the world" (12). When Reb Smolinsky
decides to sell Bessie in marriage to the repulsive Zalmon,
the fishpeddler, for example, his wife colludes with him,
multiplying Bessie's betrayal and her unhappiness. Sara, to
some extent, understands this trap and her need to escape it.
She perceptively construes her mother's life story as her own
‘ possible future. As her mother tells her daughters how
beautiful she once was, with "cheeks like red apples, skin
softer and finer as pink velvet. Long, thick braids to my
knees. Eyes dancing out of my head with the life in me,"
Sara compares her description with the woman before
her—-"Mother's faded eyes, her shape like a squashed barrel
of yeast, and her face black and yellow with all the worries
from the world" (30). Sara, of course, turns away from her

mother's path.

172

Or does she? Rachel Blau DuPlessis proposes in Writing
Beycnd_the_Ehding that a female main character's
self-development, constituting the novel's quest plot, ends
where the marriage plot begins. In other words, "Soon after
she accepts the man in the love plot, the female [questing]
hero becomes a [passive] heroine, and the story ends" (8).
DuPlessis discusses the "tension between selfless love and
self-assertion" that animates many nineteenth-century
novels--a tension that is quite present in Bread_£iyere, as
Sara repeatedly laments the selfishness of her own life
compared with her mother's selfless existence. Most often in
novels this tension was resolved by reinforcing social
convention through marriage--again, as it is in Bread_fiiyere.
"In short," DuPlessis concludes, "the romance plot, broadly
speaking, is a trope for the sex—gender system as a whole"
(5). Yezierska's ending, then, is problematic in that it
reinforces convention not only through Sara's marriage to
Hugo Seelig (who is, of course, her superior as principal of
her school), but also through Sara's reconciliation with her
father. Significantly, her father has not changed at all,
nor in any way contributed to their reunion. Sara even goes
so far as to reinforce his self-centered behavior--"He who
all his life had his own way must continue to have it to the
end of his days" (291)--while she continues to condemn her.

own selfishness. She can't forget that when her mother asked

173

her to visit she replied, "I have no time. I can come and
see you later, but I can't study later" (244). Indeed, her
final embracing of her father is partially in penance for
this neglect. She takes her mother's place as her father's
caretaker: "I saw in him only the child who needed
mothering—~who must be protected from the hard cruelties of
the world" (285).

Schoen, too, implicates Yezierska for the
happily-ever-after romance ending of Bread Givere. "The
child Sara was based on Yezierska's own life," she argues,
"but the created self stands detached from its creator. But
when the main character became a woman, Yezierska's need to
justify her own life forced her to identify too closely with
the fictional self. The result was to diminish the
credibility of her heroine and to retreat into a vision of an
impossibly perfect world with only the awareness of the
burden of the father to tinge its Utopian quality" (75).
Despite Sara's independent spirit, despite her rejection of
oppressive religious and cultural traditions and despite her
refusal to be ruled by her tyrannical father, she apparently
succumbs in the end to the romance myth. It is also in the
ending of this autobiographical novel that Yezierska parts
company with autobiography. Having herself left two
marriages ten years before she published Bread_Giyere, she

seems to credit marriage with accomplishing things for Sara

174

which it never accomplished for her.

Apparently, like many women writers, Yezierska dared take
her rebellion only so far without fear of condemnation and
marginalization. On the other hand, perhaps she calculated
her position well. Perhaps because of the culturally
acceptable outcome of Sara's story, Bread_§iyere gained
immense popularity. Yezierska had her audience. To this
audience Yezierska's voice speaks clearly as a challenge to
the established order, despite the novel's ambiguous ending.
Through Sara, Yezierska confronts the tyranny of a
patriarchal religion and of a selfish father. She claims
cultural authority and significance for the story of an
immigrant girl-~and of all immigrants. She brings into vivid
focus the hardships of poverty--of hunger, dirt and noise, of
overcrowded tenements and overworked shopgirls. She
describes the longing to learn that motivated her heroine and
herself to leave the ghetto. And she shows what passion and
sacrifice went into making a "Horatio Alger" story in a
real-life America. In speaking her own experience and in
creating Sara's, Yezierska values what, until then, had been
insignificant--the immigrant's struggle. In part because of
Yezierska, this struggle is, today, no longer ignored; it is

a much-discussed part of the American experience.

175

Notes

1 These accusations are culled from several sources,
including Schoen, Henriksen, Harris and others, including my
own classroom experience as a student and a teacher.

2 Though Yezierska took her work very seriously, she never
considered her novels to be "literature." See Kamel, 43,
and Schoen, Anzia, 14.

3 Both the first chapter of Bread givers and the first
chapter of the more autobiographical Reg Rihhen en a White
Heree are called "Hester Street."

4 I will return to this discussion of the novel's ending in
more detail later in the chapter.

176

Chapter Eight: Radclyffe Hall Speaking the Forbidden
Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel The_Weii_ef_Leheiineea,

the thinly disguised story of her life, has been a lightning
rod for controversy since it was first published in 1928.
Then, the novel's most vehement critics instigated its trial
on obscenity charges both here and in England, where it was
banned. Today, it is condemned by some feminist critics for
presenting the lesbian central character, Stephen Gordon, as
biologically deviant and full of self-hatred. As Gillian
Whitlock ruefully points out, the novel "denies joy and
choice in lesbian relationships" (569). Hall's central theme
is, as the title suggests, the loneliness and alienation of
homosexuals in early twentieth-century society.1 As such, it
is a daring book, which speaks openly of the lesbian
experience. So daring is this novel, in fact, that it still
moves critics to ask why Hall would risk a promising literary
career to write it.

Like Yezierska, Hall had a case to plead before the
public. And she chose the form of the popular novel to do
it, perhaps, again, in order to reach a wider audience than
did more experimental lesbian novels of her time by Virginia
Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. That Hall's was a political

choice and a personal mission becomes clear in Vera Brittain

177

and Lovat Dickson's biographies.2 In Raeeiyrre_Haiir_A_Caee

ef_Qheeehity1, for example, Brittain writes, "She recognized
that such a book might mean the end of her career, but the
conviction that she must do it became very strong" (Brittain
75). But because her topic was so taboo, so potentially
volatile, Hall appears to have thought she could write her
life only if she could be shielded by fiction. So she
insists on the fictionality of her characters. In a note at
the beginning of the novel, Hall asserts:

All the characters in this book are purely
imaginary, and if the author in any instance has
used names that may suggest a reference to living
persons, she has done so inadvertently.

A motor ambulance unit of British women drivers
did very fine service upon the Allied front in
France during the later months of the [First World]
war, but although the unit mentioned in this book,
of which Stephen Gordon becomes a member, operates
in much the same area, it has never had any
existence save in the author's imagination.
Yet as her own letters and the journals of her longtime
companion Una Troubridge prove, the characters in the novel,
especially Stephen herself, did exist beyond fiction, outside
of the author's imagination--in England, in the Allied

ambulance corps and in post-war Paris.3 And, as the novel's

 

 

 

178

obscenity trials prove, the shield of fiction was not strong
enough to protect Hall in a culture where women's writing is
traditionally treated as inevitably self-referential.

Hall consciously draws a distinction between fiction and
truth in her autobiographical novel. It was the freedom to
do this-—the freedom of autobiographical fiction--which
allowed her to attempt autobiography. This freedom was
especially important to Hall, whose story was, culturally,
not just ignored like Yezierska's, but prohibited. Her
"desire for cultural and literary authority" was especially
transgressive because, as C.H. Rolph explains, "the denial of
homosexuality, in particular the determined pretence that it
could not exist among women" was vital in the post—Victorian
twenties, despite that decade's pretense of sexual liberation
(20). Indeed, the scientific and medical discourse of the
time insisted on explaining away lesbianism as biological
deviance, an "affliction" termed "congenital inversion." The
gist of this theory is, as Whitlock explains, that "women do
not become lesbians by choice or circumstance" but by biology
(556).4

Richard von Krafft-Ebing, a notable proponent of this
theory, took on the patriarchal task of naming this women's
experience. He "scientifically" divided inversion into four
categories, each increasingly more masculine and more

"deviant." Havelock Ellis modified Krafft-Ebing's theory to

179

include passionate female friendships as another category of
inversion. This categorization is also significant as an
exercise of patriarchal authority over women, considering the
prominence of the language of science and of psychology among
the modernists that I pointed out in Chapter Three. As
Esther Newton explains, Ellis's "inclusion of such
friendships in a discussion of inversion inevitably marked
them with the stigma of 'abnormality'" (Newton 567). Ellis's
naming was, in fact, so powerful and influential that Hall
herself was apparently convinced by it--so much so that she
asked Ellis to write an introductory note to The Well ef
Leheiiheee, thereby accepting his naming of her experience.
This note still appears at the beginning of Hall's text each
time it is reprinted.

In this commentary Ellis affirms that Hall's novel "is
the first English novel which presents, in a completely
faithful and uncompromising form, one particular aspect of
sexual life as it exists among us today," meaning, of course,
inversion. Even while Ellis appears to be sympathetic to
Hall's story, he exerts his scientific and cultural authority
by holding to an absolute and very narrow concept of
normality. He writes: "The relation of certain people--who,
while different from their fellow human beings, are sometimes
of the highest character and the finest aptitudes--to the

hostile society in which they move, presents difficult and

180

still unresolved problems" [emphasis added]. Literary
critics and biographers of Hall followed Ellis's strategy of
using a subtle language of condemnation while appearing to be
sympathetic. Lovat Dickson, for example, uses phrases like
"unnatural union," "unholy love" and "strongly sexed" woman
in his study Radclyffe_Hall_at_thc_Well_cf_Lcncliness.
Surprisingly, Radclyffe Hall also uses this subtle
language of condemnation in her description of Stephen
Gordon, making it clear that she was unusual from
birth--through either fate or biology. Either Hall had truly
accepted the Krafft—Ebing theory of biological inversion, and
she invoked it here as an explanation of herself, or she used
it as a political and narrative device-—to avoid the burden
of having chosen to be a lesbian, a choice which would have
certainly been condemned by her readers and critics alike in
1928. Thus, she introduces the the long-awaited first child
of Sir Philip and Lady Anna Gordon's ten-year marriage as "a
narrow—hipped, wide shouldered little tadpole of a baby, that
yelled and yelled for three hours without ceasing, at though
outraged to find itself ejected into life" (13). Already
named "Stephen," because Sir Philip was so sure he was going
to have a son, the baby girl is christened with this
masculine name. This foreshadowing of the life Stephen would
later lead operates on two levels--as textual anticipation

and as part of Stephen's narrative telos of becoming a

181

lesbian.

Hall immediately identifies little Stephen with Sir
Philip in appearance and in attitude. They ride horseback
and foxhunt together, sharing the outdoors and their love of
the land. Anna and Stephen, on the other hand, "were
strangely shy with each other--it was almost grotesque this
shyness of theirs, as existing between mother and child"
(15). There are even times when Anna's feelings for Stephen
move beyond timidity, "when the child's soft flesh would be
almost distasteful to her" (16). Sir Philip senses this or,
Hall suggests, some other mysterious injustice--"it was
almost as though he divined by instinct that his daughter was
being secretly defrauded, was bearing some unmerited burden"
(16).

This other mysterious injustice begins to take shape when
seven-year-old Stephen develops a passionate crush on
Collins, the housemaid. In light of Nancy Chodorow's
theories of female self-development as I outlined them in
Chapter Four, wherein female children develop a sense of self
through identification with others and male children do so
through separation and individuation, the fact that Stephen's
crush takes the form of intense identification with Collins
becomes significant. Indeed, so strong is her empathy that
Stephen tries to develop "housemaid's knee," and prays that

she can "bear Collins' pain" for her (21). Then, when

182

Stephen sees Collins kissing the footman, she responds
violently, throwing a flowerpot at them, and Collins is
dismissed.

Hall builds the anticipation of Stephen's difference
after this incident. She points out that, unlike other little
girls, Stephen rides "with a leg on each side of [her] horse"
(42), she loves to dress up like "William Tell, or Nelson, or
the whole Charge of the Balaclava" (19), and she is tall and
physically strong. When she learns to fence "She discovered
her body for a thing to be cherished, a thing of real value
since its strength could rejoice her" (58). As a young woman
she is awkward at social gatherings, uncomfortable in women's
clothes and uninterested in romance. She develops a strong
friendship with Martin Hallam, a young man who shares many of
her interests, but when he proposes she responds with
"terror," "outrage" and "deepest repulsion" (98). When,
trying to understand herself, she confides this response to
her Father, his suspicions are confirmed. Convinced by his
reading of Krafft—Ebing that his daughter is a "victim of
inversion," he responds desperately: He "wanted to cry out
against God for this thing; he wanted to cry out: 'You have
maimed my Stephen!‘ (106).

Shortly after this revelation of Stephen's narrative
destiny, Sir Philip dies in an accident, depriving his child

"of three things; of companionship of mind born of real

183

understanding, of a stalwart barrier between her and the
world, and above all of love-~that faithful love that would
gladly have suffered all things for her sake, in order to
spare her suffering" (121). Left alone, Stephen falls in
love with Angela Crossby, the American wife of a
nouveau-riche neighbor. The self-indulgent Angela encourages
Stephen for a while, perhaps to stave off boredom or, more
likely, to take advantage of the expensive gifts the wealthy
Stephen brings her, but when her husband becomes suspicious
about an affair she is having with another man, Angela
betrays Stephen's love to divert his attention. She gives
him a love letter Stephen wrote to her and asks him how to
discourage Stephen's attentions. Angela's outraged husband
then sends Stephen's love letter to Anna Gordon, who
confronts her daughter: "All your life I've felt very
strangely toward you. . . . I've felt a kind of physical
repulsion, a desire not to touch or be touched by you--a
terrible thing for a mother to feel--it has often made me
deeply unhappy. I've often felt that I was being unjust,
unnatural——but now I know that my instinct was right; it is
you who are unnatural, not I" (200).

Upset by her mother's denunciation of her, Stephen seeks
refuge in her father's study. There she stumbles on his
marked-up copy of Krafft-Ebing's writings on inversion. She

is immediately as convinced by his theory as her father had

184

been and responds with similar desperation-—and with
self-condemnation: "Oh, Father . . . there are so many of
us——thousands of miserable, unwanted people, who have no
right to love, no right to compassion because they are
maimed, hideously maimed and ugly--God's cruel; He let us
get flawed in the making" (204). When Stephen turns to the
Bible for comfort she finds only further condemnation, as the
book falls open to a passage about the mark set upon Cain's
head. As Whitlock explains, "the medical texts are
immediately placed alongside the Bible, which translates
their language into that of another patriarchal discourse and
process of labeling--the mark of Cain" (Whitlock 572).

Thus accepting the future which has been foreshadowed in
the novel, to spare her family shame Stephen leaves home for
London, taking her governess and teacher, Miss Puddle, with
her. The loyal Puddle addresses Stephen in the Biblical
language of the Ruth and Naomi story: "Where you go, I go,
Stephen. All that you're suffering at this moment I've
suffered. It was when I was very young like you--but I still
remember" (205). In London, Stephen becomes a successful
writer, but suffers painful loneliness and alienation.
Realizing that there are many women like her who love other
women, she decides to seek them out. At the advice of her
friend, the playwright Jonathan Brockett, she goes to Paris

where he introduces her to his circle of friends—-writers,

185

artists and intellectuals--all homosexual.

Stephen, having embraced her "abnormality," still feels
alienated and alone until, serving as an ambulance driver on
the French front in World War I, she meets Mary Llewellyn
and the two fall deeply in love. Though Mary returns her
affection, Stephen hesitates to begin a relationship with
her. She faces her dilemma in an imagined exchange with
Mary:

If you come to me, Mary, the world will abhor you,
will persecute you, will call you unclean. Our love
may be faithful even unto death and beyond--yet the
world will call it unclean. We may harm no living
creature by our love; we may grow more perfect in
understanding and in charity because of our loving;
but all this will not save you from the scourge of a
world that will turn away its eyes from your noblest
actions, finding only corruption and vileness in
you. You will see . . . unfaithfulness, lies and
deceit among those whom the world views with
approbation. You will find that many have grown
hard of heart, have grown greedy, selfish, cruel and
lustful; and then you will turn to me and will say:
"You and I are more worthy of respect than these
people. Why does the world persecute us, Stephen?"

And I shall answer: Because in this world there is

186

toleration only for the so-called normal."(301)
It is passages like this, in which Hall, through Stephen,
deals Openly with the forbidden subject of lesbianism, that
give this autobiographical novel its power. Newton points
out that The_Weii_efi_Leheiiheee, which has been known as the
lesbian novel, has "continuing meaning to lesbians because it
confronts the stigma of lesbianism——as most lesbians have had
to live it. . . . Most lesbians have had to face being
called or at least feeling like freaks" (560).

Stephen overcomes these feelings, and she and Mary return
to Paris after the war to live together. There she also
renews her friendship with Martin Hallam, who had once
proposed to her. At the end of the novel, however, Stephen
reverses her earlier decision to pursue her relationship with
Mary. She gives Mary up so that Mary and Martin can be
together and lead a "normal," happy life, accepted by their
society. Stephen, on the other hand, is left alone in a
house full of "a jibing, grimacing, vindictive silence"
(434).

It is here at the end of the novel that Hall most notably
parts company with autobiography. Until her death, Hall
enjoyed a long-term committed relationship with Una
Troubridge, who had been married but rejected that life to be
with Hall. Yet Hall denies Stephen a similar resolution.

Why would Hall have the protagonist of her autobiographical

187

novel suffer an isolation which she herself didn't endure?
Perhaps, as with Bread_fiiyere, the ending of this novel
reveals Hall's surrender to social convention--removing
Stephen from the romance plot allows her to move the more
conventional Mary and Martin into it. Or perhaps Hall wanted
to reinforce for her readers the effects of the intolerance
that lesbians encounter in our society. Her readers,
familiar with the form of the popular novel, would miss a
happily-ever-after ending for Stephen. Perceptive readers
might even recognize the havoc that Martin and Mary's
happily-ever—after wrecks on both Mary and Stephen.

This manipulation of the romance ending reveals how Hall
artfully used the tools of her trade to reinforce her

message, a skill some critics recognized and censured Hall

for. An anonymous reviewer for the Anhhai_Begieter, for

example, criticizes Hall for mixing poetry and politics. The
book, the reviewer writes, "has too much the air of a
personal crusade" (Brittain 20). Rolph, too, suggests that

Hall is too close to her subject, calling The_fleii_ef
Leheiiheee Hall's "big, rambling, overwritten and desperately
sincere book" (27) [emphasis added]. Even Whitlock, who
defends the novel's importance to lesbians, calls it
"sentimental and at times florid and clumsy in its prose and
characterizations" and concludes that it is "not great

literature" (560).

188

Dickson affirms this separation between the novel's
aesthetics and its politics. He comments that The_Weii "is a
book of importance in the history of the unending struggle
with censorship. It was the stone that loosened the
avalanche" (21). Then he, too, insists that it "isn't a
great literary work." He compares it with Hacie_Tem;e_Cahih,
another novel, he implies, with relatively little "literary"
merit, but important political clout. Both, he points out,
appeared at "just the right moment" to have great influence
(22). Dickson does, however, recognize that "Radclyffe Hall
had been a successful writer, who had published several
volumes of verse before turning to novels. She had scored a
considerable succés d’estime with Agam'e Breed, which in 1926
carried off the two great literary prizes in England, a feat
accomplished only once before, with E.M. Forster's Eaeaagerte
India" (14). Thc_Hell_cf_Lcnclincss was apparently a
different story altogether.

Brittain discusses this dual assessment of Hall's novel.

Miss Radclyffe Hall's important, sincere and very
moving study demands consideration from two
different standpoints. In the first place, it is
presented as a novel, and it is therefore open to
criticism as a work of imagination, a creative
effort which challenges comparison with other

examples of fiction. In the second place it is a

189

plea, passionate, yet admirably restrained and never
offensive, for the extension of social toleration,
compassion and recognition to the biologically
abnormal woman, who, because she possesses the
tastes and instincts of a man, is too often
undeservedly treated as a moral pariah.

Many critics maintain that propaganda, of
whatever kind, impairs a work of art. True as
this aesthetic canon may be for the majority of such
works, the fact remains that it is the problem which
it discusses, rather than its rank in fiction, which
lends to Miss Hall's book its undoubted
significance. (48)

Obviously the book's stand midway between autobiography
and fiction posed a problem for its reviewers. But here
Brittain comes very close to valuing the novel for its
"cultural power," an argument Jane Tompkins makes for uheie
Temie_Cahih in her study, Seheatiehai_ueeighe. Tompkins
"self-consciously reverses the negative judgments that
critics passed on . . . popular fiction by re-describing them
from the perspective of an altered conception of what
literature is." Instead of attending to traditional
aesthetic categories for evaluating a novel, Tompkins attends
instead to "the way a text offers a blueprint for survival

under a specific set of political, economic, social or

190

religious conditions" (xvii). Viewing The_Weii_ei_Leheiiheee
from this perspective, it is more than an important book, it
is significant literature.

It is, to its credit, political literature.5 Whitlock
proposes that it is "a political intervention in which Hall
starts the process of producing a 'reverse discourse,’ a
space for other lesbians to speak for themselves and so move
toward self—definition" (560). In other words, because Hall
dared speak "the love that dared not speak its name," others
have been able to define themselves through the discourse she
began. Brittain recalls in her memoir about Hall "the
pale, intense face of the woman whose contours suggested
those of a handsome man in early middle age courting
martyrdom, with a determined identification of herself with
the misunderstood minority, which she regarded as her mission
in life to explain and defend" (Brittain 36).

Hall lived with the alienation that her lesbian lifestyle
brought on--an alienation certainly more tangible and more
culturally—imposed than the existential isolation or artistic
solitude of other modernists. But she didn't, as Brittain
says, "court martyrdom" or celebrate that alienation. Hall
wrote The_Weii_er_Leheiiheae as a plea for an end to the
alienation of homosexuals and she makes this plea through
Stephen, who, like Hall, suffers painfully at the hands of.a

society that will not accept her. In addition, the act of

191

writing this autobiographical novel was, for Hall, a
rejection of alienation. She will not accept that her story
should not be told. She claims legitimacy for her self by
writing her experience. In fact, Stephen, though she must
sacrifice her romance plot at the end of the novel, embraces
what DuPlessis describes as its incompatible alternative--the
quest plot. Though she loses Mary, she embraces a vision of
herself as the spokesperson for others like her. Hall's book
becomes the embodiment of that vision.

The magnitude of Hall's defiant act of speaking her
experience becomes obvious when considered in historical
perspective. One contemporary reviewer of The Well ef
Leheiiheee wrote in the Nefl_§tateemah (24 November 1928) in
response to Hall's novel: "people who desire tolerance for
pathological abnormalities certainly should not write about
them" (Rolph 25). Hall disagreed, if not with the terms at
least with the premise. Through her disagreement she helped
initiate a change in legitimate discourse about homosexuality
from which we benefit today. And because she believed she
should write her story and claim her experience as
legitimate, she gave voice to the culturally forbidden and
lifted the sentence of silence for many women who followed

her.

192

Notes

1 Though I recognize that the author was actually named
Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall, I have chosen to follow her style
and use her literary designation, Radclyffe Hall, when
discussing her as an author.

2 Both Lovat Dickson's Radelyffe Hall at the Well ef
Lenelineee and Vera Brittain's Radelyffe Hall; A Case ef

Qheeehityg biographies of Hall are first-person accounts by
her contemporaries which center on the obscenity trial in
Britain. By far the most insightful biography, however, is
Una Troubridge's brief, informal one, written shortly after
Hall's death.

3 This is not to say that all of the characters in the novel
are simply reproductions of people Hall knew. Though
critics and biographers have identified Mary Llewellyn as Una
Troubridge, Valerie Seymour as Natalie Barney and her mentor
and governess Miss Puddle as her maternal grandmother other
characters, such as Sir Philip Gordon, are invented and still
others are significantly altered.

4 Though a debate continues on whether or not lesbianism is,
in some cases, biologically determined, many lesbians have
gone beyond determinism and declared they are lesbians by
choice. When I refer negatively to the theories of
Krafft—Ebing and Ellis, I do so with reference to the
inevitability of their arguments and the assumption of
deviance which underlies them.

5 I use the term "political" here and throughout this
discussion in a feminist and rhetorical sense, as Judith

Fetterley defines it in The_Reeietihg_Reager-—meaning

persuasive, value-laden and concerned with the issues of
power.

193

Chapter Nine: Nella Larsen Claiming a veice

"Participation in the autobiographical tradition,"
Regina Blackburn declares, "is a declaration of selfhood"
(148). In an essay on black women's autobiography, Blackburn
explains how this declaration challenges power structures in
our culture which would have the voices of women, and
especially black women, remain marginalized or silenced.
And, as Sidonie Smith asserts, it will be recalled, the black
woman is "doubly or triply the subject of other people's
representations, turned again and again into stories that
reflect and promote certain forms of selfhood." When a
minority woman takes up her pen to write her story, Smith
explains, she must negotiate "sometimes four sets of stories,
all nonetheless written about her rather than by her" (Smith
51) [see Introduction to this section]. To declare selfhood
and give voice to her silence, then, a black woman must
reclaim her stories for herself, reworking the
representations of her in our culture-~representations
created by black and white men and by white women.

Perhaps the most difficult of these stories to negotiate
is that of black woman as object. Doubly commodified by race
through slavery and by gender as an object of man's sexual

desire, the black woman must defy the strictures of

194

objectification and claim the subject position in order to
write her autobiography. By choosing to write an
autobiographical novel, Nella Larsen, with Quicksand,
artfully obfuscates the polarity of subject and object. As
subject, she claims her story, her version of the "tragic
mulatta." And as artistic object she replaces herself with
Helga Crane, a beautiful, perpetually dissatisfied version of
Larsen as subject.1 Through this once-removed perspective
Larsen is able, like Yezierska and Hall, to fill in a gap in
patriarchal culture and tell her story. But, again like
Yezierska and Hall, she could not write her autobiography
without this shield of fiction. Larsen's was also a
forbidden story, a story of "race intermingling." As she
points out in Qaieheahd, "among black people, as among white
people, it is tacitly understood that these things are not
mentioned--and therefore they do not exist" (39) [emphasis
added]. Just as early twentieth-century society had an
interest in maintaining that homosexuality did not exist, it
also insisted on never mentioning mixed marriage.
Miscegenation was, in fact, illegal in many states. But
Larsen, as both black and white, both subject and object,
transgresses cultural prohibitions in theheahd. She claims
a voice for her "nonstory" through autobiographical fiction.
Larsen had a strong tradition of black autobiography to

call on, as Blackburn points out in her essay "In Search of

195

the Black Female Self: African-American Women's Auto-
biographies and Ethnicity." Blackburn traces three recurring
themes in black women's autobiography: first, identity,
"defining and understanding this black self"; second,
"assigning... some value to the black self" and third, "the
bind of double jeopardy, being both black and female" (136).
Larsen's handing of each of these themes is complicated by
the fact that she (like her protagonist) is not only both
black and female, but also both black and white--and, of
course, that her story is both autobiography and fiction.
Helga Crane searches throughout her life for a way to define
and value herself as a member of one race or the other. She
searches for an identity that will allow her complete
self-acceptance. In Quicksand, Larsen gives the appearance
of trying to work through for herself the problems of
alienation, self—hatred and dissatisfaction that this search
inevitably brings on.

The novel opens with Helga's decision to leave Naxos, "a
composite of Larsen's experiences at Tuskegee Institute in
Alabama and at Fisk University in Tennessee" (McDowell
xxxiv). For the past two years she has been a teacher at
this all-black institution, but she decides that "she could
no longer abide being connected with a place of shame, lies,
hypocrisy, cruelty, servility, and snobbishness" (14). She

finds the rules, which encourage students to "know their

196

place" (3) and behave like "automatons" (12), too
restrictive, the atmosphere of "self—righteousness" (5) and
the general air of intolerance and "dislike of difference"
(5) unbearable. In these first pages, Helga Crane is
described as disgusted and defiant, and seething with anger
and resentment.

Leaving Naxos also means, for Helga, breaking off her
engagement to James Vayle, a fellow teacher and the son of a
prominent Atlanta family. Through James, she admits, she had
hoped to gain the respect she missed as the illegitimate
daughter of a black father and a Scandinavian mother.
Feeling rebellious, lonely and dissatisfied, Helga has
already begun to dislike James in the same way she will later
dislike her friend Anne Grey in New York, the young artist,
Axel Olsen, who proposes to her in Copenhagen and the
Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green, who will become her husband.
This dislike—-which Larsen even describes at times as
"loathing" and "aversion"--is seemingly an extension of
Helga's feelings about herself onto those closest to her.

Because Helga leaves school in mid-semester, she is
unable to find work when she moves to Chicago, though she
spends weeks searching. Rejected by white relatives to whom
she goes for financial help, she soon finds her meager funds
depleted. "She felt horribly lonely too. This sense of

loneliness increased, it grew to appalling proportions,

197

encompassing her, shutting her off from all of life around
her. Devastated she was, and always on the verge of weeping"
(34). She is, in short, alone and desperate--until she meets
up with Mrs. Hayes-Rore, a traveling lecturer who addresses
"the race question." Mrs. Hayes-Rore takes Helga to New
York, where she finds her a job and lodging in Harlem in the
home of Anne Grey, a young widow who quickly becomes Helga's
dear friend.

Secure and comfortable, surrounded by friends, Helga is
happy in Harlem for two years. Then the familiar feeling of
dissatisfaction returns: "All interest had gone out of
living. Nothing seemed any good. She became a little
frightened, and then shocked to discover that, for some
unknown reason, it was of herself she was afraid" (47).
Apparently it was the black side of herself she feared
because "abruptly it flashed upon her that the harrowing
irritation of the past weeks was a smoldering hatred.

Why, she demanded in fierce rebellion, should she be yoked to
these despised black folk?" (55). Unable any longer to
identify herself as black, Helga decides to leave New York
and live among her white relatives in Copenhagen.

But in Copenhagen she finds she cannot escape her race
identification. She is "a curiosity, a stunt, at which
people came and gazed" (71). People on the street call her

"Den Sorte," the black one. At first Helga appreciates this

198

attention and passes two happy years in Copenhagen with her
aunt and uncle, but soon she begins again to feel alienated
and alone. She decides to return to Harlem, ostensibly to
attend Anne's wedding. Back in New York, Helga joys in being
among blacks again. She decides that "These were her people"
(95). Soon, however, inevitably, she "felt alone, isolated
from all other human beings" (109). When Dr. Robert
Anderson, Helga's former principal from Naxos and now Anne's
husband, denies their mutual attraction, the depressed Helga
stumbles into a church where she is caught up in religious
fervor and "swept by the tide of unsuppressed emotion and
libidinal release" (Giddings 192).

The next day, still riding the wave of that experience,
she marries the Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green, and he takes her
to "the tiny Alabama town where he was pastor to a scattered
and primitive flock" (118). Three years and four children
later, Helga again finds herself overcome by deep depression:
"she had to admit that it wasn't new, this feeling of
dissatisfaction, of asphyxiation. Something like it she had
experienced before. In Naxos. In New York. In Copenhagen.
This differed only in degree" (134). Just as she recovers
enough to plan her next escape, she finds herself pregnant
with her fifth child. Finally, it seems, there is no escape
for Helga. As Paula Giddings notes, "the reader assumes that

she will spend the rest of her life in mental anguish"

199

(192).2

Helga's recurring "mental anguish" and gnawing
dissatisfaction are, as Blackburn explains, linked with her
experience as racial other in a culture dominated by whites.
"As a consequence of lacking power, of being victims of
racism, and of the failure to develop a positive sense of
self, African—American women . . . often suffer
psychologically and spiritually from self—hatred" (143).
Helga is six years old when her mother marries a white man,
and she grows up despised by her step-father and her
step-brothers and sisters. The narrator informs us that her
relatives all "feared and hated her" (6). And she returns
their antipathy. When Helga is 15 her mother dies, and she
is sent away to an all-black school where, for the first
time, "she discovered that because one was dark, one was not
necessarily loathsome, and could, therefore, consider oneself
without repulsion" (23).

Helga apparently doesn't learn this lesson well enough,
as she comes, while in Harlem, to again hate her blackness
and long for an escape from her race identification, as I
noted above. Helga's inability to own and value herself as a
black woman is, as we have already seen, a problem for the
autobiographer in the black woman's tradition, where this
recognition of blackness is a key theme. But Helga

insistence that she wants to belong "to herself alone and not

200

to a race" (64) is further problematized by black cultural
tradition, which values community. As Elechi Amadi explains
in his study of Nigerian culture, in the African tradition an
(American) emphasis on the individual is harmful: "Extreme
individualism," he writes, "only generates despair and
antisocial behaviour" (110), two characteristics, clearly, of
Helga's behavior. As Elizabeth Schultz explains,
"Characteristic of the black autobiography . . . is the fact
that the individual and the community are not polarities;
there is a community of fundamental identification between
'I' and 'we' within any single autobiography" (110). Stephen
Butterfield, in his writings on black autobiography, also
discusses this sense of community, African in origin, which
characterizes this genre: "The 'self' of black
autobiography, on the whole . . . is not an individual with a
private career, but a soldier in a long, historic march
toward Canaan. The self is conceived as a member of an
oppressed social group, with ties and responsibilities to the
other members" (xx).

Without these ties to connect her story with a community,
Helga, as Larsen depicts her, is set loose, unable to define
herself. She wonders: "Was there, without her knowing it,
some peculiar lack in her? Absurd. But she began to have a
feeling of discouragement and hopelessness. Why couldn't she

be happy, content, somewhere?" (81). Vernon J. Dixon

201

explains that "Implicit in the unity of the African—oriented
world view is the nonseparation of man in relation to his
fellow men. The individual's position in social space is
relative to others. He does not and cannot exist alone
except corporately. The individual is not a human being
except as he is part of a social order" (63) [emphasis
added]. These theories of the black African and
autobiographical tradition take on further significance when
seen in the light of Nancy Chodorow's theories of female
development through connection, as I outlined them in Chapter
Four. As a black woman without a community, Helga is doubly
cut off from herself. Her avenues toward self-knowledge are
blocked.

Further complicating Helga's problem with self-knowledge
is her constant identification as object. Deborah E.
McDowell posits that "Helga is alternately defined by others
(primarily men) as a 'lady' or a 'Jezebel.' Neither
designation captures her as a sexual subject, but simply as
an object" (xix). At her first meeting with Dr. Anderson, he
says, "'You're a lady.’ You have dignity and breeding" (21).
But Axel Olsen informs her that she has "the soul of a
prostitute" (87), and a woman in the church she visits at the
end of the novel calls her "a scarlet 'oman" (112). Neither
virgin nor whore, Helga is again trapped, her roads toward

identity blocked by limited definitions of woman in

202

patriarchal language.

Helga is further objectified as an artistic creation.
Twice in the novel she is called "a decoration," the first
time by a female teacher at Naxos who tells her, "We need a
few decorations to brighten our sad lives" (14). And in
Copenhagen she literally becomes a decoration, as Axel

Olsen's artistic gaze dissects and appraises her piece by

piece while she sits silent: "Superb eyes . . . color
neck column . . . yellow . . . hair . . . alive
wonderful . . ." (71) Even her aunt and uncle, Fru and Herr

Dahl, address each other as they speak of Helga in third
person: "She's beautiful; beautiful!" (69).

Helga's identification as object does not carry through
in her relationship with Dr. Anderson, who, again, denies his
sexual attraction to her, though he had once professed it
with a passionate kiss. His singular perspective apparently
leaves Helga so confused that when she realizes that Rev.
Green does see her as a sexual object, she embraces this
identification by marrying and, we are to assume, sleeping
with him. She realizes too late that, as McDowell reminds
us, "for women, and especially for black women, sexual
pleasure leads to the dangers of domination in marriage,
repeated pregnancy, or exploitation and loss of status"
(xiv). The thoroughly depressing ending of Qaieheahd

reinforces this. Helga is held captive by her children

203

because "to leave them would be a tearing agony, a rending of
deepest fibers. She felt that through all the rest of her
lifetime she would be hearing their cry of 'Mummy, Mummy,
Mummy,’ through sleepless nights. No. She couldn't desert
them" (135). And, by association, she couldn't desert the
repulsive (and ironically named) Pleasant Green.

Again, as with Bread_fiiyere, the ending of this
autobiographical novel is interesting for the tensions it
fails to resolve. Helga's aberrant romance ending is the
marriage that not only circumvents the quest plot, as I
discussed in Chapter Seven, but which also destroys the
chance for any happiness in Helga's future. McDowell
discusses Larsen's "unearned and unsettling endings" that
"sacrifice strong and emerging independent female identities
to the most acceptable demands of literary and social
history" (xi), explaining them in the context of her study of
black female sexuality in novels.3 Why would Larsen have the
protagonist of her autobiographical novel suffer a fate worse
than any she ever had to endure?

One explanation is that, however negative the ending may
appear, Helga is, for the first time, connected to
someone--so much so that she can't leave when the familiar
mood of dissatisfaction strikes her. She finally has a
community with which she is identified, even if that

community consists only of her four children. Alasdair

204

MacIntyre explains that such familial identifications as
"mother" are "not characteristics that belong to human beings
accidentally, to be stripped away in order to discover 'the
real me.’ They are part of my substance, defining partially
at least and sometimes wholly my obligations and my duties"
(33). Given this, one could argue that Larsen conceived this
as a positive ending for Helga. However, it is difficult to
see her communal experience as positive when her community is
headed by Rev. Green, for whom Helga feels, again, only
deepest aversion.

More likely, as I see it, Larsen's ending is, like
Hall's, political. There was no happily-ever—after for
Larsen, nor could there be for a woman of mixed race in
Larsen's society. And Larsen wanted to reinforce this point
through the bleak ending of Qaiekeahd. Butterfield theorizes
that "The autobiographical form is one of the ways black
Americans have asserted their right to live and grow. It is
a bid for freedom, a beak of hope cracking the shell of
slavery and exploitation. It is also an attempt to
communicate to the white world what whites have done to them"
(xx) [emphasis added]. Blackburn, too, notes, that "The
world described in these women's autobiographies reveals a
great deal about the writers' perceived place in it" (148).
By diverging from her own life story and providing an

obviously negative ending, Larsen was, most likely, making a

205

point about the black woman's place in our culture.4

In her discussion of Quicksand, McDowell calls on W.B. B.
DuBois's contention that "All art is propaganda and ever must
be, despite the wailing of the purists" (xxxiii). Larsen's
autobiographical novel, like Yezierska's and Hall's, speaks
from between the gaps of patriarchal language and cultural
authority and is, therefore, easily dismissed as too
"personal" or "political." It is, of course, both personal
and political, as is all literature. But Larsen, as McDowell
states, "has to be regarded as something of a pioneer, a
trailblazer in the Afro-American female literary tradition"
(xxxi). She claims the tragic mulatta as subject, not
object, and tells her story in all its bleakness, without

romance, rewriting cultural myths along the way.

1206

Notes

1 Again, I take this term, its definition and its spelling
from Barbara Christian's Blaek Wemen Neveliete. Larsen,
however, has Helga refer to herself as "Helga Crane, a
despised mulatte" (18).

2 Helga's fate is very much like that of the anonymous
narrator in an earlier James Weldon Johnson novel, The
A ' h x- l r M (1912).

3 McDowell's excellent discussion of Qgieheahg and Passing
in the context of black female sexuality serves as the
Introduction to the American Woman Writers Series edition of
the novels. She notes that "The questions confronting
[Larsen] might well be formulated: How to write about black
female sexuality in a literary era that often sensationalized
it and pandered to the stereotype of the primitive exotic?
How to give a black female character the right to healthy
sexual expression and pleasure without offending the
proprieties established by the spokespersons of the black
middle class?" (xvi).

4 Very little is known about Nella Larsen's life, and, as of
this writing, no biography of Larsen is yet available. One
is, however, forthcoming from Louisiana State University
Press.

207

Conclusion

If, as W.E.B. DuBois said, all art is propaganda, then
all criticism is political as well. And this dissertation is
no exception. I maintain that the novels I analyze in this
dissertation are the equal of any that are traditionally
included in modernism classes in the university. The
cultural work these autobiographical novels accomplish with
the tools of autobiographical fiction is, to me, endlessly
fascinating. The confusion of subject and object, the
blurring of the distinction between public and private, the
subversive word play, the courageous claiming of cultural
significance, the insightful anticipation of the issues of
postmodernism, the unblinking assessment of woman's place in
early twentieth-century society--these and other aspects of
modernist autobiographical fiction make it a subject I found
worth studying and certainly worth writing about.

Throughout this dissertation my aim has also been to
modify traditional conceptions of literature. I would argue
that the "pure aesthetic experience" in the Kantian sense on

which our critical categories of literature are based does

208

not exist. There is no "entirely disinterested" perspective
from which to view art, nor does there exist any art which is
not, in some way, interested. Art only appears to be
universal when the dominant voices of a culture have agreed
on the terms of its universality. This agreement has serious
implications for the voices which aren't dominant, as Edward
Said points out: "the discursive situation," he writes, "is

usually like the unequal relation between colonizer
and colonized, between oppressor and oppressed" (48).
Criticism, as Terry Eagleton demonstrates, "is not an
innocent discipline" (Critieiem 17). When we agree on
artistic categories, when we define "universal," there are
always silenced "others" on the margins of our discourse. In
our culture it is women and minorities who haven't had the
luxury of detachment, the sure sense of self as central to
our stories, nor the positive relationship with literary
authority which has been the privilege of white men who
defined the aesthetic experience.

As Pierre Bourdieu argues in Dietihetieh, "aesthetic
perception is necessarily historical, inasmuch as it is
differential, relational, attentive to the deviations which
make styles" (4). What we appreciate, he demonstrates in
this extensive study, is what we have been trained to
appreciate by our upbringing and our education. Or, as

Annette Kolodny maintains, "we read well, and with pleasure,

209

what we already know how to read" (154). Since our training
directs the aesthetic perceptions of our culture, it follows
that we can change those perceptions by changing our
"training," i.e., through education.

I believe that the women authors I've discussed, at some
level, accepted that premise, and they set out to change
their world by contributing to its literature. They added
their voices to the dominant ones and dared to be recognized.
They formed a new community of women writers, as Nina
Auerbach has shown, a community which self-consciously sought
to send a women's literary tradition "forward into the past"
(Gilbert and Gubar, I, 167). Yet many of them were silenced
or ignored until feminists literary critics in the 1970's
started listening for the hidden harmonies around our
stories. When our categories of aesthetic appreciation were
modified, these harmonies became counterpoint, each with a
unique solo voice to contribute to the dominant discourse of
our culture.

Perhaps most importantly, however, others on the margins
were emboldened by these subversive women who dared tell
their stories in autobiographical novels. Because of The
Weii_ef_Leneiiheee and Quieheahd, we have Toni Morrison's
Sale (1973) and Richard Wright's BlaCK_BC¥ (1945), Alice
Walker's The_Ceier_Enrpie (1982) and Gloria Naylor's The
Wemeh_ef_Breeeter_£iaee (1983). Because of Yezierska we have

210

Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick and even Saul Bellow, though he
would probably not see it that way. Because of H.D. and
Virginia Woolf we have a tradition of women writers and a
language in which to discuss them. And because of the
popularization of the genre of women's autobiographical
fiction, we have Maxine Hong Kingston's The_Wemah_Warrier
iifllfii, Doris Lessing's The_§eideh_fleteheeh (1962) and Sylvia
Plath's The_Beii_Qar (1971).

So while I use "Emphasis Mine" to refer to the
autobiographical fictional mode, I also use it to underscore
that I write from an interested perspective of my own--a
perspective that embraces and advocates modernist women's
autobiographical fiction. I do so because I find that these
novels lead us to accomplish what is the goal not only of
most feminist theory but also of much of postmodernist
theory: they liberate us from our old ways of thinking.

They take us out of binary thought by asserting their
difference. They lead us to reconceive aesthetic and
cultural categories by centering the marginal, by claiming
recognition as different but not "Other"-—as different and as
subject—-thereby presenting a way of "conceiving difference
without opposition," as Craig Owens advocates in his study
"The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism" (62).
Naming their experience in these autobiographical novels,

these women writers escape the "master narratives" of our

211

culture, as Jean—Francois Lyotard defines them, by denying
their right to mastery. Their autobiographical fiction leads

us, as critics, to do likewise.

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