Women's Unspeakable Desire in British and German Modernism

Abstract

This dissertation, “Women’s Unspeakable Desire in British and German Modernism,” argues that the Weimar Republic’s modernism should condition our understanding of literary modernism in Britain. My project contributes to the growing field of new modernist studies and argues for expanding the boundaries of British modernism to consider the ways in which the modernisms of other parts of the world ought to inform the field. My project asks and responds to the query: How is women’s unspeakable desire for more from life represented and externalized in British and German fiction produced during and after the First World War? “Unspeakable” is meant here in its double sense: that there is no adequate language with which to discuss this desire and that this desire, were it expressed, would be considered appalling and indecent. I claim that in these texts female characters’ desire is expressed by way of metonymy: that is, their desire is conveyed by way of objects adjacent to them in the narrative, so that they and their authors may avoid directly discussing taboo subjects and still communicate desire that eludes language. The field of modernist studies has long been dominated by an understanding of modernism as an artistic and literary movement that originated and flourished in Britain with canonical giants such as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf (as of the 1970s), all of whom still certainly epitomize literary modernism. However, many leading British modernists found second homes in Berlin of the 1920s, where they were able to live queer and more openly desirous lives in public. In the cases of Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Katherine Mansfield, and others, their artistic work and particularly their discussions of desire, are often inflected by their time spent in Germany during the early twentieth century. The more permissive social and legal ethos of the Weimar Republic undeniably introduced new ways of understanding desire across the western world. Each of my dissertation chapters focuses on one such modernist and the way in which she uniquely uses metonymy to sidestep a lack of adequate language for her female characters’ aspirations. Chapter 1 argues that the fiction of Irmgard Keun reveals how fashion plays a crucial role in understanding female desire in modernism. Chapter 2 argues that Virginia Woolf uses both objects in the natural world and fashion in her fictional narratives to register female characters’ desires to make their secret, core selves visible. Chapter 3 examines the way Katherine Mansfield’s fiction employs objects to obliquely address taboo subjects such as queerness, hatred of motherhood, and deep loneliness, all relevant to women’s desire for different lives. Chapter 4 argues that May Sinclair’s novel Mary Olivier (1919) constructs a protagonist who finds the material word inadequate to answer to her desires and she therefore resorts to abstract metonyms that her metaphysical Idealist philosophy constructs. Characters in Keun, Woolf, and Mansfield connect these transgressive yearnings to items in their proximity; Sinclair’s heroine rejects the material world for the spiritual, and her epiphany is that nothing in this world can fulfill her desires. That characters’ dreams of liberation accrue metonymically to a fur coat (Keun), to a lighthouse (Woolf), to an aloe plant (Mansfield), or to an immaterial realm (Sinclair) is a literary expression of these authors’ feminism. Their fiction registers the repression and demonization of female desire, yet it foregrounds metonyms for life beyond the status quo.