I may have just uncovered a very large problem in my work.
My dissertation is about everyday life and gender in the fiction of Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, and Katherine Mansfield. When I first read much of the literature, the following things struck me: These works get at an everyday level that most literature tries to transcend. Also, it seems that the characters have differing experiences of that everyday based on their gender. And, most importantly, the authors experiment with style and form, with the explicit goal of creating a new “feminine” discourse, or a language that properly represents their experience. My primary argument was that the style these three women developed provides a window into the gendered experience of modernity by going through the everyday. My objectives were: 1) To see what more the experience and representations of women’s everyday can tell us about modernism, taken as a cultural response to modernity, and about the role played by women’s writing in the emergence of modernism; 2) To supplement male-centered theories of the everyday by exploring women’s experience of the everyday; 3) To bring attention to Richardson’s and Mansfield’s significance to modernism. I was hoping to uncover a liberatory feminist politics at work in the literature through its potentially subversive relationship to traditionally “feminine” acts.
I’ve come up against one major criticism from my committee. They worry that I risk essentializing the sign of the “feminine.” I worry about that too – in fact, I didn’t originally intend to write about gender at all but I was kind of railroaded into it. I’m fine with it now, but I sometimes feel like I have set a trap for myself that I have to be very careful of throughout the whole process.
As I research, write, and think more specifically about my dissertation, I’ve been having some difficulty fitting the gender stuff in the way I expected. The gendered responses I thought I saw in the literature are much more ambiguous and complex than I realized. This, of course, is good – it only means that I have more ideas to work with. But there was still something unsettling about it, something nagging at me that this wasn’t going to work.
Today, I was looking through some of my notes on Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life to answer a completely unrelated political question. As I skimmed through my pages, I couldn’t help but notice the words “woman,” “women,” “feminine,” appearing again and again – problematic given that part of my objective rests on the premise that everyday theory doesn’t take account of the lives of women. Other, very important critics have said so, so I took it for granted that they were right and I let their arguments colour my own readings of the primary texts. But Lefebvre, de Certeau, Benjamin (all the major players except Debord), actually do take account of the everyday lives of women. The catch is, they don’t privilege gendered inquiries into the everyday because they too don’t want to risk essentializing. In Everyday Life in the Modern World, Lefebvre argues that, “for the critical mind woman’s significance in everyday life is too great to be confined to Femininity. If chance exists, if the individual can back the individual, it is in this field that the game is played, that the stake is lost or won; moreover Femininity forbids real women access to their own lives, adaptation to their own lives, for it submits individuality and particularity (specific differences) to trapped generalities.” He’s not trying to suppress women’s experience, he’s trying to avoid suppressing women’s real experience beneath the sign of the “feminine.”
Simply because I don’t have the time or space, I’m going to skip all the logical steps and background knowledge that led me to this argument: modernity created an essentializing and oppressive version of “femininity” that hid behind the image of the modern, emancipated woman. Modern capitalism assigned women to a role that not only kept them in check but also trained them as good consumers. Lefebvre says, “the ideology of femininity, or of happiness by and in femininity, is only another form of the ideology of consumption (happiness through consuming) and the ideology of technicality (women possessing the technique of happiness!).” The emancipation of women in the early 20th century worked in a dialectical relationship with the concurrent reification of this modern “femininity.”
Maybe, rather than simply expressing women’s experience of modernity, the literature in my dissertation is registering that dialectic. Maybe the innovative “feminine” style that Woolf et al. were trying to create submits to a feminization, and thus marginalization, of the everyday. Maybe it is showing us how the underside of modern femininity was created and reified. This could be why I’m not seeing the liberatory politics I expected to find. I might be wrong, but this hit me like a hammer on the head today and it felt right.
And now I’m scared of my own potential discovery and what it might mean. I may have never really wanted to do a feminist project – but I certainly don’t want to do an anti-feminist project either! How do I tell a community of scholars that the stylistic experimentations in female modernism carry this shadow-side without making them think, from a feminist perspective, that I’m devaluing the literature? Not to mention, Woolf scholars are part of an almost terrifying cult of author worship that ensures no negative arguments about her work will ever see the light of day. I just recently read a series of articles that destroyed a woman who suggested at a conference that Virginia Woolf was classist. Seriously – Woolf calls herself an upper middle-class snob – why can’t we?
I can only think of one way through this at the moment – if a sustained analysis of the literature can help us to uncover the process of reification of a modern femininity, then it may enable a proper critique of everyday life, as Lefebvre intended.
Yikes.
Posted by situationniste 
Posted by situationniste 
Posted by situationniste 
