The Day I Screwed Myself

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 20^th 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.

The Meaning of Life

In a review of Dorothy Richardson’s Interim (1919), the 5th installment in the 13-volume novel Pilgrimage, Katherine Mansfield writes:

For them [certain modern authors] the whole art of writing consists in the power with which they are able to register that faint inward shock of recognition. Glancing through life they make the discovery that there are certain experiences which are, as it were, peculiarly theirs. There is a quality in the familiarity of these experiences or in their strangeness which evokes an immediate mysterious response — a desire for expression. But now, instead of going any further, instead of attempting to relate their “experiences” to life or to see them against any kind of background, these writers are, as we see them, content to remain in the air, hovering over, as if the thrilling moment were enough and more than enough. Indeed, far from desiring to explore it, it is as though they would guard the secret for themselves as well as for us, so that when they do dart away all is as untouched, as unbroken as before.

But what is the effect of this kind of writing upon the reader? How is he to judge the importance of one thing rather than another if each is to be seen in isolation? [...]

In it [Interim] Miriam is enclosed in a Bloomsbury boarding-house, and though she receives, as usual, shock after shock of inward recognition, they are produced by such things as well-browned mutton, gas jets, varnished wallpapers. Darting through life, quivering, hovering, exulting in the familiarity and the strangeness of all that comes within her tiny circle, she leaves us feeling, as before, that everything being of equal importance to her, it is impossible that everything should not be of equal unimportance.

Precisely the thing that Mansfield felt was a shortcoming of Pilgrimage is what I find most interesting about it. It seems to me that by focusing on the subjective experience of everyday moments and objects, and by refusing to frame them as part of a larger, more meaningful narrative, Richardson expresses that which is nearly impossible to express: the everyday itself, that which cannot be contained in any single detail but persists in the whole.

Mansfield’s argument that assigning “equal importance” to every detail causes every detail to become equally unimportant is exactly the mode of thought that has taken us away from the everyday. We focus on the marvellous, the inspirational, the philosophical, those things that stand out from the ordinary, and thus sacrifice our understanding of real experience as consisting of the mundane.

This is exactly why I love Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. “What is the meaning of life?” It seems like such a big question. But it’s really not. Life is birth, death, sex, work, love, friendship, laughter. Life is, quite simply, the everyday.

Everyday Myths

I’m not currently working on my dissertation — no writing yet, no research for now — as I am far too occupied with studying for my candidacy exams. But I did come across something today which is plainly related to studies of the everyday. I was reading Roland Barthes’ Mythologies and, though I’ve read it before, I haven’t thought about it for quite awhile. What struck me is just how much Barthes’ work falls in line with other theorists of the everyday. He even returns to Baudelaire, Proust, Mallarmé, Bataille — all modern writers to whom other theorists of the everyday refer.

Mythologies in particular is about how various cultural productions, from texts, to photographs, to advertisements, to everyday myths and narratives, are at their base ideological. Even the most taken-for-granted truths or the most benign or neutral-appearing representations carry the traces of an ideological message. He makes connections between cultural representations and the material conditions of existence; for instance, he suggests that the specific chemical structures of cleaning products directly correlate to the real conditions of the women who use them: “the chemical fluid is an extension of the washerwoman’s movements when she beats the clothes, while powders rather replace those of the housewife pressing and rolling the washing against a sloping board.” In addition, the advertising of those products is intimately connected to the idiosyncracies of class: “Persil Whiteness for instance, bases its prestige on the evidence of a result; it calls into play vanity, a social concern with appearances, by offering for comparison two objects, one of which is whiter than the other.” This particular example also carries the connotations of racial distinction.

What Barthes makes apparent is not just that everyday representations are ideological, but that ideology is most effectively disseminated through coded everyday representations. I can’t help but wonder why Barthes has not made an appearance in the canon of everyday life theory. Especially considering that it is essentially a branch of cultural studies and Barthes could easily be regarded as a forefather of the discipline. Perhaps because it is still a developing field and no one has made it into that corner yet. Or perhaps people in the academy are not particularly interested in Barthes right now (I’ve certainly gotten that impression in general). Or maybe he doesn’t really fit and I just don’t know enough about this particular field to see that yet. I have to say though, if Barthes suddenly makes a splash onto the everyday scene in the next year or two, without my having already made my comments on him, I’m going to kick myself for doubting it.

Breton’s Nadja and Everyday Life

DISCLAIMER: This will probably only be interesting for those of you who have read André Breton’s Surrealist “novel” Nadja –

Breton’s Nadja is made up of a number of elements that mark it out as distinct from mainstream novelistic narration. Composed of: a contemplative ‘preface’ where a number of anecdotes of coincidence are recounted and reflected upon; the story of Breton’s various encounters with a woman called Nadja; photographs that relate to this story and to other parts of the text; drawings and other ‘evidence’ related to the text; and a final afterword — Nadja doesn’t add up to a novel. Maurice Blanchot suggests that the main text of Nadja should be seen as a récit, a tale that tells of a singular and exceptional event.

[...]

If, for Blanchot, the novel deals in the everyday, it does so in a way that evades the everyday. On the other hand the tale is the everyday when the everyday is exceptional or marvellous. In its refusal to exercise the rhetorical tropes of the novel and persuade us we are entering a ‘world’, Nadja offers us the marvellous everyday stripped of description. Here places are actual. [...] The ambivalent representation of Nadja’s relationship to the everyday is exemplary of the Surrealist conception of everyday life: she is seen as having escaped the everydayness of the everyday, at the same time as being in danger of falling back into its routines. The gendering of the everyday is made vivid by a femininity out of control; at the same time, another feminine everydayness threatens to engulf Nadja in the domestic.

(Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 51-52)

The Beginnings of Reading

I am finally making my first real forays into dissertation research. Well, not my first exactly… I have done a lot of compiling of resources over the past little while. But this week marks the beginning of my serious reading. Since I have to study for exams my dissertation reading will be limited for a few months, but for now I’d like to get a start on it so that I can write a proposal.

Today I read a good chunk of Ben Highmore’s book Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. Just trying to get a sense of the theoretical field, since I haven’t actually read all of the primary texts, nor will I be able to for quite a few months. So far I’ve found his discussion of Walter Benjamin the most compelling. Benjamin’s critique of Surrealism was that it failed to use the available tools to mobilize a political critique of modernity, but instead remained in thrall to modernity. Following Surrealism, his project was to find an appropriate form within which to represent the everyday that would capture the experience of everyday modernity and render it meaningful. This form would then make possible a political critique of modernity and of the history of progress. Though his precise politics remains abstract and undeveloped, I find the idea of an appropriate form for critique very interesting. It will be interesting to see if the literary forms of my primary dissertation texts could possibly fall into this category. Particularly Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage. As a novel (or series of novels) that is all about experimenting with form and capturing the everyday life of a modern woman, I wonder if Benjamin would see political potential in it.

What Highmore comes to in his discussion of Georg Simmel, Surrealism, and Benjamin is that all three were concerned with finding new forms to represent the changed and changing experience of everyday modernity. He also notes that all three privileged the urban experience as the true arena of everyday modernity. This then begs the question of what other kinds of modern experience are left unexplored. He continues to ask another more specific question that will be very relevant to my own project, one that I hope to at least partially answer:

How would the everyday lives of women feature in this project? For the most part women are absent. Part of the project of developing ‘theories of the everyday’ is going to be rescuing pre-feminist theory from its gendered orientation. There is much here that may be useful: Simmel’s emphasis on spheres of sociability (the meal, for instance) might be reworked in a way that articulates the gendering of the everyday; Benjamin’s work on interiors might similarly be explored. (74)

I was left with the feeling that I am venturing into an area ripe for research, and that got me pretty excited! I’m looking forward to finishing the book and writing my proposal now.

Initial Thoughts

I think I’ve finally figured out what I’m going to do for my dissertation. It of course depends on what I find in my reading and whether or not my supervisor thinks it’s a good idea. My supervisor seems to have a good instinct for what works and what doesn’t so I trust he will let me know ahead of time if it’s going to be a disaster. Though he claims that I too must have good instincts or I wouldn’t have made it this far. He may be right about that — we’ll see.

The primary literary texts will be authored by Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and perhaps D.H. Lawrence. I knew I wanted to work on Woolf and Richardson but part of my problem thus far was feeling like my choice in authors was going to necessitate a feminist project. I am very resistant to this for a number of reasons. I have done a fair bit of work on feminism and gender already and I haven’t been terribly excited about it since I finished my Master’s. Also, it seemed to me that any feminist reading I came to of the texts would be incredibly boring — it is really hard to say anything beyond ‘this is an example of the feminine aesthetic,’ ‘this is écriture feminine,’ ‘feminine perspectives are different,’ ‘this is how gender is constructed,’ blah, blah, blah. Boring. And already done by legions of scholars before me.

What interests me lately is questions of politics, political resistance, representation, style, and specifically the everyday. It didn’t properly occur to me until yesterday, as I was discussing it with a friend, that I could use the feminist angle as a way in to the everyday. Framing the project with women’s particular experience of modernity, then using it to talk my way into politics, resistance, or aesthetics. I could frame it thus without having to resort to a ‘traditional’ feminist reading. Brilliant! And there is piles of room for that kind of a reading as well considering most feminist work on modernism is banal and uninteresting.

The inclusion of Lawrence would be a way of addressing the gendered experience of modernity without doing a ‘women’s writing’ project. So much of the work on Lawrence is preoccupied with his either being a proto-fascist or a misogynist. It would be nice to shed a different light on some of his texts, particularly Women in Love. Lawrence is the least stable part of the plan at this point though.

My friend made a very valid point yesterday as well — in the eyes of a hiring committee, this would be a very sexy topic. I could market myself as not only being able to teach 20th Century Literature, Modernism, and Theory, but also women’s writing, and from a potentially more sophisticated point of view.

So here it begins.

I’m sure you are wondering why I am writing in my blog about this. After all, not very many people would be interested in reading it. However I find that, if I am writing just for myself, I don’t write. Many journals of mine have ended up in the garbage or stashed in a storage box with only three entries in them. If I think there is the remotest possibility that someone is listening, I feel compelled to share. In turn, I’m hoping that anyone who is reading will also feel compelled to share their thoughts. The lone scholar is a myth as far as I’m concerned, yet in practice we are still plagued by the solitariness of this endeavour. I strongly believe that it doesn’t have to be that way — that the best way to work through these things is to talk them out with trusted colleagues and friends.

You may also be wondering if I am worried about people stealing my ideas. Well, guess what — I am really not. I don’t intend to write my (inevitably) brilliant dissertation online. What I really want is a space to say all the things I won’t actually write down in the finished project. You know, the stupid stuff, the thinking-through of it. If someone wants to publish my stupid stuff, good luck with that, I don’t think it’s worth much to the academic market. That last sentence is not a permission by the way.